Section 99 - A Good Man, Chapter 1

For those who have felt the choke of a collar, leash, or chain of dogtags, figurative or literal.

Van Parker was having an awful day, all things considered. His last joint was 12 hours into the past, he'd been sat pretending to read his tablet at the table of a donair place whose lunch offering was both disappointing and insubstantial, and the gun he was wearing didn't fit the shoulder holster he'd printed for it, and it was beginning to dig into his ribs.

It got worse when he caught sight of the guy he was out for, as he checked his messages at a local backroom FTL comms operator. He couldn't just have been the easy mark he looked like, some dipshit dandyism aspirant whose hat didn't era match his suit jacket, which didn't colour match his shoes. No, it was the fact that a man so self-evidently mediocre had nevertheless developed the sort of tail-sense you normally only find in small woodland creatures, and proceeded to run like one after the second corner taken.

A small woodland creature, with a machine pistol beneath his faux-pas jacket.

Red-faced and swearing as much as he was marathon-breathing, Van rounded a narrow alley in a tight pack of prefab habs, only to find a raised muzzle pointed at him, with a dickhead behind it. Van sucked in air and put his all into a single hard thrust of movement, sending him cannonballing into the side of an aircon unit. Full auto fire raked down the alley, kicking up a haze of asteroid dust and shards of dead beer bottles. Van's kidneys hated him from the impact; his cover held. So he wormed himself into a prone and found his weapon, peeking out an angle on the halfway-dandy. Dickhead fired again, and it was clear now he was panic shooting, maybe as scared to hit someone as he was to be chased. So Van put slugs from his automag down the alley, blowing loose pipes and wires from the surrounding habs. Dickhead yelped, squeezed the rest of his mag into a dustpile and peeled off around the corner at the alley’s t-junction.

Inwardly, Van reconsidered his life choices. Outwardly, he pressed up and ran after. A shout from the habs of "Oh you fucking assholes!" he met meekly with "I am so fucking sorry, please, get in your bathtub."

The hab alley opened up into an overlook above a street on a lower stratum of the hollowed-out rock the settlement was built in, with a skywalk across to the neighborhood dive, a construct of big windows, neon and a single holograph sign that read ICEHAUS, the sort of place that never closed, because the Port of St. Joseph never actually stopped or even slowed down. Dickhead was stumbling across the skywalk, trying to find his feet on the grip grating, his clashing shoes obviously not made for running. When he caught sight of Van, he raised up his machine pistol again and pulled a dead trigger. He pulled it again, and his panic reached a head. Especially when Van raised up on him.

"Oh come on man, please!" Van knew instantly how much he hated this man.

The 11 millimeter slug Van's magnum roared loose creased out the inside of Dickhead's thigh, tore a literal strip out of him. He straightened, eyes wide, mouth a suckhole, and then he stumbled down to a knee. He screamed. Van approached.

"You fucking asshole, you nearly shot my balls off," he shrieked, trying to get hold of the railing of the skywalk with one hand, and hold his opened leg shut with his other.

"I know, I missed," Van said, his voice a growl. He hooked the dickhead under the arm and hefted him up into a limp, dragging him bleeding across the grating toward the dive.

"Kurt Weller, yeah?" asked Van, ratcheting his arm.

"Maybe, maybe not," said Weller, further confirming to Van how much he hated this little man, who plead for mercy only after running out of ammo, then turned around and gave him sass afterward.

The kneelift Van planted to his face turned his nose into a faucet. Weller pitched forward and grabbed at his face, so Van released his hold and drove his heel into his ass. The Dickhead hit the glass door of the ICEHAUS’ upper balcony, flopped against it, streaking red through the film of powder-fine asteroid dust it was collecting. Van slapped off his hat and grabbed a fistful of his hair.

“Unless there’s another narrow-assed speakeasy poseur on this rock, who just happens to have that same knife scar on your cheek, you are Weller, and you just got done selling a young friend of mine as illicit labor.”

“And you think I’m some sorta snitch too?”

“No, I think talking to you like an adult is the most degrading thing I’ve done today.”

Van peeled him off the glass, craned his neck back, and drove the barrel of his gun into the back of his head, at lovetap strength. He ragdolled, and the punch sent him through the glass in a heap.

“You people keep it outdoors,” came a shout from downstairs, the voice of bartender used to enforcing control, “Nobody in here needs that kind of shit.”

“This is an open armament settlement,” Van yelled back, “And he drew down and shot at me first, on account of I was coming to put his people-trafficking op out of work. Don’t suppose this is the kind of person you folks want in your community?”

“Please help me, this man is a murderer wanted out of Dos Santos, he’s been after myself and my family for the past three months,” said the Dickhead, trying to drag himself on the railing overlooking the lower level of the bar, trying to drag himself out of this situation. The glass he’d gone through was safety grade, but the powder it was breaking down to was starting to mix with his blood and seep into his wounds, not a pleasant feeling.

“This man is Kurt Weller, he’s the middleman for the kidnap crew that took Taino Sendra. He’s got a bounty on his head from Janila Sendra and the Sendra Clan for his live capture and delivery to Alemeka Grove, on Samoud,” Van said, feeling the Clanwrit in his jacket’s interior pocket.

“He said he was going to use my daughter as target practice once he got done with me,” Weller said, finding as much of an upright base as he could manage.

This was enough for Van. The flat of his foot landed flush with the Dickhead’s face, heel to chin, toes to hairline. He pitched over the rail, tumbled a full back somersault, and landed shoulders down across a stand-up table, killing a few highballs and bottles, sending patrons scattering. Van followed after, the mini-EVArig he was wearing braking his fall against the settlement’s artificial gravity to a minor thud. A minor thud he planted in Weller’s chest with his knee.

