Chapter 4: History
STILL A FEW DAYS AGO
The door to Leo’s squat wasn’t even locked. It was a statement of profound, stupid hope. Texas pushed it open, the hinges bleeding a long, metallic sigh into the dim hallway. The apartment beyond was a tomb of cheap synth-wood and stale air, lit by the garish neon bleed from the Strip below. A man, Leo, fumbled with a heating coil over a single burner. He turned. His eyes went wide, then flat. He knew the white uniform. He knew the bug-eyed helmet, glowing faintly in the apartment’s gloom.
Texas didn’t speak. His internal systems painted Leo in a grid of red lines: cardiac rhythm elevated, posture defensive-low value. The official commission was for the debt. But Texas’s scanners, sweeping the room, caught another signature. Faint biosigns behind a makeshift curtain partitioning a sleeping area. One human, resting. Low-level cybernetic readouts—civilian grade, medical. A recent job.
The shot wasn’t loud. A wet, percussive thump. Leo folded onto the stained carpet, a dark flower blooming across his chest. The heating coil clattered to the floor, hissing against a drip of something.
Texas stepped over him. He pulled back the curtain.
A woman was there, sitting up on a thin mattress, blankets pooled around her waist. She was young, hair a mess of dark waves, skin pale. Her eyes, a startling brown, were still clouded with sleep, then chemical painkillers, then pure, undiluted terror. They flicked to the curtain, to the shape on the floor beyond. Her breath hitched.
Scanning.
NAME: ROSE CALLAHAN.
STATUS: BIOMECHANICAL RESUSCITATION. CREDITOR: VEGAS GENESIS MEDICAL HOLDINGS.
DEBT OUTSTANDING: 147,850 CR.
NEXT PAYMENT DUE: 14 DAYS, 3 HOURS, 11 MINUTES.
LOCATION: OFF-GRID. UNAUTHORIZED RELOCATION.
Not yet overdue. Technically, she wasn’t a skip. Not for 14 more days.
But she was here. Hiding. With a dead contractor. Her systems were broadcasting a low-grade distress signal, a subconscious plea from the hardware in her chest. She was looking at the door, at the window—a third-floor window, cheap plexi.
She was going to run.
Texas’s logic processors evaluated. A medical debtor, high-value chassis, demonstrated fugitive behavior. Apprehension now would save resources later. Pre-emptive asset recovery. The justification formulated in a nanoseconds-long chain of cold rationale. It was efficient.
He shifted the mag-pistol. The barrel, still warm from Leo, pointed at the center of her chest.
Her reaction was pure animal instinct. No scream. She moved, a frantic lunge sideways, away from the gun, toward the window. She didn’t try to open it. She threw her whole body at the plexi, elbow first, curling into a ball as she hit.
The material cracked, splintered, gave way. She vanished into the neon-drenched night with a shower of glittering fragments.
Texas ran through empty frame. He jumped, aiming for the vines supporting Rose. A vine lashes out, throwing him off balance as he lands hard on the dumpster. His optics tracked her heat signature, flickering and fading as she fled.Servos in his legs shrieked. A knee joint buckled, hydraulic fluid becoming a fine, acrid mist in the air. Damage assessment scrolled across his vision: right tibial actuator, compromised; pelvic stabilizers, microfractured; mobility reduced to 68%.
By the time he looked up, her heat signature was gone, swallowed by the labyrinth of the Old Strip.
Texas stood. A limp was a new rhythm to learn. He retracted the helmet into his collar, his true face—a polished lattice of diamond and smoked glass—catching the neon for a second before the holographic skin shimmered back over it, presenting the unremarkable face of an unremarkable man. He walked, each step a grinding complaint, back to headquarters. He paid the premium for a rush repair job. The credits subtracted from Leo’s commission.
As the welders fused his tibial actuator, he reviewed the traffic cam footage he’d intercepted before leaving HQ. The lunar-style terra-truck. Its route was erratic, then purposefully obscure, heading into the badlands. Toward the rumored sinkholes of society like Maple Creek. Where one high-value debtor fled, others gathered. An untapped market.
He decided. He would follow the lunar cyborg. He would find the flower girl. He would make the trip worth his while.
The road to Maple Creek was a scratch on a scarred face. Texas drove through the deep night, his repaired leg humming, his sensors parsing the void for signatures. The terra-truck’s trail was cold now, lost in the static of stone and dust.
Then, a crackle. A distorted human voice, punched through with panic, bleeding from a public band radio frequency.
“—anyone! Off the old mill road—they’ve got a—my car is—”
A distress signal. Local. Unaffiliated. Texas almost filtered it out. Noise.
