Bounty Hunter Academy 4, page 12
My face took on a sour expression. “Not exactly the kind of behaviour we’d like from an outsider doing business in human-controlled space.”
“Just a cultural difference, that’s all. In their eyes, we’re just as weird as they are to us. And Krepulons are some of the most understandable, relatable races in the universe. Wait until you get outside the Tri-Galactic Territories. Believe me, after that you’ll think Krepulons are as normal as your uncle Mugnot.”
“I don’t have an uncle Mugnot.”
“Really? Must just be me then.” Eckel cocked his head towards the huge archway that led into the bowels of the spacestation. “Come on. Let’s get a bit of R & R before our next mission. The space gods know we’re going to need it.”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s our next mission? Is it dangerous?”
“They’re all dangerous,” Madge broke in before Eckel could answer. “Only question is, how dangerous. Or how dangerous to you, to be more accurate.”
“Ignore the droid,” said Eckel. “She’s just trying to spook you.”
“An easy task, if ever there was one,” Madge quipped.
Eckel beckoned with a wave of his hand. “Come on. There’s a shop here that sells amazing pyjamas. And seeing as how someone on my crew keeps stealing my pyjamas, I’m in need of a new pair.”
“I don’t know what you’re looking at me for,” said Madge. “I don’t wear pyjamas. And even if I did, I’d never wear the hideous rags you dress yourself up in.”
Eckel’s face reddened. Apparently, the topic of who stole his pyjamas was enough to set off his anger. “Well, who is stealing them, then? Lerren?”
Madge shrugged her steel shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What possible use could a monkey have for pyjamas?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he sells them in secret on the galacticNET and uses the zenthars to buy bananas. He’s a smart monkey, you know.”
“No, he’s a monkey with a super-intelligence chip implanted into his brain.”
“Same difference.”
“Come on,” Madge said, taking me by the arm. “There’s a holomovie theatre here. We can pass the time there while Captain Pyjamas does his shopping.”
“You watch holomovies?” I asked, struggling to decipher the meaning behind Madge’s frequent personality switching from acid-breathed killbot to friendly eyed robocompanion.
“Of course. Doesn’t everyone?” Madge ducked her head slightly as we passed under the wing of a parked starship. “Of course. You don’t think of me as a person. That’s alright. I can understand. I wouldn’t think of me as a person if I was a human. But unfortunately for me, I’m stuck with a circuit board for a brain and a thermal cooling fan for a heart.”
Madge flashed a rare smile. I scrutinised it for any hint of a trap, but, not finding one, I was forced to assume it was genuine and return it. It was a strange feeling, smiling at someone who had made more verbal jabs at you in the past twenty-four hours than most bullies had made at me during my entire time at school.
“Hurry it up, Eckel,” Madge called back to our rotund leader, who was lagging behind. “The retail zone closes in six hours.”
We took a few more steps, then Madge stopped abruptly.
“Eckel?” the droid called across the tops of the vessels parked in the hangar. “Is something wrong? Eckel?”
Madge fired a concerned stare across the hanger at the solitary figure frozen under the wing of a mammoth fighter craft, but Eckel didn’t turn around, not even when Madge called his name a second time, and then a third time, too.
“Wait here,” Madge said, then she released her grip on my arm and marched across the hanger. I watched in the midst of a cloud of confusion as Madge said something to Eckle, and he replied without tearing his gaze from whatever it was he was looking at. Madge said something else, and then her head turned to look in the direction Eckle was looking, and while reading the expression of a droid wearing sunglasses was about as hard as kicking a turboball without any legs, I felt certain I could detect a considerable amount of alarm in her robotic visage.
