by Jason LaPier
“Source material? Well yeah, I was.” He blinked and looked at his glass, but didn’t dare to drink under the heat of their angry glares. “It was just that … it turned out better than I thought it would. I mean, I had to edit the hell out of it, let me tell you—”
“Dammit, David,” Jax said. “I didn’t want to be in it at all! You were supposed to blur my face! You weren’t even supposed to use my name!”
He blinked, then tilted his head. “Really? Why not?”
Jax breathed through his nose. “Don’t you remember when we met? Don’t you remember the state I was in?”
Granderson’s look of innocence melted as his mouth drooped and his eyes widened. “Jack. I remember – I remember a lost man. A man trying to escape an old life, trying to find a new one. But … I just … what is it? Jack … Jack, why don’t you want your face to be seen?”
The question caused Jax to huff, to wring his hands, but he could give no answer except through clenched teeth, “Because.”
Lealina got between them. “David, someone is after Jack. He’s in hiding.”
Granderson’s jaw slackened. “What, really? Who?” He looked at her, then over her shoulder at Jax, then he frowned and his mouth tightened. “No. You shouldn’t tell me who. It’s better not to know.”
“We need you to pull the ads,” Lealina said. “We need to get Jack’s face off the airways.”
“Of course. Of course. I’ll do a recut and a re-release. No Jack, none at all.”
“Wait,” Jax said. “Did you say the premiere was tonight? Has it already played?”
“Yeah, tonight it has. But I can do an all-stop right now, get it pulled from the theaters—”
“How many?” Lealina asked. “How many theaters?”
“Well just two here in Stockton,” he said, then pursed his lips. “And one in Nuzwick and one in Sunderville.”
Jax tried to control his breathing. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us you were going to do this? Why didn’t we even get to see it?”
Granderson stood and put a hand on Jax’s shoulder. He was almost as tall as Jax and tried to meet his eyes. “I’m really sorry, Jack. It’s just how it’s done. You two are subjects of the film. You’re not stars. You’re not even actors.” He swallowed and looked away. “And you’re not partners.”
Jax brushed away the hand. “Fuck you, David.”
Lealina stepped between them again. “Look, what’s done is done. Do what you can to clean it up, David.”
“I’m not contractually obligated to,” he said. When they shot him a pair of glares, he raised a hand. “I’m just reminding you. I’ll clean this up, I promise. As your friend.”
While Jax’s vision began to haze, he felt Lealina’s hand on his chest. “Okay, David,” she said. “Thank you.”
“What are you going to do?” Granderson asked.
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “There’s a TEOB facility in the Low Desert. It’s hidden away, not for any reason other than being remote and underground – to measure magma flow under the crust. Only problem is my car won’t get there. I need an all-terrain, and I don’t want to use one of the TEOB vehicles if I can help it.”
“I know how you can get there,” Grandson said quickly. “It’s the least I can do.”
Forty-five minutes later they were on a private gyrocopter heading for the middle of the Low Desert.
CHAPTER 16
“I was just passing through,” Runstom said. “I thought I would come by and see how – to see what – well, to see …”
“To see if I’m still locked up?”
“To see you’re being treated fairly.”
“I appreciate that, Stanford.”
Jenna Zarconi rose from the cot and went to the sink where she filled a small plastic cup with water and sipped at it. The cell was small, but it was another temporary hold. Before coming in, he’d checked on her transfer status. Outpost Gamma was the last stop before she would arrive at her permanent residence at the zero-G prison facility at the edge of the Barnard system. Runstom was only in the outpost momentarily, a stop on the trip to his next mission. This was place that housed his old precinct. Perhaps that was why he avoided contact with anyone in Justice – all his old co-workers – other than to gain access to the holding cells.
“I heard about your success on Vulca,” she said, turning from the sink.
“Oh?”
“Well, news of the attack was all over the media. Some mention of the heroics of the ModPol Defenders stationed there. A trial unit that was upgraded to a full contract.”
“The media said all that?” He wondered if his name had been mentioned. He’d hated all that media attention after the arrests on Sirius-5.
She smirked at him and shook her head lightly. “Only if you have the time to dig past the headlines. And time is all I have.”
His hands turned over themselves involuntarily. “Did they uh …” he started, trailing off.
“Mention you? Not by name. But some of the details, the stories.” Her smile grew wide. “I couldn’t help but to recognize your trademark bullheadedness.”
“Yes, well …”
“I don’t expect you to tell me what happened.”
“I can’t.”
“I know.” She paused, turning away to pace the short distance back to the cot. “But obviously you got to the bottom of the attack.” As if an afterthought.
“Yeah. I …”
“Yes?”
He wanted to stare her down, challenge her with his eyes, but then he remembered who she was. He couldn’t intimidate her. He could barely hide from her. “I wish I could have looked a little harder at the details,” he admitted. “That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”
“But you were unable to.”
“No. As you said, a new contract was signed. They didn’t need me there anymore so I got whisked off to the next assignment.”
“Which brings you back to Barnard,” she said. “That’s quite the trip.”
“You would know,” he said, unable to resist the shot laid out for him. But her shot had already landed: he wanted to dig, and instead they’d sent him to an entirely different star system.
