A Quick Death in Texas, Chapter 10

How to handle the aftermath of a sudden thunderdome of violence erupting in your workday.

Nine - Desperate Minds and Occupied Hearts

“Could you not do that?” The guy strapped to the office chair said.

Van exhaled a plume of sticky gray smoke. “Do what,” he said, with a shallow, dry cough, his face momentarily cringing with the rising high.

“Smoke in my office,” the guy said. “Could you not do that?”

Van stared at him, narrow-eyed. Then the Canine spoke up: The fucking temerity of this prey.

Did you just swear? Van asked the killer in his brain.

It was appropriate, I felt.

It was, Van agreed, and that’s weird.

“No,” Van said to the guy, Santana was his name. “I literally can’t. I’m actually a highly experimental model, yeah? Got these special cannabis-powered aggression inhibitors that act as the brakes to my combat mods, and given how hard I just exerted myself, I gotta restock my supply like something fuckin’ fierce, man. I don’t get this emotional support weed down, I could wind up killing you and everyone you care about, or even like, y’know,” he gestured with a flailed palm, the spliff trailing smoke between his fingers. “Unforseen shit, y’know? I could wind up doing environmental damage or something.”

“You really like being a funnyman, don’t you?” Santana said.

“Yeah, I do,” Van said, and took a pull off his spliff, exhaling in his face. “I also like beating you unconscious, so WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MY BIONICS, asshole?”

Santana flinched sideways and broke eye contact from the green glare, but said nothing.

“I have just stacked bodies in such volume, you’d need a moving van to shift the goddamn mass,” Van continued, and the Canine dialed down his circulatory regulation enough that his anger could flush his skin. “Bodies pressing an attack you DEFINITELY knew was coming some point today, against your community, your neighbors, that’s done some real tangible fucking damage, taken lives. But yeah, I’m obviously the funnyman in this scenario, not the large-type asshole that’s complaining about a little secondhand kush minutes after being complicit in the murder of his union siblings.”

Santana kept his eyes averted.

“You were praying I’d get killed, I bet,” Van said, combing his fingers through scorched hair that flaked away along with chunks of cooled metal and polymer spall. “Bet you were hoping I tripped and fell face first into an RPG, huh?”

He unzipped his jacket, and rolled up the sleeve on his shot shoulder. There wasn’t as blood much as their should have been, the direct effect of internalized hemostatic measures, but even still, the black fabric was warm and slick to the touch. Beneath, right at the cuff of his deltoid, was a clean hole the diameter of a pinky finger that dug into him deep, that his auto-repair measures had already drawn tight and sealed internally.

“See this?” He said. “There’s a needle round in there, maybe a blacktip, probably just a jacketed penetrator. I’ve turned all the nerve clusters in that shoulder off, and somehow, I can still feel my own doc-bots wriggling around the fucker, trying to nibble it down to nothing so they can seal the void in my tissue it’s holding open. It’s a miserable feeling, but not even slightly as miserable as knowing they’re going to be chipping away at the thing forever if I just leave it, which means the moment I get a spare hour to ration away from all this business, I’m going to wind up doing a little self surgery on myself to yank it loose and just get it over with in one big effort. Like pulling a bandage, times one thousand, with forceps.” He dragged his fingers through the senseless, punctured flesh, and showed Santana up close how sinister a red hand looked when it was literal. “That’s how my day’s going, Jackie. That’s what I have to look forward to, Jackie. But enough about me, how are you doing, Jackie? Got anything you want to say yet?”

“I wanna…” Jackie began.

“YOU WANNA WHAT?” Van lurched over him and sent Santana’s face even further toward the floor, domination a tangible weight on him.

Back up, too much, the Canine said. He’s a coward, he’s already afraid and terror will make him check out.

“...I wanna talk to my union rep,” Santana said, barely above a breath.

“Fucking of course you do, after you got a bunch of your sibling workers killed, you’re on line for a shitload of restitution payouts at least,” Van dialed in the decibels on Santana, let himself fade backwards into his own chair, pulling at his spliff.

“I’m being serious, I want to talk to my union rep,” Santana said again.

“And I am too,” Van exhaled dragon-smoke through his nose, “because I know what you’re trying to do right now is delay me, or at least keep it so that you’re not the one that squealed first. Play something you have in your hand to buy you an alibi for your masters, while I go rip the intel I want out of someone dumber than you.”

The smoke wafted into a haze that shrouded Santana. “It won’t work,” Van continued, “I’ve been here before, I’ve met you before, you aren’t nearly as important as you think you are. You are entirely a loose end to the people you deal with.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Van asked him, plain and simple.