But context was everything. A situation in progress was a tableau. It could be entered. It could be manipulated.
He stopped his car, a nondescript off-roader, half a click from the signal’s origin. He climbed out. The night air was a dry chill. He activated his full uniform, the white polymer plates weaving up from his collar, the bug-eyed helmet materializing over his face. He became Texas again. A figure of absolute authority. Or absolute terror.
He moved toward the sound of a struggling engine.
The scene was almost quaint. A rusted car, steaming from a severed line. A woman with brass limbs standing her ground, a wrench in one hand, a crude piston-rifle in the other. A man, aggressive, desperate, advancing. He assessed her in a glance: cyborg, mechanic class, tactical value moderate, emotional state: furious, not scared.
He didn’t Intervene. He orchestrated.
He stepped into the edge of the light from the car’s dying taillight. He stood, a stark white monolith in the dark. He saw her eyes lock onto him through her goggles. He saw the recognized dread. Bounty Hunter.
Texas didn’t flinch. He looked past the gun, at the woman. “They will kill you,” he said, his voice electronically flat, communicating through radio waves straight to the woman. “Then they will strip your parts. Your choice is gone. Your only remaining action is survival. Shoot him.”
He said it with the calm of a weather report. It was permission. It was a command. It was a test.
She hesitated. The thief’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Texas took a single step forward, placing himself more fully in the road, in the line of fire, a perfect, unconcerned target. “Shoot. Him.”
The roar of the piston-rifle was enormous in the desert silence. The thief jerked back, a hole blossoming in his shoulder.
The woman—Sandy—turned the gun on him, smoke curling from the barrel.
Then, lights. Engine growl. The lunar terra-truck, speeding around the bend, too fast. It swerved, but not enough. The grille caught Texas in a glancing blow. It felt like a meteor strike. He was hurled sideways, tumbling across the hardpack with a sound like shattering ceramics. New damage alerts screamed across his vision: thoracic plating, cracked; photoreceptor, misaligned; power flow, fluctuating.
He lay still as the truck drive away, leaving him for dead on the side of the road.
Once their taillights were swallowed by dust, he moved. He stood. A servo in his spine whined like a damned soul. He limped back to his car.
Inside, he shed the white uniform. It folded itself away into a compartment. He pulled on worn denim, a faded plaid shirt, scuffed boots. He activated the full-body hologram, the one that projected flesh and sinew and the illusion of stubble over his crystalline substrate. He practiced the smile in the mirror. Easy. Open. A little tired. He became Logan.
He drove back to where Sandy was walking on the side of the road He offered a ride into Maple Creek. He offered a sympathetic ear. He built rapport, bolt by bolt.
NOW
The booth in The Last Drop felt like a dissection tray. Logan—the idea of Logan, the performance of him—smiled warmly at Steele, trying to solder a connection over shared whiskey. But underneath the hologram, Texas was multitasking.
One processor thread ran the Logan-simulacrum: modulating breath, timing blinks, injecting calculated warmth into his hazel eyes.
Another thread analyzed Steele: the lunar alloy arms (high-grade, expensive, tactical), the posture, the strategic lack of personal data. Not simple. A relationship needed cultivation.
A third, deeper thread tracked Sandy, now across the street in Grisha’s workshop. She was a tool. A damned fine one. Her mechanical empathy was a rarity. With direction, she could be revolutionary. The commission for recruiting a hunter of her caliber would be substantial. It required careful coercion. Isolation first, then offer a new tribe. He was in phase one.
But a fourth thread, a low-priority background scan, kept pinging on an anomaly. Biological. In the booth. Rose.
She was trying to be small. Her hands were wrapped around her mug, but he could see the fine, chlorophyll-green tracery peeking from her cuffs. His subsonic scanners, muted to avoid detection, picked up the faint, rapid flutter of a secondary pump—a heart-drive, medical grade. The same signature from Leo’s apartment. The flower girl.
She hadn’t recognized him. How could she? He’d been a white nightmare then. Now he was a friendly guy with debt. His internal chronometer noted the countdown: PAYMENT DUE: 8 DAYS, 7 HOURS, 22 MINUTES.
She was almost ripe.
The joy of it was quiet, profound. Two birds, one stone. Tapping the Maple Creek well and collecting a prime asset. It was better than he’d planned.
He excused himself from Steele, gave Sandy a nudge toward her destiny, and left the bar. The cool night air was a relief. The hologram required constant power, and the damage from the car impact made his systems run hot. A faint, static-like haze shimmered around his edges for a fraction of a second before his regulators compensated.