Following the line of their stares, I tracked my gaze over the tops of the assembled starships until it fell onto the huge holoboard spread out over the far wall of the hanger where, only moments earlier, there had been that advertisement for Grandma’s Best Chrono Pretzels, but where there was now a grid of square holos featuring what looked like the cast of Space Mafia 17. At the top of the holoboard in enormous red letters were the words ‘TRI-GALACTIC TRANSGRESSORS’. At the bottom of the holoboard was a comm code and a few lines of text that promised an unspecified amount of zenthars in exchange for information about any of the listed felons. And just to the right of that little scrawl of text was an emblem I was as familiar with as I was with the sound of my own breathing.
A blaster and a shield crossed over a starmap.
The emblem of the Bounty Hunter Academy.
While it was standard procedure for bounty hunters to hunt down their targets by using only the established, ‘respected’ methods of tracking (following digital trails, paying bartenders for information, tying people to thruster banks and threatening to turn them on if they didn’t spill everything they knew about the target), there were occasional instances when a bounty hunter might choose to enlist the aid of the intergalactic citizenry. The obvious reason was that the particular bounty in question was proving somewhat hard to track. But this wasn’t always the case. Sometimes it was a tactical move to flush the bounty out from wherever they were hiding. Sometimes it was a local law enforcement procedure the bounty hunter (who was not above the law) was forced to obey.
And sometimes…
Sometimes the bounty hunter just wanted to play with their prey before they ripped it to shreds.
At first, I assumed Eckle must have seen someone he knew on that holoboard and was worried about their safety. Perhaps a friend or a cousin. Maybe even an uncle or a brother. But as my eyes tracked over those gnarled, pockmarked faces - faces that were, for the most part, so downright ugly they probably couldn’t even hide behind a stealthsuit’s active camouflage mode - my gaze came to rest on a familiar countenance.
The face was chubby and bedraggled, with dishevelled, straw-like hair and wide eyes that looked like they hadn’t blinked in a decade. Around his shoulders was a crimson trench coat, and wrapped tightly around his neck was a gleaming sheet of metal.
A steel neckbrace…
I almost jumped through the ceiling of the hangar when a hand thumped down on my shoulder.
“We have to go,” said Madge, her eyes locked on Eckel, who hadn’t moved from the spot where he had first started doing his impression of a statue. “Now.”
I nodded, knowing the serious of that holoboard as well as Madge did, if not better. “Right,” I said, instinctively glancing left and right for any signs of trouble. “You get Eckle. I’ll keep a lookout.”
Madge gave me a curious frown, like she had expected me to fly into a panic. “Right, I almost forgot. You were a cadet at the academy, after all.”
“That’s right. And I’d appreciate if you continued to keep that little secret to yourself, especially since the present circumstances might cause Eckel to react unfavourably to anyone with links to the academy.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
I waited for Madge to skip back over to Eckel, but instead she held me in a penetrating stare. Behind her thick sunglasses, I could almost hear her circuits whirring away on overdrive.
“Madge? Is everything OK?”
Madge seemed to finally arrive at her question, and then she voiced it. “You aren’t affiliated with the academy anymore, are you?”
I smothered a sudden rush of anger. Was this really the time to discuss past loyalties? “I couldn’t give a single space rat dropping about the academy,” I said, and I meant it. “As far as I’m concerned, it can get sucked into a black hole.”
Madge held me in her arresting stare as she presumably ran my words through whatever inbuilt lie-detection programs she was equipped with, then she nodded and handed me a rectangular remote a few simple buttons. At the top of the remote in stencilled lettering was the word ‘RECLAIMER’.
“You know how to start the engines on a starship?” she asked.
“I might have to plead ignorance on that one.”
“Then just get the cargo ramp down. It’s this button here.”
“Got it,” I said, making a mental note of the button Madge had indicated. “You want me to get a weapon from the armoury the moment I’m on board?”
“That would be great, but we don’t have an armoury. Well, we used to, but the captain switched it out for a sauna. In any case, it makes no difference. We don’t want to get into a shooting match with a bounty hunter. I think we both know how that’s going to end.”
