Conversations Between Friends Who Are Killers: The St. Joe's Faithful

Van's past incidents, Telin's family motorsports outings, and shared affection over Italian food: I swear these two hypercompetent idiots will realize they've quietly built a relationship some day.

Canine and Heelcutter

The St. Joe's Faithful

“So you lived in St. Joes how long, and we only just now run into each other?”

Telin kept sober when she was in the chair, for as much as she enjoyed her drink. So when it was time for Keeda to take watch, or Ganiya, the ship’s Procedural Intellect to activate her autopilot, she made sure to take a good 10 to 15 minutes for herself, to properly build herself her favorite drink, her favorite way- old spiced kelladi, torched for 5 seconds, stirred with erolberry syrup, then spiked with hot sauce. The Sunset Sea, “mongrelized,” from the added heat. She’d sit, and sip, and make pleased noises to herself, but it was all Her Time, and nobody else’s.

When she chose to speak, was when she chose to be social. It was a common enough question among St. Josephites, as though their City in Space was like any other residential station of 50 thousand, rather than the metropolis of 3.6 million lives inside a hollow asteroid that it was. ‘We’ve only just run into each other?’ asked the woman who lived in a place with a 12.8 kilometer turnpike, as though her home was no bigger than a baseball stadium or a shopping mall.

“Been 5 years, 286 days. Want hours and minutes?” Van said, holding his body in a high bridge. Part of Phase One of prep for prolonged use of advanced augmentations: strengthening your body’s remaining biological bits for the coming mechanical torture.

“This a cyborg brain thing?” She made her raised eyebrow apparent in her voice.

“Sorry, I let the augs do that part of my thinking,” Van said. “I used to have truancy cops on me all the time just because I was so bad at keeping time.

“Hey, no judgement there. Student Control used to be on me all the time too,” she said, kicking back in her chair.

“You oversleep alarms too?”

“Hell no, I can tell the time by looking at the position of the sun on 3 different planets,” Telin said, her pirate swagger coming through in her words, with each tilt-tilt-tilt back of her chair. “It’s just that Consortium rhidling education is nothing but colonialist bullshit. Teach you that numbers don’t go past 5 digits in one book, teach that you’re naturally inferior to obedient terrans and genetically perfect arissiyans in the other. Tell me that’s not hateful nonsense.”

“I can’t,” Van said. “I’m not a truancy cop.”

“No shit you’re not.” She said. “Going by the stories I hear about you, one way or another, folks don’t reoffend when they hit against you.”

“Oh fuck me, what stories have you heard about me, Jesus Christ.”

“What, you think it’s a bad thing that people talk about how you saved a guy from a 10 on 1 beatdown while you were still moving into your apartment?”

Van processed this for a second. Then he laughed.

“So you live in Portside Gardens, right, Sector 1?”

“Yep, my clan commune’s in the Northwestern Walls, it’s the blue hanging flowers and orange lanterns,” She replied.

“Oh cool, I can see your house from the rooftop batting cages in my hood,” he said, genuinely happy to know what that nice bit of light and colour on his horizon was. “No, it’s just, the farther away that story gets away from SoPo, the more guys I flatted that night. It was really just three guys on meth. Not 3 Mafiya soldiers with steel pipes, not 5 ninjas with fucking swords and a kusari-gama, like I swear I got one time. Three guys, rolling on crystal. Three-point-five, if you count the really big fucker. Pretty sure he was from Evergreen, that one.”

He relaxed out of his bridge, and the Canine took its appraisal of his body’s structural integrity. Across his vision, a schematic view of his own anatomy expanded into focus, pointing out growing flaws and microdamage to his soft and solid tissues. His knees’ cartilage and his artificial ACLs were starting to wear out again, as usual- 3 sleep cycles of active maintenance would bring them back to proper combat shape. His hard ride up the elevator shaft on Insomnia had rendered his left arm in considerably worse shape- microsplinters in his forearm’s osteographex layers, several redundant tendons blown, the ablative layers on his replacement rotator cuff and deltoid worn off entirely. The Canine suggested 8 cycles worth of regenerative maintenance. This effectively meant he was going to be eating like he was three men for the next week and change.

He closed the window, refocusing his regular vision. He rolled on his side, and was instantly face to face with Telin.

