Chapter 7: The Hunter's Confession
The twin suns baked the canyon floor, turning the air into a wavering lens that distorted the tracks ahead. Steele moved with a focused grace, his lunar-alloy arms occasionally catching the light as he pointed out disturbances in the dust—a scuffed rock, a deeper impression where the bounty hunter had adjusted his grip on the unconscious Jax.
Logan kept pace, his breathing calibrated to sound appropriately labored. The facade was a constant, low-grade drain, like holding a muscle flexed for hours. Inside, his mind was a clean room of strategic assessments: the angle of the sun, the mineral composition of the cliff face, the statistical probability of Rex’s location given his psychological profile. Reckless. Arrogant. Likely to choose high ground for a egoistic display.
“You think he’s leading us into a trap?” Logan asked, wiping faux sweat from his brow.
“Maybe. But the alternative is leaving Jax. No choice, really.” Steele’s voice was calm, analytical. He knelt, brushing fingers over a dark, sticky spot on a stone. Not water. Coolant, or hydraulic fluid. The hunter or his prey was leaking. “He’s getting sloppy. Or he’s injured.”
“Or he wants us to think he is.” Logan scanned the upper ridges, the sunlight glinting off crystalline deposits like a thousand watching eyes.
For a while, they moved in silence, the only sounds the crunch of their boots and the dry rasp of the wind. The canyon walls narrowed, funelling them into a corridor of striated rock.
“Back in the cantina,” Steele began, not looking back, “you talked about making places safe. You think this model of yours, Maple Creek’s model, is scalable? To a place with ten thousand people? A hundred thousand?”
Logan considered the question through the filter of Texas’s knowledge. “It’s inefficient. Direct consensus requires proximity. Shared fear. When the group gets too big, the fear splinters. You get factions. You get people like Maloy who skim the treasury, or desperate souls who sell information to scavengers.”
“So you think it’s hopeless?”
“I didn’t say that.” Logan hoisted himself over a tumble of boulders. “I think it requires a different kind of structure. Not a single, fragile trust, but a system of verified trusts. Layers. You can’t know everyone, but you can know the mechanisms that protect everyone. That’s what you’re trying to build, isn’t it? With your town’s civic codes, your resource contracts?”
Steele glanced back, a flicker of surprise in his silver eyes. “You’ve been paying attention.”
“I listen. It’s a nice idea. Trust verified by system, not just sentiment. But systems can be gamed. The bounty commission is a system. A brutal, simple, effective one.”
“And that’s what you think is coming? For everyone?” Steele’s tone hardened.
“It already has. It’s the default. What you’re doing here, what Sandy and Rose are clinging to… it’s a reboot. Trying to install a friendlier operating system on a very hostile machine.” The metaphor emerged from Logan’s persona, a useful simplification. “Some parts might be compatible. Others… they’ll just crash.”
They reached a fork where the canyon split. The main drag continued left, wider and sun-bleached. A narrower, shadowy cut veered right, marked by a single, fresh scuff on the entrance rock. The tracks, however, seemed to vanish on the hardpan just before the fork.
Steele frowned, squatting down. “He dragged him here. Then… no tracks.” He placed his palm flat on the ground. A faint, sub-audible hum emanated from his arms. “The top layer of dust is fused. Heat. A localized burst to obscure direction.”
“So, left or right?” Logan’s internal scanners were already mapping the right-hand path. It climbed, had several blind turns, and terminated in a likely cul-de-sac. A classic ambush point for an amateur. The left path offered more open sightlines and eventual egress. A professional would have gone left. Rex, he calculated, would choose the dramatic choke point.
“He wants us to guess wrong,” Steele murmured.
“Or he wants us to stand here arguing while he gets further away.” Logan leaned against the sun-warmed rock, playing the frustrated ally. “Look, I know you’ve only met the… polished variety of hunter. The corporate asset. But not all of them are like the bug-eyed freak in Newhaven.”
Steele stood, his gaze sharpening. “You know other kinds?”
“Stories. Gossip in the relay stations.” Logan kept his expression open, earnest. “Some take the commission code to its logical extreme. They only hunt the worst of the worst. The ones who’ve forfeited any claim to society. They see it as a purification. A nasty, necessary job.”
“And you think one of those… purists… might be convinced to work for a community? As a defense?” Steele’s skepticism was a physical force.
“I think systems talk to systems. Your town has laws. So do they. Just… sharper ones. It’s a negotiation. Maybe an impossible one.” He pushed off the wall. “But when you’re out here, looking at fused dust and a missing friend, impossible options start to look like only options. That’s all I’m saying.”