I nodded. “I’ll go get the cargo hold open.”
“I’ll go kick the captain in the shins until he starts moving.”
The blonde-haired droid and I exchanged one final nod, then we broke apart, setting off on our individual missions. As I wove through the landing struts of the parked starships, my eyes whipping left and right like the security scanbeams on the front of the president of the Tri-Galactic Territories’ hovercar, my thoughts turned to the identity of the bounty hunter who had been tasked with catching my new employer.
Whoever it was - whatever elite, battle-hardened warrior - we just had to hope that they weren’t on our trail just yet.
Because if they were…
I swallowed, clutching hard at the remote.
If they were, our chances of escape were about as slim as a singularity on a weight-loss diet.
15
Chapter 15
“Exit clearance received,” said Madge over the hum of the ship’s engines coming online. “Want me to take her out?”
Eckel shook his head in the pilot’s seat. “I’ll do it.”
Madge nodded in a way that didn’t suggest complete and total confidence, but if she had any disconcerting thoughts, she kept them to herself. Eckel, for his part, had recovered rather well after seeing his face on the list of Tri-Galactic Transgressors. The faraway stare that had occupied his face in the hanger had gone the moment he had mistakenly (or, quite possibly, if Madge had anything to do with it, on purpose) whacked his head on the door frame that marked the division between the cargo hold and the rest of the ship. Now, the captain of the Reclaimer appeared steady and alert, but both Madge and I kept watch out of the corners of our eyes, ready to give Eckel a sharp yell (or, in Madge’s case, a sharp elbow on the ribs) should he show any signs that he was about to do another zombie impersonation.
“Should we continue on our original heading?” Madge asked as the ship slid through the hangar forcefield, moving into position in the centre of the bright yellow rectangles that marked the exit route from Starcore Station.
“No reason not to,” said Eckel. He flicked a switch overhead, and there was a whirr underneath the ship that might have been the landing struts disappearing back into the underside of the ship. “As far as we know, we haven’t been tagged yet. And besides, if we turn around, we’ll only end up back in orbit around Tenkankor.”
Madge pushed her pink sunglasses up her nose. “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea. I mean, if there’s one place in the Tri-Galactic Territories a bounty hunter would have a hard time catching a target, it’s on a planet controlled by the League of Human-Controlled Worlds.”
“The League of Human-Controlled World doesn’t exist any more. And while the authorities on Tenkankor are undoubtedly hostile towards anyone who isn’t descended from the losers of the Third Tri-Galactic War, they won’t risk incurring the wrath of the Bounty Hunter Academy by interfering with a mission that’s received full authorisation from the bounty hunter supreme herself. Besides, even if they did want to help us, there isn’t much they’d be able to do against a bounty hunter. The space gods know entire star systems have tried to get in the way of a bounty hunter before, but in every instance, the only thing they succeeded in doing was slowing down the inevitable.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?” Madge asked, her frustration threatening to overload her capacitors. “We can’t just let the bounty hunter catch you.”
“We’re not going to.”
Eckel slid the throttle forward, and the ship picked up speed, moving through the last of the channel markers at a clip that was definitely in excess of the maximum allowed velocity while leaving or entering a spacestation. A light on the comm board started flashing. The hanger controller no doubt had some choice words for our ears. But Eckel made no motion to open a comm channel.
I waited patiently for Madge to ask for clarification regarding our ultimate destination, but instead the droid merely sunk back in her chair, her metal lips wrinkled with concern.
“What’s the plan, then?” I tentatively asked. “Where are we supposed to go that a bounty hunter can’t follow?”
I almost burst out laughing as I heard the question come out of my mouth. The very idea that it was possible to escape the pursuit of a bounty hunter was so ridiculous I should have thrown myself out of the airlock for even thinking it. There was nowhere we could go, nowhere we could run to, where we would be out of the reach of a bounty hunter.
