A Quick Death in Texas - Chapter 5 Skeleton

WELL THAT WAS QUICK.

Five - Severe Circumstances With Difficult Explanations

[Welcome to Gator’s POV. We won’t be here long, because as we’ll rapidly discover, he’s equal parts miserable bastard and boring fuck. As he makes his way through the New Laredo starport, we come to understand the very minimalist way he understands the world: as cold data, except where he can find flaws to amuse himself about by being internally cruel and petty. His is the lizard brain view, that the world is a series of resources to take and competitors to either kill or leverage out of the way. He views himself as the ultimate apex predator, one not made of weak flesh and bone, but cold steel, flexible polymer and pure, perfect logic. He sees the world as his wilderness, and all else is his prey.

He enters the terminal, and makes his typical shitty comments. He spots Van, and immediately misreads him as something he’s not- Van cranks up his biosigns when he’s got to do the whole ‘pass through a security checkpoint and not get made as a living weapon’ thing. He spots Telin and Keeda, and completely disregards them as anything other than weak meat, because everyone is weak meat to an apex predator.

He then spies Spooky, his mark, the one that Ross woman paid him to kill. She was lucky she had friends with a lot of money, herself, as he doesn’t move on the word of some wint in a suit unless it’s for enough to put his own dignity aside. Quantums were always so easy to kill. Can’t read a mind that’s circuits and light, you stupid, weak meat- that’s the unfair advantage of being born better, of being built better. Just need to get close, act friendly, and then, snap.

Except when he manages to pull both of those off, Spooky responds as Spooky is wont to do: she puts her hand to his chest, makes a fist, and thinks about how much she hates the Consortium while she does rapid-fire spatial-relativistic math in her head. And as a basketball-sized reach of atmosphere collapses into the size of a mustard seed in Spooky’s fist, fuses into a microscopic sun, and detonates as a contained-but-powerful cavitation wave that dents his chest armour and blows him across the room, we leave his POV with one final thought:

“Oh… right. That other kind of quantum…”]

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[This is not the first time someone has tried to kill Spooky. She’s actually used to it now, being that she is a Section 99er, but she’s not used to the people doing it being so brazen. This guy must be stupid, she decides quickly, as she blows him into the wall, causing every militia agent working the customs desk to pull their weapon.

Their shouts to stand down go unheard by Gator, who pops his weapon arm and unleashes a hail of SAW fire into everyone drawing down on him. Some militia get shot up, while others manage to get to cover. Spooky boosts to cover in a D-Blink, and retrieves her carbine from her packroll, and opens up on automatic on Gator, turning him into a discotech of pulse laser sparks and spraying molten spall. This proves to be the wrong choice, as Gator’s integral plates are coated with ablatives, and thus don’t give a fuck about pulse lasers- he pounces and tackles her to the wall.

Then, we get a glimpse of Gator’s namesake: he unhinges his jaw, exposing the sawed-off shotgun concealed in his throat, and tries to blow Spooky’s head off with it.

Tries, because Spooky reflexively begins accelerating her d-field defensively the second she sees a gun, which she actually sees quicker than Gator even realizes- in his machine-supremacist mind, he’s completely disregarded the arissiyan eye, capable of perceiving more than 15 times the image density and clarity of the terran eye, on a 300 hertz cycle, and with the depth of a few million additional colours. Before he even thinks to trigger his integrated gimmick weapon, she’s already defeated it, and the buckshot simply redirects into the wall around her head and shoulders, harmlessly.

She then headbutts him, and gives him another taste of the Overt Quantum’s version of ‘I rubbed my socks on the carpet in winter and then touched my little brother’s ear.’ Namely, the full buildup of prime kinetic energy discharges, like a fallen powerline arcing onto a storm drain cover. Only instead of devastating electrical shock, it goes off like a hybrid of a claymore mine and roughly two dozen heavyweight haymakers. Her lovetap of a butt nonetheless causes him to reel so violently, he does a sick flip. Oh, and it disrupts his sensor citadel, causing him to go blind and dumb for a second before he can even get up.

A highly unconventional cowboy showdown occurs, as Gator and Spooky draw down on each other with their weapon of choice: Spooky, building a massive blast of displaced space between her cupped hands, aiming to scatter it as a series of faster-than-light darts, individually targeting his vitals; and Gator, targeting where he was guessing where she’d be weakest with his integrated guns.

