by Jason LaPier
Most of their wine was smashed, being that Jax had insisted on getting the classic, glass-bottle variety. He’d never tasted anything like it until the superliner, and he grieved more over that loss than anything else on the ship. He stuffed the two remaining bottles down in his pack before they headed out.
Then they walked. For several hours they walked, the thinness of the air making them slow and tired. They saw a great variety of plant life on their journey, as well as a number of bird-like creatures. They saw a pack of what looked to be predators of some kind, but the multi-limbed, large-fanged, thickly-furred creatures seemed uninterested in them, sparing the two men only a sidelong glance before moving off through the tall blue-green grasses.
At first, the whole place made Jax very uneasy. He was on the surface of a planet not protected by a dome for the first time in his life. The longer they walked, the more it felt natural to be in those surroundings. It was like being in a dream. The smells in the air had an effect on him. He kept breathing deeper, trying to take in the strange, fresh, raw odor of the local flora. It would change ever so slightly as they moved from the plains to a grove of trees to patches of brush, and each time he would make himself dizzy trying to smell as hard as he could, desiring so badly to recognize those subtleties that he had never smelled before.
When they finally reached Fornwood, the closest town they could find on the map, they were exhausted. The town was a lot of wood structures, the likes of which Jax had never seen before. It wasn’t an overly large town, but there were a number of residences, a market area, a railway station, and a small shipyard. A real shipyard, as in a place where wooden boats were built: rafts, canoes, sailboats, stern-wheelers, those kinds of things.
The people of Fornwood were a bit bizarre to Jax. Their skin was generally light pink but with a bluish hue. They wore a lot of clothing that looked like it was pieced together with animal pelts, and they had such odd accents that Jax would often have to stop and think about what someone said before he could understand them. There were, of course, other off-worlders about, but not many. The Fornwoodians were very friendly to strangers, inviting everyone to stay awhile, perhaps do some shopping and visit a few restaurants while they were in town. The town was safe, they assured the visitors. Not like other places on Terroneous.
They still had some money, and after asking around, found themselves in a room at an inn. They got the same overly-hospitable treatment there that they encountered everywhere else in the town. They were too exhausted for much banter, so they ordered meals right there at the inn and had them delivered to their room. What arrived was some kind of stew, with hunks of animal meat floating around with big cuts of roots and vegetables. On the side there were pieces of a bluish, bread-like food that was kind of tough to chew, unless they dunked it in the stew first. Despite being so tired that he could barely keep his eyes open, Jax was aware that it was the most amazing and flavorful meal he had ever eaten. Runstom said it was because they grew plants right in the ground, in farms just outside of towns. The same went for livestock – they had enough space to raise large meat-bearing creatures naturally, by allowing them to roam large pastures. No hydroponics and factory meat. The officer said it was food made nine-tenths of the way by the planet, then assembled and cooked by people.
Jax slept well that night. Better than he could remember sleeping in a long time; even back in Gretel, on Barnard-4. His home-world was only the next planet inward in the system, but it was millions of kilometers away, and to him that life felt millions of years in the past. In his dreams that night, he was a large, furry animal, stalking unsuspecting prey through tall blades of blue-green grass with his pack-mates.
When he awoke, he felt renewed and ready to move ahead on their only lead. Runstom was in a similar mood. Being on Terroneous lit a spark in the officer that Jax was glad to see. ModPol had no jurisdiction anywhere on the moons of Barnard-5, and so Runstom wore the plainest set of clothes they had managed to salvage from the personnel transport. Jax dressed similarly, but in the back of his head he had half a mind to go into the market and pick up an animal-hide coat.
There was a small postal house in town. They asked if the clerk could look up the TerroPac Express office by the number they had on their package, and she was happy to oblige. The office they were looking for was in a town called Sunderville several hundred kilometers away, but they could reach it very easily by mag-rail.
They picked up some proper luggage at the market, and Jax got himself a lovely animal-hide coat. The saleswoman told him it was leather, which was what they called animal-hide once it’s been cured for durability. She assured Jax that if he took care of it, the coat would outlast his own life. Jax decided not to mention that he was probably living on borrowed time anyway, so that wouldn’t be much of a feat. They stayed one more night at the inn, had another magnificent meal, and then caught the mag-rail to Sunderville first thing in the morning.
CHAPTER 14
“I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk said. He was a tall, old, frail-looking man with yellowing, wrinkled skin, but despite his appearance, he held his ground steadily and adamantly. “I cannot give you a customer’s information if they have chosen to send a package anonymously. That,” he said with a glower framed by bushy gray eyebrows, “is our policy.”
“So let me get this straight,” Runstom said, ratcheting up the indignity. “If someone was to send me a box of poisoned cookies, and they did so using your anonymity feature, I would have no way of finding out who had just tried to kill me?”
“Well, sir,” the old man said. “They’ve a saying, you know. Tis not the poison cookie what kills a man, nay, tis the baker.”
