Section 99: A Good Man - Part 5

He rose on the third day, early. Keeda was passed out in the common area in front of a playlist of pro wrestling that was still running. Telin was dialed-in, reclined in her captain’s chair in the half-asleep, half-aware trance a starship captain could achieve with meditation and active neurotropics. So he made himself space in the Closeup Sunrise’s internal hold, rearranging the pallettes of cigarette cartons and cannabis bales- pending deliveries to Insomnia that Telin has fast-tracked so as not to raise suspicions of a cargo ship arriving empty to a station with functionally no exports.

He unzipped his padded bag and got to work. The vest had to go on beneath his pants as well as his sweater, because of how it was designed to protect the pelvis and groin. Magazine goes into magnum, which goes into holster, which goes into belt; shells stack into the tube of the shotgun, which attaches to the quick detach line on his shoulder rig, which zips tight to his back; mini EVA-rig, on, heavy boots, on, leather jacket, on, spare ammo, out of sight on the belt. Simple prep for a simple concept: train while wearing your gear.

“Stand up straight,” he said internally, “put your shoulders back, set your feet. Are you off balance? What’s missing?”

Nothing, you’re good, the voice said.

Van cracked his neck. “You want out?” he said inwardly?

I want the old harmony between us.

“That’s not happening,” he said inwardly. “Different times, different places, different people in charge.”

Then who is in charge now?

Van felt his lip curl. He inhaled, deeply, then exhaled.

“I am,” he said. “You want out, you meet me in the middle, and do as I say.”

For a time, it felt like the voice was looking for something within him, some measure of control it could leverage Van with and make what he said invalid. Its presence felt frustrated- file not found.

We will meet in the middle, the voice said, finally. The emphasis was on will.

“Good,” Van said to the voice. “Get me ready.”

His enhancements surged and rose within him. In his body, he felt lighter, stronger, nimble and loose, and falling seamlessly, he began his routine of warmups for a body rebuilt to be a weapon. In his mind, he felt completely removed from the physical prep and exercises his body was performing, calm and focused, a stable room in a rocking boat. He had all the inner serenity he needed to review the details of a plan. Which wasn’t much of a plan from the standpoint of anyone sensible.

His first order of business was getting aboard Insomnia unnoticed, with a jacketful of unsanctioned weapons. This was the first big leap his plan required, one that he’d done before, exactly once. It had taken a slow two week approach in a landing sled with a stasis pod to avoid scanner sweeps, an hour long spacewalk and two guards dropped, stashed in an empty EVA suit cabinet. This time, he didn’t have that sort of luxury, which meant he was doing the dumb version of that plan: from where Telin would set down the Closeup Sunrise’s lander, out of sight of landing attendants and customs staff, he’d have to take a jump off the lander platform to dock’s sublevel gantries. With his mini-EVA thrusters and the lowered gravity of the docks, he reckoned he had a realistic chance of making it. He also reckoned he had a realistic chance of missing, sailing out the enormous opening of an atmospheric softlock, and blowing out into the void of space. Or cracking his head on the gantry railing instead of missing, and getting spaced all the same.

From there, provided he’d touched down without dying, he’d have to sneak his way through authorized access areas while looking like the hinkiest motherfucker in free space, but at least that meant he’d blend in when he made his way out to the streets. At least there, there’d be ground beneath his feet.

Things would only be momentarily easier as he found his way to the site of the auction. From there, he had no idea what to do, other than make a good effort. Primary objective was the location and extraction of Taino, but were he to fall short? He supposed he’d just have to aim to make a big enough crater, a major enough incident, and hope that the right eyes would find Taino when they looked into it.

A galaxy of little details bred doubt in his mind. His emotional suppression kicked in, and it numbed away the worry to a neutral-warm contentment at having a task and being able to do it. A task that had a thousand fatal hitching points and no clear path through all of them. He realized that this was how it used to be for him all the time, but he didn’t have any strong feelings about it at that moment. 

“Final jump is shallowing out, we’ll be at terminis point in 30,” Telin called though comms in Makara.

He blinked and he was back in his body, hours later, bent back into a bridge. The strength of enhancements receded, like a polished blade slipping into its sheathe. He didn’t know that he was ready for what he needed to do. All he knew, was that he was as ready for as much as he could manage.

---

20 thousand-odd kilometers off of Insomnia, the Closeup Sunrise blueshifted out of displaced space. From her reclined captains chair, she was immediately greeted by a seething orange warning: active sensor scan detected, Insomnia sees you. The shipboard clock realigned to Standard Decay Time- 3 days, 4 hours had passed.

