A Quick Death in Texas: Chapter 8 Skeleton

It's time for things to blow up in entertaining ways.

Eight - The Importance of Safety Regulations

[Let’s build ourselves the skeleton of an action chapter, shall we?]

[We open on Telin as a palette cleanser, in terms of characters with distinctly different personal approaches: namely that rather than throwing weight around, she’s listening to someone at the local airfield vent about current events, being extremely put upon, then having to deal with some outsider that wants to borrow a helo on a favor, all from the comfort of her well-cultivated meditative space. She’s a good listener, from somewhere within the Zen trance. That’s when she gets a call from Van, and she decides it’s in the realm of “this is important, I need to take this.” Not to be impolite, but venting is nice to have breaks from.]

[“How’s your day going?” “I’m working on finagling a helo off someone whose stressed out and mad at one of my uncles. How’s yours?” “I’m waiting for the two guys I knocked out to remember how to talk, so they can tell me some shit, basic stuff.”]

[At this point we’re starting to get some insight into the foundations of these two’s relationship as it’s growing: Van sees Telin as someone who’s normal enough compared to him, who makes him feel like an actual person, not just some bionic super-product performing his function. But with her, she’s getting someone who makes her feel like she’s back to where she was, from a time where we never knew her, but she was a wilder, sharper, fiercer individual. From her point of view, we start to understand that Van reminds her of a time when she wasn’t quiet and solitary, and more, he makes it so that she can inhabit that old self of her, that she didn’t feel quite so confident in being. What they have is a camaraderie based off of a shared feeling of Being Okay when their energies interact- .72 of a functioning person and .88 of a functioning person found each other, and in doing so, made each other a total of 2 whole functioning people.]

[And that’s what we have here: a sweet scene between people being affectionate, who aren’t typically, that advances the idea that Telin is out there, getting ahold of some transport.]

[“Anyway I gotta go. I got mumbles, that’s progress.”]

---

[We’re back with Van in the office. Santana and Kellog are lashed to their chairs, with the privacy curtains drawn and the Back In X Minutes sign up on the door. This was not a secure site, but on the other hand, he’d worked with less. He’s also eating the sandwich that Kellog delivered, because bionics are extremely calorie-expensive to run.]

[Kellog is the first to speak, and all he manages is “whythefuckyouhitme, maaan?” This is initially enough to make Van understand that he’s probably a useful idiot and little more than that. He didn’t need any voice analysis augs to figure that, it’s just there’s a way the Pablo Escobars of the galaxy have of announcing themselves, and that extremely was not it. “Because you didn’t want to read what you delivered to this guy, so now I gotta beat it out of both of you instead of eavesdropping like a politer thug.” Of course this provokes an immediate and frightened “IIIIIII dunno NOTHIN man,” which immediately prompts Van to cock an arm and see if he flinches; he does, so hard he almost pitches over in his chair. At this point, Van effectively eliminates him as a deeper player in the conspiracy- he’s a pawn, and a particularly dumb fucker of a pawn at that.]

[At which point he starts paying attention to Santana, who he pings and notices has a normalized breath and pulse rate. At which point he tells him that he can either speak up or just point to where the message is, because by the sounds of things, that was probably time sensitive, and “you don’t want to see me in a rush.” Santana decides to be willful, which is a poor idea to do to someone who has an engineered-sociopathic behavioral analytic analyzer, sensor aggregator and targeting computer-intellect spliced into his brain. Van catches his lie by the throat and tells him simply, “I don’t believe you, and the next time I don’t believe you, it’s going to hurt.” Which is when Santana decides to try and get union high-and-mighty about his Siblings and how Magistral Won’t Stand for This.]

[“Yeah, it’s clear you’re in good with the union. They even gave you an office with a bathroom in it.” Which is when he goozles Santana, opens said bathroom’s door with his head, and dunks him into the toilet bowl. We did it, Van has now swirlied a nerd. Speedrun Any%.]

