Day after day rolled by. They interviewed hundreds of people. The floor of their room was piled high with notebooks, the walls covered with the profiles of suspects. Runstom had declared that someone had to fit into one of three categories to be worth considering. First: a crew-member, either greedy or desperate for cash. Second: a passenger that looked out of place, like someone else had footed the bill. And third: someone who could afford a cruise, but had a past. Someone who got to where they were by stepping on others. Someone in a position to be extorted.
Jax thought the last category was pretty far-fetched, but the ModPol officer was always reminding him that anything was possible, and they had to consider all potential scenarios, even those that seemed only remotely likely.
As the days rolled by, Jax’s life as a LifSup operator began to feel farther and farther away. It was like being on a vacation that he knew would never end – or at least, it wouldn’t end with a Monday back at the office. Day and night they talked to people, made notes, compiled them, and debated. Their lives became nothing but eating, sleeping, and trying to find anyone who might own or who might have seen a transmitter.
Somewhere around the fifth day, they got word of their own deaths. ModPol had managed to keep the attack on the prisoner barge quiet for a couple of days, but eventually the press had their way. Space Waste wasn’t named specifically, but they learned that the barge had been decimated by space-to-space torpedoes. Life on the cruise ship seemed to be a world of its own, and Jax and Runstom might have even been alone in watching the news report, for all they knew. Certainly none of the other passengers or crew talked about it. The only two survivors of the attack refrained from the subject as well.
It was that closed-world feel of the cruise that allowed the two to so easily talk to as many people as possible. Everyone there was overly comfortable with everyone else – as long as they dressed the part, they fit right in. The stack of Alliance Credits they found stashed in the Space Waste-stolen personnel transport helped out. They acquired a few fancy outfits at some of the many shopping malls on the superliner. They bartered with wait staff, ship operators, cleaners, and other workers about the ship for various uniforms.
For weeks, they pretended to be other people. Once Runstom loosened up, his old dreams of going undercover seemed to take over. He was able to role-play more naturally, hamming it up with everyone they met. It was amusing to see him in action, this rigid, awkward man fitting in so easily – as long as he was pretending to be someone else. After a while, the undercover stuff started to rub off on Jax, and he came to terms with the fact that at the present he should be either locked up and awaiting a fixed trial for charges of mass homicide or alternatively slaughtered at the hands of a bloodthirsty space-gang. Instead, he had to play-act to hundreds upon hundreds of people for the next few weeks, and if that stoic, hard-nosed ModPol officer could enjoy it, then Jax might as well enjoy it too.
The working class on the ship were generally pretty friendly, and the two men, while undercover, felt like they could come right out and ask most people if they’d seen anything strange – like a large electronic device with an antenna or dish sticking out of it – and they’d get an honest answer. Most people didn’t even want an explanation, and those that did earned an earful of Jax’s half-nonsense techno-babble. One day they might be looking for some device used to measure background radiation in space, and the next, like they told Bob the maintenance guy, it was a rogue asteroid-detector. Whenever anyone did ask too many questions, Runstom would manage to deflect suspicion – more often than not with bombball talk. The galactic pastime was a big hit with people who had spent years of their lives working on a floating island of isolation.
The paying passengers – most of whom were B-threers – were all too eager to socialize, being heavy subscribers to the it’s-not-who-you-are-but-who-you-know philosophy. Names dropped out of their mouths like water from a faucet, and they carried around pictures of off-ship material possessions, presenting them like badges of honor. Runstom and Jax decided it was better to lose the work talk and to pretend to be rich and on vacation when talking to passengers. They didn’t have any photographic evidence to back up their fabricated existences, but that didn’t inhibit anyone from believing them. If anything, it seemed to make folk more enamored, reveling in the mystery of the two newcomers, closing their eyes tightly and letting their imaginations run wild as the two men described their worldly riches in great detail. Runstom’s exotic skin color helped with the fiction, and after a while Jax learned to take advantage of his own skin color, inventing stories that took him from B-4 rags to B-3 riches.
The cruise patrons weren’t bad people; Jax had to keep telling himself that. Some of them were just unfortunate enough to be born into more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime, and victims of the shallowness that comes so naturally to that lifestyle. One thing they loved more than anything was gossip, and Runstom and Jax learned to trade rumors and hearsay on the superliner like cigarettes in prison. They had established a system for determining the value of each tidbit of information they came home with; how likely it was to be true or false. Jax had them calculating numbers based on corroboration between a number of people and whether each person had more falsehoods or more truths in their gossip-wallet. Boiling things down to logic and numbers was the only way the operator could get his head around the mountainous task of getting to know the motivations and secrets of as many passengers as possible. Besides, it felt so odd to be away from a console for so long that he felt like he had to do something with formulas and variables or he’d forget his own name. To these mathematical determinations, Runstom added his natural cop gut-feeling intuition, which Jax had to admit, was generally pretty accurate.
Roughly three weeks after the day they boarded the superliner, they decided to take a more focused approach.
“We’ve only got a few more weeks before we get in shuttle range of Barnard-3,” Runstom said while doing push-ups on the floor of their tiny room. “And then we’ll lose some passengers and take on new ones. We need to start playing the odds. How many of the employees have we talked to now?”
Jax sat on his bed and flipped through a notebook that contained the most recent summary information. “We’ve covered about 95 percent of the employees.”
“And their guilt-probability scores?”
“All relatively low.” There was gossip among the workers, just as there was among the passengers, but the workers didn’t talk much about shady pasts; their gossip mainly had to do with who was sleeping with whom. The working-class stiff out to collect a big paycheck suspect classification had nearly been eliminated by this point.
“Good,” Runstom said. “I think we need to target the highest-scoring passengers.”
“What do you mean, ‘target’?” Jax asked, looking up from the notes. “We’ve already talked some of them blue in the face.”
“Exactly. It’s time to start looking for hard evidence.” Runstom stood and walked over to the profile wall, where they hung details of some of the higher-scoring passengers. “We’ve become close enough to some of the workers. I think we can get some of them to go into rooms for us. Cleaning crews, maintenance crews – those types can come and go as they please without arousing suspicion.” He turned and looked at Jax. “We’d have to compensate them somehow. We’ve still got a few thousand Alleys—”
“Eh,” Jax grunted, cutting the other man off. “These people, they don’t want money. They can’t spend it. They get room and board as part of their employment here. They don’t have any bills. They get a big fat paycheck when they get done with their multi-year tour of duty. We need something that can entice them here and now.”