by Jason LaPier
“Yeah, I know.” X stood up straight again and walked past them, approaching the vid-screen. He stared at the device with a frown. “How do I turn this thing off?”
“Oh,” Jax said loudly, cutting off Jenna Zarconi before she could say anything. “Just hit that red button there on the front. Yes, that’s it – the round one.”
X crouched down and hit the button. The screen blinked, then reflected the scene in the room, causing him to stand up and take a step back to get a look at it.
“Now just hit that large, flat, gray button on the very top of the screen,” Jax said in a calming tech-support voice.
“You didn’t know he was my brother, Jenna. But you did this,” X continued, not willing to lose his momentum. “You killed him.” He pressed the gray button on the top of the device. The screen flickered and went black, and he turned back around to face her. “Didn’t you?”
Jenna Zarconi’s face turned into a scowl. “Yeah, well. We did it together, Mark. I couldn’t have done it without you,” she said at him, over her shoulder. Then she turned her head around forward and stared at nothing. “Even if you didn’t know you were helping.”
“Jenna, what the hell are you talking about?” Runstom demanded.
“You and your stupid operator,” she snarled, turning to face him. “Yes, I tracked you down. After I got a d-mail from that fat idiot Stallworth. He was supposed to be a buffer. All the connections ended with him. But I should have known anyone dumb enough to be in Mark’s pocket willingly was going to crack like an egg under pressure. He begged me – he thought I was Mark, of course – begged me to let him off the hook after getting a visit from a couple of thugs. One tall, white-skinned guy and one green-sleeves.”
“How did you find us?” Runstom’s voice sounded small and weak, even to himself.
“Oh, give me a break, Stanford,” Zarconi spat, her brow creasing. “There’s only one interstellar port here on Sirius-5, and it’s in Grovenham. And flights from Terroneous don’t come every day.” Still on her knees, she leaned closer to him. “You’re a fucking green-sleeves, just like me. I’m reminded every day of how much I stick out.”
“So you waited for me at the spaceport. Watched for a B-fourean and a space-born. Followed me for a bit until I went into that bar alone.” Runstom was trying to remain calm, but he felt the rage building inside him. He closed his eyes. He knew there was something off about that woman when she sidled up next to him and started buying drinks, but at the time he was too upset with Jax to think straight. His anger had clouded his judgment then, and he tried not to let it happen now. He swallowed and opened his eyes. “When we went into the other room to get the vid-player, we passed your bedroom. I saw suitcases on the bed. You were going to take off, weren’t you? When you found out we were on your trail, you were going to—”
“Shut up!” she screamed suddenly, louder than Runstom had ever heard her. “Did you get a nice taste of justice yet, Officer Runstom?” Her green face glowed an almost yellow color, and her brown eyes were blazing and wet. “Because it’s going to be the last thing you ever taste!”
“Oh, come now, dear Jenna,” X said, still standing behind them. “Officer Runstom here was just trying to do his job.” He leaned forward, sticking his head between Runstom and the woman. “Weren’t you, Officer? Or should I say, ex-officer. Hey, how about that – you’ll be an X just like me!” He laughed at himself and straightened back up.
“Wait a second,” Jax said, who’d been quiet up to this point. “Um, Mr. X. Sorry to interrupt. I just want to see if I got this right.” He looked around at everyone to see if they were going to let him continue. They all looked back at him. “So you’re saying, Jenna here killed this guy Jorg? Who also happens to be your brother? And engineered the Life Support failure to cover up the murder? But why did everyone think that you did it, and not her?” His tone wasn’t accusing, but sounded like genuine curiosity. Runstom thought to himself that he would be lucky if X didn’t decide to gag him then and there.
“Excellent question, Mr. Jackson,” X said. “I figured you must be a smart one. Being that you’re still alive and not in jail and all that.” He looked at Zarconi and spread his hands out, palms up. “Lady Z – you want to take this one or shall I?”
