A Quick Death in Texas Prewriting: Chapter Seven - 100% Pure Well Poison

Sometimes detective work is as simple as putting yourself in the right place to hear something you shouldn't.

Welcome to the next day. It’s time to kickstart a morning blessed by a trickster god. There’s a lot of moving parts in play, and what’s crucial is the order they move in. So, let’s do some refrigerator poetry:

• Ellering is having a bad time of things. It wasn’t enough that he had to speak with his non-infiltrating assets- you know, the bandit scum -before lunch in a civil matter, but then he later in the evening had to schedule and emergency call with them, in order to move up the timetable. Carly’s man failed. Carly’s man failed in spectacular measure. Then, he committed the greatest sin of all: he turned his phone off. The fucker is loose, and there’s not one, but two 99 operators in play now. This is unacceptable, and it’s thrown his entire rhythm off. His Thoughtcrafting Meditations have been disrupted! Now everything has to be shifted around, he hates rescheduling- it’s destroying precious perfection to him. Never mind that, time to make the settlement pay for their insolence; bring to bear the actuators, and bleed these plebs dry. Also, tell the valuable union busters to keep their heads down, and that means mobilizing his sneakernet- Burger Boy Away!
• Arriving to scout the mining belt is Van, being driven to a row of oresheds and processing yards by a dispatch of Jerry, Nicky and a couple of other Greenstars, who promise to stand by him on guard, as cred to the local unioners. He doesn’t reject this help, as he’d be effectively wandering into a warzone with a third party’s uniform otherwise- that just gets you shot at by everyone. So with the proper introductions made, Van starts tentatively prodding. The long and short, is that he gets walled off, up until he sets a little pebble rolling, that someone might be running a section 99 operation against all this anti-union banditry going about, and that he might be the intel agent for that operation. This is reinforced when someone notices him as the guy who beat up the Huge Metal Fucker at the starport yesterday, or at least figures him in as the guy. The greater details they’ve gleaned:
  • Magistral Resourcing stands as one of the most united of the unions against the banditry. Big Country is caught between moderates that want to wait for outside reinforcement and Texan Proud types that want to deal with matters locally. Greenstar, meanwhile, is caught between firebrand direct action eco warriors that want to fertilize the soil with some nice rich bandit blood, and the gentler agriculturalists who either don’t want to fight, period, or can’t.
  • Freebird Broward was about, trying to lay hands on mining explosives or anything he can use to turn fertilizer into a bomb. He’s one of the bigger agitators in the Greenstars, though he leans toward more the ‘violently rugged individualist’ bent rather than the type that’s just trying to protect his home. They sent him packing.
  • They’ve been trying to up-armour their own personal trucks and haulers, and this means they’ve been getting mean visits from Big Country reps complaining that they aren’t going to be handling any repairs that stem from them overloading their machines with extra plating and mounted weapons. Even McCafferty came by in person to be grumpy about matters.
  • People are tired of getting robbed just for trying to live their life, they’re angry, and they’re ready to make the next wave pay after the losses their union took the last time. He came to a bad neighborhood- he might not be unwelcome, but the mining belt is highly fucking flamable at the moment.
  • The real big problem is that people aren’t just keeping their weapons pointed toward the bandits; they’re starting to point at Big Country’s people.
• Which is why the appearance of a Dot Micro, a 2-seater electric car that Van has it on good authority he can bench press the front end of, marked with the logo of Sweetsmoke Barbecue delivery. This is something that to Van’s mind, could be nothing. Just like a tank outside a preschool could be nothing. Just like an ice cream truck at Stalingrad could be nothing. Which means that in Van’s experience, it’s not nothing, it’s the thing he’s looking for. So he moves to investigate, real quiet and slowlike, pinging his sensors like a submarine hunting a merchant vessel.
• “Look, it’s a simple message, heads down past noon, that’s all I got.” “Yes well, instructions unclear, where do I keep my head down at, dumbass, it’s a warzone out here?” “Do you want the sandwich or not? Because that’s the only thing else I’ve got for you.”
  • Why so specific, barbecue guy?
• Van appears from a cloud of dust, and asks the barbecue guy what’s going down past noon. Lucky Kellog, not exactly being a bright light, decides the best decision when confronting a stranger who’s asking a potentially sensitive question, is to try and hit him in the face and run. This is inadvisable to try with Van if you’re not some sort of fellow synthetic or otherwise a metasapient. Van simply ducks his clumsy swing and jabs him unconscious. And is slightly disappointed by how little he put up. But obviously, this guy’s worth talking to, so he zipties his dumbass and throws him into the passenger seat of his Micro.
