by Lisa Wylie
“I’ll go get the medic,” Wai-Mei offered, getting to her feet.
“No,” Jen gasped between coughs. “It’s OK. Just… is there any water?”
Wai-Mei crossed the cell to the toilet stall, returning with two paper cups and some toilet roll. She handed Jen the cups, one full, one empty. “Here. Rinse first.”
Jen sloshed a gulp of water round her mouth, then spat it into the empty cup. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” The thief huffed a concerned sigh. “You might really have a concussion. They should check you out properly.”
“They will,” Jen predicted dryly. “Won’t want me dying in custody—that’d look bad on the stats.”
Wai-Mei chuckled. “Well, your sense of humour’s intact.” Her smile faded, and she met Jen’s gaze sympathetically. “I’m sorry about Jones,” she offered. “He seemed like a nice guy, and I can tell you were close.”
Tears stung Jen’s eyes, and she bit her lip to force down the impulse to give in to her sudden, wrenching grief. She nodded to the other woman, not trusting her voice, then gulped down the remaining water in the cup to deflect the moment.
Wai-Mei took the cups and handed her the tissue. “Want another drink?”
“Please.”
As Jen drank the second cup, the nausea gripping her stomach eased somewhat. She uncoiled from her hunched position, taking a slower, more thorough look around. The gunmetal-grey cell was devoid of any furniture save for the bunk she was sitting on and its twin along the back wall. The toilet cubicle was recessed into the opposite wall, with only a stall door for modesty. She and Wai-Mei were the only occupants. “I’m surprised they left us together,” she noted.
“Easier to have me babysit you than waste resources, I suppose,” Wai-Mei replied.
Jen sighed. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”
“Nah, don’t be.” Wai-Mei smirked a confident little smirk. “Getting busted is an occupational hazard of mine. I used my comm call, so the wheels are in motion. All I have to do is hang tight, but I feel a little bad that I can’t take you with me.”
Jen shook her head. “Don’t worry about that. It’s not your fault I’m in here.”
“True enough. I’ll tell you what, though, that bastard Solinas? Number one on my shit-list,” Wai-Mei declared fiercely. “Just so you’re prepared, the only thing I told the cops was that he’d swapped out Baines. But if they don’t pick him up, well, I have a few friends in low places who owe me favours.” She smiled savagely at the thought.
“Great.” Jen grimaced as the room shifted again. “Woah. I’m gonna lie down again, I think.”
“You do that. I’m going to call for assistance. You don’t look so good.”
“Whatever.”
Jen lay back down, and in spite of her discomfort, she quickly fell asleep again, coming to groggily when Wai-Mei shook her by the shoulder.
“Jen, wake up. They’ve sent someone to take you to the doctor.”
She sat up slowly. Her shoulder still throbbed, but her head felt clearer, and much less sore, and the nausea had eased. “I feel a bit better,” she noted.
The door hissed open before Wai-Mei could reply, and two uniformed police officers, a man and a woman, stepped into the cell. “C’mon, Bronwen, on your feet,” the woman ordered. “We need to make sure you didn’t scramble your brain when you head-butted the floor. Don’t want you cryin’ memory loss to a jury.”
“You’re all heart,” Jen retorted sourly as she complied. To her relief, her stomach didn’t protest too much. She took the time to look back at Wai-Mei, offering the thief her hand. “Nice working with ya. See you around?”
“Sure, Bronwen,” Wai-Mei returned, shaking her hand firmly. “It was a pleasure, even if it went tits-up in the end.”
“Aww, you’re giving me cavities,” the male cop drawled sourly. “Get your ass in gear, we’ve got better things to do than coddle you.”
Jen cocked an inquiring eyebrow at his partner. “Who pissed in his coffee?”
The woman snorted with laughter as she snapped her cuffs over Jen’s wrists. “Damn, Krieger, she’s got you pegged.”
“Yeah, yeah, let’s see if she’s still laughing when they thaw out her popsicle in a few hundred years.”
“What happened to innocent till proven guilty?” Jen shot back.