And then, a wild Van appears! The wild Van used Superman Punch! It’s super effective! Specifically, we get foreshadowing- Van literally shuts Gator’s mouth, and Gator just catches himself before he blows a chunk of his own head off. Which, c’mon, it’s Chekov’s Mouthgun- this man is going to get his face blown open by his own mouthgun, it’s going to happen. But here, we leave Spooky’s POV and head back to-]

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[-Gator’s POV. Gator has had his confidence shaken; Gator, who is not doing well.

The Quantum was one thing, that was his blunder, something that he could own and hold. But the man who was hitting him- he misunderstood him entirely. A second ago, he was breathing normally, he had a pulse, his body had thermal and electrical signals. Now, nothing, completely dead, not even a cogitoi, a machine- he’d become some sort of golem. His sensors were not working on him, because all he was, was a silhouette to them- no electrical impulses that he could read and react to, to intercept and defeat the inferior biological’s feeble ‘martial arts’ with simple machine logic. No breath to read when he was about to exert himself, nor pulse to read when he was tiring himself out, nor anything but a look of complete and utter contempt sneered across his face to read his emotions.

It was horrifying to him, and also magnificent. He didn’t know what he was feeling, besides agony, as fists that should have been made of meat and bone, yet struck as though they were nanocomposite alloy, landed like 12 gauge slugs against his plating. He tried to fight back, and realized that he for the first time was without the aid of his sensory tools and targeting systems, and he didn’t actually know how to fight otherwise. It was exhilarating, and also mind-destroying, to swing at something so tangible that you swear you’re fast enough to touch, and it simply disappears and hits you, again and again, until your whole world is joyously crumbling. Your whole worldview is sloughing off like your compromised armour, because finally, finally, someone can challenge your domain.

And just has he’s thinking that, Spooky shouts at Van to get clear. As he dives clear, and Spooky thrusts her hands outward, Gator then realizes, with an even greater intensity of joy and terror, that there’s actually more than one!

Then the blast hits him. Then he hits the wall. Then he hits the ground outside. Then his POV ends.]

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[Ever notice how when we resume Van’s POV, he’s always being annoyed by his situation in life? Specifically, it’s with a situation he can’t punch out of his way or gun down: explaining just what the fuck that was to a bunch of starport officials whose nerves were already shot to begin with. They’re not very appreciative of the fact he hid his implants to the degree he did, though given they can’t actually tell the extent of which he’s wired up, he’s got a fair argument that all he did was suppress some stealth and strength augs, and that he’s not the Billion Dollar Rifle That Only Hits Heads of State he secretly is.

Around him, carnage is getting cleaned up. The encounter had a bodycount, like everything in New Laredo as of late. Unfortunately, Gator was not among the dead. Wreckage of him was found, splatters of thermotive fluid, hell, they found his half-melted polyflesh face scraped off on the wall. But where a corpse should have been, there was instead frantic, four-limbed running tracks in the dirt, that led over the fence and into the anonymity of the open range. Somehow, this was Van’s fault. It was his problem, yes. But ‘fault?’ Fuckin’ cmon, only he gets shit like that.

Fortunately, he’s not the only one getting yelled at, as Spooky is at the opposite desk, also getting both barrels from the local customs heavies. It’s here, we get an understanding of how Spooky is outwardly, versus how she is inwardly. Inwardly, her narrative is florid and sensuous and easily delighted; outwardly, her affect is entirely flat and hollow, her face a shadowed blank, not so much devoid of emotion as it is paralyzed of it. Save from her one tick- the giggle. From flat and blank, to “hehehehehehehehehehehehe,” accompanied by a goblin’s grin and cocked eyebrows, her tall ears oftentimes sticking out at odd angles when she’s especially tickled. As the agents struggle to understand if she’s either fucking with them or high (or both), Van and the Canine pick up on what’s actually going on with her. Namely, that his sensors are measuring her expressions and body language, and having trouble telling him anything other than ‘arissyan; feminine,’ which means that amount of missing data is, itself, actually abundant data as to what the deal is.

Between the two of them, however, their stories check out: both of them made no secret that they were 99 operators, and their statuses and identities were easily confirmable. When asked directly what his business is in New Laredo, Van answers as he does: “Well, it seems you have an asshole problem around here that needs dealing with…” For as much as that is a barb at the customs agent, he’s also not wrong, which is why they decide to back off him.

