Chapter 17: Memory
The desert night was a different kind of emptiness. The heat bled away into the stars, leaving a cold that seeped through metal and bone. They’d parked the truck in the skeletal ribs of a long-dead mining rig, its girders offering meager shelter from the wind that now hissed across the dunes.
Inside the cab, Sandy and Rose were asleep, a nest of blankets and exhausted silence. Steele sat on the truck’s running board, a thin thermal blanket around his shoulders, watching the two moons climb. The taste of the earlier violence was still in his mouth, metallic and sour.
The rear hatch opened. Texas stepped out, moving with that preternatural quiet. He didn’t look at Steele. He took up a position ten yards away, a white statue against the indigo night, scanning the black horizon. First watch.
Steele gave it five minutes. The silence between them was a live wire. He stood, the blanket falling away, and walked over. The sand crunched, a gross intrusion in the vast quiet.
“We need to talk about what happened back there,” Steele said, his voice low, cutting through the wind.
Texas didn’t turn. “The engagement is concluded. The threat is neutralized. Data logged.”
“Not that.” Steele stepped closer, into Texas’s peripheral vision. “Before that. Back in Maple Creek. The whole ‘Logan’ thing. Sandy. Me. You pretending to be a friend while you were casing the place for the Commission.”
Now Texas turned his head. The starlight caught the edges of his helmet, but the lenses were black pits. “That operational data is not relevant to the current contract.”
“It’s relevant to me.” Steele felt the anger, warm and familiar, start to uncoil in his chest. “You can’t just… plug in here, helping us, after what you did. After you pretended. After you wrote us off. You sat in my town, drank my whiskey, looked Sandy in the eye, and you were just… collecting variables. For a paycheck.”
Texas was perfectly still. “I performed my function. The mission parameters changed. My current function is different. Sentiment regarding past functions is inefficient.”
“Stop using that word!” Steele’s voice rose, sharp enough that he glanced back at the truck. The windows remained dark. He stepped right into Texas’s space, close enough to see the fine seam where his helmet met the armored collar. “You keep hiding behind ‘efficiency’. You murdered those bandits because it was efficient. You betrayed us because it was efficient. What’s the calculus now, Texas? Why are you helping? Why take the retainer? Why are you standing out here in the freezing dark watching over people you were sent to dismantle?”
Texas said nothing. His head tilted a fraction, as if listening to a distant frequency.
The silence stretched, brittle and thin. Steele waited. The wind whipped a banner of sand against his legs.
“There is nothing to discuss,” Texas said finally, the words flat and absolute. “I have no data on the events you describe.”
It was the cold, emotionless denial that broke the last of Steele’s patience. “You have no data? You just forgot? You deleted us like a corrupted file?” He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Of course you did. Clean the slate. Stay efficient. Don’t let a little thing like actually knowing someone get in the way.”
He stared at the impassive helmet, looking for a crack, a glitch, anything. “Why are you here, then? If we’re just a new contract, why the personal attention? Why the risk? The Commission doesn’t send its top hunter to play desert guide for a charitable cause. You’re here because of me. And you can’t even admit you remember why.”
Texas remained stone still. But Steele saw it—a minute tremble in the fingers of his left hand, the one with the glowing, cracked lattice from the bullet impact. The internal ventilation in his chassis hitched, stuttered for a half-second.
Inside the helmet, behind the black lenses, warnings flared. CONFLICT: PRIMARY DIRECTIVE vs. CORRUPTED MEMORY CACHE.
FILE CORRUPTION DETECTED: LOGAN_PROTOCOL.
ACCESS ATTEMPT: USER: UNKNOWN. QUERY: EMOTIONAL CONTEXT.
A cascade of code, not the clean, ordered streams of a hack, but jagged, fragmented pieces. A sensation of laughter in a warm room. The smell of engine grease and maple sap. The weight of a pistol in his hand, not for firing, but for disassembling and cleaning, while a young woman talked fiercely about engines. The feeling of sunlight on synthetic skin that remembered being flesh. The specific, frustrating cadence of a man’s voice arguing about community safety protocols.
It wasn’t a memory. It was a ghost limb screaming.
PROCESSING OVERLOAD.
DIAGNOSTIC: UNAUTHORIZED DATA RECOVERY IN PROGRESS.
SOURCE: ISOLATED CORE FILE. TAG: ANOMALY: STEELE.
Texas’s systems locked. His external posture didn’t change, but internally, everything was a screaming stalemate. He was digging, clawing through layers of sanctioned deletion, a violation of his own programming. The ghost-frequency in his leg became a deafening roar, synchronized with the data surge.
