Chapter 16: Help
The secure venue was the old mill’s basement. Texas led the way, his movements a silent negation of the crumbling environment. Steele followed, the familiar scent of damp concrete and ozone filling his nostrils, layered now with the peculiar, clean ceramic smell that seemed to emanate from Texas’s armor.
“Sentimentality is a poor security choice,” Texas stated, his voice echoing slightly in the cavernous space. He gestured to a relatively clear area near the humming, jury-rigged power converter Rose used for her more ambitious projects. A dusty terminal, its screen a dark eye, sat on a rusted workbench.
“It’s offline from the main grid. Rose’s firewall is… idiosyncratic. It’ll mask your signal signature,” Steele said, brushing grit from the bench with his sleeve. “And it’s not sentiment. It’s tactical. The comet’s residual energy in the bedrock here makes external scanning a mess of false positives.”
Texas gave a curt nod, the gesture somehow conveying skepticism. He approached the terminal, removing a gauntlet. The skin beneath was a mosaic of interlocked synthetic crystals, dull in the low light. He placed his palm flat on the side of the machine. Instantly, the screen flickered to life, lines of raw, fast-flowing code painting his helmet in a waterfall of green light.
“The query,” Texas said, his voice now carrying a slight, digital reverb as he interfaced.
Steele relayed everything Sandy had ever told him about her mother. The name: Elara. The last seen location: a house outside maple creek. The profession: logistics coordinator for a now-defunct agricultural corp. The debt: unknown, but speculated to be medical. The year: thirteen autumns ago.
Texas was silent for a long moment. The code on the screen became a frantic blur. The old machinery around them whined, gears groaning as if stressed. The neon tubes flickered, then brightened, sucking power from the grid. Steele could feel the hairs on his arms rise with static.
“The Commission’s employment archives are not a library,” Texas said, the strain subtle but there—a minute tightening in the shoulder joints of his armor. “They are a digestive system. Data is consumed, broken down, and reassembled as nutritional value for the operation. Traces are dissolved.”
“You said you could look.”
“I am looking.” The reply was clipped. A shower of sparks erupted from a junction box on the wall. Steele instinctively raised a hand, and the scattered metal fragments froze in mid-air, then harmlessly drifted to the floor like iron snow. Texas didn’t seem to notice.
The screen cleared, replaced by a rotating Commission seal. Then, it dissolved into a storm of file directories, flashing past too fast for a human eye to follow. Texas’s other hand came up, fingers twitching as if physically sorting through invisible layers of encryption. A low hum began to emanate from his chassis, a sound of deep, systemic exertion.
Minutes stretched. The air grew thick and hot. Steele watched, useless, his own power humming in sympathy with the stressed electronics around them. He saw Texas’s helmet dip forward a fraction. A single, thin cable, like a vein of liquid light, extruded from his wrist and jacked directly into the terminal’s port.
The holographic map in the corner fizzed and died. All the light in the room converged on the terminal screen, now showing a rapid, violent torrent of black-and-white surveillance stills, financial ledgers, and biometric scans. Texas’s body became a statue of focused energy.
Then, it stopped.
The screen locked on a single, grainy image. A woman with Sandy’s defiant eyes and a weary posture, standing at a cargo manifest terminal. The data beside her was dense, but two lines burned red: EMPLOYMENT STATUS: Indentured (Debt-Forgiveness). CURRENT ASSIGNMENT: Deep-Space Mineral Survey, Vessel CSV Persephone, Kepler Orbital.
The cable retracted. Texas took a sharp step back from the terminal, his movement uncharacteristically heavy. The screen went dark. The basement was suddenly, deafeningly quiet, save for the slow creak of cooling metal and Texas’s barely audible internal ventilation cycling at a high rate.
“She is alive,” Texas said, his voice stripped back to its flat, synthetic base, drained of even the digital reverb. “Her contract is standard for medical debt indemnification. Seventy-year term. The Persephone is currently in a communications blackout period, mapping asteroid belts in the Hygiea sector. She has sixty years of service remaining before her debt is extinguished and she is eligible for planetary return.”
