Justice in an Age of Metal and Men Read online

  Justice in an Age

  of

  Metal and Men

  Anthony W. Eichenlaub

  Copyright © 2014 by Anthony W. Eichenlaub

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN 978-1493776092

  www.eichenblog.org

  Cover Art by: Aaron Wood

  To my wife,

  Carol

  Chapter 1

  I wore cowboy boots and a dark brown duster made of real oilskin. I chewed snuff derived from a real fine tobacco extract. I had Texas Army–issued black metal replacing my whole left arm. I carried a modified Smith and Wesson Model 500 that had been manufactured before neural implants were even a thing. I believed in traditional Texas values, right down to my soul. Nobody was above the law and the law ought to stay out of people’s business when it’s not needed. As sheriff, my job was to keep it that way.

  My name is Jasper Davis Crow. People called me J.D. I was the law around the town of Dead Oak, or at least as close to justice as its people were like to get. It wasn’t always enough. Sometimes these tough lands produced some tougher outlaws.

  To the average guy on the fringe, a civilization in retreat looks a whole lot like a civilization advancing. That’s how it was in independent Texas, anyway. Folks walled themselves up in their big shiny cities while out in the untamed wilderness we struggled to make life out of dirt and justice out of guns. It wasn’t the Wild West. Feral was probably a better word. It was once tame, but Texan independence, technology, and neglect had ushered it back to the near lawlessness that had heralded its beginnings.

  When I met the kid, he wasn’t broken. That came later. But he wasn’t just some happy boy either. He was strange. He had his own way. Like some tough oak sapling that would one day cast a dark shadow, he was twisted and stunted by the harsh world, but he never did fall. If there’s one good thing you could say about him, that kid loved his mama.

  Of course, whoever comes later might hear my story and judge what we did. Maybe somebody will learn something from our mistakes or get some form of entertainment from the retelling over the years. I can’t say I care for much of any of that. I’ll tell the story how I like. I don’t believe anyone is going to learn from my mistakes. There are probably too many to sort out. I don’t need anybody judging me either. I do that plenty myself.

  The call came in early, so the recording was waiting for me when I got into the station. One message, a holo that flickered like a candle ready to burn out showed a frantic-looking farmer’s wife yammering about her dead hubby. Seemed he got himself drunk and killed in the middle of the night. It was Daniel Brown. I didn’t remember the wife’s name at the time, but I knew I could look that up on the way.

  That passed for excitement in the town of Dead Oak, Texas. Anyway, it was enough to get me out of bed on a Saturday. With all the shiny tech they sit on over in Austin, you’d think you wouldn’t have the need for shithole little towns like this.

  There we were anyway.

  Dead Oak was a hub for ranchers a couple hundred kilometers around, from what used to be the northern tip of the Chihuahuan desert nearly all the way over to Austin. Since the fall of the American empire a hundred years previous, both the desert and Texas had grown considerably, but the dynamic of rural life had mostly stayed the same. Everything the poor bastards of West Texas scraped out of the dry dirt was shipped through Dead Oak and then straight to that big, shiny city of Austin. Dead Oak was a small town, but it was the place to be for meat, dairy, electricity, or drugs. It wasn’t all legal, but you might be surprised at where the federal government of The Republic of Texas drew the line. They sure as hell tried their best to leave Dead Oak alone, which left it to me to take care of the little stuff.

  Dead ranchers were little stuff.

  I jammed the autopilot button with my three enormous iron fingers, and my police cruiser climbed to fifty meters. Below were the towering black windmills that were such a common sight these days. For a minute, I focused on the horizon that stretched out before me. Then I looked at my reflection in the glass. My hair was still a little more pepper than salt, and lines were forming on my face. They weren’t laugh lines. They weren’t scowl lines. They were just your average getting-old lines. It happens fast around here. This job was wearing on me.

  Looking into the glass, I gave my best scowl to make sure it still worked. This might come in handy. One of my best tools of the trade was that scowl. The other was my friendly attitude and positive outlook, which I was sure to bring out at least once a year. When the general population is armed to the teeth and bulletproof, quite a bit requires nothing more than charm, intimidation, or a clever mixture of the two.

  The cruiser dipped to the left. Flying vehicles drove themselves, and I was mostly used to it. Still, my heart skipped when they dropped a few feet or changed direction. Most people didn’t pay attention to that sort of thing, but I had seen one too many failed gravity drives and broken logic engines to really trust anything that did the steering for me.

  I pulled out my glow cube. It was an old-style gesture holo that I had been using for a decade. Denise. That was her name. Denise Brown. She had five kids and a husband named Daniel on that ranch. The operation was dairy and beef mostly. Part of the Act of Self-Sufficiency after the war drove a lot more dairy down into these parts. Something about sucking milk from Mother Canada’s teat didn’t sit well with the proud Texan populace.

  The ranch was good financially, far as I could tell. They had paid their taxes the previous year and only carried 50 percent of the ranch’s value in debt. There was something about some trouble with one of the kids. It looked like minor stuff involving a local gang. I jabbed the power button on my glow cube and stuffed it into my coat pocket.

