A Quick Death in Texas: Chapter 3

"You know, those first two chapters, those felt like they were Section 99 storytelling, but I gotta ask, where was all the blood- OH HERE IT IS, HERE'S THE BLOOD!"

Three - Bloody Footprints

The farmstead fell quiet, and the regulators laid in a low prone behind a foliaged dirt berm. Seconds passed since the last round barked out of the kitchen hab, a big roar of plasma that had scattered over range and turned a three foot patch of terraformed earth into dirty glass. The echoing rattle of gunfire trickled out and died over the open countryside as the breeze kicked up a haze of red bark powder from the row of xeno trees that lined the compound’s main drive. Ahead of their position, they could hear Collinsworth screaming.

“He’s still alive,” Burke said, swapping the battery-mag on his pulse rifle. “Cover me, I’m going to get him.”

“Fucking stay there,” Halloran bellowed from behind his MMG, smoke still curling from its heatshield and flash hider, more than 100 of its 200 round canister he had just sent downrange. “You go after him, you go down like him, leave him there. He’s more useful that way.”

“Sarge?” Burke said.

“We’re burning a fucking farm, not staging a rescue operation. Let him scream, let those commie pussies hear him, get a good long earful,” Halloran said, cold, calm, not a whit of heart or humor in him. “Fuckin’ don’t call me sarge, either, that shit’s done.”

“Movement, left side of the orchard house,” Fremont yelled down the line, before ripping loose a long burst from her kinetic carbine, its commando barrel throwing a reading-light muzzle flare even in the late-morning light. The last shot was cut off by an audible mechanical clunk, its bolt falling on a double-feed jam.

“Fucking Galler, fucking stupid piece of shit, never should have printed this worthless fuckling...” she snarled, stripping its mag out with repeated punches and racking on its charging handle like she was starting a lawnmower.

“What was it?” Halloran called to her.

“It was fuckin movin, that’s what it was,” she called back, still trying to jack the double feed out of her weapon’s chamber. The only reason she’d picked it to print was that it was an Outlier design, it should have been Superior to the guns of these worthless Disobedients. It ruled the range, but now it was choking on dust.

Collinsworth screamed again. He was hit bad enough that he wasn’t able to form words, even though he was trying. He wasn’t hit bad enough to decrease his volume, though. Burke held his ears.

“Fucking head in the game, you asshole!” Halloran punched him in the side of the head. “You got a fucking set of balls? You’re getting held back by fucking farmers, you goddamn pantywaist, and now you’re crying?!”

Shots cracked off from the other side of the compound, desultory pick-and-choose pops of semiauto gunfire.

“Yellow to black, what’s your status,” Halloran barked into comms.

“Got two moving towards the barn, wait for it,” Bartlett said through digital compression, dug in behind a stone fence on the other side of the farm.

More shots, cracking on semiauto. Then, something different: the peal of a bullet that sounded more like a brick ripping through atmosphere like a thunderbolt, followed by a distant bang two seconds later. Bartlett made a guttural sound through comms.

“Black, repeat that?” Halloran called. Nothing. “Black, fucking speak up.”

Again, the bang, distinctly from the west this time, and far. Another one, and another, shots that sounded like jet wings cutting through the air, shots that Burke could hear hit their mark, even with his ears covered. “Black, what the fuck was that, what is your status?” Halloran’s voice cracked into a squeal, and suddenly, he was back on Exeter IV, five years earlier. In his eyes and ears, he was watching his proud Expeditionary Homesteading Legion and the Walls of Exeter collapse and burn beneath the weight of a Cascadian creeping barrage and followup assault, the sound of his Imperial Arissiyan superiors in his ears blaming their defeat on his Terran Inferiority. One of them pledged to have his family flayed to death, as they slow roasted alive inside their crippled power armour. Their screams echoed in his ears, as Collinsworth made a sound less born of pain and fear, and more of exhausted dread. The tone in his voice had changed. Somehow, he knew something was wrong, and Burke couldn’t not notice.

“Movement by the barn!” Fremont piped up, pulling her pulse pistol sidearm, having given up on her carbine. “Fuck ‘em up!” she screamed, slashing out laser pulses towards the running figures.

Halloran tried to roar, and instead shrieked, laying on his weapon’s trigger like a rager stepping on the gas pedal. The chunk-clink-chunk-clink of his weapon’s report and feed soothed him, the one-two-tracer-repeat stream of fire hypnotizing him into a sense of momentary calm- still life, with gunfire. The fear melted away and the panic sublimated to courage, as his aim focused through the picture of his sight, of rounds tracing a path of impacting death towards the shape of running hominids seeking cover in the barn. Endorphins spiked in his brain, as he swore, he goddamned swore, he saw a tracer sear through the leg of one of those fuckers, bleed you goddamned commie fucker, bleed.

Then a bullet like a brick hit him in the collarbone and ripped everything in its path out of a hole in the center of his back, splashing it into the dirt beside Burke. A mud-sludge of geoengineered xeno soil and Halloran’s contents splattered Burke in the face, and his eyes sprung open out of sheer involuntary shock response. The monster-man with fifty Disobedient kills was gone. The body that thrashed and flopped over onto its back, his body, was a dying animal, eyes wide to their limit, mouth open like a fish on dry land, a hole like a fist where there used to be the base of a neck. He was trying to say something, but his body just couldn’t. He arched up into a twitching bridge and let out a sound like a rasping ‘hwoof’ that half emerged through his wound, before kicking out and dropping flat. In his last coherent seconds, as light faded for his eyes, he reached out and tried to find his Heaven.

