A Quick Death in Texas - Chapter 1

Pardon Me for Screaming

“At this point, I just have to ask all of you, forthright and honestly: what do any of us benefit from keeping Van Parker on his leash?”

‘Granny’ Janila Sendra, spry at 62, fiercely beloved by the clan she was matriarch of, let her open question hang in the room. Not all present were present in body; some flickered on omnidirectional sprite-screens, their image and voice broadcast lo-def across light-centuries by FTL relays. Others sat with professional composure, in ornate leather chairs at the round table in the Sendra Clan compound’s central gazebo. All present represented the shadow of the bright side of Freeland leadership, those considered more shady but just as important as the colony mayors and the union leaders- the heads of ‘Familial Societies’, leaders of intelligence unions, and those representing groups totally unabashed of being crooked. Their voices were muted to the outside world by layers of rhidling foliage, hedgerows and creeping flowers in the layered, labyrinthine garden that surrounded them, their meeting secured by members of the Sendra Sekech, their corps of sworn clan-warriors.

“We, at least, annoy a man who has done very well for us since coming into the employ of Mrs. Sendra,” Francis Mendel was the first to speak up, handsome and refined at 43, the head of the Mendel Organization. The Mendels were a Jewish crime family, based out of New Providence on Samoud, a group that resisted Consortium occupation on Terra, managing to themselves escape, before coming to own the gambling racket in New Providence, while splitting time railroading Terrans and other sapients, Jew and gentile alike, out of the Inner Galaxy. “And at the most, we damage a working friendship with an individual who is uncommonly effective at what he does. We get nothing.”

“What is it that Parker is effective at?” asked Takin Pross, arms crossed, ears back, tail straight. Pross was one of three shift commanders at the Alameka Grove Civil Security Detail. He hadn’t had a happy history with Van, and what Pross had at one time described as ‘destructive antics’.

“The man is the best hammer I ever met in my life.” Mendel said, with a straightfaced smile. “I say that with no disrespect to you or him, Mrs. Sendra, I know you treat Mr. Parker like a family member, and I would not use such a word disparagingly. A hammer for pounding nails, a hammer for fine chiseling, a hammer for breaking down walls, the man is very versatile, and I have the utmost respect for him.” Granny Janila had lent Van out to Francis as a bloodhound a few years back. Someone had been predating on the entertainers working out of his casinos, blinding them with mace before slashing faces and cutting hamstrings. Francis expected either someone with some sick tendencies towards show tune singers and kickline girls, or he was getting moved in on by a hostile crew. What he didn’t expect, was that it wasn’t a rival family, but a group of failing entrepreneurs running a show theater off main in the entertainment district, who’d decided maiming the competition was the way to get asses in seats. Van piled the zipcuffed slashers at Francis’ feet on the loading dock of his Tradewinds Casino, each of them beaten to tenderized and blindfolded with a mangled showgirl headdress. Francis’ people suffered no more attacks after that, and as bonus, he got to flip a mismanaged show theater into a popular comedy club.

“I wouldn’t take disrespect, and neither would he. You know what a raknaw means, Mr. Mendel?”

“I believe the rough English is, ehh, ‘uncommon thug?’”

Granny Sendra nodded. “He is my raknaw. He knows what it means, that he might not be my right hand, but he is my closed fist, and I love how he punches.”

“Ah, yes, ‘thug’, good word.” Pross didn’t have much love for the rhidling clan system, himself pledged to the Rhidling Commonwealth. He wasn’t one of the happy go lucky ‘we’re just like one big happy clan, except without the blood feuds’ Commonwealthers, either, but one of the ‘we are a more civilized society’ types. He didn’t appreciate house enforcers keeping their own clan’s peace, and he especially didn’t appreciate big, stompy-footed Terran louts, confused and thinking they’re part-rhidling and belong to a clan, taking that same role. Van Parker had been encountered over two dozen times by Alemeka Grove CivSec, and every time he was forced to be released on the scene, if he was even detained at all, all because the Sendras were a legitimate powerbase, if a shadowy one, with the ability to either commission or designate members of their own operators under Section 99- each time, let go because he was Their Guy. The last one involved an on-foot and in-vehicle pursuit, in which Van’s augmented agility resulted in the wreck of 3 interceptor cars on the Alemeka Turnpike. Not to mention the 7 agents he assaulted and injured, that weren’t actually in the interceptors.