[There’s a back and forth that occurs when someone is caught in a corner with their personal situation, and someone that’s out to expose them that isn’t acting in an official capacity. See, certain types of shitty people base their entire sense of self-worth and courage off their ability to manipulate the systems they find themselves within- they know they can just say “I don’t know to a cop” over and over, and if they just talk in bullshit circles long enough, the cop can’t lay hands on them if they want to have a chance at making a case in court for the prosecution. When you introduce into the minds of individuals like this, the idea that they are entirely outside of all known systems, because the only one they exist in at that given moment is “in the grasp of a growing-slowly-angrier man who is monstrously strong and knows they are lying as much as they do.” This is not a workable situation to these people, and when they suddenly realize they’re treading water in an open ocean, without land in sight? Panic ensues, and the emotional reckoning is swift and fierce.]

[“What do I have to do in order to make you stop screaming and start talking?” “YOU’VE GOT TO GET ME OUT OF HERE, THEY’RE COMING.”]

[That’s when Van hears the bang and feels the building shudder. That’s when he realizes he needs to be going, now. So he anesthetizes Santana with a bionic one-inch punch, then tells Kellog, “I don’t need to tell you not to run away, I will find you if you do.”]

[Van runs outside and finds that the clamor is a 50/50 split between unarmed workers fleeing and armed workers running towards the blast. Machinery starts to shut down, and gunfire starts to become distinct. Van barks to the Canine, and the Canine responds with its typical Terminator Bullshit: it pulls up a procedurally rendered map of everywhere he’d been and seen that day, as well as a computational approximation of where the shooting was happening. He’s quick to point out to the Canine that he could have done that himself with his ears. “EARS ARE THE ANALOGUE MICROPHONE TO ADVANCED DIGITAL OUTPUT, FOOL.” The Canine is really starting to feel itself; it knows real violence is nigh, and it’s going to get steadily more pushy and more unhinged until it gets catharsis- we’re going to learn this is quite literally a side effect of Van restraining its impulses, him figuratively holding its leash. The beast gets anxious and hangry when there’s death to deal and Van won’t let it draw a targeting reticule over everything that’s hominid and registering a pulse.]

[Van makes a snap decision, which are always his best bad decisions: he decides to steal Kellog’s car, the Dot Micro, and use it as his assault vehicle to roll up on the shootout he’s now registering in his sonics. This is a unconventionally bad idea, but so is he, in his own opinion, so he decides to go with it. As his security domination software hotwires the car, he unfurls the shotgun from his bag… then realizes he’s about to try to work a pump action while driving. Again, a Van idea: shoulda thought ahead, but at least he’s theoretically got an edge, somewhere.]

And now, we bulletpoint some bodycount:

