Section 99: A Good Man - Part 6

“No,” Van said internally. “Still one left.”

Timmins was sprawled out on his back, trembling, staring.

“Still one left,” he said to himself, cracking his knuckles, taking a slow stride towards the little man. The little pissant who declared himself some old world adventurist safari king because he had a personal navy to go exploring with, built with the money and connections made from auctioning off other people’s culture. This whisper thin motherfucker who didn’t even have the good sense to live life with a gun on him if he was going to make his profit by selling other people’s children, who was instead trying to scoot away on his narrow ass with both hands raised as a mea culpa.

The voice tried to say something he couldn’t hear it.

He took another step towards the awful little bastard wretch that’d built his lot off the back of a small army of scum willing to do his dirty work. He wondered how he started off, if he was old money like so many of the crooks on Insomnia, or if he was some mob pencil pusher that got put in his place to be an earner. He considered if he’d backstabbed his way to where he was, but he couldn’t see it in him. Too flimsy, too without nerve; this man was a manager, and a vicious little chihuahua of one, but a manager was all he was. Exactly the sort of petty, cruel little shit that only needed a layer of paperwork to insulate himself from his own hideous pursuits. A coward that signed life away with a pen’s stroke- Van had met enough of those to be able to smell them.

The voice tried to say something again, and he pushed it aside. 

His body ached, his breath burned, and blood stung in his eyes. Every cut, wound and bruise on him throbbed, and his pulse pounded in his brain, deafening his ears. He felt like a monster awakened, and as he loomed over Timmins, he felt a monster sort of hunger rise in him. One that he could sate with heavy hands and stomping feet.

Van, your brother is watching you, the Canine managed to break through and say.

He stopped and went cold. A wave of shame washed over him, but he realized that wasn’t helpful for what he really needed to do. He looked over, and saw Taino, locked in a metal pet cage, draped in a royal blue curtain, clutching at the bars with eyes wide. It was then that Van knew was important.

“Hey, kid,” Van said, walking over to his little brother, a smile spreading across his bloody, burnt face. He pulled the curtain away and put his hands in Taino’s, his big mitts practically crushing the kid’s clawed paws from the sheer gulf in size. Different species, but family all the same.

“I don’t know why, but I knew it’d be you,” Taino said. He was only in shorts and a ripped up open-back shirt, with a black eye and a split chin. There were bruises on his neck, circular pockmarks- forcible spray-injections from how they were keeping him docile. Handfuls of the fur on his backpelt had been torn out, around the shoulders and at the back of his neck where it flowed under his hair. For just a fraction of a second, Van regretted not letting Caesar suffer longer.

“You know me, right?” Van said. “You think I got anything else going on?” He mussed the kid’s hair, ruffled his ears, which stood upturned again.

“Are you okay?” Taino said. He was crying, but trying to power through, show he was a young hardman to his hardman big bro.

“I’m fine, I’m tough,” Van said. “I just need you to do me a favor.”

“Yeah, Van, yeah.”

“I need you to not watch this next part,” Van said.

They stared at each other. The kid cleared his throat, looked away, behind Van, to Timmins. He wiped his eyes, and when he looked back, they’d narrowed, grown cold, pale yellow with slits of black obsidian. ‘Sendra’ meant ‘people of heart’, a moniker that made their rivals think them soft, too caring for an uncaring galaxy, to unwilling to be a threat. The Sendra killed these rivals, defeating them fairly according to inter-clan law, with those too proud to abandon their allegiance to broken clans living as nameless wretches under the protectorate of their former allies. The trees of Alemeka Grove are nourished by the ashes of the cruel, the greedy and the wicked, and the people of heart that live among burned their bodies and ground their bones. Because when you live by your heart, you understand that a warm heart can also be a hard heart. 

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Taino said to Van. “I’m going to make sure it’s the last, though.”

“You fucking know who I am?” Timmins suddenly piped up, his voice cracking into a shrill.