Over the next few milliseconds, Van’s internal monitors clocked a minor but noticeable spike in his body temperature. Internal cooling measures compensated rapidly, ensuring his blush was invisible to covert thermal imaging and other threat detection measures.

“Hey, hello,” he said.

“Hi, is this yoga?” she said, head in a hand propped by her elbow, tail flicking against the carpeted floorplates.

“No, this is a synthetic-terran thrashing his own ass to see if it blows out at an inopportune moment.” He said, recomposing himself. “Ironically, when you’ve got bullet-resistant skin and bones? You’re one of the biggest threats to yourself.”

She smiled and blinked at him.

Woman. The Canine intoned at him from within his own mind.

I know, he snapped at it.

You have a tendency to forget, it said to him, taking a tone.

Oh trust me, I don’t, he said.

“I think I get your tendency to beat up on yourself, then,” she said, after what felt like an eternity. “You have to, as manner of course. At least, apparently.”

“What, we’ve known each other for about a month now, and you’ve sussed that out about me from watching me try to kill my own quads?”

“Trust me, I can profile people from how they sail. Judging character from method of operation is one of a captain’s chief social skills, you can’t run a working crew without it.”

She had a way of speaking that made him want to take her at her word. She was steady in her timbre, calm and warm in her manner, relaxed. He was rebuilt for black-ops intelligence gathering, and she couldn’t make the deception detectors in his sensors even twitch. They’d known each other for a month then, and he’d sussed out that what others could see in her as arrogance, was a distinctly piratey sort of self-confidence.

“Still, do you know yoga? It’s a thing I want to learn, I’ve heard it works well enough for rhidlings and some mornings it feels like a bomb got dropped on my back,” she continued.

“Nah, it’s programmed stress positions I’m doing, it’s not actually that good for you if you don’t have regenerative augs,” he said, sitting up. “Still, now that you mention it, it’s kinda weird I’ve never thought to look into it. Couldn’t hurt, and St. Joes has like a thousand places to take it at.”

“Yeah, especially in Central Plaza. Kinda place where you can get a fancy coffee from a place on the deck, then take a yoga class in a studio on the second floor, beneath the other, different yoga studio on the third.”

“Exactly,” Van said. “Then after class, you can head up to the coffee shop on the rooftop patio, because it’s Central Plaza. Sector 5, fuckin’ bo-heme beyond bo-heme.”

“Oh be nice, we deserve a nice art district, and art district people deserve art district things,” she said with a smile. St. Joseph was working class to the bone, with as much of its sprawling size devoted to its massive shipping and warehousing industry, as to its residential and self-sustenance facilities. Central Plaza had a tendency to seem like a man in a mechanic’s jumpsuit was wearing a Landsjaeger’s feathered hat, a particularly outstanding artist’s colony amidst a population that was so working class, they only cleaned their fingernails out before going on a date. A date to the hockey game.

“Yeah, I know, I’m just playing. I actually head up there a fair bit, the canal boats and the sakura trees calm the fuck out of me. I just have a tendency to feel like I wandered into the wrong place when I roll up on a day with bruised knuckles in a leather jacket, and there’s some arissiyan bard in flowing robes playing a rislya while sitting off the edge of a pedestrian bridge.”

“Ask anyone that lives there, they don’t enforce a dress code. As long as you’re dressed…” She said.

“Yeah, it’s just some days I forget to shower the blood off,” he said.

She chortled. Then realized she shouldn’t have. “Sorry,” she said.

He waved her off, “I’m just playing.” He wasn’t, but she didn’t need to know that. “Any other horror stories, or does me grinding out 3 tweakers actually get that much talk these days?”

“How about the story that you blew up about 30 terran supremacists doing a rager on the turnpike, what the fuck was that about?”

“Oh, fuckin, jeez,” he put both hands up. “Right to Silence, is my comment on that point, ma’am.”

“Ahhh, so that was you!” She said with a wide-smiling growl, as she sat up beside him bumping hard into his shoulder and giving him a claw-prickling pat on his back. “Holy fucking shit, I didn’t know I had a certified legendary ally of Terran-Born Xenosapients in my presence for sure, but I was gonna roll the dice that that magnificent motherfucker on the news was you.”

“Right to Silence, ma’am,” he repeated.