• The Micro is just nakedly a Mini from the Timeline Bleedthrough Effect (™), so here’s the point where Van immediately realizes he might actually have a live one, as the little EV tears off the line like it dumpsters tuners in drag races for its morning constitutional. He takes a corner and realizes that the hype he’d heard about these things might be real, even if he was a bike guy.
• He then allows it to attempt its final test: he spots a definite flashpoint, a tangle of transport vehicles, the result of an ambush vehicular collision. Right in the middle of the street, he spots what he makes 100% as a fuckhead blackhat- the Harry S. Truman mask and the milsurp fash plate carrier was a dead giveaway. As he raises his rifle to fire on some workers, Van guns it and hipchecks him with a vehicular powerslide, breaking him at the midpoint like a snapped, unpeeled banana.
  • It administers a lethal sanction no problem, yet it fits in the compact space- that’s a fine automobile.
• The car takes some rounds through the hood, a few more through the windshield, and Van guns it in an arc, driving to make the hardest target he can; he spots Churchill and Stalin trying to light him up, and resolves to make sure that if there’s some fuckhead wearing Mussolini, he’s going to do him hand-to-hand. Instead, he puts a pair of targeting reticules over the Allied Powers leadership and hammers out a pair of shots from his automag, hitting one in the neck and the other through the head.
• He slides the car to a position where it’s functionally hull-down protected and rolls out, shotgun in hand. Shouting to workers to get in cover, 99 is on site, he takes fire from hostiles ripping fire off from behind a work truck. He puts his own cover down as he hits a burst of bionic speed and blazes toward cover at metasapient speeds, hailing high-caliber rounds to put their heads down. When in his own cover, he starts firing 12 gauge from the shoulder, getting an angle on one of the hostiles in an allied powers mask and tearing out a chunk of his side. 2 more open up as that one falls, retreating behind the truck’s cab to cut down his angle. Van opens the breech on his shotgun, and takes one of the mini-rockets out of the side saddle.
  • People saw he had rockets, we’re giving them rockets.
• The cab shears apart in a blizzard of wrecked alloy and polymer, the explosion concussing the two hostiles to death before its secondary projectiles turn them to sausage meat. Van, hearing no further local complaint, begins thumbing shells back into his weapon’s magazine, and reloading his pistol.
• He calls out if anyone’s hurt, and gets a quick response that people need medics in a nearby yard, there’s workers down. Before he can do anything to aid, another blurt of gunfire lights up down the road. For a sick, horrible moment, Van feels the paralysis of having immediate responsibility in two directions, the sinking feeling of knowing shit just got worse instead of better. Someone makes the call for him “just go, we’ll get an ambulance.”
• Van drops his foot to the firewall in the Micro and hauls off to where the Canine’s automapper is pointing him, tearing off with as much speed as he can wring out of the little car.
• As he pulls off down the street, he picks up a tail, in the form of a blackhat deathmobile that comes crashing through the side of an abandoned hauler as he passes. An asshole in a beartrap mask opens up on him from the top with a mounted gatling pulse laser. Things go squirrely as Van suddenly finds himself in an awkward moment of trying to drive while do something hard: namely, open the breach on his shotgun so he can drop another rocket shell into the chamber, then rack the slide forward.
• After a couple of near misses with embankments and road dividers, and a couple of moments where it feels like the gatling hit something important on the car, Van gets his weapon tight and fires the next rocket shell through the deathmobile’s front viewport, a little mailslot in the hillbilly plating that only a man with a magnifying optical sight in his eyes could make. The rocket goes off with a muffled boom from inside the armoured rollcage of the deathmobile, turning the driver to relish and causing the wreck to crash into one of the struts of a conveyor chain and eject the gunner headfirst onto the tarmac. And no, he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Facemask, yes, helmet, no.
• The shooting ahead grows in volume, and gets nasty: it sounds like someone’s wheeled in some sort of mounted gun, and they’re attacking the central belt chain station. He confirms this when it takes aim on him and flips the car with a single shell, sending him into the guardrail on it’s roof and spinning. Blackhats approach the car, waiting for it to stop moving before they go for a full surround, so Van picks his moment to do something only his anatomy can get away with: he sticks his hand out the window and digs his fingers as deep down into the asphalt as he can manage, and just slithers out as it spins. He rises to his feet firing, taking one of the blackhats down before he’s even hit his stride. He dives below cover, hardcrete traffic directors that can easily take a hit, that nonetheless start coming apart like graham crackers under sustained automatic fire. Eventually, cease fire is called, and they advance on his position, weapons reloaded and find… nothing.
• Because Van has crawled into the culvert pipe in the ditch behind him. He punches out the drainage gate above him and pops up directly behind where the blackhats advanced, inserting shotgun shell A into asshole B. He brings another down as he breaks for the cover of the shipping containers located to his right. The gunner on the autocannon technical points out his position and tries to take aim with his rifle; Van reduces him to an impressionist painting with a choked-up swath of flechettes. The technical tries to pull away, and Van blows out its cockpit with another breach-loaded mini-rocket.
