Section 99 - A Good Man, Part 4

Hard thoughts, bad dreams and good talks in space.

“Waiting on final displacement check,” Telin spoke in Maraka into her headmic, holosheet displays arrayed around her captain’s chair. The bridge was cramped, built for only a few small bodies, a rhidling design. Van felt folded up in chair of the secondary comms station behind her, his bulk impinged upon the confines.

“Standby,” Keeda called back from the engine room, voice coming through the bridge comm speakers.

Van watched her as she smoothly and calmly worked the controls of her elaborate chair. With practiced hands, she rolled her ship, the Closeup Sunrise, into Port of St. Joseph’s departure channel. The St. Joe tower pinged a confirmation in her instrumentation: clear for departure on your go.

“Numbers are good,” Keeda’s voice came again, in Makara. “We are all blue for displacement.”

“Instrumentation and nav is all blue, get set,” Telin called back. “You ever seen this from the bridge?” she switched back to English for Van.

“Couple of times,” he said.

“Never gets old,” she said, a smile in her voice.

She reached for the mechanical slider on her right hand side, and unlocked it from its rear position. She slid it forward, and Van felt the ship thrum around him as it locked to the front. His skin prickled with static, and he felt heavier in all directions at once.

Telin opened a channel to the tower. “Peace with you, Port of St. Joseph,” she said. “We’ll be back soon, but we’re leaving for now, in 3, 2, 1,” and she racked the slider back.

Around them, through the wrapsheet screens that formed an encompassing display of surrounding space via the exterior scopes of the ship, the light of the stars stretched, smeared and became like smoke. Colours bled from the debris field, the miner drones, the nav buoys and the nebula beyond, becoming fluid and melting into a spiralling fractal that stretched into the distance of space like a kaleidoscope. At its centermost point, Van could have sworn he made out a tiny little speck of a space station.

Then space displaced and The Great Loophole slingshotted them far beyond the speed of light, a bubble inside of a bubble. One second, it felt as though Van’s head had been slammed into the bulkhead behind him, the next, like he was underwater; then, he was fine. 

The screens went an impossible, total sort of dark that Van found hard to look at. Telin switched the screens to nav readouts. “No guarantees, but there’s a good chance we’ll make it inside of three days,” she said. “We’re running light and tight so Keeda was really able to optimize her equations. Who knows, we might outrun them, be waiting for them when they show up.”

Van was glad she had his back. “Here’s to optimism,” he said.

“To optimism, in rough times,” she said.

---

The pizza Van had delivered to him by Agnelli’s during final ground prep was cold and down to its last few pieces. He was eating slow. Only his body was hungry, because his mind was engaged. Sat on a couch for rhidlings that became a generously sized chair when he sat in it, he hunched over his tablet in the midship common space.

In the final ground prep before departure, Van prowled the local nets for as much as he could gather on what Weller had given him. Some of it came simple, practically friendly-like. Insomnia was as much a tourist hub as it was a crooked stronghold, it liked to advertise and to be amenable to guests. Finding the auction’s address was as simple as inputting it into the local map app. It even included options for navigation via foot, taxi or tramway. The building was the Emphira Solarium, an arissiyan-style exterior access penthouse atop a hanging garden. It was a place made for art exhibitions and fancy dress parties, to take in the colours of the city lights beneath glass shimmering with a neverending artificial rain. ‘Ascend either the spiralling stairs or the slow-rising elevators to experience the living floral majesty of a dozen worlds intermingled, up toward the luxury that awaits’ and other yadda-yadda, including a form to request an event rental. What its site lacked was a floorplan. Floorplans were things Insomnia was not open with.

Which meant he needed to reach into his wallet and contact his brokerages. Preliminary payment for his collars had come through, with his share shaking out to 5000 reales a head. This, he threw at any intel he could buy on where he was going, as well as the names Weller had given up. He couldn’t find any architectural designs or schematics for the solarium or the hanging garden. What he did find some some datascape images, taken to make digital reconstructions of the area by sneaky tourists with sub rosa cartographer scanners- can’t make the trip? Visit in VR, with this recreation we scanned! Where they worked, they worked. Where they didn’t was functionally everywhere that was authorized personnel only, which meant his layout for approach and egress was incomplete at best.

Weller had given up names as well. His boss was a guy named Quinton Timmins, and he wasn’t hard to track down online, at least on the Insomnia local net. They loved their society pages, and he was splashed across them as an up-and-comer among the rich, privileged and crooked that made the station their home. As things stood, he wasn’t near the top of the 3rd Exchange, but with the waves he’d been making, winning prestige for his organization through his scores and his personal expeditions to claim them, he’d be there soon.