He walked to the edge of town, where the desert began again. He needed to send a pulse. A status update to the Hunter’s Network, buried in a data-dump of meaningless noise. Asset located. Recruitment in progress. Stand by.
He raised a hand. Between his fingers, a tiny arc of blue current snapped, aimed at a rusty satellite dish on a nearby roof. It was a whisper in the machine world.
Behind him, in Grisha’s workshop, a single, half-assembled turbo-fan sputtered and spun for three seconds before dying. Sandy, elbow-deep in a gear assembly, frowned. “Grisha, you getting a power surge?”
Grisha, under a crawler, grunted. “Generator’s steady. You’re hearing things.”
Sandy listened to the silence. It felt like the hum after a struck bell. She looked out the grimy window toward the dark shape of Logan at the town’s edge. Just a man, looking at the stars.
She wiped her brass fingers on a rag, the motion rough, unsure. The memory of the white hunter in the road, telling her to shoot, played behind her eyes. Then it was replaced by Logan’s easy smile, his talk of fresh starts. Two different kinds of static. One violent, one gentle. Both, in the end, just interference.
The next morning, the memory of that staticky hum itched behind Sandy’s eyes. She found Logan leaning against a porch post outside Nell’s, sipping what passed for coffee. Sunlight cut through the holographic stubble on his jaw with a slight, uncanny refraction she blamed on her tired eyes.
“My car’s still out there on the mill road,” she said, no preamble. Her brass hand tightened on a grease-stained tool roll. “I need a ride out. An extra pair of hands wouldn’t hurt, if you’re just standing around looking decorative.”
Logan’s smile was instant, warm. “Decorative is my middle name. Let’s go rescue your metal baby.”
Her ‘metal baby’ was a gutted, angry-looking thing, half-sunk in the dust. Sandy attacked it with a fervor that was almost violence, her hands moving with a sure, silent language. Logan obliged when she snapped her fingers and pointed—“Hold this line taut.” “Shine your link-light here.”—his presence useful but un-intrusive.
“Thanks,” she muttered once, elbow deep in the engine block, her voice muffled. “Most people ask a million questions. Or try to help in the worst ways.”
“I’m a spectacularly good listener,” Logan said, kneeling to steady a fuel injector assembly. “And I know when not to touch the shiny bits. It’s a gift.”
She let out a grunt that might have been a laugh. By late afternoon, the car coughed, shuddered, and then rumbled to life, smoke clearing to a steady purr. Sandy leaned against the warm hood, a real smile breaking through the grime on her face. It transformed her, making her look younger. “Told you she wasn’t dead.”
“A miracle worker,” Logan said, and his admiration felt genuine because part of it was. The potential she represented was magnificent.
They drove separately back toward Maple Creek, the sunset painting the canyon walls in strokes of fire and ochre. Just outside town, Logan pulled over, flagged her down, and gestured to his front tire, now visibly soft. “Think you could work your magic? Feels like I picked up a nail.”
Sandy rolled her eyes but grabbed her patch kit. “You buy your tires from a poet? They’re all air and no muscle.” As she worked, kneeling in the dust, Logan stood back and watched the town.
His cybernetic systems, muted to a near-silent whir, conducted a passive scan. In this light, with the day’s rhythms slowing, the data-vulnerability of the place was more apparent. A flicker of a personal medical alert from a wrist-link. A late-payment notice blinking on a public terminal screen in the sheriff’s office window.
He focused. Sheriff Maloy. The man was rolling a chair back from his desk, yawning. The scan deepened, pinging encrypted financial layers. Medical debt. A specific, debilitating sum stemming from a lung graft five years prior. The creditor was a subsidiary of Vegas Genesis. It was a clean, high-value commission, ticking away right in the heart of this “safe” town.
He needed to act tonight. The debt would soon sell to a collocation agency, fracturing the fee. But a direct extract from Maple Creek required an alibi. He needed witnesses.
Sandy stood up, slapping the repaired tire. “All set. Try not to aim for more sharp poetry on the way home.”
“Actually,” Logan said, his voice shifting to a conspiratorial warmth. “It’s too nice an evening to waste indoors. I’ve got a pack of synth-beef patties and a portable grill in my trunk. We should go camping. Have a proper BBQ under the stars. Celebrate you not being dead in a ditch.”
Sandy wiped her hands, considering the darkening sky. “I’ve got an early shift with Grisha.”
“All the more reason. Fresh air. Quiet. No buzzing lights or grinding gears. Just… off the grid for a few hours.” He saw her hesitate, the temptation of true quiet warring with her wariness. “I’ll even let you burn the patties.”
