A Quick Death in Texas, Chapter 7: 100% Pure Well Poison

Van Parker is the galaxy's best completely untalented detective and spy. What does that mean? You'll get an idea from this chapter.

Seven - 100% Pure Well Poison

The room was so that people couldn’t hear him swear. In his view, it was just the same as having his own personal toilet in a room he could lock, with windows he could shut. Both facilitated acts he found personally vulgar and unwarranted, yet acts he needed to perform in order to keep his body in working order. They relieved pressure, one was physical, the other mental, but neither were things others ever needed to see him seeing or doing.

“...COCK HEADED SON OF A COUSIN’S GOAT FUCKER,” he managed to finish his sentence, then drew in a sharp breath to re-inflate lungs that were running in the redline range. He had a clearing thought as he did it, one that set him straight, made him feel focused: people out there thought they were good at this swearing business, and that’s like being good at taking a shit, which is exactly what these peasants would value.

Hurt them. Hurt them, they think they’ve got the right, and only you have that right. You are in the right. Teach them this in a way they can’t ignore. Hurt them.

He straightened himself, cleaned up the lines in his shirt and trousers, adjusted his cuffs. He unfolded his cosmetic-only Intelligentsia glasses, and placed them perfectly over his ears and nose. He was himself again, purged of vulgarity; he pressed the panel on the interior of the Swear Tube, and the wall slid away, opening into his private bathroom through a hidden panel, which shut soundlessly behind him.

The discordant outcome of yesterday had disrupted his Thoughtleading Self-Meditations, taken his invaluable time with personal distress. But now he knew the way forward, and it was keeping both hands firmly on the wheel while stepping on the throttle. Time to find someone to put his foot on.

“Carly,” he began, his private bathroom door gliding silently shut behind him, “I trust you’ve not heard word from the supposed asset you arranged?”

“No, Mr. Ellering,” she said, hiding her sigh. Fucker didn’t wash his hands. Again. “He’s still got his phone off.”

Bastard, Ellering thought. Sinner.

“So he’s dead to me, even if still alive,” he said, enunciating a period, end of sentence. “Don’t worry Carly, understand that I know his failure isn’t your failure. Your failure, stands in your lack of perception of his inabilities as an asset. How do you intend to fix this?”

How do you keep a dumpster fire going? Thought Carly. Throw more garbage in. “I’ve assembled a preliminary list of secondary assets to assist in counteracting the outside agents. They’re each individually out of towners, but I’m certain I can have them assembled here by air so as to begin the interview process-”

“Carly, that’s a standing solution and we’re already in motion. I need motion, you understand me?”

Like a woman beneath a pigeon, she thought. “Yes, sir,” she said.

“Whoever they are, if they have even a hint of the skills they claim to? Hire them, they’re in, because they’re a wave. We are past the point of finesse, what with yesterday’s failings. We don’t make the mistake of having one go about like a sneak-thief, yes? We make our own personal task team, and their task will be these specialist outsiders, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And this is the crucial part but one that you’ll be happy to know you’ll be suited to, because you will not be required to care about quality, you understand? Your job is to open the sluice gates, and then hold them open for whatever detritus with a weapon and a high-minded ideal of himself wants the work, you understand? Because we do not care about subterfuge or survivability at this point, as now comes the time where we exert control through manifest strength, now comes the part we drown them in numbers, you understand?”

No I don’t understand, you Luftwaffen Fauntleroy, what numbers? What fucking superior numbers do we have to drown anyone in? She thought. “Yes, sir,” she said. Jesus, I am going to be making so many ugly fucking phonecalls to just… bonechilling people, she thought, shuddering.

“After what I saw yesterday, from the feeds? Understand I expect a high degree of… employee turnaround. But we’ll find in this process those that will be of true value to us, while the rest are all free labour upon their exit- whatever they accomplish, that’s fine, but we don’t have to pay them if they’re dead.” This was his moneysaving cost. He liked this, yes, this was brilliant. Swamp them in pretenders to slaughter, like the one they slaughtered yesterday- eventually through simple law of average they’ll come against the one or two or three that aren’t fake, the real natural talent that he wanted on his side. Not like those freaks the peasants dared to pit against him, that insane invalid they treated like a witch because, ‘haha, hee hee, sparks go crackle, she must be magic,’ says the plebs; nor that wirejob cripple of a walking corpse that’s enough of a stunted, hollow-head puppet to be able to look in the mirror and think he sees a real boy.

He’d sought to create something Pure and perfect in a savage galaxy, and these peasants were daring to challenge his creation, first with their own unwashed struggling, and now by unleashing violent mutancy. This alone had made it clear to him, that history would remember him well in this conflict. He was clean, and they were so self-apparently dirty. And from that mindset, he let himself know that he was in the clear: whatever he did to these people, he was not the monster. They had dared to interfere in a galactic betterment, which meant he was free to make anyone obstinate enough to stand against him a body. The scholars would understand, someday, appreciative from within the Golden Age he’d seeded for them.

Bodies, bodies, thinking of, he thought. “Largo, you met in preliminary with the members of our new Elevated Security Recruitment Committee, yes?”

“Well I mean I met the volunteers if that’s what you’re asking,” said Largo Ross, his voice muffled from beneath the office’s coffee table. He wasn’t sleeping, but his eyes weren’t open either, 10 in the early shift was just too fucking early for it to be as bright as it was, for as stuck as he was feeling. He didn’t think of them as hangovers anymore, it was more a state of being low on fuel, of needing an oil change, but he was too sick to drink and too stuffed up to inhale. So he was stuck, at the moment.

“Good people?”

“Yeah seemed pretty badass, I got to go shooting at the security room shooting… place. It’s cool, they’re cool, I’mma get with ‘em and see what we can do once I’m,” he paused, twitching, cramping, his stomach turning, his blood lighting ablaze. It subsided, as he stabilized his lying position with a firmly planted hand. “Once I’m back up to speed.”

“Good, good. If this works out, we’re going to have the beginnings of something better than our subcontractors, we can finally look forward to cutting that fat free. Glad I’ve got you with me on this, buddy,” he said to his longtime friend.

“Ayoooo,” came the voice of Largo from beneath the table, waving a thumbs up from underneath.

Trim the fat, he said. The part you savor is where you’re lighter and fitter. “Which simply leaves us with, Mr. Bekker? I believe we have a timetable for said subcontracted parties today?”