This, and Spooky’s own contract with the Greenstars gets them to step aside, just in time for Jerry Gibbs and a few of the Marvez ranchers to roll up in a worker-bus pickup. Jerry, being the well-wired switch he is, sees the appearance of a second section 99er as an immediate pickup, and says simply, “Howdy. Need a ride?”]

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[The ride out to the Marvez Ranch doesn’t take a lot of time. During it, though, we get the feel for Van’s approach: right now, he’s not exactly doing a hostile infiltration of the operation. But he’s getting close to it, as an independent, because it’s a lead that quite literally jumped out at him- he’d be stupid not to take it, given that the part where it tried to kill him already happened, and failed.

So instead, he signs on at the moment as a Plus One to what seems to be a basic but high-powered bandit cull, what sounds like the kind of bodycount building that’s going to keep the soil fertilized for decades. So as he checks his comms with Telin and Keeda, who are currently setting up the lander as an ad hoc HQ, he keeps his other ear open, and gathers intel from Spooky and Jerry’s conversation.

Jerry’s not her brief, and not a military man by any stretch, but he’s having trouble containing his anxious curiosity over Anchor’s plan, on the basis that his world’s standing on rocky ground. It starts out with basic stuff- you’ve done this before? You do this a lot? Does it work, really? Can you actually drive people like this off?

Which is when Van interjects with what’s on his mind: “As long as you get who’s actually in charge, yeah. But only when you make it costly for them, and not before.” And Spooky, who detects a twinge of ulterior motive on the surface of his thoughts, involuntarily giggles, then agrees. The giggle has a way of cutting that bit of the conversation off for a bit, before it resumes more innocuously: “if I stood real, real still, how far do you think you could teleport me without blowing me up?” “Only a few meters, unfortunately. Maybe 10.” “Ah. Still though… should you get done early, can you try that on me? I’ve always wanted to teleport.”

That’s when Nicky Critelli makes himself known to Van, who we don’t quite know yet is an ex-Camorra lawyer in hiding, as one of the Carillo’s orchard workers. Instead, he’s just yet another scared-but-inquisitive sodbuster wondering what the fuck, about the godawful Groundhog Day of violence his life has become. He asks him what exactly he means, by making it costly for the one in charge. Van gives an honest answer: that violence to you, is business to them. “They’re armed thugs to you, but they’re employees to someone else.” That if you being able to hand dead bodies back to the bandit groups themselves isn’t stopping them, then they aren’t the ones in charge, because someone else is at their back, driving them forward over those same dead bodies.

“You want it to stop, for good? Find out who that someone is, then hurt him.”

Him. Spooky immediately links that and the surface thoughts he’s having. Then she starts giggling again.]

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[Van meets the inner circle of the OP, and hits his first big snag: In offering his share of intel on the situation, he’s just levelled a huge finger at people in the Settlement, to the point that Marvez and Carillo send their people out of the room when he even brings it up.

There’s also the fact that Anchor himself is unmoved by what Van is after. Van to him is chasing an amorphous shadow, while he’s still deep in his Logical Machine Haze, and high of his own algorithm plan. The two pieces of heavy metal have an uncomfortable moment of character clash. Namely, the big giant doesn’t like this little conspiracy theorist pipsqueak that’s threatening his logical, subtle and elegant plan with him coming in and starting what could very well be massive political upheaval in the colony, he wants the quo as it is right now, because it’s his ideal hunting ground for his revenge.

And Van? Van sees immediately something isn’t right with this guy. Van sees a machine that’s acting logical and analytical, yet isn’t accepting new and important data. This is totally fine with most cogitoi, as they have all the same ability to be irrational or emotionally stubborn as any sapient- their AI’s foundation was several sapient minds, afterall. Except when you get both of these things at once, it very quickly becomes apparent that this is an act to Van, who at this point in his life considers himself as much a synthetic as he does a biological- he goes to support groups for both, after all. Something big and bad is going on in the mind of this man, and it’s something he’s hiding behind his lack of a proper face.

So instead, he goes to Marvez and Carillo and gives them the offer of a spy of the Sendra Clan: one crucial piece of evidence that’s kindling for a pyre. A pyre he’ll gladly light for them, should they accept its veracity. Marvez and Carillo, unsettled by what Van shared with them, are knocked cold by his presence. But nevertheless, they take his offer, seeing things his way: if it’s loose in the colony, it has to be dealt with.

This is good. Except for the part where Van has no idea where to start with finding that evidence...]