Runstom’s brain wasn’t ready for that. “He’s somebody. He’s undercover. It’s the only explanation.”
“Maybe.” Jax shook his head, then his posture slumped in submission. “You’re right. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”
Runstom reached up to put a hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “Listen, Jax. I need you to go back in.”
He pulled back, glaring. “Back into what?”
“Into Space Waste.”
“You’re fucking insane.” Jax no longer made any attempt to quiet his voice. “No way. No, no, no.”
“Listen, Jax. This guy could be one of us. If he’s undercover, he’s there on a ModPol mission and he may need our help.”
“Forget him, Stan. You promised me I could go back to Terroneous—”
“I know,” Runstom said, his voice stern. He worked to soften it. “I know. And you will. But something is really wrong with this whole thing and I think this Basil Roy might be the only clue we have. He led Space Waste into a slaughter. They could be hunting for a mole right now, and it means he doesn’t have much time. And I know he knows a helluva lot more than—”
Jax took a step back, shaking his head. “What is it with you? If this guy is undercover, then that’s his choice. There’s no way I’m going back in that den of psychopaths to find out if he needs a hand!”
“They’re not psychopaths,” Runstom said. The statement shocked himself as it came out of his mouth. “They let you live. They even sent back the OrbitBurner. They trust you.”
“Dava let me live,” he said firmly. “Dava might trust me – well, to be honest, I don’t think she trusts anyone. And even if she did, don’t you get what’s going on here? Space Waste is falling apart. They’re going to be at each other’s throats trying to find out why they were ambushed.”
“All the more reason to get in there now and—”
“Why do you even care?” Jax said, extending his arms to their full wingspan, nearly banging them on the low ceiling of the OrbitBurner’s bridge. “Seriously, Stanford! Tell me why it matters to you.”
“Because I’m sick of not knowing what the fuck is going on!”
They stared at each other in silence. Runstom hadn’t shouted, but when he replayed the words in his head, he could hear the frayed edges.
Jax’s mouth opened and closed. His eyes narrowed at Runstom, then he simply shook his head. He left the bridge through the stairwell that led to the recreation room below.
And there it was. What was it that Runstom was really after? He stood alone at the back of the bridge, his mother Sylvia working quietly through her databases on the other side. She heard all, there was no doubt. What would she say? He suspected she might be the only one that could understand his motivations. His desire to put the pieces together. His inability to cope when they didn’t fit.
Then again, she had a mind for the gray, and Runstom’s mind sought black and white. He frowned at himself, his stubbornness rising from within. So what if he just had to know what was going on? So what if he was looking for an explanation? For a case to solve?
So what if that wasn’t his job?
*
Jax paced around the recreation room furiously. How much more could he take of that blockheaded Stanford Runstom? The man was in constant detective mode, and he wasn’t even a cop any more. He was a goddamn public relations officer.
“Sick of not knowing what’s going on,” Jax muttered. “How about sick of running for your life? Sick of being in hiding? Sick of never …”
He was alone but even still, he couldn’t finish the thought. His eyes caught the liquor cabinet. It probably wasn’t the best way to cope with his souring mood, but it was a way.
The bottles in the cabinet sat in cozy-looking mounds of fluff, with a pair of stylish straps crossing over each. Designed to hold everything in place in zero-G, Jax realized, with the benefit of appearing plush and expensive. Looking at them made him think of his last encounter with Dava and the other Wasters. They’d hid down in this rec room, Runstom none the wiser, focused on piloting from the bridge above.
The thing that stood out most in Jax’s mind was Dava’s claim over experience with fear. Jax had been living it for a year, always on the run, always looking over his shoulder. He’d thought he’d earned a mastery over the subject. Dava reminded him he knew nothing about it.
He knew very little about her; the first thing to come to mind was always that she was a bloodthirsty assassin. The number of times she hadn’t killed him was growing uncomfortably large. She was black, that was the next obvious thing. Which really meant she was born on Earth. In the colonized systems, Barnard and Sirius – and now Eridani – that made her almost as rare as a greened-skin space-born like Runstom. Dava and Moses were the only Earth-born people Jax had ever talked to. He’d seen a few on holovid of course, and had even seen a few in passing while on Terroneous. He tried to imagine what that was like, to be so rare. No, to be so outnumbered. Maybe that was the fear Dava was talking about.
If Dava lived in fear, she certainly hid it well. And just because she had grown up worse off than Jax, he decided he’d definitely gained some knowledge of fear in recent times.
“So fuck it,” he said, and unstrapped a bottle of something brown.
He was going to insist on getting back to Terroneous; that’s what he decided as he took a gulp of something spicy and fiery and in a distant way, a little like rotten wood (a fragrance he’d never known living in the domes, but had recently learned while living in a tiny, shoddy apartment in Stockton). The distance from Eridani would be measured in weeks, even at the highest Xarp speeds. He had no money himself. Runstom carried a company card, and that was taking care of expenses while they were on Eridani. He didn’t know how to get back home, not without Runstom’s help.
“Home.” He tried the word aloud since he’d caught it popping into his head. The idea was starting to sink in. Or perhaps worm in, chewing its way through his mind and body and rooting there: you can have a home again. All you have to do is go back to Terroneous and call it home.
He took another swig. Surely Runstom would see reason. Jax’s part in this whole mess was over. Couldn’t he just go in peace?
And that’s when the rest of that conversation with Dava came back to him. When he’d asked her how she managed to live her whole life alongside fear, her answer was anger.
A small part of him fed on that. He’d been wronged time and time again, by criminals like X and Jenna Zarconi, by ModPol, by Space Waste. He was a tool, a playing piece, a disposable nothing to all of them. They took advantage of people like Jax, and it wasn’t fair.
And that’s why he’d given up Basil Roy’s mischief to Dava, because he wanted to stir things up, to help make a mess of it. Runstom wanted to solve the mystery, to unravel and decode all the games that the galaxy was playing, but Jax just wanted to break them.
He could go back in, go back and play the malleable fool, the timid operator. He could use his gift – the invisibility of the weak – and wreak havoc.
He put the brown bottle back and selected another one. This time a clear liquid, that burned with just as much fire – probably more so, since he expected it to taste like water – and an aftertaste that made him think of medicine and fruit. Where did all this stuff come from? He looked at the label for an answer: Ethereal Vodka, distilled in Nuzwick.
Nuzwick. Another town on Terroneous. It was one of the many that Jax visited when he and Lealina Warpshire traversed the entire moon, resetting the configuration on hundreds of magnetic field sensors. Lealina, because she was the acting director of the Terroneous Environment Observation Bureau, and Jax because he was the mysterious