“Fine,” she said, finally. “But I’m bringing the seasoning. Your food tastes like despair and packaging.”
“Perfect! Hey, we should invite the new folks. Rose and that Steele guy. Make it a welcome party.” His logic was flawless. More alibis. More bonds to reinforce his cover. And it would keep Rose close, where he could watch her.
“You don’t give up, do you?” Sandy said, but she was already walking toward Nell’s.
Rose was refilling salt shakers behind the bar when they entered. The idea of a social gathering made the fine veins on her neck darken with anxiety. “Oh, I don’t know. I have to close up, and—”
“Nell will understand,” Logan interrupted, beaming. “It’s a community duty. And you should invite your friend, Steele. Man looks like he could use a real meal and some bad company.”
The pressure was friendly, inexorable. Rose eventually nodded, a small, trapped motion. “I’ll… go ask him.”
Twenty minutes later, the four of them were piling into Sandy’s freshly-revived car, the portable grill clattering in the trunk. Steele looked politely baffled, carrying a six-pack of local brew he’d traded for. Rose sat stiffly by the window, a tiny night-blooming flower twining unseen through her hair.
As Sandy drove them out past the town limits toward a flat, rocky overlook, Logan chatted amiably about nothing. He watched the sheriff’s office shrink in the side mirror, a perfect little box holding a perfect little debt.
His internal chronometer synced with the fading light. He gave them two hours of camaraderie, of smoke and casual stories. Then he’d need a private moment to stray from the firelight. The desert night would swallow the brief absence, and the sheriff’s debt would be resolved with quiet, surgical precision.
The grill flared to life, casting their dancing shadows against the stone. Laughter, forced at first, began to loosen into something real. Logan passed Steele a beer, his smile easy and wide, a perfect mirror to the flames.
Logan passed Steele a beer, his smile easy and wide, a perfect mirror to the flames. “So, consultant,” he said, tapping his bottle against Steele’s. “What’s the water reclamation verdict on local brew? Passable humidity?”
Steele chuckled, the sound low and genuine. “It’s wet. That’s a start.” He took a swig, his silver eyes catching the firelight. “Better than the coffee at The Last Drop, anyway.”
“A low bar,” Sandy grumbled, poking at a synth-beef patty with a stick. It sizzled in protest. “That coffee could dissolve rust. I use it to clean carburetors.”
Rose, seated on a folded blanket, allowed herself a small smile. The knot in her chest, tightened since the cantina, began to loosen a fraction. The vast desert sky, pricked with infinite stars, felt less like a void and more like a ceiling. The air was clean, scented with smoke, dry earth, and the faint, mineral tang of the comet’s legacy.
“You’re burning it,” Logan observed, leaning over Sandy’s shoulder.
“It’s called flavor,” she shot back, but flipped the patty. A shower of sparks leaped upward. “You want a pink center, you cook it.”
“I want a center that isn’t charcoal, is all.” He retreated, playfully raising his hands in surrender, and settled on the ground next to Steele, not too close, but companionable. The fire popped, sending an ember skittering toward Rose’s feet. A tiny, quick vine emerged from the dust and snuffed it out before retreating. No one saw.
The beers went down easier with the second round. Stories emerged, carefully edited but truer than before. Sandy talked about Grisha’s impossible standards and the satisfaction of a purring engine. Rose described, in vague terms, the aggressive lack of greenery in Vegas. Steele offered dry observations about lunar hydroponics, the relentless efficiency of it all.
“Sounds cold,” Logan said, stretching his legs out. He was on his third beer, and the performative edge of his friendliness had softened into something that mirrored the group’s own slow unwinding. “All that control. No room for surprise.”
“Surprise is often another word for systems failure,” Steele said, but he was smiling when he said it.
“Or for opportunity,” Logan countered, his gaze holding Steele’s for a beat longer than necessary. There was a flicker there, an appreciation that wasn’t purely analytical. “Something beautiful growing in the crack of a broken algorithm.” He then immediately laughed, as if embarrassed by his own lyricism, and took a long drink. “Sorry. The beer’s talking.”
“Let it talk,” Steele said, his voice quieter.
The night deepened, the fire burned down to a bed of pulsating coals. The temperature plummeted, a desert cold that bit through layers. Sandy announced she was turning in, retreating to the sheltered hollow of a rock with a rolled-up jacket for a pillow. Rose curled on her blanket, pulling the edges over herself, listening to the slowing breaths of the others.
Logan unrolled his own bedroll near the dying fire, close to Steele’s. “G’night, water consultant,” he mumbled, his voice thick with genuine fatigue—or a flawless simulation of it.
“Night, Logan.”