Van studied his picture. Immaculately groomed, eyes like a lizard, smile like oil in a puddle, cheekbones that needed a fist.

Society pages weren’t what he needed though, and unfortunately Timmins kept his part of the Exchange running with tight seals. What privileged intel access he cared to pay for all functionally said the same thing, that the guy was real about his expeditions into the Uncharted, and that wherever he moved, he had people moving with him to check his corners and open his doors. From what he knew of Insomnia and the syndicates that ran it, the man could be in charge of upwards of 40 soldiers alone, beyond his staff and inner circle. He was a big tree for as little axe as Van was bringing. All he could hope for was that Timmins would keep security in moderation, so as not to bother his moneyed buyers with too many armed suits flitting around.

Weller’s contact between himself and Timmins was a guy called Caesar, just Caesar. Caesar was more well known on information exchanges and what Van could buy up on him came with a lot of red flags telling folks to stay away. The jist: cogitoi, big motherfucker, bad motherfucker, the kind of person that didn’t need a psych eval to tell that he was in it at least partways for the violence. His business was making sure his boss’ affairs ran smoothly, and all accounts had him as the type to keep the wheels greased with other people’s blood. His face was a death mask, one Van resolved to see buried.

Van scrolled through everything he assembled, again and again, eyes darting, committing it all to memory. He vacantly raised a piece of pizza to his mouth and ripped it in half, wolfing it down; he asked himself what it was he was looking at.

“Not a lot,” he said inwardly.

You’ve operated with less, the voice suddenly rose in him. Trust me.

He hated that he knew how right it was. He hated how much better it knew than him.

---

Song Young-Jae was Privileged Class, a singer whose classical style swayed crowds of the hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions across the worlds he was permitted on. The Loyalist Party hated him, because the Imperials had grown to hate him, out of a rise of messages in his art deemed to be subversive. ‘The world will be here tomorrow,’ he sang famously. He left out mention of it being ruled by an arissiyan Imperator. When Canine had reached him, he was in his penthouse apartment, having an evening with his girlfriend, approved news anchor Choe Hyun-Ok. Their relationship had taken a turn for the volatile over Song’s musical rhetoric, or so the state sponsored tabloids had reported. Which is why they’d get their story early the next morning, when Canine headlocked her over the edge of a 120 story drop to the streets of the Seoul massed population center below. Song tried to stop him; he wouldn’t have managed it if he was five men. Instead, Canine walked him to his dining room table, sat him at the head, and shot him under the chin with the Privileged-sanctioned handgun he’d taken out of Song’s desk. The clean cut suicide of a murderous traitor to the Imperator. The Imperials liked things to be clean cut.

Van regarded Song’s head, as it sat on the clean white walls of his mind. His eyes were uneven, but still frightened, and his jaw sagged, trailing drool. The little pitmark on his chin was all but concealed by the stream that flowed from his nose, the small caliber slug stopped dead in his brain.

He remembered Song acutely, despite not ever being a fan of his music. Of what he could make out of his deepest memories, Song felt like one of his earliest dispatches, easily his most high profile. His emotions over him flowed together but didn’t mix- programmed-in satisfaction, postmortem horror and disgust; hate, just hate.

“I don’t think he hates you,” a voice said behind him.

He turned and the white walls bled to the flower-vined walls and fat-trunked trees of Alemeka Grove itself, on the front porch of Van’s old wood-walled flat. Taino was in front of him, and he was 14, dressed for ancestral observances at the end of the week.

“I think you just think he hates you,” Taino said, fidgeting with his sash.

“Yeah, but I’m the one that’s still here,” Van said. “He travels with me, not the other way around.”

“You don’t honor him or set him on his way. Why bother?”

Van felt a twinge of something nearby. Danger, behind the gate to the street behind Taino. Calm and contained, he did the same thing he did every time he knew things might be getting rough around the kid. He took him by the shoulders and made eye contact. Go to the safe zone, like we rehearsed, he meant to say. It came out sounding a lot like “Because someone should hurt for what I did.”

He pushed through the gate and he was on Geryon, and he felt the rush of his enhancements spinning up, a stimulated adrenal high mixing with the confidence of having his emotions bionically dampened. Bullets were hitting his armour, his faceplate, the energy of their impact being deadened and redirected by the energy of its integrated shield. Whatever hit slipped through was turned to a cut or a graze by the kilometers of graphex nanotube thread that reinforced his skin and muscle, wrapped his organs and bones; he felt the pain but it was irrelevant information. His eyes lit with the lights of green targeting data, as he ran at full sprint, leaping as deckplates fell away, damage cascading through the station’s substructure, his carbine firing, kicking against arms that wouldn’t allow it to recoil, as bodies fell ahead of him like blood-burst dominos. They all had different uniforms or colours, Imperial deserters, syndicate enforcers, a half dozen Freeland and private militias. A lot of them were just people, shooting back with range rifles and hunting shotguns, or sometimes coming at him with knives or bats. He knew these people, or at least he remembered their faces well; he’d killed them all before, in life and in dreams past. The wounds that took their lives the first time persisted in his memory, but they still screamed when he dropped them all over again.

