“Then what?” Runstom said. “We can try to buy something of value from some passengers, but I don’t think they’ll be interested in selling. They’ve got more money than they can spend as it is.”

Jax looked down. He had hoped to keep this little secret to himself, but he felt like it was time to come clean. “Remember when we came out of Xarp, and I didn’t talk for the next five hours or so?” he asked, head still down.

“Yeah. Worst case of Xarp sickness I’ve ever seen. Like a junky, stoned out of—” Runstom stopped in mid-sentence as Jax looked up at him. “You sonova bitch,” he whispered. “Drugs? On my ship?”

“I’m sorry, Stan. I was a little freaked out. The near-death experience and all.”

Runstom looked back at the profile wall. “Where did you get them?” he asked, his voice like ice. “And what are they?”

The officer’s suddenly cold and indifferent tone made Jax’s hairs stand on end. “They were stashed in one of the equipment lockers, behind some guns. Delirium-G. Pill form.” He left out the part where Prosser made a deal with him to reveal the hiding place of the pills in exchange for feeding him a dose. The foul-mouthed Space Waste pilot was pretty heavily restrained in the cargo bay and Jax had felt a little sorry for him, so he agreed.

The officer was quiet for a while, and Jax just let him be. There were worse things in the world than D-G, and Jax knew that Runstom knew it. Let him throw his little cop-minded mini-tantrum. Finally, he said, “I should make you jettison them.” Then he turned around, his demeanor lighter. “But ModPol law on drugs varies to a large degree from one contract to another. And since I’m only well-versed on the Barnard-4 contract, I have no idea what the law is regarding Delirium-G on a Royal Starways Superliner.”

“Oh,” Jax said, a little thrown off by that statement. Having never left his planet before this month, he had not considered the fact that the law wasn’t the same everywhere. He’d always thought that part of the point of having an organization like ModPol around was to have a consistent set of laws across multiple populations.

“Additionally, we’re currently conducting an improvised undercover operation, so I cannot make any attempts to call this in to ModPol HQ. Furthermore, it is acceptable to commit minor criminal or questionable acts while undercover in order to establish connections or discover evidence.”

“It is?” Jax said, wishing he hadn’t questioned that last part as soon as it came out of his mouth.

“Well, yeah. I mean, they do it all the time in the holo-vids.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s true.” Jax was lost in thought for a moment, and Runstom was too, apparently, because a silence grew between them. After a few minutes, he decided it was time to lay out the obvious, for the sake of progress. “So, uh. Here’s an idea: how about we offer some Delirium-G to some employees in exchange for getting them to do a little digging into the rooms of a few passengers?”

“Let the record show that I do not condone the use of these drugs,” Runstom said in some bizarre, half-wooden voice. “But I agree that this may be our best course of action at the current juncture, and time is of the essence.”

What record? was the response that Jax managed to keep to himself. “So noted,” he said, in a mock-official tone. “Let us proceed, Officer Runstom.”

Jax didn’t have a whole lot of experience with Delirium-G, but he’d encountered it a few times. Maybe more than the average person; especially the average B-fourean. After his mother passed, he went through a phase during which he spent a lot of time in the underground corridors of Blue Haven. He mostly drowned his grief in a glass, but he did some occasional gambling, and that had led him to his first introduction to the stuff. In one of the more shady gambling dens, during a card game, a woman had tossed a pill onto the table in place of money. A final, desperate attempt to win back some of her losses. It had not been long since Irene Jackson was in the accident when Jax first learned that his father was going to move to B-3 with his soon-to-be second wife. That night, Jax was on a mission to hit rock bottom, trying to gamble away the small amount of savings he had left. Fate conspired against him and doled out a stingingly ironic streak of good luck. Jax had taken many hands over the course of a few hours, including the one with the Delirium-G pill as a bet.

He was feeling low enough to abuse a substance he’d never encountered before, figuring that if he couldn’t lose his money, he could at least lose his mind. Again his intention to bottom out was thwarted. The drug did not have the detrimental effect that public-service announcements often described. He couldn’t remember most of the experience anymore, but he could remember finding a small amount of peace with the loss of his mother for the first time that night.

Despite the benefits the drug had brought him, Jax knew better than to fall into a trap of relying on it. It had gotten him over a hump (or perhaps more accurately, out of a trough), but he knew the danger in becoming dependent on a chemical. After that first encounter, he’d sought it out again about a week later, while still frequenting the underground. The second time was already noticeably weaker than the first, so he decided to avoid it after that. A few years later, he’d gotten a couple of pills because his girlfriend Priscilla wanted to try it. Since then, he hadn’t even seen it again until that day on the stolen transport, when Prosser told him where some was stashed in a compartment on the vessel.

Since they had gotten the stuff out again to use as currency with the employees, he pocketed one. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted it, and maybe he would just get rid of it. But it was hard to pass up the last chance to hold on to just one.

For a few days, it burned a hole in his pocket. He wouldn’t be able to hold on to the pill for long; he knew he’d be in real trouble if Runstom found out he’d kept one. He thought he’d better just flush it, but then one day Runstom was gone for a while, off bargaining with some cleaning staff. Jax was left alone for a few hours.

As much as he generally disliked life in the domes on Barnard-4, it was his home, and being away from it for so long was having an effect on his nerves. It didn’t help that he was working with a cop who was a lot more used to both the travel and the work. The whole being falsely accused of mass-homicide and facing life imprisonment thing just might have been another factor in the fraying of his edges, but who was he to say, really? He popped the pill and headed for one of the mini-domes that speckled the superliner.

He found himself sitting in a deckchair, watching the stars go by impossibly, yet not imperceptibly, slowly. He felt the weight of gravity – not heavier, just pulling more significantly. Tugging, more accurately. A sporadic tugging at his limbs, never all at once, just one here, then there, as if he could detect the microscopic machinations of the artificial gravity pumps deep in the center of the ship. His vision wasn’t affected much, as long as his head was still. If a sound caught his attention and he turned to look, the scene seemed to pan slowly, as if some unseen holo-vid director was attempting to create a sense of bigness and tension. His thoughts ultimately unfocused on the final destination of his gaze, instead lost in the journey it took to get there.

He watched the buzzing of the humans around the ship, the little clockwork bees with jerking movements of the limbs zipping to and fro, stopping to get pollen from the bar and storing it somewhere internally, as if there were a plan to return it to a hive where it could become sweet, sticky honey over time. They sometimes visited him to make conversation, which he would review in his head, as if he were a book-reader at that moment rather than a participant in the dialogue.