Telin switched the bridge screens to exterior viewports. Insomnia menaced above them from a distance, a column of black steel, kilometers long, that bled multicoloured neon light from its every exterior transparency. It seethed and throbbed like a god of sleaze, lazily rolling on its side, unchallenged in clear and open space. It was a technological marvel, built around a well-guarded powerplant designed to harness massive amounts of power via orbit of a black hole. The hypnotic, hazy oblivion of the Deep Dark wasn’t just a draw for tourists looking to sightsee the end of the universe, nor a body dump for card cheats, but also what kept the lights on. Lights that drew in people with money, from all corners of the Freelands.

Smartly colour-coordinated naval vessels held station around the station’s proximity. Black steel, neon marker lights, big guns- enjoy your stay, but only on our terms.

“Sorry about not beating them there,” she said back to him, still slightly in her Captain’s Trance, not taking her eyes off the instrumentation.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He’d considered what he’d do if they’d arrived ahead of the Burneside, the ship Weller had given up as being Caesar’s ride from their exchange. Everything his mind returned was ‘wait for them to unload, then ambush them,’ but for what tactical advantage being able to take the initiative in the open, fighting in the open streets was an even worse plan than what he had. Besides, that route lacked the specificity of the ‘major incident’ he had in mind.

Insomnia tower hailed the Sunrise. Telin took it over bridge comms.

“Small Cartage Handlers United number 273, designated Closeup Sunrise,” she spoke into her headmic, “requesting permission to approach an--”

“Copy SCHU-273, we have you as VIP. Proceed to mooring group 3 at once, you have been cleared to land at dock 18.” The comms bleeped off.

Telin swiveled around to Van in her chair. She was steady, but her eyes were spooked. “You make the call,” she said.

“Take us in,” he said.

---

They touched down with no special fanfare, no envoys waiting for them, no syndicate heavies with truncheons and bodybags waiting to throw them out of the softlock. Instead, they were met with the standard compliment of jumpsuited longshorers with loading lifts and lightly armed-and-armoured customs agents. If anything stuck out as unusual, it was the speed and enthusiasm at which the longshorers moved to help with the palettes of smoke Telin and Keeda were offloading.

One of the customs agents beckoned to Van. He tensed, growling to himself when he noticed the Fortune’s Wheel patch on the sleeve of his armour.

“Callsign: Canine, registered under Section 99 out of-” he began.

“Yeah, go ahead and tell the whole station,” the agent said.

Van raised his eyebrows, rearing backwards slightly. “Oh, okay, this is what we’re doing,” he said, barely above the collective din of delivery drones, forklifts and shouting voices.

“Ms. Delroy has approved for both your arrival and the stay of your companions inside of Fortune’s Wheel territory, where they will enjoy the full hospitality of the Galaxy’s Premier Entertainment and Gaming Syndi-”

“I get it,” Van cut him off. “What about me, I get any special amenities?”

“You get to walk off his dock and into the station,” the agent said to him, leaning in closer. “From there, I legitimately don’t want to know what you get up to.” He stepped away and signalled to his attendant. They left, and didn’t look back.

Van went back to Telin, who was wheeling a palette of cannabis hardpacks into a delivery drone. He told her the news.

“Well, shit,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“We’re passed the point of being sorry,” she said. “Do you trust these people?”

“I trust that we’re a part of someone else’s plans now, and that they’re most likely not interested in harming a small cargo crew,” he said. “Still. No pressure or nothing.”

“Well, if you think this shit’s dangerous, let me tell you about the time I lived under interstellar fascists when I was 14,” she said with the hint of a smile.

An elaborate coach arrived, made to look like a luxurious circus carriage wagon. It slowed to a stop and its gullwing side burst open, rolling out a red carpet and showering gold confetti. A man dressed as a carnival barker emerged and proclaimed through an old tube-style megaphone, the winners of the first ever Casino Carnivale Happy Landings Lotto, and to drop by Fortune’s Wheel territory to see the ways you can win too.

“Jesus,” Telin said, staring grimly.

“Put on a good show, I suppose,” Van said to her.

She shrugged. “Moyo, Keeda, let’s go play cards,” she called. “Let’s eat buffet!” Keeda bellowed back, locking down a palette of cigarettes into a delivery drone.

Van looked back at her as he passed the coach. She caught it when she sat down inside, and nodded back. Then the door closed.

He felt the voice’s presence rise in him. You’re free now, it said. 

Go to work.