“The raider groups, sir? They’re on track as set per yesterday’s meetings, and I’ve heard no objections from the leadership,” Bekker’s voice was an automated phone menu designed for renewing auto insurance.

“Yes, well unfortunately you’ll need to arrange them to go to work early, let’s say…” he strategized in his mind, against the known clockwork of how the commies preferred to work that was so exploitable to a mind like his. The plan was to catch them off guard, so switch the attacks from end of shift, to beginning of lunch. “...five hours, they’ll be going in. That if they want pay, they’ll demonstrate versatility by moving up their timetable.”

Bekker expanded his tablet page, and jotted down the changes. “Very good, sir,” his voice said, exiting out of his moving mouth.

“And, you know…” Ellering paused and thought. He smirked. He nodded. Sure, why not, I said it myself, didn’t I? ‘Detritus with a weapon?’ Of course it’s time. “...get van Rooyen on the line for me, as well. I’ve finally got some tasks he’ll be interested in.”

“Sir, quick warning: we still have our assets in the field and they’ve not been apprized of any changes yet,” Bekker said, his body momentarily reviving from its state of living death in the presence of an actual, real thought.

“Yes, right, this is going to be a bit… messy, this one.” Ellering took a moment’s thought. “Well I guess they’re going to be getting an early lunch today from our little messenger, then? Hopefully they can eat whatever it is we’re feeding them with as they run, because, well… not our problem what happens next now, is it?”

---

One of the little features Van had really come to appreciate of his Tombstone PA12-N shotgun, was that it was just short and stubby enough a bullpup that he could stuff it bundled in a blanket into a wilderness-sized rucksack, fully loaded, with spare ammo, and it just made him look like a backpacking drifter with it slung across his back. Instead of a weapon, it was a disguise piece that made him just a guy, ready for anything on the trail. Which was the truth, just, not in the way most people would expect.

Girl Guides don’t typically carry rocket-assisted 12-gauge antivehicle slugs, for one.

His automag was in his waistband holster, hidden beneath the tuck of his armoured jacket, which reinforced the vest he was wearing beneath. Armour, layering armour, layering armoured skin- were it not for his heat regulation augs, he’d have steamed alive beneath the morning sun of the settlement. Instead, his reprocessed blood pumped lizard-cool through an aftermarket circulatory system, keeping the heat off his vitals without making him sweat. He was kitted in plain sight, yet even still, he didn’t feel like it was overkill. He was about to walk into a place that had a nonzero chance of becoming a warzone without warning.

Which is why guns and ammo were always a last line of self-defense in times like this. When Jerry came to him in the morning with a Greenstar visitor union ID and a Greenstar armband, it was like being blessed on high, by an angel that wore a lifting belt. Two little strips of green cloth and an ID with a green star insignia saying he was a union guest wasn’t an infallible defense, but it did form the basis for who he was and what he was doing in a colony being torn up by predators, an explanation that worked at long range.

It was Jerry that offered him the ride he needed to the mining fields. The meeting yesterday wasn’t as sealed as it couldn’t have been, and voices carried through the locked doors. Word had buzzed regardless, that the stranger knew more than the other hands in that room, that he was on to something bigger than just bandits.

“People talkin’ ‘bout getting at the root of things yesterday,” said Jerry, as he led Van to the ranch’s motorpool. “You think you’ve found the root of this shit, is what folks’ sayin’?”

“I think that if what’s causing your problems is something else than what I’m following, then we’ve all got bigger problems than we realize,” is what Van could give him in his full honesty. “So yeah, say that I do.”

“Then I’m on your team today, same as my crew. ‘Cause what the fuck else we gonna do? Donor herds are shacked up in the barns and fed, and we sure as shit ain’t clonin’ no steaks and brisket givin’ the circumstances.”

“That’s fair enough,” Van nodded, happy for the help. He noticed Nicky had piled onto the crew bed of the truck as part of his escort, clutching his AK like it was more a lifeline than a weapon, but with it at least angled more safely. “Just be on your word that just as I don’t do cowboy shit with your people, you folks don’t go on the attack if bad guys show up, on account of you having 99 with you.”

“I gotcha,” he said. “You folks don’t do shit without a proper work order, same as anyone else.”

“Yeah,” Van said, buckling in, “a plan’s kind of important when the problem is shooting at you.”

“Easy to figure when you put it that way,” said Jerry, switching the truck’s AC on, the heat of the day already rising. “Probably still hurts to get shot when you’re bulletproof, or whatever.”

“Oh yeah,” Van said, making the wince in his voice apparent. “It sure does suck.” Until the thing in my brain isolates the nerve clusters causing me pain and shuts them off, then it’s okay, in a relative sort of way, comparatively I guess, is the part he kept internal.

The truck swayed as the last of Jerry’s work crew loaded in, 3 more to add to Nicky and a little, heavy-boned guy who looked like he hadn’t slept properly- at least he was keeping his shotgun pointed toward the ground. Jerry slapped the side panel of his door, with a quick “we good?” A chorus of depressed voices grunted affirmative, the weeks of tension having rendered them grown adults regressed into that nervous ‘yes sir, no sir’ mumble of a teenager with strict parents. “Then we’re off,” said Jerry.

The ride to the ranch yesterday was one where it was hard to focus on the scenery of the colony. Too much stimulation, too many moving parts, too much punching a synthetic horrorshow into a standing TKO for him to be able to pay much attention to the finer details of the landscape, only the shape of the terrain and where enemies might be hiding. He’d never been this far out into the Freelands in either his life bound or unbound. Firsthand, he’d felt the second-Terra qualities of Samoud, a planet he could imagine was what his was like in a pristine, if more primal state, and he’d known the ever-present cold sting in the air of Evergreen, a planet that, despite its name, was mostly arctic badlands but for it’s wildly beautiful equatorial belt that most of its population chose to settle. These were the first two of the Three Gems of the Freelands, the planets in the 50+ stable colony club, where the majority of the galaxy’s known free sapient peoples lived, over a billion and growing. But he’d also been where the millions and the thousands lived as well, from his home aboard the asteroid colony Port of St. Joseph, where 3.8 million souls had efficiently packed themselves into a warehouser’s metropolis, with steel and polymer surroundings that had become overrun with an artificially seeded wilderness, and now the cavern walls climbed with an interstellar congress of ivies and a liquid water heatsink had spawned life enough for a space station to have an avid fishing community; he’d been to the floating rings of Horizon City, a colony built around a massive deepwater deuterium processor on the waterworld Psirathe, where you have to remember to bring a hat or a hood if you head into the industrial sectors, where they don’t have salt-skimmers processing the sea spray out of the air, because your hair will suffer horribly if you don’t; and he’d been to Brokkr’s Bellows, a metalworking and processing station where the thousand plus residents lived in what Van often described to folks who didn’t know the place as ‘a cylindrical mall with a really intense gravity setup.’

