Unclear Skies

by Jason LaPier

  “Okay,” Jax said with a swallow. “Space Waste shows up to steal weapons. Supposed to be unguarded, or close to it. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only there’s no weapons.” He got another refill. “There’s soldiers. A shit-ton of them.”

  “An ambush.” Dava’s face registered first shock, then frustration. Like she hadn’t learned something new, only accepted something she already knew.

  “And ModPol frames it as,” Jax said. He spread his hands as if to present a headline. “Space Waste attacks Epsilon-3. Thwarted by ModPol Defense.”

  He drank and let the burn dance on his tongue before trickling down his throat. The rest looked at him distantly. They didn’t see all the pieces, and neither did he. But Runstom’s conspiracy wasn’t just paranoia, he was starting to believe that. And as much as he wanted to go home to Terroneous, he knew that wasn’t happening any time soon.

  He locked eyes with Dava. “When did you finally stop being afraid?”

  She returned his stare. “When I got angry.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Once Jax had started to come around to Runstom’s conspiracy theory, the other man didn’t want to discuss it. It made for a frustrating subwarp trip to Epsilon-3. Jax spent the whole time trying to drop clues: things he knew about Space Waste, but without letting on that there were three Waster stowaways hanging out below in the rec room. It became clear that Runstom had reached the edge of his ability to cope with large amounts of untied threads. He was tired, burned out, and Jax, though fired up, had consumed too much brandy to properly move the conversation productively.

  Runstom’s plan was to do his job. It annoyed Jax, but he knew that his cop-minded friend sometimes needed to go into duty-mode in order to work things out in his head. There was a comfort to it, a shelter. He decided he’d go along and give Runstom the time he needed to process.

  The job involved getting to Epsilon-3 and meeting with some of the new colony’s administrators. Jax was able to get Runstom to talk about his work, at least. He was there to convince the local government that they were in need of ModPol’s services; and not just the policing, but the peacekeeping as well. Conveniently, the staff of the Garathol had supplied Runstom with a plethora of battle footage. The first step after landing was to make a stop in the small ModPol office where a marketing intern would chop apart the footage and piece together the most terrifying clips into a sixty-second run.

  Before that, while Runstom managed the paperwork at the dock, Jax went down to the rec room to have one last meeting with Dava and her pals. They all agreed that discretion was in everyone’s best interests, and that Jax would accompany Runstom into town while the Wasters would lay low in the ship and look for an opportune time to quietly slip away. Then they could find their way to an interstellar port or whatever. Jax didn’t care so much, just as long as they got off Runstom’s ship. His friend had enough to deal with, he didn’t need to find out that he’d inadvertently aided three murderous criminals in their escape from ModPol.

  Then there were tours. Several of them. Runstom told everyone that Jax was a technical consultant, and when anyone asked too many questions, Jax went into technobabble mode until someone shut him up. It worked out well. The new domes were state of the art, like nothing he’d ever seen, even in the photos of Barnard-3 that his stepmother used to send him in an effort to convince him to visit. He kept asking Runstom under his breath, why wasn’t the new colony all over the news back in Barnard? Throughout the day, he began to piece it together: it was under wraps because it was so expensive. Upon completion, the target audience was the wealthiest of the wealthy, those that would not seek it out but arrive by invitation only.

  The hardest parts for Jax were the times when he could see the surface. Seeing the suited workers out there leveling out the terrain, scanning for mineral and ice deposits, putting together air processors, or whatever, every time it reminded him of his mother. It brought him right back to when he was younger and she took him to work on occasion. Showed him what the surface looked like. It was the only time he’d seen it, his whole life on Barnard-4. She’d ask, how can anyone live on a planet and never look out at its surface? And then that same surface had taken her away.

  Finally there was a break for lunch, and Jax and Runstom had some time to themselves over a couple of meat sandwiches. Or what Jax hoped was meat. It was hard to tell, but the sauce made it bearable.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” the waitress said as she topped off their drinks, which were a mildly sweet carbonated liquid of some kind. She tilted her head as she looked at Runstom. “Okay?”