“You’re still mad, aren’t you?” The cogitoi known only as Doomsday Clock spoke from their screen, their face a cloaked mask of turning gears and twisting springs with blue glowing eyes and a razorblade smile. “About the fascists he rooted out in your detail?” Their eyes and smile glowed in time with their words playfully lilting words. Clock was the head of a group who referred to themselves simply as The Clockworkers, cogitoi who were, 99% of their lives, friendly neighbors devoted to doing simple jobs throughout all walks of life in the Freelands, and 1% of their lives, spies, assassins and body-defilers of known cogitoi-exploiters attempting to hide out in the Freelands. Van had once liaised with a group of their people, in an operation to free their agents from a Consortium incursion stockade. Not only did Van manage the infiltration, he also managed to upload Lifenet firmware to the stockade’s supply of combat androids as they slept in their dispenser racks, waking them as full-fledged cogitoi and freeing them all as well, the vanguard of a sudden armed uprising. Since that day, Clock had nothing but love for Van, and sent word through their network that he was a bionic brother to the cause, that he should be looked out for, because he looks out in return.

“He’s a periodic nuisance that on occasion explodes into an unnatural disaster, what’s not to like?” Pross kept his arms cross, turned up his nose.

“Commander Pross, I warned you about those individuals and the people they’d been caught consorting with. You didn’t believe me, and when you were confronted with the hard reality of their dealings, you offered personal apology to myself and my organization, and you have my respect for that.” Clock was melodic, speaking with a metronome’s timing. “Yet you don’t offer apology to our good friend Van. And why is that?”

“He assaulted my agents, he threw my cousin off a pedestrian overpass, he destroyed three chasers playing bumper-tag on the turnpike, and at the end of it all, he made us look like the criminals,” said Pross.

“You were. At least, four of you were,” said Clock.

“See me? I’m allowed to not like this man, yes?” Pross spread his arms, beckoned wide. “I assume there’s a word for this feeling I have for him in English or another Terran language?”

“‘Sour grapes.’” Francis said, with his professional smile.

“Thank you, good word,” said Pross.

“It is the opinion of both myself, and the members of my organization,” Clock talked past them, “that we only have benefit to letting our good friend Van perform this proposed function of his. We are each of us leaders of our own communities, and each of us through experience understand, that secret societies like this Unseen Mutual? They never work out well, for us, for the people we represent, for the communities we live, operate within and support. They are not any biological parasite, they’re a botnet that attacks remotely and invisibly, and they need to be fried to nonfunction before they grow too large and distributed to be assailable.”

“So you’re saying, we turn the Canine loose, and, what? Pray the splash zone doesn’t reach farther in than the third row?” Maxine Delroy, High Seat of the Council of the Fortune’s Wheel syndicate, took her moment to speak for the first time, relaxed in her opulent office, framed in her sprite-screen comms window.

“I’m saying, we let our good friend Van seek his justice, that he might make the galaxy a better place as a result,” Clock said.

Maxine let out a long, laboured sigh. “See, this is why I avoid working with anarchists if I can,” she said at the end of it.

“You would raise issue with Van’s operational independence, Miss Delroy?” Granny Janila said from behind folded hands, narrowed eyes and raised ears.

“Loudly, Mrs. Sendra. I understand full well he’s a favored minion among yours but, the man is barely containable as he is. The second we condone this action, is the second we’re all complicit in disturbing the peace on a potential, literal interstellar scale,” she said. If there was one thing the High Council of Insomnia wouldn’t accept, it was the sort of widespread chaos that’d disrupt the precious flow of moneyed tourists to their nigh-short-of-Caligulan pleasure-station.

“Two questions to you, then: One, ‘minion?’ Madam?”

She let the air settle. Nobody said anything, nor did anyone break their poker face.

“Two, this wouldn’t also be the case of you having hurt feelings over Van, regarding possible prior incidents in your history?”

