Conversations Between Friends Who Are Killers - 1

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Canine and Spooky

“With Great Power, Comes Great Eye Lasers”

“So I guess the question is, which one of us gets to start?” said Van, after he’d exhaled his smoke. He kept his eyes to the horizon, scanning with his sensors for movement on the New Laredan range, even though his mind was starting to comfortably haze. Let the Canine do the work, this is what he’s good at.

“Should we settle by stakes of will?” Spooky replied, then took a drag on her own sichaal reed.

“Not sure I know what that is,” said Van.

“We compare our individual wills honestly, in the stake of who goes first,” she began, her face relaxing from her high. “In both our cases, we ask because we’re inquisitive minds. In your case, you appear to be some sort of hominid spy-satellite that’s capable of snapping necks without a middleman. In my case, I’m a thought-taker with a curious nature.”

“Compulsion,” Van said. He took a drag. “You said it yourself.”

She considered this for a second. “I should not mitigate my works in progress. Very well, the stake is yours then. Ask away.”

Van thought for a moment about what he wanted to ask first. The responsible adult operator in him told him to get a tactical explanation of her capabilities, an overhead view of what she was capable of. The kid in him, though?

“Can you go invisible?” The kid in him had a way of winning out.

She considered what he’d asked as she exhaled a trail of faintly violet smoke. “Fully invisible or transparent?”

“Let’s say, close as you can to functionally not-visible to an unaugmented eye, in any way you can manage.”

“No, then,” she said. “I can do transparent, that’s a matter of a Fluidic State field of sufficient charge and current cycle, which you’d need a lot of both. It bends the light around me, you see. Problem with light-bending stealth, is that you need an incredibly still mind to keep the a field that excited stable for long, one so still, you’d be beyond meditating, you’d be flatlining. Eventually, after maybe about 3 seconds of me trying this, the light would start warping around me in a sort of orbit, it looks a bit like flashlight points in three-dimensional space. So part of me would be glass, and that glass would be illuminated by especially bright points of light. You look like a person-shaped cloud of slightly-burning swamp gas. For sneaking? Yolkosa ania.” ‘Utter worthless shit’, it meant. “For making people think they’re being haunted? Oh yes, very fun.”

“You’ve done that?” A smile creeped across Van’s face.

“Twice, yes,” she said, and she let out a long giggle. “The first time was a mean trick to a mean trickster, who needed to be corrected in his neighborliness. The second time, I actually managed to scare a guardpost of fascists into a bone-orchard of frag mines. Shocking tactical effectiveness, that one instance.”

“Well shit, I’m impressed regardless of the invisibility thing,” Van said.

“Quantum activity is about playing with what you’ve been dealt. These are my cards, and they are unique, but you can build an interesting hand with them on almost any sort of play on the field. Still though, you can get a far more effective version of invisibility from pushing someone’s mind into believing you’re not there, and that’s not something I’m capable of, I’m too deep in the Overt end of the spectrum to reach that deep into the Covert end. The drawback is that you can’t trick cameras with that technique, of course, unless you can actually find the person watching the cameras and push their mind as well.”

“I’ve had someone try that on me, it didn’t work, exactly,” Van said, and the Canine rankled at remembering. The push had hit Parker’s mind without warning, the quantum had blindsided him, thinking he’d just sneak past without incident. Except that his coprocessor could see the guy plainly, ninja-creeping like a dickbag despite his abilities. The tug of war between him and the Canine over what was real and what wasn’t, was one of the most exasperating experiences of his entire life. “My targeter caught him, but trying to look at him with my actual eyes made my brain hurt, worst case of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever had, gave me a fucking migraine. First time I ever put beef into a beating over a headache someone gave me that came from a shot to the inside of my skull.”

“Yes, well, it can be extremely effective against unaugmented biologicals,” she said. “It’s hard to fight your own mind once it’s made up, and that’s what a good Covert push can do.”

