A Quick Death in Texas: Prewriting

Hey look, my creativity was hiding in the form of Van Parker.

Welcome back to the galaxy of Section 99, and the life of Van Ever Parker, the Uncommon Thug. Our boy has himself a list of names, and from his intel connects, he's managed to get good data to move on: Dudley Ellering is in Texas. Not that one, the new one, in space.

It's a thing, it'll get explained.

Today, you're going to be looking at both the basic premise for A Quick Death in Texas, as well as some of the new characters that are going to be joining Van, Telin and Keeda. Because no man is a bionic island, and as things are going to turn out, Van's going to need some new friends to help him deal with what he finds waiting in the colony of New Laredo.

As before, wherever you see this italic in the body text, that's me peeking in to give you a little more foresight into what's going to be happening with a particular bit.

---

The Premise

When Van and Janila landed outside of New Laredo, they weren’t sure what they were expecting, but they weren’t expecting trouble to just jump right out of them. They weren’t expecting to roll in on a town whose three main co-operatives were armed and factionalized for a three way dance. The Greenstar Collective, Magistral Resourcing and Big Country Machineworks were the folks that founded this place out of common cause and camaraderie, and now they’re the folks pointing guns at each other.

Nobody can say for sure when this started. Some say things have been tense ever since the area picked up a rash of bandit activity, from hostile bands raiding the periphery and outer roadways. Others say, it was when Big Country welcomed in the outsider collective NuWay, whose arrival came with them settling in a bit too comfortably and aggressively- none neighborly, those folks. But still, some others say that it happened after NuWay started setting up their commsats, when new voices within the co-ops began challenging leadership, talking up more aggressive, competitive policy, a real us-versus-them mentality.

Very few? Figure all of these things are symptoms of the same problem. Van knows this for certain, because Van has a crucial bit of information- Dudley Ellering, the first address on the mailing list of The Unseen Mutual, is the man running the show behind NuWay. Dudley Ellering, a former Consortium billionaire, turned enemy of the Imperator, marked kill-on-sight when it was learned his fortunemaking low-cost consumer comms service was nothing more than a hack of the Noble-caste’s main data trunk. Turns out, Nobles are privileged with so much interstellar bandwidth, you can piggyback a few hundred million subscribers to your ultra low-resource voice and text service through a security loophole, and you’ll still barely move their usage needles. This is the tech Ellering has brought with him to the Freelands, tech he’s using to subvert Freelander FTL comms systems, to work as the pre-existing infrastructure for a Mutual communications network.

He’s taking the same parasitic attitude to New Laredo itself, acting to destabilize the local union cooperatives or flip them capitalist with plants- nothing more he’d like than a whole colony to himself, especially one he didn’t actually have to build. If working for Brian Charles Grafton wasn’t enough, the extent to which he’s willing to fuck with the lives of innocents tells Van everything he needs to know about how hard Dudley Ellering deserves to be hit. 

Knock knock, nerdboy, it’s the vibe check you didn’t order.

We'll learn more about Ellering soon, in an update I'll probably title "here is a list of dead people" or somesuch. I mean, maybe not, spoilers. Whatever, it's the journey, not the destination. The long and short though, is that for as much as I'm drawing from Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark in my prose, one of the other major inspirations for the writing in Section 99? The Hitman series' meticulous skill for creating absolutely dead-on caricatures of real world awful people. Dudley Ellering is yuppie techbro trash that is a collage of the worst tendencies and character flaws of both Mr. Virgin Mobile Flawlesshair and   T H E   Z U C C. He is both the death of morality in the tech sector and the exacting and abusive eccentricity of billionaires, personified. He is made to be dropped like a bad habit. Just wait.

