Jenna Zarconi must have gotten the worst of the smoke when the canister first hit the room. She was a little ways down the street, on her feet, but bent over and still coughing heavily. She picked her head up and tried to move at a slow jog, not bothering to look behind her.

In ModPol boot camp, they made new recruits learn how to deal with smokers and other gas bombs the hard way: by sticking them in a closed room and tossing the stuff in. Runstom and some of the other cops knew enough to get low and cover up as soon as the smoker hit the floor. Of course, in the boot camp test, no one was shooting or running around stabbing people.

He began walking down the street after her. He switched the squawkbox over to the central line and pushed the call button.

“Dispatch,” the box crackled after a few seconds. “What can I do for you, Officer Pontiac?”

“Officer Pontiac is down. This is ModPol Officer Stanford Runstom, Barnard System, Gamma Precinct.”

A few more seconds of silence. Runstom quickened his pace to close the gap between himself and Zarconi.

“Um, okay,” the box said. “What the hell are you doing on Sirius-5?”

“Look, I’ll explain that to your team when you send them in,” Runstom said, impatiently. “We’ve got one officer down, badly wounded, and two others that are dead. I’ve apprehended three suspects. Now send someone the hell down here!”

After a second, the box replied. “Okay, Officer Runstom. We’ve got a ModPol team on the way and we’re contacting the locals for Emergency Med support.” It paused for a second, then added, “Have your credentials ready, Officer.”

“Right.” Runstom slid the squawkbox into his pocket and reached out to grab Jenna Zarconi. She offered little resistance and he proceeded to restrain her.

“Can’t you just let me go?” she said between huffs. “X is the real bad guy here. You see that, don’t you Stanford? He pushed me!”

“I do see that, Jenna,” he said. “And I’m sorry. But it’s not up to me now. It’s up to a court of law.”

Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes. “They’ll never believe my side of it,” she said softly, shaking her head. She turned and looked him straight in the face. “Please, Stanford. You have to let me go. I only wanted what you want. I only wanted justice.”

He looked into those light-brown eyes and that forest-green face. A small part of him wanted to believe her, to help her even. He quickly smothered it. “Your quest for justice resulted in the deaths of a lot of innocent people, Jenna.” He pulled her by the arm. “Come on. It’s time to go.”

“So this is the famous Psycho Jack,” the brown-skinned woman said. “Johnny Eyeball told us all about you.”

Jax lost half of his grin. “By ‘us’ I presume you mean Space Waste?”

“Said you were in the lock-up for mass murder. That true, Jack? You kill thirty-some people?”

“Yeah, he did,” X chimed in. “But he didn’t even know he did it. Like a blind pilot in the cockpit of a passenger ship, flying her right into the sun.”

“Hmm, that’s disappointing,” she said, looking Jax up and down. She shrugged – more naturally that she should have, considering the fact that her hands were bound behind her back.

“Credit where credit is due, I suppose.” Jax raised his hands in mock defeat. “I was set up. Mr. Phonson here had much more culpability in the deaths of those thirty-two people than me.” He grinned again. “I mean, that’s what you’re under arrest for. You know that, right, Phonson?”

X laughed shortly. “Yeah, well. Good luck making it stick, operator.”

Jax regarded him silently for a moment. “Now that we have some time to chat,” he said. “There’s something I’ve been struggling with. Brandon Milton.”

“What about him?”

“Did you know him?”

Phonson laughed that short laugh again. “Yeah, sure. I knew him.”

“Which means what? He was under your thumb?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Well, I’ll just be honest, because I don’t know where the line is drawn in this course of events – when it stops being you and becomes Jenna Zarconi pretending to be you,” Jax said. “Brandon Milton was my supervisor. As far as I can tell, he was the one who stole my voiceprint, fingerprint, and login credentials and sent them to Markus Stallworth, so they could be used to encrypt the package.”

X considered this for a moment. “Interesting,” he said, finally. “If I remember right, Milton – in Blue Haven, right? Yeah – he was a John.”

“What?” Jax said, unable to make sense of the statement.

“We hit the Blue Haven underground one night a couple months back. Busted a whole lotta hookers. I worked that case for a long time, made sure we got as many as we could when we made our move. Any one of their customers who had a reputation to protect got to go free.”

“Free, as in they owed you a favor,” Jax said. X said nothing. “I never would have figured Milton for the type to do that.”

“You’d be surprised, pal,” Phonson said, looking away as if bored with the conversation.

“But he was married.” To Priscilla Jonnes. Sure, Jax and Priscilla had a falling out, but he still felt a small amount of indignity on her behalf for her husband’s infidelity.

“All the more reason to make sure he never got caught.” He looked back at Jax. “Milton is just another name on my list. A soul in my pocket. If Milton stole your creds, then he did it for Jenna, thinking he was paying back the favor he owed to me.”

“Was,” Jax said. “Was a name on your list.”

“Ooh,” purred the woman. “Did you kill ’im Psycho Jack? For what he done to you?”

“No.” Jax was spending a significant amount of effort trying to forget that Milton married a woman that Jax was never good enough for, trying not to think about how while with such a woman, Milton paid for companionship on the side. “Well, yeah. Actually. I did kill him, but not on purpose. He was one of the people in block 23-D.” He looked back at X and pointed. “So again – you killed him. And now you’re going down for it. No one is going to owe you any more favors.”

“I don’t know what you’re not getting about this, op,” Phonson said. “You got nothing on me, and I’ve got way more friends in ModPol than you or that idiot Runstom.”

“Mmm?” Jax walked over to the vid-screen and pushed a button on the front. “I’m sorry, were you saying something?” He turned and looked at the cop. “Did I tell you to hit the round red button to stop this vid unit earlier? Damn, I get so confused about those buttons. That was the record button.” He ejected the memory card and held it up. “Pity someone put a hole through the screen. We could watch you bury yourself while we’re waiting for Officer Runstom to come back.”

The woman started laughing. “Goddamn, I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but sounds like you’re cooked, pollie.” She nudged him, and X flinched with a spasm. “So anyway, Jack. I don’t mean to be rude, but you’ll have time to chat with this asshole later, I’m sure. I just want to ask you a few questions. While I have the chance.”

“Um, okay,” Jax said warily.

“How did you manage to make off with a Space Waste transport?”

“Well.” He thought of Johnny Eyeball and his story about the trial raids they did on their test barge. “You guys knew what you were doing, right? You had it all planned out. Practiced it.”

“Yeah,” she said nodding. “We tried a few different attack points. Played out what the defense would look like.”

Jax thought for a quiet second. “I suppose that’s what it comes down to. All your strategies, they’re all attack and defend.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “Not everyone had defense in mind, I guess.”

She cocked her head. “You mean, you didn’t.”

“I mean, it was clear the ship was dead in the black. Officer Runstom and his partner weren’t thinking about defense, they were thinking about survival. They made for the supply bay because it was the only part of the ship that they could get to that could be closed off if whole barge came apart.” He made a motion with his hands to demonstrate pieces of the craft coming off. “Other than the bridge, the supply bay was the safest bet. I’m just lucky they dragged me along.”