“Okay,” Runstom said, his eyebrows furrowing. “What are you thinking?”

“We have the original package, or at least the outer wrapping.” Jax pulled the folded brown paper out of his satchel. “Look, here. There’s a code on here that says RTSOF. Return to sender … something.”

“On failure.”

“Right! Return to sender on failure. Which means whoever sent the chip to Linda Parson requested the return service feature.”

Runstom’s face finally lit up. “So we make a new package, wrap it up with this wrapper that has the sticker with the sender’s ID on it, seal it up, and return it to TerroPac.”

“Yes!” Jax said. “And they’ll give the sender a call and we can stake out the office and see who walks out with the package.”

They talked the plan out as they walked to a store to buy a box of cookies. Runstom rubbed his hands together with an almost frightening enjoyment for subverting the TerroPac Express anonymity feature. Jax felt a little guilty about it, being that he actually thought they had a pretty strong point. He’d never really thought about it much before, laws and control and all that.

They booked a hotel room so they could get their package together and give themselves another day before they “returned” it. Sunderville was quite a bit larger than Fornwood. There were plenty of residences, including some apartment complexes, and there were stores and restaurants offering a wide variety of products. There was even at least one school that Jax had noticed. The smaller buildings were mostly brick or wood or a combination of both and the larger buildings were made of steel and featured a lot of glass windows.

People mostly got around town on foot and on cycle. In fact, it was a bit of a contrast to Fornwood. Where the smaller town was almost all foot-traffic, this town had lots of dedicated, paved roads for cycle and small motor vehicle traffic. Some other massive, truck-like vehicles were restricted to use on the outskirts of the city or near delivery docks and transportation hubs. All the cycles and motor vehicles Jax saw were the ancient wheeled variety – no hover-bikes or hover-cars in this town.

Their hotel room was pretty high up, fourteen floors, and the view out of the large glass window was breath-taking. Jax had never seen anything like it. They saw rolling hills in the distance, covered in the blue-green fuzz of vegetation, those tree-like plants dotting the landscape. The planet, Barnard-5, was beginning to sink into the horizon and he could see its long curving surface, as if it were just a mostly-hidden circle positioned right behind the nearby hills.

Standing in front of that window, Jax felt like his insides were turning to jelly. It felt like he’d always had this life goal to see the surface of another planet, ever since his mother showed him the dead, gray surface of Barnard-4. And here he was, on a giant moon that was teeming with life. He’d walked across this moon’s surface. He’d reached out and touched the plants that grew from its living soil. He’d watched the animals who lived on it naturally move about freely; freer than any human who lived in a dome. He wished Irene Jackson could be there to experience it with him. But even if she couldn’t be there, he knew his mother didn’t have to be alive to be proud that her son walked on the surface of any celestial body other than Barnard-4.

Jax was really beginning to like it on Terroneous. He kept that information to himself, though. In fact, he tried to keep it from himself. It was dangerous to the mission. If he started to think too hard about it, he might decide it was not worth tracking down the next lead. He might start thinking about making this moon his home; a new home, beautiful, quiet and remote, where ModPol and any part of his old life would never bother him.

“That’s it. That’s the package. I can see the red X we marked on it.”

“Give me that ocular,” Runstom said, grabbing the scope from Jax. He took a look for himself and saw the small red X on the side of the package. It was being carried out of the TerroPac Express office by a tall man with broad shoulders and a massive midsection. The clothes he wore hung about his frame haphazardly, covering most of his pale-pink skin.

The target frowned heavily and walked with a bit of scorn in his step. He was clearly frustrated about having to pick up the package. Runstom wondered if he’d yet realized it wasn’t the exact size of the package he had sent out. He didn’t seem paranoid or suspicious of anything – just grumpy – as he strode head-down toward the trike he had ridden up to the TerroPac Express office.

The hotel had provided Runstom and Jax with a pair of bicycles as part of their room package. The cycles bore the flashy logo of the hotel on them, which made them look like a couple of tourists. Jax had been agitated about the notion of being identified as a tourist, and Runstom was detecting some sudden urge to fit in coming from the other man. The officer reminded him that if they looked like tourists, no one would suspect they were staking out the TerroPac office.

The charade continued to be useful as they trailed the big man on his tricycle through the streets of Sunderville. He showed no signs of being aware that he was being followed, and certainly made no attempts to shake the two tourists who coincidentally turned the same way he did, time and time again. It was fortunate, because Jax had never been on a human-powered bike before, and as a result, he bumbled around like a drunk. This vehicular disability was undoing all the fitting-in that his new leather jacket had bestowed upon him. The jacket was, however, helpful in keeping his clothes from being torn to shreds as he proceeded to fall off the bike every few minutes.

Finally, the heavy-set man stopped at an apartment complex. Jax and Runstom rode past him and stopped at a store across the street. They watched as the big man put his three-wheeled bike in a shed in front of the complex and then headed inside. Runstom quickly stuck his bike in the auto-locking corral in front of the store and grabbed the key-card that popped out when he engaged the locking mechanism. Jax followed suit and they sprinted across the street and into the apartment building.

No one was in the lobby. There were two elevator doors and Runstom noticed that the digital floor number readout next to one was quickly ticking up: 8 … 9 … 10. It slowed down and stopped at 12. He looked at Jax.

“I guess we can hypothesize that the big man didn’t take the stairs,” the operator said.

Runstom nodded and hit the elevator call button and they took the other car up to the twelfth floor. When they arrived, they stood in the hallway and looked left to right. There were about ten rooms on either side of the elevator, doors on either side.

“Well, now what?” Jax whispered. “We can’t just knock on every door.”

Runstom gave his partner a half-smile, and Jax rolled his eyes. “Come on,” the officer said. “Let’s start at this end.”

The big man was behind the fourth door, not counting the ones where no one answered. He looked at them mildly confused, just like the other three people who answered their doors did. “Can I help you?”

“Your package got returned,” Jax said before Runstom had a chance to speak. He glared at the operator.

“How did you know—” the man started, looking quickly to Jax, then to Runstom, then back. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“We work for X,” Jax said. “And we need to talk.”

Fear darkened the man’s face like blinds closing over a window. “I – I tried to send the package. I don’t know why it came back,” he stammered. “X said that I should send it anonymous!”

“Let’s step inside,” Runstom said, before Jax could pull anything else. He made a mental note to deck the operator at his earliest convenience for taking the lead. Sure, they didn’t exactly have a plan, but Jax’s ruse was just reckless. The big man was frozen in the doorway. “Now,” Runstom said, putting his hand on his hip and revealing the laser pistol he’d kept since the shootout with the Space Wasters.