“You’re a spy, man, how do you resist interrogation like that?” she said, with a laugh.

“I’m not resisting you, I like you enough to give you my neurosis as an open book.”

“Except the part where you’re ignoring the story about you wasting several carloads of jackboots in a high speed firefight,” she butted her shoulder into him again.

“I am sworn to a literal Blood Oath not to divulge details of the events that occurred on that day, I literally have my blood on a piece of preserved paper saying I won’t say who those people were, what they were doing, or why I was shooting them and wrecking them. They weren’t terran supremacists, but they were extremely shitty people, is what I’ll say.” He rolled his head side to side, thought of what else to add. “And, I mean, to be fair, some of them were racist as fuck.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay,” she said, rapt. “Okay, fuck, what then can you tell me, then?”

“That every time I meet with a city councillor, every time I have to sign in at the mayor’s office? I get some dick making a joke about ‘Another Turnpike Incident, Mr. Parker?’ Like they’re so smart, they figure they’re the first person to say that in 3 fucking years since my last goddamned moving violation. I’ll have you know my fucking Trustee record is pristine since that shit, and considering the sheer number of hard takedowns I bring in only scuffed up? I think I deserve a little better than being the last couple of cars I blew up.”

“You’re bulletproof, but your nerves are just so easy to touch…” She said, rolling her eyes more than a tad. “Okay, the bike, then: what the hell is that thing? Other than impressive, because shit, I’m an airspeed girl myself, but that thing is fucking fast, all things considered.”

“You know your chassis makes?”

“It’s a Ronin 047, right?” She said.

“Yeah, the GT-R model, 2016 revision. He’s rebuilt with a Jordan 400-Duel DPT as his powerplant and a custom floating rear suspension so he can take a jump better. Got him wired up with Zeus MacroVolt piezoelectrics from Electric Dynamics, and they’re feeding into a Rymora Blueshift Type-50 forward deflector and chassis polarization kit and a Gromon Holeshot Blazer kinetic booster. He’s fast as fuck, I take a turn and hit the booster? Like riding a cruise missile.”

“He?”

“Yeah, I call him Machine. Like I am. We have an understanding, in that way.”

“Fair enough,” she said, shrugging. “Does Machine typically eat sedans, or are they only a sometimes food for him?”

“I will divulge, that the unmentionable individuals were driving for subtlety, not speed. Machine’s built to duke it out with Bosozoku bikes and tunnel-sprinters on the track, it wasn’t nothing to overtake a bunch of St. Joe-sized cars on a closed-down freeway.” Van had a great deal of pride in Machine, and he didn’t mind sharing it with people that wanted to know. In his ride, he’d created something that resonated with him, that he could bond with and use like it was an extension. It was a right-minded sort of pride, the want to describe the what and why of the things he did right, while keeping the humble frame of mind of satisfaction in a job well done.

“Still, I’ve seen K-Booster jetwashes, I’ve pulled a few off myself. I didn’t know you could jetwash a car on a bike. Those fuckers rolled three times, you DNFed them so hard.”

Van remembered the car, the dark green Palmetto compact. More directly, he remembered the frantic rictus of Mike the Spike hanging out its rear driver-side window with a PDW, spraying and praying like the Devil was chasing him. He wasn’t going to do that car dirty, he was just going to hurt them normal-style, until he saw Mike the Spike. He knew there was no logic to it, but in his mind, he could’ve stopped the entire Quiet Disagreement of the Port of St. Joseph just by killing 3 men on one fateful night, and Michael Angelo Montiero was one of them. Gentleman Jim Conroy, Van had wasted literal minutes before, having sideswiped him on foot with Machine out of a 50 kph powerslide, then shot him 8 times with his automag when he refused Van’s very simple order of “drop it, motherfucker.”

Van had killed him twice before, but Gentleman Jim’s Lazarus augs were as effective as Jim’s soul was ugly. Overkill was the only kill for him.