---

The platform rotated as it rose, adjusting to match the shift between the gravity fields of the docks and the interior of Insomnia. Van felt nauseous for a moment, and judging by the woozy sounds others made around him, he wasn’t the only one. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, he was awash in peach, pink and purple light as the platform rose to street level. Some of the people around him ooooh-ed and aaahh-ed. Some were dressed toward whatever their ideal of high society was, be they dandy, neo-aristo, fashionista or just ostentatiously rich. Some of them were common folk that had come upon money, sodbusters, dockworkers, shiphands, that were most likely about to lose all of it, yet still walk away happy, possibly with years off the end of their life. Some were as hinky as Van felt, and none of them ooooh-ed or aaahh-ed; at the very least, he had some peers to blend in with.

Insomnia was a city on the inside of a bottle, blocks of urban rises spread across the interior surface of its cylindrical structure, a metropolitan zone that rolled and wrapped around itself. It was more than just urban quarters, but park spaces, artificial lakes and rivers, bridges and mass transit, interconnected in one tightly contained sprawl of ultraluxury real estate. It was its own unceasing night sky, where at any point on its many streets, one could look up and see the twinking stars that were the lights and signs of the streets and structures directly above, that were realistically only a short tram ride away. Artificial clouds hung in the space between, and lightshow drones made them blaze from within, occasionally displaying ads for the latest big attractions. They distracted from the smaller surveillance drones that would occasionally hold station above, watching, before darting away like gnats.

The platform’s railings dropped away, and the people around him disembarked, bleeding into the thick foot traffic of the arrival area. For the barest of moments, he was visible in the open, and an outside mind ripped through space at a quantum scale and bridged itself to his.

How’s it going, mate? It stung in his mind like a sudden blurt of static through a bad connection, crawled through his neural pathways and finally died down to a pseudo-sonic intrusive thought with a Dublin accent.

“Oh, you know, just getting my mind probed by a covert quantum,” Van said, checking to see if his nose was bleeding. “The usual.”

Oh, you are sharp. Said the quantum, delight in their broadcast approximation of a voice. Ms. Maxine wasn’t joking, right on the money you are with the world of advanced operations!

“Are you my backup?” he asked.

I’m your discretionary assistant, the quantum said. I provide assistance at the discretion of others. Right now, I mostly just watch you. As you stand around, instead of heading northbound like you should. Chop-chop. 

With a sneer, Van started moving. Ooh, good lad, look at him go, said the quantum.

Van shouldered his way into the scrum of foot traffic, pulled up his sweater’s hood and became anonymous among the many-species throng. He pulled his phone and accessed the local map app, got his bearings. The foot streets were made to be a maze, casino design applied to a city, and he needed to be blocks away. So he made his way through the territory of the Kowloon 20, past street stalls of sizzling food and suspect merchandise, to Night Market station, where he hopped the emptiest available tramcar.

The only other people with him were a group of loud group of young people on a rager, three terrans, two arrisiyans- they looked like rock jockeys from a mining colony, and all of them were barely older than Taino. They noticed him looking and quieted down, spooked; he looked away and felt terrible.

The quantum bridged their minds again, and this time it only stung slightly, making his right eye twitch shut and tear up. I have to be realistic about your chances, they said. Namely, I hope you like mayhem, since the auction is already started.

“Shit,” he said internally. The voice’s presence roiled, and in the connection between their minds, he felt the momentary intrigue of the quantum.

So for your sake, with whatever you mean to do, you better hope your boy is still there. Otherwise, this’ll be a bit of a disaster, I reckon. For you, at least.

“A major incident,” he said.

Exactly, they said.

“And if he is there?”

Then I imagine this next few minutes will go a lot different for you than you’re feeling right now.

Van tried to find it within his senses to trace where the quantum was speaking to him, tried to judge direction and distance based on the pain in his brain. All he could figure was ‘close’ by what he knew from his previous experience with the quantum adepts, was that if one could broadcast from mind to mind like this, they needed to be inside a hundred meters at least. Which meant they were either impressively skilled at foot tailing, or more likely tracking him from a high vantage. He looked out the tram window and spotted a single-person helo, a skybike, keeping pace at a low and steady altitude.

The quantum sent him the image of a hand waving hello.

He disembarked at Commerce station, and the architecture had shifted from the more contemporary archiplast, alloy and glass of the Kowloon 20, to the upper crust stylings of the 3rd Exchange, a hybrid of art deco and graceful, swanlike arissyan stylings. A string quartet played on a street corner, welcoming visitors down a row of high-end boutiques- suits and gowns made from artisanal materials, the finest liquors from across the known galaxy, jewelery featuring the most spectacular stones mined from the void -the 3rd Exchange’s more legitimate moneymaking outlets. He strode out into the faux-cobblestone streets, down a row decorated with a boulevard of many-coloured rosebushes, toward the golden hanging garden that rose above all else in the immediate skyline.