Van turned to him, slow, his eyes drawing up from his feet from where he sat, sprawled out on the flooding stage. His combat HUD was still on, green-tinted overlays still scanning for threats and objectives. It wouldn’t automatically lock to Timmins, a man neither a threat nor an objective as codified by the tactical coprocessor that bad people had butchered into his brain. Van overrode it, locked it onto Timmins’ trembling mass as he scooted backwards instinctively when their eyes met.

Timmins took a breath. “You motherfucker, you know who I am?” he shouted again. His suit was getting soaked, his handkerchief drooping out of his jacket pocket.

“No, tell me,” Van said to him, head cocked back, straight down from his nose.

Timmins looked incredulous, enraged and strangely heartbroken. He choked on his words, unsure of how to answer that question from a man that had just broken a personal security force across his knee. So he rolled over onto his hands, tried to get to his feet. Van was on him, turning three of his ribs inward with a punt that lifted him into the air and dropped him on his back. Timmins wheezed and spat up blood, rain pouring into wide eyes. 

A helo buzzed overhead, turning a spotlight on the hanging garden grounds, kicking up a racket outside, making the artificial rain whip and spray.

“Oh, you are fucked now, buddy,” Timmins managed to say, clutching at his side. “You are fucked. You walked into my house, thinking you can just come up and fuck me in the face, you fucking nobody?”

Van took a step towards him, and Timmins started to crawl away.

“This is Insomnia, I’m 3rd Exchange, and I’m the guy that’s the talk of the town. You think I’m going down for any of this, you piece of shit? I sit at the banquet tables, I give the speeches, I speak in the backrooms, me, you understand that? That’s why you’re fucking fucked!”

Something clicked in Van’s brain that made him go cold and tingle. Something he decided to just say.

“I’m just wondering who your outside hookup is,” said Van, ice-cold calm.

Timmins went bone white.

“You know, the people you go visit when you’re off on expedition, the people who you’re running some sort of a side-deal with alongside the other syndicates here,” he started. “Them as the supplier, you as the high-class fence. The sort of people able to kidnap a clan heir from a starport on the other side of the Freelands, working with you, the sort of piece of shit that’d sell a kid at a fancy auction. They’re probably your insurance policy, at least you’d assume, past the point you think your reputation here is so untouchable you can operate a fucking slave market by invitation.”

Timmins grasped at words for a moment. His eyes vibrated as his face drew tense. “Who the fuck told you?” is what he managed to get out.

“I’m good at a cold read, I guess,” Van said, the hinting of a smile spreading across his face as blood dripped from his nose. “I mean, fakes like you, it’s always a business.”

Timmins processed this. Then he scrambled to his feet and ran like a wounded animal, surging behind the curtains that decorated the rear of the stage, fumbling for the doors of the rear atrium, the balcony overlook. He ripped into the interior pocket for his phone, drew up his security net for anyone still up- anyone close enough wasn’t moving, anyone still moving was far away and weren’t moving in. He keyed the comms: “Where is my fucking backup?”

The door closed behind him and he nearly slipped as he wheeled around. Nothing but a pane of glass wiggling on its jamb.

Timmins keyed close comms again, his heart pounding in his neck. “Where the fuck are you p-”

Van slid in behind him and grabbed his tie out from beneath his collar, pressing him into the air like a squirming, gagging kettlebell. He ratcheted Timmins’ arm and forced the phone from his hand. Then he threw him like a bag of laundry, hard enough to make him roll across the nicely polished marble. He squawked, coughed and spat blood, but actually managed to put his feet beneath him and made a run at Van.

“Don’t you fucking touch that,” he yelped and swung with a clumsy, sweeping right. Van bobbed under, crushing his liver with an open hand that drove in like a piston. His hips popped into the air and he folded in half, crumpling to the floor. He went quiet as his body went paralyzed. Then he groaned awfully and kicked his legs as his nerves caught fire.