He was planting the seed, not for his own game, but for Steele’s benefit.
Steele processed this, his eyes scanning the two paths again. The wind sighed through the right-hand defile, carrying with it the faintest metallic reverberation, like a loose plate rattling.
“He went right,” Steele and Logan said in unison.
Steele looked at him, a question forming.
“The left path is smarter,” Logan explained, shrugging. “This guy isn’t smart. He’s angry. He wants a confrontation on his terms. In the tight, dark place.”
A grim smile touched Steele’s lips. “Then let’s not disappoint him.”
They entered the shadowy cut. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Light fell in jagged shafts, illuminating swirling dust motes and the strange, glassy veins in the rock. The metallic rattling grew louder, paired now with a low, rhythmic thumping.
They rounded a final bend and the canyon dead-ended in a broad, bowl-like enclosure. The scene was illuminated by the harsh spotlight of the high noon sun focusing directly into the bowl.
Rex stood in the center, Jax slumped at his feet. The medic was alive, moaning softly, a nasty burn on his temple. Rex had discarded his helmet. His face was a patchwork of old graft scars and angry red biomods. His gray armor wasn’t uniform—it was a haphazard collection of scavenged plates, one shoulder pauldron from a mining exo-suit, the other a polished piece of corporate security gear. He held a heavy, jury-rigged arc-caster, its barrel still glowing from the heat burst that had hidden his tracks.
Steele stepped forward, his hands loose at his sides. “Let the medic go. Your business is with whoever hired you.”
“My business is the business,” Rex spat. “Credits. Him?” He nudged Jax with a boot. “He’s a hefty payload.”
Logan hung back, his posture tense and fearful, perfectly mimicking useless anxiety. Internally, he was mapping trajectories, power levels, structural weaknesses in Rex’s cobbled-together armor. The arc-caster was potent but slow to recycle. The right shoulder joint was poorly integrated, a mismatch of hydraulics.
“You’re not commission,” Steele stated, his tone shifting from diplomatic to diagnostic. “You’re a freelancer. A scavenger. Which means you have no extraction protocol, no guaranteed support. You’re alone.”
“I’m enough!” Rex roared, leveling the arc-caster.
In that second, two things happened.
Logan’s analysis concluded. The optimal move was a kinetic strike to the mismatched joint, followed by severance of the primary power conduit at the neck. It would take 0.8 seconds.
Steele made a different choice.
As the arc-caster whined to full charge, Steele flicked his right hand. Not at Rex, but at the canyon wall beside him. A six-foot spike of raw, fused mineral and glass exploded from the rock face. It wasn’t aimed to kill. It shot past Rex’s head, close enough for him to feel the heat, and slammed into the arc-caster.
The weapon screamed, overloading, and exploded in Rex’s hands.
Rex howled, stumbling back, his hands smoking, his faceplate cracked. He stared in shock at the shard of canyon wall now embedded in the ground, still humming with residual energy.
Steele didn’t stop. He moved forward, a sharp, deliberate march. He made another gesture. The scattered shards of Rex’s broken arc-caster shivered, then rose from the dust like a swarm of metallic hornets. They orbited Steele for a heartbeat before swirling around Rex, the sharp points hovering inches from his neck, his eyes, the seams of his armor.
“You are in my sky,” Steele said, his voice low and utterly devoid of its earlier warmth. It was the voice of a man used to giving orders that shattered lives. “You dropped a ship on a home in a town under my consideration. You took a man who is under my temporary protection.”
Rex tried to speak, a bubble of blood forming on his lip. The shards drifted closer.
“I am not a bounty,” Steele continued. “I am a governance event. You have failed to comprehend the difference. Now, you will drop every weapon. You will walk out of this canyon. You will leave this territory and never return. If you do, I will know. And next time, the rock won’t miss.”
The shards vibrated, emitting a high-pitched whine.
With a clatter, Rex detached a sidearm, a vibro-knife, and two grenades from his belt, letting them fall. He kept his hands wide, his eyes filled with pure, animal terror. He had come for a brawl and found an executioner.
“Jax,” Steele said, not taking his eyes off Rex.
Logan rushed forward, the concerned friend again. He checked Jax’s pulse, finding it thready but present. “He’s alive. Needs a medkit.”
“Walk,” Steele commanded Rex.
The freelancer didn’t need telling twice. He shuffled backward, then turned and broke into a clumsy, panicked run, disappearing back down the narrow cut, the hovering shards following him for a dozen yards before falling harmlessly to the dust.
The oppressive silence of the canyon rushed back in.
