by Jason LaPier
“The kind that makes you look big and flashy?” Thompson said. “Like you got more muscles than you really got?”
“No, well, yeah,” he stammered. “Same kind of stuff – I use it all the time in my films. But instead of being flashy, it was doing the opposite. Like, like a muting effect. Not quite camouflage, but enough to make it so most people would never notice these guys walking around.”
“Interesting.” Dan’s quiet voice was so unexpected, it almost made Dava turn to look at him, but she kept her eyes on Granderson.
“What did you tell him?” she said.
“I want to be clear,” he said slowly and deliberately. “I don’t know Mr. Fugere all that well. I don’t even know his real name. I don’t know exactly where he went—”
“But you have an idea,” Thompson prodded.
Granderson stared at them in silence for a moment, looking from Thompson to Dava and back. He hung his head. “Yeah. He said he was going to the Low Desert.”
“Why?” Dava said. “What’s there?”
“Some hidden facility.” He lifted his head and crossed his arms, his lips pulling tight across his face. “That’s all I know.”
“So like an underground building in the desert?” Lucky Jerk asked from the other end of the room, suddenly interrupting the conversation.
“I don’t know,” Granderson said through clenched teeth, glaring at the flyboy.
“Yeah, I bet I know right where that is.”
“How the hell would you know that, shit-for-brains?” Thompson said, the barrel of her gun straying in his direction.
“Because, Tommy-girl,” he said with the taunting voice of a younger brother, “when we were looking for a solid place to put the dropship out in the desert, I was doing a density scan. We flew right over a spot that looked like a perfect rectangle somewhere under the sand.”
“What the hell, Lucky,” Thompson said. “There was an underground building out there and you had us parked next to it?”
“No, dammit,” he said, practically stamping a foot. “Listen to me. I saw it and put us on the other side of the desert just to avoid it.”
“Perfect,” Dava said. “Mr. Granderson, thank you for your cooperation.”
“Are you,” he started, and she heard his voice crack a little. “Are you going to hurt him?”
She took a step toward him. With the slow drifting, she was now practically on top of him. “No, don’t worry about your friend.” She looked him in the eyes and cocked her head slightly. “We’re going to rescue him. And then we’re going to recruit him.”
“R-really?”
“If he gives us any trouble after that,” she said with a twirl of her blade, “then we’re going to hurt him.”
* * *
The personnel at the TEOB Magma Center were anxious to give Jax an in-depth tour of their facility. He wasn’t in a hurry, knowing he could be stuck there for an indeterminate length of time, but they acted like he might evaporate before their eyes and they needed to show him as much as possible before that happened. Maybe it was just that they never got any visitors.
Lealina was off on some administrative errand. In order to get him past the visitors’ area of the structure – which was no more than a five-meter-square room with half a dozen plastic chairs on a floor specked with sand tracked in from the desert – she had to file some kind of contractor-evaluation paperwork. She explained that was just the beginning, that in order to let Jax stay in the facility, she’d have to have someone complete the evaluation and then he could be hired as a consultant. Hired but not paid, simply because there was no budget for it. However, room and board would be provided.
So he’d left Lealina on the first sublevel and followed a trio of technicians around the second sublevel as they pointed out the living facilities: bed-chambers, a small kitchen, showers, a tiny game room, and so on. The halls were narrow and short, and Jax had to duck just a few centimeters any time he passed through a doorway. Every time he did so, he thought about the tons upon tons of desert sand bearing down on the walls and then had to think of something else.
Before long they took him in an elevator down to the third sublevel, which they explained was where most of the observation work was done. There was a fourth sublevel, but none of the technicians were keen on making the trip down. Evidently it wasn’t much but darkness and heat and noise, as the fourth sublevel was where holes had been drilled deep below the surface and various sensor equipment went down. A handful of people worked below to keep the systems running with the aid of some maintenance bots, and neither group was what the technicians considered hospitable company.
They pulled him into an observation room that was full of monitoring and recording equipment. It seemed they could carry on three simultaneous conversations independently from one another with no lack of enthusiasm or momentum, and he desperately tried to pay attention to their overlapping exposition. He was going to have to earn his keep, and he wanted to contribute eventually, but he was too distracted in that moment to follow half of what they told him about their operation.
What was he going to do? He couldn’t keep running and hiding forever. All the news he’d been following, all the crap he’d accumulated in his folder of fugitivity, none of it was pointing to his freedom.
He should have been thankful. Lealina was looking out for him in a way that no one ever had, with the exception of Stanford Runstom. Hell, even Granderson did his best to make his wrongs right, got an associate to fly them out to the middle of the desert in a gyrocopter. And Jax was thankful. It was just the not knowing that was killing him. What kind of future did he have, what kind of life could he make, always looking over his shoulder?
The trio of techs prattled on and he thought of Runstom. He knew the officer’s reach was very limited, and he knew it was in his best interest that Runstom not seek him out. But he desperately wished he could hear from him – something, anything. And even though it was a dangerous idea, he briefly entertained the fantasy of Runstom swooping down to Terroneous to rescue his ass one more time.