Van Gets a Crew

Brian Charles Grafton destroyed the life of Van and unknown numbers of others, and he has continued to do so even since the Terran Principalities burned him for being a rogue intelligence asset. The man is a habitual line stepper with an Emperor-in-Exile mindset, who is a full blown believer in the Keyser Soze method- it’s not about money, connections, or muscle at the end of the day, it’s about being the one that will do the truly awful, the stuff that nobody else wants to do. BC Grafton is a certifiable ratfucker- he delights in the stuff nobody else wants to do, it dirty-tickles the get-off centers of his brain. There’s no whit of an ethical floor in this man, there’s just an abyss where it should be. This is the threat of him: he’s a smart man who disguises his severely borderline tendencies, insulating himself with layers of people and obfuscation, while being every bit as terrible as anyone ever imagined. This is also his fatal flaw- he’s got a lot of people left in his wake, people that are still breathing and know more than he thinks. People that want to make him bleed out, real slow.

People just looking to throw in with someone who happens to know the name of the man who figuratively shot them in the back, with a penstroke, from a hundred lightyears away. Then thing protecting him from them? The layers of people and obfuscation. This is why Van Parker is the most dangerous man in Brian Charles Grafton’s world: he’s the one person left that actually knows his name and face. And Brian doesn’t even know he’s still alive...

While I love a good "local man too angry to die" story as much as the next person, it kinda defeats the purpose of Section 99, the People's Special Operations, to have this story unfold as one single-minded wildman's rampage, with a support staff in the back somewhere. For one, that'd be doing both Telin and Keeda dirty, having them be little more than the delivery system for One Angery Boi. (We're of course going to learn more about them, as well, don't worry!) For two, this is a story designed to tweak the revenge fantasy that is specifically about a rebellion against The Man, as condensed into one, well, man. In that kind of story, it can't just be one guy wronged, who exists in a vacuum, because it doesn't work with what I'm trying to do here. A part of the journey that Van will take to get to Brian  has to be him learning commonality and fellowship between himself and the other people that have had their lives thrown into chaos by the whims of the privileged, because Section 99 is at its core about social justice expressed in the directest action imaginable. That Van is one of many against a hostile society, and that he accepts this and welcomes the help from others is the most important thing. At the end of the day, having friends of all types and backgrounds doesn't just mean you have more boots to kick and stomp a dictator to death with, but it also ensures there's more exciting and effective varieties of kicks and stomps being employed.

Anchor

“But given that I happen to be a big metal jarhead, the kinda trigger puller that can’t be trusted not to eat my own crayons? Probably a bad idea to make me wanna stomp your face, even if you are a person of interest.”

He/Him, cogitoi, physically 16 years old, with a Lifenet simming an individual in his mid-late 20s, the compact model of a brick shithouse cogitoi, awakened from a former marine-model combat simulant. Real name: Arthur Currie, but he goes by Artie. Though generally a man of good temperament and humor, the Artie we meet in New Laredo is running a pretty volatile 70/30 ratio of pissed off/devastated. The jingling bouquet of people’s militia dogtags jingling from the forend of his heavy rifle says everything: he’s the sole survivor of a group of local regulators sent to deal with bandits, and instead, they hit the equivalent of a well-funded PMC. He wants to know why a group of supposed bandits were getting orbital resupply drops; he wants to know how they managed to get so dug in and situated without anyone noticing; he wants to know who signed the death warrants of his friends and comrades, and why.

Mostly, he wants the fire in the part of his mind that makes him feel hate and hurt to go out- neither of those things are who he is.

He’s not the last of New Laredo’s militia, but as the sole survivor of his unit, he’s the one pressing the union for a new operational plan: full alert, barricade up, call in backup from The Big D, Adelaide, maybe even Dos Santos, then work on progressively uprooting these “bandits” from the hills. His pleas have fallen on deaf ears, his voice drowned out beneath cries of factionalization in the militia, of aligning with a collective, and if so, which one. While Artie doesn’t consider himself an intellectual, machines are very good at math, and 1 plus 1 equals 2 is simple arithmetic. If he can’t get answers from the militia, he’ll get his answers through Section 99...