“Trust me, even with it working only halfway on me, I believe you,” he said.

“Okay, done,” He added. “Your turn.”

Spooky tilted her eyes to the night sky, let the high of her smoke take her sharp eyes and make them sharper, so her arissiyan sight could fully appreciate the colours of the stars, and the nebula that framed them. She thought for a moment. “Not in theory, and not in a gym, in the field, under active action: what do you think is the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted, and what was the context.”

Van let out a loud HAH, and her ears twitched from the crack of his cackle.

“Okay, that’s easy, it’s the gnarliest powerlift I’ve ever done. It was the front-end of a short cab pickup truck,” he said.

Spooky giggled.

“That was trying to run me over from a parked stop,” he continued.

Spooky giggled louder.

“Being driven by a fugitive from a busted hijack ring, that I dropped off a 3 meter embankment, onto the roof.”

Spooky giggled loudly enough that she buckled in her chair, becoming guttural, almost hoarse in her wheezing.

“Please, do go on, and I’m sorry, this is all genuine, I truly am laughing, this is not anything other than utter hilarity,” she said with only the faintest hint of franticness, despite her body shaking from laughter.

“Three idiots from a hijack ring in Port of St. Joseph decide that my neighborhood is the place they can lay down a hideout. They’re of course, dead wrong, I go in at the behest of CivSec and Public Safety, clothesline everyone, drag these idiots out in the streets, hooray, it’s all ticker tape parades and groinkicks to downed assholes, you know how it goes, right?” he began. “Easy day at work, but satisfying day at work. Turns out though, one of the shift volunteers at CivSec was a little too much of a softie to be handling people traffickers, and actually fell for the ‘ow my wrists hurt a lot’ play with the restraints on the way to transport. One the slime slips loose and runs for it. Now, folk looks like they’re an arissiyan track runner- they’re going so fast, it’s like the wind is whistling around them.”

“Barrow-runner?” She asked. All-terrain crosscountry was a favored adventure sport reclaimed from her people’s suppressed history and culture.

“No, that’s the fucked up thing, I checked out their dossier after the fact, they weren’t even typical terrestrial origins, they were born on a floating deuterium colony on Triton and had residences across a bunch of stations. Where the fuck did they get that running experience from? They never lived anywhere that had that sort of running room.”

“Cosmic Enigmas,” Lyrisa said, plainly.

“Yeah, well, I think that’s what might have saved me,” Van said. “Cause thing is, I don’t know that they knew how to drive, because I don’t think anywhere they lived had cars. At least before St. Joe’s, anyway. But it didn’t stop ‘em from trying, because they just sort of ran and jumped into the open door of a public works truck on a jobsite like 5 blocks down from where we started.”

“That fast?”

“They had a headstart on me, I was still in the building when they broke loose, but yeah, like electrical current, I had to turn on my afterburners to keep them in sight. Anyway, yeah, open truck, they jump in the driver’s seat, hit the ignition, but they can’t get it in gear, which is when I get to the front and decide to do my circus strongman trick. I hurk it up, and I tell folk, ‘Seriously, don’t give me a reason to do this, because I want to try, now.’ They look at me like I’m about to throw a moon at them, and that’s when the active help app in the truck’s nav system actually shows them how to put the truck in gear.”

“That is helpful,” Spooky said.

“Yeah, well, fucker starts accelerating on air. Extremely good for me the thing was a small truck made for city driving, and it didn’t have 4-wheel on by default. If they’d figured out how to turn 4x4 on, I’d be eating undercarriage.” He caught himself. “Jesus, fucking phrasing, dude.”

Spooky chortled into her giggle. “Where is the embankment in the story?”