• Now Van’s after the homeboy barbecue man was talking to, which allows him to make use of a skill of his he had even before he had his augments: he smells barbecue and follows it like a trail, through the small admin office the guy had delivered it to, out the back, where he spies Jackie Santana with the bag balanced on the roof of his own car, but shakily taking a pull from his hip flask. Not stress nerves, those; terror nerves.
  • Van stops him as he tries to drive off, by physically blocking him and telling him to key-off. He starts by being a good Freelander: “Hey you know you’re free to get turnt and whip donuts out away from everyone else out here, but folks typically don’t like it when you drive drunk on colonial and intercolonial roadwork.”
    • “Good think I’m travelling, not driving. Asshole.”
    • This causes Van to smile. And punch in his driver-side window, goozle him, extract him through the hole and throw him, splat, against the hab wall behind him.
    • This causes Santana to also somehow find his guts and try to hit Van. This time Van just slaps the guy, hoping it won’t knock him out.
    • It does anyway. Van is minorly upset. “...my workflow.”
• Two idiots awake in an office with sore faces, probably wishing they hadn’t mouthed off. Van’s blacked out the windows of Santana’s portable, locked and wedged the doors; Kellog and Santana are in a bad, bad place.
  • Kellog mostly wants to know what the fuck is going on, because he wasn’t in the business to get smashed in the face by a cybernetic gorilla. He doesn’t actually seem to know what business he’s in, other than it’s another extra line of income to pad out his delivery job’s take and his Freelander Basic. The man was offered the chance to carry a few specific words and phrases without context, he’s got no real idea of what the messages were, so he says.
    • “What does ‘head down past noon’ sound like to you, fuckwit, an invitation to go blow yourself in open daylight?”
  • Van’s sensor pings and his body language analysis leads him to believe what it seems, that Kellog is a dude whose brain appears to be mostly for the purpose of navigating a 3D space and little else; he doesn’t actually know anything, he’s scared, in pain and quite dumb.
  • Santana on the other hand, is a rat with a paw stuck in a light socket- his vitals are off the chart, looking like a man about to go into shock, his face leaking fear.
    • “You having heart trouble, pal? Or you just got something you want off your chest?”
  • This is when Santana takes the high road and starts attempting to frame Van as some bandit thug or even a fascist, a stranger among a close-knit community. The problem here is that he’s extremely bad at this strategy, as it doesn’t even sound like he believes himself, he’s so lacking in conviction. Man doesn’t even sound like a Freelander, he sounds like some marketing exec that got on the wrong bus, which then proceeded to get on a Escape Boat- he’s using the wrong words, he’s saying things like some Consortium dick would frame them, ‘collective bargaining’ instead of ‘union payrate,’ ‘law and order’ instead of ‘community peace.’ He even goes that extra mile of throwing up that telltale Red Flag, of evoking ‘those fucking jocks’ who used to beat up on vulnerable nerds in high school.
  • Which Van quickly responds with, “yeah, those evil jocks who submit their bodies for the entertainment for the masses, against the vulnerable nerds who vent their anger by radicalizing into fascists.”
  • At this point, Kellog simply looks over and asks “what the fuck are you talking about, dude?” Van tells him, “hey, don’t worry about it now, I’m pretty sure you’re just an idiot, and he’s the asshole here.”
  • Van offers to continue the analogy, which is when he boots the door on Santana’s office’s bathroom door. And its toilet. Where nerds get flushed.
  • Santana decides to test him, and he really shouldn’t do that, as Van proceeds to goozle him again, lift him vertically still tied to his chair, swirly him to the edge of consciousness, then wake him up with a cloud of drysoap to the face, slapping him to shake off the excess.
  • Van doesn’t mince words that he smells a liar, and that this particularly smelly liar is about to get pulled apart like fresh-baked bread if he doesn’t start smooching.
    • Upper ore fields, the iridium deposit they just exposed, they’re going to aim to shred the workers and make it look like they were robbing a load of Raws. “It was supposed to happen near clock-out, when everyone’s focused on everything else, now it’s happening at lunch when everyone’s hungry, I guess.”
  • Van then gives him one more dose of swirly, to again remind him who’s in control of his life at this moment. He then throws him back against the wall, had enough that it shakes, slaps him as very lightly as possible to wake him, then tells him “if you’re juking me, I’m going to put you down that thing feet first.”
  • He then turns to Kellog. “Hey, genius. Wanna make some money?” Kellog nods. “Good. Make sure he stays put, and you’ll live to go to to work tomorrow, that’ll make you money. He gets loose? You’re going to have the first headstone in the galaxy that mentions a spinning backfist.”
• He leaves them gagged in the barricaded office, and quickly puts in a call to Jerry to get the Greenstars the fuck clear, and to tell anyone else in their way to either get to safety or prep to defend. Which is when the shooting starts, to the north, distant. And Van, out of options, looks at his means to drive toward that shooting: the barbecue car, the Dot Micro.
• Then, we proceed to the action scene that'll be next chapter.