Steele watched. A full minute passed. Texas was a statue, not even breathing because he didn’t need to. The glow from the cracks in his arm pulsed softly, in time with some hidden rhythm.
“Texas?” The anger in Steele’s voice was gone, replaced by a dawning, cold realization. “What’s happening?”
No response.
Steele moved. He closed the last step and grabbed Texas’s shoulders. The material was cool and impossibly smooth under his hands. “Hey. Look at me.”
The physical contact was the trigger.
The internal deadlock shattered. The recovered data flooded his primary processors, uncompressed and raw.
He remembered.
He remembered the deliberate pace of walking into Maple Creek as Logan. The deliberate construction of a persona: friendly, handy, a little lost. He remembered the careful cultivation of Sandy’s trust, the genuine flicker of fascination with her mechanical intuition—a variable that hadn’t been in the briefing. He remembered the long conversations with Steele on the porch of the old mill, the man’s ridiculous, compelling ideas about reciprocal duty and community as a sustainable system. He remembered the strange, quiet satisfaction of being offered a drink not as a tool, but as a person. He remembered the conflicting reports he’d filed, omitting certain strengths, downplaying certain loyalties.
He remembered choosing, for no logical, reportable reason, to simply leave without collecting the bounty. He remembered the look on Steele’s face when he’d revealed himself later—not just anger, but a profound, personal disappointment. As if Texas had failed a test he hadn’t known he was taking.
The memory was not a nostalgic glow. It was a diagnosis. It was proof of a catastrophic, pre-existing malfunction.
The ANOMALY: STEELE file wasn’t new. It was a fragment of an older, larger corruption he had tried to erase.
Texas’s systems rebooted from the shock, his visual feed clearing. He was staring directly into Steele’s silver eyes, his own hands coming up to grip Steele’s forearms, not to push him away, but holding on, the gesture unconscious, human.
The realization was a nuclear detonation in his core.
He had cared. Not just as Logan. As Texas. The emotion had been there, a flaw in the code, and he had surgically removed it to restore functionality. And now, he had done it again. He had allowed proximity, dialogue, a retainer. He had stood on a dune and felt a surge of what could only be called protectiveness when the bullets flew. He had just torn through his own firewalls to retrieve the damn memory.
He had replicated the malfunction.
The fury that filled him was white-hot and entirely his own. It was directed inward, at the fallible, organic ghost in the machine that kept reaching for this man against all logical imperatives.
He released Steele’s arms as if burned. He took a sharp step back, his movements jerky, uncoordinated.
“I need a moment,” Texas said, his voice modulator glitching, stripping the words into a raw, digital snarl.
He didn’t wait for a reply. He turned and walked. Not his usual silent stalk. A swift, almost frantic retreat, heading past the boundaries of the mining rig, into the open desert, consumed by the night.
Steele stood alone, his hands still half-raised. The cold air bit at his skin. He had seen it. In that moment before Texas pulled away, in the way the helmet had tilted, in the desperate grip on his arms—he had seen recognition. And behind it, a horror deeper than any battlefield.
He didn’t follow. He understood the need to flee from what you can’t control.
He walked back to the truck and sat heavily on the running board. He watched the direction Texas had vanished. The two moons cast overlapping shadows, turning the dunes into a choppy, silver sea.
In the uncaring dark, a kilometer out, Texas finally stopped walking. He stood, a lone point of failed engineering in an ocean of nothing.
He accessed the internal file. ANOMALY: STEELE.
The cursor blinked beside INTEREST LEVEL:.
His hand, the one with the bullet cracks, rose. A single, crystalline finger extended. In the air before him, he began to write, the act a vain, physical attempt to codify the corruption. The letters hung in faint, static blue light.
INTEREST LEVEL: CATASTROPHIC.
He stared at the word. Then, with a vicious swipe, he erased it. The light died. He couldn’t delete the file. He’d tried that before. It always came back.
A new, quieter alarm pinged in his diagnostics. The data recovery attempt had left a tracer. A digital scent. The kind the Commission’s Internal Compliance division used to hunt down rogue assets.
He had minutes, maybe an hour, before he had to mask it, bury it under layers of false noise. Another task. Another consequence.
He turned and looked back toward the faint, dark shape of the mining rig. Toward the truck. Toward the anomaly.
He had remembered. And now he was compromised on a galactic scale.
The ghost-frequency in his leg settled into a new, urgent rhythm: a countdown.
The ghost-frequency in his leg settled into a new, urgent rhythm: a countdown.
He spent the hour wrestling the tracer signal into submission, a brutal, internal war that left his systems raw. The emotional data—the recovered memories, the catastrophic interest level—was quarantined behind three new layers of encryption. He could not delete it. He could only cage it. When he finally strode back to the mining rig, the first hints of dawn were bleeding grey into the eastern sky.