“Just get me my union rep, you fucking…”

“Sure thing, boss!” Van said, with the tip of an invisible cap, as he sprung from his chair with enough speed to make Santana flinch. “I’ll just make sure he’s still up and on his feet out there. They’re still trying to track down everyone out there, you understand.” He shut the door as he left the office, a length of chain with a padlock turning it into Santana’s holding cell for the time being, two guards posted.

“This one wants his rep,” Van said to them. “Where’s the stupid guy?”

---

The wint hit the wall when Van entered, which was odd because Van didn’t touch him. The conversation was succinct, and more clear-minded than what Van was expecting. He told him plain: “So that guy you sneakernet messages to? Total dick. Right now, he’s getting in contact with his rep, so he can probably snitch you out for antiunion activities related to today.”

The wint stared at him, bleakly. “He’s a fucking liar, I just lift and carry.”

“I believe you completely on that,” Van said, and was genuine. “Still doesn’t mean he isn’t about to toddle off and get slotted by his under-table employers, because he thinks he’s connected by taking a payout. But not before he tells them about the little matter of the compromised messenger, right?”

The wint leaned back in his chair and looked like he wanted to cry. He mouthed “I just wanted to make some extra money” and shook his head as the tears fell. They fell and so did his head. His shoulders sank and wept, and Van could hear his breath wheezing as quiet sobs. One ping of the sensors, one close range read of the vitals of a man acting like his entire worldview and stability just broke like poured sugar. Nothing he knew that scanned as skilled acting

“What’s your name?” Van asked him.

“I’m Evan,” he said, finally. “I fucked up.”

“Yeah, you did,” Van said. “What do you need to tell me today, Evan?”

He sucked in a breath, and let it go, easy. “I need my boss to bring me receipt records, for that guy, Jackie Santana, and these two other assholes I’m on call for.”

“Whosat, back up a sec- what two other assholes?”

“So, so,” Evan shifted in his chair, racking his head- Van hadn’t bothered strapping him into the little walk-in storage that had been quickly repurposed as a holding tank. “So, the guy who runs the experimental strain grow-op, what’s his name, midlife crisis hair… Broward, Freebird Broward. And then big bald guy that runs the truck-builders, fuck, uhh… Tom McCafferty.”

The first one, no, he’d remember a name that greasy without having to consult logs. McCafferty, though, he’d just run into, in the same neighborhood no less. This wasn’t a pattern he needed augments to see, and he didn’t like any of it.

“What was on the receipts?”

“I dunno, some dumb shit on the delivery instructions that just looked like some texting chat or whatever, I dunno, probably meant something to them though.”

Hard and internalized evidence of a conspiracy, something close to a key he could use to open doors closed to an armed outsider- in this moment, Van was glad he only hit the guy as hard as he did. He’d done a 180 on his priority with young Evan- one instant, too smalltime to worth even slotting, the next, someone to be protected at cost. Van gave him one more ping of the sensors, looking for that one specific thing he wanted to double check, that one thing that never failed him in telling him when he was getting somewhere: that telltale sign of a heart beating more at ease, now that its owner had dropped the big lie, and with it, his rationalizations that he was somehow above a bad situation, that whatever was happening wouldn’t affect him. Just a heart beating clear and easy, probably for the first time in a while.

“Okay,” Van said, after a second of sustained head-cocked stare. He considered his play “Let me go find you a local phone, call your boss, but say nothing about the records yet- just get them over here.”

---

“So just to be clear, you’re all in one piece?” Van said over his internal mic, his outward voice silent.

“I was in the air when the shooting started,” Telin’s voice hummed in his earpiece. “I figured once I started hearing full auto open up, the safest place was behind the earthworks bags at the airport.”

Van eyed the wreckage being cleared from the day’s fighting from his position against the office prefab’s outer walls,the raider deathmobiles and the smashed mining vehicles, blackened by fire and pocked by gunfire. The Laredans were using their heavy geoengineering vehicles to pull it loose, the sort of tracked muscle a colony would use to clear boulders out of packed dirt.

“Yeah, unfortunately I think if it starts back up, you’ll be safer in the air,” Van said. “This is tactical honesty.”

“I get you,” Telin said, her professional voice fully on. “You’re in one piece?”

“I’m annoyed,” Van said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I got blood on me, but the what’s from me, the bleeding’s stopped,” Van said. “I’m annoyed, but I go all the way up to apoplectic. You don’t want to see me past ‘pissed.’”

“You’re alright, though?”

“More than well enough,” Van said, wanting to smoke another joint, but also not wanting to waste the high by purging it the second more action happened, when it happened. “Just a little cut up.”

“Well, stay together, then,” Telin said.

“You too,” Van said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Gotcha,” she said. “Standing by.”

He clicked off, not bothering to say goodbye.