Weakly, almost like an involuntary twitch, he reached for the grip of his weapon, and died.

Burke stared. Like a boy watching an abusive stepfather bleed into the dirt.

“What the fuck was that,” Fremont yelled, changing the magazine on her pulse pistol. She glanced over and saw Halloran’s wreckage. “What the fuck was that?!” she repeated, louder, more frantic. Burke didn’t hear her. Burke couldn’t hear anything.

Then she spotted the glint, it was just barely there, and only then for a fraction of a second. The hill was way too far away for it to be possible, but there it was anyway. It wasn’t from the crest, that’d be too obvious, too rookie, but about three meters down from the top instead, tucked in among bushes that Fremont had come to know as absolute bastards that could stick you through thick clothing. Collinsworth made that horrible moan again, and this time Fremont was the one to take note. He’d been the one that tried to warn them about taking a job against the Greenstar Collective. He’d been the one that tried to tell them about their Ringer agent, the one that made him so eager to get out of the country and into the compound that he broke cover in a firefight. “She can hit you from the goddamned moon while you’re on a moving train, BAM, just like that,” he’d said in protest, “she finds us and catches us off guard? We are fucked.”

They didn’t listen. The Disobedients liked to talk about having warriors among their ranks, but it was all big talk from misguided farmers thinking they were educated, and artists thinking they had valid ideas beyond the pretty things they made. It was impossible to outfight the Proud Loyalist, they all knew that.

Except that Collinsworth pointed out, they weren’t Proud Loyalists anymore, they were bandits-for-pay in the Freelands now. He pointed out, they did get outfought, repeatedly, and that was just by militia, they hadn’t even seen a Section 99er. They laughed at him, called him a sackless craven Pleb, and reminded him that Section 99 didn’t exist.

He knew better. That’s why he ran.

Her eyes dialed down to pinpricks. She said the only words she could think of in the split second she had left: “I’m sorry, Jesus.”

Then came that sound of thunder, that caved her head in above her right eye. She tipped over like a grazed bowling pin, kicked once, then never moved again.

Two seconds later, a distant bang echoed across the range.

---

Inez Daws ratcheted the lever on her rifle and resighted her target, the gunblast of its 10mm chambering still vibrating the hypodermic-sharp needles of the bush she was covering in. The humble magnified reflex she mounted only gave her 1.4 power of zoom, but to her eye, it was like giving a hawk a pair of binoculars. She leveled and everything fell into focus, just over 700 meters away: plus one dead bandito, laid out neatly in morgue slab position, her pea brain opened up to breathe the fresh country air.

Don’t say I ain’t done nothin’ nice for you, hon’, she thought to herself, sneering. First she shoots at a dog trying to find his people, then she pulls her pistol on a father and daughter running for cover in the barn? That kind of mean is better off playing the part of fertilizer, yessir.

Then she found the coward, crouched and sandwiched between corpses. She narrowed an eye and looked for the expression on his face. He was gone, broken, no heart for the fight then, and possibly even when it started. Didn’t stop him from opening fire when the signal was given, though.

He picked his carbine off the ground and made to flee, digging panicked crazylegs into the soil in a desperate bid to gain traction. Daws nudged her aim lightly, drawing a lead just ahead and high of his forehead. The Arc appeared in her eyes, an all-too-real imaginary line that she drew from the muzzle of her weapon, to the temple of his skull. The wind shifted; she nudged ahead him even further, and The Arc’s shape changed in kind. Her trigger finger tightened, to the stop just before the break and the bang.

He hit the brakes, hard, and so did she. For just a moment, she reassessed her surroundings, just to make sure she wasn’t target fixated- no countersnipers lining her up, nor ninjas sneaking up behind her. Then she found him in her optics again, still standing straight up.

Odd one, she thought passively. She tended to let odd ones be odd, before she shot them, as long as they didn’t do anything dangerous.

So she watched, as he stood still, shaking, like he was waiting for her to do him. It was an honest first; she didn’t actually know what to do.

Then the eager beaver that was in the dirt before she even showed up made a sound, a pain howl riding on the breeze. The coward’s posture changed, straightening and squaring. In a motion almost primal in its fury, he threw his weapon aside, dug in a 180, and ran for his comrade, at some points four legged as he scrambled back over the berm and the bodies of his former allies. Through her optics, she watched as he executed a textbook rescue lift on the fallen man, hefting his friend onto his shoulders, before belting off in the direction of retreat.

She took her sights off him and pressed her weapon’s crossbolt safety with her thumb.

Okay. You’re even, she thought. “Tell your friends about me,” she said, instead.

Weapon still shouldered, Daws pressed off the ground, rising out of the bushes. The vines of the bushes the locals dubbed ‘razor-rings’ for their utterly merciless barbs had no purchase on her, the movement control needed to walk through them like the local wildlife not even second nature to her, but first. From birth, she’d been raised in this new place in space called Texas, as true a native as there could be to it- she was the first generation of hominid sapient life to understand this alien frontier like it was their backyard. Even if she was only half the shot she was, an 8-set of confused Outtatowner scum, lost in the New Wild West, was nothing but a row of cans for someone like her to knock over.

