A Quick Death in Texas: Chapter 4 Framework

Welcome to me maintaining momentum in my posts by bringing you all the even-further-behind-the-scenes work I've been doing on A Quick Death in Texas. Today, I've got the framework for Chapter 4 for you all! Enjoy!

Four - And Those Who Follow Them

[Van’s dreaming again. This time, it’s not the inner terror he has over himself and his own world on display, but rather the other half of bad dreams and depression: the dream where you’ve got something to do, you know you can do it, you’re surrounded by people that are expecting you to do it, and yet somehow, you just can’t. It’s a dream where he’s after Brian, and no matter how much ground he can cover, somehow, he keeps moving out of harm’s way. He’s got Taino in his ear, he’s got Telin in his ear, they’re both telling him about the shit that Bryan’s been up to in the years since the end of Project Retriever. It’s all nonsense but, even so, Van’s starting to lose it in his dream. He’s so frustrated, he doesn’t even notice that the planet Ometochtli falling on him, out of the sky.

The ol’ Reverse Falling Dream. Fell for it again.]

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[The Closeup Sunrise makes ingress on the Quetzecoatl System, dropping out of displacement a few hundred thousand kilometers outside of the outer rim debris field. Amid Telin making sure her friend is 100% head in the game after a morning where he seemed somewhat shaken, Van opens up info channels and starts scraping the local datanets, just getting plaintext at the extreme limits of the data transmission range. There, he sees what’s been happening planetside in New Laredo: waves of bandit attacks, staged across weeks; bodies getting stacked up like cordwood, yet it only seems to be getting worse. This is the work of someone who values life like it’s just another resource in a stockyard. The kind of sign that not only that he’s on the right trail with the intel they found on The Phone, but that something bad has started to kick off even before he started moving. Dudley Ellering is here, he knows it in his bones and his bionics.

If this is gonna be some sort of corrective action, some sort of work that prevents more innocents from getting hurt by a bad man, rather than just some sort of selfish revenge thing? He’s gotta get his ass in gear, because he’s already late.]

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[We go to the New Laredo Union Council Tower, where we’re meeting with the heads of the Three Unions: Lucas Rivers of Greenstar, Luisa Olmos of Magistral and Cypher Dodge of Big Country. Amid the assembled support staff and other concerned union members, are two of our three union busters: Freebird Broward and Tom McCafferty. They aren’t announced as such, as that’s too early to run that play. Instead, they’re playing the part of those still looking to stay the course and keep things conservative, because their ultimate goal in Ellering’s plan is to wear down confidence in the community response. They’re there to be assholes and cause discord, in under the guise of having a want to maintain The Spirit of the Colony: don’t mess with Texas, because no matter what you try to pull, we’re gonna maintain business as usual, while being able to shoot back. “That’s just the way it’s got to be, it’s the way we want it to be.”

This isn’t sustainable, nor is it smart, and they know this. Problem is, lots of people are with them, and they don’t. For one, it isn’t a bad idea to circle the wagons when bandits try to keep overrun you. Then there’s the part where they don’t have the full picture of what they’re actually up against.

Still though, this is all background to the actual meeting, where the subjects being discussed include: reparations for the families of those slain in the previous attack; ongoing investigation into the nature of these attacks, who appear to be perpetrated solely by remnants of defeated Loyalist Terran Consortium incursions and… that’s all they can tell, that’s the only connection; difficulties getting not only exporters to come to town, but now they’re having trouble importing supplies now due to the attacks; the apparent ineffectiveness of the militia against these attacks, as well of their inability to locate an AWOL and mentally unstable cogitoi heavy trooper despite him reactivating his Section 99 status; and the complete and notable silence out of NuWay on any of this.]

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[Hello, NuWay. It’s asshole o’clock as we meet our principle antagonists in the modern day late capitalist doom fortress that is a marble-embellished penthouse office, on the 55th floor of the NuWay combo arcology/FTL comms tower. It’s Dudley Ellering, Largo Ross, Richard Bekker and Carly Ross are deep in the midst of the morning checkup: Important Corporate People Discussing Matters from the Top-Down, Corporately. Carly Ross is the one trying to conduct matters like an actual businessperson would, and is not even subtle about how uncomfortable she is with the underlying death and destruction they’re causing beneath talk of Expansion and Operational Synergy with Pre-Existing Resources. It’s still not getting through to the others in the room, because they are frankly all planks of very different varieties of woods. And I’m just going to abandon any attempt at further making a wood analogy about what they are, because, no.

Instead, it’s Dudley Ellering being too self important to care, Richard Bekker being too dead inside to care, and Largo Ross being too stoned to care. We can establish from their meeting of awful minds, that the plan of attack is destabilization, then restabilization under their control. They’re running a play out of the Terran Corporate Strategy Playbook, the High Stakes PR War- destroy public confidence in a competitor by destroying a dozen few lives, then ride to the rescue as the reliable alternative for consumers left alive. Ellering’s view: things are going good, but they could be going better. More are beginning to question the Union Council due to the efforts of his union busters, but one of them is flagging, the Magistral asset, Jackie Santana, an individual who is beginning to grate on him, an individual who isn’t simply underperforming in influencing his collective, but who attempted to contact him directly, rather than using the sneakernet like a professional.

Then there’s Van Rooyen, who is willful. The man is not a team player, for as much as he was delivering, he was also refusing to properly acknowledge that this wasn’t his show, it was Ellering’s. Van Rooyen was his head of security, he wasn’t a subcontractor, and he wasn’t expecting to be treated as a client, but as the boss. This was chafing him. What chafes him even more is when Van Rooyen pulls a Santana, and calls him on his direct line. Matters could be pissy, and they do take that vibe for a little bit. But then Van Rooyen actually does his job, and reports a security emergency: A big-bad from the militia has gone missing, with his last act having been activating as Section 99 and registering on the local network. Van Rooyen’s crew have been looking for him, blew up his apartment but, nothing. He’s got a posting out on the network, and he seems to be gathering friends. “Might want to get on that. Boss.”

Ellering doesn’t like willful people, on either side of his operation. He instead chooses to use someone he knows is reliable...]

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[Anchor and Rooster have joined forces, via the magic of the Section 99 network. Turns out, Anchor’s posting isn’t actually backed by anyone he’s got a connection to; it’s Rooster, operating through her Greenstar connections, because as it turns out, Emelia Marvez, the Carillos and a bunch of other families aren’t about to sit around and pretend like nothing’s wrong. This is enough for a Section 99 action, just those few families acting in interest of their planetary holdings. This is how it all gets started.

The big problem: Rooster, for as good of a shot she is, is not a leader, she’s a scout and woodswoman. Anchor isn’t either, but he’s in an even worse state of mind: the Logical Machine That Knows What to Do, who is actually a half-step verging on another panic attack. Sheltered by Rooster and the Greenstars, Anchor has been putting out the call for more insurgent operators to come turn the tide in New Laredo. One has responded: an overt quantum, callsign Spooky. Next point in the objective: Make contact. Except there’s just one problem-]

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[-In amongst Van and Telin touching down at the New Laredo Starport, we get ourselves a spot of bother: namely, we see the arrival of Spooky, being greeted by Anchor.

Except that’s not our Anchor…]