“Hey guys.” Jax turned at the sound of Lealina’s voice and found immediate solace in those bright blues. “Mind if I steal Mr. Fugere for a few minutes? I’ve got some forms for him to fill out.”
The techs happily shook his hand and went about their business and he followed Lealina back down the hall and into the elevator. While they rode she gave him an overview of the virtual paperwork he would have to deal with back on the first floor.
“But first, I want to show you to your room,” she said, getting off the elevator on sublevel two. “They aren’t the best accommodations, but they’re private. I had someone bring your stuff down already.”
She handed him a keycard and led him to the section of corridor where the living quarters were. They found his room and went inside. It was definitely small and sparse, but it was livable. A bed, a desk with a terminal, a closet, a dresser, and even a small holovid in the corner. His bags were piled in the middle of the floor.
“Not bad,” he said, then looked at the light-gray walls. “Could use some color.”
“I’ll get you something,” she said, quietly closing the door behind her. “Some art.”
“That would be nice.” He looked at her and looked away. To get him something meant she would be leaving. He bent down to shuffle through his bags. “Guess I’ll make myself at home.”
“I’m going to stay for a couple of days,” she said.
“That’s good.”
“Then I have to get back.”
“I understand.”
“I’m still acting director and all.”
“I know.”
“Of course, I’ll be back. I come here a couple of times a month for work.”
He stood up and tried to smile at her. “Lealina, everything you’ve done for me—”
“I know.” She took his hand. She looked at him for a moment and they were quiet. He wanted to be angry at the universe for giving him something only to t
ake it away, but those eyes would not let him be anything but at peace.
“Jax?”
“Yes?”
“I know this is a moment and all, but like I said, I can only stay a couple of days.”
He released her hand. “Right.”
“So we’re going to have to fast-track this,” she said and unbuttoned her shirt.
* * *
Two days at the facility and Jax had gotten enough orientation to begin work assisting the techs in one of the observation rooms. It was a lot of watching for anomalies that never appeared, and there was an odd familiarity that nagged at the back of his mind until he finally cornered it and realized it was very similar to the work he did as a life-support operator back on B-4. The thought paralyzed him momentarily: had he really traveled so far, experienced so much, only to end up doing the same thing he was doing less than a year ago?
He shook it off. He reminded himself that this was survival mode, reminded himself that he would do what needed to be done, day by day. Every day he woke up free was a victory. It didn’t matter what he was doing to earn his keep. Did it?
Kuri, a mousy, yellow-skinned tech in his mid-forties, interrupted Jax’s pontifications. “Mr. Fugere,” he said, pointing at the ceiling. “Director Warpshire is requesting your presence up top. Something about paperwork finalizations.”
“What?” He followed the finger up, then looked back down instead of staring uselessly at the ceiling. What paperwork was there left to do? None, of course. “Oh. Right. Guess I’ll see you after lunch,” he said, already having learned the technicians’ strict adherence to the break timetables.
“Yes, of course.”
Jax went up the elevator to the top. He asked for Lealina at one of the front desks and a clerk told him that she went outside to take some readings. He gave the man a curious look. What readings would she be taking in the middle of the desert? None, of course. He smiled and nodded and headed for the stairwell that led to the small opening above.
Lealina was about twenty meters out, just at the top of a nearby dune. He frowned at his improper clothing; not only was it not fit for walking through the desert, it would collect sand, and the techs would no doubt give him a lengthy lecture about the dangers of bringing the stuff into the observation chambers. He watched her for a moment. She was turned away from him, a scarf wrapped around her face, hands in her pockets. She looked peaceful.
He trudged up the dune, acquiring several kilos of sand in his low-top shoes in the process. He took a place next to her and looked into the distance, where she looked. The dunes were like frozen waves. Views like this always hit him particularly hard, both with a sense of beauty and a sense of vertigo. Just being able to see into such distance was still a shock to him at times, having grown up in domes which themselves were divided into subdomes and blocks and chambers and corridors.
“My mom,” he caught himself saying unexpectedly. “Uh …”
She turned only slightly, still mostly facing the landscape. “Yes?”
He cleared his throat. “My mother, she was a terraformer. Sorry, I just remembered her now. You never see the surface on B-4. Well, you were there, you remember.”
“Yeah. Claustrophobic.”
“Yeah,” he said, trying out a few different meanings for the word before coming up blank. “What’s that one?”
She laughed from behind the scarf and her beautiful eyes rolled at him. “Fear of being closed in.”
He considered that. “It seems like a valuable fear to have,” he said, mostly to himself.
“You were talking about your mother?”
“Right. My mom. Once in a while when I was young – like seven, eight years old – she would bring me to work. I never got to go out onto the surface of course, but she let me see it.”
“Out here, Jax?” she said, turning to look him directly in the eyes and taking his hand. “This is how we know that not everything is made by the human race. That – in fact – most of the universe is not under our control.”
He grinned at her. “I like that. But I’m not sure everyone would agree.”