He sucked in a bitter breath when he rounded the corner, because the street ahead suddenly grew crowded, thick with fancy clothes and glinting shine. The hanging garden was holding a garden party at its lower levels, happening enough to be spilling out into the street. He strode past- water feature lightshow, full bar service, live music, high wrought iron fencing, camera drones, six armed guards that he could make with a sidewise look alone. Dig the high class loadout- English cut suits with matching royal blue ties, kerchiefs and gloves, with the waistcoat and trousers probably packing soft armour panels, probably PDWs or heavy handguns hidden under the jacket. One of them wore a hat that made him look like a chauffer- probably guard captain, definitely an idiot. A frustrating distribution of mass; too many bodies standing around in the open to storm the castle, too few for him to slip into the party unnoticed. The voice made its presence known, bristling with frustration.

Van feigned getting a text; he pulled his phone, leaning up against one of the brass lamp posts that lit the lane. He darted his eyes back and forth from the screen, and every time they darted up, he got more bad news- another spotted guard, another security scanner, another bottleneck to close a lot of vertical distance. He judged the hanging garden tower was five storeys tall, which he was either going to have to run via a crowded spiralling staircase, or ascend in a slow elevator. Either option made him feel his own mortality. 

He had a sudden, unexpected feeling of warmth. That this time, he’d probably be the one to die. That if he was right, and he knew he was, it’d be the first time in his life he put in an honest effort toward a good cause, with all that had been done to him.

But he realized he had target fixation. The tower wasn’t what he needed to be looking at, it was the part of the picture that had changed from his intel. Namely, that the building on its left-hand side, what appeared to once be some sort of art showroom, was under reconfigurative renovation, strewn with caution tape and ‘mind our dust’ signs in many different languages. Against the property line was a lower hedge, which the bar was set up along, with a connecting side door. 

He wasn’t going to slip in unnoticed, but it was as much as an opening as he could manage with what he had. Sometimes, you slit a throat with a sharp knife in a dark room, sometimes, you make due with a broken bottle in a barroom brawl.

He drew in a slow breath, let it out slow and measured, and took his shot.

Van tuned his senses as he walked, focusing on the showroom, trying to pick up any sounds coming from within, any rumble of movement. It read as clear, but that was a snap decision. Fuck it, he reasoned, he was done making decisions that weren’t snap.

So he swung around the far left side, and found a loading ramp that led to a lower entrance, wide enough for an urban delivery drone or a garbage collector. He picked up a whiff of cigarette smoke that wafted up from around the corner, and dialed his senses to the edge of a scalpel: beneath the surrounding sounds, a man leaning on the wall inhaled, held, then exhaled, shifting his weight from side to side, producing the tiny telltale sound of polymer holster on alloy frame, against concealing fabric.

Van rolled from around the corner, and was face to face with a guard in his black suit and blue tie. A cigarette trembled in his lips.

“Uh,” the guard said, eyes wide. His hand went immediately for his gun. Van’s left found it and clamped it to his side. His right went into the guy’s nose and flattened it, slamming the back of his head into the bricks behind him. He crumpled, jelly-brained and leaking from his face. Van caught him before he dropped, sinching in a single-armed headlock.

“More than anything in your world, you want to let me into the auction, and you want to do it quietly,” he said, dragging him toward the loading doors.

He has a key, crush him and take it, the voice said.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said internally. His skin prickled.

The door opened. “You’re gonna want to report it to Hauser before you disappear like that,” guard said, tapping a cigarette out of her pack as she pushed through. “I don’t care how hard you’re nicking ou-”

She stared at her comrade, bleeding out a wrecked face, held bent over by a big man in a leather jacket, whose eyes were glinting with a green light. He stared back without budging, despite how the man under his arm was struggling.

Do it, the voice said.

“Sic em, boy,” he said to himself.

He didn’t process that he’d wrenched the doubled over man up and in front of him, into the path of machine pistol fire the guard had cut loose at him. By the time it had happened, he’d dropped to his knee, found his magnum and found his sights. As she tore her comrade apart with autofire, Van shot from between his stricken, wobbling legs, dropping her with a hit to the heart and the head. 

The screaming was nearby and immediate.

“Fuck!” Van yelled, pressing off the deck to his feet.

Let go of the leash, the voice yelled back, pushing Van’s body through the bloodstained door and up the stairs behind. He slotted his magnum away and pulled the shotgun from under his coat, leaping stairs in bounds. When he reached the upper floor, he saw three black suits with blue ties piling through the side door to meet him, guns in hand. Green bounds outlined their bodies, and Van’s tuned reflexes drove his weapon between them. He dropped the first with a blast to the chest that knocked him flat, causing the others behind him to stumble and trip over his perforated body. Van racked and fired into the stumbling tangle, and blew them open before they could get a clean shot.