He shouldered his way off the wall and made his way past the crew clearing the 3-way split of a wrecked deathmobile, a garishly painted metal beast that was gutted out by a doublet volley of RPGs, splayed across an intersection as a hail of blackened shrapnel. That multiple members of its crew were laying smashed beneath hull sections, one with a leg still twitching, was only a thin salve to the fact the bastards were using the thing to do machine gun drive-bys on unarmed miners and steelworkers. He worked his way back to the emergency muster point/militia OP that had been set up in the aftermath, a fenced-in gravel storage lot the militia had erected ad-hoc defenses around.  Worker headcount was still ongoing, and with each 2 healthy walk-ups they got, there was one to add to the sea of stretchers or another to zip up in a body bag. Which is why things were especially tense around the ring of militia vehicles that were protecting the command and control tents they’d set up, and with them, the few prisoners they’d managed to take this go around. The miners were in a skinning sort of mood, and the militia were only tenuous about stopping them from making themselves some new wallets. Yet there was pushback, as in their midst, voices more clear than raging were being raised: “We follow the C-FIC, we respect our prisoners, WE ARE NOT THE CONSORTIUM.” It was the reasonable view, and one that Van agreed with, because Van knew full well how easy it was to be better than the Consortium regarding prisoners of war: you take them, and then you don’t even slightly torture them, even at all.

Van noticed that one of the voices pushing the point was Tom McCafferty, standing tall, strong and mustachioed among the throng. There was an authority in his voice that irked Van, something that’d probably be invisible without the new context.

I’ll bet you’re the smart one, Van thought, as he passed him in the crowd.

Van’s appearance in the crowd calmed things to a stable point, a sudden volatile cooling like hot metal quenching in water. The anger was still hot, but the appearance of a cybernetic regulator that could pull men apart like fresh bread made people rethink just how badly they wanted to have a further incident that day. People looked at him like he was going to make any blanket statement of leadership, take ownership of the situation; Van was an anarchist with better things to do.

So he shouldered through the crowd, and found a captain taking control of the militia’s end of things. “You got a place set up for interro?” Van said to him, gesturing to the variety pack of zip-cuffed creeps the troops had penned-in, behind a line of bulwark bags that’d been pelted with bottles and rocks.

The graying-haired captain regarded him as though allied armour rolled up, not guarded, but still more cautious than he’d be normally. “You’re not gonna do any crazy shit, just so we’re clear,” he said, his nerve holding, his voice stern enough in the presence of someone who really didn’t have to listen to him, and he knew it.

“Trust me, I’ve seen it the other way,” Van said. “This is the better way, for everyone.”

The captain nodded, the slightest, knowing look of disgust passing his face. Judging by the way he stood, he was used to the way a BDU fit, and all that might entail. “I’ll have some hands put up another field shelter. Which one you want?”

“The softboy neofash,” Van said. “The poor motherfucker who looks like he never had a good birthday in his life.”

“Have at him,” the captain said. “The others were looking like they were going to eat him anyway.”

Van approached the pen of POWs, just over a dozen in all. Some of them sneered and tried to posture despite the fact they were sitting with their wrists bound, but others went wide-eyed when they realized what they were dealing with and pulled away, scrambling to their feet only to be pushed back down by the attendant militia troops holding watch. Van beckoned to one of them, two fingers and a point: I wanna talk with the guy who looks like what high school feels like, the guy who thought a swan dive off the machinery would fix his problems. Gingerly, they hoisted him over the barricade, his body limp and compliant, his face still stained with tears.

“Yeah, there the fuck you go, Heavener.” It was the guy Van used like a welcome mat, trying to sound tough through cracked ribs. “On your way, you fearful little commie whore, give up the fight.”

Van leaned into him. “Entschuldigen sie, bitte, die erwachsenen reden.”

“I don’t speak German, asshole,” the guy spat.

“Then what the fuck use do you have to anyone?” is all Van could think to say to him.

The tent they dragged Heavener to was little more than the tactical variation of something made to be set up at a night market, coloured and tarped-in to match the red soil of New Laredo, nothing more than a collapsible frame, some LED lights and a solar panel but not for the fabric bits. The militia that had put it up had scarcely dragged in a set of folding chairs before Van politely shoo’d them out- he didn’t need anything else, other than time and relative quiet.

Heavener stooped in his seat, looking like someone trying to will themselves into a coma, flat, dead in life. Carefully, slowly, Van sat down across him, all the form of a church guidance councillor, but for the spun-around chair.

“Want the lights on?” Van asked. Nothing. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds of nothing. “Probably not,” Van said. “The sort of day you’ve had, shade probably feels like a nap.”

Gently, he reached into his jacket pocket, but when his fingers went out of sight, Heavener flinched. The appearance of the brass spliff case didn’t make him relax. If this was the Inner Galaxy, that could be anything, some mystery night-terror of tech used by a select few to do horrible things in quiet places to the masses. Even when he sprung it open and the lines of neatly machine-rolled joints in clips revealed themselves, Heavener didn’t relax, but tensed further, to the point he started shaking, because he knew what it was to be offered a smoke by a man in a dark jacket on a battlefield.

