It felt good to think that over, to “remember” how it all happened. It helped Jax to feel like he should not have been suspicious, should not have seen it coming. But the question of why was still on his mind. This guy X, what was Milton’s connection to him? Was it about drugs or gambling, like Runstom guessed? Did Milton get into trouble – get into debt – and ended up owing X a favor? Did X say, just get me any operator’s credentials, I leave it up to you to pick your victim? It was possible. Jax supposed he’d better heed what Runstom said and not pretend to know Milton – really know him – just because they worked together.

It was the only thing that made sense for Milton’s story. It had to be something bad. Linda Parson, she had political ambitions. Markus Stallworth was running a business and from the sounds of his blubbering about X getting a cut, he’d probably become indebted when the mystery man alleviated some competition or drummed up some not-so-legal lines of inexpensive supplies. But Milton didn’t have a lust for power or money. He was just a LifSup supervisor. Just another toiling B-fourean, another ant in the anthill.

And there was the other thing the detectives had slapped onto the table: a debt. A personal debt, as if Jax owed Milton something. The cops had all kinds of official paperwork that said Jax owed Milton a significant amount of money. They even had Jax’s signature, and he knew he never signed any such thing, nor had any reason to. Not for the first time, the operator wondered if any of those cops were on X’s payroll. They seemed awfully eager to convict an innocent man. Were they part of the conspiracy? Or just being mildly incompetent cops? The debt, though, was something. Maybe it was payment. If Jax had been convicted of murder and there was an outstanding debt with a citizen, then according to law, Jax’s savings would have been used to pay off the debt.

Maybe Milton was in some kind of money trouble and along came a solution. Someone says, set someone up to take a fall and we’ll make sure you get a payday. Milton probably didn’t even know his payday was supposed to come in the form of an IOU from a convicted murderer – that by framing someone and getting them sent to prison, he’d be getting a payment out of the personal savings of that same person when they were convicted.

Of course, Milton probably didn’t know a lot of things. He didn’t know that when he stole Jax’s credentials, they would be used to murder a whole block. Otherwise he wouldn’t have set up the Life Support operator on duty for the same block he happened to reside in. But then again, how could he have known that was going to happen? Jax himself had to be convinced that it was even possible for someone to write a program that could circumvent those block safety protocols. Milton must have had no idea why X wanted an operator’s credentials, or what he would use them for. If Milton really knew anything, he wouldn’t be dead.

This guy X, whoever he was, was starting to take the shape of a mob boss in Jax’s mind. How many people did he have in his pocket? How many people owed him, and how many people worked for him?

Talking their way into the processing facility at the d-mail docks was not as difficult as they anticipated. The people working in the extremely remote location (on the already remote moon) were more than happy to give in-depth tours to anyone who bothered to make the trip. Jax talked about being interested in going off-world to school to learn more about drone engineering. He spoke some of the same language that the d-mail techs spoke, and within twenty minutes of their arrival, the staff on hand were treating Jax as one of their own.

Jax again began to feel the pull. The allure of just letting go of the incident at block 23-D and staying right there on Terroneous. The large moon was not in ModPol jurisdiction and they might never bother to look for him if he just laid low. He imagined getting a job at the d-mail facility – the site was remote, but to make up for it the people there worked in shifts of one month on, one month off, still collecting a paycheck. The place was like a hotel for most of them who had their own homes in different cities and towns only a few hours away by plane.

Whenever he looked at Runstom, Jax knew he had to keep going. He could see the officer carrying around the deaths of those innocent people, the hunger for justice. The deeper they got into this case, the more hungry the man looked. Every lead was an appetizer for the next course. It was infectious, that hunger. That desire to find this bastard “X” and put him away for good.

They spent a few hours there at the d-mail facility, and Jax had plenty of time to scope out the drone he was interested in. It was an interstellar drone from the Sirius system. After Jax had a little more time to enjoy the company of fellow tech-heads, they said their goodbyes and took a mag-rail to the nearest city with an interstellar port.

Two days later they were in cryo-sleep in a long-range passenger vessel, headed for Sirius-5.

CHAPTER 16

“Alright,” Moses Down said, his voice resonating deep. “Slow the hell down, 2-Bit. Tell me what happened. From the beginning.”

“Right, right,” Captain 2-Bit said. The aging gangbanger took a deep breath. Even over the low-res vid-screen he was visibly antsy. “We’re out in my cruiser, right? Just took off from Terro with a load of that dark Terro beer that the boys all love, right? I mean, we cleaned ’em out – got a couple dozen barrels of—”

“Get to the point, Captain.”

“Right. So we left Terro and we check our contacts before Xarping, just as normal, right? And what do we see, but hello, that personnel transport that went missing during the raid on the prison barge. You know, when y’all sprung me and Johnny Eyeball, right?”

“Yeah, you told me that already,” Down said, motioning with his large brown hands. “So what happened? You went after her? Did you get ’er back in one piece?”

“Well, see, I sent two fighters out after her, right? I told those boys, take out her thrusters so she can’t split, right? Then we can hop aboard, grab anyone we find, and take back our ship, right?”

Down nodded. “Good thinking, 2-Bit. So they took out her thrusters?”

“Yeah, they did,” 2-Bit said, getting a little excited. “She didn’t even know it was comin’, right? They get on one side of her, one boy does a flyby, real quick-like, and they got her surrounded.” He tried to model the scene with his hands. “She doesn’t even react to the flyby, right? So the boy, he comes back around and BAM! Takes her thrusters out, perfect cluster.” He poked at one hand with the fingers of his other.

“Nice,” Down said, grinning wide, stretching the short, curly beard that framed his jaw. “You’ve trained your boys well, Captain.”

“Right,” the captain replied, then followed with a sigh. “See, my boy, he’s thinkin’, the ship can’t go nowhere now, and they don’t know how to work the weapons on it or somethin’, because they didn’t put up no fight. He comes up on her real slow-like, right? So’s he can board ’er. But he’s bein’ careful to make sure she’s not gonna fire back.”

Down’s mouth turned downward. “But not careful, enough,” he said. 2-Bit didn’t reply right away, so he prompted him. “Is that right?”

“Well, he got right up on her. And outta nowhere, the auto-turret – you know, those personnel transporters we lifted from that Sirius Navy outpost – they got this beautiful auto-turret, right? Dumb as a rock, but that sucker packs a punch, right?”

“The auto-turret dusted your fighter,” Down guessed.

At this, Captain 2-Bit took his hat off and held it over his heart. “Aye, boss. Complete disintegration.”

“Okay,” Down said after a grimace and a moment of silence. “So then what happened? You tell the other fighter to take him out?”