When he could feel anything other than pain, it was numbness. It felt as though ages had passed, but he knew from his training that the effects of a standard stungun lasted about a quarter of an hour.
“Never,” he coughed when he could get his throat to do anything more than grunt. “Felt.”
“There was a time when everyone coming up through basic training had to get zapped.” His mother’s words. Understandable, but distorted. “They wanted every cop to know how it felt. They stopped doing it though. Better not to know, then you won’t hesitate to use it when you need to.”
“Fuck.” Bright shapes punched their way into his head whenever he opened his eyes. “Mick … McManus.”
“Take a deep breath, Stanley. Not into the chest.” He felt a warm pressure on his stomach and realized it was her hand. “Here. Pull the breath into the belly. Slowly. That’s right. Now hold. Four. Three. Two. One. Now out, slowly. Push it out from the belly. All the way out. Again.”
He wanted to brush her away, get to his feet, get after McManus. But he humored her. Breathed like she told him to. The pain became less like fire and more like ache.
“McManus,” he said when he thought his voice would work. “He’ll get away.”
“At the Department of Agricultural Systems, it’s our job to scan the surface of EE-3. We measure everything. There’s a small fleet of satellites up there.” He tried to interrupt her with a wheeze, but she waved him quiet and continued. “Inside the satellites are brigades of these tiny drones that we can program on the fly – like in case we need to track down a specific anomaly, or even just send a message. There are hundreds of these innocuous little buggers floating about in low orbit. I have a subroutine that tells a drone to track a ship, attach to it, and begin pulsing a beacon.”
“I didn’t know you could do that,” he whispered through measured exhalation. He held back on asking why.
“Naturally, I coerced someone into creating the original routine for me,” she said. There was too much left out of the word naturally and he wanted to press her, but he was occupied with the breath-holding and counting after an inhalation. She swept away the opportunity for further inquiry with a wave of the hand. “All I have to do is upload the signature of the ship I want to track. It has to be in EE-3’s orbit for me to reach it with a drone.”
“So you’ve done this before?”
“There are people I’ve felt an urge to keep tabs on, yes.”
He laughed, or rather made the motions of laughing, expelling a small hiss. “Still paranoid.”
“Still alive.”
“So wait.” He was still in a lump, half-lying on the floor, half-propped against the wall. He tried to shift his weight around so that he could look more directly at her. “You’re saying you can track McManus’s ship?”
“There was only one ModPol ship in the public traffic reports. An intersystem patroller.”
“Intersystem. Special ops ship?” Most of ModPol’s Xarp-capable ships were the big ones, large transports. Patrollers in general could only do sub-warp, but there were a few special models. Oversized patrollers that weren’t much but guns and engines. Runstom had only flown one once, unsimulated. McManus on the other hand could barely fly a standard patroller, but he’d admitted that he had a pilot with him.
“He left the ship in orbit and came down in a shuttle. The same shuttle is heading back up now.”
Runstom strained to get his legs to cooperate. “We need to get up there, now.”
As he moved to get up from the floor, she pushed him into a sitting position. It was a demonstration of his weakened condition: a woman in her sixties dominating him physically. A lightning strike of pain flashed through his head. His reward for making the effort to stand. He sucked in a breath to chase away the black clouds at the edges of his vision.
“We’re still mag-locked,” she said. “The dock controller told me they’re on a timer, so we can lift off soon. But not right this minute. So just sit still.”
He closed his eyes. Tried to slow his breathing. Slow the blood pounding heavy through his chest and into his temples. He allowed himself to feel the comfort of her hand on his shoulder. “Okay, Mom.”
They were both silent for a few moments and Runstom tried to empty his head, tried to think of nothing. Finally she spoke. “You’re going to be leaving soon.”
“Well, the work here is done anyway,” he said unenthusiastically. “Next steps are outlined.”
“Everyone loved you.”
He rolled his eyes. “It was too easy.” There had been several meetings with various administrators. He showed them the polished recordings of ModPol Defense in action. Evidently it had been more convincing than the previous attempts from the marketing department of ModPol Justice. Still, it wasn’t that everyone was enthusiastic. It was more that they simply didn’t question any of it. Nodding heads and handshakes. “Did you have something to do with that?”
She shrugged. “I may have convinced some people to hear you out. I knew this visit was going to be short – with Jax here with you – and I didn’t want you to be delayed.”
He swallowed. “I have to go.”
“I know,” she said. “I know. I wish you didn’t have to, but you do.”
There it was. The fear he’d been fighting for the past week. Fear that at any moment he would leave and then he wouldn’t see her again for some unknown length of time. Months, years. Maybe never. Never was always a possibility.
“You’re going to be here for a while,” he said, hopeful. Just knowing where she was, it was something.
“Probably,” she said. “Nothing is ever certain, especially not … well, you know.”
Not for someone in witness protection. “Well, in any case. Maybe I can make it back here sometime. And maybe you’ll still be here.”
She took away her hand and his arm felt cold from its absence. “Listen, Stanley. We don’t have long, so I’m going to talk to you about something.”
“Are you sure—”
“Just listen.” She stood, partially turning away from him. “You’re being used.”
“Mother,” he said weakly.
“To some, there are many pieces on the board, and you are just one of them. You’re not a person, you’re a piece. You’re useful, but you’re disposable.”
“What do you mean by that? Disposable?”
“I don’t mean they’ll kill you. They aren’t killers. They’re always working the long game. Always the long game. And their game never stops changing, never stops evolving.”
“Are you talking about ModPol? Defense?”
“Defense, Justice, all of ModPol, all the rest,” she said. “Anyone who is securing their position in this galaxy. Because it’s not as safe a place as the domers would like to believe.”
“Yeah, no shit.” Runstom’s head was still thick, but it had lightened enough for him to stand, using the wall to brace himself.
She turned to him. “X is different.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “X. I don’t want to hear about X. He should be in prison for life.”
“Mark Xavier Phonson is good at the game, but only out of necessity. He runs on survival instinct. Through raw coldness and manipulation – and pure luck – he is still out there. Doing what it takes to stay alive.”
“He’s a real scumbag,” Runstom said, feeling his lip curl up as he said it.
“He’s probably afraid of you.”
“That’s good.”
“No, it’s not good.” He opened his eyes as he felt her touch again on his arm. She drew close. “Fear breeds desperation. And when men like X become desperate, blood spills. That cop – McManus? You knew him?”
