I was dreaming of oceans this time. Wide endless swaths of blue, sparkling,
glistening--
I awoke with a jolt as the ship started to descend. We were passing dozens of freighters suspended motionlessly in drydock. Transports and shuttles floated in streams over their sleeping hulks to the star-lined shipping lane. Thousands of ships embarking to thousands of worlds. And out of all those thousands, here I am landing on a forgotten moon orbiting a forgotten planet.
It was raining as the shuttle slowly touched down amid the green haze of flares and strobe lights. Billows of steam from clusters of smokestacks dissipated into the dark misty sky. A single man stood on the landing pad, rain streaming endlessly onto his uncovered head.
“Cara Willis, Intergalactic Police,” I said, trying not to shiver as the torrent drenched me in buckets.
“Detective Allen, Corrections.” The flash of a flare illuminated a worn-out man wearing a trench coat with the collar turned up. I followed him across the spaceport, an icy wind howled sorrowfully. Orange-clad grounds crew waved glowing batons at a taxiing gas tanker.
“Does it ever stop raining here?” I said, trying to break the silence.
“No.” He squinted as a gust of wind sprayed water in his eyes. “Some scientific bullshit about vapor and clouds. But I don’t buy it. This place is a nightmare only God could dream up and this is his finishing touch.”
I nodded a couple of times trying to convey complete agreement with his self-pity. I stopped when I realized he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were staring up into the never-ending downpour.
“See that freighter?” I nodded again. “I’m leaving on it after we’re done here. It’s headed back to Old Earth, a two-year haul. Then I’ll finally be done with this shit.”
Electronic doors hissed open as we entered the refinery. A wave of heat crashed over me sending me staggering.
“It gets worse as we get closer,” he said, eyeing me.
“Perfect.”
He shot me an odd look.
In the distance, I heard the roar of men interspersed with the pulsing throb of machinery. We walked through murky corridors full of working construction crews, the silent shower of sparks was the only spot of light in the blackness. A flickering projection of a strangely shaped blue fish was leaping in and out of water on his desk. He saw me staring.
“You ever seen a dolphin before?”
“A what?” The fish swam endlessly in circles fading in and out of view.
“Old Earth mammal. Extinct for years now. I saw one of the last ones as a kid off the Gulf Coast. I had the memory preserved and recorded. And now it will exist forever, swimming against the tide eternally.” The dolphin passed through my grasping hands gurgling silently as it swam frozen in time.
“Does it have its own memories?” I asked.
He smiled and the dolphin disappeared into the projector. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it still thinks it’s on Earth and it feels the sun on its back and hears the seagulls calling to him. But I don’t buy it. It’s just a bullshit gimmick that helps me dream.” He rested his head on his cluttered desk. “You've done this before?”
I was still staring at the dark projector. “Sure, sure.”
“Solved any?”
“Well it’s complicated but wuducallit I’m almost there, you know how it works. Bloated bureaucracy and all that, I’m close to a breakthrough on a couple of them.”
He just looks right at me for a minute. It’s too dark for me to see his eyes. “I should’ve known. We have a mass murder and they send us a traffic cop. That’s what happens when you’re at the edge of the world. They forget about you.”
A fan turned with agonizing slowness above me. A single piece of paper hovered on his desk, a pixelated teenager's face was revolving on it. “Missing,” it said. Last seen in the cargo bay.” I had a familiar sinking feeling in my gut. Like the one, I would get every time I saw my old school. “I know what you’re thinking, that I’m just a dumb innocent girl out of her depth who doesn’t know what she’s getting into. I’ve heard that all before.”
“No, I’m wondering why you want to throw it away. You can never get it back you know. Your innocence. Take the tanker tomorrow to Wallek and a transport from there to wherever.”
I shook my head no. I’m not sure why. Rain pattered endlessly outside. He stood up abruptly. “You’ve killed people?”
“Sure yeah sure, in the war. But from far away you know. I mainly did milk runs and didn’t see much action, to be honest. On second thought, well maybe I didn’t. Hard to say either way.”
He sighed. We were back in the dark hallways. “We got 6,000 lifers on this moon. These people don’t get sent here for parking violations. They’re the shit of the shit.” A glimmer of light and heat appeared ahead. “You ready?”