Ainsley Sherwood would be out of his reach on that day, which meant double-bad for Mike the Spike, who Van had already resolved to reduce to ground pork over comments Mike made at screaming distance toward a 9-year-old client related to his case and the Disagreement itself. Now Mike was about to get Ainsley’s serving as his extra-heaping helping, as Van gunned his booster to maximum amp, rocketing through the 9mm hail on a flat acceleration curve, from a 80kph cruise, to a 220kph burn. The Palmetto rocked on its suspension as Machine’s deflector field scraped against its outer skin, squashing a pressure wave against it that exploded as Van passed. He pulled ahead by a half kilometer and arced around on a smoke-rising, glow-casting U-turn that was only possible through magnadynamic covalence boosting- go faster and grip harder, at a molecular level. Then he rode them down, in a fatal game of chicken, pulling aside at the last second, his inside leg clearing the Palmetto’s bumper by only a few centimeters, and hitting it with a full oncoming kinetic jetwash from the combination of his deflector and booster. The resulting combination of forces went off like a small bomb, heaving the high-stanced compact car by its front driver side wheel and hurling it a full three rollovers across the turnpike’s center boundary. None but the driver were wearing their seatbelts; only the driver lived, and it took him a while to be able to drink one-handed afterward. But Mike the Spike was hanging out the window, like the overly-extra, volume 11 pillock he was. So Van had given him a proper end: the impressionistic splatter his body left as it turned to parts and mash via friction and force against hardcrete curbing and alloy guardrails was the closest thing to art this Michael Angelo was capable of, in life or in death.

And you’re welcome for that, asshole, Van thought with a smirk.

“I mean, a Palmetto will tip over doing a moderate turn in a stiff wind- it’s the reason why you only see them on stations these days, colonies will wreck a Palmetto but quick. If I had flipped a pickup truck? Hell, if I flipped an Ozark? That’d be some real action movie shit. Way I see it, I was just giving that thing an alley oop, they really shouldn’t have been pushing that thing past 70, it’s a narrow lane taxi, not a highway driver.”

“You are so fucking weird,” she said. Her grin was incredulous.

“Yeah, I know. What in particular, though?”

“I know one bike from another, but you spend all that time talking up a bunch of tech that, might as well be me describing to you the custom bits in my chair’s consoles, and it might as well be in Russian to me. Only Keeda speaks Russian on this boat, yeah?”

“Da,” Van said.

“Yet you speak with more pride about that stuff, than the fact you took out a small army by yourself, live on the news.”

“Consider my point of view, okay? Machine is an easy daily driver, that also lets me blow off steam on weekends by going fast on the track. The Turnpike Incident is something that continues to paint me as some sort of violent anomaly to this day. You’d understand why I favor the one over the other.”

“Okay,” she said. “So tell me something you did that you are proud of?”

“Getting Taino back,” he said, instantly. “I know it’s an easy response, but it’s the most genuine thing I care to think about in retrospect right now.”

“Easy answer, I guess. Still, I respect it.”

Van dared to turn his glance to her. She was blinking at him again.

He stood up, and decided that a sustained chinup from the common room’s ceiling girders would be a good next stress test to perform.

She joined him. Then she inverted, holding on with her feet as she stared up at him.

Right, rhidling, fuck, he thought.

“So please tell me something about your hood, so I don’t feel like there’s a fucking spotlight on me,” he said, trying to focus on the tension sensors in his elbow servos above her fixed gaze.

“The Gardens? Hell, nothing happens up there that’s noisier than campus parties at the Uni getting out of control and cyclists getting a little too aggro on the park trails. That and there’s too many one-ways, and there’s not enough places to eat that isn’t the Centermart food court.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that. Super nice neighborhood, except there’s nowhere to eat except Restaurant Row, literally.”

“Yes, and Restaurant Row is six places, and a Jumpshot. Not that I dislike Jumpshot, it’s just, they’re a corner store, not a dining experience.”

“I take offense to that statement,” Van said.

She laughed. “Yeah, well, at least one of those six places is Angionelli’s north, and I can get toasted ravioli sent by drone up to my balcony as late as 4 in the Late Shift.”

“Fuck yes, Angionelli’s. Fastest and best tasting way in the city I know to load about 4000 calories on a short notice. And yeah, they’ll send pizza to either my balcony or through the Sendra office skylight.”

“I swear, in this pilot and starship captain’s opinion? Their drone crew are legitimate aces, they’ve got such a low incident rate, it’s the kind of skill you want to see in a flight team. I think I appreciate it as much as I actually appreciate their actual Italian food.”