Within minutes, Logan’s breathing settled into the deep, even rhythm of sleep. The others soon followed, the day’s tensions and the beer pulling them under. The only sounds were the wind and the faint, ticking cooling of the grill.
An hour later, Rose stirred, half-waking from a dream of whispering roots. Steele was a still silhouette gazing at the stars, his lunar alloy a soft, bio-luminescent blue in the dark. Sandy snored lightly.
Logan did not stir.
But under his blanket, a silent, segmented segment of his left forearm detached at the wrist. It was a complex module of sensors, emitters, and micro-power cells. It lay on the ground, hidden by the fabric. From it, a low-powered hologram shimmered into being, depicting Logan asleep, his chest rising and falling in perfect time.
The real Logan slipped from his bedroll, a phantom in the gloom. He moved twenty paces from the camp, behind a large boulder. There, he let the full-body hologram—the illusion of Logan’s skin, clothes, and face—drop.
In the starlight, he was a sculpture of angular shadow and muted reflection, a man-shaped lattice of composite materials and darkened crystal. He glanced at the camp. No movement.
Then he ran.
His form was pure function, cutting through the cold air with a speed no human could match. The town was a cluster of dark shapes in the distance. He went straight to the sheriff’s small, standalone house at the quiet end of the main street. A light was on in the back bedroom.
The lock on the weathered door was a simple mechanical tumbler. He placed his crystalline hand against it. A concentrated surge of current, tiny and direct, sparked inside the mechanism. There was a faint snick. He was inside in less than three seconds.
Sheriff Maloy was at his small kitchen table, nursing a gut-ache. He looked up, confusion etching his weathered face. “Who the hell—?”
Texas didn’t give him time to finish. He closed the distance and pressed a hand to the man’s neck. A controlled, high-voltage stun coursed through the sheriff’s body. His eyes rolled back, and he slumped, unconscious.
No noise. No struggle.
Texas hauled the man over his shoulder, his internal stabilizers compensating for the weight with a soft whir. He exited the way he came, melting back into the shadows between buildings. He moved toward the eastern canyon edge, where he’d left his car tucked behind a rock formation earlier that day.
He dumped the sheriff in the passenger seat, securing him with polymer cuffs from the glovebox. He synced with his vehicle’s system and pulled onto the dust road, leaving no lights on until he was a mile away.
“Comm channel seven,” he spoke into the empty car. A connection hissed to life. “Asset in transit. Medical debt, classification gamma. Coordinates for pickup: the main freight route two miles west of Newhaven settlement. ETA twenty minutes.”
The sheriff groaned, coming around. He blinked, disoriented, straining against the cuffs.
“Just relax,” Texas said, his voice the flat, synthetic tone he used in uniform. It echoed strangely in the dark cabin. “It’s nothing personal. You’re an outstanding balance. I’m a collector.”
“Maple Creek… they’ll come for you,” Maloy slurred, bile and fear in his throat.
“No,” Texas corrected, calmly. “They won’t.”
He reached the desolate rendezvous point. A non-descript med-van was already waiting, its back doors open. Two silent orderlies transferred the sheriff from the car. A transaction ping registered on Texas’s internal display. Payment received. Clean, efficient.
He turned his car around and pushed it back toward Maple Creek, faster this time. The sky in the east was just beginning to bleed a pale, watery grey. He had to hurry.
He stashed the car back in its hiding spot and ran, a blur in the pre-dawn gloom, back toward the overlook. He could see the faint glow of the embers from a distance. Two figures were still up, sitting side by side: Rose and Steele, talking in low voices, watching the coming light. Good.
Behind the boulder, he reactivated the hologram. The familiar, worn clothes reappeared over his crystal frame, Logan’s affable face settling into place. He picked up the detached arm module, reattaching it with a soft, magnetic clunk he muffled against his chest. He took a breath, ruffled his own holographic hair, and then walked casually back into camp, yawning.
Rose jumped slightly. Steele’s head turned, his eyes sharp.
“Couldn’t sleep anymore,” Logan mumbled, his voice convincingly gravelly with sleep. “Sky was getting too pretty to miss.” He shuffled to the cold grill, fished out a portable brewer and a canteen. “Coffee?”
They nodded, watching him. He busied himself with the task, the normalcy of it a shield. The sun crested the canyon rim, washing the world in sudden, brilliant gold. The three of them sat in silence as he poured the steaming, bitter liquid into three cups.
He handed one to Rose, then one to Steele. Their fingers brushed briefly.
“So,” Logan said softly, sipping his coffee and looking out at the illuminated desert. “What’s the agenda today?”