She gave him a short laugh. “I’d ask you how the flight was, but you’re right, I just took it myself. One good thing about a life sentence is that I’ll never have to do cryosleep again.”
He smirked, and tried to hide it, disgusted with himself for finding humor in her misfortune. But it wasn’t misfortune. It was her own actions that brought her here.
“Yeah, hate that cryosleep,” he muttered for lack of anything better to say.
She nodded quietly, then said, “Back in Barnard. Who in this system needs your public relations magic?” She stood with her cup in hand and turned her head to the upper corner of the wall, looking through a non-existent window. “B-3 and B-4 are locked in. Terroneous is too independent. Too large a land mass with minimal, siloed governments spread across it.”
Runstom grunted. “Peter – I mean, the account manager for Vulca – he told me Terroneous is the keystone. Seems impossible to get them under ModPol, but if it happened, all the indies would follow suit.”
“That’s probably true,” she said, still looking into the distance. “The other independent settlements see Terroneous as proof of the prosperity that’s possible. If they don’t need ModPol, then no one does. But you’re not going to Terroneous.”
“No,” Runstom agreed. “Not Terroneous. In a few days I’m going to Ipo. It’s a smaller moon of B-5, where there’s an ore refinery.”
“Really.” She turned her head slightly, still not looking at him. “ModPol Defense services for miners?”
“It’s grown large enough in population to become an incorporated district.” He suspected she already knew this. She had nothing to do but sit around and read up on current events.
“Which means a handful of public services to manage,” she said softly, nodding. “And taxes to collect.”
&n
bsp; “I suppose.”
“Some say Ipo is just another Terroneous settlement. It just happens to be on a different moon orbiting the same planet.” Again, she looked into the solid wall. “Makes sense that ModPol would seek a foothold there. Strike while the opportunity is fresh. How long will you be there?”
“Two months, give or take.” He was feeling dangerously close to the border of what he should be sharing with an inmate. “I guess I better study up a little on asteroid mining.”
He gave an awkward chuckle at this last statement, but she turned to face him fully, her expression stone. “I wish I could say I was surprised to learn that Jack was on Terroneous, but I wasn’t really.”
“What did you say?”
“No one told you. That also does not surprise me.”
“Jenna, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Had you heard about the magnetic field disruptions on Terroneous a few weeks ago? It would have been just before your interstellar trip.”
“Yes.” He’d caught the news story while back at ModPol HQ on Sirius-5. Hundreds of thousands of lives were in danger, so of course he was concerned, but he couldn’t help the selfish concern for Jax most of all. Because of the scale of the problem, it was easy to gossip with others about what might happen without revealing he knew anyone on the moon. Sadly, the general opinion around Sirius-5 was that those endangered people should have been living in domes anyway. “What does that have to do with Jax?” he asked. How could she know he was there?
“Turns out there were no magnetic field disruptions,” she said with a turn of her hand. “Turns out it was all a bunch of misconfigured equipment. See, on Terroneous, they get all this hand-me-down equipment. Take whatever they can get. But most of the time they don’t know how to use it, or only half know. So here’s this planet-wide crisis – well, moon-wide I suppose – and a B-fourean with technical operation experience pops his head out of the ground and saves their bacon.”
“Oh, that stupid sonofabitch.”
“They think he’s a hero.”
“Yeah, well. Sure. I’m sure they do.” He suddenly wondered if there were any mics or cameras in her cell. He realized he should assume there were, but he needed to know what she knew. He leaned in close to her. “How do you know it was Jax?”
“Watch an HV sometime, Stanford.”
“Jenna!” he whispered.
She rolled her eyes and stepped back, projecting her voice. “Some holographer made a film about the whole incident.” She too must have suspected recorders in the cell, and was letting him know she was only sharing widely-known information. “Got Jax on camera a couple of times, under the name Jack Fugere. They call him ‘Fugere The Fixer’. The original film never made it off Terroneous, but the previews did. Some of the fringe networks picked it up and pieced together the story. Asking the question, ‘Who is this Jack Fugere?’”
Runstom clutched his temples with one hand. What could he do? It was a matter of time before Jax would be tracked down – he’d always known that. But now, the B-fourean was daring ModPol to come get him.
Except he was on Terroneous. “ModPol has no jurisdiction there,” he said aloud as he thought it.
“No,” she agreed. “Not as such.”
“What does that mean?”
She looked away, as if distracted, then turned to face him, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I don’t have to explain it to you, Stanford. ModPol may not have jurisdiction, but deals have been struck. The governments on Terroneous are weak and sometimes desperate. You know he’s not safe there.”
He frowned. “He’s not safe anywhere,” he mumbled.
He had to turn from her then, before he started tracing everything back to the start, before he started thinking too much about how it was all because of her, this woman, this psychopath.
Instead he focused on what he could. Was there anything he could do for Jax? He’d truly hoped that the case would have moved along by now, that they would have exonerated Jax. Any inquiries he initiated were met with stone-faced replies. He was Defense now, and Justice felt like they owed him no explanations.
