Most of their wine was smashed, being that Jax had insisted on getting the classic, glass-bottle variety. He’d never tasted anything like it until the superliner, and he grieved more over that loss than anything else on the ship. He stuffed the two remaining bottles down in his pack before they headed out.

Then they walked. For several hours they walked, the thinness of the air making them slow and tired. They saw a great variety of plant life on their journey, as well as a number of bird-like creatures. They saw a pack of what looked to be predators of some kind, but the multi-limbed, large-fanged, thickly-furred creatures seemed uninterested in them, sparing the two men only a sidelong glance before moving off through the tall blue-green grasses.

At first, the whole place made Jax very uneasy. He was on the surface of a planet not protected by a dome for the first time in his life. The longer they walked, the more it felt natural to be in those surroundings. It was like being in a dream. The smells in the air had an effect on him. He kept breathing deeper, trying to take in the strange, fresh, raw odor of the local flora. It would change ever so slightly as they moved from the plains to a grove of trees to patches of brush, and each time he would make himself dizzy trying to smell as hard as he could, desiring so badly to recognize those subtleties that he had never smelled before.

When they finally reached Fornwood, the closest town they could find on the map, they were exhausted. The town was a lot of wood structures, the likes of which Jax had never seen before. It wasn’t an overly large town, but there were a number of residences, a market area, a railway station, and a small shipyard. A real shipyard, as in a place where wooden boats were built: rafts, canoes, sailboats, stern-wheelers, those kinds of things.

The people of Fornwood were a bit bizarre to Jax. Their skin was generally light pink but with a bluish hue. They wore a lot of clothing that looked like it was pieced together with animal pelts, and they had such odd accents that Jax would often have to stop and think about what someone said before he could understand them. There were, of course, other off-worlders about, but not many. The Fornwoodians were very friendly to strangers, inviting everyone to stay awhile, perhaps do some shopping and visit a few restaurants while they were in town. The town was safe, they assured the visitors. Not like other places on Terroneous.

They still had some money, and after asking around, found themselves in a room at an inn. They got the same overly-hospitable treatment there that they encountered everywhere else in the town. They were too exhausted for much banter, so they ordered meals right there at the inn and had them delivered to their room. What arrived was some kind of stew, with hunks of animal meat floating around with big cuts of roots and vegetables. On the side there were pieces of a bluish, bread-like food that was kind of tough to chew, unless they dunked it in the stew first. Despite being so tired that he could barely keep his eyes open, Jax was aware that it was the most amazing and flavorful meal he had ever eaten. Runstom said it was because they grew plants right in the ground, in farms just outside of towns. The same went for livestock – they had enough space to raise large meat-bearing creatures naturally, by allowing them to roam large pastures. No hydroponics and factory meat. The officer said it was food made nine-tenths of the way by the planet, then assembled and cooked by people.

Jax slept well that night. Better than he could remember sleeping in a long time; even back in Gretel, on Barnard-4. His home-world was only the next planet inward in the system, but it was millions of kilometers away, and to him that life felt millions of years in the past. In his dreams that night, he was a large, furry animal, stalking unsuspecting prey through tall blades of blue-green grass with his pack-mates.

When he awoke, he felt renewed and ready to move ahead on their only lead. Runstom was in a similar mood. Being on Terroneous lit a spark in the officer that Jax was glad to see. ModPol had no jurisdiction anywhere on the moons of Barnard-5, and so Runstom wore the plainest set of clothes they had managed to salvage from the personnel transport. Jax dressed similarly, but in the back of his head he had half a mind to go into the market and pick up an animal-hide coat.

There was a small postal house in town. They asked if the clerk could look up the TerroPac Express office by the number they had on their package, and she was happy to oblige. The office they were looking for was in a town called Sunderville several hundred kilometers away, but they could reach it very easily by mag-rail.

They picked up some proper luggage at the market, and Jax got himself a lovely animal-hide coat. The saleswoman told him it was leather, which was what they called animal-hide once it’s been cured for durability. She assured Jax that if he took care of it, the coat would outlast his own life. Jax decided not to mention that he was probably living on borrowed time anyway, so that wouldn’t be much of a feat. They stayed one more night at the inn, had another magnificent meal, and then caught the mag-rail to Sunderville first thing in the morning.

CHAPTER 14

“I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk said. He was a tall, old, frail-looking man with yellowing, wrinkled skin, but despite his appearance, he held his ground steadily and adamantly. “I cannot give you a customer’s information if they have chosen to send a package anonymously. That,” he said with a glower framed by bushy gray eyebrows, “is our policy.”

“So let me get this straight,” Runstom said, ratcheting up the indignity. “If someone was to send me a box of poisoned cookies, and they did so using your anonymity feature, I would have no way of finding out who had just tried to kill me?”

“Well, sir,” the old man said. “They’ve a saying, you know. Tis not the poison cookie what kills a man, nay, tis the baker.”

“What?” Jax said. “Is that really a—”

“And furthermore,” the clerk continued. “If ya be on the receivin’ end of a pointed stick, look not to the man at the other end for guilt, but look to ya-self. Chances are, ya’ve earned that poke in the ribs.”

“We don’t have such sayings on the law-patrolled planets,” Runstom growled. “And thieves and murderers can’t hide behind a mask of anonymity.”

“Aye, tis true, we’re a bit lax on lawfulness in these parts,” the old man said, raising a crooked finger. “But we make up fer it in respect, young man. Laws are only necessary for people who don’t trust no one else. And when you can’t trust someone, you can’t rest unless you control ’em.”

Runstom was fuming, but Jax put a hand on his arm. “Okay, Stanford. They have a policy. The clerk is just doing his job. Let’s go.”

A few minutes later they were walking briskly down the street away from the TerroPac Express office. Runstom was practically sprinting in anger, and Jax had a hard time keeping up with him.

“Stanford,” he said. “Hey. Stan!” He grabbed the officer by the arm and spun him around, earning a burning glare from the dark eyes on the olive-green face. “Slow the hell down. I have an idea.”

This statement seemed to soften the other man’s face ever so slightly. “What?”

“Well, when we were in that office, I got a look around. I noticed that another one of the extras they offer on delivery is a return service, so if you send something to someone and they send it back, TerroPac will ring you up and you can come pick up the package. They even have a deal where you can get that as a combo with the anonymity thing. People probably reject a lot of anonymous packages, so in some cases you might want to make sure, if they rejected it, that you would get it back.”