She flicked the needles that fell loose as she rose from her scout vest, fingernail out, one at a time- if you brush with the back of your hand, they’ll rip you open like you just tried to slap a razorblade. She reached to her immaculately undercut hair and flicked one free, clearing it from her seething red-dyed fauxhawk, the comb of her nickname, her handle as an armed agent among her collective, and her callsign under the Section 99 registry.

“This is Rooster, callin the Carillos? Carillos, I swear, yall better still be alive down there,” she called into her comms, hitting the speed-connect for the farmstead she had in her sight lane. She stomped her foot when there wasn’t an immediate pickup. “Carillos, don’t go making me sad,” she said again into the line, a bit of her sharpshooter’s cool starting to bleed off. One little sign, c’mon, she prayed to herself.

“Inez, thank God,” the line spoke up. “We knew it had to be you. We’re alright, but Diego’s been hit in the leg and Anna has some glass in her.”

Thank God is right, she said to herself. “Ain’t glad about that last part, but glad about the rest, Chico. I’ll call the medics for you,” she called back.

Shots. Automatic. Banditos. About two kilometers, southeast. The Marvez ranch. Dangit, Rooster thought.

“Chico, I’m sorry, you gotta make that call yourself, I just got a call elsewhere, there is trouble all over,” she said into the line, and she couldn’t not keep the sinking feeling out of her voice.

There was a pause. Then a tentative, “R-right, Inez, I understand. Godspeed.”

“Thanks, Chico, Rooster out.”

She turned and made good time back to her all-terrain, keying its engine and taking it off quiet-drive, onto maximum output. As she sped towards the sound of gunfire that was gathering like a falling rain, the realization that this was the third attack she’d been inbound to since the sun rose meant something was very, very wrong. That while an 8-pack of confused Outtatowner scum, lost in the New Wild West, was nothing but a row of cans for her to knock over, there sure seemed to be a lot more than just 8.

Eventually, even she was going to run out of bullets.

---

The uptime clock he consulted read only 38 seconds. He was a machine. Every millisecond of those seconds should have been recorded in detail by a comprehensive logger that was his short term memory, to be compressed into archives for later consultation- long term memory. He could not remember why he was standing by his rack. He could not remember why he was in high alert. None of what was happening made sense. This was an error.

There were gunshots in the distance. He must have heard them when he was in rest-mode. That must have been it. That must have been what he heard in his rest, that was the shooting.

Troubleshoot. Run system specifications: I am a Theban 2A-N(M) combat android, upgraded to full Cogitoi status via introduction of Lifenet firmware v4.6 “Horizon” into my operations kernel. Designation/Legal Name: Arthur Currie. Aliases: Artie, Art, ‘Anchor’. Assembly Completed/Date of First Activation: 17 April 2005 (Physical Unit Age 16 Terran Years). Occupation: Militiaman/Auto Mechanic. Formerly: Personal Security Responder for Captain Robert T. Blanden, US-ANS Pensacola (Deceased.) Self Classification: Fighting machine.

Run primary diagnostics. All green. Run secondary diagnostics. All green. Run memcheck. Logging is active; no discrepancies detected.

There was the sound of distant gunfire again, and it was like every artificial muscle in his back tensed like a chain of firecrackers flaring off, so hard that the integrated armour plates on his core clicked against themselves like cards shuffling. His fingers curled, and he let out a breath of heat like a hair dryer. ‘Dragon’s Breath,’ the cogitoi called that, what happens when you tense up to the point your thermal purge shuts down and the heat buildup starts to cook your head and chestparts, to the point the emergency system kicks in so hard, the resulting exhale can be hot enough to blister a pair of poly-skin lips.

Run heat purge diagnostics, that must be the problem.

All green. FUCK, he thought.

He opened his internal logger. The word “FUCK” stared back at him, ticking up the tape feed of seconds that’d passed. Nope, guess that really is working too, he thought.

Gunfire, automatic, closer. On reaction, 150 kilograms of precision-engineered, bullet-resistant alloy and polymer executed a flawless combat roll across the floor of his apartment, so agile that he barely made a sound. He slid to a stop with his feet beneath him, beside the counter of his kitchen unit, where he pounded on a hidden compartment that sprung open and ejected a loaded Arana PDW into his gunhand. From his cover, he drew a targeting boundary over his front door and parented the automatic in his right hand beneath it- anything that came through, could deal with his literal homing aim. His left arm scissored open, revealing its deadly payload of a micro-plasma cannon, the nasty pipecleaner of an integrated secondary his fellows of the Marine-model line all mounted. He parented that under to the targeter he bounded his apartment’s front window in.

Then he waited, machine still, a landmine of sophisticatedly targeted gunfire. He waited, as he heard the sound of a pickup truck pass on the road behind his hab complex. He waited, as his neighbor turned on her shower, and made the pipes in the shared wall rattle for just a second. He waited, as another blurt of distant shots turned his gut, turned a gut that was a highly efficient sugar catalyst designed for chemical-to-electrical generation via traditional food sources, like it was a quivering coil of biomass being tossed by an angry sea.

A figure ran past his window, and the targeting boundary drew the atomic death in his left hand after it. No weapon detected; Visual ID: McKayla Gordon, Terran, age 13. She lived in the next building over. She was running for cover.

There was another blank in Artie’s memory all of the sudden. He hadn’t in any capacity registered the last five seconds, since he’d processed the last targeting input, until he discovered he was now sitting slumped behind his counter, head low, covered with hands that were still armed and in attack mode. Holy shit, that was a little girl, his thoughts had resumed on the log. I just locked a microplas to a little girl, what the fuck is wrong with you? You goddamned can opener, you motherfucking radiator!