Even if he didn’t get shot, it was probably laced with poison.

So Van put one to his lips, and lit it with the jet lighter in the hinge. He took a short drag on it, just enough to get a cloud into his lungs and put a sustaining ember on the end. “When I lived in Detroit, weed was a Level Orange controlled substance, same as coke and heroin. It still there, or has the Better Children, Better Future outrage finally put it on Red with meth?”

He offered it to Heavener.

“Trust me, I don’t carry focus stims or emergency antipsychotics on me, so this is your best chance at a mental vacation from whatever big thoughts you might be having at the moment. You don’t have to take it, I’m just saying, it’s not even half as scary as They make it out, and it’ll probably do a lot for what you’re feeling right now.” The big ‘They,’ that term like a fearful worshiper beneath a vengeful god, the way people in the Inner Galaxy talk about the Consortium without triggering any nearby listening devices.

Heavener lifted his eyes for a moment, then quickly glanced back away. He sniffed at the smoke and winced.

“It’s one of the things my doc, my bio-doc, anyway, suggested for my nerves, and my pain,” Van continued. “I don’t know what They did to you, but they unzipped me from my toes to my fucking brain. I got scars that look like the map of a mass transit system. The way things are, I’m so sore all the time from having to lug around extra artificial bone mass and the subdermal armour mounted to it, I have to either run my pain suppressors at low level, which costs calories and makes me even hungrier than typically get, or-” Van took another drag, “-this turns it down like a dimmer switch. Also, makes it so I can actually take naps again.”

The guy started to speak, then decided not to.

“You can talk, it’s what I’m here for,” Van said. “Help me out, give me something to do, a nap’s starting to sound pretty appealing right now.”

“What did They do to you?” is what Heavener managed, weakly.

“The short version is, They scouted me for a project, blew me to bits and rebuilt me into a weapon. They, uh… harvested me, back when I was a teenager, and tried to make me grow up into another of Their assassins with some real fucked up tech-”

The Canine rankled, and Van paused to calm it with a mental Chill.

“-and I fought Them, and They made me suffer for it. I still killed people for Them, but I was more of an, uh-”

Ugly images. Uglier feelings. Shove them aside.

“-think like an armoured puppet. Like an infantry drone with fucking way more gizmos and enough money poured into me to feed billions for years. Like an assassin, except as noisy and opposite as subtle as it gets, so’s to kill as many that get in the way as possible. Kind of a bomb that self-delivers, is the best they could make of me.”

“I just,” Heavener started, then faded.

“Do I have to tell you to talk, man?” Van said, cocking his head. “I can take that tone if I need to.”

“I just enlisted, out of high school,” he finally said. “My dad, just… fucking piece of trash. Wanted me to be him, wanted to carry the family pride even though it was a Defeated Culture or whatever. Fucking thought he was clever with what he named me.”

“What’s your name.”

“Henry,” he said. “Heavener.

Van thought for a second. “I don’t get it.”

“Say it in German,” Henry said.

It clicked. “Jesus Christ,” Van said.

“Yeah. Not like I can change it. Gotta go through life either afraid of the people who don’t get the joke or getting glared at by the people who do. Or, fuck, worse, the ones that nod.”

“So the fact that you’ve got the actual Buddhist swastika inked is-”

“Camo. Those scumbags couldn’t tell it from theirs, they’re rat-piss stupid. Wouldn’t believe it if you told ‘em, they’re that…” he trailed off again.

Van leaned forward. He took note of Henry’s features- hair, bleached until it was straw, eyes, slightly crooked, nose, bent to one side.

“Away from one shitty dad to another, huh?”

Henry let out a single, joyless little laugh.

“Either would have killed me if I stayed long enough. My dad was just a hateful… nothing, and wanted me to be just like him. The Planetary Forces said I was only good enough for two things, fighting the Bugs, or fighting the Commies. I picked Commies, because bugs scare the shit out of me.”

“Keechi scare the shit out of everyone,” Van said.

“Just bugs in general, I mean,” Henry said, sniffing.

“What happened that you went blackhat?” Van said.

“Fuckin’, Osowiec happened. Oso-wee-ek, that’s how you say it, right?”

“Yeah, far as I know,” Van said.

“Yeah, fuckin’...” he shook in his seat. He spent a few seconds in another place, then blinked. “Only friend I had was on the Prideful Resolve, and she ate the alpha strike. We come through the jumphole, and already the political officer is telling us about their ‘heroic sacrifice’ ‘n shit. Then we get hit with boarding torpedoes, and the fucking, the crazy fuckers, they had these fuckin’ skull masks, their carriers were wrapped with barbed wire, they were breathing out this fucking, glowing yellow shit, what even was that?”