He darted past a window toward the side door, and automatic fire tore it out behind him- high volume, high angle, the guards on the stairway most likely. Van flattened against the door opening, peeking one eye out- it was chaos. Guests were scattering to the main gate heads low, trampling on one another. Some of them had their bodyguards shielding them with weapons drawn, some of them even holding 3rd Exchange goons at aggressive bay. Someone fell from the garden stairs, pushed by the wave of panicked auctiongoers making their way down, a man in a tailed suit whose tophat popped off when his neck whiplashed against the grass. Another dangled limply, hanging from the neck by trailing fuschia and blue flowers, with vines like piano wire. 

Those fleeing gave a wide berth to the guards firing from over the railing, a pair that raked him with machine pistol fire, showering him with fragments of brickwork. He drew back behind cover, and rammed home a stack of shells into his shotgun. He pivoted out, then realized he had no good shot on either. A round caught him in the left thigh as he switched to the opposite side of the door, unzipping three inches of skin before it glanced off his subdermal armouring. Van winced; his augmentations noted minor damage.

He poked out again, and was immediately put back down by a stream of accurate rapid fire. Then, something Van didn’t expect- two shots, rifle bore, high and from across the street. The quantum found his mind in the mayhem.

Got you a front door, mate, use it.

He looked out, and the two up high were down, one slumped over the railing, one clutching at her chest, kicking her legs on the stairs’ grating. A third was assaulting him, now naked without his covering fire, haloed in green; Van blasted him flat and tore off over his carcass, making for the stairs up the garden.

He pushed into the fray, shouldering escaping partiers and auctiongoers over the railing with each leap up the stairs. Some turned when they saw him coming and collided with those who didn’t; Van trampled over them without stumbling, hard boots stamping into pampered skin. Automatic fire reached for him from a level above, shredding leaves and petals from the hanging plants, hitting him twice in the vest and knocking him sideways, the misses either pinging off the railing or thudding into escaping bodies. He found his footing and fired back, putting the black suit over the railing in a shower of red.

A stampede was making its way down, too many for Van to shove aside even with how dosed he was. He couldn’t find an answer to it, but the Canine in him did, making his body leap from the railing to the top of one of the slowly descending elevator cars amid the garden’s flora. The occupants screamed with the sudden thud and side to side swing. They screamed louder when an exploding slug blew a chunk out of the car’s roof and stippled Van with fragments, peppering his face and ripping up his jacket. He looked up- the Chauffer, rocking backwards from the recoil of a garak combat riveter, a massive spent shell flying free of its ejector. The swaggery fuck lined up another shot, and Van leaped clear as it sailed past, shattering a section of stairway. He fired his EVArig and the rush of upward thrust boosted him onto the roof of the adjacent car. The Chauffer fired again and blew a searing pock in the car’s roof; someone inside made a hideous sound before screaming drowned it out. The followup shot caught the car clean in the hoist cable, fragments fritzing out the emergency brake controllers. Van fired and sent the Chauffer down behind cover. Then the car fell.

Van had no answer, so the Canine answered for him. He jumped vertically as the cable snapped and wrapped his arm around it as the counterweight dropped, augmented grip strength clamping down on it. The greased high tensile wire bit down into his skin as it dragged him upward, shredding through his jacket sleeve, his subdermal threading keeping it from ripping off his arm entirely.

He let go of the wire and landed on the service platform of the elevator bank. Then the car and the counterweight cratered into the ground and shook the entire hanging garden atrium, the crash echoing through the packed-in architecture of Insomnia. He rammed home a stack of shells into his weapon, and checked his vitals. Breathing? On fire. Heart rate? Combat speed. Hand and arm? Agony, shaped like a limb. Leg? Still shot. Around him? An awful lot of people looking for him with guns.

All things considered, he was doing better than he expected.

Weapon raised in one hand, he forced the elevator door open with the other. He was made immediately as he peeked out, by a guard whose eyes went bowel-empty wide before he raised a magnum and made to yell. Then a rifle shot like a scalpel pitted the atrium glass and spilled his head out across the floor.

The nice thing about reading minds, the quantum zinged Van. Having your targets call themselves out.

“So I have your discretionary assistance, now?”

Mate, you got me as president of your fanclub if you make it out of this.

