Eyeball rubbed his hands together with delight. “We went to a ModPol auction, see? We’re all in disguise and shit. Like, not me, but some other dudes. ModPol makes tons of Alleys, so they’re always buying new ships and shit. They decommission the old ships and put ’em up for auction.”

“Uh-huh,” Jax said, trying to follow Eyeball’s excited gestures.

“So we bought us an old prisoner barge,” Eyeball continued with a series of quick winks. “Because Space Wasters are always gettin’ arrested, see? So we get an old prisoner barge, take ’er out to deep space, and then start raiding ’er!”

“You bought a barge and then attacked it? Attacked your own barge?” Jax gave him a sideways look.

“Doncha get it, Psycho Jack?” Eyeball leaned closer, as if he were about to speak in a low voice, but continued at the same volume. “We practiced on the old barge!” He sat back, grabbed his bottle of liquor and laid it on the table sideways. Fortunately, the cap was screwed on and the contents remained inside. “A couple of guys gotta sit in the thing and play defense. The rest of us track the ship.” He surrounded the bottle with his shot glass, Jax’s beer glass, and a salt shaker. “Then we come up on it and start hittin’ it with boarding tubes!”

Johnny Eyeball picked up the bottle again, popped the top, and refilled his shot glass. He pushed Jax’s beer back over to him and held up his own glass, as if making a toast. He grinned and winked. Jax picked up his beer cautiously and clinked it against the Space Waster’s shot glass. They both took a large gulp.

“Took us a couple tries, to get the timing down good.” A sad look crossed Eyeball’s face. “And the first time we do it for real, I gotta be on the inside and miss half the fun.” He sighed. “Ah, but anyway – even from the inside, I knew my own part in making the whole thing go smoothly. Practice makes perfect.”

“But I thought you were all about chaos,” Jax said acidly. He probably should have kept the challenging comment to himself.

Eyeball put his index fingers and thumbs together, forming a vague circle. “Order,” he said, then spread his fingers wide. “Into chaos. Crime takes discipline, you know.” He pointed at Jax. “I mean, you know. Right? You didn’t kill a couple dozen people without some planning, didja Psycho Jack? You must’ve had a practice run, didenja?”

The operator’s brain seemed to lock up and it tried to go in two directions at once. One of them was his real self, the one that wanted to stand up and declare his innocence, over and over again. The other was the criminal that he was pretending to be when he talked to Johnny Eyeball. The one who did this, the real psycho.

I know I’m innocent, he told himself. Now let’s just take a trip down this other road and see where it goes. He was afraid that if he went that way, he’d somehow relinquish that innocence, like confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. It was a risk he would have to take. It was time to be the murderer for a few minutes. If he was going to track down a murderer, maybe he should give a go at thinking like a murderer.

The criminal sitting across from Jax had a point. If he wanted to wipe out a whole block of people, he would have to do some planning. And clearly, X did some planning. He did some exploiting. But when it came down to it, whoever wrote the program, that’s the killer. That’s the hit-man. Maybe it was X himself, maybe it was someone who worked for X. Markus Stallworth and Linda Parsons were just pawns. Brandon Milton was a pawn. They didn’t know what they were passing along, what they were contributing to, and they didn’t want to know. But the programmer, whoever he was, he knew what he was doing. He might not have delivered the bomb, but he created the bomb. And when you make a bomb, you know it’s only used for one purpose.

The programmer who was somewhere on this planet, Sirius-5. Whoever he was, he knew he was making a murder weapon when he wrote the program that would open up a hole in the roof of a block.

“Yeah,” Jax said in a low voice. “I had to practice. You see, I killed those people by messing with their Life Support system. Inside a dome, the residences are all divided into blocks.” His hands chopped invisible squares into the table. “In each block, you have somewhere between twenty and fifty people. Each one has a Life Support system that functions mostly independently. That way if anything … bad … were to happen, you could isolate the incident to a single block.”

Jax took a pull of his beer, mainly to give himself a second to think, then continued. “So I needed a LifSup system to practice on. Just like you guys had to practice on a barge. My LifSup system couldn’t be one that was hooked up to a block, because then real people would get hurt and they’d be on to me before I got a chance to go after my real target. And if I went right after my target without practice, I’d never be able to be sure it would work right.”

“What do you mean by ‘it’?” Eyeball asked quietly. His eyes were unwinking and transfixed on Jax. “‘It’ would work right?”

“It,” Jax said. “Is a program. It’s a program that tricks the LifSup system into opening the outer and inner ventilation doors in a block at the same time. Many of the people – my victims – many died from being thrown about, along with all their worldly possessions, due to explosive decompression. Others who managed to keep from being impaled or crushed eventually asphyxiated.”

“Suffocated.” Eyeball held his breath as if trying just a taste of a horrible death by lack of oxygen.

Jax nodded, allowing his criminal-self, the role he was playacting, to revel in the untimely deaths of his victims. After a moment, he went on. “So in order to write the program, I had to get myself a LifSup system to test on. Decommissioned systems would be too unreliable, and most of them are recycled for parts anyway. They don’t auction those things like ModPol does with their ships that are only a few years old.” He was hypothesizing about this part, but the logic seemed firm. “So my best bet was to get one straight out of manufacturing.”

He paused and thought about the next step carefully. “I could have made friends with someone in LifSup manufacturing, got myself some contacts and acquired a unit that way.” Now he was more or less thinking out loud. “But I wanted to leave as small a trail as possible. I know all about these LifSup systems, so I went and got myself a job at a plant. I knew exactly what they’d be looking for to hire someone that would work in the final stages of production. Like – an inspector, for example.” Actually, he wasn’t sure if the programmer posed as an inspector or something else, like a floor engineer or shift supervisor, or whatever. In any case, the idea that he got himself a job at a plant was sounding pretty good.

“So I go to work in this plant,” Jax continued. “And I manage to get myself a LifSup system. Part of one anyway – the part that’s programmable. I take it home, and I write my malicious little program, and I make sure it works against my LifSup system.” He paused for a few seconds, then added. “I even wrote myself a little test routine, so I could run it again and again – just like you Space Wasters practiced your raid a couple times until you got it just right.”

“Hmm,” Eyeball said, looking through Jax, into nothingness. “Psycho Jack, kills people with a program,” he said to no one in particular. “So how did they catch ya?” he asked, but before Jax could answer, he sat up with a start. “Hey, if you weren’t on the barge, how the fuck did you even get out of jail?”

“Oh, I don’t fucking believe this!”

Jax and his table-mate were both startled by the loud and haggard voice that cut through the bar like an old, heavy ax. A couple of men came across the room, swift and blurry in Jax’s dark and foggy vision. They were large, tattooed, and apparently fairly well armed.