“It’s the bare hardcrete that the work truck is there for, to start turning it into a beautiful urban planter. So obviously the workers are yelling at me, but it’s fine. Everyone yells at me. And the folk in the driver’s seat, I don’t know what was wrong with them, other than being a prick, but they just wanted with all their heart to run my ass over and drive up the turnpike offramp behind me, and fuck if I’m gonna take that. Especially from a slaver-drone. So again, I make eye contact, and considering the possibility he might not have great English, I say very plainly, ‘you asked for it.’ And I start pulling him over to this thing, on the truck’s back wheels, which are still in neutral. The scum in the driver’s seat can’t find 4x4 so they’re just pressing everything on the instrument panel. Meanwhile, public works are throwing wrenches and hardhats at me, there’s a crowd now that’s cheering me on because a couple that knows me saw me and started being all, ‘yeah, beat his ass, beat his truck’s ass.’ Me, I just want to dunk this fool for being a piece of shit that ran.” He neglected the part about how enthusiastic his bloodthirsty hitchhiker was being at the time, she didn’t need to know about Him. “At any point in time, they can decide to just jump out of the truck and end this. But no, I roll them over to the edge of this new embankment, that’s over a maintenance road into the artificial lake’s park- I dunno if you know how Southland Point is set up, you ever been to St. Joe’s?”

“No, I haven’t,” Spooky said.

“Eh, doesn’t actually matter, point is, my heels are on the edge of this thing, and they’re still trying to kill me with a truck. I give one last look, and they’re still giving me the Fuck You eyes. Which means, yeah, fuck you too buddy, I guess, and I wind up kind of improvising what I can functionally describe as a Judo shoulder throw, on a pickup truck. Not because I’m actually throwing the truck, not very much anyway, but just because I need to quickly get out from under it while still dropping it.”

“Like, ippon-seoinage?” Lyrisa asked. Van’s brain clicked in a pleasing way, that he’d found a fellow appreciator of fine culture.

“Yeah exactly, a really dirty one-kneed version where I sorta side… scurried at the end. You’ve got some Judo?”

“Yes, I picked some up from a terran contemporary in the Quantum arts. I’ve gotten some use out of my sweeps, but I’ve never thrown someone in a real fight, everyone I’ve gone against, I’m either too tall to properly throw them, or me lifting them physically is a mechanical impossibility.”

“Go to your knees, take a leaning bow down, drag them onto their head, hard. Do ‘em dirty like that,” Van said, pulling clenched fists down with his words.

“It’s why I’m not very practiced with them, I’m not pleased to deal my friends concussions. Quantums are partial to their brains…” She savored her enunciation of ‘brains.’ Then she paused. Then she giggled. “Anyway, you destroyed a slaver with a maintenance vehicle?”

“They drop down onto the ledge of the embankment with the wheels spinning, but they come down uneven, so one side sorta bounces and lists out suddenly, causing it to go over as a corkscrew and land on the roof, three meters down onto the maintenance road. Came down clean, too, didn’t even hit the grass, nothing but pavement. The shitheel inside? Grade 2 concussion, lower spinal injury, bruised liver, lacerations and contusions. Bad guy neutralized.”

“Was anybody else impressed?”

“No, St. Joe’s Public Works yelled at me, a lot. The Mayor’s Office damned it with faint praise, by saying I’d ‘defended St. Joe’s no mercy policy against sapient trafficking by valiantly destroying public property.’ Which, you could grow fucking mushrooms in that shade.”

“Well, I’m impressed, for what it’s worth” she said. She giggled. “Sorry, not joking. That was a ‘good story’ sound.”

“Thanks,” he said. “My turn?”

“Your turn,” she said.

“That thing you hit Fuckface with, the first time- that was a plasma shot you generated, right?” He asked, taking a long drag on his spliff and shaking out the come-up as he exhaled.

“From an overhead perspective, yes,” she said, weighing how much she wanted to lean into the technical speak with her new comrade. She still didn’t know how safe she was giving him anything at all. For all she knew, he had some sort of tactical encyclopedia within his skull that he could cross reference her answers against, to either size her up, or solve her entirely. But she reminded herself that friendship among dangerous people was the bravery to look past the implicit threat in your peers. That old saying from her long-dead homeland that now only lives in stolen and unsealed books, that ‘self-solitude is the slowest death possible.’ “Have you heard the term ‘Directed Fluidic Field?’” She asked.