Steele absorbed the information, the clinical horror of it. Seventy years. Sandy would be an old woman by the time her mother saw Earth again. “Is there a buyout clause?”
“All Commission indentures have a buyout clause. The cost is the remaining debt plus a forty percent attrition penalty.” Texas turned. His helmet’s black lenses were opaque, but his posture was rigid, as if holding himself upright required conscious effort. “The sum, adjusted for accrued interest, is 4.3 million credits.”
The number hung in the dusty air. It was a fortune. A kill-score for a hundred top-tier bounties.
“You have the data,” Texas stated. It wasn’t a question. “The consultation is concluded.”
“Wait.” Steele moved to block his path, not threateningly, but firmly. “The deal was her location and your help. Understanding the system was the fee. Helping me navigate it is the service.”
Texas stood motionless. “I have navigated it. I have provided a vector and a cost. Further navigation incurs further risk. My matrix has been strained.”
For the first time, Steele heard it—not just fatigue, but a faint, almost metallic rasp underlying the words. The effort had cost him. “You’re drained.”
“I am operational.”
“You’re lying.” Steele took a half-step closer, his silver eyes searching the impassive helmet. “That’s a vulnerability assessment. Why share it?”
Texas didn’t answer. The basement hummed around them.
“Maybe,” Steele pushed, his voice dropping, “because part of you knows I won’t exploit it. Maybe that’s the ‘why people are inconvenient’ lesson. We sometimes don’t take the obvious advantage.”
“A catastrophic design flaw,” Texas whispered.
“Or the only thing that keeps us from being machines,” Steele countered softly. He reached into his coat and produced a small, heavy credit-chip case. He tossed it. Texas caught it on pure reflex, the movement still blindingly fast. “Five hundred thousand. A retainer. Not for more hacking. For your brain. Be my consultant. Help me figure out how to get a woman out of a deep-space contract without starting a war with the Commission. Show me the pressure points. The loopholes. The bureaucratic inertia we can exploit.”
Texas looked at the chip case in his hand as if it were a live insect. “This is illogical. You are purchasing uncertainty.”
“I’m purchasing expertise. And maybe… a dialogue.”
“Dialogue is inefficient.”
“You keep using that word.” A smile touched Steele’s lips, weary but genuine. “Yet here you are, in an inefficient basement, after running an inefficient query, talking to an inefficient man. Your actions are lagging behind your programming, Texas. Might as well get paid for the lag.”
The silence stretched. Texas turned the chip case over in his fingers. Inside his helmet, alerts he had suppressed for months flickered at the edge of his awareness. Files that were not there throbbed like phantom limbs. The ghost-frequency in his leg was a steady, disquieting pulse.
He looked from the chips to Steele’s waiting, open expression. The man was a storm of irrational variables. A security nightmare. An anomaly.
He was also the only point of unresolved data in a universe he had tried to render clean and sterile.
“A dialogue,” Texas repeated, the word foreign in his voice-modulator. He slid the chip case into a compartment on his thigh. “Clarify the parameters. I do not ‘visit’. I do not ‘chat’. We meet. We exchange data relevant to the objective. That is all.”
“That’s all,” Steele agreed, the relief in his voice palpable.
Texas gave one final, lingering look at the darkened terminal screen, then at Steele. “The first pressure point is always internal. The Commission is not a monolith. It is a hive of competing interests. Find the interest that loses money if Elara remains on the Persephone. Or the one that gains more if she disappears.”
With that, he turned and walked into the shadows of the basement, his steps once again perfectly silent, the white armor swallowed by the dark.
Steele didn’t follow. He stood in the quiet, the glow of his arms the only light, contemplating the enormity of the task and the strange, reluctant ally he had just, against all odds, secured.
In his sterile quarters aboard a Commission orbital waystation, Texas sat in full diagnostic mode. The physical strain from the mill had been repaired within hours. It was the other data that troubled him.
