“And you knew this.”

“I mean, do you think X is the type of person who would let someone trail him from a goddamn parcel delivery office?” Jax continued. “To a tiny, shitty, studio apartment in a place like Sunderville? Of course he wasn’t X.”

“Then you know goddamn well that Brandon Milton isn’t X, don’t you?” Runstom fired, his voice strong and stern. “Brandon Milton was another pawn and now he’s dead.”

“No,” Jax said weakly. “He didn’t deserve it.”

“No, probably not. But an old man told me recently that if someone jabs you with a pointed stick, you probably earned it.”

“But what did Milton do? How did he earn his death? He was a good man. He wasn’t some loser on some backwater moon. He was married,” Jax started to say, but the words choked off.

“We don’t know,” Runstom replied. “Look, Jax. You have to trust me – you don’t know everything about everyone. You can work with someone on a daily basis, but you don’t know their secrets. Maybe he was into bad drugs. Maybe he was a gambler and he owed the wrong people money. He crossed paths with the wrong people. I’m not saying he got what he deserved. But I am saying that there’s a very good chance that Milton didn’t have a clean past.”

“But then what about me? What did I do?” Jax said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Why am I a pawn in this bastard’s game? What did I do to earn this?”

“Listen to me, Jackson.” Runstom put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “You’re not a pawn. All of these people, they did something willfully. They can act like their hand was forced, that they had no choice, but it’s not true. They all had a choice and they chose to turn a blind eye to what was happening and allow themselves to be a link in the chain of events that led to the deaths of thirty-two people.

“You didn’t allow yourself to be used,” the officer continued, trying to look into Jax’s wet, gray eyes. “You didn’t do anything of your own free will. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re as much of a victim as those thirty-two people. There’s only one difference between you and them. You’re not dead. You’re still alive and that means you can set this straight.”

Jax coughed and pulled away, trying to wipe his face. “Do you understand me?” Runstom said. “You are not this man’s pawn. You are the unexpected wild card in an otherwise stacked deck. And you’re going to be the one to bring down the house of cards.”

“Okay.” The operator was making strange noises, half-crying and half-laughing. “I get it, Stanford. You can stop with the ridiculous mixed metaphors.”

“Okay, so d-mail. Drone-mail,” Jax lectured after Runstom asked him why they were on a small, low-altitude, passenger air-vessel, bouncing through turbulence on their way up to Terroneous’ north pole. “Electronic mail works great when you’re on the same planet, but in order to send e-mail to another planet, it has to be transported physically by these Zarp-drive drones.”

“Gotcha, Xarp-drive drones.” Runstom looked uncharacte‌ristically queasy as the craft bobbed erratically.

“Not Xarp,” Jax corrected. “Zarp.”

“Huh?” Runstom’s face bunched together, creating ripples of light-green and dark-olive lines.

“Zarp. With a ‘Z’. Not Xarp with an ‘X’.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, Warp is light-speed, right?” Runstom seemed to nod, but with all the bouncing, it was hard to tell. Jax continued anyway. “Xarp is FTL – that’s faster than light. Zarp is an order of magnitude faster than Xarp.”

“I never heard of Zzzarp—”

“Well, of course not,” Jax said. “People can’t use it to travel. Zarp moves too fast for animal or even plant life to survive the trip. The time-space alterations cause any organic matter to reverse-compose. So only automated drones can actually do Zarp.”

“Oh,” Runstom said. Jax gave him a few seconds in case he had any other questions, but he didn’t say anything else. Jax was a little thankful, because honestly, that was about the limit of what he knew about Zarp speed.

“Old-school networking principles apply here,” Jax continued, back on the topic of d-mail. “A drone will be echoed back when it has been received successfully, and multiple drones with the same data on them are launched together for redundancy. The drones are actually pretty small and are launched from orbiting satellites so they don’t need any rocket fuel. They’re just a shell with a bunch of memory cells for holding the mail data and those little Zarp engines. And of course a computer to drive them, with minimal artificial intelligence.”

“Okay, I get all that. But I still don’t understand what we’re going to do up there.” He motioned vaguely into the distance. “Up at the mail dock, or whatever you call it. The d-mail that the program was attached to didn’t have any sender inform—”

“I know, I’ll get to that,” Jax interrupted. Runstom rolled his eyes and let him continue. “Okay, first what happens is that a drone lands at a d-mail dock. Then its contents are downloaded and those messages and electronic packages are sent on to their intended recipients, using the regular local communication technology – satellite, fiber optics, whatever. Once a drone’s memory has been downloaded, it goes into this queue – for re-use. So there’s this whole queue of drones that are sitting there waiting to be filled up with new mail so they can be sent back out into space.” He paused to see if that was sinking in. “See what I’m getting at? If the drone with that d-mail that had the program in it is still in the queue, we can find it.”

“You mean they don’t wipe the memory in the drones after they download all the d-mail?”

“Nah, not right away,” Jax said. “They’ll get wiped once they get to the front of the queue. And there’s always a ton of drones in queue. If our drone came in a couple weeks ago, it’ll still be stuck somewhere in the middle.” He got his satchel from under the seat in front of him and pulled out their notebook. “And yes, the sender ID was not in the d-mail. But every d-mail has its drone ID added onto it when it’s uploaded to that drone. It’s stored in the header of the d-mail. Kind of like a stamp on a passport. Mostly there for troubleshooting,” he added, as he pointed out the drone ID he had noted on paper. “But also for billing purposes. You can mask the sender ID on a message, but for every block of memory used on a drone, someone somewhere has to pay a d-mail company. And it’s not cheap either. Which is good for us, because the high cost of Zarp engines means you’ll never see more than a couple hundred drones at any d-mail docks.”

“Okay. But even if we find that particular drone, what good will that do us?” By this point, Runstom’s normal green luster had paled half-way to an ashen gray.

“Well, each drone comes from a single planet, moon, or space station,” the operator replied. “It will have the last d-mail facility it delivered mail from imprinted on it. Right on the outside of the drone, visible to all. Again – they do that for troubleshooting purposes. You know, like if a drone never made it to its destination and it was just out there floating around in space.”

“How the hell do you know all this?”

“Don’t ask.” Jax wasn’t in the mood to relive another potential career path he failed to follow. He looked out the window. They were just above the cloud layer, but it was broken and he could see the land below. Blue-green patchwork lying atop soft hills, interrupted here and there by pools of clear liquid. The round shape of Barnard-5 was occupying more of the sky throughout the day, shrouding the land in shadow, and he could see part of the gas giant through the mist. An ever-present guardian, keeping watch over its moon-child.

“Goddamn turbulence,” Runstom muttered as they jiggled up and down.

Since his partner didn’t seem much up to conversation, Jax found himself lost in thought. The sting of being betrayed by Brandon Milton was very strong, and not likely to fade anytime soon. He knew that. He thought about the last couple weeks of work as a LifSup operator. He thought Milton was just giving him a hard time like everyone else did who wanted to somehow bully Jax into reaching his full potential. Milton taking Jax under his wing. The micromanaging was driving Jax crazy. Now he could picture it all happening in his head. Micromanagement was an excuse to look over Jax’s shoulder – a number of times. Learning Jax’s password. Helping Jax clean up around his station. Had he stuffed a beverage can into his pocket? One with perfect copies of Jax’s fingerprints? And the voiceprint – how hard would that be to get? A pocket recorder. Milton had used one to “talk” notes, rather than using a notepad and pencil. He had gotten Jax’s biometrics, no problem whatsoever. Easy peasy.