“What?” Jax said. “Is that really a—”
“And furthermore,” the clerk continued. “If ya be on the receivin’ end of a pointed stick, look not to the man at the other end for guilt, but look to ya-self. Chances are, ya’ve earned that poke in the ribs.”
“We don’t have such sayings on the law-patrolled planets,” Runstom growled. “And thieves and murderers can’t hide behind a mask of anonymity.”
“Aye, tis true, we’re a bit lax on lawfulness in these parts,” the old man said, raising a crooked finger. “But we make up fer it in respect, young man. Laws are only necessary for people who don’t trust no one else. And when you can’t trust someone, you can’t rest unless you control ’em.”
Runstom was fuming, but Jax put a hand on his arm. “Okay, Stanford. They have a policy. The clerk is just doing his job. Let’s go.”
A few minutes later they were walking briskly down the street away from the TerroPac Express office. Runstom was practically sprinting in anger, and Jax had a hard time keeping up with him.
“Stanford,” he said. “Hey. Stan!” He grabbed the officer by the arm and spun him around, earning a burning glare from the dark eyes on the olive-green face. “Slow the hell down. I have an idea.”
This statement seemed to soften the other man’s face ever so slightly. “What?”
“Well, when we were in that office, I got a look around. I noticed that another one of the extras they offer on delivery is a return service, so if you send something to someone and they send it back, TerroPac will ring you up and you can come pick up the package. They even have a deal where you can get that as a combo with the anonymity thing. People probably reject a lot of anonymous packages, so in some cases you might want to make sure, if they rejected it, that you would get it back.”
“Okay,” Runstom said, his eyebrows furrowing. “What are you thinking?”
“We have the original package, or at least the outer wrapping.” Jax pulled the folded brown paper out of his satchel. “Look, here. There’s a code on here that says RTSOF. Return to sender … something.”
“On failure.”
“Right! Return to sender on failure. Which means whoever sent the chip to Linda Parson requested the return service feature.”
Runstom’s face finally lit up. “So we make a new package,
wrap it up with this wrapper that has the sticker with the sender’s ID on it, seal it up, and return it to TerroPac.”
“Yes!” Jax said. “And they’ll give the sender a call and we can stake out the office and see who walks out with the package.”
They talked the plan out as they walked to a store to buy a box of cookies. Runstom rubbed his hands together with an almost frightening enjoyment for subverting the TerroPac Express anonymity feature. Jax felt a little guilty about it, being that he actually thought they had a pretty strong point. He’d never really thought about it much before, laws and control and all that.
They booked a hotel room so they could get their package together and give themselves another day before they “returned” it. Sunderville was quite a bit larger than Fornwood. There were plenty of residences, including some apartment complexes, and there were stores and restaurants offering a wide variety of products. There was even at least one school that Jax had noticed. The smaller buildings were mostly brick or wood or a combination of both and the larger buildings were made of steel and featured a lot of glass windows.
People mostly got around town on foot and on cycle. In fact, it was a bit of a contrast to Fornwood. Where the smaller town was almost all foot-traffic, this town had lots of dedicated, paved roads for cycle and small motor vehicle traffic. Some other massive, truck-like vehicles were restricted to use on the outskirts of the city or near delivery docks and transportation hubs. All the cycles and motor vehicles Jax saw were the ancient wheeled variety – no hover-bikes or hover-cars in this town.
Their hotel room was pretty high up, fourteen floors, and the view out of the large glass window was breath-taking. Jax had never seen anything like it. They saw rolling hills in the distance, covered in the blue-green fuzz of vegetation, those tree-like plants dotting the landscape. The planet, Barnard-5, was beginning to sink into the horizon and he could see its long curving surface, as if it were just a mostly-hidden circle positioned right behind the nearby hills.
Standing in front of that window, Jax felt like his insides were turning to jelly. It felt like he’d always had this life goal to see the surface of another planet, ever since his mother showed him the dead, gray surface of Barnard-4. And here he was, on a giant moon that was teeming with life. He’d walked across this moon’s surface. He’d reached out and touched the plants that grew from its living soil. He’d watched the animals who lived on it naturally move about freely; freer than any human who lived in a dome. He wished Irene Jackson could be there to experience it with him. But even if she couldn’t be there, he knew his mother didn’t have to be alive to be proud that her son walked on the surface of any celestial body other than Barnard-4.
Jax was really beginning to like it on Terroneous. He kept that information to himself, though. In fact, he tried to keep it from himself. It was dangerous to the mission. If he started to think too hard about it, he might decide it was not worth tracking down the next lead. He might start thinking about making this moon his home; a new home, beautiful, quiet and remote, where ModPol and any part of his old life would never bother him.
“That’s it. That’s the package. I can see the red X we marked on it.”
“Give me that ocular,” Runstom said, grabbing the scope from Jax. He took a look for himself and saw the small red X on the side of the package. It was being carried out of the TerroPac Express office by a tall man with broad shoulders and a massive midsection. The clothes he wore hung about his frame haphazardly, covering most of his pale-pink skin.