Jenna Zarconi dipped her head for a moment, then raised it again, revealing a teary streak down one cheek. “They wouldn’t let me out. The bastards. They were always calling me for favors. Always threatening me. And they never gave me a fair cut. They never let me in on their take. It was XYZ! I was the Z!”
“XYZ,” Mark Xavier Phonson scoffed. “Gimme a break with that shit. It was never XYZ. You were just the dumb broad who wanted to turn a partnership into a love triangle.” He came around the front of the three kneeling captives. “If anything, it was XY. The men doing the real work. You, the woman, just wanted to screw things up.”
“That is extremely sexist!” Jax remarked, sounding more fascinated than offended. A few sharp glances pointed his way and he swallowed. “Um, I mean. From a dome upbringing. I mean, you know – I don’t know the whole story or anything, so I don’t want to jump to conclusions.” He swallowed again and looked away, narrowing his eyes, as if his attention were suddenly grabbed by that remarkable painting on that wall over there.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jenna Zarconi said. “The men. Guess I showed the fucking men something. I showed them what a woman can do. You and your men – you’re all so stupid.” She sneered at him, creases forming on her green face. “Do you know how easy it was to send a d-mail to one of your hitmen? To pretend to be you, telling him Jorg was threatening to go to the cops? Telling him that Jorg was threatening to bring you down and he had to be taken out?” She laughed, an unamused, unnerving sound. “The jerk was so excited to make with the violence, he didn’t bother to verify the target.”
X looked down, and a real expression of sadness seemed to cross his face. “Ah, but your hitman made sure to let you know it was done,” she said, reading him. “Didn’t he? After it was too late? Dropped you a note to say, ‘Jorg is dead, just like you wanted’?”
“Yeah, Jenna,” X said somberly. “You know what? You’re right,” he added, a tad more lightheartedly. “You showed me something. I underestimated you. That’s my sin. I underestimated you and now I lost two good people. Maybe it should have been XYZ. But now, it’s just X.”
He looked over at the blank vid-screen and was quiet for a moment. “Of course, I’m stuck with your set up. I’ll have to use it – to keep my rep. And yes, when I got the call from Kane, I had to throw some weight around to keep ModPol from digging too deep. Now I’m working on spreading a rumor that the Life Support accident on Barnard-4 was a cover-up. That I, the man known to most only as X, had Jorg Phonson killed because he tried to cross me. So much work, cleaning up after your mess.” He sighed wearily, then attempted a dismissive shrug, which Runstom thought looked a little forced. “I lost two good people – but on the bright side, I get a nastier rep.”
X looked thoughtfully at Jenna Zarconi. “If I had time, I’d come up with something for you too. A rumor that lets everyone know you tried to cross me too, and paid for it.” He shrugged again, this time raising his hands slightly. “Ah, but never over-complicate, I always say. No, I’m afraid you’ll be fatally injured while resisting arrest.” He glanced at Jax, and waved a hand at him idly. “You too. Sorry, Mr. Jackson. You don’t deserve it, but sometimes life gives you the short end of the stick. And someone has to take the fall for this mess.”
Jax laughed. Quietly at first, just a giggle, then breaking into full-on, raucous merriment.
“What’s so funny?” Runstom said, before anyone else could. By now, the officer was used to Jax’s tendency to exhibit inappropriate behavior and as such he was the only person in the room who wasn’t stunned to silence.
“Hey,” Jax said. “Yeah, sorry. You know, Stanford. We were having that conversation the other day, about how this bad guy X has all these pawns that do his
bidding. Remember? About how some of them knew they were being used, but I didn’t.”
“Yeah,” Runstom said quietly. He didn’t like where this was going, but they were all done for anyway, so he let Jax go ahead and dig their graves deeper.
“Well, it just occurred to me that this whole time, the big bad X is the pawn!” Jax said, laughing. “This Zarconi psycho-lady here was pulling all the strings.” He cocked his head in thought. “Yeah, that’s it. Just imagine there’s this puppet master, right? And he has all these strings that lead down to these puppets. Well, when he’s not looking, she comes up and tugs on the strings, moving the puppets and making it look like he’s doing it!” Keeping his hands on his head, he made an awkward motion toward X. “Get it? You’re the pawn, in her game!”