The garden atrium was a collection of lavish rooms, subdivided openly beneath a high glass ceiling, upon which a perpetual artificial rain fell. The floors were tiles of alternating coal-black and silver-speckled arissiyan marble, the walls were massive wrapsheet screens displaying masterworks of art from across the galaxy, and each room had its own specific theme. In the room Van found himself in, it was an exhibit of proto-arissiyan artwork, clay and cyclopean stonework from their earliest recorded epoch. A rendering of a fisher on their canoe, a trail waystone, a hooded brazier carved from a single piece of stone; the pieces sat on wide rectangular plinths, protected by shield-polarized glass and little else. Van sure hoped they were replicas.

He moved through the gallery; auctiongoers in cover between the plinths cowered when they saw him, and he shushed them, hissed at them to put faces down and their hands flat. At the end of the room, he stacked against the neon-glass double doors, and his hearing tweaked- hard soled shoes sliding into position from the other side, someone doing a press check on their gun, someone sucking in a deep breath. He waited, tensed, ready.

Three black suits kicked the doors and Van kicked back, slamming the door into one of them, sending him sprawling headfirst into the opposite wall. Van put a shell into his back to keep him down, before pushing into the other two that spun to met him, diving in low beneath their leveled weapons. He caught them both and lifted them with augmented strength, pushing them toward the wrapscreen wall, a massive depiction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night pixelating and abberating as their bodies slammed into it. Van swung at them with a right hook like a piston. The first one ducked and slipped out of his clinch; the second didn’t and took the full force directly into his temple, pitching over, eyes dead, skull broken. The skin on his neck prickled and his senses twinged- he jerked his head to the side and shriek of plasma burnt him along the left of his face, exploding a patch of the wall. He turned and caught the woman who had drawn the plasma pistol on him, inverting her elbow and sending her next three shots into the high ceiling, burning molten holes in the reinforced glass. He shifted his weight around her and threw her like a ragdoll toward the window. Gracefully, she broke her fall and pressed to a three-point base, finding her aim on Van again. Then the quantum shot her twice in the back, and she died mouthing ‘what the fuck?’

“Nice shot, now shift with me,” Van said to himself, before realizing that a quantum isn’t a radio, and feeling like a dope.

He pressed into the next room, clearing it of threats- a lot of people in nice clothes, ducked low behind fine recreation Victorian furniture or out of sight behind the burgundy drapes that hung from the ceiling. Neoclassical European portraits were on display behind shielded glass, and a man with a monocle hid himself behind one when Van made eye contact with him.

He stacked himself against the door to the next room, and tuned his senses- a lot of movement in a bigger space, a lot of hushed voices, a lot of angry confusion and issuing orders. He reasoned this was it, what he was looking for, one way or another. Then he tweaked hard, a threat on his immediate six.

“F-freeze,” said a voice behind him.

He turned, and found a man of his early 20s in an ash gray suit and a green tie, blue eyes watery but intense, levelling an Imperial arissiyan pulse pistol at his head. Its gold inlays matched his blonde hair.

“Kid, do everyone a favor and put that thing dow-” Van began.

“You v, violated the NAP,” he said.

Van stared at him, blinking.

The flailing body of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed young man of his 20s crashed through the doors of the next room. He was immediately chewed to pieces by a hail of PDW and carbine fire, before a single shot from a combat riveter turned him to wet rags. From his position, Van listened.

“Aw, fuck, who was that?”

“Shit!”

“Oh man, I think that was Darcy Pennington.”

“Oh my fuck.”

“You think?”

“Do you know who his fucking dad is?”

“YOU THINK?”

“SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT-”

Van made his move. He ran low into the largest, centermost room of the atrium, where rows of plush folding chairs were set up around a raised, curtained stage, scattered by the sudden panic. His threat detector painted green across the armed bodies that met him, four black suits, the Chauffer, and a big cogitoi that had to be Caesar. It also returned an inconclusive outline, the body being shielded by Caesar that Van made as Quinton Timmins. He punched his shotgun out and flattened the suits that stood poking up among folding chairs like they wanted to die, trying to make shaken hands put sights on a moving target. Two dropped, spiralling threads of blood as they fell, as the rest ran dry on their weapons, fumbling to find their spare magazines.

He rolled into cover behind a marble plinth at the rear of the room, and a rivet slug blew the corner out of it as he slid in. The impact knocked the wind out of him and he felt splinters lodge in his arm and bite down. The pain registered in a want to do terrible things to that fucking Chauffer. He reached for spare shells, and found none in his beltclips. When he pressed out for an angle, Caesar hosed him down with a big autorifle, shredding up the floral arrangement on the plinth and grinding its exposed side to rubble. A shot hit Van in the shoulder- his armour held but his aim jerked enough to put his last shell into the atrium ceiling. The flechette scatter blew out one of the largest panels, and a hundred kilos of thick glass fell as a rain of razors. One of the black suits on the auction floor managed to scramble free, throwing himself into a pile of chairs; the other didn’t, and was only spared by taking a big piece to the head before the rest of it took her apart.