“That sounds like the sort of thing I’d only know about from stealing secret shit about it, so no,” Van said.

“There are mainstream scientific papers on them, they aren’t an esoteric technology in and of themselves, just difficult to implement artificially without a quantum- too much energy needed for not enough effect. But yes, you find the most detailed understanding of them in quantum manuals. Which typically are treated as spell-tomes by outsiders to the craft. And some insiders…” she said, trailing off.

“Do you?” Van asked.

Her breath quickened, unto becoming heaving. The giggles were forceful. “Yessssssssss…” she hissed flatly, when they subsided. Then they quickly resumed.

“You alright?” Van asked, legitimately concerned.

“I’m fine, yes,” she said, straightfaced again. “Directed Fluidic Fields, yes? Yes. Imagine a plasma window in a fusion reactor. Now instead of actual energized plasma, it’s energized displaced space, roiling in constant motion so that it maintains cohesion. With the proper spatial equations applied, I can manifest a field as a freeform polygonal shape, and layer it to add surface properties. I can make the innermost layer ‘sticky’ to space, atmosphere, suspended particles, anything else I can pull into it. The layer beyond it, I make as impermeable to heat and light as I can manage. The layer beyond that, is my transformational layer- I start it as large as I can manage, so that I can scale it down as small as I can manage. In turn, everything down inside scales down with it, until physics breaks and everything collapses into a tiny mote of a…” she watched her words, equal parts protection of trade secrets and sparing Van from more esoteric jargon. “...a gravity well, without the gravity. It’s the spatial equivalent of turning carbon to diamond, except that it makes a little star, that I can shoot like a rock out of a mental slingshot.”

“Diamond out of a slingshot,” Van said with a stoned smile. “Cool,” he said, after a too-long pause.

“Yes. I can make my mind tell it where to go, but it’s a matter of running the numbers so I can…” she again took time to choose her words, though this time it was more that she was simply having trouble describing what had become a logic beyond words, a language unto itself, a highly complex muscle memory macro. “Make the tunnel, or the track, between points I suppose. Plot the course. The closer I am, the quicker I can do it, and I can do it out to about 50 meters or so with my amp on.”

“Yeah but I don’t think you just zapped him with it,” Van said. “Plasma alone couldn’t do what you did to Fuckface, it just likes to explode the first thing it hits. It blasts in, it doesn’t punch through.”

“Yes, I jumped it through him,” she said. Van was beginning to pick up on how she worked around her outward lack of emotionality, the rhythms in her speech. When she was pleased, she savored words like candy, and she practically chewed that sentence.

“Howzat?” Van forgot where he was, and hit her with a St. Joeism.

“I jumped it through him,” she said again. He wasn’t asking her to repeat, but go on, and she didn’t know that; she didn’t care, she wanted to say it again. “From the front, out his back, and burn all in its path to atoms,” she said, grumbling like a goblin, leading into another wheezing giggle. “A needle of sunlight piercing the fabric of corruption manifest.” Her fingers curled into a cruel claw that she stared into as she spoke, and in her palm, space rippled into an aberration of light and colour. “Divine annihilation loosed forth from the wilderness of the cosmos.”

“Lady, I will get the fire extinguisher,” Van said.

“I’m allowed, my brain can time travel,” Lyrisa said.

“Okay, don’t hurt me or nothin,” he laughed with an exhale of smoke.

“That’s why it’s a plasma bullet from an overhead view. The closer you get, it starts to look at something different. It’s why I can specifically do the damage I can with it that a plasma pistol can’t, it’s a far more destructive form of projection than an electromag gun can manage, at least without a much different power-to-payload ratio and a bigger magazine to compensate.”

“This is starting to sound more like a particle impactor,” Van said.