  I picked my hat up off the seat next to me and beat the red dust off of it. I put on the dark brown Stetson and a pair of small, mirrored sunglasses my father gave me when he quit being a lawman so long ago. They were fancy tech stuff, but I almost always left them powered off. I didn’t like the distractions.

  My cruiser had dropped to two meters from the ground, so I hopped out. My boots sent up clouds of hot dust. The blowback from the cruiser pulled at my coat, so I walked a few feet toward the house before pulling my glow cube back out.

  The main house was big—Wright-style construction, but probably only about a hundred years old. A quarter mile away I saw a matte black barn the size of a football field. Both buildings had walls that angled in slightly and had rounded corners, like a stubby pyramid. It gave the buildings a stout appearance, but it helped them survive the brutal winds that sometimes raged across those ruined lands.

  There was a kid watching me—small, seven or eight, with hair so light it seemed to glow in the sunlight. He stood stiller than I ever thought a kid his age could.

  “Howdy,” I said. It never hurt to be friendly to kids.

  The kid nodded in acknowledgement, but just barely. He might not even have known I was there. There were flecks shining in his green eyes. The kid had been enhanced by the wonders of technology. I always hated to see kids changed so young. Structural augments were illegal until you stopped growing. Too many kids were showing up in hospitals outgrowing bones they couldn’t afford to upgrade. No way was the federal government of the proud country of Texas going to pay for all that medical nonsense to get that fixed. They just made it illegal. Seemed like big government to me, but it got the job do
ne. Skin and eye enhancements were widely accepted, though. There was usually no surgery involved, so it was generally considered abusive to not enhance kids as young as possible.

  “You Francis?” I guessed, based on the info popping up on my cube.

  “Frank,” the kid whispered.

  I crouched down so I could see eye to eye with the kid. He reminded me of something—someone from a long time ago. I looked right into his eyes, but he wasn’t looking at mine. He was somehow looking through me.

  “Frank, you the man of the house around here?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, Frank, you wanna tell me what’s happened?”

  He shook his head again, almost imperceptibly.

  “Son, you ever need any help, you let me know, all right? My name’s J.D. It’s my job to make sure kids like yourself don’t get hurt.” I was still looking at his face, but he refused to look back. I felt a lump forming in my throat, but I forced it back. No kid that young should have to experience the death of a loved one.

  He didn’t nod but he looked me in the eyes for just a second. I saw a flash of purple play across the pupils.

  “Well, Frank, is yer ma around?” I stood.

  He nodded.

  “Where?”

  The kid pointed at the barn, so I tipped my hat to him and started walking. My mouth was dry and I desperately needed a drink, preferably a strong one.

  The walk was farther than I’d expected. Dry, knee-high grass and uneven ground slowed me down till I stumbled on a packed dirt road running between the house and the barn. It weaved for no discernible reason and made my walk take a good twenty minutes. I wasn’t in no hurry.

  “Mrs. Brown, you in there?” I banged on the wall of the barn a few times. The black wasn’t paint. Just like the windmills, the whole thing was covered with a photoelectric paneling. If the wind died, the sun would keep things powered up. If the wind died and it was night, well, they’ve probably got batteries. If the batteries died, nobody was going to be happy. Most folks made their own power out there. It was as much a commodity as beef or corn, but part of it was subsistence too. People whose bodies were mostly hardware liked to make their own power if they could. It gave them some independence.

  “Hold on, hold on,” It was a raspy voice. It’d clearly been dried out by years in the heat. It was female but not feminine.

  I cracked open a plastic capsule and stuck its contents behind my bottom lip. The tingle of nicotine briefly warmed my jaw. One of the benefits of nanomachines purging poisons and their aftereffects from your system is the way you never build up a resistance to recreational intoxicants. The warm tingle buzzed in my head and brushed my fingertips. I leaned up against the wall next to the eight-meter doorway.

  After a while, I heard someone coming. I straightened up and spit out my snuff.

  “‘Bout time.” The woman before me was heavier than would be fashionable in the city, but she wasn’t fat. She wasn’t tall either. Her age was a mystery, but if I had to guess, I would put her in her early forties. She jutted her square jaw out at me in some sort of defiance that I would have laughed at if I weren’t such an outstanding professional. Her straight, brown hair whipped around in the wind as soon as she stepped out of the barn. Her skin was tan in the way that made me think she might just be covered in dust. Could’ve been augmented skin, but it was too hard to tell through the dirt. She wore the ever-fashionable overalls and real brown leather boots. From her back protruded four long prehensile arms, each ending in a different sort of tool. The back of her neck and her lower back was a full graft of lobstered chrome.

  In her left God-given arm she cradled a baby. One side of her overalls was unbuttoned to give the thing access to a breast. A quick glance at my glow cube tells me that this baby is named Toby. I can’t think of any reason to care.

  “Ma’am,” I tip my hat. “Condolences.”

  “Condolences, my ass,” she spat. “Lazy son of a bitch weren’t good for nothin’ anyway.” The frantic emotion of her video message seemed to have turned into stubborn pragmatism with a touch of anger. It seemed like she had already figured out how to move on, which was good. The ranch wasn’t going to wait around for her to mourn.