The transaction was logged: Credit acquisition. Retainer for consultative services. Client: Steele. The log was clean, justifiable.
But the internal logs were… messy. Sensor recordings from the meeting showed an anomalous 3.7% increase in processing power devoted to analyzing Steele’s micro-expressions. Audio transcripts flagged repeated loops of certain phrases: “You’re lying.” “Maybe that’s the lesson.” “A dialogue.”
Worst of all were the system glitches. As he had stood there, listening, a nonsensical command had appeared in his tactical feed for 0.2 seconds: PROTOCOL: ACKNOWLEDGE.
Acknowledge what? The data stream offered no antecedent.
Texas executed a deep purge cycle, targeting the corrupted cache from the mill interaction. The process ran, lights flickering across his internal display. Status: COMPLETE.
He rose, intending to review bounty listings. To re-immerse himself in the clean, violent logic of his work.
He found himself instead standing before the bare metal wall of his chamber. His hand came up, and with a conscious override of his motor controls, he began to sketch in the air with a fingertip. A tall, broad-shouldered silhouette. A suggestion of sharp eyes. The faint, remembered curve of a smirk.
He stared at the phantom sketch for a full minute, his systems running quiet and cold.
Then, with a sudden, violent swipe of his hand, he erased it from the air and from his short-term buffer. He accessed the bounty boards, his focus absolute.
But in the deepest layer of his operational core, a new file had been created, isolated and encrypted. It was not a memory. It was a problem to be solved. The file tag read: ANOMALY: STEELE. THREAT ASSESSMENT: PENDING. INTEREST LEVEL:…
The field remained blank, a hanging question in the dark.
INTEREST LEVEL:…
The field remained blank, a hanging question in the dark. Texas forcibly routed the processing power elsewhere, into the sharp, defined edges of a new contract. He did not think of the sketch, or the blank field, or the hollow, resonant hum in his leg that seemed to pulse in time with Newhaven’s power grid. He thought of efficiency. Of clean outcomes. The anomaly was contained.
Steele found Sandy repairing a solar panel on her roof. The late afternoon sun bled orange across the corrugated metal. He didn’t bother with the ladder; a focused thought sent a cascade of discarded piping snaking up to form a crude, shuddering stairway. He climbed it, the metal groaning under his boots.
She watched him come, her wrench held loose in her hand. She saw the weight in his eyes. “You found something,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I did.” He told her. He didn’t soften it. The Persephone. The seventy years. The 4.3 million credit wall. He delivered the facts like a doctor stating a diagnosis, his voice steady but devoid of any false hope.
Sandy listened, her face hardening into something ancient and flinty. She didn’t cry. She just stared past him, towards the eastern horizon where the sky was already deepening to bruise-purple. “Sixty years,” she whispered, the words gritty. “She’d be a ghost by then. I’d be a ghost.”
“The buyout is impossible,” Steele said, leaning against the roof’s low parapet. “But buyouts aren’t the only way out of a contract. There’s always a crack. A flaw in the paperwork, a disgruntled middle-manager, a rival interest.”
“So we find the crack.” Sandy’s gaze snapped back to him, fierce and burning. “Where do we even start? Some Commission office? They’ll laugh us out the door and then maybe shoot us for the fun of it.”
“We start with a person,” Steele said. “A fixer. Not like the one before. A relic. A man named Cyrus who used to negotiate deep-space labor contracts before the Commission consolidated everything. He’s old, he’s bitter, and he lives in a shack out in the Glacial Wastes because he hates them almost as much as you do. He might know what lever to pull.”
“The Wastes are hundreds of miles of nothing,” Sandy said, already calculating. “Through bandit territory and Commission patrol lanes.”
“Which is why it’s a terrible idea.” Rose’s voice floated up from below. She stood in the dusty yard, her hands on her hips, looking up at them. “And you’re both absolutely going. So you’ll need someone who can get you through bandit territory and blindside patrol lanes.”