Artie is a scrapper, a smiling and proud toughguy, sort of the mood opposite of Van’s more introverted and self-deprecating personality. Though despite being a landlubber militiaman in the middle of Texas, he embraces his status as a marine/naval combat chassis by adopting both Marine esprit de corps and the Marine “Ralph Wiggum with a gun” sense of humor. While he likes to refer to himself as a fighting machine, Artie is anything but- self-identified cogitoi ‘fighting machines’ are pale plastic killer ghouls that barely have emotions, and like it that way. Artie burns hot, but he also burns bright, a big-hearted metal-man who wants justice for his friends, peace for his neighbors, and a chunk out of whoever it is that decided to make a mess of his home. Wielding a rifle that is a modernized space-BAR, with a close-quarters plasma cannon in his left arm he calls “The Pipecleaner” and wrapped in a combat suit, Anchor is the answer to the question “what would Van Parker consider a heavy by his standards?” His liquor of choice as a cogitoi is General Brighton’s Barrel Proof, a 67% ABV bourbon. Distilled with pride, in Space Texas.

Anchor is here to give us insight into the synthetic people that are the cogitoi. Because science fiction has had enough emotionless Kill All Human combat androids, he's the android that takes great pride in his ability to Only Kill Some Humans, then get the rest to safety. He's a bighearted warrior-gunfighter, and he might actually be more vulnerable deep down than Van, who is carrying an ugly excess heat in his core. My goal with this character is to create a protector that people themselves want to protect, a guy with metal plating who still seems huggable, despite everything. And if you're wondering why a Marine synthetic would take the name of a Canadian Army general, I posit that anyone with an emotional intellect in a machine mind would deeply respect the strategic philosophy and training ethos of the guy who perfected the Creeping Barrage. Just my (weird) hot take.

Rooster

“Whoof. Right in the hu-way-vos. Bad way to go.”

She/her, terran, early 20s. Inez Daws, a resident of New Laredo, or at least its outskirts. Born and raised on the Double Horseshoe Ranch, a ‘free-progressivist Texan commune,’ a place where the central belief is ‘God is real, and good, because he invented love, weed and barbecue,’ and every truck has a rifle rack in the back. Raised to shoot by her father, she first started by dropping whatever predatory xenofauna got brave enough to jump the terraforming border to predate on the ranch’s livestock.. This changed when she was 16 and a Consortium kidnap team hit New Laredo, and in the chaos, she shot 3 soldiers that were trying to drag off her younger brother and her neighbors. Three rounds, three hits to the weak points in their armour, three soldiers dead before they hit the ground, dropped in three seconds by a teenager with only a frontier repeater. Then, after a moment to think about what she did, she ratcheted round number four into the chamber, turned, and put it through the face of another outlaw on the ranch. And another. And another.

In the aftermath, the local padre took her aside. There wasn’t a demon in her, nor were they the sort of Christians taught to see the Devil in everything. But what he saw in her, was a fearsome but a God-given gift to fight and protect others, at risk of succumbing to a thirst for the blood she just tasted. She needed to be trained- perhaps not as a militiawoman, but perhaps more specialized, someone that could be the Double Horseshoe’s own Section 99 reservist operator. This is how she’s served her commune into her young adulthood- for the sake of the neighbors, she’s nothing but a range warden for the ranch. But check at the post office- she’s on the books, under Section 99, as a local operator.

The Double Horseshoe is a part of the Greenstar Collective, and because of that, Rooster’s been more or less pressed into the rising tensions in New Laredo. She means to find a way to the bottom of it though, because in her words, “ain’t in no rush to shoot a com-rad-neighbor over somethin’s got no right to be rowdier than room-and-table business”; she’s done nothing that wasn’t defense, against attackers without colours. Problem is, she’s a smalltown shooter, not a detective. More than anything right now, she wants a clear direction to aim herself in, and a hand in learning how to do more than just efficiently ace blackhats with headshots.

Marked by her signature red-dyed fauxhawk, the sharp-eyed and coiled-postured Rooster was born free, raised a fighter and never taught to fear authority. Though young and narrowly focused, she is a canny and eager learner from anyone that can teach her. When she was young, there was nobody in her life that told her that she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, that she’d never; that’s why talk like that bounces off her, and you’ve got to reason with her trying something she shouldn’t. Because when she’s doing something in her wheelhouse? Nothing actually can stop her. She’s a sharpshooter that rolls with a frontier repeater, and she makes it work. That kind of stuff makes a Freelander a Legend.