He watched his logged thoughts tick by, set to echo on infinite. Time resumed, from a week earlier, an hour later in the day, in a place 46 kilometers outside of city limits. He was scrambling out of the back of a burning militia rover, hit by a beam cannon that partially liquefied the front end, sent it spiralling end over end off the side of a country road. Olfactory sensors registered a tangy carbon stink that was clinging to him, that it quickly discerned was roasting arissiyan flesh- Sarophen was in the driver’s seat. Davidson was riding shotgun beside them, and a combination of molten metal spall and Sarophen’s own bone matter had sliced him apart. Artie tried to dismiss the red tinge of his fire control systems from his vision, then realized it was blood and spit from the mouth of Zakra- one second, he was sat next to Artie, laughing, joking, the next, his eyes were glazed, dead, pointing in opposite directions, as his neck snapped against the ceiling of the rolling vehicle.

As he hit the dirt road, clear of the wreckage, he rolled into a ditch, the last best resort for cover against a long-range directed energy gun. He tried to rally himself. Then looked at his hands, and saw the blood that clung to him, the different colours: terran crimson, arissiyan vermillion, rhidling burgundy. Fuck, there was the garak deep violet. He looked back at the wreck, and saw a fuzzy mass in a militia BDU, pinned and broken beneath its red-hot armour. Goddamn it, Margan had eight kids and like 30 grandkids, God no.

They were all dead.

He heard mobile-2 round the corner, and he screamed for them to stop, hit the brakes and reverse from his position in the ditch. Mobile-2 managed to see the wreck by the roadside before the cannon fired again, hitting them straight through the roof. The rear section of the militia carrier blew out, Howards and Korgra tumbling out among the debris, engulfed in flames, their bodies already starting to burn to tallow and ash. He pressed off the ground and pushed all available cycles into his fire control systems and scanned for available targets. He found the barest hint of motion more than a kilometer away, close enough to armed figures. He dialed in a firing solution and let loose on full auto, aiming for area damage, roaring like a monster from behind his automatic rifle. His targeter wasn’t wrong- they bit back at him with supporting automatic fire from a pair of kinetic MGs, big, big caliber, that arced in high and in tight bursts. The shots fell around him like a hail, made the stones in the dirt shatter like bone china, before hitting him once, then twice in his core, then a third in the head. He fell, and tumbled back into the ditch.

A trickle of milky blue cogitoi thermotive fluid dripped from the fragment-speckled crater in his forehead, and added to the blood staining his militia jacket. It was the clearest thing he could process through the static of his rattled optics, and the pulse of the [SENSOR CITADEL DISRUPTED, RESTARTING IN 3, 2, 1] error in his vision. When he was back online and he could feel control returning to his motivators, the only thing he could make them do in time, was yell for his comrades to get to cover, as long range machine gun fire butchered them standing. They fell, Anderson, Bright, Lerose, Namaphra- his friends.

He remembered flip-reloading his weapon’s jungle mags, bracing against the side of the ditch and scanning for hostiles again. This time, nothing. Somehow, they’d dispersed, clean as a wisp of smoke on breezing air. They were gone, and he was alone in the world now.

He turned and slumped against the side of the ditch. As feelings rose in him that he lacked the hardware to express, he gave in to a grim urge: he checked the pulsing damage report icon in his corner periphery vision. It read:

Exterior armour damaged; estimated integrity remaining: 90.8%.

He screamed. Until he was certain it was beyond the point of all logic.

Then he was back in his apartment, in the same position almost. Another blank, this time just 3 seconds. He wasn’t screaming, that had instead turned to a whimper like a german shepherd. It was the only thing he could manage for what he was feeling, no tear ducts, no blood to turn his face red, he couldn’t even shake, as his internal stabilizers would even the motion out. He was in pain, he was in so much pain; he was malfunctioning, he didn’t know why his own systems were hurting him and not even bothering to at least track it as an event. Goddamn the bastard who decided AI should feel, Goddamn them. Where were those three seconds, why did they not log properly? Why did they hurt him so much to try and think about?

Three seconds, three fucking seconds, where are you, why are you? His thoughts raced, and he watched them on the log, echoing into a cascade. He was lost in a hall of mirrors reflecting a frantic need to know.

Then blackness, peaceful, deathlike blackness. It was followed by a soothing green, like that of a conifer in spring, back on Terra. The word Lifenet appeared in his eyes, as a loading bar filled in behind it. Then the world came back into view, as his reboot completed.

That will not repeat, Arthur declared to himself. That was. Embarrassing.

He stood, straight, mechanically, and reset his shoulders. He safed the weapon in his left arm, then shut it, snapping his hand back into place, before replacing his PDW in its compartment. Inadequate, he thought. I require greater firepower.

He checked his systems. All green. Gunfire rattled in the distance, again. This time, no change, but for it appearing properly in his event log. Good. Optimal. This was functional: Arthur Currie, fighting machine, had self-assessed as Good to Go.

So he declared in his mind a new set of objectives, given that as he was now unfortunately the last member of his militia squad, he could be field promoted to Sergeant. He filed them as plaintext, and pinned them to his visual UI as he composed them:

1. Determine identities of individuals involved on the attack of 8 June, 2020 that resulted in the near annihilation of Able 1-2 of the New Laredo People’s Militia.
2. Locate perpetrating individuals and their support staff.
3. Neutralize all as hostile comba--

He stopped, then backspaced.