Maxine raised an eyebrow. It twitched. “Start with the 5 DBs he spread across the 4th floor of the Kashmir, what was it, two of them neck-broken with empty hands, and three of them riddled with a suppressed automatic? Those were private VIP guards, mind, but then you can add three of my people to the morgue when your attack dog took the hard way down an elevator shaft and shot everyone in the car coming up. Plus another seven in the lobby, and then 4 in the hotel bar, which he destroyed-”

“Miss Delroy…”

“-with a grenade launcher! A god, damned, grenade, launcher. He cinderized the poor bastard he was after with the thing, an incendiary shell and a near-full body burn. The man was reduced to his left leg below the knee with an intact shoe, a right foot and his left hand, his Dormeyer Series-X serving as the break that stopped the fire at his wrist.”

“Miss Delroy…” Granny Janlia tried again.

“I have a Series-X, doesn’t surprise me, prettiest watch you can drop on the highway,” said Francis.

“Mr. Mendel, Commander Pross, I know you can appreciate this, but I don’t know if the rest of you can: do you know how hard it is, to get people, a community, back to normalcy after carnage like that? Do you know how difficult it is, to instill trust in a people that mayhem like that won’t happen again?”

“I imagine, Miss Delroy, it would be as difficult as convincing me the High Council of Insomnia doesn’t condone sapient trafficking, given how my grandson-heir was recently rescued from an auction block held within its spaceframe. Especially after you assured me personally that was impossible.”

Nobody said anything, nor did anyone break their poker face.

“That was a bit of an incident, yes?” Granny Janila said.

“A major one, yes.” Maxine Delroy said.

“Let it be said that I don’t like being tense with you, Miss Delroy. We’ve benefitted from our collaboration in so many ways. In my mind, we can’t make this a matter of the makoum or ego, it’d be arrogant and stupid of us. I need to know who felt my grandson was merchandise. You need to know who made one of your allied syndicates stab you in the back, and made your entire community lose face in one of the direst of ways.”

There was a clear moment of air, like it took a moment for Maxine’s stream to catch up; it didn’t, she was swallowing her pride.

“I agree,” Miss Delroy said, straightening herself.

“And if you and I are of similar mind on matters such as that most heinous of crimes against the Freeland public, I’d imagine you’ve got as much will as I have to personally skin at least one or two of the perpetrators yourselves,” said Mrs. Sendra.

“Oh, I very much agree,” Miss Delroy said, with a nod and a faint smile. “I’ve done one or two so far, if we’re being honest.”

“Then I would posit that the only people in this room who say nay, are those who had their own reasons for doubting before, and paid for that doubt with a humbling lesson,” Granny Janila said, sternly, but softly.

The wind picked up for a moment, then died. The muted buzz of a security drone orbiting high above broke through the quiet.

Miss Delroy let go of another sigh. “I’m not saying the man isn’t an effective troubleshooter, I’m saying I question the safety of letting a man as destructive as the one I met that night be in charge of his own People’s Special Operation.”

“Except that on the night in question, he was under the bionically implanted control of a fascist regime, to be their killing implement. All of us knew what was like to be under the control of that same regime, all of us understand firsthand what it is to rely on others to break that control. We’ve all broken that control now, and so has he. Only for him, it took my clan’s biohackers surgically removing a piece of his brain and running a bypass through it. That’s what it took to put him back in full control of his own mind, his own body.” Janila Sendra’s voice only just had the hint of a quaver to it, her decades of serving as the head of a clan of spies and shadow warriors and all the strength that comes from such a duty holding her emotions in check. Even still, she’d come to love Van in the same way she’d loved her own son, lost years ago to violence, they were shades of one another in differing species. His pain was hers as well. “Are we actually going to treat this man as the same puppet he once was, now that his strings are cut?” she said, after a time.

“Mrs. Sendra, I apologize, but this is all getting a little too philosophical for my payrate,” said a voice from the back of the gazebo, that sounded as though the concepts of cigarettes and gridiron football had been given terran form in one body.

A squat, gray-haired man with MPB and built like a fireplug emerged from obscurity, wearing a windbreaker and with a briefcase in his hand. He approached Granny Sendra.

“The hell are you?” said Pross.

“Unified Interstellar Mixed-Mass Shorthaulers, I’m shadow rep with the union, my name’s Mike Kronke,” said Mike.

“When did you get here?” said Pross.

“I was here all along, why didn’t you notice me?” said Mike.

Commander Pross sneered a fang, flicked his tail and looked away. Mike dismissed him with a wave of the hand.