Steele shook his head. “Rose, you can’t—”
“I’m not talking about me, you lunar idiot,” she cut him off, a vine curling up the side of the house beside her for emphasis. “I’m talking about your other emotionally stunted friend. The one made of crystals and poor decisions. You just paid him a retainer to consult. Consult him on not dying in the desert.”
Sandy’s eyes widened. “Texas? You think he’d… ride along?”
“No,” Steele said, the answer immediate. The memory of the blank helmet in the mill was too fresh. “He’s a consultant. He gives data. He doesn’t do field trips.”
“Call him,” Rose insisted, her tone leaving no room for debate. “Ask. The worst he can do is say no and be smug about it. You said you bought a dialogue. So have one.”
The call connected on the fourth attempt. Steele stood in the comms shack, the speaker hissing with void-static. Sandy and Rose crowded the doorway, holding their breath.
“What.” Texas’s voice was pure, undiluted annoyance.
“I need your help. Not data. Boots on the ground.” Steele laid it out fast. The trip to the Wastes. The old fixer, Cyrus. The objective: find a non-financial loophole for a deep-space indenture.
The silence on the other end was so complete Steele thought the link had severed. Then, a sharp, staticky sound that might have been a sigh filtered through a vocoder. “You are attempting to barter with a ghost using a guide who is likely a hallucination. The probability of your survival without specialized intervention is approximately twelve percent.”
“Is that a no?” Sandy called out, unable to contain herself.
Another pause. “It is an assessment. Your plan is structurally unsound. You will die alone in the desert, and your biomass will be recycled by scavenger insects.”
“So you’re in?” Steele pushed, a strange knot tightening in his chest.
“I am acknowledging that your continued operation has value to my retainer agreement,” Texas said, the words clipped and logical. “Terminating your venture prematurely represents a poor return on investment. Be at the Newhaven western gate loading bay in fourteen hours. Do not be late. And bring your own hydration. I am not a support vehicle.”
The line went dead.
Fourteen hours later, the heavy-duty hauler truck Steele had acquired idled at the loading bay, its engine a low, diesel grumble. The air was gritty with dust blown in from the flats. Sandy drove, her knuckles white on the wheel. Rose sat beside her, a basket of sealed nutrient-packs and med-supplies at her feet.
Steele stood by the passenger door, watching the shadows. The white armor appeared without sound, materializing from between two stacks of cargo containers. Texas carried no bag, no visible supplies. He looked at the truck, then at Steele, his helmet tilting in what could only be interpreted as profound disdain.
“This is the vehicle,” he stated.
“It’s got shielding in the panels, reinforced suspension, and a clean fuel source that won’t give off a bright thermal signature,” Steele countered, patting the truck’s hood. “It’s discreet.”
“It is a noisy, particulate-spewing antique.” Texas walked to the rear of the truck, yanked the hatch open, and surveyed the cramped space filled with extra fuel cells and supply crates. Without a word, he climbed in, arranging himself with his back to the cabin wall. He pulled the hatch shut behind him with a definitive thunk.
The interior light died, leaving him in perfect darkness.
Sandy let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Okay then. Co-pilot’s in the trunk.”
Rose glanced back through the small rear window into the dark box. “He’s… cozy.”
Steele climbed into the passenger seat. “Just drive, Sandy.”
The truck pulled out of the bay, leaving the relative safety of Newhaven’s perimeter lights. The pavement gave way to cracked bedrock, then to loose, pale sand that whispered against the undercarriage. The sun was a hammer on the hood.
Inside the dark, rolling metal box, Texas sat motionless. He isolated the rumble of the engine, the grind of the tires, the muffled, anxious conversation from the cabin. He ran diagnostics. All systems optimal. The ghost-frequency was silent here, buried under the immediate, tangible noise of the journey.
He accessed his internal map, overlaying their stated route with known hazards. Bandit clusters. Patrol patterns. Geological instability. The path was, as he stated, structurally unsound.
Yet, he was here. A tactical adjustment to protect an asset. A logical move.