“That’s because most people are fucking stupid,” she said, pulling the scarf down and grinning right back at him.
He kissed her then, for a length of time he could not possibly estimate, while the warm air lightly danced around them, specking his skin harmlessly with sand. When the movement of time began again, it was due to the interruption of a sound that could only be made by the human race.
They pulled apart reluctantly. Her face turned from warm bliss to cold terror. He followed her eyes to the distant sky. A black form, heavy and unnatural in its defiance of gravity, cut through the sky in a zagging pattern. Searching. Seeking.
“Jax.” She tugged at his arm. “You have to get inside.”
* * *
Though his technician hosts had avoided giving him the tour of the bowels of the station, he was forced to visit them anyway. It wasn’t as dirty as he thought it would be, but the air was very stale and the noise was incessant. A combination of clamor from drills and fans and other machinery that gelled into an irregular white noise that was peppered with odd pangs and thunks. He found himself shaking slightly, but was unable to decide if he was afraid of ModPol or afraid of the walls coming down around him.
He recognized some of the faces down below, having passed them in the halls or seen them in the cafeteria. The workers there paced slowly around the equipment, in and out of boring rooms and processing chambers and filtration closets. There couldn’t have been more than six or seven, but their unceasing movement made it seem like they were an entire colony.
One of them returned from a comm, which had to be entirely enclosed in a soundproof circle. She was a young woman and Jax could see the lines of her muscles through the tightness of the uniforms the workers wore out of necessity.
“Mr. Fugere,” she said, coming close enough to be heard over the din. “I’m not going to ask you any questions. We don’t need to know.”
He nodded at her, and had nothing else to say, other than, “Thank you.”
She shook her head once to discard his gratitude. “Warpshire says we need to find a spot for you.”
Lealina had left him at the elevator up above. She insisted he go down while she stayed to get rid of the interlopers. He wasn’t sure of her strategy; it seemed to be a combination of denial of any knowledge of Jax and an insistence that ModPol had no jurisdiction on Terroneous. If they were already there, he didn’t imagine they would give up their search easily, but she insisted that he hide so that she could deal with it.
The worker who spoke to Lealina took him through a labyrinth of carved-out tunnels that led away from the safety of walls and structure. The paths were lit by strings of lights and there was some kind of reinforced mesh that held the sides and ceilings of the tunnels together. She explained that it was sprayed on and when it touched the dirt, formed a molecular lattice that was almost as strong as steel. He didn’t care for the almost. The floor was less reinforced, and at such a depth the dirt was wet. Between ducking under the low ceiling and sliding around in the mud, Jax felt like he was making no progress. Every step forward was a step backward in such muck.
Finally they arrived in a larger space the size of a small room. There was a desk and a couple of chairs and some equipment stacked in a corner.
“This is as comfortable as it gets down here,” she said, then gave him a handypad. “Go ahead and do some reading or something, I guess.”
He took the device, which was heavy and encased in extra layers of hard plastic. “Thanks.”
She approached the desk. “There’s a comm box here. It’ll broadcast announcements once in a while, if you’re down here long enough. Otherwise, if you need something you can hit this all-call button here and use this headset. Someone will pick up eventually, just keep hitting the button if you don’t get a response right away.” She looked at him for a long hard moment. Even though she had promised not t
o ask questions, he could feel her examination of him, her judgment. “I have to get back to work. We’ll come get you when the director says so.”
And then he was alone. He looked at the blank handypad but couldn’t bring himself to wake the screen. The irregular walls of the room curved around him and up into a low ceiling that made him feel like he was trapped inside his own skull.
“Claustrophobic,” he mumbled, trying out Lealina’s description of the domes.
He sat at the desk and put his head down. It could not go on. How could it?
And what would happen if they did take him in? His fear was that he should not have run in the first place. That every day he spent on the run was another sign of guilt. That even if they found him innocent of those terrible murders, they would lock him up for hiding from the law.
Why couldn’t they just leave him alone?
Time passed as he stared at the emptiness of the room and fought back the thoughts of what his life would be like in prison. The sounds of the work were lessened in this space, and he was thankful for that. From where he was, they sounded like distant scratchings and scrabblings. He tried not to think of it as the work of insects, which no doubt lived in the walls of dirt all around him. He was still not used to insects.
The comm box buzzed to life and he nearly jumped out of his chair. He had no idea how much time had passed, as he still found himself unable to activate the handypad. Half an hour? An hour?
“Attention, everyone.” There was a great deal of static, hissing and warping the voice that came out of the comm speaker. “Attention. This is Sergeant Jared McManus of Modern Policing and Peacekeeping. We are looking for a fugitive named Jack Jackson, also known as Jack Fugere. We have reason to believe Jackson is here in this facility. We require your cooperation.”
He stared at the box as if it were a bomb, freezing him in terror, as if to move even a centimeter would cause it to blow him up.
“We will search this entire facility,” McManus continued. The name sounded familiar, but the voice did not. One of the officers who arrested him on B-4? “So if you are aware of Jackson’s whereabouts, you can make this easier for everyone by letting us know now.”