He breached the door he was looking for, the one he remembered from memory, that he breached whenever he dreamed he was on Geryon. Kristine Carter was on the other side of it, the Imperial traitor that cast in her lot with her workers and stole from the Imperium a mining fleet and a fancy new station, the station she’d helped to make a node on the Freeland map and a prosperous mining cooperative. He had done his part to damage Geryon, with concussion charges he’d stolen from an explosives stockpile, massed on the struts and heat exchangers of one of its 3 outer towers, causing stationwide destabilization that would take months, if not years to fix. Carter he would leave in worse condition, neck-broken and throat-ripped, with an empty gun still clutched in her hand, a hopeless fear written into her face. Scan the face, for handler confirmation of kill; leave the body where it’ll be easily found.

“Hmm,” a voice said from behind Van, “I don’t know if I’m happy with it.”

Van’s skin turned to ice. He turned, and his weapon was gone, his armour was gone, his confidence gone. He was back, surrounded by starkly white polymer walls, under white lights that left no place to hide. He was down to an asylum smock, and a collar that bound his neck tightly enough that his pulse pounded.

Brian Charles Grafton examined him with a critical eye, hands behind back, his pearl white three piece suit gleaming in the brightness of the room, contrasted by his black and gold tie and handkerchief. His blonde hair looked like spun gold, his eyes like arctic ice. The impulses in Van’s mind told him to take extra notice of these details, and appreciate them against his own shortcomings.

“The station is still online, we’re not looking at any sort of population trend toward abandonment, even if you made a very impressive fireworks display,” he began. “There’s also the matter of Carter: do you feel you exercised your best judgement in her disposal and exampling?”

Van said, “I wish I could explain to you how much I hate you.” His lips made it sound a lot like, “Forgive me sir, what do you mean?”

“I mean I feel as though your performance was missing,” Grafton said, and every word pounded into Van’s skull like a nail. “Wanting. I want to know what you intend to do to improve your work output for me, to better meet the standards being set by your peers in this operation.”

“I want to drink your blood out of my boot,” Van said, but his mouth didn’t move. “Sir, I’m sorry, please clarify?” said the Canine. “Did I not achieve my objectives?”

“I do not ask for a minimum deliverable product from you, asset, I demand excellence,” Grafton snapped, and voltage coursed through Van’s brain; his skin sizzled from imagined acid. “I ask for prestigious performance that will raise the profile of this operation within the Imperial intelligence community, and you give me work that could have been accomplished with a gang of plebian thugs.”

Van didn’t see where the hand came from that leashed him; he never did when it happened. Every time it did, he wanted to scream, but the Canine kept him stoic, untroublesome, a good dog that didn’t whine. “Consider this your chance to self-workshop ideas for how to take initiative in the field, yes?” Grafton called after, he was dragged from the room on his back, legs kicking involuntarily. 

He stared up at the ceiling of the white corridor, helpless against the drag. He tried to see who held the leash, but he couldn’t make his head turn or his neck crane in the right direction. Instead, he shut his eyes, and tried to make himself breathe. He knew where they were taking him. He knew they were going to the pens.

“Who gets to hurt for what they did to you?” He heard Taino say. “For what they made you?”

The pen door slammed shut and locked with a harsh click. Van opened his eyes, still in the dark, laid on his side in a space just barely tall enough for him to roll over, not deep enough for him to fully stretch out. “You deserve this,” the Canine said to him. “This will teach you to be better next time.”

“It’s okay, Van-kosa,” he heard Taino say. Big brother. “I’m here with you.”

The thought of Taino folded up in the dark like he was made him want to weep.

---

Van blinked his eyes open. He wasn’t shocked awake by his nightmares any more, they happened too frequently, shared the same features too often. They mostly just left him tired, but unable to go back to sleep, like being woken up by a phone scammer with an autodialer. His neck hurt from being slumped on the couch. His pizza box was still beside him, and he felt the weight and spice of pepperoni sitting sore in his stomach. Annoyed, he shoved it away, and flopped down on his side with a dejected groan.