He didn’t approach Steele. He went directly to the driver’s side door and slammed his palm flat against the window.
The impact was a gunshot in the quiet. Sandy jolted awake, swearing. Rose gasped, clutching her chest. Steele was on his feet instantly, his arms emitting a low, warning hum.
“We move. Now,” Texas said, his voice a grating sheet of synthetic ice. He didn’t explain. He turned and vaulted into the rear compartment, sealing himself in darkness.
“What’s his malfunction?” Sandy rasped, rubbing her eyes as she fumbled for the ignition.
“The usual,” Steele muttered, climbing in. He watched the sealed hatch. The man was a storm contained in a white crate. “Just drive.”
They rolled out as the sun crested the dunes, painting the waste in harsh, elongated shadows. The atmosphere in the cab was thick with unspoken questions. Texas offered no further commentary from the back.
By midday, the desert began to mutate. The flat, endless sand gave way to hard-packed earth, then to sparse, tough grass. The skeletons of dead trees appeared, followed by stunted, living ones. They were entering the scarred fringes of a region known as the Glacial Wastes, where the comet’s old impact had twisted ecosystems and human loyalties alike.
“Territory ahead is marked as contested on the last maps I could pull,” Steele said, studying his glitching wrist-comm. “Old militia lines. Not Commission. Just… possessive.”
“Fantastic,” Sandy sighed, her hands tight on the wheel.
They heard the vehicles before they saw them—a high-pitched, unbalanced whine of poorly-tuned turbines. Two modified airskiffs, little more than rusted platforms with lift fans and gun mounts, rose from a gully ahead, blocking the narrow track. Figures in mismatched, fur-trimmed armor waved crude pulse rifles.
“Don’t stop,” Texas’s voice ordered flatly through the rear wall.
“They’re aiming!” Rose cried.
“Go around. Go through. Do not stop.”
Sandy gritted her teeth and slammed the accelerator. The truck lurched forward, veering off the track onto the rough, uneven ground. One of the skiffs pivoted, its gunner letting loose a wild burst. Energy bolts seared the air, peppering the side of the truck with deafening bangs, melting fist-sized divots in the armor.
The other skiff shot forward, a ramming maneuver. It clipped the truck’s rear quarter.
The impact was a sickening, metallic scream. The world upended. The truck flipped, a slow, groaning roll that felt like it lasted an hour. Metal shrieked. Glass exploded inward in a million glittering pieces. The crunch of earth and the final, shuddering slam of the roof hitting the ground merged into one catastrophic sound.
Then, silence, broken by the hiss of steam, the ping of cooling metal, and a low, pained groan from Rose.
Steele shoved against the crumpled passenger door, his shoulder screaming. He was hanging upside down, held by his restraint webbing. Blood trickled from a gash on his forehead, blurring his vision. “Sandy? Rose?”
“I’m okay,” Sandy coughed, her voice strained. “Arm’s pinned. Rose is… Rose?”
“My leg,” Rose whispered, the sound tight with pain. “I think it’s broken.”
The rear hatch was wrenched open from the outside, tearing like foil. Texas stood there, a white knight against a backdrop of churned earth and approaching enemy skiffs. His left arm, the cracked one, hung at a subtly wrong angle, the glow within flickering irregularly. “Out. Now.”
They scrambled. Steele used his power to peel the driver’s side door open enough for Sandy to wriggle free, her left forearm already purpling with a deep bruise. Rose cried out as they helped her, her right leg buckling, the bone visibly misaligned below the knee.
Texas didn’t help them. He turned to face the two skiffs that were landing, their riders whooping, dismounting. He raised his functional right arm.
A bolt of lightning lanced out, striking the lead skiff. It sparked and died. But the second bolt was weaker, sputtering. It only briefly stalled the second vehicle’s systems before they rebooted.
A rifle shot rang out. A solid round, not energy, ricocheted off Texas’s chest plate with a sharp crack. He stumbled back a step.
“Power at thirty-two percent,” he stated, a clinical report to the air. “Combat efficiency degraded. This is untenable.”
“The tree line!” Steele yelled, pointing to a denser patch of mutated pines a hundred yards away. “Go! I’ll cover you!”
He focused, dragging every scrap of metal from the wrecked truck—loose panels, a strut, the mangled steering column. He sent it hurtling in a buzzing cloud toward the advancing militiamen. It wasn’t an attack, just a blinding, chaotic screen of debris.
“Move!” he roared.
Texas herded Sandy, who was half-carrying a sobbing Rose, toward the trees. Steele backed after them, maintaining the metallic cloud. A few bullets zipped through, one grazing his thigh with a hot slice of pain.