“Jesus Christ,” someone exclaimed from a booth.

“Oh yeah, you go to church,” Van said, mostly to himself.

He took a look around, and went cold. Nobody was on the top floor of the bar, but there was more than few on the first floor, hardy dock-working folk with thick arms and hard hands. More to the point, he just realized he’d survived a minor running gunfight with a person trafficker, shot him, thrown him through plate glass and then kicked him off a bar balcony. This was not the behavior of a welcomed individual, especially among Terran longshorers built like highway dividers downing strong lager like lemonade, heavy-framed Cogitoi with bare-metal lifter arms and mason jars of apple-mash shine, and wiry, sharp-eyed Rhidling can-pusher pilots lighting their spiced kelladi on fire before shooting it. He could feel the heat of the room roiling off of everyone looking in his direction.

“He shot first,” he said, the force ebbing from his voice. “Go up to the catwalk, his piece is still smoking on it.”

“This isn’t a fucking bounty hall, get the fuck out,” the bartender said, a man whose arms looked like they were rolled up tattoo samplers, with a head like a calloused knuckle.

“Nah, seriously, go up there, grab a friend for your bar shotgun.”

“Get the fuck out!” the bartender shouted, hands sinking beneath the bartop.

“This man is facilitated the monetary trade of a Rhidling teenager, 14 years old, the only blood heir of the Sendra Clan right now, and I am as of this moment the issuing agent for the reward on his head,” Van’s voice rose again, not a shout, a loud declaration that rose out of his gut and hit his own ears like a gunshot. “Anyone want to be useful and help put away a bad guy, or does he gotta look like an empty glass for any of you folks to do something about him?”

Someone makes a mean move, you sic ’em, boy.

Van hated that voice in his head. He hated that phrase.

Sic ’em, boy.

He resolved that if anyone moved to help the Dickhead, he’d make an example of them right there, right then. It was the right sort of quiet for someone to try, quiet enough that Weller trying to remember how to breathe was loud.

Then, instead, someone said from behind him “If this man is who you say he is,” and Van held his fight instinct at the vector it was pointing him. For a second, his gun felt infinitely heavy in his hand.

Instead he turned, keeping his movement smooth, deliberate. He found a Rhidling woman pushing through the surrounding crowd, head and shoulders shorter than the mostly Terrans that ringed him, steady and hard looking. Van gave her a scanning glance; nose broke, healed well, left ear marred, big chunk missing, brawler’s chin, about 30- she’s either a threat or she thinks she’s a threat. His finger tightened on the trigger just slightly, but he held his weapon down at his side, still. 

“Then that would explain why I saw this guy getting out of a hack with a kid that looked like he was stoned out of his mind yesterday,” she continued.

Van’s trigger finger loosened. “That a fact?” he said.

“Yeah, talking with the clan about rounding him up and having a close talk with him just now. Nice coincidence, yeah?” she said. Van saw she had a tag on her flight jacket, but he couldn’t make out her name script from where she was standing, just her clanrune: Maniro. He hadn’t been keeping up with clan politics as of late, but unless a bomb went off and he hadn’t heard about it, he knew the Maniro and the Sendra were on terms like kin to each other.

“And you’re sure that’s him?”

“Never seen another Terran dressed like him, he weird or something?”

“Nah. Just a Dickhead chasing a style.”

Van holstered his gun, and the room exhaled slightly. By the time he had pulled the Clanwrit from his pocket, people were turning back to their drinks. It was old world stuff, printed on clan letterhead on paper made of gelim grass pulp, signed with sikali ink, the Sendra clanrune punched through the paper and embellished with two short ribbon chains, made to be carried in a shielded pouch, and displayed as identification as an appropriate Clan agent. Folded further inside it was the payend he’d printed off and registered at the FTL post, reinforced cellulose paper with dot matrix stippling: IOU- one serious sorta favor. This was how Granny Janila fronted him for expenses- having a favor with a Rhidling clan can get you a lot, especially with the honestly-crooked ones who had underworld connects and soldiers among their resources. 

“Registered on the local nets across this sphere. You want to confirm it legit, take it down to the comms office and see yourself.”

“I know what a Sendra writ looks like,” said the Maniro, reading it over, “I’m in the Freelands because of a favor from them.” She sniffed it and smiled. “Smells like home,” she said, taking the payend and zipping it up her sleeve in a single motion.

The bartender piped up, “Am I calling the marshalls or are you two getting out of here?”

“No, actually, this is a nice spot, I think I wanna pitch a tent,” Van snapped. He felt how red his face was, and the knucklehead jerked back slightly. Fucking people, he thought through mental images of taking satisfaction from putting a few magnum slugs through the fancy bottles on his bar back. He swallowed, and sank some of his anger with it.

“Don’t suppose you and your people want to help me in figuring where he took the Sendra boy?” he said, turning to back to his savior.

“I can show you myself,” she said. She made for a handshake, then took a moment to rethink the grip she was reaching with. Van met her halfway with The Clamp- across species of intelligent life that have hands, The Clamp worked for basically everyone.

“Telin,” she said. 

Van thought for a while what he was going to say, which from his standpoint felt utterly ridiculous. This moment was insignificant to the universe, and monumental to him. Once upon a time, he had a name, Van Parker. Then he had a callsign, one that he hated. Civilians have names and get to live. But he was in service again, and he had just realized it.

“Canine,” Van told her his callsign. He waited for the comment about his strange name. Then he realized she didn’t realize, relaxed slightly, and felt a vague sort of lousy for having done that.

Operations had codenames, and as much as he hated it, he was in an operator sort of mode. He felt focused. He felt strong. He felt like he wanted to die, all the same.

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