“Mass homicide. Sus—” he started. He was about to qualify the charge with suspected, but the look in the unwinking eyes of Johnny Eyeball made him realize it might be a little easier to sleep at night if he left his innocence out of it. We’re all psychos here, he imagined saying, adding a maniacal grin.

“Fuck you,” Eyeball breathed. “Really?”

“Yep,” Jax said, trying to sound confident. “Class five.”

“No shit.”

“Yep.” Jax’s roommate looked him up and down, so Jax returned the look. “I like your tattoo, by the way. Is that a smart-tat?”

“Oh yeah.” The larger man flexed his bicep and his tattoo morphed from a series of abstract lines into three arrows, bent into a circle, each arrowhead pointing at the start of the next arrow. Johnny grunted, twitching his fingers, and the arrowheads bent and twisted vaguely outward. “Get it?” he said, smiling. “Fuckin’ chaos, brother. That’s what I do. Take the cycle of order and turn it into fuckin’ chaos.”

Jax nodded. “You know something, Johnny Eyeball? I rather like that idea.”

The one major difference between the current accommodations and a jail cell on-planet was the small, round, window in one wall of his room. Through this porthole, Jax could see the inky darkness of space, pinpricked by stars, and occasionally he could see distant planets and even spacecraft traveling the same lanes (keeping a safe distance of several thousand meters, of course).

For the first time in his life, he was drifting through space. Well, first time he was literally drifting through space. Jax felt like he’d been figuratively drifting through space his whole life. Or at least the chapter of his life that began when his mother passed on. The woman was his best friend, the one person he felt like he could connect to. B-foureans – or maybe it was all people, but he only had B-foureans to go on – seemed to be alien to Jax. People Jax interacted with on a day-to-day basis, whether his co-workers, clerks in a shop, or passers-by on the street on the whole seemed to have some ability or inborn trait that allowed them to avoid showing any significant emotion. Even their happiness felt halfhearted. They laughed with an air of bland bliss, and never at an ironic situation or humor born of satire. They beamed with glee about the work that they and their fellow citizens did, but rarely indulged in too much pride or envy. Jax’s mother and her co-workers, however, laughed heartily. They poked fun at each other, and they poked fun at life. And they were proud people. They were proud of the work that they did and they were proud of their families and they were proud of their accomplishments. Jax’s mother was proud of Jax, and she rarely passed up a chance to wallow in his pride.

She was proud of Jax for who Jax was, not for who he was supposed to be.

A few hours later, Jax was still staring out that window. His roommate was sound asleep in the top bunk. When he heard the clinking sounds of the auto-lock on the cell door, he didn’t turn around, but instead watched a small commuter ship cruise past in the distance, heading the same direction as the prison barge.

“Hey, Jax,” Officer Runstom said to his back. “Halsey and I wanted to fill you in on what we found out.”

Jax stood there for a minute more, watching the little ship fly on. “Never been off planet before,” he said, distantly. “Never could afford it. Get framed for a mass homicide, get a free trip all the way to the outer rim.” He chuckled to himself. “I’d love to tell my friends about that little loophole.” For no real reason, he added, “’Cept I don’t have any.”

“Nonsense,” Halsey said. “You’ve got Stanford here.”

Jax could hear Runstom grumble something at his partner. He turned around and faced the two ModPol officers. “I’d offer you a seat,” he said. “But as you can see, I only have the one chair.” He sat down on the bed and leaned his back against the wall. “I guess you guys can fight for it.”

The bed above Jax’s head creaked as his napping roommate rolled over. The big man coughed a few times, then stuck his head over the bed. “Hey,” he croaked. “You da cops dat arrested dis guy?”

The ModPol officers both looked at Johnny Eyeball and said nothing.

“Yeah,” Eyeball said, as if speaking for them. “Tell me. What’s dis guy in for?” Jax couldn’t help but to grin at the criminal’s thuggish accent, apparently switched on just for the benefit of the cops.

“Mass homicide,” Runstom replied.

“Thirty-two people,” Halsey said.

Johnny whistled. “Fuckin’ psycho,” he breathed, then rolled back over. He was snoring within seconds.

Runstom and Halsey both stared at the top bunk warily for a moment, then looked at each other. “It’s okay,” Jax said. “I think they gave him something. He hasn’t been awake for more than a few minutes at a time since he came on board.”

Halsey shrugged and sat in the chair, leaving Runstom to stand. Runstom didn’t seem to mind. He stood in front of Jax with a notebook in his hands, holding it tightly as if it were a precious artifact. “Jax,” he said, quietly and cautiously. “We’re not supposed to be in here chatting with you. We’re just on escort duty.”

Jax nodded slowly. “I understand. Thanks for coming.”

Runstom looked at Jax for a moment, then opened up his notebook. “Halsey and I constructed a model,” he explained. He went into great detail about the rotation of Barnard-3, a cone of contact, and the paths of all the ships in the traffic logs. It took several minutes and Jax tried to follow, but astrophysics was definitely not his forte. As he strained to stay focused, he felt saddened by the thought that under more fortunate circumstances, he probably would have found the math involved very interesting. As he grew uncomfortable sitting on the thin mattress of his cell, he wished Runstom would just get to the point.

Eventually, he did get to the point, which was this: Runstom and Halsey had narrowed it down to two possible ships that could have sent a mock-satellite signal to the LifSup system at block 23-D. He told Jax all the details around the mining vessel and the superliner.

“Any chance the traffic logs could have been doctored?” Jax asked at the end.

“Doctored?” Runstom appeared taken aback. Jax realized the two officers might have been clued into the possibility that conspiracy was afoot, but hadn’t considered that someone within ModPol might be part of it.

“I compiled those logs from multiple tracking modules, all over the system,” Halsey said. “Someone would have to hit every one of those to erase a ship – and I mean physically, because they only have one-way transmitters, they don’t receive incoming data. The logs weren’t doctored. Not unless they were doctored by me.”

Runstom gave his partner a suspicious glare, prompting Halsey to spread his arms. “Oh, come on, Captain Paranoia! You know what? You go do a random sampling of my log sources. Verify that they match up with module data.” Halsey looked at Jax. “You got this miner and this cruise liner. That’s it.”

“Unfortunately, both of them make good candidates,” Runstom said, apparently sidelining his paranoia.

“So where do we go from here?” Jax asked.

The two ModPol officers exchanged worrisome glances. “Halsey and I have talked it over. We don’t know if this is enough evidence to change the minds of Detectives Brutus and Porter. But we have to take it to them first. That’s the chain of command.”

“You mean, you’re gonna take it to them,” Halsey said, putting his hands up defensively, palms out. “All I know is that Officer Runstom asked me to compile some traffic logs for him. Leave me outta the whole ‘accusing our superiors of incompetence’ bit.”

“Okay, okay, George. I’m leaving you out of it. But I’m not accusing anyone of incompetence. I just want to show Brutus and Porter that there could be more to this.”