  I nodded. No use arguing.

  “He was out there drunk again. Got trampled by the herd, by the look of it.”

  I nodded again. “Where’s the body?”

  “He’s back behind the barn, ‘bout twenty meters south.” The baby sucked away at her like there might not be any tomorrow. “Ben’s back there. You talk ta him if you need anything.” With that, she turned and walked back into the gaping darkness of the barn.

  I followed her.

  “Just a few questions before I go,” I said. “You sure it was an accident?”

  “Yup.”

  Darkness swallowed us and the air became heavy with the humid musk of caged animals. I pulled off my sunglasses and squinted at the shapes moving in the darkness. Big shapes. Longhorns, by the look of them. The modern longhorn stood half as tall as me and weighed somewhere near two ton. I never could remember if the geneticists had added American bison DNA into the longhorns or if it was the other way around. That was all ancient history. What they got was a giant version of the original Texas longhorn. With bigger being undeniably better than smaller, these animals took over the ranching industry. The modern longhorn was docile, huge, and quite versatile.

  “You do dairy?” I saw milking machines hooked to dozens of the beasts.

  She stopped and narrowed her eyes at me in response.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Yeah, we do dairy.” She turned and started walking again. “We do diary, beef, leather and out by the house we got some chickens. Just like any other ranch these parts.”

  I walked in silence. Sometimes people just took a little while to tell their story. She stopped at a small table near the end of one row of penned up cattle. On the table was a pitcher and half of a dozen filthy-looking glasses. She poured two glasses of milk and handed one to me. I nodded a thanks to her and took it. It was sweet and warm—just perfect for such a dry morning.

  “Dumb bastard didn’t have a problem with the chickens,” she said after draining her glass. “They’re the only thing that never made us any money.”

  My eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the barn. I could see the hulking longhorns shifting, agitated by something. I figured it was probably me. I never got along much with animals.

  “Drunk son of a bitch was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shoulda known just before sunrise is when the cattle comes back to the barn. Happens every damn day.” She spat on the dirt floor. “Goes on, though, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you best get out there and finish what you need to do so we can burn and bury the son of a bitch.”

  The longhorns were settling down again. The rhythmic noise of milking machines was the only noise for some time. I walked to the back door of the barn slowly, breathing in the humid stink of a hundred giant cattle. They were the foundation of Texas. Operations like this all over the country were all that kept those cities from chaos and anarchy. There probably wasn’t a single city dweller who knew it, though. Funny how that worked.

  Before I left the barn I turned and glanced at Denise one last time. She had finished feeding her baby. Throughout the barn there were dozens of popping noises as milking machines disconnected. I smiled at the idea of people resembling their pets. I guess that works for some of these ranchers too.

  The grass out in back of the barn was tall but not dry yet. I plucked a long strand and stuck it between my teeth. I smiled, sure that it would be an easy morning. Folks die all the time. Accidents or old age don’t give me much trouble. I just check a box and scan the area and let the family take care of the cleanup. Take it or leave it—that’s about as much involvement as people wanted their government to have.

  I walked twenty meters from the barn and looked around. Must have been the spo
t, but I didn’t see anything. Fat, irritating flies drifted in the sharp morning light, so I knew I was close.

  The kid was nowhere in sight.

  The ground back there was packed reddish clay. It was hard like concrete shaped to look like trampled mud. With the toe of my boot, I poked at the hoof print of a longhorn.

  “We grow ‘em pretty big.” The voice sounded like that of a boy who desperately wished his voice was deeper.

  I turned and saw him sitting on the hard ground. He had the gangly limbs and almost-muscles of an eleven-year-old with sandy blond hair spiked into seven long spears. He had a wrap-around mirrored lens covering his eyes and a poncho that seemed to shift colors like a chameleon when he moved.

  “I bet.” I turned back to my work. I didn’t think I was going to need the kid’s help and I got the impression that he didn’t like me much.

  Then I saw it behind a thick stand of grass. All I needed to do was follow the flies. The body had been crushed all right. I waved my natural hand through the controls on my glow cube, cursing when it didn’t work. One of the problems with my partially enhanced self was that tech didn’t always work. Some days were better than others. I switched hands and clumsily operated the cube with my three huge, industrial clamp-like metal fingers. I scanned the body and got a full work-up of the surrounding area. Never hurts to run full procedure, even in the case of an obvious accident. Like I said, I’m a sucker for tradition.

  The area was covered with giant hoof prints. Some looked fresh, but I could tell by a slight wear around the edges of the print that the mud had molded them days ago. Also, it hadn’t rained in two weeks. The scan confirmed that the guy was saturated with alcohol, and decomposition put the time of death just before sunrise. Cattle coming in just before morning must have trampled the pathetic passed-out rancher.

  “It wasn’t an accident.” The kid was talking again. I ignored him.

  Daniel was crushed bad enough that the face was ruined. I leaned in close to get a good look, but there wasn’t much to see. He was just a smashed pulp at this point. I took out a metal vial and scooped up a blood sample. The vial plugged into the top of my glow cube, which then went through a series of tests.