“Like you said, Osowiec Fortress is home to crazy fuckers. It’s why folks out here are glad it’s guarding Point 3, and not in their backyard,” Van said, giving the spliff a little pull just to keep it lit. “You fought ‘em off.”

“No, God, no, we blew the rear compartments and ran for the rendezvous at Lismera, and we held it for a while. Cause they were just…” he trailed off. “They, they didn’t know how to shoot, they were fuel refiners. Then we got hit. Our group got told to keep hold on the starport, that there was some ‘resistance pockets that emerged’- it turned out to be… like, a bunch of…”

“People like me?”

“Yeah,” he let out as a tense breath. “Fuckin’, just. They said it was under control, under control, but don’t worry about all the reinforcements we keep pulling in from reserve. Don’t worry about how the shooting’s getting louder, how shit’s blowing up up over there. Meanwhile I feel like I’m sitting there waiting to be the next to go over, and then what happens but the fuckin’ Red Army fell in on us. Entry sleds, except theirs worked properly.”

Henry held himself, and started shaking again.

“I got offmoon, only because those pigs out there stole a lander, and took me with them. Because they gave me The Nod and thought I was one of them. Like I was some fuckin, scared little mascot they could laugh and joke about being named after Hitler’s paper-bitch, and how much shit I’d eaten in my life to keep True to the Path or whatever. Got the ink so they’d ease off me being a blank canvas. Again, they’re stupid as fuck, they just saw a shape and thought it was theirs.”

Van assembled the pieces: Jumped through Point 3, immediately shot to shit by the Dead Men of Osowiec, then blown up at Lismera by Zhukov’s Army- he was talking about the Sneak Play War, a small conflict that spilled blood across 6 nasty weeks and saw a casualty rate of nearly 90% for the Consortium. It was a complete clusterfuck of poor planning staged by a strong-of-heart-but-dumb-of-ass noble from a house with enough lives, money and resources to consider all of them disposable, an invasion that hinged on taking a fueling operation on a mostly-water moon as a beachhead. One of the major problems: nobody in intel told the brass it was a frozen mostly-water moon, and the troops were dying of exposure from the word go, despite a nearly unending day-cycle. It ended in a grist mill of a battle that was spearheaded by a team of 99ers that hit like a hammer off the anvil of Zhukovnik Elites that sandwiched them from the other side. It happened roughly 3 years ago from that day.

“How old are you, Henry?” Van asked.

He lifted his head slowly, raised his eyes slowly. He looked ragged and spent, in his mid-30s.

“21,” he said. “I think. Shit’s a blur, this last while.”

Van paused to consider what he said, but almost immediately Henry began to cry again, harder this time, a spasm that tiled him over in his chair, made him heave, weep so deeply he started to choke.

“Hey,” Van put a hand on his shoulder, gentle pressure, enough to steady him, but not enough to control him. He offered the joint again. “Past’s got pain for you, future’s uncertain- what about the present?”

Henry sucked in a breath, and let it go like it was ripping its way out of his lungs. He wiped a face that was a mix of sweat, tears and snot, with a uniform sleeve he didn’t give a fuck about, then snatched the spliff like it was food in a wasteland.

Van clocked it: a sustained 33 seconds of virgin doom-cough, provoked by an inhale that was way too eager for how brutal-dank the Samoud-grown Vermillion Kush was- most likely, Henry was a guy who picked up smoking nails as part of Planetary’s morale program, and was expecting a different kind of smoke.

“Jesus Fucking Christ, it’s like burning oil,” he retched between coughs.

“Fuckin’ wicked, ain’t it?”

Henry’s cough died off. Then his face went calm, at least just a little calmer. His eyes went just a little vacant, just a little loopy, and he squeezed his fists in a rhythm, like he was enjoying the build and release of the tension in their tissue. He twitched for a moment, then evened out with a tiny dry burp, and pressed his lips into a flat line, his head nocking to one side, like a golden retriever hearing the initial W and A of ‘walk? Walk?’

“Yeah,” he said with a new lightness in his voice. “Yeah, it,” he whew’ed with a slow headshake and a raise of his eyebrows, “that’s what this is, yeah, it is.”

Something tweaked Van from deep inside, something he had to keep compartmentalized, away from his own emotions: he had the sinking suspicion that a half-smoked joint was the sweetest gift this kid had ever known in years, if ever. Which is why he gave him a minute to enjoy the onset of cannabinoid zonk that was obviously overtaking him like a haze of warm pillows.

“So, Henry,” he said, the minute up. “Hate to be a buzzkill but: tell me about those assholes outside.”