He didn’t mean to do that, he heard there was still a piece inside; he didn’t hate pizza, he loved pizza.

Curled into the fetal position, face buried into the cushions of an unfamiliar couch, slingshotting through space at faster-than-light speeds, Van let himself cry what few tears he could bring up.

---

“So, back up, there’s valid target zones where you can try to rail people with a pitch? Because I always thought the whole body was fair game,” Telin paused to take a sip of her drink- nabana, sweet, spicy, mildy boozy. “Given how much you see the gory highlights with people getting pitches in the knees and the elbows, the compilation videos.”

“Fans are fans, but that shit’s illegal,” Van said. “I mean, I guess not if you’re playing on clan grounds where the clan allows them, but that’s not Unified Rules of Defko. You want to rail a player, hit them in the chest, no limbs, no head, groin or tail. But anyway, we’re getting sidetracked.”

“Right, right, the alien is telling me how to play a game my species invented,” she said with a smile.

“Wow, the a-word, rude,” Van returned the smile. “And you told me you weren’t into sports!”

“I know, it’s just weird is all!” She shrugged and shook her head, making wheeling, vague hand gestures.

“So, long story short, Taino, who wants no part of playing headpoint, but is being pressured because like, clan heir and all, has functionally no option but to put himself out there,” Van began again. “Leadership shit, or whatever.”

“I can understand that,” Telin said. “Love you dad, I didn’t need to start flight school as soon as I did.”

“So here I am doing what I can to help the poor kid, who just that season had learned the basics of catching and throwing, how to pitch against strikers who were older and bigger than him, that were probably gonna try to rail the fuck out of him just for being an heir. Now, I only flirted with being a pitcher when I played baseball, I played second base mostly, but I had enough of a throwing motion that I figured I could adapt to throwing a ko.”

“They’re both made of corkwood, basically?”

“Yeah, the ko just has a metal core, and it’s varnished instead of leather-wrapped like a baseball.”

“Ouu-ah, get one of those in your elbows?” She cringed.

“Yeah, right? So here I am, in whatever spare moments I can find, trying to find a throwing motion that’s going to help the kid find his edge. I when I think I have one, I pass it along, and Taino, who is sharp as hell even if he’s not the most natural athlete, manages it. Then, next game, he goes out, and comes back with a bruise on his chest from where some 16 year old that looked like he eats other 16 year olds managed to bat an In right into his left lung.”

“Poor kid,” Telin winced.

“And the kid is tough as rocks on a deathworld, but shit, right? Either of us would be crying with the shots he was taking home and waking up lying on. But I just felt so bad that I couldn’t help him.”

“But turns out?”

A voice called from the other end of the common compartment, “Telin talk so loud with new boycrush!” It was Keeda, feet up, watching Rey del Lobos engage in a grappling battle with ‘Majestic’ Marith Morion, recorded live from Arena Cosmica- hour 6 out of her 22 hours of wrestling catchup from being out to space on delivery.

“Ari neleka kormuskai,” Telin said to her flatly, powerfully enough that Van could have sworn he saw wind ripple through the fabric wallhangings that decorated the compartment’s bulkheads. Don’t make me come over there. 

She turned back to Van. “But turns out?”

Van took a drag off his spliff and exhaled. “Well, I feel bad, so I get mad at myself, and when I get mad at myself, I get mad at the world and, well…”

Telin raised her hand over her head into a grip, rolled her eyes into the back of her head and stuck her tongue out.

“Yeah, exactly,” Van said. “Except that now I’m just out on the field while Taino’s in class, throwing like an asshole, just ripping them as hard down the line as I could manage with a fastball grip, not even thinking about what I’m doing. Until I realize what I’m doing, which is what I should have been teaching him to do all along.”

She shrugged in a ‘go on’ sort of way at him.

“I taught him how to throw a fastball. Then, I taught him how to aim fastballs at where a striker’s chest would be, in their striking stance.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, and smiled broadly. The smile turned into a cringe, sharp fangs glinting in the subdued light of the cabin. “Kaolumkey,” she said. Bone-eater, derogatory term, a cannibalistic scav- how a rhidling calls you a motherfucker in at least one of their languages.

“Do unto others, before they do unto you,” Van said. “Can’t rack up Ins if your side keeps getting retired by rails, and your strikers get too beat up to continue.”

“And did it work?”

“For as long as it needed to work. Taino was so tired of getting victimized on a grass field that the first thing he did at the next game was launch an absolute rocket into the biggest striker on the playline. He hit the poor kid right in the liver! Just, thwap, splat, down he went. He didn’t need to throw many more like that to get the point across that he wanted to play friendly.”