Van stashed his shotgun against the plinth and pulled his magnum. He listened, and tried to somehow make a loud thought of “I could use some help, discretionary assistant!”

“I’m moving for an angle, cover me,” he heard an unsure voice say. Someone changed magazines, rifle-sized, on the stage. “I’m backing you up,” a voice with a cold, metallic echo said. Footsteps, two sets, one hard soled, the other bigger, heavier, clunkier. Someone from the furthest back in the room shouted, “Deal with this!” with a thin, nasal voice- Timmins, probably. 

“I told you my people would come for you,” came from further behind. “I told you we Sendra are the Small Eyes of the Stars,” said Taino Sendra.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Caesar, his register hollow, hateful.

“Taino!” Van called.

“You’re dead, motherfucker,” the tinny voice droned at him.

“...Van?” he heard Taino say.

His grip tightened around his magnum. For a few seconds, he found himself shaking, feeling like he was starting to boil from within. His jaw clenched tight, grinding teeth as his face twisted into a rictus. Then, he went cold. He heard the voice try to say something to him, and it failed to register as anything other than a mumble.

“Taino, I’ll be right there,” he yelled, his voice cracking. “Keep your head down.”

He poked up from cover and got two bad shots off before combined fire put him back down in a heap. One round skimmed through his scalp and bounced off his reinforced skull, knocking him dull and blinding his left eye with a stream of blood. Three others hit him in the chest, thudding flat against his armour, driving the wind out of him, putting him on his back. He wheezed and rolled and scrambled back to the shelter of the plinth that was turning to gravel from the beating it was taking.

“I just have a little left to go,” he said, quietly, between difficult breaths.

A third set of footsteps stamped down behind a door to Van’s ten o’clock. A black suit with a PDW booted it down, and only managed to squawk out “shit!” before Van punched him out with three slugs to his chest. The others opened up on him again, and he felt the plinth start to come apart. He hunched and rocked, and gripped a half spent handgun like it was worth a damn. His every want was to be able to tear across the room and rip everyone that stood in his path, toward his friend, his little brother, the kid that gave him a chance to be something other than someone else’s tool. But he couldn’t, because he’d hit upon the limitation of what just one person could do, that a good man alone was just a small light in a dark world. The Canine in him tried to say something, but all he could do was howl. Howl out his tears, that this was as much as he had in him for the right reasons, that he knew he’d done so much more for so much worse.

Stay put, the quantum found his mind, faraway, weak. Just a second more.

A rifle shot cracked from further away, pinpricking a window and slicing the black suit’s knee out from under him. He screamed, before a second round to his head silenced him. Caesar wheeled in the direction of the shot, and couldn’t find an angle.

Fight, you idiot! Now! The voice finally managed to break through.

Van pounced on the opportunity with both hands, peeling out of his cover, storming Caesar, pumping magnum shots into his side until the slide locked back. The slugs tore through his suit but hit hard panels beneath- he buckled sideways and he dropped his rifle from catching a round in the elbow, but he caught himself from fully falling. The Chauffer thudded a slug from his riveter from the back of the room and blew the plinth to shards. Van felt it come apart in the concussion that hit his back and gave him one last push before he slammed into Caesar, bulldozing him in a tangle of limbs into a pile of chairs.

Caesar rolled through and kicked Van off; Van rose, turned and slammed a left and a right across his carbon fiber face, before realizing he shouldn’t be swinging for the head on a man with a solid state brain. He caught a hook in his ribs for his troubles, and felt the secondary rams in Caesar’s forearm fire, delivering a second blow from inside the first. He staggered backwards, windless, two ribs cracked.

“Caesar, down!” The Chauffer bellowed. Both he and Van straightened to seen him lining up a shot with his riveter, and both of them dove and tucked when the shot he peeled loose blew a trench through the rows of chairs and exploded a section of floor. 

“Hauser, you fucking moron,” Caesar shouted back at him, finding his feet and trying to find his rifle.

He fired again as Van scrambled for any sort of cover he could grab, smashing in the face of a Clan Sumek patriarch by Redekki rendered on the wrapscreen wall behind. He tried for a third shot and his weapon’s bolt dropped on an empty chamber. “Shit, I’m reloading,” he shouted.

