Unclear Skies

by Jason LaPier

  Somewhere in the middle, just off-center, was a woman with long, brown hair, tied in a knot behind her head. Her skin was a dull gray-green, not at all the vibrant color it’d been when he first saw her in a bar four months ago. She slouched over a plate of food, chewing slowly, her eyes closed.

  After exchanging pleasantries with the guard at the entrance of the cafeteria, he approached her.

  “Um, hi.”

  Jenna Zarconi opened her eyes halfway, but did not lift her head. “Officer Stanford Runstom. Or I suppose I should be calling you Detective Runstom by now.”

  He sat on the bench opposite her. “No. It’s still Officer, only now it’s Public Relations Officer.”

  She raised her eyes and frowned at him. She sat back and shook her head. Strands of her hair loose from the knot waved around her like clouds. “I’m sorry, Stanford. That was an unnecessary thing to say. I already knew that they transferred you to Market Strategy. Word travels, even down here.”

  They looked at each other in silence. She looked tired. Defeated. Empty. The meal in front of her was nothing more than piles of goop in varying shades of brown. He hunted in her eyes for any flicker of the life that was there, to chase that spark he’d felt the first time he met her. To chase that bold thought that awakened in the back of his mind, the one that said maybe someday he could have a normal life. Maybe he could find love, or at the very least find someone he liked. He looked into her eyes and sought that feeling that came before everything else destroyed it. Before he found out what she really was.

  “Of course, there’s one word that doesn’t travel here,” she said, looking back down at her lifeless food. “X.”

  “No, I figured not.”

  “So have you heard anything?” Still looking down.

  “I suspect I know less than you.”

  She sighed, long and hard, then cut her breath short, swallowed. “He’s too deep. He’s got too many friends in too many places.”

  “Jenna, there’s the recording,” Runstom said gently. “He gave us everything.”

  She pushed her tray aside. “So where is he?”

  Runstom felt cold. “He’s going down for this—”

  “Where is he!” she shouted suddenly, her face coming up and her eyes stabbing at him. He hadn’t noticed the thin gray wire around her neck until her veins bulged against it. “Where the fuck is he?”

  Spots of red began to light around the wire. The guard from the back of the room boomed over a loudspeaker. “Prisoner six-gamma-eight. Reduce your heart rate or you will be sedated.”

  She closed her eyes and her mouth went tight. He could see her nostrils move as she breathed hard and fast, then forced herself to go in slowly, hold, go out slowly.

  “You’re right,” she said finally. “There’s too much evidence. The media has a hold of the story. He’ll get his. I just,” she said, then swallowed again.

  “I just hate not knowing,” Runstom said, using the words he knew she wanted to say. “I’m sick of not knowing.”

  Her eyes opened and a hint of a smile broke into one corner of her mouth. “I don’t get many visitors. At first there were friends, but they’ve all disappeared over the months. They didn’t want to believe I had a hand in killing those people. I started to tell more truth than they could handle.” Her voice softened. “I should thank you for coming to see me, Runstom.”

  “I only just found out you were here. Otherwise I would have come sooner.”

  She sighed, letting the small smile dissolve. “I know you would have.” She turned her head, staring into nothing. “I don’t blame you, you know.”

  Runstom huffed. “You should. I arrested you.”

  “But it was my crime. The funny thing about it, Stanford? I never had a plan.”

  “You seemed to have the whole scheme pretty well planned out to me.”

  “No, I mean for after,” she said. “Even if I had gotten away with it, I had no plan for afterward. The whole plot – the dome malfunction, creating a trail to lead back to X, framing him for mass murder – it was a short-term goal. What was I going to do after?”

  “You had a job.”

  “Yes, but that was temporary. Could I live a normal life after that? I’ve had months to think about this, and I’m not sure prison life is all that different than my life would be on the outside had I not been caught.”

  “Except that an innocent man would be here in your place.”

  She turned to face him again. “Would that have hit me, eventually?”

  Runstom looked at her for a long time. She was one of the few people he’d met that had the green-tinted skin like he had. Born on a ship with unnatural light and whatever filters there were for solar radiation and everything else bouncing around space, skin pigmentation not behaving quite the same way that it did on Earth.

  “You know, Jenna,” he said. “I don’t think you’re a monster. I think somewhere inside you is a good person. But somewhere else inside there was something bad, something that wouldn’t let go. It condemned you a long time ago.”

  “Maybe so,” she said. She sounded unconvinced.

  The subject died on the table. “I saw that you’re getting transferred,” Runstom said after a moment of silence.

  “Yes. Back to Barnard. ModPol Outpost Alpha.”

  “Have they set trial dates?”

  “I haven’t been informed if they have.”

  “Well, if you’re going to Alpha, it’s close,” he said. “Anyway, I wanted to see you before you left.”

  “Oh?” she said, touching the rim of her cup. “What about?”

  He shifted, feeling his leg falling asleep in the hard plastic chair. “Oh, I just – you know, it’s just weird that we haven’t seen each other since – well, since, you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  He drummed his fingers on the tabletop and noticed the wood grain. “Imported?”