She took another big drink, and shook her head at him emphatically. “So how many kids, exactly, did you wind up putting in the clinic with this strategy of yours?”

“Absolutely zero, and I stand by that. I gave the kid a tool, he used his mind to use it to defend himself,” he took another drag off his spliff and exhaled through his nose. “I can’t help but be a good role model.”

She cackled, “fuck you, children, I’m a role model!” She mimed pitching into the corner.

Van chuckled as his high rose and swole. “Look, if it stunts them, they weren’t that strong to begin with,” he said, choking on his smoke lightly, giggling like a head. “Wear a helmet if you’re afraid of shrapnel, child!”

Telin tried to say something and choked on laughter instead. She coughed through her smile and started to go slightly orange.

“But that’s the thing, this is what I respect about Taino. He called his shot, and he took it, and he made his point. He taught bigger, meaner kids that it was in their interest to keep polite with someone they thought they’d just be able to bull out of the way. When he saw that they realized he wouldn’t back down, and they stopped, so did he. Taino gets it,” Van said.

“Yeah, more than most. ‘Letting shit go’ is revolutionary thinking for clan leadership,” she said.

Van cringed affirmative, with a hissing sigh, but said no more than that. “Anyway, kid didn’t go to set the world of defko on fire, but he made a lot of kids more honest. And credit to him, he brought some games home. Anyway, that’s why the Sendra clan has a rep for playing chippy defko if you push them, and that’s also my major contribution to rhidlet culture.”

Telin killed her nabana and turned the bottle to her eye, looking at him through it like a spyglass. When she took it away, her smile was more thoughtful than anything else.

“The Sendra got you out of your trouble only halfway, right? He was the other half,” she said.

“He still is. I’m gonna be at that kid’s wedding,” Van said, burning his spliff down to a roach. “I mean, if he wants to get married.”

The conversation went quiet for a moment.

“You want to tell me about your trouble, Canine?” Her voice spoke the tones of a friend, of someone that could maybe begin to understand. When he looked at her, he didn’t want to look away, someone he could make eye contact with without feeling either awkward or interrogating. A day ago, she had volunteered more than he could ever imagine anyone would, all for the sake of an associated loyalty. More than anything, he wanted to trust her with what he held inside him. She was the quickest he’d ever wanted to trust.

“My name is Van,” he started. 

She blinked slow. “I figured, you didn’t look like a Canine.”

She gave him time to breathe, to gather his thoughts. He was going to be honest, but he was going to be within reason of honesty,

“I didn’t volunteer to have this done. I’ve got a lot of extra parts, and that includes extra parts in my brain, parts that used to control me. I got sent to do some damage to the Sendra. I didn’t, somehow, and they didn’t kill me. Neither by shooting me, nor by trying to cut the parts out of my brain. So they hacked them instead, deprogrammed them. Made me in control again.”

She didn’t look away from him as he said this,

“Then they helped me find myself again,” he said. “Gave me purpose. Gave me a lot, actually.”

“So that’s both of us they’ve helped,” she said, and she relaxed back into her chair, fiddling with her empty bottle.

He nodded. His smile was fading. “I don’t know if I could deny them for all they did for me. This isn’t about loyalty, this is about me owing them for my life back. For whatever that might be worth.”

She looked sadly at him. “From what I’ve seen of it so far, they were right to give you your life back.”

“I dunno if I can agree, but thank you,” he said

They went quiet again. It hung heavy.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” she said.

“I owed you an answer,” he said.

“Yeah, but a painful answer wasn’t something I wanted out of you.”

“I appreciate that,” he said. “But life, uh,” he pointed around, gesticulating at everything they were doing, “life isn’t painless.”

“No, it isn’t,” Telin said. She cracked a weak smile at him. “But at least when you’ve got others with you, you can have someone hold your hand during the painful parts.”

She held her hand up. Despite everything, Van put his hand in hers. It was warm. It was nice. It made his guts turn to jelly, and after a few seconds, it made his his tears well up. He leaned in, and clamped his other hand over hers, putting his face to it. She was surprised, and held back a laugh, not sure if he was joking or not. She realized he wasn’t when he felt the tears. She was flattered, but also felt very strange, all things considered.

“Hey,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She was starting to feel her booze, and she was pretty sure he was starting to go blackeyed-baked from how much he had smoked; both were suited neither for driving or dealing with emotional shit. But even so, she found herself whispering to him, "it's okay, it's okay."

“Ooo-ooo-ooo, boycrush!” Keeda leered from the other end of the cabin.

“I’ll crush your FUCKING SKULL,” Telin shouted back at her, not letting go of Van’s hands.

---