It took a second for the words to register, the slowed synaptic latency of a mind that was learning new ways to enjoy simply being. “What do you want to know about them,” he said, his voice strong, but with a stilted cadence. “Fuck ‘em, to start with,” he said, with an odd, furtive laugh.

“Start with composition: there’s a couple groups I hit today, I want to know what you know about them, starting with your-” he caught himself, “-the crew you were with.”

“Fuckin’ Nazis, man. Saw too many movies about Final Terran Victory, and thought the other side’s uniforms looked cool. Barely know anything about their own Suppressed Culture, except the part where they think they get to kill everyone because they say so and they know that 88 is idiot code for a salute. They really like those uniforms.”

“A nice uniform’s the most some people could ever hope for,” Van said, emotional suppressors deleting the look of contempt that would have twisted his face. He needed Henry to see a friend in him, and to not get buzzkilled by the death glare Van’s own thoughts about neo-Nazi scum provoked.

“How many are still out, loose in the wild?”

“Nobody, we were it,” Henry said, his face threatening sadness, before veering off into a placid vacancy. “That’s why Harris had us go in like that. ‘Victory or death,’ fucking asshole. We were supposed to have more, link up with em yesterday. We get there, someone blew em all to rags and just, left em there, in chunks, LAVs burning.”

He took a long drag on the spliff, and his lungs punished him again. He was giving himself something else to think about, choking instead of reliving what he saw. Finally he lolled back in his chair, and really felt the smoke overtake him.

“We’re, fuckin, really great at fighting wars, you can tell,” Henry said, his voice deepening as his core untightened for possibly the first time in his life.

“So who are the other ones, I saw two other sets of colours out there,” Van pushed through his daze.

“The jokers in the masks are PrivCits, or ex-PrivCits. I actually heard they were some sorta fucked up startup that did these party cruises, that ended out here, doing canned hunts on Commi… Free Plebs Freepeople? Freeple?”

“Freelanders. Also, fuck.”

“Yeah, yeah, they got busted for not having a political officer with them when they did their crossings, is what I heard. I guess they figured they had guns enough to go merc over on this side, and they’re just, having party time.”

“What’s with the masks of the Allied Powers?”

“People love movies about the Final Victory, I guess? I dunno.” Henry paused for a second, a dark look coming over his face. “The other ones,” He started.

“The others are just fuckin nightmare people. I don’t know what it is they’re on, but they’re gone on it. It’s some crazy homebrew amph they’re ripped off of, like it’s meth but then there’s some crazy unstable shit in it. I think they’re making it wrong but think they made it better. Some of them have gone full mutant from what it’s done to them, and some of them are doing fucked up aug-jobs on the others, because some of them have limbs that are melting off and they don’t even give a fuck and just…”

Tears again, even through the high.

“Holy fucking shit, this is the side I’m on,” he said.

“You can make that change easily, just keep talking,” Van said, his voice steadying.

“Fuckin, easy for you to say, They ate you up and you came out with superpowers. WHAT DID I GET??”

Van said nothing. He had nothing to say to that. He just held Henry’s gaze, and let the burning in his eyes die off. It was the best he could do in that moment, let Henry have the floor to say anything he wanted. Or nothing at all.

“I try to be different, I get beat up. I escape by being the same, I get sent out into THIS. I do what I can to survive, because it’s all I can do, and I fucking just…” He was looking for words, and every one he found was something he didn’t want to say.

“I was made to hurt and make other people hurt,” Henry said, at last. The deep, aching guilt of an individual with a desperate mind and an occupied heart, realizing he followed orders to find a place in the world, and wound up regretting every last ‘yes, sir’ and ‘yes, my lord’ he could ever remember sounding off.

Van let him have a moment to let the words clear the air, make it known that he heard him.

“Here’s where it stops,” is what Van chose to say. “The part that sucks is that you’re still far from the finish, because we still gotta get you out of here to the next part. But you’re at the start of the end of all of that hurt. You might not think it, you probably don’t even realize how there can be anything for you after what you’ve done, but I’m just gonna say to you: the Consortium told you that this is a place where there’s only disobedients, convicts and deserters, and let me just confirm, that’s the only thing they said to you that’s true. We all had to escape somehow.”

Henry looked at him with the sort of disbelief that was causing him pain, something that didn’t scan to such a degree it was causing him distress. “I killed people,” he managed to get out with one hard exhale.

“So did I,” Van said, steady-calm. “Here I am, still.”

Henry started to say something, then Van pressed him, gently so as to focus him. “That’s three crews. The locals told me there’s some sort of real bad dudes out there that don’t seem to line up with any of the profiles you just gave me. They seem to think they’re some sort of commando types going by how they operate. You know anything about them?”

Henry’s mouth held open, his eyes shut, frozen in time, caught between wanting to just pour out everything he knew, and clam up over the threat that someone new was exploiting him.