  She laughed then, a genuine out-loud laugh. “Hardly. Looks real, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Real enough to fool me,” he said, allowing himself to smile at his own expense.

  “So what do they have you doing now, exactly?”

  “Oh,” he said, jarred by the change of topic. “Well, I’m going – I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about my mission.”

  “Your mission?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Something tells me they don’t call it that.”

  “No, they call it something else.” He couldn’t remember all the new terminology that was being thrown at him.

  “Come on, Stanford,” she said, leaning over the table slightly and showing him her eyes. “You can tell me. What am I going to do? They don’t even give me terminal access. My only connection to the rest of the galaxy is a holovid in the rec room that’s stuck on one channel, and it’s some ModPol-produced 24-hour news network.”

  Runstom sighed. “Well, okay. It’s not that big of a deal I guess. I’m supposed to go to Vulca – that’s one of those outer moons here—”

  “Yes, I know what Vulca is. The company I work for – worked for – uses some of the test facilities up there.”

  “Right, sorry. Anyway.” He pulled her tray back over to the middle of the table, which caused her to lean back. “So we’re here on Sirius-5,” he said, gesturing at the tray. He took a small sauce dish from the tray and placed it just off the side of it, then did the same with a couple of spice shakers so that the three outer objects were roughly equidistant from each other. “We have these ModPol stations in orbit. They facilitate communication and monitor everything that happens on the surface of Sirius-5, mostly around the primary dome clusters.”

  “And Vulca,” she said, picking up her cup and placing it farther off on the table. “Is way out here. About 700,000 kilometers, I think.”

  “Yeah, something like that. Anyway, it rotates around.” He dragged the cup a few centimeters across the table. “And is usually in good position to be monitored by the ModPol stations.”

  “Except for the
far side.” She took the cup from his hand and drained the rest of the water from it.

  “Right,” he said. “So with the rotation, which is really slow, facilities on the surface can be on the far side for stretches of months at a time.”

  “And?” She gave him a look he couldn’t quite read. A dare, perhaps.

  “Well, they’re pretty much unprotected.”

  “Unprotected by ModPol.”

  He huffed. “Unprotected period.”

  “What could happen to them?” She cocked her head in mock ignorance.

  He narrowed his eyes. It felt like he was already out there, being grilled by his new clients. He hadn’t been through the material yet. He had no idea what could happen to the far side of Vulca. It was just a moon with a handful of research stations on it. “They could be attacked, I suppose.”

  “By whom?”

  “Well, I’m not sure.” Would someone tell him? Were the threats properly outlined in the briefs sitting in his office? “I think it’s more a matter of identifying vulnerabilities.”

  “Oh, I can think of a dozen ways to exploit those facilities,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I was up there once, managing a stress test on some new life-support hardware. But it seems to be the who would be more important than the how.”

  He slid the tray back down the table and leaned forward. “Tell me one.”

  “One?”

  “One way to exploit the facilities on Vulca. Give me the biggest weakness you can think of.”

  She smiled unnervingly, then purred as if mulling it over. “Hmm. I’d have to say power.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s all solar power up there. But parts of the moon can go for months in the dark because of the slow rotation. So they have these massive collectors – four of them, if I’m not mistaken – all around the middle of it.”

  “The middle? You mean like, along the equator?”

  “Yeah, more or less. They’re all connected. They have these substations between them, but it’s like one power lifeline that runs around the middle of the moon. So even if you’re in the dark for a month, you can draw power from down the line.”

  “So you’re saying if the line were severed, it could be bad.” Runstom thought it over for a moment. “Wouldn’t they have backup power, reserves of some kind?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But remember, we’re talking months of darkness. And these people use a lot of power. A lot. Anyway, it’s a ring, so you could lose the connection in one direction and still have one in the other direction.”

  “Still sounds tenuous to me.”

  “Well, they’ve never had a problem up there. But then again, no one has ever attacked them. That’s why I think you need to ask who.”

  “Maybe.” He shrugged and felt a little ashamed to feel like that didn’t matter. “I guess what we have to convince them of is that there could be a threat.”

  “I see,” she said. “Market Strategy. Expanding your available market?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, you know you can always come to me,” she said, glancing at the wall clock, which was closing in on the end of the lunch hour. “I know I’m never going to see the outside of a prison again. But you can help me do something right once in a while. Just ask for my help, and I’ll be here – or in a ModPol prison somewhere. I know you have as few friends as I do.”

  “I don’t think,” he started, then stared at his hands. Who was he kidding? “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Speaking of your very small number friends,” she said, “how’s Jax?”

  “Off the grid.”

  “Even to you?”

  He stared at the fake woodgrain that ran through the top of the table, trying to compare it to the memory of the supposedly real wooden desk in Victoria Horus’s office. It all looked the same to him.

  “Even to me.”

  * * *

  Jax tugged at his sleeves. The work shirt fit fine, with the cuffs reaching down around his wrists, but he couldn’t help feeling too long for it. He tried to bring his attention back to the food in front of him. Even as hungry as he was, it felt like work.