Rooster is our insight into what people who are born in the Freelands are like. Which is to say, open but right-minded, well versed in the Paradox of Tolerance- that the only allowable intolerance is of intolerance itself -and perhaps alarmingly hardened to the realities of violence. It's a mixed bag, really. She's not a person ignorant to the worst aspects of society, because she's seen what they look like close up. But she was never raised within those worst aspects, and in fact, was raised to have only contempt for the people that perpetuate them, and pity for those too ignorant to see that things can be different. She's the antifa gunfighter, someone who preaches de-escalation, be it by keeping things civil, or by making sure the people she shoots pulled their guns first.

Spooky

“If felt hesitation each time I’ve heard ‘no, please, wait, stop’ from someone that tried to kill me, before they exploded... 

...I’m quite certain I’d be more squeamish than I am today.”

She/they, arissiyan, late 20s, early 30s. Real name: Lyrisa Neyno. Oh, Spooky. Sib, you do your best, and you’ve made so much of yourself, but the shit you’ve been through from the very start. See, just like all quantums, Lyri’s brain was exposed to an FTL displacement field either immediately pre or post-partum. All this takes is going FTL in those developmental stages and the cosmic dice gets thrown, that in that great big warp and slingshot-jump, when matter and energy bends and distort, the energy in your brain can bend and distort its matter, and make a strange change. Your brain can start developing neural pathways in structures you’d typically see in the collider rings of a displacement drive, and just like a displacement drive, it can create an epicenter. An epicenter that projects a displacement field, that can bend space and time, and alter the properties of the matter and energy within it. Sometimes this ability sits dormant in you, and your quantum development is nothing but the catalyst for a lot of difficulties growing up, a lot of mental illness, learning problems and awkward social moments. Then you get discovered somehow and, in the best case scenario, you get made to go to a special school, so you can be of ‘advanced use’ to the Consortium.

And sometimes, you blow your mother’s hand off reaching for it, when you’re only 6 years old and in front of all your schoolmates. Because they were chasing you and you got scared, and lost control. And you start giggling, in that way that makes your schoolmates think you’re weird. Because you’re either in an impassive cloud, or you’re making that giggle. That’s just how your emotions are wired, because your brain is different. The part that tells you to scream and cry, tells you to giggle instead.

Imagine the kind of school you go to in the Consortium, when that sort of word gets out about you. Then, despite everything imagine finding the resolve in you to not only escape from that sort of hell, but help others like you escape from it as well. That’s the kind of person who Lyri is- for as much as she is a realist about matters in her life, she’s always willing to try. They know firsthand how dire things can get and still be salvaged. Nothing’s over until you’re dead, and even if that should happen to her, in her eyes, she’ll always get the last laugh. How could she not?

Lyri is a career Section 99er, one answering an open recruitment call set up by Anchor on New Laredo, one with a preference for particularly odd jobs- as she would say, “I’m an odd fit, this is simply nature taking course.” Unlike the quantum we met in A Good Man (their name is Scathach, by the way, and we’ll be encountering them again) who was covert, Spooky is an overt quantum, with abilities that are considerably, uh, louder. The technical term for what she specializes in, is the Kinetic Prominence, a quantum protocol which in practice should really be called ‘everything in this nearby contained area gets violently ablated to molten shit by chaotic, megahertz-frequency spacetime vibrations over a milisecond.’ This is hardly official or scientific language, however. She needs a moment to do this, but if given proper cover, Spooky can cave-in the side armour of an LAV with her mind, and put a basketball-sized hole through the front.. She is quite proud of this fact, even if she has difficulty expressing this. However, when she’s found in the story, there’s a bit of a problem- namely, the sort of deception she’d normally not fall victim to, were she not responding to a contract to a cogitoi. Her Anchor? It’s not our Anchor. It’s not actually any Anchor. It’s just a NuWay scab. Don’t worry though, this will be sorted. Explosively. Because Spooky doesn’t care to have cruel games played with her. They’ve had enough of that in life.