Steele’s shoulders slumped, just a fraction. The cold authority bled from his face, replaced by a weary revulsion. He looked at his hands, the lunar alloy dimming slightly.
Logan watched him, his own internal processes recalibrating. The display of power was not shocking, but its application was. Steele had chosen control over carnage. He’d manufactured a threat so absolute it bypassed the fight entirely. It was ruthless, and it was, in its way, merciful. An inefficient but fascinating approach.
“You could have killed him,” Logan said, quietly.
“I know,” Steele replied, walking over to help lift Jax. “But then I’d just be a more efficient version of him. The system doesn’t change that way. It just gets a new manager.” He grunted, getting Jax’s arm over his shoulder. “Help me with him.”
As Logan moved to take Jax’s other side, his foot kicked one of the discarded grenades. It was a standard concussion model. His eyes, however, caught the glint of something else half-buried in the dust where Rex had stood: a thin, translucent data-needle, ejected from a compartment probably damaged in the explosion. It was slick with a trace of bio-gel, unlabeled.
A hunter’s dead-drop. Coordinates. Client information. A partial contract.
He discreetly palmed it, the cool surface disappearing into his grip as he swung Jax’s arm around his shoulders.
“Let’s get him home,” Logan said.
They began the long, careful trek back, bearing the weight of the unconscious man between them. Steele was silent, lost in the moral calculus of his actions. Logan was silent, the data-needle a secret weight in his hand, its contents waiting to be unpacked, to reveal who had hired the reckless Rex, and why.
The canyon walls watched them go, holding the echoes of violence and the thin, lingering scent of ozone and fear. Ahead lay the town, and the smoke, and the harder questions. Behind them, in the dust, lay the shattered tools of a brute, and the first tangible thread of a deeper conspiracy.
The walk back to Maple Creek was slow, burdened by Jax’s dead weight and the heavier, unspoken things between them. Steele was locked in a silent review of his own performance, the ghost of those hovering shards still dancing in his silver eyes. Logan played his part, offering supportive grunts and adjusting his grip, all while the data-needle in his palm felt like a live wire.
Back at the med-station, a rushed and grateful chaos swallowed them. Sandy clapped Steele on the shoulder, her relief stark and unguarded. Rose fussed with blankets, her green-veined hands fluttering over Jax’s burns. The story was told in clipped, collective sentences: the canyon, the confrontation, Rex’s panicked retreat. They left out the details of Steele’s power, painting it as a lucky distraction and a bold bluff.
“He won’t be back,” Steele said, but it sounded more like a hope than a certainty.
Logan slipped away as the local attention focused on Jax and the hero. In the dim, cramped silence of his room at the inn, he finally examined his prize. He inserted the data-needle into a port concealed beneath the flesh-toned hologram of his wrist.
The data unspooled in his mind. It wasn’t a full contract. It was a fragment, a blind brokerage receipt. The client was listed as a numbered shell corporation, but the broker signature was clear as a fingerprint in the code: Marla. His Vegas contact. Steele’s own broker.
A cold, clean anger settled in his circuits. Marla had brokered Rex. She was playing both sides, seeding chaos near Steele’s project, likely hoping to drive him into a more expensive, long-term contract with Texas for “protection.” She was manipulating the market, and in doing so, had nearly compromised his op. This was the deeper conspiracy, mundane and greedy.
He ejected the needle and crushed it to crystalline dust. Outside, night had fully fallen, and with it, the window for clean, corrective action. Rex was a loose end, now personally insulted and physically beaten. He would fester, or he would return with friends. The equation was simple. Rex had to be removed from the board. The baker, a man named Eli whose flour-dusted apron Logan had seen, had a debt flagged in the commission database that had just matured to active status. And Jax… Jax had seen Texas’s. His memory, if discovered by the townsfolk, was an unacceptable risk.
Three problems. One trip.
The town slept the shallow, anxious sleep of the recently traumatized. Logan’s hologram flickered and died. Texas emerged from the glitching image, a spectre of alloy and cold purpose. He moved through the stagnant darkness without a sound.
Eli the baker was first, dreaming of dough in his small shack behind the ovens. A focused, localized pulse from Texas’s hand bypassed his crude neural inhibitor and put him into a twitching, silent unconsciousness. He threw the man over a shoulder.
The med-station was dark, save for a single low light. Old Man Harrow was supposed to be on watch but was snoring softly in a chair. Jax lay on a cot, sedated. Another touch, another controlled surge. Texas slung the medic next to the baker.
He loaded the two limp forms onto the back of his black motorbike, securing them with webbing. The bike was a strain, but its electric motor was a whisper.