“Where’d you get an appreciation for Italian?” was his main question.

“This is gonna sound real weird but, outside of Nurburg, back on Evergreen.”

“The German Cultural Reclamation colony? There’s got to be a story there,”

“No, not really. I didn’t actually live in Nurburg, I lived at Starfield City, it’s on their tram route, but it’s a few kilometers away from their limits,” she said, finally letting go of her grasp on the girder, rolling out and reseating herself on the floor. “It was my home when I was going to the Rykendro flight school, and it wasn’t really any one main demographic there. Salon del Capitano was a literal Italian mom and pop place, except it had an arissiyan working the pasta maker and a garak kid as their delivery boy. They’re smart, they make their stuff for a more xeno-diverse palette.”

“How so?”

“Well, they can make you a pizza with shaza-skin strips.”

“Goddamn, that does sound good,” Van said. Bacon umami with the crunch of fried chicken skin- shaza was so good, you’d swear you weren’t eating lygropyte lizard, a literal pest. “So wait, you lived outside of Neu Nurburg? Sprechen sie deutsch?”

“Ja, genug, um einige der lustigeren Wörter zu kennen,” she replied. “You know, fahrprüfung, gewurztraminer, antibabypillen. I only felt it was right to learn some, for the times we’d go visit the Reclamationists.”

“You ever go see the races?”

“That’s why we went, most of the time, or my brothers wanted to go drive the clan moneycar on an open track day.” Moneycar- vehicles were communal to small rhidling clans or large families. They typically kept one or two for personal transport, one for utility and moving, and one “moneycar” for special occasions; they were either the family celebration-mobile, or something project-built to tear up figure eights or rally tracks on weekends. “Again, I’m more about airspeed, I think I was always more interested in watching the drone cameras follow the cars than actually following the race, I actually volunteered for the camera crew one year, when I was 16. That was… fun, but harder than I thought.”

“Yeah, it turns out trying to shadow a fast ground vehicle with a smaller, faster air vehicle? Actually way harder than it sounds, you overshoot and cut corners before you realize what’s even happening. Still, I’m pretty sure it made me a better pilot, and it was fun to see all the terrans smiling when they saw a rhidling jungle rocket lining up to join the run on the Weisswald exit.”

“What did you guys run?”

“A Mattrax Sek520, the ‘94 Rock Rally model, with basically everything cut off it that that doesn’t assist it in going faster, turning tighter or holding together when it rolls. Well, except for the secret weapon…”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah so we had piezoelectrics and a K-Booster in it just like your ride, ours was a Elseros… something or other, one of the Green Arc models? I don’t know, my brothers, my aunt and my cousins built that thing.”

“Elseros is a good maker too, I would have gone with them, except their bike stuff is kinda fragile, and the last thing a pursuit vehicle needs is a booster that blows out after an impact.”

“Funny you should say that, we had that problem too. The trick we figured out, to even out the shocks? We looped a set of magnaskids through the piezo systems. As in, like off a helo, what lets the helo make a safe crash landing in case the hard skids go out, what lets it rise up into takeoff stance, those sort of magnaskids.”

“Right right,” Van said, the gears in his head turning. “So you’ve got a gauss cushion where sensible folks would mount undercarriage lights.”

“Exactly!” she said. “Can’t break an axel on a jump or a rough corner when your axels are riding on magic carpets, and it’s kinda hard to spin out when you’ve got a big road-magnet on your underside. So you can imagine the look on the local’s faces when brother Salo decided his answer to the hardest chicane on the course was ‘full throttle, full booster, no brakes but e-brake’ and a car that looked like a rolling junkyard went full lightshow when the skids kicked in during the drift.”

“Jesus, that’s cool,” Van said, giving a little whistle, despite his stress position.

“Yeah, so if you see a GTR-rated car that’s running those in a race? We invented doing that.”

“SALO STILL HAS PICTURE OF ONE OF CROWD-PERSON’S FACE AS HIS BUSINESS CARD BACK,” Keeda shouted as she passed down the corridor. “IS VERY GOOD.”

“Yeah, when your chosen career is ‘freelance stunt pilot/driver,’ a photo of a guy making a ‘holy shit’ face at your driving is basically a miniature resume,” she said, rolling to her feet and moving to build herself another drink. “I took that picture, by the way.”

