They rolled over, Runstom dazed, McManus in control. The gun swung around in Jax’s direction again, and though it didn’t fire, he flinched again and slid back onto his ass. McManus pressed his advantage by standing to his full height and aiming the weapon down at Jax.
Runstom groaned and rolled over, putting one knee against the floor to prepare to stand. McManus’s gun swung to meet him.
“Have you ever been shot by a stungun?” he said. “Do you know how much it fucking hurts?”
Jax scrambled to his feet, but not before a bolt of white shot forth and struck Runstom, his body jolting against the wall in a fit of shaking. Jax grabbed McManus by the wrist that held the gun, but the cop’s elbow shot out sharply, landing in Jax’s midsection with a painful and staggering shock unlike any he’d felt before. He fought to draw breath and fell to one knee.
McManus swung the gun around the room with narrowed eyes, seeking out other targets. Jax managed to turn his head and though his vision wavered, he could see Sylvia was gone.
The cop grunted in apparent satisfaction and holstered his weapon. He came up behind Jax and grabbed his shoulder. Jax tried weakly to resist, but the ground came suddenly up to meet his face with a painful smack. He felt his arms get pulled out from under his body and yanked behind, then felt some kind of binding slide over his wrists.
“Don’t worry, they aren’t shock cuffs,” McManus said. He hooked his hands under Jax’s armpits and with a grunt, hoisted him to his feet. “I decided to go back to the old-fashioned style. Strict-cuffs. The more you pull against them, the tighter they get. They’re not standard issue anymore. Too many broken bones.”
Without resisting, but just through the shifting because of the unnatural position his arms were in, Jax felt the oddly-warm straps constricting. He tried to breathe, to relax his muscles, but he was still having trouble from the blow that landed just below his chest. The walls blurred by as he felt himself pushed and pulled through the outer airlock hatch and into the space beyond.
*
Runstom bathed in pain for eternity. Every nerve screaming electric. His vision stuttered like a video on a short loop. His ears were full of a swirling buzz, a living, organic noise.
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