“No, Linda,” Jax said, stepping in front of her. “You loaded the gun. I pointed the gun. But someone else pulled the trigger. This is not your fault, just like it’s not my fault. Do you understand?”

She stared at Jax, or maybe through him. Runstom thought about his words, words he knew the operator was telling himself as much as he was telling Linda Parson.

Runstom said, “We’re going to find this X. Just don’t talk to anyone else about this whole thing. Nothing links you to any of this. Just ride out this cruise and then go home. We’ll keep in touch.”

“Okay,” she said, with a swallow. “Thank you.”

They walked most of the way back to their room in silence. When they reached their hallway, Jax finally spoke.

“So what are we going to do now?”

Runstom sighed. “I should be arresting her, or at least detaining her. Bring her in for questioning.” He stopped.

“But you won’t do that. Why not?”

“I’m not sure,” Runstom said in a distant voice. “It feels – it just feels like there’s a lot more to this.”

Jax didn’t ask for any more clarification. He thought back to Runstom identifying himself as Detective while talking to Linda Parson. As soon as Detective Runstom reconnected with ModPol, he’d go back to being Officer Runstom. And then it would be out of his hands. How far was this guy willing to go? How badly did he want to know the truth? How badly did he want to prove himself? Would he see it through to the end? Jax wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t be smarter to just turn himself in with the evidence they had up to this point, or if they needed more. Knowing in his heart that he’d been set up, he didn’t want to put his faith in the ModPol judicial system just yet.

“And what did the note say?” he asked.

Runstom thrust the box into Jax’s arms and got his MagiKey out to open the door. Then he took the box and set it down on the desk in their room. He pulled out the note and handed it to Jax. “First, you need to pull this box apart and check it for any other memory modules that might be able to store the code that was beamed down to your LifSup system’s receiver. Second, we need to find out where the trash goes on this ship. We need to get a hold of that package that those cookies came in.”

Jax read the note.

My back itches. Place the metal cookie in the box exactly four days from this very moment. Take the box up to a sitting deck on the port side, plug it in, and flip the green switch. Stay with it for twelve hours. —X

“What the hell does this mean? My back itches?”

“I scratch your back, you scratch mine,” Runstom said. “As a politician, Linda Parson knew exactly what that means. She got help from our mysterious X, and she owed him a favor. She could either comply, or he could expose her. He probably has all kinds of evidence that ties her to the Eagelson controversy – which was probably fabricated.”

“So if she didn’t perform this seemingly simple task, she knew she’d be committing political suicide,” Jax said. “She’d probably even go to prison.”

“Exactly,” the officer said, sifting through some of their notes.

Jax stared at the note thoughtfully. Then something struck him. “Did you just suggest we’re going to go digging through the trash?”

“That’s right. We need that package. It’s our only lead.”

Jax’s first instinct was to get all incredulous about the notion that an empty package was a lead. He caught himself, and tried to think like his partner for a moment. “Um. Because it was delivered. By a delivery company. And we could figure out where it came from and maybe even who sent it?”

“Hey, not bad,” Runstom said, still looking at some notes. “You could almost pass for a cop.”

CHAPTER 12

A few of their last Delirium-G’s and they had earned themselves a pair of Trash Operator uniforms and a full shift of work. Working in the trashitorium wasn’t as dirty as it could be; Gar-bots did most of the heavy lifting. The TrashOps supervised the bots, inspected the containers, regulated the amount of trash that went into the incinerator; that kind of thing. Despite being on a superliner, the trashitorium wasn’t much different than what the domes had back on B-4. Jax was surprised to find out it wasn’t even much smaller.

The incinerator didn’t actually have fire in it. It was a high pressure, high temperature structure that a trash container was emptied into and then bombarded with a particular kind of amplified cosmic radiation. All the material was broken down into individual molecules, which could then be sorted by various methods. First, the smallest microscopic holes would open in the structure and vacuums would suck out the smallest molecules – gases and the like. Then a series of increasingly larger holes opened in the sides of the structure while it spun around, creating artificially high gravity and pulling out molecules in groups of one element at a time.

Jax would have found the whole process interesting if he hadn’t already seen it. He’d worked in a trashitorium back in Gretel, before he managed to crawl his way up the ladder to the glorious position of LifSupOp. It was a good thing too, because though they traded for the uniforms, they still needed to pretend to know the job, and Runstom had no clue.

With little in the way of hands-on work to be done, Jax and Runstom managed to get themselves a shift all alone, and Jax was showing Runstom the ropes, in particular the intake and outtake schedule.

“This is obscene,” Runstom said as they checked out the data on a console. “It’s completely backed up.”

“Trashitoriums are always behind schedule,” Jax said. “Even with such a refined process, it still takes time. And the people on this ship are outputting garbage non-stop.”

Runstom nodded and hummed. “That’s good then. That gives us better odds that the package is still around, right?”

“Yep,” Jax said and tapped at some keys. “The oldest stuff in the containment queue is a little more than two weeks old. Now we just track Linda Parson’s refuse.”

Another feature of the average trashitorium that gave them an advantage was the almost malicious attention to detail. The bureaucracy enjoyed by TrashOps made them feel extremely important in an otherwise extremely banal job, but it also meant that any particular refuse container spent a significant amount of time in processing.

“Every container is meticulously labeled and verified,” Jax explained as they dug through the database. “You want to know which containers have trash that came from room 1468 between this date and that date? It’s like going to the library. We don’t even really need this database. Someone who knows the system could just walk through the containers on the staging deck and find anything they wanted to.”

“Then why are we looking in the database?”

Jax shook his head. “Come on, man, you can’t expect me to remember everything from a job I had like eight years ago.”

Before the end of their shift, they were down in that maze of refuse containers, following the hints that Jax managed to dig out of the console. After the better part of an hour, they found the container that had the garbage from room 1468 on the given week they calculated, based on Parson’s story. The massive container was further broken into smaller cubes, perfectly packed and wrapped in plastic, each labeled with a unique identifier. Jax had to keep hitting the remote to divert the confused Gar-bots that periodically came around to attempt to clean up the mess they made as they dug through the stacks.

Finally they found the bag with the label they were looking for.

“Here goes,” Runstom said and tore it open with a pocketknife.

They spread the contents out onto the floor. They’d been compressed and vacuum-sealed, so there was little decay among the organic matter – not that it made it any less repulsive – and the various plastic-based materials were flattened at odd angles.