3. Neutralize hostile elements, capture alive surrendered combatan--

He stopped, then backspaced again.

3. Make them all pay for hurting my friends.

Good. Optimal. This was functional.

---

The reality of being as good as Rooster was, was that as far as her rifle could reach, she couldn’t aim it everywhere it needed to be at once. This is what she reminded herself when she saw the bodies in the field, as she pulled onto the ridge overlooking the Marvez cattlelands. Scattered amid a rough dozen head of longhorn that caught the initial storm of incoming fire, were Calvin Crawford, Junko Ishioda and Wrin Aeophon, all of them tenderfoots, all of them dressed too light for a day in bandit country, all of them folks deserving better than what they got.

The devil at her core roiled, smouldered, smoked. She thanked it for the fire, took that anger and focused into something useful, skidding her all-terrain to a halt and dismounting in one motion, pulling her rifle from its sleeve across her back as she broke into a low sprint. Expert eyes broadened, looking for a good shooting position- she found a keyhole between two boulders on the ridge, and slid into it like she was stealing home. She raised her rifle, and the natural killer in her worked its dark magic: not perfectly beneath the post of her sight, but high to its 10 o’clock- bandito.

Howdy, she thought to herself, snapping the crossbolt safety off. The Arc appeared in her vision, through her sights, and the devil in her made it seethe, blood-charged, pulsing. She evened her breathing and it smoothed into a silken thread that pierced the mangy terran runt right through his pale blue eyes. In the pause between breaths, in the void between heartbeats, she squeezed the match trigger beneath her finger, and it broke clean as a glass needle. The atmosphere-breaking crack of the shot pounded the dust off the boulders she was covering between, half a cannon blast exploding out of the muzzle of a lever-action rifle. In her raptor’s eye, she watched the vapor trail go out through her gunsight, and connect the dots between her and her target. An explosion of pink mist, and the blondie in an armoured duster with a beat-up Kalash turned to a string-cut puppet, a heap of dead meat among mounds of cowshit. Headshot, base of the brain- literally dead before he dropped.

You enjoy that, she thought.

What came next was academic. As Rooster opened up from her vantage point, planting another two hostiles into the dirt with buffalo-killer bullets, the bandits broke off their advance through the field and fell back to the terraformer canal, falling behind the lip of the ridge and setting up a hasty firing line. As they went, Marvez collective workers rallied and reached after them with their own own weapons, and one of them crumpled, bit by bit until he fell in a heap, sequentially demolished by at least a dozen small caliber shots. The bandits tried to return fire from their new position, and the workers raked them with their weapons. Their hail of bullets and pulse-slashes was made all the more demoralizing when Rooster found enough of the head of the rightmost bandit on the line to draw The Arc through, then blew it off. They sank, pinned down and panicked, giving pissed off Marvez workers time and room to pile into a pickup parked by the fenceline and then gun it, opening up on them in a cowboy drive-by with ranch rifles, shotguns, even a pre-Terrafall M1911 pistol from the War. Rounds started finding their mark, as puffs of red started joining the dirt kicking off the canal ridge with each degree their firing angle sharpened- one of the bandits fell flat, clutching at a ripped-open throat, another fell backwards, hit through the shoulder. It became a full flank, and the two left alive turned and tried to flee through the canal, waist-deep in water laced with geoengineering fertilizer. Rooster let the workers have the last call. Amazingly, the ranchers tried to shout them down, get them to surrender, and the bandits turned with weapons raised, fingers on triggers. She blew one of them away, cut his spine in half through his shoulder; the workers tore the already wounded man to pieces with massed fire as he vainly tried to make a last stand.

This was frontier justice, understood by one who’d seen it from behind a gun. You either drag it in front of the judge by the ankles, or you extract it one round at a time.

The problem with it though, was that it left a lot of Why’s hanging in the air. The Why’s, Rooster couldn’t get out of her head as she came down off the ridge.

“The first thing I need to do is apologize,” she said to Emilia Marvez, boss at the ranch, who was at the center of a scrum of ranch hands that parted as she approached. “I needed to be quicker and I weren’t.”

“Daws, you saved lives today,” was Marvez’s immediate response, the voice of a woman still wired on adrenaline and not about to accept a mope as a greeting.

“Right I did, but only right for the ones I didn’t,” she said, and Marvez hissed through her teeth.

“It’s this like this all over again, isn’t it?” Marvez said, instead of starting an argument.

“‘fraid so,” said Rooster, and her words reflected in the face of everyone, the mix of tension, exhaustion, the fatigue of a recurring nightmare. This was the fourth round of attacks they’d seen across New Laredo recently, scattered bandit raids, touching off in sequence from before dawn and into the afternoon. They were separated by a week at least, usually a week and change, a rising and falling tide of violence that always came back just as hard, no matter how many bodies they fed their fields with. Sometimes they were chuckleheads that couldn’t be relied upon to do anything other than burn a crop field or two, Outtatown goons who weren’t nothing doing against a gang of angry Texans with guns. Other times? They were scary. They did real damage, those other times, they caused real harm.

No matter who it was doing the knocking though, the change in the status quo was wearing on the colonists. It was wearing on Inez. One of the firstborn of her land, she’d grown with the it, become strong like it. Now, bit by bit, day by day, it was being picked apart by a hatred that refused to announce itself proper, and she felt every second weigh on her. That every time it reared its head unannounced, it devoured a bit of her world, neighbor by neighbor.