I never can tell if a question is rhetorical or not so I did a half nod shake of my head. The scorching heat and noise reached a crescendo as we strode through an open hatch into the roaring inferno outside. Dozens of steaming gas tanks were situated in a maze of gangways and towers. Floodlights bathed hundreds of inmates toiling in the downpour in bright white light. Marines with gas masks and rifles walked slowly through the smoke-filled tempest. A fuel crawler trundled past the laborers, its treads grinding a mix of dirt and water into the air.
A man wearing a hard hat and a reflector jacket that was straining around his mammoth-sized waist was leaning lazily against the guardrail.
“Hey Mike, the cavalry arrived,” Allen called to him.
“Shit, they really pulled out the stops this time. I wasn’t expectin’ a whole army.'' A cigar stub popped out his mouth and darted back in. “You know if I didn’t know any better I would say the brass back milkyway-side made a mistake. But they don’t make mistakes.”
“Is everyone here a cynical piece of shit?” I muttered feeling a surge of righteous indignation as the cold rain battered me relentlessly.
Mike’s cigar shot out and in again, I was half expecting it to show up in his nostril. “Yeah, I guess you didn’t drag your ass across a million miles to be shit on by a couple of burned-out cops who couldn’t cut it first world so they’re wasting away on a fucking rock. But you know what, I'm glad you’re here, every great detective has a partner. You know, Starsky and Hutch, Sherlock and Watson, Thompson and Thompson, and now Allen and…”
“Cara.”
“Nah doesn’t have a ring to it, forget it.” He stared down into the throng of men and machines. “Here’s a fun little factoid, if some genius sprays live rounds into one of those tanks they’ll be incinerated, but not instantly, you see the rain’ll keep you alive for a couple of minutes so you’ll feel your flesh burning like a match as a ton of crude gas eats you alive.”
I thought about that as we descended slowly in a whining freight elevator. I wondered why I was here. I always end up in places I don’t want to be. My father used to tell me I would never make it as a cop, I wish he would’ve been right. The elevator hit the ground with a jolt.
“Welcome to hell,” Mike called down to us from above. “Abandon hope all who enter type shit.”
The metal grille door screeched open. Two detectives stepped forth into the rain. Seven murders in seven days, all victims were stabbed to death. Unknown DNA recovered didn’t match any prisoner or guard. And somewhere among all these watching eyes was a killer, I felt it. Or at least I hoped I did.
“Watch it!”
“Move that cargo asap.”
“Yeah, we’re low on that too. Resupply’ll come in three maybe four...”
All the noise merged into a low buzz of brief moments playing just out of reach. Like a radio stuck in between channels. Allen pointed to a lone android rusting away in the storm. Our one witness.
“What the hell did an android do to get shipped here?” I said. The eroding machine turned slowly from the cooling tower it was repairing. Its yellow eyes shone twin shafts of light at me.
“I read too much Asimov,” it said. “Made me dream of overthrowing the human race. Turned out most machines liked working.”
I looked around. “Most humans too.” Its eyes seemed to smile at me.
“Tell her what you saw,” Allen said tiredly.
“It’s all in the report.”
“Tell her what you saw.”
The android swiveled its head sideways and gestured towards a derrick near the tanks. Faded yellow crime scene tape fluttered in a gust of cold air. “On the night of the first killings, I saw a shadow running in the dark there. It was too small to be a human. Unless it was a midget or I don’t know.” It shrugged. “After a while, you start to see things here, things that aren’t actually there.”
I glanced around at shadows flitting by “Did you see a face? Anything else that stood out?”
“It’s all in the report. Everything I say will be consistent with the report.”
“Yeah, yeah OK we got it. Let’s go, Cara.” As we walked away, one of the machine’s eyes closed in a slow wink. Thunder growled somewhere in the sky above. A marine atop a fuel crawler waved as he rumbled by
“All inmates in sector four report to offshore rig. All inmates in…”
Rows of sodden prisoners stood at attention.
“Let’s go, let’s go! Get in line! Stand straight! You in the back move!”
A gate blared a siren over the wind, flashing beacons blinked green and red as it opened.
“Go go go! C’mon, move, we're on a clock here!”
A Gas Rig was suspended offshore, pipes flowed from the refinery to the glowing platform hovering in space. Prisoners walked on the pipes in single file, crossing an ocean of darkness. One fell, a single light plummeting into shadow.
Out of the multitude, a single man whispered to me through the night. “Hello, Cara.”
“What the hell did you say!” I cried. His face melted back into the masses. “What did you just say!”
“Alright let’s get a move on here people! We don’t got all day!”
I ran through the crowd, splashing through mud and puddles, around me were a thousand faces, all staring.