Krieger rolled his eyes as he opened the door. “Just move it,” he growled.
The cops led her through a maze of bland, featureless corridors, delivering her to the care of a brusque, surly physician who took the minimum of time and effort to diagnose a mild concussion and hand over a paper cup containing three analgesic pills. “Take those, and if you feel dizzy or sick again, tell an officer immediately,” he said by way of dismissal.
Jen took the pills, then her escorts led her to an interrogation room, where two male detectives in plain clothes were waiting. One, blonde and bulky with a military-grade crewcut, sat at the table in the centre of the room; the other, slender and olive skinned with unkempt black hair, loitered in the shadows by the mirrored observation window. Krieger and his partner shoved her down into the chair opposite the seated detective, unlocked her cuffs, nodded to her interrogators, and left.
The detective ignored her, focusing on the datapad he was holding, scrolling down through the text slowly. Jen could see it was her own citizen’s record from the back of the display, which was almost as transparent as the attempt to make her uncomfortable. It might have worked, if she hadn’t been in situations like this once or twice before. The key to survival, she reminded herself as she waited, was to keep your temper.
“Jennifer Bronwen. That’s you, correct?” the detective opposite her asked eventually, without even bothering to look up.
Jen leaned back in her chair and folded her arms, staring at him impassively. The silence lengthened as he scrolled down to the end of the text string, and then he looked up, a hint of annoyance in his expression.
“Hey!” He snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Are you awake?”
Jen said nothing. The silence stretched once more, and after about twenty seconds, he shrugged. “Suit yourself. It’s not like I need verbal confirmation, I’ve got your records right here. Your government was happy to help us track you down.”
Jen rolled her eyes. “I’m sure,” she agreed dryly.
“Oh, so you can speak, huh?”
Jen shrugged. The less she gave away, the better, until she could get a feel for just how deep the shit she was in actually was.
The detective scrolled back up his datapad and began to read aloud. “Jennifer Louise Bronwen, formerly Jennifer Louise McAndrew. Born nine seventy-three ATA on Siwan, Bronwen system, to Philip and Delia McAndrew. Enlisted in the Marauder Marine Corps in ‘ninety-one. Qualified as a combat pilot in ‘ninety-two, achieving the rank of corporal. Two commendations for bravery. Bad conduct discharge in ‘ninety-three for fraternization. Arrested twice in Marauder space on minor misdemeanour charges, once in Terran space for being drunk and disorderly, and once on Kyzar on suspicion of theft. Charges didn’t stick.” The detective looked up from his notes. “They will this time.”
“Oh, sure, yeah,” Jen agreed in a bored tone. “So you know how to read. Congratulations.”
“Oh, you don’t like this story?” the cop asked, pulling up a second file. “How about this one? Autopsy report for suspect Thaddeus Jones. Cause of death: gunshot wound to the head. Specifics: the projectile penetrated through the soft tissues of the scalp, and caused a sixteen-millimetre circular entry hole in the frontal bone that expands inwardly in a conical fashion. The bullet travelled through the left frontal pole of brain, down and to the rear, perforating the cerebral peduncles and cerebellum. The bullet then impacted with the occipital bone just below the lambdoid suture and exited the skull, causing an irregularly shaped wound thirty millimetres in diameter.” The cop looked up. “Course, I don’t understand all the fancy words there, but it basically says the bullet ma
de a smoothie of his brains on the way through.”
Nausea boiled anew in Jen’s stomach as guilt and fury crashed through her in a scalding wave. Oh, God, Thud, I’m so sorry. She closed her eyes, but the image of Thud’s body collapsing was branded behind her eyelids. Dashing away her sudden tears with her hand, she opened her eyes and glared at the cop. “What’s your fucking point?” she snarled, her tone charged with enough anger to make the second detective push off the wall and stand upright, alert for trouble.
“Settle down,” the seated cop warned, a glint of satisfaction in his eyes. “Unless you want a violent conduct charge added to your rap sheet.”
“Yeah,” his partner sneered. “C’mon, Bronwen, why not aim for the big ten C in consecutive sentences? You’re already well on your way there.”