“It’s both, really, yes. I’m making a plasma accelerator that lasts a few fractions of a second, entirely out of trace matter and energy generated from a spatial loophole, that I catalyzed with my own mind and math.”

“Christ, you make me sound like a stone axe,” Van said, pinging a sensor sweep over his dwindling spliff, just to remind himself he wasn’t obsolete. [24.53% THC. High Myrcine Content. Quantify - Known Substance (ARCHV>Narc>LowR>Canna> Violet Martian)]. Yeah, okay, pretty good, he allowed himself.

“Alright, well then, let me ask you, what would make you feel less like that, if you told me about it?” she asked.

The Canine rose in him, growling like it was ready to announce its presence with series of howling barks. Hey, hey, quiet. He snapped at himself. You remain the silent partner

I am a remorseless combat domination engineer, the fruition of ruthlessness extrapolated into science, The Canine said to him.

I am not listening to any of this, at this point in time, Van said to the Canine.

“I mean,” he thought about the tour of his sensors, but then considered who he was talking to. “I have a lot of interesting scanners, up in my brain. Thing is, so do you,” he said. Between the fact her species was known for its remarkably fine and deep sensory perception, she had the additional edge of being a limited thought-reader.

“Yes, correct,” she said. “This might be competitive for friendly conversation.”

“I mean, I can do sonar vision,” he said. “Can you do sonar vision?”

“Not as such, not directly. Still, my audio-spatial perception is quite good,” she said.

“Like, how good?”

“Take just a little puff on your smoke, please.”

He obliged her, and gave his spliff the smallest of burns.

“It’s in your right hand,” she said, as soon as he moved it from his lips.

“You could have guessed that,” Van said, nevertheless casting an impressed glance at his own hand.

“Between your middle and ring finger,” she continued.

“Oh, well, fuck me,” he said, even more impressed. “Yeah, okay, if you can’t do sonar vision, you can do close to sonar vision.”

“Yes, so,” she said, then let out a thinking sort of breath. Her tall ears twitched from high above her crown braid when she had it.

“Ah, good, that’s my question: where is your heartbeat?”

Van winced. Some asshole misplaced it in a medical waste container in Detroit, back in 2002, maybe 2003, he thought. No, too rude, and she doesn’t yet need that level of detail.

“So, long answer: my circulatory is a complete rebuild, which means I don’t need a typical pace-made bionic heart with mechanical chambers, that can only pump at a certain upper ceiling of tolerance because it’s still delivering blood under pressure to, uh, ‘stock’ arteries. Don’t for a second think that I like this or agree with the idea that I needed to be better, that’s just-”

“The Consortium,” she said. “I was a Court Sorcerer, I know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Right, so, Dr. Frankenstein fixes me with this magno-dynamic fluid jet engine in place of my old heart. It doesn’t pump so much as it just shoves, continuously, without pausing. It’s part of the reason why I can do the stuff I can without keeling over immediately after. And it’s the reason why I show up as a walking dead body on biosign sweeps, or at least, part of the reason.”

“Is this why you asked if I can go invisible?” she asked, after a preemptive little giggle.

“No actually,” he said. “In the Senda Clan, I work alongside people who can do some pretty intense ninja shit, and I’m terrible at it. Being able to go invisible is a power fantasy of mine.”

She giggled. “Are you a ninja? Is that why you wear the red scarf?”

“It’s a bandanna,” he said. “Anyway, yeah, that’s the long answer for where my heartbeat is. The short answer is-”

He paused, and Lyrisa listened close. He went silent, very silent, enough that she lost him in the soundspace entirely. Then there was a sound, like a mechanical snap engaging deep from beneath layers of insulation, and she straightened in empathic distress when she heard the pained, laboured breath Van drew in. It wheezed in, hung and got stuck, then broke free like a cramp coming loose.