But Ometochtli was another new experience, not one to trump the others, but one to stand among their uniqueness. For one, the fucker was hot. Hotter than any place he’d been that wasn’t actually in some sort of distress, like a starship or station where the climate control was busted, or on fire. The sun wasn’t even high yet, and Van’s externals were reading 32 celsius; the other readings were a bit odd, though in that recognizably odd way one can get in regions still undergoing active geoengineering to tweak the local livability. The wind blew one direction, he got salt-sand on the air, fine enough to be a sandblasting medium; it shifted, and suddenly he was reading pollen from the programmable seedlings and the terraforming grass. He saw trenches that he figured might be irrigation from the more established colonies, then realized they were actually terraform trenches- the green-brown tinge in the water was a mineral-bacteriological house party of upper strata soil conditioners, a mix of completely unpleasant stuff that was nonetheless the polar opposite of toxic even if it was a biohazard, and could gently turn the planet’s sod into something friendly to the aliens the colonists were seeding everywhere.

A sign flashed by on the roadside: “THE AQUIFER BELONGS TO EVERYBODY - RECYCLE YOUR TOXICS - DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS.” Never change, sodbusters, Van thought.

He could see the ‘Belongs to Everybody’ was apparent in the landscape. There were roads , ditchwork and embankments, and some places where folks had chosen to either string up enclosures or build stonework walls. But between rolling fields and ranch houses, there weren’t a lot of barbed wire divisions. This was the place where it seemed that the free grazers won out, because the only fences he was seeing anywhere were the tall terraforming fences that surrounded the full extent of the colony’s expanse. He’d only seen them in archival images before, the signs of a young colony on a planet with a living ecosystem that’s willing to play ball with alien plant life, but only with some degree of negotiation. 4 meters tall, with foundational meshwork sunk into the soil another 2 meters down, someone had given him a pretty simple description of what they were: functionally 2-way lint traps, with coarse links to keep large life from spreading in or out, backing a fine mesh with a low-energy static charge to keep finer particulate from spreading as well. The foundational mesh kept root structure from spreading beyond within reason They had a tendency to cake up after a while and start looking like bright orange or yellow adobe walls if not regularly cleaned out, so he read, but the ones he was seeing were well maintained, their flat earth-brown letting them blend into the landscape nicely. Except one section he noticed to his 10 o’clock, atop a stony hillside, that looked like it had been battered over by heavy impacts and… claws?

The truck slowed to a halt, because suddenly, there was something that resembled a dinosaur standing in the road, staring at them.

“Is that a fucking dinosaur?” Van said.

“In a manner of speaking, I guess,” Jerry said. He opened the center console and extracted a revolver that looked like it was bored to fire cigar butts. He pointed it out his open side window. “Get the out of the road,” he shouted at it.

It cocked its head. Then it turned further sidelong, widening its bipedal stance, clicking its foreclaws as it lashed a long tail across the breadth of the road, eyes blinking coldly beneath a feathered and frilled brow.

“Get the fuck out of the road, you fuckin mutt, you fuckin know what you’re doing,” Jerry said, thumbing the hammer on his revolver. “I hate these things, the way they fuck with you keeps me up at night.”

Van stood through the open sunroof of the truck, pulling his automag as he rose. He cast a quick target spread past the creature, picking a pair of stones to either side of its legs, and fired as fast as a man flicking a lightswitch on-off, letting the recoil carry his aim. Two 11 millimeter slugs propelled out of super-high pressure casings turned rock to rubble, kicking up a noise and hailstorm that sent the beast rearing out of sheer instinct. With oily speed, it turned and scurried into the ditch, down the roadside and up the hill through the fence break.

“In my experience, things with lizard brains tend to only understand force,” Van said, safing his pistol and ducking back into his seat.

Jerry made a sound of pause, a little “uh, woah,” that leaked out on his exhale. It was the sound of someone seeing the true mark of professional work, after a lot of spirited amatuer efforts. It was the sound of someone who didn’t know people could actually shoot like that.

“Yeah, well,” Jerry said instead, collecting himself as he released the brakes, “those guys, range raptors? Think they understand a lot more than that, and that’s the problem with ‘em.”

“They take you being in their territory personal?” Van asked. Local fauna that seemed benign suddenly ‘going nasty’ once a few habs go down was a problem more common in the Freelands than most people wanted to admit. Urban encroachment has a way of going extremely wrong on planets with particularly spicy native physiologies.

“It’s not even that. Fucker’s ‘ll play with you,” Jerry said, letting his foot sink in a little deeper than he normally would along that road. “Thing you learn real quick out here? After dark? If you hear a sound outside your pitch, and you go looking for it, and it starts leading you around, yknow, first one click here, then two clicks over there, and so on? Get back inside, right the fuck now.”

“You’re getting lured out for a midnight snack,” Van said.

“Yeah, ‘cept sometimes, you’re just a toy, they don’t even move in for the kill, they just… play,” said Jerry, shivering.

Van nodded slow, grim. “I getcha. Though for what it’s worth, the way you deal with something with power that wants to play games?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t play.”

---

That the noise of the mining sector in open air could match the din of St. Joseph’s warehousing district from inside an asteroid cavern was proof the hills of New Laredo were rich. Under the guidelines of the C-FIC, planetside mineral take on a world with native life had to be a sustainable harvest with regards to preserving the local environment, not a ruthless stripmine. Even so, taking the hypodermic needle approach to resourcing the landscape was still managing to pull up so much Shiny, the sheer volume of machinery running at max capacity, for blocks upon square blocks of complex, made the mining fields scream like the deck of a drone carrier during a massed sortie.