“Fix your fucking aim or shove it up your-” Caesar was cut off by a folding chair clattering sideways into his neck. He whipped around and staggered as his optics fuzzed and his gyro wobbled. Van launched himself at the big cogitoi again, smashing another chair over his head and bending it in half, before he went to work swinging at his joints, trying to cut him down to size. He sank to one knee, before he rose and drove his shoulder up into Van’s chest, picked him up in a double leg and slammed him down back first. Van’s head caromed off the stone floor, and his consciousness turned to sludge.

He woke to pain unlike anything he’d ever felt in his life. He’d never had his head clamped in a vice before, but he understood the basic jist of it from having it caught between between Caesar’s massive metal hands. He felt his sinuses shifting, his teeth grinding against one another, his jaw feeling like it wanted to pop loose and separate, his eyes starting to bulge. He kicked and flailed against the cogitoi’s painless body, and it only made him squeeze tighter and tighter.

“I’m reloaded,” the Chauffer called.

“Hauser, you stay weapons tight, I have this,” Caesar shouted. “I am going to make this hurt, you motherfucker,” he said to Van. “And then I am going to take everything I can out of the kid as a receipt.”

Van’s vision ran red.

“Fucking arrogant meat, doesn’t know its place,” the cogitoi said.

Van’s body wracked from head to toe.

“Van,” he heard Taino call, “you can do this. I know you have it in you.”

His fury rose as a roar that caused Caesar’s auditory receptors to clip and distort, green light shining from eyes fully shot with blood. He flattened his back against the floor and threw double-legged kicks into Caesar’s midsection that landed like hammerblows, loosening his grip and disrupting his lower body controllers. He forced his hands up between Caesar’s arms and jammed his thumbs into his oculars, wrapping fingers like claws around the hard angles of his face and gripping as tight as he could manage. The left gave before the right, but he sunk both back into Caesar’s metal skull. He tried to say something, but it came out as a disrupted blurt of garbage audio. His arms shook, and his grip slipped.

Van roared again and grabbed the cogitoi’s arms in underhooks, ratcheting up on them with every fiber of strength in his body. “Fucking meat,” Caesar managed to say, voice still garbling, trying to find his footing against way more strength he expected from a terran. His elbows creaked, his microvesicle hydraulic musculature straining and whinging against the torque.

“Caesar, I got him,” The Chauffer yelled.

“No you fucking don’t Hauser,” Caesar yelled back, his words becoming a rapid fire stutter of distorted, digital syllables. “Hold fire!” he managed to get out, before his arms gave up on him, failing at the elbow joints with two loud metallic cracks, his tinny voice squawking and hissing like a crashing audio driver. Van let them dangle and twitch, grabbing Caesar by the collar and yanking him face first into the top of his head for good measure. One last time, Van let out a guttural sound and charged forward into Caesar, diving into his legs and lifting him into a run towards the auction stage.

“Caesar!” The Chauffer yelled.

“Don’t you fuckin d-” Caesar honked, and then his back slammed into the stage, sending the whole platform squealing backwards as he and Van crashed into it. The Chauffer stumbled and fell hard on his tailbone, his heavy weapon coming down on his chest and knocking the wind out of him. Van ran up Caesar’s toppled body, partially crushed into the front panel of the stage. He leaped, landing on the Chauffer’s chest, where he did what he’d wanted to do since he first spotted him: punch that stupid hat off his stupid head.

Van hefted him by his tie, hanging him in his grasp, before grabbing an arm and hurling him over his shoulder into Caesar. They crashed with a wet clap and fell in a heap, the Chauffer stunned and limp on the top of the pile, Caesar swearing and trying to make his remaining limbs work from the bottom. From his feet, Van picked up the combat riveter, giving it a half pull back on the charging handle just to make sure the Chauffer had loaded it right- big brass stared at him from the ejection port. He shouldered it, and aimed at the pile. The Chauffer’s went lucid just long enough to blurt “aw, fuck” as he saw the ragged, bloody man with the green light in his eyes bring his favorite gun to bear on him. 

Van dropped the trigger and blew him apart from the chest up, smearing his fractured remains across the smooth floor. Caesar writhed from beneath, a shallow crater in his chest from the shellburst, fuel cells ruptured, his electrocapacitive gel mixing with his blue thermotive fluid, mixing with the blood raining down on him. He lifted his head towards Van, staring from ruined oculars, his body twitching and groaning- pain, real pain, as a synthetic asshole could understand it. Van gave him a moment to savor, before blowing his head off.

He dropped the weapon, and sank to his knees. For a brief second, he listened to the rain coming down through the broken ceiling.

Good. All targets down, room is clear, the voice said to him. Secure the objective.

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

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

“Still one left.” 

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