  The place he was in – well, he didn’t really know what to call it. A market, he supposed. It was named Wei’s Wares. The word ware made Jax think of hardware and software, but the wares in this place were mostly anything but. They sold everything from prepared food to clothing to tools and equipment. Sure, some of the equipment was hardware running embedded software, but what Jax found more surprising was the number of tools that required no power at all. Human-powered. Is that what the locals would call it?

  His fingers were at his sleeves again. It wasn’t his clothes that made him feel awkward; they were a set from a work uniform he’d acquired on the superliner. It was the fact that he stood at least a head taller than everyone he met. The fact that the hands in front of him were so pale they practically glowed in comparison to the mélange of skin tones around him. He had hopes he might see at least one other domer on this rock, just one person that looked like him. None so far.

  He took a bite, knowing he had to eat something. It was some kind of hand-held food. A square of spongy, flour-based material wrapped around a mix of cooked meat and vegetables. He had to admit, it was quite delightful. The overwhelming flavors reminded him of why he chose this place to come back to.

  If he’d gone back to Barnard-4, he could have blended in. Everyone else, tall and pale like him. He could have obscured his identity, found any number of jobs, and found a place to live. Hiding in plain sight – that’s what Stanford Runstom would’ve called it. And things would be back to normal. Not back to normal, but closer to normal.

  “What’s normal again?” he muttered to his lunch.

  He took a large bite to occupy his mouth, in hopes of diverting from the fact that he was talking to himself. He was in public, and Wei’s Wares had a number of customers milling about. It’d been a long, isolated journey to get to Terroneous. He was talking to himself more often these days.

  But he wasn’t afraid. Or he was so afraid, every moment of every day, that fear became normal and no longer affected him. The run used to have purpose. Running toward clues. Now he was just running. Hiding. Trying to stay out of sight, and trying to stay alive. But the latter was growing increasingly more important. He wasn’t just on the run from ModPol. He was on the run from hunger and poverty.

  Homelessness was difficult to achieve in the domes. Every living human was guaranteed shelter. But out here, outside of the domes, without a direction, without a purpose, without a job or a place to live that’s what he was. Homeless.

  Maybe that’s why he had a hard time feeling the fear. What was there left to lose? Even convicts had a roof and food.

  Before he knew it, the last of the delicious wrap had disappeared into his mouth. The fact that he could remember the taste of it was enough to keep him moving. Stay human. This time he said the words in his head, and not out loud.

  For lack of anything better to do, he decided to wander through the store’s offerings. Maybe if he could get a sense of what kind of objects one could find in a bazaar such as this, he’d learn a little more about life on Terroneous. What his life might be like.

  He’d come in to Wei’s to sell some clothes. With the little cash he had running out, his only valuables were the clothes in his bag. All of them were acquired on the superliner, not just the outfit he was wearing. As he’d combed through them that morning, deciding what he could let go of, he was flooded with the memory of those weeks he spent on that ship. The Royal Starways Interplanetary Cruise Delight Superliner #5. Those were his first days as a fugitive, wearing disguises and tracking down clues. Teaming up with Stanford Runstom, the ModPol officer who put everything on the line to help Jax.

  Because they were so often in disguise, and they had gotten a hold of a wad of money by unsavory means, they bought a lot of clothes. Sometimes they were work outfits, made to ble
nd in with the maintenance staff, the kitchen staff, the cleaners, the stockers, whatever. The superliner employed over three hundred people. Other times, the clothes they sought were meant to help them blend in with the passengers. People who individually had more money than entire subdomes had back on Barnard-4. To look the part, Jax and Runstom spent far too much on flashy clothing that had little use anywhere else in the galaxy.

  But here at Wei’s Wares, all manner of trade was accepted, and Jax was able to unload a particularly fine suit of a silky, deep-red material, dotted with clear gems along the sleeves and pockets. It was garish by anyone’s standards, but sometimes the occasion called for garish. For that reason, the manager of the market was giddy to take the suit off Jax’s hands. She pressured Jax to consider trade, and so he promised to take a look around. But he knew he’d need to take cash, even if it meant a lower value. What would he do with anything he found here? He had no home. He wasn’t even sure he would stay in this town.

  “Look, pal. How much you expect for something that’s broken?”

  As Jax brushed his fingers against some brutish construction tools, he paused to listen to the conversation between the manager and a newcomer.

  “It’s not broken, I swear.” The man was stout and had light-brown skin. He wore a broad-rimmed hat and a loose, dusty-gray suit. “It worked a few days ago. It’s mint!”

  Jax angled his head to get a look at the object in question. It was a Kitcheny, a combination storage unit and cooker that was common in domer apartments. The dull-white, round device stood about a meter and a half tall and looked as out of place as Jax did. The surface touch panel that would normally report on what food was available in storage and provide an interface into selecting and preparing a meal was unsettlingly dim. Jax realized he’d never seen a Kitcheny without power.

  “Well I don’t know what to tell ya, pal,” the manager said.