“What sort of work does that get you?” Van asked. He noticed a twitch in his left bicep as he continued his chin-up hold, the sting of a buildup of lactic acid that his bionics should have been holding in check. New blood filters, a new extractor pump- add another night’s sweaty, uncomfortable rest to that arm’s rebuild schedule.

“Product trailers for cars and aerospace, mostly, plus the occasional action movie,” she said with a shrug. “What you’d expect.”

“You make it sound boring, it sounds like the guy’s living his best life.”

“Oh he absolutely is, Salo never has a bad day and I’d probably still be living with the Starfield City Maniro today, if I hadn’t realize that,” she tilted her head, as though she wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t pause in building her drink, she just went quiet for a second.

“That I don’t think I was meant to live on a planet, period.” She said, after she added a few dashes of hot sauce to her cup. She took a sip, and smile-winced at both the alcohol burn and the heat of the sauce. “Weird as fuck yeah, but, you understand I think.”

“You prefer a controlled environment. Planets are a little too wild, a little too accessible. A ship? A station? Much more manageable, more points of control, fewer means of ingress and egress.”

“I mean,” she swirled her cup, “I don’t disagree, but I think that might be you projecting.”

“My neurosis, open book,” he said, holding his chin-up. One more minute, if his left arm was going to catastrophically fail, it was going to happen soon, but if not, he could finalize his test data. Which was an odd series of thoughts, but that was his life at that point in time.

“I think it’s more that, I love space, but space can’t actually love me back. Because it’ll suffocate and freeze me to death. So in order to live in it, I need for there to be a city out in the middle of it. And oh, look! Lucky me, there’s Port of St. Joseph, a big, mined out spacerock that terrans decided was somehow a good place to build a city in, and somehow, they pulled it off. That’s why I’m there: everything I love about space, and no dying in a vacuum. Plus trees, they’re nice, I like trees well enough to bring them to space with me.”

“Mmm,” Van made a noise of agreement. “Strong agree. It’s why I planted Japanese Maples on the Sendra Clan’s street co-op. They go nice with the burgundy ivy on the office.”

“So wait, Sector 9, right down by the south edge of the lake, right?” She asked. Southland Point, SoPo, wasn’t just an entertainment district, it was honest beachside property in the middle of open space, situated at the edge of an artificial lake that had originally been intended as a fluid counterweight and heat sink for the city, but since had been populated with an artificial ecosystem of freshwater life. Faker’s Lake, it was called, for reasons that were more apparent in the early days when it looked more like a rained-in quarry, rather than the living thing it was now.

“Yep, right on the southeast corner.”

“So you’re what that long red office block is, like, two or three streets up from the onramp, right?”

“We aren’t the whole block, but we’re the balcony on the end, yes,” Van said. “With the walkup Jumpshot underneath. Because nobody expects there to be a spy agency above a corner store.”

“Okay cool, that’s what that is! Which means I guess the place with all the neon uprights on the roof is the batting cages?”

“Yep.”

“Cool. We see the same skyline.”

“It’s a definitely interesting one. One that doesn’t actually have a sky.”

“Yeah, but I like the cavern ceiling. It has its own character, especially now that the trailing vines on the terraform walls are starting to get up it.”

“It’s a big floating machine in space, that somehow got overgrown with plants and populated with its own small wilderness. You can see a hockey game and get good pizza in it, why wouldn’t I live there?”

“I know, I love it too.”

The silence was followed them that sound of two people saying everything they needed to, without speaking a word.

She smiled again, that slow blinking smile, and this time he wanted to return it. He held the urge, but also held on to that moment in time. What that was, what it represented, wasn’t for him at that time. But that it was there at all, made him remember that he could still feel his heart, even though it’d been replaced with a machine part.

He dropped from the girder, and dusted his hands. “So,” he said, “do people ever give you that line about why everything in St. Joes has red pepper flakes in it?”

“Yeah, I tell them that they’re what the vert-farm grows, and also, I live in a place where people prefer their food to have flavor,” she said.

“Hell yeah you do,” he said. They pounded knuckles. “Fistfight Capital of the Galaxy, baby, St. Joe’s Penalty Box.”

“Act like you live Somewhere,” she said, as pretty as the city motto ever sounded.