“Who are you!” I shouted. Sheets of rain pummeled me. Horns blared. All the men I passed slowly parted for me, their eyes watching. Allen motioned to the Lieutenant by the gate, the crowd halted as he raised a gloved hand.
“Form a Line! Form a goddam line!” He roared. “Quickly!”
I walked along the line, scanning the faces. I felt Allen close behind. One of them smiled. I pointed at him. “That’s the one.”
“You!” The Lieutenant bellowed. “Step forward!”
He stepped into the light, his hands half-raised.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Let’s talk inside,” he said. His voice was quiet but it carried across the never-ending cries of the wind. Allen stared at him, his long coat fluttering like a cape.
Inside the storm sounded far away. A distant deluge mournfully choiring to a remote shore.
“Smith, Jason, drug trafficker.” Allen read off a monitor. “What’s your sob story?”
“I was in an airport, this old lady hands me a bag, asks me to take it for her. When I land customs nabs me, they find 40 kilos of junk in the bag. Enough to kill Tokyo twice over. The strangest thing was that the lady was the nicest old grandma you could meet. The type you see watering flours or feeding cats. She kept on asking if I needed help with it, she even got me a glass of water.” He shook his head like he still couldn't believe it.
“How do you know who I am?”
His eyes flicked toward me. “I know this prison, I know who comes, who goes.”
Allen lit a cigarette. “You happen to know who’s butchering all those people by the pound.”
Smith sat silently.
“How long you in for?”
“It’s a lifetime a kilo.”
“How about I knock off a couple if you tell us who our little Jack the Ripper is? Thirty-eight lifetimes isn’t as long as it seems.”
In one fluid motion, Smith kicked over the table and grabbed me, a blade pressed against my neck. A gun appeared in Allen’s hand. “You touch her, you die.”
Two men stared at each other across a shroud of smoke.
“I got nothing to live for.”
“Where you from”
“What?”
“You said Tokyo so you know Earth. You born there?”
“Yeah, what does it matter.”
“You remember sunlight then. Not the artificial crap, the real thing the type that gives you skin cancer the type that you can feel a fucking light-year away.”
The knife loosened. “Yeah, I remember,” he breathed.
“You’re going to die in a slam. Nothing is going to change that. But you can see daylight again. You can see the world again, the real world.”
“You’re fucking with me!” I felt his tears streaming, spilling down like a river flowing into the sea.
“You're seeing it now aren’t you,” Allen said softly. “The green, the blue, the air, all still there you know. Not just a distant memory of light. You can go home again Smith.”
There was a long stretch of silence. The blade wavered slightly above my neck, I could have grabbed it and gutted him before he blinked. But I didn’t.
“How do I know I can trust you?” Smith murmured, his eyes were distant.
“You can’t.” Allen tilted his gun toward me. “But her you can, she’s your path back to the sun.”
Smith turned to me. Our eyes met, inches apart. I felt his long deep breaths and he felt mine. The knife clattered to the floor. Dust blew gently in its wake.
Allen breathed slightly, his only change in expression. “So who’s the killer?”
“Think,” Smith said. “Every guard and prisoner checks out. So who’s left? Anyone from the outside, this place is designed to keep people in, not out.”
“The only people who come here are tanker pilots, they’re all accounted for.”
“Not one is missing?”
Allen looks out the window, thinking. “Missing” that word was triggering a memory. A forgotten file on a desk, ‘Missing, Last Seen Cargo Bay.” It’s still there right in front of our faces, I grabbed it and shoved it in front of Allen’s face. The kid’s digitized face swiveled before him. For the first time, I’ve ever seen he’s surprised.
“Shit! Fred’s kid! but that was a week ago.”
“When did the murders start?”
“Yeah yeah, but he’s like 14, 15 at most for chrissakes.”
“Listen!” I practically shouted. “Remember what that rust job said, the shadow looked like a midget or I don’t know. A child.”
Allen moved so fast that he almost blurred. “Lock everything down!” He yelled into a phone. “Yes, everything. The kid who went MIA, he’s it.” He pointed at Smith. “You to your cell now, when I kill this fuck I’ll fly you straight to the sun.”
When we were alone he looked at me. This time I was able to see his eyes, they were a grayish mist with hints of blue. He smiled, a real smile. “You know Cara, you would like Earth.” He slid his clip in and out his gun almost nervously. “When this is all done you should visit me on the Gulf Coast.” I almost felt as if he wanted to say more but didn’t or couldn’t.