“The union siblings have entrusted me to pass on their blessing with Mr. Parker’s operation,” he said in a low rumble to Granny Sendra, a man dressed as a dockworker before a woman dressed as a lady at leisure. “You and I both know when your boy shows his face on the Routes, things get safer for every honest worker on a boat, so he only has our support.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kronke. The There-and-Backs have always been such polite customers and collaborators, and the Sendra are glad to have your union’s friendship.”

“You’re welcome, Mrs. Sendra. Here, for your boy, when you see him next. Hundred thousand, non-sequential. Not like there’s a need for that, but if you can do it, why not?” He laid the briefcase on the table. Pross went cockeyed.

The underlying truth of the matter is that the Shorthaulers were pissed, as were a lot of the other interstellar shipping unions looped into the Sendra Clan’s intel services. The word was handled carefully, obfuscated with rumors- stirring up the idea that every load you haul from point to point could be some illicit shit shipped under guise by a private clubhouse of cryptofascists did nothing to keep the Freelands moving. But the people fully in the know could do the math, and knew that very thing had already happened on their watch. This meant that for the above table business, new training had to be put into place, and new security features to be distributed to working crews. Beneath the table? It meant bodies were going to drop somewhere in the galaxy, holes in badlands on parts of planets that didn’t have names yet were going to be filled. The Shorthaulers, even Kronke himself, knew Van was the man that could drop those bodies, he’d seen firsthand how heavy the man’s hands could fall. When a wave of ship hijackings rocked the union, the Sendra sent Van as an agent to assist them in acting on their intel. Together, they devised Operation Idiot Box, a plan as surface-simple as it was effective. The hijack crews were known to emerge from biosign-shielded shipping containers, before systematically clearing and taking over the boat, compartment by compartment. Idiot Box simply played their own trick on them, with a more devastating payload- the highjackers’ container only contained assholes with mill-quality weapons, while the union’s smaller container contained an experimental combat cyborg, made fussy and irate by an extended stay in a cramped space. The operation not only resulted in the hijack crews being messily folded and crammed back into their own gimmicked containers, but it also led to the recovery of the lost ships and the surviving members of their crews. This was the care and respect he’d paid their people; a briefcase of money out of the special endowment fund and a pledge of support was the least they could do for him in return.

“Thank you again, Mr. Kronke,” said Granny Sendra.

“Tell your boy good luck,” he said, as he turned to leave the gazebo- backroom meetings were fun at all, but he also had volume that needed moving. “He’s got a helluva lotta work ahead of him, but he’s a good man for taking it up.”

---

It was as dark in the morning as it was in his dream, so Van didn’t notice he’d continued his scream into the waking world until he felt his bed beneath him. He squelched himself, turned his voice into a yelping, honking sob as he rolled himself up into a cocoon in his bedsheets. Sorry everyone, pardon me for screaming.

Quinton Timmin’s face was shattered beyond conventional surgical repair by the third of the blows he’d rained on him from full mount, his skull cracked like a walnut against the grain, his face distorted, pulling against itself like a stretched nitrile glove. The fourth shot, Van loaded like he was pumping a shell into the chamber, and fired through his sinuses into the marble tile beneath, his head coming apart like a fresh pie fallen off a high shelf, the tile breaking against his force. That was real, that was memory; he had accepted his temper, and how sometimes, it makes him do bad things. Just like how he’d accepted how he’d lost himself in a red haze, and turned a man who was completely and totally dead into ground pork from the chest up with roaring, double-handed axe blows. But the part where started pulling him apart, ripping him open, breaking open his chestcase and feasting, gorging himself on the tangled masses of ruined meat, pulverized bone and burst organ? That was the dream. The part where he hooked in bionic hands into his dead belly and tore it open like an overstuffed sausage, so he could cram hand-over-handfuls of fresh, wet kill into his slavering maw? That was just the dream. The part where he heard every gnash of his unbreakable teeth and jaw snapping, crushing and grinding every mouthful of death-meal, every snarling, guttural swallow of raw fleshmass, every groan of deep satisfaction with the flavor of degloved skin, torn muscle and spilled blood that came from knowing that he tasted delicious, and yet he was the least of the prey he’d devour or die trying? That was just his own head, his own compromised mind, trying to put him back where he belongs: in the wrong.