Mark Xavier Phonson’s face grew hard and he pulled his baton off his belt. Jax’s giggle faded and he tried to cover his head, but the club came down hard. As Runstom watched Jax’s body go limp, the room grew smoky, and he felt his own body grow heavy and disconnected, as though he were the one that got clubbed in the head.
Dava crouched outside one of the windows on the back side of the house. She could hear voices inside, but couldn’t make out the words. She carefully lifted her head just enough to get a look through the window. She was looking at some kind of little kitchen. It was unoccupied.
She pulled out her thermal cutter and fired it up. The blade grew instantly red from the heat, and she quietly sliced through the locking mechanism on the window, then silently slid it open. She crept over the ledge and onto a tiled floor.
From behind a cabinet, she leaned out just enough to see down the hallway and into the main living room of the house. There were a couple of ModPol officers decked out in full armor standing around with their pistols drawn. It looked like there were a couple of people kneeling on the floor with their hands on their heads. The one closest to her was a green-skinned man.
Her instincts were right. If this was an arrest, there’d be a van here by now. They’d have these guys face down in the lawn, not kneeling in the privacy of the living room. Some bad shit was going down here. They were probably squeezing these guys for information, and once they were done, they’d fade ’em.
She could hear their voices now. She could hear someone laughing, and she tried to get a look. One of the people on the floor, it was a tall, skinny, white-skinned guy. That must be the B-fourean. He was laughing rather raucously and saying something about puppets and pawns.
“Sounds like Psycho Jack is trying to get himself killed,” she said to herself. It was go time. She punched a few numbers on her RadMess and stood up, drawing her small ExpandoKnife from a sheath inside her jacket.
She gave the scene one more good look. There were four large, cushy chairs in a circle in the middle of the room, a cart with a vid-screen of some kind on it, and two small, low drink tables that sat between the chairs. Infrared wouldn’t pick up much of the furniture, so it was important to know where it all was. Bashful Dan had said four ModPol cops had entered the house, and indeed, she counted four purple-armored men, on their feet. One had his helmet off, exposing the bright-red skin of his bald head. He had a baton in hand and was hovering over the B-fourean. He didn’t have a gun drawn, but the other three did. She’d have to take them first.
The little gray canister bounced its way into the room just as the red-headed cop struck the B-fourean across the temple, hard. Psycho Jack went down like a sack of rocks, and the room started to fill with thick black smoke.
She slid the mask from around her neck up to her mouth and the infrared-enhanced goggles from off the top of her head down to her eyes. She took one breath to make sure the mask was working, then sprinted into the main room.
The powered-up shot-poppers that were ModPol standard-issue lit up like little orange toys, floating around the smoke, barely attached to the red snowman-like blobs that flailed around the room. One gun spun around in an arc toward her as she approached and she batted it aside, sliding her knife into the center of the owner’s chest. The purple armor that the ModPollies favored was woven out of a material designed to reflect and filter light-based attacks as well as repel attacks of high-kinetic energy, making them extremely resistant to both hand-held lasers and hand-held projectile weapons, but ineffective against knives, clubs, and so on. The officers’ combat training was supposed to save them from hand-to-hand attacks.
The small blade of the ExpandoKnife penetrated quickly, and she hit the button on the hilt. The cop made some gurgling noises, a mix of sounds coming out of his mouth and from inside his chest, as the knife rapidly doubled in surface area, retracted, and repeated the process six times in a second or two. His knees buckled a little to one side and his top end fell away and down, the small knife in Dava’s hand coming away from his body with little resistance. The infrared showed the bright heat of the inside of the man’s chest as he slid to the floor.
She scooped up the downed cop’s gun with her left hand and crouched low, backing away from the middle of the room slightly. Dava could see three forms on the ground now, red hand shapes covering red head shapes close to red body shapes. The three men standing up waving their guns were shouting at each other, trying to get a sense of their locations in the blindness that the dark smoke created. None of them dared fire a single round without knowing who might be in the line of fire.