The goal of Lyri to be both an insight into arissiyans and quantums, the culture of both. In her, we're going to get some touchstones of what it's like to belong to the species that's trying fruitlessly to conquer that galaxy, and really only succeeding in making miserable a dozen and a half species beneath them. In her, we're also going to understand what it means to be a feared but desired 'sapient resource' under the Consortium. We'll see how both have shaped her, around the difficulties she's faced because of her neurological disorder. Spoiler alert: Spooky is not going to be a tragic character or a hopeless character;  Spooky is here to reinforce something I deeply believe in, that cracked doesn't mean broken, and that battered doesn't mean ugly. Along the way, a lot of godawful people are going to see her giggling face before getting turned to screaming atoms, hopefully to the cheers of the crowd.

Big Razz

“Rule number one kid, when I gotta century on you, I get to call pretty much anyone ‘kid’ I want. Rule number two, when I gotta century on you, it’s understood that I know stuff you don’t, like how to take proper revenge. Rule number three, don’t mean mug an old man, it makes you look like a dick”

He/him, garak, in his 180s, so he’s not even that old for a garak. Real name: Razek Kuobo. A shop foreman of the Guild of Build, a guild that operates more or less in service to individuals under Sections 98 (People’s Militia), 99 (People’s Special Operations), 100 (Civil Security First Responders) and 101 (Health and Safety First Responders) as a specialist gear manufactory that operates functionally wherever people are. The Guild isn’t a local gunshop manufactory, like the kind Van visited in Port of St. Joseph; The Guild is where you go to get a gatling laser fabbed for you. Or if you’re feeling spicy, get an arma (this setting’s version of a mech, basically picture something the size of a Striker IFV, only standing up on one end, with legs) fabbed to mount that gatling laser onto. This is the kind of extreme they do at the Guild of Build- combat armour and weapons, safety gear suitable to survive burning buildings, rapid deployment medical equipment, and armoured and/or all-terrain vehicles. But the Guild is a reputable bunch- you need to show proper credentials to get access to their services, and getting that chance to show your credentials means You Gotta Know Somebody. 

Big Razz is a man that keeps his pride in a well-run workshop. To him, that doesn’t simply mean one that’s productive, but one that operates with a sense of low-friction harmony. Homeboy does not demand any sort of acknowledgement of his position or his experience, but everyone in the shop feels compelled to call him Chief, as a show of respect for a man who cares that his people are working safe and happy. Big Razz is a 99er vet, a man who keeps the emblem of the Raised Fist of the People holding the Dagger of Special Operations on his shop wall, properly wreathed in the motto of “Do No Harm in Taking No Shit.” Turns out, a guy who leads from the front, cares that you go home happy and has a confirmed fascist bodycount? That’s the ideal sort of manager, in the mind of folks raised in the Freelands.

Which is why Big Razz found his way onto Dudley Ellering’s hitlist- guy’s not just a pillar of the community, but he happens to be a pillar that oversees the production of weapons of resistance. Thing is, a half dozen hitters aren’t about to take down a deep root of a garak kill-engineer like Big Razz. A carbomb was his cue to hit deep ground, while a pair of hitters blown apart from the shoulders up from Razz’s rivet pistol was his message to them to quit following him, cause he’d only drop more. When we find Big Razz, I’m thinking he’s going to be in a place that looks like he’s cornered, were it not for the sheer difficulty his pursuers were having in not getting killed by his booby traps. Right now, I’m feeling ‘Razz is welded into one of the walk-in coolers of a slaughterhouse, and is using his MacGuyver hacks to turn the equipment into a robotic horrorshow for the hostiles’ is the situation. When Van and company arrive on the scene and offer aid, Razz asks to be let into the loop. When he is, he offers his opinion: this isn’t going to work as some dumb brute path of revenge, it needs to be a controlled demolition, timed and performed by professionals working as a team, backed up by a community that will provide support and embursement.

What this needs to be, is a Section 99 action. 