Naw, fuck that, he said to himself, once his head was clear enough to form a thought.

He rolled out of bed in black sweatpants, padding on bare feet to the sliding door of his garden flat on the Sendra Compound, the little reed-obscured guest house by the guard shack he’d taken as his own since he’d come into their fold. The stars were still out, but the little sliver of platinum light from Ithaan, Samoud’s distant but powerful sun, was a threat of waking hours carried on the line of the horizon.

Naw, fuck all of this, Van said to himself. He unfolded his spliff case, lit up an indica and burned it down to the filter in one prolonged and bionically-assisted huff of a breath. He held it. His hearing swam and softened; on the wind, he could hear the crash of the waves against the nearby beach, the sound of Greaches, big local xenobirds, making their greach-greach calls to one another as they woke, finding their murder-mates from where they bedded down the night before. He held his breath longer. His vision blurred at the edges, the phantom pains of his surgical scars faded, the feeling in the tips of his fingers and toes started to tingle. He held just a bit longer. Images from the dream tried to rise out of his memory and jump on him, like the once-downed killer at the end of a slasher movie; they hit a wall of smoke and were knocked away, loopy, fading into nothing.

He exhaled through the nose, for a long time. “Fuck that,” he said, as it all drifted away on smoke.

He staggered back inside, slid the door shut behind him harder than he was expecting; he jumped and made a gesture like he was about to apologize. Then he fell gracelessly back into his bed, and mumbled to his bionics: ‘Personal audio system: play ‘Big Body Presence’, September 22, 2020 from leaveoff point.’ The audiocast played:

“We’re dancing around the big issue here, which is the coach who should never, ever be allowed access to a time machine: that’s right baby, the pride of Gellarton, Wilson Turcott.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“OLD TIME HOCKEY, FROM THE CRETACEOUS, JUST LIKE OLD TESTAMENT GOD INTENDED IT.”

“Wilson Turcott fires up the time portal and drafts a wooly mammoth in the first round to play goaltender.”

“MASTODON’S BENCHED TILL HE QUITS PLAYIN SO FAR OUT OF HIS FUCKIN CREASE.”

“Mastogoalie was never given his time to shine, before being traded for 3 Neosoviet prospects and a case of vodka.”

His stoned chortle turned to a snore.

He snapped awake. Daylight, voices, hours later. He checked his phone- mid-morning. Fine, fine, nobody expected him earlier. 15 minutes wrapped up in the sheets was what he needed to make sure that he really was ready for this whole ‘being awake’ venture.

He left in workout clothes, nothing but his phone strapped to his arm and a tennis ball in his shorts pocket. The anxiety that lived in him wanted him to go everywhere armed; the rational parts of his mind knew that he himself was a weapon, and more to the point, Shade-Unity Garden was the Sendra clan’s stronghold in the galaxy. The whole neighborhood knew him, and the hood sentries would throw down for him in a second- the only angles he was open from in the Garden were orbital.

So he did as normal folks did: he went for a jog. Where the roads and sidewalks were conventional, he ran like a terran. But when the raised walkways of this rhidling neighborhood, in a rhidling-build city, did decidedly rhidling-things, like expecting a vertical leap typically only seen on basketball courts or the ability to walk on outcrops other species would only see as handholds, his agility powered him past with uncanny ease, despite his heavyweight frame. Without fail, every morning, somebody he’d pass would make a little sound of disbelief, usually a rhidling out tending their garden or sorting their recycling. This time, it was a couple of terran teenagers who stared and whispered “dude what the fuck” to each other when he bounded from curbside to a pedestrian roofwalk without bothering to touch the ladder.

His path took him to Redfringe Beach, where windsurfers were out on the morning waves, as Greaches swooped at the deeper waters, hunting for breakfast for themselves and their murders. Fenced off from the beach itself was the Metalyard, an outdoor workout space popular with folks in both the Garden and the surrounding districts- a workout, getting some air through your backfur and maintaining your tan was one short three-step lesson in how to work smarter, not harder. Most hours of the day, folks could be seen hanging from the steel arch that lit the yard, doing chinups and hanging leg lifts while folks pumped iron beneath. Van wasn’t there for the arch or the iron, he was there for the long protective stormwall that sheltered the equipment against sudden surges off the coast. At this time in the morning, it was the perfect shadowboxing wall, casting a flat dark double of himself right at his eyeline.