Van caught the screen before it went dark. His eyes lingered on the security net layout, at all the blips that weren’t moving. Then he closed it, and went looking. When he started with Weller, he had a scant list of previous calls to operate with; Timmins was the opposite, intel overload, his daily business cracked wide open, too much to take in at once. His phone history was largely impenetrable and his recent text history ranged from inane blowups over the configuration of the hors d'oeuvres to ‘GOOD LORD EVERYONE IS SHOOTING EVERYONE ELSE.’ So Van opened his inbox and tossed his mail: syndicate communications both inter and intra that he definitely wasn’t supposed to be looking at, a lot of pissant shouting at his underlings, petty fussing over details of his event- oh look, a forward from Kurt Weller, that even Weller was smart enough to delete. 

In between, there were a series of messages on an interstellar network whose number Van didn’t recognize, with almost all of them looping in the same six numbered addresses. Timmins was 4 it looked like, but that’s all Van could understand from what he was looking at- it was mostly vague and self-satisfied wank shared between people who seemed to be very pleased with their various forms of deviousness. He thumbed past the image of a pentacle, marked with Iosan glyphs at the points, the pen-stroke arissiyan characters for soil, sea, sky, space and shadow. Van rolled his eyes, let out a snort and shook his head, but his stomach sank all the same- a pack of moneyed and connected idiots trying to kickstart their own secret society, destroying lives while they argue over branding and letterhead.

Then his eyes hit the crucial subject line, way, way months back: “DELETE THIS AND ALL MESSAGES PRIOR TO THIS.” It was unopened, so Van thumbed it. It read simply, COMMIT PREVIOUS DATA TO MEMORY AND DELETE, AS FAILURE TO DO SO REPRESENTS A CRITICAL SECURITY RISK.

It was not the last message on this net in Timmins’ inbox.

He went back further. There were only a few, and they were mostly boring, relating to the basic stuff anyone would go through when setting up a network, even if it appeared to be some sort of sneaky-snake black ops interstellar network. But then he found the email that Timmins did actually open and look at, the one marked ‘address key.’ In it, he found a neatly ordered list of names associated to each address. His eyes read over five of them: Dudley Ellering, Treizo Kala, Diamond Eyes, Marashin Nalrona and Quinton Timmins. The sixth, his eyes slid over, like it wasn’t real, it wasn’t there. It couldn’t be, why would it be? For a moment, he asked himself if he could really believe the galaxy was so small in practice as the universe was cruel in its sense of humor. In his experience, yes on both accounts. Because name number six was Brian Charles Grafton.

He felt old aches in his neck and side, from long nights spent in the kennel; he felt his blood pressure rising despite his enhancements keeping his systems regulated. The green of his combat HUD blinked from his vision, and he felt his augmented strength fade. He started shaking as it went. The helo buzzed over again, shining a light down into the carnage of the atrium, its rotor fans washing over the glass, too bright, too loud, he couldn’t breathe, the leash was back around his neck and it was strangling him, he couldn’t fucking breathe, why was he here, what was he doing?

He pitched forward and wretched, deep from the depths of his guts. Nothing came up, but it felt miserable all the same. He burned from within, feverish, but he shook like he was freezing. His vision blurred and all he could hear was his pulse. The Canine tried to say something, but he couldn’t make it out.

Van looked up from his hands. Timmins stared from a fetal position, eyes red and teary. A part of him wanted to make Timmins talk, make him spill on what he was up to with the man whose program turned him from some high school kid into a wide awake nightmare. This was the sensible response, and Van wasn’t feeling sensible. He slammed the toe of his boot into Timmins’ sinus cavity, his strength raw and unaugmented, save for being that of a stocky six-footer used to carrying around an armoured skeleton. Timmins’ body rolled end over end, trailing blood as he went; he spit up teeth and chunks that only looked like teeth. Van hoisted to him to his knees by his collar, tearing it as he bent him backwards, then howling as he hammered right hands into a bloody face that was turning to wreckage against his fury. Timmins’ knees gave out around the seventh or eighth shot, and Van slipped on his blood, landing on top of him in a heap. So Van wrapped his hands around his throat, and squeezed and squeezed, tighter and tighter. Waiting for the flicker in Timmins’ eyes to snuff out. Waiting for someone to come and explain to him how this is all just an improbable mistake. Waiting for him to wake up from this horrible nightmare he was having, where his work was only just beginning.