“I know you think I feel no remorse,” Zarconi said, breaking his thoughts. “And in many ways I don’t. But I am sorry, Stanford. I’m sorry that your friend’s life has been destroyed.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder, then looked down. Took a step toward the door. “I don’t know why I came here.”
“I’m sure the mines will wait, if you take a detour,” she said, freezing him before he reached the door. “If you happen to swing by Terroneous, take a moment to say hello to your old squadmate, McManus.”
He spun to face her. “McManus?”
She finished her water and set the cup down on the edge of the sink. Looked around the room, as though she had more important matters to attend to, then finally answered him with disinterest. “This whole outpost is like a sewing circle. No rules against loose lips.”
So McManus was the one they would send after Jax. Runstom figured the other officer still held a grudge against both of them. He was a useless and petty man. He no doubt volunteered for the mission as soon as word got around. Not that there would be much in the way of word; not many would even know who Jax was. But McManus did.
Still, he couldn’t go down to Terroneous and flat out arrest Jax. No, it would have to be an undercover operation. Runstom didn’t like that thought at all: McManus hunting Jax down on that independent moon without any oversight.
“I have to go,” he said.
“I’m sure it will be a grand reunion.” She placed a hand on his hand and gripped his fingers tightly. Looked directly into his eyes. “The old gang, getting back together.”
There was a flick of her eyes, darting upward then back to him in a micro motion. She knew more that she couldn’t tell him. More that wasn’t getting through his thick skull.
He pulled his hands away. “I have to go,” he repeated.
“Good luck winning the mines,” she said idly.
CHAPTER 17
“Nice studio.”
The man at the controls spasmed and twisted around in his chair. “Who the hell are you? You scared the crap out of me!”
It was a long, narrow, dark room with shelving units trailing down the sides three-quarters of the way, cleared away at the end to make room for a broad, makeshift control center, patched together with mismatched speakers and monitors, a mix of flat and holo. The room’s original purpose must have been storage, possibility even food storage, being below ground. Instead the shelves were sporadically occupied by strange hunks of electronic equipment, presumably for filming.
Dava motioned the others into position without taking her eyes off their subject. “Are you David Granderson?”
“Yes.” His head bobbed from side to side, his eyes trying to adjust to the darkness of the rest of the room, probably having spent hours staring at the brightly lit screens and holovids that glowed behind him. “I mean, who wants to know?”
“We’re looking for Jack,” Dava said. She moved slowly toward him, so slowly he squinted, as if unsure whether she was drawing close or if it was just his imagination. “He was in your holofilm.”
“I make lots of holofilms.”
“Mmm,” she purred. “Only one has Jack Fugere.”
“Yes, w-well,” he stammered. His body language shouted that he wanted to spring to his feet, but he was restraining himself, trying to appear calm in the face of intrusion. “I suppose that is true. But that was some kind of mix-up. That footage didn’t belong.”
“A mix-up?” Thompson said with a laugh. “Get a load of this guy – a mix-up? How do you accidentally put footage into a holovid? And was it a mix-up when it was in all the previews too?”
Granderson lost his restraint and stood up. He turned to face them fully and his voice grew loud. “Yes, that’s right. It was a mix-up. Just what business of—”
“You’re going to want to sit back down there, Mr. Granderson.�
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Thompson’s voice cut through the air like a bullet. Granderson flinched, then took a long hard look at the menacing submachinegun that she casually aimed in his direction. He risked a glance behind himself, as if some part of his brain was more concerned with damage to his equipment than to his own body, then he sat back down. He took a look at each of them in turn: Thompson in front of him, Lucky Jerk by the door, Bashful Dan lurking in the back, and Dava twirling a blade and drifting slowly toward him.
“Man, that guy wasn’t kidding when he said someone was after him,” he sighed. “Look, I don’t know what you want from me. I already told your friend everything I know.”
“Someone from ModPol?” Dava asked.
“What? ModPol, no. Never see ModPol on Terroneous. Was just another jerk like – uh, I mean, was just some jerk.”
“Describe him.”
Granderson frowned. “I don’t know. I thought you were with him.”
Dava looked at Thompson. “Destroy something.”
She flipped the submachinegun over to single-shot mode and with a crack put a bullet through a small speaker mounted on the wall behind Granderson.
“Fuck!” he yelled and waved his hands high. “Those are expensive!”
“Something else,” Dava said.
“No, wait, wait.” He stood, lowering his hands down to chest level, palms still facing out. When Thompson’s gun swung back to him, he sat back down quickly. “It was a pink-skinned guy. Like from B-3. And he was big, you know, built. Hair was a buzz cut. No uniform or colors even, just a wore a lot of grays.”
“Was he alone?” Dava said.
“Yeah. No. I mean, he spoke to me alone, but I saw him meet up with some other guys. Two other guys. Also in just grays and browns.”
“Did you see a ship or a vehicle?”
“No.”
“Not much use,” Thompson said with a sigh.
“Wait, there’s something,” he said, putting his hands up high again, but careful not to stand. “You know, the clothes – they weren’t from around here. They weren’t cloth or hide or anything. They were hybrid mesh fabric.”