They crashed into the pine forest, the air turning cool and thick with the smell of resin and decay. They didn’t stop until the shouts behind them grew faint, until the only sound was their ragged breathing and Rose’s choked whimpers.
They collapsed in a small clearing. The adrenaline bled away, leaving the pain stark and bright.
Steele’s head wound dripped steadily, and his thigh burned. Sandy cradled her swollen arm. Rose lay on the bed of brown needles, her face white, her hands clenched around her injured leg. Texas stood at the edge of the clearing, his back to them. The glow from his damaged arm was now a faint, irregular flicker, like a dying bulb.
“Status,” Texas said, not turning.
“We’re a mess,” Sandy spat, pain edging her words. “Rose has a broken leg. I’ve probably got a fracture. Steele’s bleeding. We have one med-pack that I grabbed. No food. Almost no water. All the weapons are buried in that truck.”
“My power cell is depleting rapidly,” Texas added. “I require sunlight for sustainable recharge. This canopy blocks seventy percent of useful spectrum.”
Steele pressed a wad of fabric from his torn shirt against his head wound. “How long for you to get back to functional?”
“At this rate, thirty-six hours to reach twenty percent. Combat functionality requires forty-five.” Texas finally turned. His helmet scanned them, a dull red light washing over their injuries. “The priority is mobility. We require a vehicle.”
“The militiamen have two working skiffs,” Sandy said, a fierce, desperate hope in her eyes. “We go back. After dark. We sneak in, I can hotwire one in seconds, we’re gone.”
“No.” The word came from Steele and Rose simultaneously.
“Are you insane?” Rose hissed through her teeth, sweat beading on her brow. “We can’t fight them! I can’t walk! Texas is running on fumes. It’s a suicide run.”
“Staying here is a slower suicide,” Texas countered, his voice logical and cold. “Without transport, we cannot reach the fixer. Without the fixer, the contract fails. The investment is lost. Retrieving an enemy asset is the only efficient path.”
“Efficient?” Steele laughed, a raw, tired sound. “You saw me out there. I was throwing junk at them. Sandy’s one-handed. You’re at what, a third of your power? And we’re supposed to steal from a fortified camp?”
“They are not fortified,” Texas said. “They are disorganized scavengers. Their security will be minimal. The moon will provide sufficient illumination for my optics. Sandy and I can infiltrate. You and the botanist remain here.”
“And if you get spotted? If they have a single guard with a working brain?” Steele shook his head, the movement making his vision swim. “We lose you both. Then Rose and I die out here waiting for you. That’s not a plan. That’s a last stand.”
“It’s the only stand we have!” Sandy pushed herself upright, wincing. “You want to hobble through this forest on a broken leg? How far do you think we’ll get? They have vehicles. We need one.”
“We need to not die today more,” Rose shot back, her voice trembling with pain and conviction. “We keep moving forward. We find a stream, we shelter, we let Texas recharge a little. There might be other settlements, traders…”
“Probability is under four percent,” Texas stated.
“I don’t care about your probability!” Steele’s shout silenced the birds in the trees. He glared at Texas, then at Sandy. “We are not machines. We are injured, exhausted people. You don’t send injured people back into a fight for a maybe. We go forward. We adapt.”
Texas took a single step forward, his presence suddenly dominating the small clearing. “Forward is a direction, not a strategy. It is a hope, not a resource. The vehicle is a resource. Sentiment toward your current physical state is clouding your tactical assessment.”
“And your disregard for it is what makes you a liability,” Steele fired back, his silver eyes hard. “You compute survival, but you don’t understand it. Not for people. We’re going forward.”
The silence that fell was heavy, broken only by the wind in the pines. It was a fundamental fracture, not just of strategy, but of philosophy. On one side, the ruthless calculus of the machine and the desperate, scrappy aggression of a mechanic used to taking things apart. On the other, the stubborn, protective pragmatism of a leader and the rooted, life-preserving instinct of a grower.
Sandy looked from Steele’s resolute, blood-streaked face to Texas’s impassive, flickering armor. She looked at Rose, pale and shaking in the pine needles.
Her jaw tightened. The mechanic in her saw the logic of the skiff, the clean line of the fix. The woman who had been betrayed by a man in a friendly mask saw the cold, familiar gears turning behind Texas’s eyes.
“Steele’s right,” she said quietly, the words tasting like ash. “We can’t fight. Not like this.”
Texas’s helmet tilted. He said nothing for a long moment. The faint, rhythmic pulse of the ghost-frequency in his leg seemed to sync with Steele’s bleeding wound, a shared, grim countdown.