“Think that was all of them?” one of the ranch hands spoke up, trying to light a match in a dark room.

“Never wanna say yes to that, not how things have been going,” was Rooster’s quick response.

“Right,” said Emilia Marvez, clearing her throat and making up her mind. “Anyone that wants some more, posse up, we’ve got neighbors that probably need reinforcements. Anyone that doesn’t, we’ve got friends that need tending to, and thank you for doing the hard work today.”

A rip of big, throaty automatic fire opened up, far to the north, probably from the road network that separated the western farm fields and the northern mining operations. All heads turned to it, as smaller cracks answered back at it, then fell away. It grew to a bellow that reverberated across the range, a sound solidly unidentifiable except for just pure deafening volume, like if an explosion could express fury.

“Uh, M-Miss Rooster,” one of the ranch hands spoke up meekly, looking like he’d just been scolded by his dead grandmother. “Seein’ you’d know the country best and all, but uh… you know anything that makes a sound like that? Beyond the terraforming fence, I mean?”

She gave a moment of thought. An explosion, but angry? Either the guttural, bacteria-laced belch of a New Laredan Range Raptor standing to full height out of its dirt-burrow and starting its attack charge, or the paint-stripping ‘sqwaaaaaaa’ of a Rubyback Skyskater trying to swoop on you from out of the sun. Problem is, to hear either of them so loud? They’d be close enough to smell, even without the wind on your side. This sound? So far away, even she couldn’t properly place it in relation to the geography.

“‘Fraid not,” she said.

All she knew is, she didn’t want to see what it was close up.

---

Nobody found it unusual when Arthur Currie reported in to the Militia central compound, as his leave from base was voluntary, only his active duty status had been suspended pending a psych-eval and reassignment. These things were taking longer than he wanted, considering what had happened in the previous attack. He needed to be in the field with his comrades, they needed him. He was their best weapon, it was only logical.

He had noted upon swiping his ID, his provisional promotion from Free Trooper-II, to Squad Sergeant. That, at least, was functional thinking happening on command’s part.

So nobody turned a head when the newly minted Sgt. Currie turned up in street clothes, nodding calm and quiet acknowledgement to the comrades that slowed down to give condolences, even despite the high alert on base. Everything was in too much of a rush to notice him using the new, just slightly higher access his buck-sergeant promotion, what could very well be the result of the rostering system on base promoting him automatically out of necessity, to access the Abel sortie archives. After all, he was the sergeant of first platoon, second squad now, he had it in right to access 1-2’s incident archives, even if he was the only one left in it. From it, he retrieved what he knew he’d need for his plan: the blood painted BDU he was found in among his comrades.

The dogtags weren’t in there yet, they were still in the bar memorial. He needed those for his plan too, but thankfully, even if anyone was in there, they probably wouldn’t have stopped him from taking them.

The part he felt that would be the most difficult of this phase of the plan was retrieving his service weapon, his Quantico IAR heavy automatic rifle- more than enough for a proper fighting machine to do damage with. This consideration of difficulty was mitigated when he saw the quartermaster on duty was Warwick, an individual who put more weight in emotion than regulation. All Arthur needed to say to melt the heart of the biological was say, in his best impression of a wounded cogitoi trying to hold in his grief:

“I want to help, and you need me to help.”

It was a very good impression. He was a very well-engineered fighting machine, very cleverly built.

Warwick gave a long, hard eye, then the implicit nod of ‘I get shit, it rolls downhill.’ Then he went behind the racks for a moment, and came back with a big gun, with a big carrying vest for a big man. He nodded again as he slid them across the counter, eyes up like he didn’t see anything, before he put his back to the counter. “You’ve still got people, Anchor,” he said.

Arthur agreed. He was still missing a big chunk of them, though. A large quantity, he meant.

This all went into his duffel, at which nobody raised an eyebrow. The biologicals were all too panicked to notice the cool, calm and collected machine gathering what could simply be his on-base belongings. Technically, they were, so nobody asked when he walked straight back out through the front gate. From there, he went to his job at the public works building, the maintenance vehicle garage that the locals called the Motor Pool. He tucked his supplies into the passenger footwell of a City of New Laredo work pickup, keyed the ignition with his union ID, and headed out onto the nearest road that’d take him into the sticks.

That was the first phase done, in record time. He was efficient. Good. Optimal.

Biologicals had taught him a number of clever and interesting things about the ways they communicate, things he’d folded masterfully into his sophisticated programming and learned to imitate nigh-flawlessly. One of the most complex things was how to verbalize abstract thinking. Phrases like ‘read between the lines’ and ‘listen to the words they aren’t saying’ taught him much about how a biological mind, and gave him context for how to express his logical, mathematically-optimized mental processing. Now, he was taking those phrases and applying them to his plan: the attacks on New Laredo were sequential, distributed, launched one after another as a series of instruments, a scattered guerilla war. Without good intel, it would be impossible to determine when such an attack would begin at its first instance in the day. However, with each sequential attack in the day, taking into account that so far, the hostiles had yet to strike the same area in a day, determining where the next attack would happen became decidedly more probable, at least with by a mind with a machine’s logical processing power.