“Guhhyeah, there we go, there it is,” he said, with a cough. “Switched from ‘Continuous’ to ‘Blending’ mode, makes it simulate a very realistic lub-dub, completely fools a bionics detector. It wouldn’t even show up that I had an artificial replacement valve, let alone this fucked up performance model assholes stuck me with. And no, they couldn’t make switching modes painless, if you’re asking. They built me under capitalism, they had to cut costs somewhere.”

“Forgiveness for asking, if it’s traumatic to you,” said Spooky.

“No, no, it’s fine. I’m a masochistic dummy that loves a painful party trick,” he said, pounding his now beating chest, like there was some optimal rhythm he could make it sync to, if he drummed it out just right. “Can I turn it off, though? Makes me feel clammy and bloated, and I had it on a bunch in the starport.”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” she said.

“It hurts either way, I’m just putting it back to-” he paused again. Snap. Pain escaped him as a low growl. “-the more comfortable mode,” he finished, taking a relieved breath. “But yes, that’s a piece of my stealth gear. I don’t have any fancy active features, but I also don’t show on anything other than visual or motion if I don’t want to- I’m a zombie by checklist, basically, even my body heat is kinda optional, up to certain limits.”

“What have you made of that?”

“Well, if you don’t mind doing the corpse float in a debris field for a few days… or weeks… you can sneak aboard a starship real easy, provided it shows up at the right place. And I gotta admit, I’ve gotten the unique satisfaction of punching out some dipshit looking for me with fancy EM goggles in a dark room- I highly recommend it if you can pull it off, it’s good stuff.”

Spooky went quiet. For a second, he worried he might have tripped something in her, took her to a place she didn’t want to go.

“I have to be very straightforward honest with my emotions,” she said after a while. “Because of my circumstances. Can I be that with you?”

“It’s the Freelands, hell if I’m going to stop you.”

She let out a long exhale. “You were made to hate the beating of your own heart. There’s a sadness there, that I can feel the cold of.”

He’d never thought of it that way, because he didn’t like to think about things he’d had taken from him, not unless he had to. Uncovering pain led to uncovering more pain, and though he’d made his mind set on the path he’d taken, he considered his attitude toward it. He didn’t feel the doubt he felt at its outset, even though he’d just barely set foot on it. He couldn’t say for certain that it wasn’t just the confidence of having met with the enemy and made him bleed, having foiled his attempt at ambush on his terms. But it felt deeper than that, more anchored and foundational.

That if Van had his heart set on a long walk to the guillotine, in the hopes of dragging the man who ruined him under the blade as it fell on them both, he wasn’t about to spit on the crowd that had gathered to see him. At the very least? He could smile and wave, as he held onto his headlock.

“Yeah, well. Lot to dislike about how things turned out with me. A lot. I hate how my heartbeat feels in my chest now, because it’s unnatural, and makes me feel like I ate bad seafood, and I’m more used to having just, pressure noises, instead of a pulse,” Van said. “Other hand, I never thought I’d sickhouse a slaver by throwing a pickup truck on him. Never thought I’d teach an armoured gun platform to spit teeth with a right hook. Life takes some fuckin’ turns, is all I’ll say.”

“They take you far from home,” was her reply. “And carry you to new ones.”

“Not saying I’m an optimist,” he said. “Just that, as long as the engine turns over, might as well drive.”

“You play the hand you’re dealt,” she said. Her voice was blank, except when she was giggling. All the same, he was growing to like the sound of it.

“With great power, comes great laser vision…” he said, and took a long drag on his spliff.

Lyrisa’s grin grew to the far corners of her face. It wasn’t her nerves, nor a buildup of stress, nor some other deep emotion resolving through crossed cerebral wires as maniacal glee. It was every bit as much as a held-in laugh as it looked.

“That’s not the cliche, you fucker,” she said, her words collapsing into forceful giggle. Van sputtered his exhale, he wasn’t expecting that out of her.

On the outskirts of New Laredo, at the edge of bandit country, hidden in the blinds of their observation post, their laughter was only perceptible to those with senses as sharp as theirs.