So it was, when Van exited the truck’s cab into the central parking lot, and the full volume hit him, making his “Jesus Christ” into a silent movie emote not even he could hear. He dialed his hearing augs in accordingly- noise filters on? Yes, extremely yes. The world’s roar deadened to a muted rumble in response, the bassy sound of a bath running as heard from beneath the water, interspersed with the odd hiss and bleep of trebel, far more pleasant than the machine hellscape of engines designed to turn rock into metal trying to bellow over one another. Actually quite relaxing, really.

“Hey Jerry?” He called from over the roof of the cab. “Say something, I need to hear if-”

“WHAT?” Jerry screamed back, as he exited the truck. It registered clear enough for Van’s logger to transcribe it as text.

“Thanks, audio check is good,” Van said, from within his cybernetic cone of silence.

“CAN’T FUCKIN HEAR YOU,” Jerry called back.

Van came round, leaned in close, made his voice big, but not shouty: “I’M GONNA GO TALK TO FOLKS. GET THE TRUCK TO SOMEPLACE WHERE YOU AND YOUR CREW CAN KEEP BOTH EYES AND EARS OPEN. I’LL CALL IF I NEED YOU, AND YOU’VE GOT MY NUMBER IF YOU SPOT ANYTHING.”

Jerry’s eyes were fixed on the bag across his shoulder. “YOU SURE YOU NEED THAT? JUST SAYIN’, YOU’RE OUTTATOWNER, AND THAT MIGHT BE A PROBLEM.”

“DON’T KNOW THAT I WON’T NEED IT, AND THAT’S WHY I’M TAKING IT.”

Jerry said something Van couldn’t pick up on audio, but his eyes caught the mouth movement, his software logging the lipread as plaintext: “Fair enough.”

“RIGHT MAN, GOOD LUCK,” he shouted back instead. “DON’T… DO NOTHIN’ BAD, I GUESS.”

Van could barely pick up the sound of the crew truck’s high-torque plasma turbine engine as it pulled away behind him, with Jerry giving him a double tap on the horn as a quick “seeya” as he pulled onto the ecopave tarmac of the main mining road. It only just noticed it go, as all around him, the sound of a hundred orchestra’s worth of industrial equipment worked the practical magic to turn dirt to steel and pull gold out of rock. Ore silos rose like metropolis skyscrapers, mass product hoppers trickling raw material onto conveyors like highway systems, dumping them into tumbling mechanical crushers to ‘eggshell’ them, to further be reduced and concentrated to powder in the grav press further down the line. Every 30 seconds to a minute or so, the complex a block down the road with the 4 big thermal ventstacks would turn into a big shudder of aug-suppressed noise, ultra-high frequency vibration and all sorts of exciting electromagnetic readings. That building Van figured had to be the local steel mill, given the readings, a superconducting field crucible design, more or less atmospherically neutral with the proper oxide capture devices built into the stacks. A lot of extremely high tech, to do something that a friendly face in a bar once described as “a big magnet array that lifts iron and carbon into a big ball, that also contains the sustained plasma jet that turns that big ball into suspended, flowing molten steel.” They called them Steel Sun crucibles, and you only needed to see one work once to know why. Van had seen one in an extremely up close fashion years ago in his past life- he’d thrown someone into the superheated surface of one underway on Geryon Station.

He shivered and brushed the ugly memory aside.

These were the main event talents of the sector, but all around, he was surrounded by more specialized facilities, with their specialized crews. A tiny woman in an lifter exo with stonepuller claws lifted boulders off the back of a heavy dump truck and military pressed them into a gravel pulverizer- stones picked from terraformed fields, turned to foundation material for buildings. Others were driving tow-lifters full of spent tailings up to the hopper end of a fine-grind processor, turning the remains of formerly metal rich ore into the beginnings of hardcrete- hardly a glamorous job, but a hell of a useful one. Beyond them, teams of lifter exos barged stacks of aluminum rods, still fresh-hot in their arms as they walked them from the extruder’s main building, to the storage shed on the same property.

They were all still working. Despite everything, all of them were still working. Fucking Freeland unions.

That’s when he spotted the how and why: 3 people in a pickup, on the bank of the raised and fenced vehicle lot, 2 blocks down, across the road. One of them was standing overwatch on a Red Army machine gun mounted roughshod to the cab roof, with the two sitting inside on lookout, protected behind a layer of Hillbilly up-armouring. Then another hit, farther down, higher up, on what he figured was the exterior walkways of an ore shed- team of two, one of them with a rifle, the other a goddamned rocket propelled grenade launcher. He did a double take, and spotted at the door that the guys standing guard were doing it with folding-stocked autopistol conversions they were hiding in the folds of their worksuits. And then after all that, another MG technical rolled by, this one a certifiable partywagon, not just with a machine gunner crewing the roof-gun, but a bedload of Magistral Resourcing workers with guns and worksuits pumped up with security-grade ballistic vests as well.

Diligence and lack of cordiality had a way of getting things done, but it made for poisonous communities. What he was seeing wasn’t healthy, but he’d heard of it before, and now, he was pretty sure he was seeing it firsthand: the sentiment of ‘they want what we’ve got, but fuck ‘em, so punch in, and let ‘em come see what happens.’ It was just a feeling, but it was a really bad one.

He felt eyes on him, and it wasn’t his sensors alerting him; he was sticking out with his looking, and people were starting to look in turn. This in and of itself was escalation; Van knew this the hard way, as his life was rife with people who had gone from being perfectly calm and passive, to looking at him, to shooting at him, in those steps exactly. So the move here, was intercede and deescalate.

He just need to figure a way to approach the locals that didn’t look like he was walking up on him.

“Hey folks!” he waved to the guards at the door across the way, made himself non-threateningly conspicuous. At least if he set them off, he was certain their machine pistols wouldn’t be able to do much to his external armouring. “Y’all know where the work desk is?”

“EAR PROTECTION BRO, I CAN’T HEAR,” one of them called back.

Fucksakes, Van thought. He gestured to him with the ‘me-you up close’ point and nod, and the guy waved him across the street.

“Looking for the work desk,” Van said, beneath the more merciful acoustics of the break-hab’s front overhang.

“You want Magistral work as a Greenstar guest?” said the guy in the worksuit patched with armour bits. The woman standing with him stood silent, her face too purposefully smeared for it to not be an amateur’s enthusiastic attempt at camouflage; maybe she though he couldn’t see her if she stayed still.

“Nah, I’m just looking for someone that could put me in touch with folks that know about the local blackhats,” is what Van chose to give him.