The garak are the wise older siblings of the galaxy, the ones that are actually capable of giving you measured advice, backed by experience. Like wise older siblings, they also fight dirty and pragmatically to protect what matters. This is what I'm emphasizing in Big Razz, an individual who cares while being willing to throw hands. Razz isn't going to be an operator like the first three new characters. What we're going to see out of him instead is one of the things the garak are known for, which is being builders, engineers and experts- he's going to be both the gear guy, and the eye in the sky. Through him, we're also going to get some idea as to what Section 99 is- how communities go about organizing an action, what sort of individuals operators are, and just why Section 99 is considered an acceptable and normal thing in the Freelands.

Franco “Frankie” Santoro

“Pardon me, sir, but I’m not a Mafia lawyer, I’m a Camorra lawyer, there are big differences in my family culture. Which I will not discuss at this time, for obvious reasons…”

He/him, terran, late 20s, early 30s. The very look of the professional criminal court attorney is Franco Santoro, an individual who first sat under a Section 113 defense of one of his clansmen of the Camorra, Italy’s oldest surviving criminal organization. It was family business he was born into, and studying the law of the Freelands, where his clan and his ‘extended family’ had spread. Despite his family connections, the man’s been able to hit some monster dunks in his career. This is a guy who doesn’t keep people from getting extradited from Insomnia, because frankly, that sorta thing doesn’t happen even with the law involved; this is a guy who has been able to get people extradited to Insomnia, legitimately, and that’s a lot harder.

This isn’t really a point of pride for Frankie, because he was functionally pulling people into a maw that was going to devour them alive. The Camorra don’t play, and more to the point, they work in a way that weighs on a mind that knows Freeland law, knows where the peoples’ concept of ‘right’ is, and knows how to exploit that, because he’s done it for years. He’s not pleased about it. Shame has a way of making any mattress you lay on too uncomfortable to sleep, because despite everything, he’s got a moral compass and a soul. He wants a way out, and those just don’t just open when you’re born into that kind of a family business.

What would he do if he got that out? Probably flip prosecutor, and start working out some pent up aggression on people that really deserve it.

Which is the service he offers to Van when their paths eventually cross. In Van, he sees a man prosecuting a line of action that is going to leave a lot of legally justified bodies under Freeland law, but just as many living wounded scumbags, that are going to hit the courts once they’re out of the hospital. Under Freeland law and the details of Sections 113 (Criminal Justice) and 114 (Criminal Reformation), the justice system isn’t just a means of reforming behavior and separating dangerous individuals from the people, it’s a means for individuals who bring in offenders to keep paid and resourced, so they can keep doing what they’re doing, to the best of their ability. A good 113er can turn a pickup truck bed’s worth of black-bagged and zipcuffed assholes into a duffel bag full of Reales and resource bonds, which are considerably more useful things to have in volume. In return for his services, he sees Van as his way out: Van makes mountains of bodies, and a mountain of bodies is a good thing to hide in when you’re trying to fake a death. Because nobody notices when one of them crawls away, with gene-modded bleached hair, a surgically modified face, and the new alias of ‘Jimmy Speck’. Because it’s a fucking mountain of bodies, that’s what your eyes are drawn to.

Frankie is a lot of stuff, in one character. He's window into what Freelanders, a people outside of traditional law and order, consider law and order. He establishes the flavor of the 'above table but still shady' vibe of the how Sections 99 and 113 interact, with himself being above table but still shady. And he also gives us a little peak into the Terran Timeline has shaken out in terms of history- Terra was conquered in a matter of days after the fall of the second atom bomb, which means unlike other SF settings, we are working with a lot of history that didn't happen. In this case, because Ol' J Edgar basically threw in with the space-fash as soon as they made themselves known, his immediately beefed-up FBI immediately went on the organized crime offensive, causing a great number of organizations to be rapidly hunted down and purged. Those that survived went resistance, up until the moment they could escape to the one place that hasn't been infiltrated by g-men: space! Then they resumed being crooked and nefarious shitheels, like the sort Frankie wants away from, that unfortunately just happen to be his brothers and cousins.

Until next time, enjoy!

-G