  “Thanks,” he said, his attention on his sandwich.

  She had the beige-pink skin that Jax’s stepmother had, and long blond hair that was woven into braids. She smiled broadly for a moment, then her mouth scrunched slightly and she moved on.

  “I think you have a fan,” Jax said when she was out of earshot.

  “Huh?” Runstom mumbled between bites.

  “The girl.” Jax angled his cup in her direction.

  Runstom’s eyes went to her for a moment as she took an order from a table at the other end of the cafe. “What do you mean?”

  Jax laughed shortly. “I mean she digs you, Stan.”

  “Oh,” he said, then shook his head. “I doubt it.”

  Jax watched him eat for a moment. He was handsome and rugged and probably had women checking him out all the time. He was too used to being an outcast to notice. Jax could only imagine how hard it was for the green-skinned boy growing up. But that wasn’t the only thing that kept Runstom in the dark. He watched the man’s brow bunch as he chewed pensively through his sandwich. Whenever that mind of his latched onto a problem that needed solving, there was no letting go, and no room for much else.

  Jax decided to broach the subject he’d held in for too long. “Stanford.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why hasn’t X gone on trial?”

  Dead silence floated between them and Runstom put his half-eaten sandwich down. “I don’t know.”

  “We had the evidence.”

  “We had it, yeah. There was something … I just don’t know. Some lawyer bullshit sleight of hand. Tied it all up.”

  “But there was enough to convict Jenna Zarconi.”

  “Yes.”

  Jax swallowed. “But does that exonerate me? Or will they try to link me to her? A co-something?”

  Runstom nodded slowly without looking at him. “Co-conspirator. Until they get X …” he said, trailing off.

  “Right, I know,” Jax said. He’d never be free as long as Mark Xavier Phonson was free. “I need to stay hidden.”

  Runstom looked down. “I’ve talked to her, you know.”

  “To Jenna Zarconi?” Jax put his sandwich down as well, his appetite sucked away with his breath.

  “Yeah. I know that sounds wrong. But she was the only person who knows the real story. Besides you and me, I mean.”

  Jax opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He wanted to understand that. He spilled everything to Lealina just to have someone else to talk to about it. But Zarconi was a murderer. Zarconi destroyed his life. But he never really knew how hard it was for Runstom. Maybe talking to Zarconi really was his only source of therapy for the whole mess. “Did it help?”

  Runstom wiped his hands on a napkin and plopped it atop the sandwich. “Yes. No. I don’t know. I suppose it helped some.”

  “I just don’t understand why they’re still after me,” Jax said. “I mean, they got Jenna Zarconi. Even without X, they have their murderer. And I’m a nobody. They have to know I’m innocent, right?”

  “Of course,” Runstom said unconvincingly.

  “Why couldn’t they just let me be? Why did they have to come to Terroneous?”

  Runstom nodded slowly. “It doesn’t sit right with me either,” he said. “First off, ModPol has no jurisdiction on Terroneous. They’d have to get the local government involved to extradite yo
u. But they didn’t. McManus was given orders to make the pickup himself.”

  “So who gave the orders?”

  “There’s that too. He didn’t know.”

  “How could he not know?”

  Runstom shook his head. “Sometimes orders come like that. Encrypted, verifiable as authentic, but no source. Rare, but it happens.”

  They both sat silently, and by the look on his face, Jax could tell that Runstom didn’t like the idea of his arrest being some kind of secret order any more than he did. He didn’t know what else to make of it in the moment, so he broke the silence.

  “I guess this job is going well, anyway.”

  Runstom smiled faintly. “Yeah, so far it’s a knockout. The threat of Space Waste so close to these fancy new domes – well, shit. It’s like I don’t really have to try. ModPol sells itself.”

  “That’s good because you’re not a very good PR officer.”

  They both had a laugh that died quickly. Runstom looked troubled. “I know I’m not.”

  “Hey, Stanford, I didn’t mean—”

  “No, no. I’m not offended. I mean, I really am not the right person for this job.”