The target frowned heavily and walked with a bit of scorn in his step. He was clearly frustrated about having to pick up the package. Runstom wondered if he’d yet realized it wasn’t the exact size of the package he had sent out. He didn’t seem paranoid or suspicious of anything – just grumpy – as he strode head-down toward the trike he had ridden up to the TerroPac Express office.
The hotel had provided Runstom and Jax with a pair of bicycles as part of their room package. The cycles bore the flashy logo of the hotel on them, which made them look like a couple of tourists. Jax had been agitated about the notion of being identified as a tourist, and Runstom was detecting some sudden urge to fit in coming from the other man. The officer reminded him that if they looked like tourists, no one would suspect they were staking out the TerroPac office.
The charade continued to be useful as they trailed the big man on his tricycle through the streets of Sunderville. He showed no signs of being aware that he was being followed, and certainly made no attempts to shake the two tourists who coincidentally turned the same way he did, time and time again. It was fortunate, because Jax had never been on a human-powered bike before, and as a result, he bumbled around like a drunk. This vehicular disability was undoing all the fitting-in that his new leather jacket had bestowed upon him. The jacket was, however, helpful in keeping his clothes from being torn to shreds as he proceeded to fall off the bike every few minutes.
Finally, the heavy-set man stopped at an apartment complex. Jax and Runstom rode past him and stopped at a store across the street. They watched as the big man put his three-wheeled bike in a shed in front of the complex and then headed inside. Runstom quickly stuck his bike in the auto-locking corral in front of the store and grabbed the key-card that popped out when he engaged the locking mechanism. Jax followed suit and they sprinted across the street and into the apartment building.
No one was in the lobby. There were two elevator doors and Runstom noticed that the digital floor number readout next to one was quickly ticking up: 8 … 9 … 10. It slowed down and stopped at 12. He looked at Jax.
“I guess we can hypothesize that the big man didn’t take the stairs,” the operator said.
Runstom nodded and hit the elevator call button and they took the other car up to the twelfth floor. When they arrived, they stood in the hallway and looked left to right. There were about ten rooms on either side of the elevator, doors on either side.
“Well, now what?” Jax whispered. “We can’t just knock on every door.”
Runstom gave his partner a half-smile, and Jax rolled his eyes. “Come on,” the officer said. “Let’s start at this end.”
The big man was behind the fourth door, not counting the ones where no one answered. He looked at them mildly confused, just like the other three people who answered their doors did. “Can I help you?”
“Your package got returned,” Jax said before Runstom had a chance to speak. He glared at the operator.
“How did you know—” the man started, looking quickly to Jax, then to Runstom, then back. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“We work for X,” Jax said. “And we need to talk.”
Fear darkened the man’s face like blinds closing over a window. “I – I tried to send the package. I don’t know why it came back,” he stammered. “X said that I should send it anonymous!”
“Let’s step inside,” Runstom said, before Jax could pull anything else. He made a mental note to deck the operator at his earliest convenience for taking the lead. Sure, they didn’t exactly have a plan, but Jax’s ruse was just reckless. The big man was frozen in the doorway. “Now,” Runstom said, putting his hand on his hip and revealing the laser pistol he’d kept since the shootout with the Space Wasters.
“Okay,” the man said, putting his hands up and slowly backing into the apartment. “Okay. Okay.”
“Sit down.” Runstom motioned toward a chair at a small table. The apartment was a fair size for just one person, but it was clear the man lived alone. It was open, the kitchen looking directly into the living area. An easy chair sat in front of a holo-vision on one side and a single bed on the other. A large picture window displayed a spectacular view of the city and the hills beyond.
The big man sat down. Jax stood in front of him, apparently trying to be intimidating. Runstom paced about the kitchen, making observations. The package was sitting on the counter, unopened. There was some other mail there as well. Half-opened bills, mostly, all
addressed to one Markus Stallworth.
“I did what he said,” the man said to Jax. “I did exactly what he said to do.”
Runstom turned away from the counter and faced the man sitting at the table. “Markus Stallworth,” he said. The man looked up at him. “When X called you—”
“X didn’t call me,” the man interrupted. “He d-mailed me.”
“Of course he d-mailed you,” Jax said venomously. “X doesn’t have time for backwoods parts of the galaxy like this shit-stained moon.”
“When he d-mailed you,” Runstom continued, stepping closer, “he didn’t tell you what the purpose of the program was, did he?”
“No!” Markus Stallworth spread his hands out. “No, of course not! All I did was encrypt it and put it on a memory chip! I got the d-mail with the program and the d-mail with the voiceprint and fingerprint and password. He said to encrypt this program in a package that will make it unreadable to anyone who didn’t have voiceprint, fingerprint, password.” Stallworth counted off on his fingers as he said the last three phrases.
“But you must have had a look at the code before you encrypted it,” Jax said. Runstom could see the operator trying to keep a lid on some very real anger. The phrase voiceprint, fingerprint, password took him back to that very first interview back at the Blue Haven Police Department on B-4, the operator detailing the console login procedure.
