The suppressed thoughts crawled their way forward through Jax’s black mind. He fought them, but he was tired, weak. X, they demanded. You never really escaped.
“Do you know Mark Phonson?” he transmitted.
There was a brief pause before McManus replied, “No.”
“Mark Xavier Phonson,” Jax said. “To some only known by the initial of his middle name.”
“What is this, some kind of riddle?”
“That’s what this is, then?” Jax could sense the hesitation in McManus’s transmission. He needed to push. “I die, and you live another day?”
There was a break so long that Jax almost checked the connection to see if he was still part of the lounge network. “Yes,” McManus said finally. “It’s X.”
In the midst of Xarp-sickness, Jax didn’t think his stomach could get any hollower, but there it was. A hole rolled throughout his insides. And he understood why McManus couldn’t go back empty-handed. X would want to see Jax – the eternal thorn in his side – disappear for good. He’d want to see it with his own eyes.
“You can’t,” Jax said. “You can’t take me to X.”
“So you know who this X guy is,” McManus said. The transmission carried mirth. “I don’t. I don’t even know who he is. But I know when someone has enough power to destroy. And to do it without anyone knowing who he is.”
“He’s—”
“And I don’t want to know.”
McManus left the channel.
In the emptiness that followed, Jax’s mind conjured worst-case projections. He was not going to be arrested and thrown in prison for an extended period of time. He was going to be killed. Possibly tortured. It was possible that X wanted him for information, wanted to know what Jax knew, as if Jax knew any goddamn thing anyway. Why did someone so strong have to spend so much effort on someone as weak as Jax? He was perfectly willing to crawl under a rock and let the whole thing go.
But X wasn’t going for that. A man that powerful must be sufficiently paranoid, and whether Jax was a threat or not didn’t matter. He would err on the side of caution and assume Jax could be the piece that brings him down.
For an immeasurable time, Jax wandered the channels of the lounge interface. Flipped past the old recordings and replays, past the bad fiction, past the mindless games. There were some historical entries, something akin to school-age education, and there were dreadful trainings on banal police procedures. Out of sheer boredom, he sifted through the trainings until he found one that was a basic overview of the local computer operating system. Specifically, it was Roscorp Common Machine Integration Operating System, 4.5.2.g.13, with a laundry list of management modules installed. Jax didn’t recognize most of these, but based on their cryptic names, decided they must have had something to do with making an interstellar ship work. A few he did recognize, and with a little more prodding – listing and scanning files – he realized that Roscorp must license life-support operations from Vitality Systems. The very same Vitality Systems that built the life-support equipment that Jax operated back on Barnard-4. The equipment that managed to fail spectacularly when hacked, performing its function in the exact opposite manner than designed.
The training would have been numbingly boring if Jax weren’t already numb and bored, but he suffered through it anyway. His reward was the quick aside that the command interface could be accessed by the lounge system if necessary. This access was apparently out of scope for the basic training, but once it ended, he had some ideas about what to poke next.
And that was how, by combing through help pages and trial and error, he found the command interface. It wasn’t protected – and Jax wasn’t really surprised. It was the local-network protection fallacy: systems like this were designed never to be exposed to anything outside of the ship, so what need was there for protection?
The engineers who built the system didn’t envision a scenario where cops take a computer operator into custody, then connect him to the lounge system for several days with nothing better to do but poke around. And poke he did.
Chapter 6 (#ua30e2d68-8f6b-5059-9faf-f99d00bebc08)
Nine days in Xarp space, in a damn dropship. No sleeping tubes. Lucky Jerk, always prepared, had packs of Delirium-G hidden in pockets all over his flight uniform. But when he dug them all out and pooled them together, there were only a handful of doses. Dava, Lucky, and Thompson had to share them. Which meant rationing. Which meant going for hours, riding Xarp raw, pulling spacetime out of reality and into some mindless dimension where nothing meant anything, pulling it thinner and thinner until that point where they wanted to just die and end it all. Open up the windows and suck out to the black. Welcome oblivion. And just before reaching that tipping point, popping a pill and zonking out. A different kind of mindlessness. One of acceptance. Of disconnection.
And with the mindlessness, with the emptiness, old ghosts came to fill the void. They came because they’d been dodged too often. Sidestepped with the day-to-day fight for survival. They came because in the emptiness, they could not be ignored.
“Lay down now, Davina.” Her father. The tang chemical smell of oil that never left his skin.
“Where’s Ma?”
“Right here, Davina. We’ll be right next to you.” Her mother wore a perfume, what was supposed to smell like flowers. It was a special occasion for her to not have the familiar scent of damp dirt. The cough that accompanied her sing-song words. The cough that made them all flinch.
“How long is it?”
“It’s far,” her father said. His voice was musical too. It was how her parents had met; folks sang together in those days. “So far that we have to go to sleep.”
“Why do we have to go so far?”
“It’s what people do,” her mother said. She always had this answer, no matter the question. “People move. There are better places out there. A better home for us.”
“We had a home.”
“This one will be better.”
“Why?”
The cough again. The collective flinch. “You trust us, doncha, Davina?”
“Yes.” Said too quickly. To cover the lie.
“What we had was not a good home.” Her father hung his head, spoke into his chest. “Maybe it was at one time, but ain’t no more.”
“So everyone is going to leave?”
They looked at each other. Then her mother looked away. Her father frowned and met her eyes. “No.” His face darkened, his voice became smoke. “We have to leave them.”
“Why?”
A bad energy grew in the space around her. Rows of beds like the one she was sitting in. Beds that were cylinders, beds that had covers on them. Anxiety in the air. In the hurried voices, the commands in the distance, echoing around the massive chamber. Drawing her parents’ attention. Causing them to glance. To fidget. To cower.
“Lay down now, Davina,” her mother said. “Don’t make no trouble, just lay down and it will be over fast.”
“Why do we have to leave them?”
Her father’s strong hand on her chest. Flattening her into the tight cylinder-bed, like stowing something into a cupboard. The eyes bearing down, pinning her into place. The eyes that would not be argued with.
“Because we’re lucky, Davina.”
She hadn’t trusted them. All they did was lie. Lie to her about how things would be okay, how things would get better.
Her mistrust had been justified. When she woke up, they were gone. And there was no home.
Nine days with those ghosts. Nine days of seeing them and losing them. Crossing and re-crossing the border between their presence and their absence.
To hide from them, Dava thought about the more recent betrayals. The snakes in her own house. Kindled that fire, forcing it to grow, refusing to let it fade. Then they docked with the base and took the first step out of the ship, and there it went. Smothered into smoke by the heavy air of failure and loss. The half-gravity of the slow swing of the station’s arms pulled heavier than the fattest of planets.
The welcome from Space Waste was not warm. Which was just fine by Dava, since she’d come looking to pick a fight. But it was so cold there, she was unable to rile anyone she came across. Those that had survived the assault had become living dead. No one was excited to see that she and Thompson-Gun and Lucky Jerk were still alive. Nor were they disappointed. They were just nothing.
As the coals smoldered, she pushed herself to storm for Rando Jansen. She wanted explanations. But he was locked away. Planning another attack, was the word. And Dava wasn’t allowed in, according to the malaise-laden guard posted outside the war room. She’d been demoted. No longer a capo. For her failure in the assault, though the guard didn’t reveal that much out loud.
Finally, she managed to corner Captain 2-Bit at the drinking hole. He blinked when he saw her – it’d been the biggest reaction she’d gotten since her arrival.