  Jax thought about this. “But they put you on it anyway.”

  He nodded. “Yet another thing that makes no sense.”

  Jax sighed. “Where’s that notebook of yours? I hope you’re keeping track of all the shit that makes no sense.”

  Like a quick-drawn pistol, Runstom had his trademark notepad in hand. “I got a new pencil in the gift shop at the dock,” he said, waving the utensil. Then he opened the pad and wrote. “Stanford Runstom is bad at PR. Check.”

  Jax laughed again. He wasn’t safe at home, but he wasn’t running for his life, he’d just eaten half a semi-meat sandwich, and his closest friend was sitting across from him. He decided it was okay to let himself unwind just a little.

  “I think we’re due for another meeting soon,” he said.

  Runstom glanced at the WrappiMate on his forearm. “Damn. We’re going to be late.”

  “Who is this one with?” Jax asked, then forced a smile as an older woman in the white-suit uniform that the administrators all wore appeared behind Runstom.

  “Assistant Director of Agricultural Systems,” she announced.

  Runstom stood up so fast his chair fell over.

  “Mom?”

  CHAPTER 27

  Sylvia Rankworth of the Epsilon-3 Agricultural Systems Center cheerfully led Runstom and Jax to the railway that would take them on the scant fifteen-minute ride out to her office. It felt like the longest fifteen minutes of Runstom’s life.

  He smiled back as she rattled off facts about the self-sustaining AgSys facilities, and how they made use of local sources whenever possible. He couldn’t follow any of it, and he could barely speak. He’d been in communication with his mother through d-mail over the years, but the address he had for her had always been an unknown destination. He hadn’t actually seen her in person for several years.

  So what the hell was she doing here?

  He knew he couldn’t say anything, not where someone might overhear, and it paralyzed him. Fortunately Jax kept up appearances by engaging her in conversation, asking questions about their farming methods and what processing was required out on the surface. Runstom heard him tell Sylvia that his mother had been a terraform engineer, until she was lost in an accident.

  Finally they arrived at the AgSys headquarters, which was really just a tiny building at the end of the railtrack, sitting in the middle of a field of mud. Sylvia insisted that before they do anything, they go straight out to the fields so she could show the overly-interested Jax some of their farms in person.

  They donned rubber boots and trudged along a dirty path no more than three meters wide, a clear plastic covering arching overhead and down to either side, another meter outside of the walkway. In effect, the mud fields were both outside and inside and the odor was earthy and salty and slightly musty.

  “These are our muckbug cultivations,” Sylvia said as they walked. “Epsilon-3 has an atmosphere, but it’s very thin and primarily nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. Quite poisonous to humans, not to mention that the thinness of the atmosphere makes the surface too cold to sustain much life. There is water, however, and complex ecosystems that thrive in pockets of mud pools. The muckbug is one of these animals native to this planet. It’s kind of like a fish, but lives in the mud.”

  She bent down to a spot where there was a handle protruding from the mud and pulled it up. A cage or trap of some kind came with it and inside were wriggling, slick, black worm-like creatures with multiple sets of fins running the length of their bodies.

  “Ugh, that’s uh …” Jax tried, then looked away and out at the fields of mud around them. “So those things are all over out there?”

  “That’s right,” she said and returned the trap. “They are terribly repulsive to look at, but very high in protein, omega-3 fats, and a plethora of minerals.”

  “So you eat them,” Runstom muttered, trying to control his disgust.

  “You ate one at lunchtime, dear.”

  Runstom stiffened, unable to speak. Jax said, “The sauce made it bearable.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We have chefs working around the clock trying to turn these tiny monsters into a delicacy. Once these domes are finished, only the richest of the rich will come live here.”

  “And you’re going to feed them muckbugs,” Jax said, clearly amused. “Why is it only for the rich?”

  “Oh, some damn fool economists back on Barnard-3,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “They think there are too many poor people there.”

  “On B-3?” Jax said. “Give me a break, what poor people?”