One of the men was off to her left and the other two were off to her right. She reached up with her arm and aimed the gun she had just picked up at the one to the left. She popped off several shots quickly, then yanked her hand back down. She could see the man’s gun light up instantly as he returned fire in a vague sweep, causing the other two men to go diving for cover.
“Ow, goddammit!” one of them yelled. “Who the fuck shot me?”
She pointed the gun to the right and fired off a few more rounds.
“What the fuck?” one of them screamed. “Stop fucking shooting!”
One of the forms to the right ducked down, crouching and covering his head with both hands. The other stumbled off in the other direction. He must have caught a glimpse of sunlight through the smoke, because he made a break for the doorway. He stepped through and there was a definitive FFZZAP, and his form flew out of view to the right side of the front yard. That armor might be laser-proof and bullet-proof, but a close-up blast of electricity from Bashful Dan’s shock-gun was going to hurt, no matter what.
With the front door wide open, a cross-breeze was already clearing the smoke. Dava cursed herself for leaving the kitchen window open. Fortunately, the can was still streaming, and would be for a few more minutes. With the cop to the right ducking defensively, she looked to the one to the left. He had managed to back himself up against the wall and was carefully scanning the room, gun tracking in a slow sweep. The smoke was probably thinner farther away from the canister, so she watched the patterned movement of the orange shape of his gun and came at him when it was off to the far side.
She moved with her left hand forward, aiming the popper at his outstretched arm. She fired off a cluster of shots and he cried out in pain, his gun clattering to the floor. Even their sleeves were bullet-resistant, but the armor was semi-soft, favoring freedom of movement over protection. The shots might not penetrate, but their impact at close range had to be terribly painful. He looked around desperately, cradling his arm and cursing frantically.
Stepping forward, she kicked the cop’s gun aside and then took a wide swipe with her blade across the halfway point between the red blob of his head and the red blob of his chest. The thinner smoke was allowing more light through this side of the room, clouding her infrared view, but Dava could have executed the move against the helpless man with her eyes closed. His curses sucked off into a gasping gurgle and his hands reflexively went up to his neck. She kicked him in the stomach for good measure and he keeled over, crumpling to the ground and half-coughing through the chasm in his throat.
She turned back to the center of the room
and saw someone standing, making a movement with his arm, as if throwing something. The smoke in the room swirled, and she realized someone had gotten enough sense together to toss the canister out. She made a circle, sticking to the walls, and came up behind the last cop. He was crouching and trying to look about, his gun still drawn but lowered. The air started to clear as she glided up to him and put her blade against his cheek. She stuffed the gun in her hand into the back of her pants and used her free hand to pull off her infrared goggles and pull down her gas mask.
The cop wasn’t wearing a helmet, and she could feel his vulnerability through the tip of her blade, as if she were drawing across his flesh with her own fingernail. He started to lift his gun, and she felt herself smile reflexively. “You wanna try me, pollie?” she said icily.
He dropped the gun and raised his hands. “Not smart,” Dava chided. “Now you’re really defenseless. Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, cocking her head to one side, trying to get a look at the face of the bald, red-skinned man. “Did I give you the impression I would be letting you live?”
“Who are you?” he said, his throat raw from smoke inhalation.
“Space Waste,” said a man’s voice. She looked back to the center of the room. The B-fourean was still on the floor, on his knees and rubbing his head. The green-skinned woman was coughing and trying to crawl around on her hands and knees, meandering as if she didn’t know where to go.
The green man was standing tall, a bulky-looking pistol trained on her. She recognized the handgun instantly; it was a Zap-n-Zap, Mk-3 military-grade laser pistol. Several Space Wasters carried that exact same model, ever since a crate of them fell off the back of a transport vessel sometime last year.
“You are under arrest,” the green-skinned man said, steadily. “Both of you.” He took one step forward and motioned with his gun, and the remaining smoke seemed to part around his outstretched arm and then his chest and head. “Get down on the ground, now!” he yelled with sudden intensity.