He hopped the fence and pulled the tennis ball from his pocket. Like his father taught him, he let it fall from his hands and caught it between his forearms. Slowly and steadily, he rolled it between his forearms, over and over, end over end, until his arms were forming the fluid and protean architecture of the 52 Blocks. He’d first seen his father use it in a dark alley, to turn a group of cocky slashers into a pile of moaning detritus with eyes and limbs left pointing the wrong way. Every week since, his father taught him, the hows, the whys and the when nots of fighting, perched on the balcony of their apartment, high on the 58th floor of their MassPop project. How to use crossbones, shoulder brushes and head and elbow taps to bait your opponent, make it look like you’re open when you’re keeping your hands active. How to roll, bird and bum-rush with the arms to work a defense that’s awkward and unworkable from the opposing side, while keeping your hands in motion, searching for an in. How to split open an opponent’s defense, how to angle or bend around it, strike unexpectedly and unconventionally, how to look for the grapple that ends the fight, but for the mounted ass-beating that follows.

“It’s hard to be patient in a fight,” Van remembered him saying. “But the alternative is rushing to die. Slow is smooth and smooth is what makes fast.”

The smooth speed came to full head as he opened his peek-a-boo guard and let the ball fly loose, straight vertical. Nobody present at the Metalyard noticed the faint glimmer of green in his eyes against the bright of the morning light, as Van’s reflex-augmenting combat overlay locked to the ball and drew his senses into impossible clarity. It was one thing to know how to stand, move, act and recover in a fight, to maintain that level of body control through one’s own skill and intuition; it was another thing entirely to have an extension of your own brain that was actively feeding you sensor-extrapolated intuition-data about your opponent’s body control. The ball was loose, but it wasn’t out of his control.

Instead, he jabbed it, and it bounded on a perfect flight path against the wall, bouncing off and back at him. His right cross sent it back, and out of the corner of his eye, Van noticed he dropped his left lower than he should have- he needed to tighten up. Fine though, still decent form. He mixed his swings, working in hooks and elbows- “a spinning back elbow’s got a way of sending a message” he always remembered dad saying -keeping control on the ball. Suddenly, it wasn’t a man doing an exercise with a tennis ball; suddenly, it was a man doing full-speed shadow boxing, while a ball miraculously bounced off every one of his strikes and ricocheted with flawless precision off a brick wall, back to him. In the middle of it, Van was working through his thoughts.

Why am I doing this?

“Practice makes perfect.”

No, why am I doing ALL of this.

“Because all sapients are equal beings in the Freelands, and have the right to seek self actualization.”

Does it ever occur to you how completely fucked it is, the manner in which we’re gonna be seeking that self actualization?

“It didn’t occur to me, given that usually when I’m having a talk like this with myself, it’s actually with a killer procedural intellect living on a fucking hard drive spliced into my brain. I think that’s more fucked up really.”

The ball bounded off the wall, directly at his face. He sheared it straight up into the air with an uppercut, and watched it as it gained altitude.

You’re going to die if you do this, he thought to himself.

As the ball fell, he caught it with a right straight that blew it open along the seams, flattened it against the wall and knocked chips out of the paintwork. The crack was audible above the waves breaking on the shore.

“Brian Charles Grafton. Motherfucking Brian. If he knows what it’s like to be as afraid as he made me, even for one second, it’ll be worth it. It’s more than I ever thought I’d get a chance at.”

That’s it? That’s what this is for?

“What the fuck else am I worth?”

Suddenly, he felt the pain in his knuckles, as he continued to carve his fist into the dead hide of an obliterated tennis ball. Suddenly, he felt eyes on him. There, behind him, over his left shoulder, two rhidling kids. Not a threat, just, staring. Wondering what the fuck they just saw.

Yeah, okay, well, wave why doncha? You angsty fuck.

Van waved, and noticed one of the kids had his phone camera held up. Sheepishly, he lowered it, as they both scurried off.

Van realized his workout was most likely over, even if he usually did a little bit more before heading home. Then his phone buzzed a text notification from his shoulder, and in the periphery of his bionic vision, a ticker read the message.

It was from Granny Janila. It said, simply, “you’re a go.”