Jen sucked a breath in through her nose and slouched back, re-folding her arms defiantly to cover the shiver provoked by the chill of fear licking down her spine. The big ten C, the Big Chill. The maximum custodial sentence for the cryoprisons in Lord’s Assembly. A thousand years of time displacement, where you were woken once every ten years for a month to make sure everything was still in something approaching working order, then dunked back into the ice. No one who’d ever gone down for ten C had been released yet, but a few seven and eight C prisoners had been released in recent years. None of them had lived very long after being thawed out. Keep your temper, remember? This is what they want, for you to react to their plays. Think. Don’t let them bait you.
The seated cop watched her carefully for a moment, then cleared his throat. “All right, let’s try this again. I’m Detective Janacek, that’s Detective Bayram. We’re going to ask you some simple questions. Do yourself a favour by answering them truthfully. There’s a lot of important people interested in this case, and interested in making sure that someone is held to account. If you don’t want that someone to be you, you’d better play ball. Your purple-haired friend has already spilled her guts, so you’re playing catch-up.”
“Right,” Jen drawled, unconvinced. She didn’t believe Wai-Mei had told them anything, other than about Solinas. Having been caught holding the bag—literally—silence was the thief’s best delaying tactic.
Janacek launched in on the usual round of questions–who else was involved, were you acting for yourselves, who hired you, where did you get the guns—all taken straight from the procedural manual. Jen met them all with impassive silence, and eventually, exasperation got the better of the detective for a moment.
“Is there anything you’re going to tell me?”
“Yeah.” Jen sat up a little. “I’ve got one thing for you. Baines, the security chief. Your informant? He was swapped out by a changeling who was working the job with us. A guy called Darya Solinas.”
“Xox told us the same thing,” Janacek said dismissively. “We’ve already got an APB out.”
“An APB for a changeling,” his partner scoffed. “That’s about as much use as a cyborg’s dick.”
“Well, we’ll see,” Janacek observed. “But if he was on your crew, Bronwen, why would he snitch on you?”
“You find that out, I’d love to know,” Jen growled. “Maybe he was fixing to steal it on his own, get us out of the picture so he didn’t have to share the profit.”
“So what happened to the real Baines? Did your friend kill him?”
“He’s not my friend,” Jen retorted sharply, “and I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“That seems a little short-sighted of you.” Janacek smirked with sudden satisfaction. “If you’re telling the truth, you’d better pray we find this Solinas character, and that we find Mr. Baines alive and well.”
“Why?”
Janacek chuckled. “Because Mr. Baines is missing, Bronwen. His wife called it in late last night. And if he shows up dead and you’re the only suspect we have, well, you’re looking at felony murder as well as armed robbery. And for a high-profile incident like this, you can be sure we’ll get the sharpest federal attorney we know to prosecute the case, and the hardest-assed judge on the circuit to hear it.” Janacek leaned forward, his smile gone. “Murder carries a five C mandatory minimum. You’ll be an ice cube for a significant portion of humanity’s future history, and when you get let out there will be nothing left for you to go home to.” He thumbed the call button, and after a few moments Officer Krieger returned with his partner, whose nametag identified her as Koch. “Put her back in the cage for now,” Janacek instructed. “Let things sink in a little, see if that doesn’t loosen her tongue a bit.” He met her gaze as Krieger cuffed her and hauled her to her feet. “Think carefully, Bronwen. You are in a whole universe of shit.”
Krieger and Koch led her back to the detention block where, not unexpectedly, she found Wai-Mei already gone. “Yeah,” Koch sighed at Jen’s enquiring look. “Some snot-nose with a fancy suit and an earpiece came down and picked her up a half-hour ago. Safe to say we’ll never see her in a courtroom.” The burly woman uncuffed Jen carefully, then looked her up and down. “You need anything? Chow will be down in an hour.”
Jen shook her head, and Koch shrugged. “All right, then. Don’t go anywhere.” Chuckling at her own joke, she and her partner stepped out and the door swung shut with a heavy clang.
***
Time passed slowly.