• The remaining two blackhats behind Van’s wrecked former cover debate on what to do: flush him out, take both sides at once, basic simultaneous sweep and clear search and destroy double plus tactical hut hut hike. After they finish their empty-headed huddle, they move out in a loose shoulder-to shoulder and take up positions at either corner of the container stacks. As they swivel out from their positions to clear their own lines down the containers, neither finds Van, as they prove the old adage time and time again: Novice players in the game need to be taught by the game to look up, or else they’ll be in danger. This is immediately proven by the blackhat on the left, the guard who only speaks stupidity, when he’s goomba-stomped by Van leaping off the container stack, onto him. The blackhat on the right, the guard who also only speaks stupidity, turns to assist a man who has just, medically speaking, had his shit utterly sundered. As he executes his tactical-corner turn, he raises his weapon’s muzzle directly into his target’s hand, a hand that allows him to lift it no further, and instead forces it downward. On instinct, he pulls the trigger and sends a fusilade through his own boot into the tarmac beneath; as he screams out his own self-hatred and also agony, Van administers naptime via an open-palmed head-ram into the adjacent shipping container.
  • See? Van can take armed subjects alive, sometimes. Sorta.
• Van moves to clear the belt chan station, and spots a bad sort of movement- the former boss of the gun crew that was directing the shelling is now running with a hostage and a few blackhat survivors in tow. As they go, formerly hidden armed workers spring from cover and open fire, dropping the tailing stragglers as they try to cover themselves in the open. In the end, only the guy with the hostage and another make it into the station; Van pursues.
• “You have nowhere to run except headlong into a grave, throw it down and we’ll get you stockaded instead.” This is negotiation to Van, which provokes a typically vile response from the blackhat holding the hostage, namely, one that makes mention of him being a ‘commie’ as said blackhat threatens the hostage with his sidearm- a Consortium pulse pistol.
• “Isn’t that just like a fascist: an ubermensch, that needs to take a human shield.” Van’s reply gets a flaring of the eyes from the blackhat, but unexpectedly, who it really sets off is the other blackhat who hadn’t made a move yet: namely, he pulls his own weapon and aims hit at his supposed ally, bellowing “I AM SICK AND TIRED OF THIS BULLSHIT, I WANT OUT,” before he’s gutshot twice by the hostage taker, who steals away deeper into the station.
• As the turncoat blackhat lays sprawled on the ground but moving, Van gives him a simple piece of advice: “throw it away, if they hurt you then, that’s on them, not you.” He obliges with a nod, and spares a bit of his strength to push his weapon away, out of arm’s reach. “How bad?” Van asks. After a delirious ‘hmm’, the guy says “give it about a mid-range. I hate it when this happens…” “You’ll live?” “Precedent says yes, yeah.”
• So Van moves in after the hostage taker, who appears to be trying to get away by riding on the conveyors, and yet is having second thoughts when he sees just how fast they’re moving, and how completely hostile the actual belt chains look to living tissue. Self preservation is kicking in, and it’s giving him pause.
• Which is when Van shows his face by saying “I really hope you’re not thinking about jumping into that thing, because I could tell you some horror stories.” The blackhat puts his full attention to him, as he begins a slow walk around the beltway station platform, angling the blackhat so as to put his back to the open section of the conveyors.
• As Van goes, we get the first time Van ever talks for real about his own family: namely, that his dad worked a shitty two-shift manufactory job that required a manual labor element to keep the belts and assembly bots running. His dad specifically maintained the welding equipment on the assembly arms, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have his fair share of horror stories, of what it looked like when people got caught in the moving belt chains. Hell, one time someone even fell in, and guess what? Suddenly, no matter what your maintenance role was in the manufactory, your job became helping cleaning that guy up.
• He reframes the context of his story, when pressed by the fash blackhat if he has a point. The point is, under the worker rights of the Freelands, places like a conveyor chain like this aren’t allowed to run without adequate safety procedures and equipment, all sorts of shit that’d seem alien to someone fro the Inner Galaxy, because it costs extra all for what? To save the lives of some cheap common folk? It’s such a gulf in skill and education, between a Freeland worker and an an Inner Galaxy worker, that just by stepping into this place, you’ve entered into a guerilla warfare scenario where you are the invading army of your own volition, and that a resourceful enough worker could cause you a world of hurt by leading you to the wrong place, at the wrong time.
• As he says this, he begins to advance on them, and the hostage taker backs towards the open edge… and the hostage themselves picks up on what Van’s laying down, and also begins to back the hostage taker towards the edge. Before the taker knows what’s happening, they’re in a full-blown tandem backpedal towards an open conveyor. As the blackhat starts screaming for them to stop, Van grabs the hostage free of the blackhat’s grasp as they go tumbling over the edge. Then, as the blackhat falls in, he grabs him by the scruff of the neck. Despite this, the idiot tries to level his weapon, so Van simply drags him up like a wet towel and slaps him on the deck of the station, crushing his everything, and ending this chapter with Van making a comment about safety regulations, and how they have ways of keeping people away from the dangerous machinery.