---

They kicked in the doors when Van was helping Taino out of the cage, bodies in big armour, with big guns and bright lights. All Van had left was to get the kid behind him, and make himself as wide as possible. Then the sting of the quantum’s voice pierced his mind, making him wince and everyone else flinch like someone turned on a dentist drill in their skull.

They’re the objective, you idiots! Weapons tight!

They let their weapons go slack, syndicate enforcers all, wearing matching combat armour, only differentiated by the colours and icons of their individual organizations- Kowloon 20 red, Fortune’s Wheel violet, Zarashaa silver. A Kowloon 20 enforcer stripped off her helmet and tried to scratch the itch on her brain through her ear. The quantum shoved both her and a Zarashaa aside as they made themselves known- wiry and threaded with killer muscles, hawklike with an undercut, quantum-neural threading spreading from the corners of their eyes to the q-amp clamped on the base of their neck.

Sorry, they broadcast, this is what happens when you have to wrangle death squad members into an armed rescue force.

“It’s okay,” Van said. “Just nice to have friends.” He pointed to his temple. “I don’t suppose we could stop with this, though?”

Nah, sorry mate, not unless you read signs, they said. I can barely manage a word cause of the implants. Not exactly my idea, you know? They drew a zipper across their lips and shrugged.

Van shut his eyes and nodded. “Yeah, yeah I do.”

They were piled into a transport helo that had touched down gracefully on the balcony, striped with violet highlights and lights, Fortune’s Wheel marking each of its rotor housings. Van felt self aware about getting blood on the violet plush interior. Even so, his old instincts to make sure Taino was buckled in kicked in. He didn’t have the heart to humiliate the kid after all he’d been through.

They lifted off, and when they rose high enough, Van spotted the street-level cordons that had blocked off 3rd Exchange reinforcements. There were syndicate enforcers pulling weapons off 3rd Exchange guards, pushing cuffed partygoers into the back of brig transports and keeping the crowd of onlookers at bay- crooks policing crooks.

The quantum sat across from them. Van was unsure if they were just pleased by the outcome, or if they always looked like that, they were hard to read. 

And there we have it, they said to Van’s mind. A major incident, the kind to kick off a joint inquiry between syndicates.

“How long has your boss been waiting for someone like me to come along,” he said in his mind.

Well, she figured it’d be more a somewhat, given what it normally takes to stir up that much mayhem. I gotta say, you’re a fuckin’ madman, chief, they said.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said. “What goes down now.”

Now, I imagine the syndicates begin ratfucking the 3rd Exchange over breaking taboo. Their leadership is going to have to start jettisoning anyone even remotely connected here in order to save face. Big loss of prestige, possible revocation of territory. All depends on what they can prove, which is a lot, even with the specific bodies you dropped.

“Want more?” Van said out loud, making sure both the quantum and Taino heard. He pulled Quinten Timmins’ phone from his pocket, opened it to the inbox, twiddled it between his thumb and forefinger. “On the condition the heir of Sendra sees too, his people need to know too.”

The quantum tilted their head, with a raised eyebrow. They beckoned for it, and when Van tossed it, a quantum adjustment to spacetime warped it to their hand. They looked it over for a moment.

Oof, you shouldn’t have been looking at that bit there, they said.

“Yeah, scroll down more.”

They thumbed down more. Their eyebrows went higher. 

He’s right, kid, they said on a wider broadcast. You and yours are going to want to see this too.

---