Thus, the second phase: analyze map of New Laredo township, limits and rural area. Cross reference with reported incidents and distress calls recorded over local comms. Express areas which can be logically read as the target zone of an attack in a red tint, then look where the map has yet to be coloured in: this was his search area, the spots where a group of enemies looking to paint his town red hadn’t hit yet.

Navigate: he plotted a zig-zag route that would take him efficiently through his search area, never remote enough that he couldn’t break away to assist if the next attack began before he found it. It was mostly all to the north and the east, in the mining complexes and the eastern farming acres. The pattern was illogical, the work of obvious biologicals: strike the vulnerable, not the valuable; spend effort in hopes a lifeform just as stubborn, emotional and territorial as you will suddenly abandon its nature, become afraid and leave its habitat. Typical flawed and inefficient thinking.

He checked his uptime: one hour, 14 minutes, 43 seconds and 5 milliseconds had passed since he’d gotten behind the wheel. He began to doubt himself.

Then he heard the voices. His event logger didn’t fully register the first few things his audio picked up, instead registering them only as voices and performing what limited analysis his systems were capable of: namely, they were terran, and they were experiencing a great deal of stress.

“I don’t care. I’m a responsible capitalist: I take money, I do the work,” was the first clean transcription.

Arthur killed the engine and pulled over. Phase three began.

---

“You want to call this shit work?” Berringer shot back. “You join the Expeditionary to kill miners and farmers?”

“No, asshole, I joined because it was better than a prison colony,” Keller said. “Getting to kill commies was a perk.”

“Yeah, watch it Keller, I don’t know if you can catch Being Dickless, but I think Barry here might give you it,” Green joined in. He grabbed at the pulse pistol in his waistband and wiggled it at Berringer.

“Careful, Greenie, if you shoot your other ball off, you might do the galaxy a favor,” Gallo said, coming to Berringer’s side.

There were 14 of them all together, all of them survivors of the fall of the Walls of Exeter. All of them drifters in a region of space they didn’t want to understand, a place that didn’t make any sense. It was a place filled with Disobedients and Deviates, a place built by people who were wrong and incorrect, and so everything they built was wrong and incorrect. None of what they did was set up to work like the Consortium, and that they’d be so insulting and ungrateful to their Superior way of life made all of them all want to throw up. More to that, they were all so fucking stupid- they had everything here, why didn’t they strip mine it like sensible people, so everyone could be a king at once?

Even still, the thought of shooting people out working in the field made a few of them feel weak. They didn’t like feeling weak. It was, well… weakness.

“Berringer, if you’re going to be a fucking pussy, at least do it in a useful place, because right now, you’re just getting in the way,” Keller said. He was the one that was good at debating.

“You wanna see what a pussy looks like, you dumbfuck?” Berringer spat at him.

“Help me,” the voice said, flatly, but loudly.

All heads turned and some weapons raised, to the rockpile that lined the corner of the road it emerged from around. The shape that emerged was hard to figure out, flat out hard to look at. Like a pile of rags given the vague shape of a man, crusted in a sickly rainbow of dried blood, it staggered, one foot in front of the other, left arm bent at unhealthy angles, right arm clutching a cloth sack in a death grip that it dragged behind.

“Help me,” it said again, with the same flat register.

“What the fuck,” Keller said, drawing his sidearm down on it. Berringer only looked on, shaking.

With violence, the figure stood to full height, and the rags flipped to his back, revealing the hulking form of a 6’4 combat android, who reset its feigned-broken weapon-mount arm into a functioning limb, and pulled an automatic rifle from the bag.

Ten dog tags jingled from its handguard in a bouquet.

“Help me,” said Arthur Currie, flatly, but with eyes full of murder, “I’m wounded.”

---

Phase 3 of his plan had executed logically, perfectly, absolutely motherfucking flawlessly. He had acquired his tools, he had sought his enemies, and now, as he tore into them with his weapon, they had seen his pain. Seen the pain they had caused in others. This was a fighting machine’s payback, executed with intent, and it was only logical to take absolute delight in the terror they showed him, rewarded him with. He lit into them from the hip on full auto, letting his fire control system do all the work, let them see what they had made angry: death, procedurally generated by a sophisticated series of algorithms. He let them know cold machine rage,

Only it wasn’t as cold as he thought it was. He hadn’t realized, by the time he had emptied the first flip of his jungle mag into the group of debators and turned them into a collective heap, that he was screaming. Not roaring, screaming, at volume he didn’t realize he was capable of, a like a man washed by a storm, trying to swim to shore. He slammed back the charging handle on his rifle and shouldered it, spreading a targeting boundary across the remaining scum. At first they opened up on him with a blurt of return fire, catching him in the vest and his plating with carbines and PDWs. The polarity in his vest’s shield array deadened the initial volley to nothing as he returned fire with his scream, shouldering his weapon as he cut down three attackers. When the shield ran dry and the shots started sinking through his vest, all they did was ping off ablatively plated polyskin that was rated for heavier firepower than they could muster. It wasn’t anything but a tickle compared to the apocalypse occurring in Arthur’s mind. He hated them so much. In only a few seconds of listening their inane, stupid, evil conversation, he’d learned so much about hate. This was what he has learned from them, what he had gained from them, what he had been infected with by them, and it made him hate them even more.

The fight was a rout almost as soon as it started, despite the numbers game. He’d chopped 14 down to six in a matter of seconds, and those that remained turned to flee, two on bikes, the rest in a crew-cab pickup. The bikers were sitting ducks, who might as well have died standing for as far as they managed to get away. He walked his fire to the truck as the driver floored it, and he managed to blow in the rear window. Then the bolt of his weapon fell on an empty chamber.