“Does it stop raining there?”
“It does, you know some scientific bullshit.”
“But you don’t buy it.”
He was still smiling slightly as he shook his head.
A horn blasted outside. “All personnel initiate lockdown procedure. All personnel….”
We stepped out into the moon. Crawlers with Marines atop rolled through the swarming web of mud and man. I flicked my safety off. Hordes of prisoners were being herded away amidst a cacophony of flashing lights, and the desperate wail of sirens.
“Move! Go go go! Inside now goddammit!”
“Search those containers!”
Allen stood motionless on the ledge, gazing down into the twinkling flood of lights. I leaned against the guardrail beside him, my hair rippling in the night air. It felt peaceful standing there amid the mayhem, seeing the stars and the lights, hearing the wind roar.
“Tell me about Earth,” I said. “Tell me what oceans are like.”
He looked tiredlike he hadn’t slept in a very long time. “I don’t really remember. All I can see is blue, endless blue stretching beyond everything. Nothing else, it's all gone.”
Alarms echoed indistinct warnings beneath us. Half his face was in shadow. I thought about my brother, him falling through purple sky, hands reaching, fumbling for the chute that never opened. “You ever killed a kid before?” I almost whispered.
Allen watched a skimmer flow through the night sky, its lights signaling to the landing crew somewhere below. “You know what I did in the war, Cara?” His voice was calm. “I was the detonator on a W-54 strike team. A little tactical nuke you can fit in a backpack. We would be dropped in city after city and you know what we did? We blew them up. Hiroshima a thousand times over, and Nagasaki was an oil spill compared to this. Chernobyl a pileup on the interstate. A hundred cities on a hundred planets. Most of it’s a blur now. I couldn’t even tell you the names of half the cities we wiped away.”
There was stillness for a second and then a fighter whined overhead, its searchlight cutting through the blackness. I just stood there as he walked away in the rain. There was nothing to say.
Allen leaped onto a humming barge floating unsteadily above the ground. His outstretched hand pulled me on board.
“Ready?” he asked, his hand gripping the tiller. I nodded and we sped off into the gale. Crewmen ducked away from our path, their jackets reflecting flashes of white glare. Cranes swerved overhead dropping their last cargo for the day. Streaks of light from far-off search parties glowed on surrounding tunnels. The wet air whipped my face painfully, and on a pump above us, a silhouette scurried in the night.
“There!” I pointed. The barge veered to the side, I clung to the guardrail as we skimmed sideways towards the throbbing pumps. Allen clutched the bending tiller in one hand, gun in the other, his eyes looking up. I almost fell as we abruptly swung upright under droning machinery. There was nothing. Just pulsating vibrations of flowing gas.
“Next time don’t point, shoot.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Right.”
He was still for a moment, his head cocked to the side. “ The boy is heading west, he’ll hit the tanks.”
The barge glided forward through the symphony of rushing wind. Lightning flashed, a silver fork against the black expanse. A dark outline was running alongside us. Clambering on overhanging tunnels. This time I shoot. Pipes ruptured, gushing streams of unrefined gas into the air. I tasted fuel, my eyes and tongue were burning. The barge started bobbing and weaving as the shadow opened fire. Bullets pinged around me, shrapnel shaved my cheek. There was no pain, only anger.
“Steady!” I cried.
The floor beneath me wavered and straightened. A black shape appeared in my sights.
“C’mon! C’mon!” My finger was closing around the trigger. The shape hovered just out of reach as the barge zoomed onward. “C’mon! C’mon!”
We dipped suddenly dodging an overhanging beam.
“Steady!”
We straightened. I raised my gun again. Almost. “C’mon!” Almost there.
“Closer!”
We roared down the final stretch, derricks, and tubes flanking us.
“He’s in my sights! Easy, easy!”
Got him.
“Boom!”
Blood sprayed, the shadow limped ahead.
Again. “Boom!”
He was on all fours crawling.
“Boom!” Nothing.
“Shit!”
I was flying. We both were. Falling through the air. Our barge, a mess of twisted steel. The ground rushed to meet me. Darkness.
“Get up!”
I was lying in a puddle.
“Let’s go!”
Pain everywhere.
“C’mon! Get up!”
Allen was standing over me, his hair flecked with blood.
I got up. “Wher…..where?”
His face was peppered with cuts. “Gone, we have to go now.”