The guy’s eyes narrowed, but nothing about him tensed beyond that. “Greenstars are bringing in outsider help with this, then?”

“A few figure having some fresh eyes could help the situation, y’know?”

The guy nodded, but even moreso the woman, suddenly roused from her stillness. Van realized he much of her camo job was hiding how tired her eyes were. “Naw, I get it,” the guy said, easing up his posture, letting his gun arm rest a little. He held it like he hadn’t put it down in days.

“I’ve been doing my best to get in there whenever they show up, is all I can say,” said the guy. “They run up, every six, seven, eight days. Sometimes you see ‘em coming a mile off, like some of them aren’t even scared or shit, I dunno,” he scratched his nose, darted his eyes. “Like one time a truckload of them just drove up on us from klicks out, we could see the the dust trail from forever away. They just came up on us like a work crew, up until we could tell they weren’t. And then sometimes, they just show up, and none of us know what the fuck.”

“Howzat, they just come out of the crowd?”

“Come outta fuckin nowhere,” the guy said, his scratching now very apparently a nervous tick. “The ore shed they torched, folks said they saw them come out of the ditch culvert, like they were sitting in there the whole day waiting. You explain that one to me.”

“I can’t,” Van said. Probably some ninjas on the Mutual’s payroll, he thought to himself. Either that or Ellering bought up some local pros from the larger settlements. “How many of them were there?”

“Too many,” the woman said. A momentary look of sick overcame her, before she straightened out. “We coulda found ‘em if we just looked but, complacent.”

Van felt the urge to raise an eyebrow, but held it flat. Having to check in pipes for bandits wasn’t something anyone had cause to feel complacent about. He hated seeing doubt in people like that, the nerves, the panophobia. It’s what he used to prey on. For a colony, it was 100% pure well poison.

The details he got from them were boots on the ground accounts, and nothing he didn’t know before, beyond the fact the guy at the door said he shot down someone he was sure used to live on the outskirts of the settlement until they chased him and his people out for cooking meth. He didn’t ask for their names, he didn’t need people getting on edge over the stranger taking people’s personals. Instead, he just asked for folks who’d also be willing to talk, on introduction- how the Freelands work, so people can vet one another. So the guy called to someone else inside the break-hab to watch the door for him, and then he took Van up the block.

“They’ve only hit us twice before that wasn’t during the day, once at full dark, once at sunset, and this was early on,” the tiny lady in the big exorig said. “You’d think they’d all be stupid showing up when they do, and a lot of them are. But then,” she took hands off controls to gesture northeast, “those guys that got the ore shed, those guys…” her voice trailed off.

“I think they were fuckin’ deathsquadders,” one of the guys pounding gravel to hardcrete said, “they moved like some bullshit death squad, like that was who they were back in the I-G. Guys like that killed my uncle when I was 10.”

“Every one of them was a terran,” said that guy’s arissiyan coworker, whose accent was more used to speaking Spanish than English, “no other hominids, unless they’ve got cogitoi under the camouflage.”

“How’d they look?” Van asked.

“Sorry, friend,” said one of the arissiyan workers at the aluminum extruder, “they were a head and shoulders shorter than me and half a body wider, that’s all the terran I could make out. Hate to be that person, but it’d be like you spotting my ears at a distance, that’s as much as I got of them, besides their shouting.”

“What were they shouting? You get anything from them?” Van asked.

“That’s the fucked up thing,” said a terran driving a loader full of rods. “I think they were speaking rhidling.”

“Rhidling?” Van said. “Can you give me some?”

“Only thing I heard clearly is when one went down, another one yelled something like, uh, ‘kak-huit?’” He said. “Like I said, didn’t get much, but I don’t know any other languages that sound like it.”

A kaket was a savory, flaky pastry from the northwestern provinces of Rhishay that used shaza fat as the shortening. It was also a derisive term that could mean ‘lazy and out of shape’ in certain contexts. In Van’s book, it didn’t make sense from a language standpoint, and his own northern Lakrei dialect was good enough to get him compliments on his ‘gangster accent.’ But beyond English and Lakrei, his language skills were mostly based in what The Canine was programmed to know, and they were only Consortium-legal languages- English and Russian Tradespeak, Consortial Ios, Rhidling Standardized -a major oversight in his own design, a myopic choice made by a man who truly believed in his own Loyalist Superiority, that Freelanders were nothing but inferior people that couldn’t make anything without what the Consortium had given them.

You’re gonna talk to Rosetta, Van said, having an idea.

You don’t make me talk to her, the Canine said. I hate her.

What’s that thing you used to say to me, junction-box? Van smiled internally at the chance to torture the angry little machine in his brain, ‘your enjoyment is secondary?’ That sound familiar?

It grumbled.

You talk to the language AI, and I’ll let you tear out one of these blackhat’s spinal columns, deal?

It made a noise of placation. But only just placation.

“Go back to the camouflage though- I thought these guys were just running at you Black-Flagged?” Van asked.

“The dumb ones were,” said the guy in the front of the MG truck. “The folks that came out of the culverts were cammed, and it was actually good. It’s how they got away so clean, we tried to chase them with camera drones, but they blended into a duststorm and just…” he trailed off, and made a little whistle instead of finishing his sentence.

“The one I got, looked like he was tailored for the colony,” the big-shouldered lady arming the machine gun in the back said. “His uni blended better than the fuckin’ militia’s unis. ‘Cause, y’know, we like to be able to see our own militia.”

“I gotta ask a question that seems like I’m trying to wedge you, but it’s just something I gotta know,” Van couched himself for what he was going to drop. He knew what he had to ask had a number of wrong ways it could be taken, and stressed people with guns were the wrong people to take things the wrong way. “You get any offers for help from the other unions, they ever come around? Greenstar, Big Country?” He paused, but just barely perceptibly- the subtle loading of emphasis of what he was actually asking about: “NuWay?”

“Greenstars wanna try something, I think,” said the tiny woman in the exo, pointing at Van’s lanyard. “Some of them, at least. Big Country are just circling the wagons.”

“NuWay’s a buncha fuckin’ empty shirts, like usual,” one of the folks at the gravel crusher said. “The Greenstars mean well, but that’s about all they do,” the arissiyan added, upending their load into the gravel hopper.

“Big Country just comes up here to yell at us for modding the machinery,” one of the guys at the aluminum extruder said. “The Greenstars are half accelerationists, half hippies. And like, not the active kinda hippies, the really useless Peace-And-Love-At-All-Cost kind. We don’t need either at the moment, we need an actual plan.”