The sound he let out was almost primal, almost agony, the sound of a starving predator watching a meal flee. The logger in his mind transcribed every nanosecond of his full wrath as his primary weapon fell away, and he transitioned to the secondary in his left arm: You fuckers think you can get away you fuckers think this gets to end when you say it does you pieces of shit think you get to hurt my people and leave me all alone and just live I will spread you across this fucking galaxy piece by piece you absolute trash and I promise you I will make every nanosecond and every angstrom unit of it the worst pain you’ve ever felt, fuck you, Fuck You, FUCK YOU, DIE.

He overcharged the chamber in his microplas, and dismissed the self-damage warning that clouded his vision. For the briefest moment, a pinprick on the New Laredan map became as bright as any star in the Freelands, as Arthur discharged the full capacity of his arm’s gas magazine in one colossal blast of focused indigo ionfire. The shot flew true, threading clean through the hole in the pickup’s rear window and exploding against the inside of the windshield. In an instant, the truck’s cab flash-flooded with fusion heat, bursting apart the passengers in a wash of expanding plasma and shredding them in a storm of molten metal spall. The heat penetrated the truck’s firewall, causing a catastrophic engine failure- fusion containment failure via cascade damage, a Freebloom explosion. The front end sheared loose from the heart of a blue-cored mushroom cloud, sending secondary projectiles flying like fireworks crackling. The sound was incredible, in that Arthur couldn’t tell if it was the burning scum shrieking, or the superheated atmosphere itself.

Then everything was still. Still with a familiarity. Familiarity and a distinct discomfort. Arthur Currie was alone in the country. Again. He wanted to cry, but couldn’t. Again. He didn’t like this. He hated this. It wasn’t at all logical.

Why did it still hurt?

One from the initial heap made a miserable noise, the sound of a man trying to cough bone fragments out of a lung. He kicked and squirmed and managed to roll onto his belly, and started to crawl, kicking bloody footprints as he went. In a slow walk, Arthur followed them, letting his footfalls be loud enough that he was sure they were audible.

“N-no,” he heard the body say. It was ‘Barry’ judging by the vocal analysis readout and the comparison in his event log. The body grunted again. “No, p-please.” It came out mostly as an exerted breath.

Arthur thought about reloading his rifle. Then he had a thought he wasn’t sure how to process, but one he was compelled enough to shoot through as a direct output: he shook his weapon, and let the dog tags jingle.

The body grunted again as he tried to gain distance, desperately. Arthur answered him, the little jingle, jingle, jingle trailing after him.

“Please I’m sorry,” the body said, “I didn’t want to.”

Jingle, jingle, jingle.

“Please.”

It only took Arthur two proper steps to catch him, kick him over onto his back and straddle him. He met eyes with him: just another brown-haired, brown-eyed nobody from the Consortium. He let the dog tags jingle again, let the voices of his comrades speak.

“Sarophen, Davidson, Zakra, Margan, Howards, Korgra, Anderson, Bright, Lerose, Nemaphra,” he said. He tried to make his voice a flat register, but he could tell by the his own waveform analysis, it was anything but.

The man on the ground looked at him. He didn’t understand.

“Do you know those names?” Arthur asked him. He analyzed his voice again- flatter. Better. Could be more optimized.

‘Barry’ shook his head. He tried to take a deep breath, and crushing pain cut it off.

“I did.” Arthur said.

‘Barry’ winced. Arthur cocked his still-open left arm, the spent gas mag ejecting from its well. He slotted a replacement in and racked it into place. His vision UI registered a fresh four shots loaded into the mounted secondary, as he levelled it at the body’s head.

“I swear, I swear it wasn’t our idea,” the body said. “We took the job thinking it’d get us jumped in with a real crew, they’re the ones putting out the open call for work. This is-” he choked on his own pain for a second, grasping the hole in his sternum. “This is resume shit. They want to know if you’re for real, so you can do the real job.”

Arthur logged this. He lacked the software to better tell if he was lying like some synthetics, but from what his limited vocal analysis could manage, this was genuine data. Data, nothing more, for a logical machine.

“Who? Where? What real job?” With each word he spoke, Arthur found the quiet, flat register he was looking for. Good. Optimal. This was functional.

The body clenched his eyes. “Fuck if I know, Keller was in charge, he was the one that talked to them.”

Arthur glanced over, at the one he’d identified as ‘Keller.’ It would be rather difficult for him to talk, given the three fatal chestcase hits he’d taken, even if he hadn’t also been explosively hit through the left eye. Data not found.

He turned back to the body. He stared up for just a second, then closed his eyes when he realized what he was looking at: one of those merciless metal fuckers that gets unleashed on a battalion ship in case of a mutiny. Jesus fuck, what was one of those doing out here, and why wasn’t it on his side? It wasn’t fair. Why was it wearing one of the commies’ uniforms? Why did it talk like it had friends? What the fuck was wrong with this place? It made no sense.

So he made what peace he could.

“Thank you,” Arthur said, trying to manage his contempt. “That was.” He paused, his register perfectly flat. “Useful,” he said.

Barely above a whisper, with that same register, he said, “Neutralize.” Then he fired.

---

Next Time: Van and Telin arrive, as we get a bigger picture on what's actually going on in New Laredo.