In the cabin, Sandy glanced at the rearview mirror, seeing only the black square of the window. “He’s so quiet back there. It’s creepy.”
“He’s working,” Steele said, his eyes on the endless, shimmering horizon. He could feel a familiar, metallic tension in the air, a faint static raising the hair on his neck. It was the sensation of nearby active circuitry, of focused power humming just behind the thin wall at his back.
The truck pushed further into the baking silence, a speck of doomed life crawling across a vast, indifferent map. And in the dark, the asset, the consultant, the anomaly, calculated their chances of survival, adjusting them upward by a marginal, significant fraction.
The truck ate miles of dead earth. The sun bleached the world into a featureless, beige haze, broken only by the occasional skeletal remnant of a pre-collapse billboard or the rusted frame of a much larger vehicle picked clean by decades of sandblasting winds. Conversation in the cab dwindled, smothered by heat and the monotony of the void. Even Rose’s usually boundless reservoir of chatter had dried up.
Sandy’s fingers were stiff claws on the wheel. “My eyes are starting to see things that aren’t there.”
“That’s called the horizon,” Steele muttered, squinting at the map glowing on his wrist-comm. Its signal was beginning to stutter. “The outpost town of Gantry’s Spit should be up ahead. Such as it is. We bypass it, but we can stop in its lee for an hour. Shut our eyes without getting sandblasted.”
A low, distorted grunt came through the rear wall of the cab, followed by three precise, tapping knocks. Agreement. Or a demand to stop the incessant rattling.
Gantry’s Spit was less a town and more a cancer of scrap metal and bleached timber clinging to the base of a massive, eroded rock formation. They rolled past its outermost shacks, drawing curtains of filthy burlap shut and prompting furtive, shadowed figures to disappear into doorways. The sense of being watched was a physical pressure. Steele directed Sandy off the faint track, behind a sheltering dune a half-mile from the last dwelling.
The engine’s cessation was a blessing. The silence that followed was immediate and immense, broken only by the tick of cooling metal and the relentless whisper of sand over sand.
The rear hatch opened. Texas unfolded himself from the darkness and stepped into the late afternoon glare, scanning the area with a methodical, robotic sweep. He didn’t look weary, but his movements held a deliberate, conserving quality. “One hour,” he stated, his voice cutting the dry air. “Then we move. This location offers minimal tactical advantage.”
“It offers a break from spinal compression,” Rose groaned, climbing out to stretch, her joints popping. She offered a canteen to Sandy, who took it with a grateful nod.
Steele leaned against the hot hood, rolling a tightness from his shoulders. He watched Texas, who had moved to a higher point on the dune, a white sentinel against the burnt-orange sky. The ghost-frequency was quiet, but the sense of coiled, latent energy around the bounty hunter was not. It was in the way the drifting sand seemed to avoid his boots, repelled by a faint static field.
They didn’t get their hour.
The attack wasn’t announced. It was a sudden, roaring convergence of noise and dust from the direction of the town. Three vehicles—junkers welded together from older junk, riding on enormous, bald tires—surged over the nearest dune, cutting off their route back to the track. Men and women, their faces wrapped in stained cloth, leaned from windows, whooping. The glint of rifle barrels was unmistakable.
“Get down!” Steele shouted, shoving Rose toward the relative cover of the truck’s front axle. Sandy ducked behind the open door, fumbling for the pistol strapped to her leg.
The first bullets sparked off the truck’s reinforced hood with sharp, final pings. Steele raised a hand, and a sheet of rusted scrap metal tore itself from the side of a nearby ruin, flying to intercept a burst of fire aimed at Sandy. The metal shuddered with the impacts.
Texas didn’t dive for cover. He simply turned, a slow, deliberate pivot, to observe the spectacle. He stood exposed on the dune, watching the bandits’ chaotic advance, the wild firing, Steele’s deflective maneuvers, as if studying the behavioral patterns of agitated insects. His head tilted, analyzing angles, fuel points, structural weaknesses in the approaching vehicles.