“NuWay only comes down from their tower when they need to fuck with the phone pickets and the network lockers,” the guy with the exo loaded down with rods said, gesturing while forgetting he was harnessed into somatic hardware and nearly spilling his load. “Their service still drops calls like a motherfucker, though,” he said, righting himself. “Buncha stumblefucks…”

“The Greenstars… they’re farmers. And I know that sounds rich coming from a miner, but you know how shit goes right? You watch a few of your friends get crushed, gotta tell their families they died choking in a live grave? Yeah, you get hard doing this shit, hard in a way shooting at bichos that get too close to the pens doesn’t make you,” the guy in the gun truck’s driver seat said. “The ones that wanna help, they wanna help, but I dunno if they’ve got the whole-ass for it.”

The gunner whistled, low but sharp. “3 o’clock, McCafferty,” she said.

“And then, this motherfucker,” the driver said to Van, out the corner of his mouth.

A matte, slate-gray Clydesdale crew-cab pulled down the central road, rolling orange-tan dust behind it as it cruised in. There was a heavy-frame cogitoi behind the wheel, whose frame the Canine assessed as a loader/laborer chassis, wearing a face that was custom engineered to lay down the vibe of a bouncer or personal security. The terran next to him looked roided- he could have been a religious lifter, or someone from a high gravity colony, but being a gymnaut alone didn’t make people look that angry, and high gravity didn’t make people that blotchy and vascular.

Supersoldier? The Canine posited, thinking it might have smelled one of its own.

Asshole, Van replied. The Canine drew targeters around the both of them anyway, just for good measure.

The truck had the logo of Big Country Machineworks emblazoned across its hood and flanking its front doors, its windows tinted dark. The rear driver’s side rolled down, and a grade-A white egg with a thick salt-and-pepper horseshoe ‘stache leaned out.

“You people know you weigh down those trucks with that shit, we’re not fixing any broken axels or blown engines, correct?” he said.

Van frowned on the inside. The diction, the commanding tone, the squared off and trumped-up authority- this guy was a cop, conducted himself like a cop. More to the point, he acted like a cop that was used to giving orders, the steady eyes, the flat stare, the stiff lip.

Van’s memory flashed, blurred. five years ago? Maybe six? He couldn’t tell, his mind didn’t fully inhabit his own augs when it did this, he couldn’t get a timestamp. What he did know, was that he was in a stall of the command-echelon bathroom, on the 40th floor of the Los Angeles massed population center police department HQ. The egg was staring wildly into Van’s eyes, bloodshot, as he exhaled rotten, dying breath in place of an audible knell; Van had stabbed him with a flattened palm, thrust like a giant screwdriver upward and under his ribcage, straight through his diaphragm and into the hollow of his chest. The Canine registered that he’d punctured a lung and torn his aorta, and the deluge that spilled from the crater where Van ripped loose from him confirmed that. He didn’t bleed out, so much as he splash-emptied onto the tile floor; Brian wanted this particular shift chief done ugly. One of the guy’s goons had laid a mistaken hand on the daughter of one of the Loyalist gentry Brian had as an asset, as part of Chief-y’s side gig as a ‘labor acquisition service.’ The Asset had called in a favor for a favor to Brian- make the lessers suffer, in the name of His Princess. It wasn’t any more or less than that: in a raid at a club for some commoners to sell on the gray market, a doom-squadder in a skull-mask made the mistake of laying a single hand on the shoulder of a young gentry-lady slumming it, and made her feel dirtied and uncomfortable as a result. For that, Van had found the guy at his day job, mangled him, fed him his own balls through broken teeth, then caved his face in with a chopping hammerfist that drove his prone, bone-broken body through his own squadroom desk. Then he fatally mutilated 3 other cops that were part of Chief-y’s side gig, parting them out alive, before spider crawling back into the elevator shaft, his infiltration point that he’d zombied the security sensors of- Chief-y was his last stop.

The egg stared at him, run through front to back, his body weakly listing from side to side like it was trying to do something, anything to fight back. He looked slightly different in the then from the now- he had a high and tight instead of being shaved bald, and birth control glasses to boot, but that mustache, that awful fucking hair-horseshoe, twisted by the rictus of a mouth silently expressing dying agony- what a thing to remember.

He remembered the two other cops on high alert, who heard the sound of Chief-y hitting the wall of the stall when he finally keeled over and died. There was the woman he’d cuffed across the jaw with an elbow slash when he kicked open the bathroom door and she made the mistake of coming at him with her control rod alone. He grabbed her in a standing guillotine, wrenching up with a crack that turned her legs to cooked pasta, and pulling her into the path of her partner’s raised service sidearm. The rapid panic fire that turned her to ribbons blew through and pinged off Van’s Black Knight armour like it was pellets from an air pistol. He flung her paralyzed and rapidly expiring mass into her partner, and he collapsed under her dead weight, grunting and screaming when the full enormity of what had happened sank in. Van dialed in a full-power expenditure from his reserves, surged forward, and kicked them apart with a single scything lunge that tore through them like a pitching wedge through turf, sending their remains up the wall and onto the ceiling. Then he hurled himself headlong through the nearest northside window, toward the coordinates of the extraction balloon that Brian claimed he’d have hanging in position, “as long as you’re a Good Boy, Van.”

“But only if you’re a Good Boy,” Van remembered his voice, his vision bloodspattered, his hands stained red, as the streets of LA roared towards him at terminal velocity. He remembered the panic of spotting the little blinking thermal flare on the skyhook in his HUD, the tiny quick-attach loop of metal, dangling from a rope, dangling from a ballooned thruster assembly that would lift him to his extraction helo; he remembered thinking ‘my hands are too wet, I’m going to slip this time’; he remembered what it was to be a mind freely thinking all of this, while also being forced to merely be a passenger along for the ride, trapped in a body constrained by the controller augment butchered into his brain.

He blinked, and was back in the present. The egg was still mean mugging him and the gun truck, a half second later.

Do not make me kill you again, he said to himself. It felt raw, it felt wrong, but he needed to let the words exist in his mind for a moment. To let the pressure out.

“Oh you mean these trucks made to carry ore and tools, these trucks?” the driver slapped his dash. “It’s a machine gun, Tom, it ain’t a fuckin’ hardcrete drum.”