“Either help them out there, or help me in here. I dunno what they ever did for you out there, but that’s some pretty top quality weed I just handed you,” Van said.

The crack that broke in Henry’s mind: that if those in charge had filled his mind with lies, than was surrender the sure death They told him it was? Was failure actually an option for him?

So he killed the joint and nearly killed himself coughing. He caught himself, stabilized his breathing, and said, “Harris thought we were being talent scouted, by some crew that’d been out here way longer than us, with better hookups than we knew how to get. That this shit was some sort of fucked up cattle call, fuckin’, if you lived through it, not only did you get to keep what you looted, you were in with these guys.”

“He know anything more specific? You ever meet up in the field with them?”

“I stayed the fuck back the one time they showed up, man, they were scary as shit. They were wearing shit that looked like the ads in the recruitment office, the high paygrade stuff I couldn’t qualify for. They had combat suits with shield arrays and stealth-shrouds, I got a fuckin level 1 plate carrier and a flak helmet, to go to an ice moon. Their sarge or whatever, he was wearing power armour like the nobles get to, but he was terran, they were all terran. I don’t think Harris would have wanted to work with them if they weren’t all terran, even though he still bitched about having issues with em.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, hates their accents, and some of them aren’t white. Basically all he needed to get riled, getting talked down to by someone he could only half understand, wearing power armour.”

“He didn’t say anything else, anything about why here or who’s coordinating all this?”

Henry shook his head, sniffing. “Nah he’s shit at everything, always has been. All I knew is the word around the group, that we were just supposed to knock down this little colony, here’s your times, here’s your places, we’ll be watching- it was just them doing it, like they’re recruiting or some shit.”

A hard stop that Van had experience with: the foot soldier that didn’t know and didn’t want to know, because he’d seen what the folks in charge look like, and quickly ducked out. He could press further and harder, and maybe risk breaking Henry in a way that’d make him shut up for good. Even the Canine stayed leashed at the idea, as silently, it’d been passively pinging Henry’s biosigns, a 5 second cycle. What it had read, was a man in the aftermath of a panic attack, too emotionally frail and spent to have the capacity for guile, and too bare in what he was showing to be faking. It was a machine-beast programmed to find delight in ripping limb from core with any configuration of a jaw it could form Van’s body into, but only against prey that had life enough to struggle; Henry was like cage-raised cattle waiting for a boltgun to the Canine, and it had only an abstract machine pity that expressed in the bareness of the notes it took on his demeanor, finding no revelry in wet-eyed ennui. The Hunt was no fun if the Prey didn’t move.

Henry broke the silence of his thought. “You know what’s gonna happen to me,” he said, voice like a man starting to check out entirely. “Assuming they don’t just kill me anyway.”

“Anyone kills you, it’ll be a war crime under our laws out here. Which we do have, by the way. Trust me, you think Harris would get to mouth off like that without getting shot in the head on the spot back on the other side? Hell, I wanted to slap the shit out of him, but folks out here take pride in not beating people in handcuffs, most of us.”

Henry nodded, but his eyes were dilating like a trance was setting in.

“We’re going to get you offworld when this is done. You’re gonna go before a judge, which we do have, and you’ll have fair representation.”

“To a guillotine, I heard,” said Henry.

“Yeah, you heard,” Van said. “You also heard about mitigating circumstances at sentencing? Because buddy, you lived a life of them, least by laws out here. People like you don’t get topped, people like you do the right thing: you tell the story of who gave you the orders that you followed, you give your side in the character of the people who were above you, directing traffic, and you submit to either an exile or reformation.”

“Reformation, like prison?”

“Like a trade school you don’t get to check out of until folks are sure you’re not a fascist any more. You get to be an apprentice under a union section and everything, get your trade card, you can learn all sorts of stuff that’s useful out here, agricultural bio-tech, mech-automotive, optronics, welding- welding’s useful as fuck, that’s a work desk that’s always got tickets.”

Heavener took a moment to chew on this.

“Do they let you learn anything to do with animals?” he said after a moment, the dreaminess of the high coming across his face again. “I’d like to work with animals. Maybe not bugs though. I don’t hate them, they just scare me.”

“Yeah, veterinary tech’s a part of agriculture,” Van said. “I know a guy, I saw him through reform, after I beat the fuck out of him for… long story, but he came out working at an animal cafe. Cause we have those out here, too.”

“I don’t know what those are,” Henry said, still glazed, though with an odd smile crossing his face.

“You’ll love them,” Van said, standing, giving him one last squeeze of his shoulder. “You’ll live to see one.”

When he pushed open the tent, Van spotted the Gray-haired captain and waved him over. A pair of militia flanked him, rifles in hand.