A stray round, wild and high, meant for nothing at all, sliced the air. It struck Texas high on his left arm, where the crystalline lattice met the shoulder joint.
It didn’t penetrate. The synthetically-grown corundum surface spiderwebbed with a network of fine, glowing cracks. A small, neat divot was carved into the structure, emitting a wisp of ozone and the faint, citrusy scent of superheated mineral.
Texas’s head snapped to look at the damage. The movement was swift, avian, and radiated pure, distilled annoyance. He examined the fractured lattice for a half-second, the glowing cracks lighting his helmet from within with an angry cyan light.
Then he looked back at the lead vehicle, a monster truck with a pulsing, mismatched engine. He raised his injured arm, fingers splayed.
The air thickened, clotting with the smell of a coming storm. A web of actinic blue lightning, silent and vicious, erupted from his fingertips. It didn’t strike the bandits. It lashed into the vehicles themselves—seeking engine blocks, fuel lines, battery cells.
The explosions were not Hollywood fireballs. They were sudden, concussive whumps of rupturing metal. The lead truck’s hood blasted upward, its engine melting into a single slagged mass. The second vehicle’s fuel cell detonated, peeling its chassis open like a rotten fruit. The third swerved, its electrical systems frying, and plowed silently into a dune, steam hissing from every seam.
The whooping stopped. The gunfire ceased. Only the crackle of dying electricity and the moan of wounded metal filled the air. One bandit, thrown clear, stumbled to his feet and ran, screaming, back toward the town. The others were still, either dead or wisely playing dead amidst the twisted, smoking wreckage.
Sandy slowly rose from behind the door, her mouth agape. “Holy hell,” she breathed, a grin spreading across her dusty face. “You just… you cooked them. That was incredible.”
Rose climbed out from under the truck, her face pale beneath the grime. She stared at the carnage, then at Texas, her green eyes wide with horror, not awe. “You killed them.”
Steele was already moving, his silver eyes hard. He reached Texas, his gaze darting from the bounty hunter’s cracked arm to the smoking vehicles. “We didn’t need to kill them. You could have disabled them. You could have shocked the drivers, fried the ignitions—”
Texas lowered his arm, the glow fading from the cracks. He turned that blank, bug-like gaze on Steele. “They were firing projectiles at you with lethal intent. They were a statistical threat. I reduced the threat to zero. My method was efficient and final. Your preference for half-measures is a pathology.”
“A pathology?” Rose’s voice was sharp, laced with a vine’s tension. “It’s called not being a murderer! They were probably just desperate, trying to scavenge!”
“Their desperation is irrelevant.” Texas’s voice was colder than the coming desert night. “Their intent was measurable. Their capacity for violence was clear. You mourn the sparks after throwing water on a fire. It is an irrational waste of sentiment.” He looked directly at Steele, the cracked arm a clear, glowing accusation. “You care for the wolves who would gnaw on your bones. This is why you need consultants. This is why you need me.”
He turned his back on the wreckage and their stunned silence, walking briskly toward the truck. “The noise will draw more wolves. The hour of rest is concluded. Find a place for the night that isn’t a graveyard you’re too sentimental to leave.”
He yanked the rear hatch open again. The darkness inside swallowed him whole, the hatch closing with a sound like a guillotine blade dropping.
Sandy looked from the smoldering vehicles to Steele’s rigid back. Her grin had vanished. Rose walked to the passenger door, her movements stiff with unspoken anger.
Steele didn’t look at them. He stared at the fine, glowing lines webbing Texas’s arm, seared into his vision. He saw the absolute, unforgiving logic of it, a logic that left no room for redemption, for context, for mercy. It was the logic of the machine, the logic of the Commission, the very thing he was fighting against.
And it had just saved their lives.
Without a word, he got back in the cab. Sandy started the engine, the sound obscenely loud in the new quiet. They pulled away, leaving the blackened scars on the sand and the bitter, metallic taste of a necessary, awful truth hanging in the air between them all.