“Yeah, plus ammo, plus about a half ton of hillbilly armour that you know won’t do shit,” said ‘Tom.’ “Except maybe blow the torque helix when you try to fire up and move that thing.”

“It’s a fucking plasma turbine not an electro, it’s built for this shit,” the guy in the passenger seat picked his moment to shout suddenly, unmoving behind his shades.

“We didn’t built it for that shit is the point,” ‘Tom’ snapped back. “And given that we didn’t build it for that shit, Big Country is officially not liable for any repairs needed caused by those mods, we clear?”

“Yeah,” the driver said, “I guess we are.”

Wordlessly, with a flat frown, he rolled up the window and the truck drove on, kicking up more dust as they powered off.

“Guy should see a doctor about his persistent hardon,” Van said, trying to physically wipe the phantom blood from his eyes.

“He’s had it for about a decade,” the gunner said. “Guess if he figures it hasn’t killed him yet…”

“And he’d be, if you don’t mind me asking?” Van ventured.

“That’s Tom McCafferty, he’s one of Big Country’s crew bulls. Guy was born a dick, but he’s effective like that, is the thing,” the truck’s driver said. “He doesn’t talk a lot, he just works. Probably why he takes minutes at the council meetings.”

“I know the type,” Van said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know that he’s taking this all as straight as he thinks he is, cause he’s been more about keeping a handle on the shit his teams work on, rather than the colony itself,” the driver said.

“Yeah, heard,” Van said, “folks don’t handle pressure all the same. Makes ‘em take odd priorities, some of them.” Nothing was right about what was happening around him, but Van made a note, that even less felt right about what just happened. Maybe it was just a bad memory, echoes of trauma. Maybe the trauma had taught him something to look out for.

The dust blew away, and in the clear, a brightly coloured little pip of Out of Place lit up his vision: in the midst of a militarized industrial complex, and people cussedly, determinedly working amid their coworkers holding armed watch, was a barbecue-red Dot Micro, one of the premier small-chassis cars of the Freelands, that nonetheless looked like a ladybug amidst the heavy machinery. Van zoomed his vision augs, and made the emblem on the side: ‘Sweetsmoke Texas Barbecue: We Deliver!’ From it, emerged a geek in a matching red shirt, that looked like he was about to be blown into the upper atmosphere from the next stiff breeze. He pulled an enormous hotbag from his passenger door, extracted a single small paper bag from it, then bopped off toward a bank of administrative offices, dance-walking to something on his earphones.

The fuck are you doing, little man? Van thought to himself.

Prey, the Canine said, simply.

Yeah, he is, Van couldn’t help but agree. Why’s he so nonchalant?

Hunt him down. On general principle, the Canine was trying to get pushy.

Follow, yes, Van said. Hunt? Shut the fuck up.

“Right, thanks for your time, folks,” Van said, trying to to appear outwardly irked. He was failing; he was pointing like a human German Shepherd. “Getting a clear picture of what you’ve got here,” he added, stalking off.

“You think you can help?” the machinegunner called after him.

“Let’s find out,” he called back.

The main advantage Van had in his tail of this particular individual in a red shirt, was that the surrounding environment was for once louder than he was. Patent absurdity: that a 6’2 man that looked roughly 240, but was in fact 370, with eyes that looked deadly even when they didn’t involuntarily flash a glowing green, could sneak around on tippy-toes and not get noticed. On most days, the best that Van Parker, the world’s worst professional shinobi could manage, was a tightrope walk of ‘large, intense man looking casual, but not too casual,’ perhaps while on his way to take in the local street race or pitfight. But in the sustained mechanical grind and whine of the mining complex, where a person could get locked into deafened tunnel vision without realizing it, Van had one simple objective: don’t let the guy look at you too hard. Because without fail, it only takes one good look back. Then there’s the double-take that follows. Then they start running.

But in this case, the wint in the red shirt didn’t seem to realize he was in the middle of a warzone. He didn’t seem to notice anything, and that might have been the earplugs he was wearing. Except as Van inched closer, he saw- they were earbuds. He was listening to music.

He was used to this. But what seemed stranger to Van was, the world surrounding seemed used to him, too. Maybe it was just that he knew he’d be out of a hotzone in a matter of minutes that he could take things so lackadaisical, but then again, nobody could really tell where and when. So then, why? Why do you so vibe as you go about your day, little man?

He turned, and Van winced internally, emitting his best psychic ‘don’t look this way!’ When he wheeled through the open door the left, he snorted and tutted at himself, shaking out the sillies of his tailing nerves. Then, as casually as he could, he subtly slammed himself against the wall of the office block, pressing as much of himself against it as he could, making it look like he was leaning as best he could. With contact established, he configured his sensors for a structural eavesdrop, full sensitivity and calibration to his outer tissues’ ‘surface mic’ functions so he could listen in through the structure of the building itself. He dialed in:

“No, we’re not stopping for nothing. You want work, just come to the desk, we’ve got hours.” Nope, not it.

“You know I love you. You know this isn’t about work, this is about our lives, too.” Not it either. Also, sorry.

A half dozen other things he didn’t want to hear, but needed to be sure wasn’t what he was listening for. Little details of other people’s business and lives that he resolved to nonetheless take to the grave with him, just like everything else he knew that he shouldn’t.

“Listen it’s easy for you, but this shit affects me, y’know? You fuckin’ think I’m gonna have a good one?”

“Bro I don’t know what you got with your meal, but it ain’t me, so don’t get at me over it, right? It’s an expression.”

Bingo. Gas, grass or dumbass. Van narrowed his sweep, focused on the interior room. It was too deep in the building for him to pick up vitals, but the two voices were clear and distinct.

“Oh so this shit is just a joke to you, huh? Maybe you wanna see what this says for once?”

“Nah bro, against policy for me to even open that bag. Freshness guaranteed, y’all know?”

“You little piece of shit, I am… I gotta fuckin, get going.”

“Yeah, like I said, have a good one.”

Tell me you did something with all that structural data I just audio-tunneled through, Van said to the Canine. It growled with pride and purpose, and overlaid a map rendering of the office block interior. It had even backfilled the rest of the map, having cross-referenced the union code-stamps on the girders it had scanned through, against known schematics in its knowledgebase- the complex was a Livsrum Hjalmarsson 4F Eighth-Block, a hab design he knew well, as roughly half the prefabs in St. Joes were Livsrum designs, including his apartment.

