“So you think this Yeorg was the one X was going after with this LifSup attack?” Jax asked. “Do you know why?”

“He was in longer than me,” she said, hanging her head. “He wanted out. He was older, and he’d had enough. He just wanted to retire to a quiet dome somewhere.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what happened, exactly. X probably called on him, like he calls on me. But Yeorg said no.”

“But didn’t X have evidence on Yeorg too?” Jax asked. He watched Runstom’s eyebrows wrinkle as he flipped a page over and then back. “Why didn’t he use that to push him? Why kill him?”

She shrugged. “Maybe Yeorg threatened him right back. He probably had something on X.”

“Yeorg Phonson,” Runstom said, interrupting the conversation from the other side of the room.

Jenna Zarconi twisted around in her seat. “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

“That’s J, O, R, G,” Runstom said. “Jorg Phonson.”

“Yes, that’s him,” she said.

“Wait a sec,” Jax said. “That’s Jorg with a J? How do you get XYZ out of that?”

“Well, it sounds like it starts with a Y,” she said defensively, folding her arms. “I don’t know. That’s just how it was.”

Runstom was tapping at something on the page his notebook was open to. “Jenna,” he said. “Do you have a video player that can take a PMD memory card?”

“Yeah,” she said. She stood up. “Yeah, Stanford. Why?”

“Take us to it,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s in my office.” She got up and paused for a second, looking at Runstom, then walked out of the room. Runstom followed her, handing the notebook to Jax on the way out.

Jax stood up and looked around the room for a moment. He looked down at the page the notebook was still open to. He saw a list of the residents of block 23-D, along with their occupations and cause of death. He scanned down the page and found Jorg Phonson. Retired. Impaling, blood loss. There was a letter V with a circle around it next to the name.

Jenna Zarconi came back into the main room with Runstom in tow. He was carrying a small screen and platform set. He set it on the floor in the middle of the room. She took a cable out of the back of the set and plugged it into the wall.

“Jenna, you don’t have to watch this if you don’t want to,” Runstom said. “This is a video taken shortly after the incident with the Life Support system. It’s a man we identified as Jorg Phonson. He was still alive when I got to him, but only barely so. We tried to give him medical treatment, but he didn’t make it.”

“Just play it,” she said. Her voice was suddenly firm and strong, like she was ready for what was coming.

Runstom poked a button on the machine and pulled a small memory card out of his pocket. He stuck the card in the player, and it winked to life.

It was a 2D recording, shaky and low quality. They saw a woman – some kind of medical technician – in a small house.

“I think there’s someone in there,” the woman said.

Runstom picked up the remote and hit a button, tracking through at high speed. They saw the view move into the bathroom, where a man lay in a pool of blood on the floor. He started normal playback.

“He’s an off-worlder,” the recording said. Jax could recognize Runstom’s voice, despite the poor quality. “Probably from Poligart, that big moon in the Sirius system. Or maybe Betelgeuse-3. That’s red skin.”

Suddenly there was a loud knock at the door. It was followed by a distinct clunk, and then a series of clicks.

“Get down!” Runstom yelled, throwing himself at Jenna.

Jax was able to drop to his knees and shield his face just as the front door to Jenna Zarconi’s house blew off its hinges.

CHAPTER 20

Dava walked down the street on some look-a-like block in some look-a-like residential sub-dome. The ticky-tacky cut-outs of houses were revolting. They reminded her of her youth, when she was forced to live in the domes. Blessed to live in the domes.

The “Start Fresh Initiative”. That’s what the alliance of corporations involved in various aspects of dome construction called it.

Her RadMess vibrated and she looked down at the face of it, strapped to the inside of her left forearm. She grinned. “ModPol,” she said to herself. “Oh, Dan. Don’t sound so worried. This is only going to make things more fun.” She tapped out a brief message back.

The “Start Fresh” corporations wanted everyone to think dome life was just the cat’s pajamas, but they weren’t exactly confident of that. They always needed more guinea pigs. And if they could wrap it up in the spirit of giving the doomed peoples of Earth a second chance, well then, all the better. They called it “Start Fresh”, but everyone Dava knew called it “Doomed to Domed”.

By the time she was a teenager, she was sick of those damn domes. Betelgeuse-3 was her personal prison planet. Back on Earth, her real parents had already gotten the cancer and couldn’t afford treatment. “Start Fresh” was supposed to be their cure. She’d said good night to them when they bedded down into cryo-chambers on the massive transport in orbit around Earth. When she woke up, they were gone. Jettisoned in mid-flight. They were sick, the flight attendants had explained. They should have reported that they were sick. Sick people can’t always survive cryo-sleep. Dava had been stuck with a foster family who couldn’t deal with her anymore once her age hit double digits. She spent the middle of her teen years in a home for “troubled youth”.

She was in that home when she met the man who changed her life. He came as a counselor, an example of how an orphan could become successful. Apparently the orphanage was desperate enough for that sort of speaker that they didn’t look too deep into his story. His name was Moses Down; thinking back on it, she always got a kick out of the fact that he didn’t bother using an alias. Moses Down was rescued from Earth about a decade and a half before Dava was. He was dark-skinned and tall, like she was. He spoke about taking control of your life. He spoke about overcoming the hand you’ve been dealt. He said if you’ve got a bad hand, you have to learn to stack the deck.

Dava approached Moses Down after his speech. There weren’t a lot of other dark-skins in domes, and he was the first adult one she’d ever seen. And one of the few she would ever see. Oh sure, she’d see one occasionally here and there, especially in Space Waste. But as generations moved forward, there were less and less dark-skinned Earth-borns. Instead there were white-skins – and not like the white people she remembered back on Earth with the light, pinkish-beige skin. White-skins were white, sometimes a grayish-white, like the color of newspaper. White skin meant they spent their first developmental years in a dome. Then there were the shades of pink, red and yellow skins. Some were born into domes as well; early domes where the skies filtered out certain things or didn’t filter out something else, in systems with different types of stars and differences in sunlight. Yellow-to-red skin was for people like Johnny Eyeball; born in real atmospheres. Outside of Earth, the only places a person could survive the real atmospheres were certain large moons. Like most people, Dava never really understood the science behind the permutations of pigmentations, only that colored skin made people different in an immediately visual way.

So she knew Moses was special. She knew he would understand her pain. He asked her how old she was. She lied and said she was eighteen. She’d been getting away with that for a while. Domed people didn’t know what to make of the tall, dark-skinned girl and always assumed she was older than she was. Moses probably wasn’t fooled quite so easily, but if that were the case, he never let on. The next day she and a couple other kids sneaked off the grounds of the home with their bags and hopped aboard Moses Down’s shuttle.