Or at least, it seemed to. Since she’d been fed twice, Jen guessed it was getting on for late evening, but it was hard to judge. She’d dozed for a while, but the aches in her shoulder and head had returned as the painkillers wore off, and nobody had stopped by to check if she needed more.
She was absolutely terrified. She couldn’t stop shivering, no matter that she’d stripped the blanket from the second bunk in addition to her own. She’d never been in trouble of this magnitude. Yes, she’d had a few minor altercations with the law, and one narrow escape with a job that had gone slightly sideways on Kyzar, but this…
Armed robbery and felony murder. Two things she would have sworn blind a few days ago that she’d never get involved in. She didn’t consider herself a sufficiently hard-core criminal for that kind of job. Bend the rules, sure, and break them now and again in the right circumstances, but she knew well enough that total disregard for the law had a very short half-life.
The more she chewed the situation over, however, the angrier she became, her anger feeding from her fear. She was furious with Solinas, for starters, and with herself for trusting him so blindly, in spite of her gut dislike, because he’d made the job easy. She’d been far, far too complacent about him.
That clean, reproachful outrage toward the changeling and her own gullibility paled, however, next to the maelstrom of her emotions about Thud. Mostly she was pissed at him for being stupid enough to get himself killed, but also for the hole he’d left her in. She’d been prepared for the risk of failure, prepared to do a couple of decades on ice for a botched snatch if things went bad, but a freezer sentence of five C or more was far beyond what she’d ever imagined she’d find herself facing, and it was all because her dumbass buddy had dropped her in the shit by ignoring her instructions.
Damn you, Thud, you dumb fuck. You never learn, do you?
But even as she thought it, the image of him falling, his blood spraying over her, assaulted her once more.
Jen, go! Don’t screw yourself on my account. Get out of here!
Her anger at him died as swiftly as he had, drowned out by a surging tide of her anger at herself. Thud’s not to blame for you being stuck in here, you are. He gave his life to try and protect you, to try and make his mistake right, and you’re sitting here blaming him? “Why the fuck didn’t you make him dump it, Jen?” she berated herself aloud. “It would only have taken five minutes. It was your call to make. You should have fucking dealt with it then and there.”
No matter who was to blame, though, it didn’t change her predicament. With an unarmed crew, there would have been a fighting chance that a court might have believed they’d had no lethal intentions, and
then even if Solinas had killed Baines—which was a better than even odds, she was sure—the blame would have stayed squarely with the changeling. However, the armed robbery charge and the hostile stand-off with the cops had handed the prosecution service everything they would need to crucify Jen by association if Baines was dead. When they gave up looking for Solinas—if they even tried—the charges would be Jen’s alone to answer, and she had absolutely nothing to offer in mitigation, and no one she could turn to for help. There was no one she could contact. All of her professional acquaintances operated too far from Modeus, and she couldn’t afford any kind of lawyer besides whatever public defender was available in the Terran justice system.
There will be nothing left for you to go home to.
Five hundred years from now didn’t matter.
She was already utterly alone.
Her rage collapsed back into anguish, and tears flooded her vision. She’d started to let herself believe that this job would mark a change, that maybe, with Thud to have her back and a bit of credit in the bank, she’d be able to expand operations, think about building a real crew and a long-term outlook. And all she’d achieved was to get her best friend killed, and to ruin her own life beyond hope of recovery. You stupid, naïve, sentimental bitch.
Tipping her head back against the wall, careless of the tears running freely down her cheeks, she offered a tortured apology to the sterile, uncaring ceiling. “Thud, I’m sorry. I let you down. I never meant for this to happen, I didn’t want you to die like that. Not for me. God, I’m so sorry.” Misery overwhelmed her, and she curled up on her bunk, cocooning herself in her blankets to shut the world out as she wept uncontrollably.
Eventually, wrung out by fear and grief, she drifted into a troubled doze, only to be rudely awakened what felt like seconds later by the cell door clanking open. The sudden, loud noise made her start upright, Thud’s name falling reflexively from her lips as she looked around wildly for the threat.