He found Rex’s camp twenty miles east, in a gully stinking of stale coolant and cheap chemical rations. The freelancer was there, jamming a plasma torch against his damaged shoulder armor, swearing violently at the fused joints Steele’s shrapnel had caused. His bike was in pieces around him.
Texas killed his engine and walked the final hundred yards, a white ghost in the moonlit scrub.
Rex heard the crunch of gravel and spun, torch flaring. The single red optic fixed on Texas. Rage straightened his posture. “You.”
“Me.” Texas stopped, his bug-eyed helmet giving nothing. “You made a mess in my operational zone.”
“Your zone?” Rex laughed, a wet, cracked sound. “The Wasteland is free. I took a contract.”
“You took a contract from a broker playing games. You damaged a client’s assets. You attracted attention.” Texas’s voice remained a flat, synthesized hum. “You are an amateur. A clumsy tool.”
“I had them! That corporate moon-man and his pet! I had them in that canyon!”
“And now you have fused servos and a fear stain in your biometrics.” Texas took a step forward. “Go back to the fringe. Hunt drifters. Come back when you have another twenty years of experience, if you live that long.”
The gloating was calculated, a needle seeking a nerve.
It found it. Rex’s anger, pent and simmering since the canyon, exploded. He didn’t shout. He hurled the plasma torch like a javelin and charged.
The fight was not elegant. It was a collision of mismatched parts. Rex fought with the furious, explosive strength of someone with nothing to lose, his repaired armor screeching with every movement. Texas was precision compromised by the lag in his patched leg and a power core still stressed from the display use.
Rex connected with a freight-train punch that dented Texas’s chestplate. Texas diverted power, delivering a shock that made Rex’s muscles seize, but the freelancer ripped his arm free, the biomods overriding the paralysis. A backhand crack against Texas’s helmet skewed his visual feed for a critical half-second.
Rex got a hand on one of the bodies strapped to the bike. “I’m taking these! Payment for my trouble!”
This was unacceptable. This was error piling upon error. Texas calculated the rapidly diminishing odds. A conventional victory would cause significant, time-consuming damage.
He made a choice.
As Rex swung a wrecking-ball fist toward his head, Texas didn’t block. He opened every data-port, every receptor, and unleashed a torrent of raw, disruptive code—a screaming digital banshee wail designed to overload unshielded cybernetics. It was a brute-force broadcast, draining his own reserves violently.
Rex froze. His single red optic flickered wildly. A guttural, electronic scream tore from his vocal modulator as his mismatched subsystems short-circuited, fried, and rebelled. He crumpled, twitching, to the sand, smoke curling from his neural interface ports.
Silence, deeper than before, rushed back in.
Texas staggered. Internal damage alerts flared across his vision. A critical power cell had been slagged in the surge. He tasted ozone and hot metal in the back of his throat. For a moment, static blurred the edges of his consciousness.
He moved on grinding, automated determination. He loaded Rex’s limp form atop the other two, a grotesque stack. He muscled the bike upright, its suspension groaning. The ride to the remote extraction point was a study in agony, each bump sending jolts of system failure feedback through his core.
The automated collection pod was waiting, a featureless black capsule half-buried in the sand. He dumped the three bodies into its open maw. It sealed with a hushed hydraulic sigh. The transaction cleared on his display: one matured debt (Eli), one contested asset (Jax), one freelance nuisance (Rex, bounty for violating commission territorial protocols).
Only then, as the pod sank into the sky, did he let his systems express the trauma. He collapsed against his bike, his pristine white armor smeared with sand and coolant. A shudder, half-mechanical, half-physiological, wracked his frame. He accessed the damage report. Mobile, but compromised. The facade systems for Logan were critically unstable.
He had hours, maybe less, before they might fail arbitrarily.
He breathed, in the way his design allowed, cycling air to cool overheating components. He pushed himself upright. He cleaned his armor with fastidious, desperate swipes. He mounted the bike.
The black sky was softening to grey in the east when he slipped back into his room at Nell’s. The hologram of Logan stuttered, blurred, and finally solidified over the ravaged anatomy beneath. He lay on the cot, staring at the water-stained ceiling, listening to the false, steady rhythm of a heart his body didn’t have.
Outside, a bird began to chirp. Soon, the town would wake. And they would discover two of their own were gone, that the rescued medic had vanished without a trace. Panic would be immediate. Questions would be brutal.
Steele would look for answers. Sandy would want blood. Rose would feel the void opening wider.
Texas closed his human-seeming eyes. He needed to manufacture a suspect, direct the fury, and stabilize his own decaying cover. All before the coffee finished brewing downstairs. The calculations began again, slower now, through a haze of mounting error.