See that? Be like that more often, and we might call what we have a relationship, he said to the voice in his head.

We have no relationship? the Canine asked.

We have cohabitation, Van said. This is a pair of idiots driving a race car, us.

The noise the Canine made at this was strangely thoughtful. Accepting, even.

It was a good day whenever they could go to work on the same page. Together, they ducked into the offices as one.

---

He didn’t know what the guy’s problem was, that Jackie S, or whatever it said on the delivery receipt. All he knew, is that out of all the guys that he was getting paid to pass messages to, in their specifically by-car delivery meals, this one was the one with the biggest, most active bug up his ass. He didn’t know what the message said, he was specifically paid not to, and that this dude didn’t have it in him to just accept a simple fact, even if it wasn’t an easy one for him… well, that was just a sign of someone who wasn’t together as they could be, he guessed. It takes all kinds to make the galaxy move, and unfortunately, some of those kinds didn’t have an easy way through life, just by their own doing.

And some, like him, could ride the waves. Like him, they could change, they could adapt, they could learn to thrive amid the revolutions per minute taking place all around. Like him, they were people who didn’t have problems, they were people who had obstacles.

He rounded the corner down the corridor from Jackie’s office, and found, an obstacle: namely, that the narrow prefab hallway he was expecting to be clear on the way out, was instead almost fully walled off by a man in a leather jacket shaped like he should be wearing multiple wrestling belts, with the aura of a prehistoric dog and eyes full of green electricity.

The waves froze, and he was frozen with them.

---

“Got anything for me?” Van asked, becoming roughly the two billionth asshole in the galaxy to ever make that joke to a delivery guy.

There wasn’t anything particularly ninja about his approach on the guy, just some simple timing: people have a shock response when they think they’re suddenly about to collide with another person, they step back and flinch, going on the defensive. It’s the mental equivalent of slipping and falling in a fight, an immediate and unexpected disadvantage that can inspire panic in almost anyone.  You want to scare the shit out of someone, so bad they comply out of sheer sudden fright? Don’t chase, get in their face, was Van’s own personal motto.

He gauged the wint’s response. 5’7 of wheatstalk, and now dealing with a redlining heart rate. Wet paper had more colour than he did.

“Uh,” he said, “excuse me.”

“Sorry,” Van said. “I said, ‘you got anything for me?’” He leaned in, and lowered his eyes to the guy’s.

“Uh,” the wint said again, and Van swore he could hear the volume increase on his pulse through his opened mouth. He shifted from side to side.

No way, Van thought. The Canine made a hideous noise, of pure, naked, malevolent delight.

The wint squared his stance.

No fuckin’ way, Van thought.

SWING, SNACK! SWING! The Canine howled.

The swipe that the wint had flailed at him was a kitten’s attempt at a looping right hook. It was also a terrible mistake to attempt it in an enclosed space, as when Van gave it a few clean centimeters of headspace with his duck, the blow ripped wide and off balance, scraping along the wall and peeling the skin on his knuckles as it listed him sideways. He clutched at his reddened hand, overcome by the sudden burn in his knuckles.

Then he realized what happened, and made eye contact with Van, still looming, smirking, eyes electric. Van, who jabbed him once to the chin, with an open hand, causing him to teeter like a mortally wounded bowling pin, the fluidity of his consciousness turning to a thick slurry.

In a single motion, Van stepped past the wint while grabbing him in a chancery hold, noosing him with an audible gargle, dragging him along on chicken-walking legs as he tried to say something slurred and drunk. Third door, on the right. Please nobody walk out and see this. Ain’t nobody here but us crooks.

Made it- Van laid a hand on the door, putting a sensor pulse through it and into the office beyond. There was just one heartbeat, just one thermal signature. Plus, a paper bag with delicious barbecue laid out on the desk. He flung it wide, and pitched the wint in like he was a mesh sack full of laundry, sending him tumbling over the office’s guest chair and into the corner of the room. Van stepped through, with a sidewise glare leveled at the man he knew was standing behind the desk, who met his look like he was staring down a truck running a crosswalk.

“You gonna eat that?” Van asked, gesturing at the bag.

The man went from a still photograph of a man experiencing an exploding aorta, to a blur of greasy speed scrambling over his desk, trying to formulate the stutter-step pattern that would allow him to dart around Van to his momentary and hideous freedom. His formula was trash, causing him to collide face-first into Van’s side, like a vacuum-bot encountering wall trim. He tried again, and almost clotheslined himself against the arm Van stuck against the wall to block him. So he pushed Van, angrily, face red and eyes welling with tears when he didn’t budge.

So he reared back to throw a right hand.

Are you fucking kidding me, today? Van thought.

yummy Yummy YUMMY, the Canine howled.

The straight he threw was better than the wint’s, but that wasn’t saying much. Van slipped it low and to the side, then lifted it with his shoulder, hooking the man’s arm and clamping a hand to his throat.

VIOLENCE IS THE ONLY VALID ART FORM, the Canine roared.

Jesus fuck, tone it down, we need him alive, Van thought, choosing the peaceful option of setting the man straight with a hard backhand across the chops.

“You got something you wanna share with me?” Van said, rocking the man in his grip, making him marionette dance through sheer cybernetic might. “Something maybe he shared with you?”

That’s when the man’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he went dead weight. Van, not looking to hang the man to death with his own augmented strength, let him drop to the floor.

An odd moment passed. Idly, Van thought to close the door behind him, locking it.

So just to be clear, he’s not faking, right? Van said to the Canine.

The Canine responded with a sensor ping, arrayed for detailed vitals:

ADVIS: Target Biosigns Significantly Altered

ASSMT: Brainwave pattern momentarily disrupted; target is unconscious

CNCLS: Target neutralized; less lethal administered

Right, Van said inwardly, sighing outwardly. And the guy in the corner?

ASSMT: Brainwave pattern momentarily disrupted; target is unconscious

CNCLS: Target neutralized; less lethal administered

He took a slow blink, and a slow breath in through the nose. The barbecue in the bag smelled astonishing, so much so he instinctively ran a spectral analysis of what he was smelling, until he scrubbed it aside and decided he’d rather be surprised by his tastebuds instead. Then he let it out through his mouth, and let the bad feelings escape with it. He righted the guest chair, and had himself a seat.

“My workflow…” Van Parker said to a room full of sprawled bodies.