  “Poor is all relative, Mr. Jackson. You might have felt poor in those B-4 domes if you compared them to the domes on B-3, but how did dome life compare to that of those struggling folks on Terroneous?”

  Runstom flinched and glanced around, but there was nothing to see but the plastic archway and fields of mud. They had walked far enough from the central facility that it was a hundred or so meters distant.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Stanley,” she said. “We don’t have eyes everywhere out here. Not yet anyway.”

  He tried to breathe but his chest felt like stone. “Okay. Well. Mother. It’s good to see you.”

  She embraced him and after a moment of relief, he wrapped his arms around her slight form. When she pulled away, she wiped her face. “I miss you always.”

  Runstom felt his face growing hot. He glanced at Jax who was staring at them in a kind of stunned silence, and then he looked back at his mother. “I miss you too.”

  She laughed to chase away the tears, then clasped her hands together. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jackson.”

  “Oh, uh. It’s no problem,” Jax said, trying to relax his stance. “It’s just that um. Well – so wait, what do poor people on B-3 have to do with rich people moving here?”

  She laughed again and blinked at Runstom and then turned back to Jax. “As I said, poverty is relative. Or so these economists believe. They think that if they shave off the top one or two percent, they move everyone else up.”

  “And to shave them off, you only need to move them to someplace more expensive,” Jax said with a nod.

  “For the capitalist, there’s always one more new world to conquer,” she said with a wry smile.

  The statement jarred loose a memory in Runstom’s head. His first meeting with Victoria Horus. Something to do with Horus moving on from the Zebra Corporation and into Modern Policing and Peacekeeping: that she’d conquered all of consumer electronics and needed to find the next world to conquer.

  He wanted to mention it, but he saw Jax take a deep breath, as if preparing to ask a more important question, so he kept the thought to himself.

  “Okay, Ms. Rankworth,” Jax said, the false name sounding ridiculous in Runstom’s ears. “How did you know my name was Jackson and that I
’ve been to Terroneous?”

  “Call me Sylvia, Mr. Jackson.”

  “You can just call me Jax,” he returned after a slight hesitation.

  “Boys,” she said suddenly. “I have to show you something, it’s just over here.”

  They followed her eager pace a few dozen meters to an intersection of tubes that ran through the mud. She pointed at a handmade sign hanging from some kind of mechanical pump in the middle. “I’ve been to Terroneous too, many years ago. I saw this and I had to have it.”

  Though unexpected rain

  churns soil into mud,

  the harshest of storms

  births more green than blood.

  She grinned as she watched Runstom read it. “The poet-farmer who wrote it was talking about the green of his crops, but I saw this and I just thought, oh how it reminds me of my little green baby.”

  “Mom, come on. I’m not a baby, I’m thirty-eight.” Runstom had to turn away from Jax’s laughing eyes.

  “Ohh,” she said, waving him off. She turned to Jax. “Did you two fly here? Who was the pilot?”

  “Stanford was,” Jax said. “He’s a pretty good pilot. Not that I know much about that kind of thing.”

  “Yes, he always was a good pilot,” she said proudly. “I started teaching him when he was twelve.”

  “Yeah,” Runstom said. “But now I know how illegal that was, to let a twelve-year-old fly a freaking spacecraft.”

  She laughed again. “Oh Stanley, what, are you worried your young fugitive friend here is going to turn us in?”

  “Oh, uh,” Jax said. “So you know about that too.”

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh. “I know pretty much everything these days. But I’m powerless to act on anything. And I can’t share what I know with anyone. You know, I feel a bit like Cassandra. From Greek mythology? Do you know her?”

  “Um, was that someone from Grecia, on B-3?”

  “She means Greece on Earth,” Runstom said. “Mom has a thing for ancient stories.”

  She went on then, prodding Runstom for information about his life, his job, his relationships (and questionable lack thereof), and she went about filling in the details of her own quiet existence. At some point Jax had the sense to excuse himself so that Runstom could be alone with her and they walked through the tunnels that ran between the muck and talked.