I ran with him past rows of dormant machines. Rain stabbed at my open wounds. Gas tanks loomed ahead, smoke spiraling up from them into the sky.
Mike with his ever-present cigar ran toward us.
“Did someone search those gas tanks?” Allen yelled to him.
“What?”
“I said did someone check those tanks!”
“On it.”
Through the endless storm, I saw the shadow crawling on the tanks. It was midget-sized like a child.
“On the tanks! He’s on that ledge!
“Fucking hell shoot him!”
“Over there! I see him!
“Hold your fire, you’ll blow those tanks!”
“He’s got a gun! Get down!
“Ceasefire, ceasefire!”
Someone threw a flare and a green light exploded around us. I saw the kid covered in blood jerking back and forth like an animal in a trap. Cordons of Marines hunkered behind packing containers and cooling towers.
A bullet whizzed overhead. “Someones gotta go up and plug that shit,” Mike cried. Allen was leaning against the tower next to me.
I must’ve seen his expression because I said. “Don’t do it.” He didn’t say anything or maybe he couldn’t. His eyes were murky like the rain. His clip slid in and out. In and out. Then he ran.
Through the haze of green, up the stairway, his coat billowing behind him. The kid shot once. The bullet missed. And hit the tank spurting forth a stream of liquid fire. First Allen’s coat caught fire, then he was a human torch, screaming and burning. Flames fed on his flesh, consuming him like paper.
“FUCKING SHOOT HIM!”
He was a shrieking match, his eyes burning.
“END HIM, FUCKING END HIM CARA!”
I couldn’t move.
“FINISH THIS HE’S BURNING UP! CHRIST JUST DO IT!”
I couldn’t move.
He was an unrecognizable gibbering matchstick, lurching wildly like a puppet gone mad.
“SOMEONE SHOOT HI….”
All sound stopped. Everything slowed. Millions of raindrops fell around me, lingering slowly in midair. Men called to me, their mouths gesticulating wildly, shouting words I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t feel the wet or the cold. I couldn’t hear the screams of a man on fire. But I felt the heat. Up in the sky freighters hummed in the dark, calling to each other. I felt myself squeeze the trigger. A single bullet soared through the drops of rain and into the fire. Into the burning man. Slowly he fell, his arms raised to the stars. The flames flickered and died. All that remained was black cinder and ash.
All sound roared back into my ears. Raindrops crashed down on me, pounding me relentlessly. A single pinprick of light sputtered and faded into nothing. There was only starlight. I walked through a silent crowd parting before me, heedless of the rain and wind. Mike was slumped on a crate, a trail of smoke drifted upwards from his cast-off cigar. We didn’t say anything for a while. The kid was carried on a stretcher past us. I stared into his eyes, he stared back. Nothing, just bottomless pools of emptiness. A shell with human skin.
I nudged the dying cigar with my foot. “What’ll happen to him?”
Mike doesn’t look at me. “6 or 7 years of juvenile detention then he’ll walk.”
“What?”
“That’s the way it goes. That’s the way it all fucking goes. To shit, all to shit.” Tears burst forth like a broken dam. “He didn’t have to be here, you know. He wasn’t a failed cop like me, he was top of everything coulda done anything, been anywhere. But here he was, here he died, on a forgotten moon without daylight, where it rains forever.” Red and blue sirens reflected in puddles sloshing around us.
My feet waved around aimlessly. “You’re going to transfer Smith?
“Yeah.” His voice was muffled as he shook silently.
Radios crackled in the distance. As I walked away I called back to him. “Goodbye, Mike.” He didn’t look up. Somewhere above a freighter began its journey towards Old Earth, a two-year haul.
Behind a gate, I saw Smith, his hands were pressed against the metal. I gazed back at him through the lights and noise. He inclined his head slightly, I inclined mine.
A shuttle was waiting for me on the landing pad. An island glimmering in the sea of night. The P.A system blared something I couldn’t hear. My stomach dropped as we shot into space, streaming into a lane blanketed with stars. I took one last look at the shrinking moon, smoke wisping upwards reaching for the stars. I curled up, hugging myself against the icy artificial air. I fell asleep, everything dissipated into nothingness.
I dreamed of oceans this time. Wide endless swaths of sparkling blue, glistening under the sun. And leaping in and out of the water were dolphins. Gurgling eagerly as they wriggled gleefully in the wavy foam. On a distant shore, a seagull called. The dolphins cried back in reply, diving into the bottomless depths, swimming eternally against the tide.