“He doesn’t have much but he’ll spill on everyone, he ain’t anything but a beaten dog,” Van said, voice low. “I can’t stop you from talking to him, but he’s an asset in my op, so he lives and not a scratch on him.”

“I’m not in the business of abusing prisoners,” the captain said. “Being on the receiving end sours you on it for life.”

The way he said it was enough for Van to know, things were straight on this end. So he nodded to the man. “Get him someplace safe, where he can sleep. Make sure he doesn’t starve, either.”

“We got a proper protocoled lockup on base he can line for a while,” the captain said. “It’ll be safe so long as the base is.”

“Good enough,” Van said. “Your people will see this through, that was a quick response.”

“Yeah,” the captain said, eyes distant, hard but tired. “Not sure what it is you’re up to out here, but thanks for your help.” He set his shoulders square, put a straightened strength into his posture just to drive his next point home: “Keep it outward-facing like that, I won’t have cause to pry into what 99 is doing in my home.”

Van noted his nameplate: L. Jordan.

“Noted. Pretty trustworthy of you, given the circumstances,” Van said.

“Where I come from, I’d be more suspicious if you came in trying to flash a badge. After putting down that much weight on our behalf? I consider you jumped in properly,” the captain said. A microexpression passed his face that cracked his veneer of discipline, and the Canine’s social data nets snapped it out of the air like a little treat: a note of respect over how hard Van could break a skull, from someone who knew how hard it was firsthand.

Then a sound of shouting, back toward the office block that contained both Santana and Evan. Not a commotion, just one voice, loud, shouting, twanging:

“WHERE M’IDIOT BROTHER AT?”

“I leave it in your hands, sir,” Van said, snapping him the subtlest salute he knew- in the grand scheme, Van’s effective rank in the Freelands’ loose association of paramilitary unions was a lieutenant, which meant the local leadership outranked him, by design as a safety measure. It prevented the Mutants-with-Guns-and-Power-Armour Brigade from commandeering a colony after colony, then just sitting on them as Caesar, for one. Then, as he turned, he tried not to look like he was frantically scurrying to intercept someone from murdering another of his witnesses.

Again the voice rang out, more twang, so much so that the Canine snickered slightly trying to transcribe it:

“CMON EVAN, H’WHERE YOU HIDIN’, YOU KNOW I’LL LOOK UNDER THE TOILET STALL DOORS, THAT’S THE FIRST SPOT I LOOK, I ALWAYS GET YOU FIRST TIME.”

Van shouldered sideways through the line of armoured vehicles, shouldered passed the crowd, and found what he could only describe as some sort of barbecue valkyrie, standing hands on hips in a Sweetsmoke BBQ shirt, ready to strike with the bludgeoning weight of the remote payment pad in her belt-pouch at any second. She was staring down a member of the militia who only seemed to match her in sheer mass by virtue of the BDU, helmet and carrier he was wearing, and by his posture, he was expecting to have to quickly slip from an incoming right hand as he tried to reason with her.

“EVAN THIS IS THE KIND OF BEHAVIOR THAT MAKES A CHRISTMAS AWKWARD, EVAN,” she yelled over the reasoning, to the air. The militiaman winced. “LIKE BUYING A STILL AND NOT TELLING ANYONE, EVAN.”

“Hey, hello,” Van managed to get her attention with as he jogged up. “I’m the guy who took down your brother, Evan.”

“‘Took down?’ Shit,” she said. She winced and her head lolled- a visual dictionary definition of ‘exasperation over a family member that went and did Their Shit once again’ perfectly rendered. Then she noticed Van, and her eyes opened took on the weight of understanding the scale of fuckup.

“You look, ah- a little tore up, Mister--” she started.

“Canine,” Van said, plain. She blinked and understood just how bad her brother had to have come down for someone with a name like that to be taking custody of him. “I’ll be fine, trust me,” Van said.

“He alive?” She said.

“He’s fine,” he said. “He wants to help, now.”

“Of course he does,” she said.

A voice came, slightly panicked from inside the office. “Jesus Christ, Paul, uh- Sarge? I think we got an issue here!”

The sarge was quick on the turn to move in, but Van was reflexively and instantly quicker. Away, inside and down the hall, was what both Van and the Canine would classify as an issue: the office door of one J. Santana, once chained shut and guarded, had been hacked at with boltcutters, the guards laying prone from smoking holes in their heads. The office was bare for what mattered, the air intangibly warm from recent movement, a scent of sweat, carbides and pumice soap hanging thinly on the air that The Canine cataloged voraciously.

Fucksakes, Van thought. He sprinted for the storage closet he’d stashed Evan in.

He threw wide the door:

“What?” Evan said, not understanding why the big, scary cyborg was looking at him so wild-eyed. “My sister’s not that much to deal with…”