Nowhere except…
“I think she’s figured it out,” said Madge, a mischievous gleam in the lenses of her pink-rimmed sunglasses.
“Took her long enough,” said Eckel.
I shook my head slowly from left to right. “You’re both out of your minds. Are you seriously suggesting we do something that dangerous just to escape a bounty hunter?”
As we cleared the last of the channel markers, Eckel swung the flight stick to the right, and the ship responded without delay. The blinking light on the comm board flicked off (the hanger controller no doubt recognising a lost cause when he saw one), and the walls of the interspace tunnel began to narrow as we moved steadily away from Starcore Station.
“I don’t see what choice we have,” said Eckel, his eyes fixed firmly ahead. “You should know as well as anyone that it’s futile to even attempt to escape from a bounty hunter.”
I glared at Madge. The damn despicable droid had told Eckel about my stint at the academy, even after she had explicitly agreed to keep that information to herself. I waited for her to notice my attention so I could give her the full force of my withering gaze, but Madge was fully fixated on a large display on her side of the control board where a series of starmaps had appeared.
I turned back to Eckel.
“I suppose you’ll be letting me off the ship at the next stop,” I said, my eyes downcast.
Eckel broke off his faraway stare to shoot me with a curious frown. “Let you off the ship? Why would I do that?”
“Because, I—”
“Because she’s from Cometbreaker Colony,” Madge broke in, then she fired off a pitying smile in my direction. “Come on, Tega. We talked about this. Just because you’re from Cometbreaker Colony doesn’t mean you’re affiliated with the academy.”
I stared at the droid, struggling to grasp the truth in a sea of confusion. “It doesn’t?”
There was a creak of metal as Eckel shook his head. “Of course not. You can’t help where you come from. It might be a different story if your parents were bounty hunters, or if you’d actively trained at the academy. But seeing as how your father’s a toy maker and your physical appearance probably would have caused an outbreak of riotous laughter in the academy admissions office if you ever applied to take the entrance exam, I think we can safely assume you don’t have any connection with the Bounty Hunter Academy - that is, beyond the basic reciprocal relationship everyone on Cometbreaker Colony has with the academy.”
I stared blankly at Eckel, trying to make sense of exactly what he knew - or didn’t know - about my previous affiliation with the academy. Upon feeling a sharp, painful pinch on the right side of my waist, I spun around, but by the time I had set my eyes on Madge, her hands were back on the control board.
I scrunched up my brow as I tried to make sense of the situation.
She hadn’t…
She hadn’t told him.
My secret was safe - at least, for now.
“Got a route yet?” Eckel asked. His favourite coffee mug had magically appeared in his hands, and he was sipping from it with the delight of a space rat nibbling on a power cable.
“A little patience, please,” said Madge.
On the large display screen over which the droid was bent, a sequence of starmaps flashed up one after the other, appearing only long enough for a green navigation line to cut through from one side of the starmap to the other. All the starmaps had the same basic colour scheme: blue for planets, colonies, spacestations and other human-made space structures; red for stars; and purple for black holes, supernovas and other interstellar phenomenon. Each item was marked by an identifying label written in Standard Tri-Galactic Speech. But as I watched the succession of starmaps appearing and disappearing, a new design scheme appeared - this one with a completely different colour scheme and with labels written in a language I felt certain I had never seen before.
I scraped my jaw up from the floor. “Are those…?”
“Outsider starmaps? That’s right. Look a little funny, don’t they?”
I blinked at the mysterious collection of muted purples, chalky whites and lime greens. At first, it felt like I was looking at one of those proto-modern artworks (the kind that rich idiots were in the habit of paying exorbitant amounts of zenthars to acquire for the wall of their private turboball pitch). But as the starmaps flashed up on the control board, I started to discern the outlines of planet, moons, stars and other space-bound phenomena with which I was readily familiar. However, it wasn’t long before I began to see things that made me wish I was suffering from that rare illness that caused your eyeballs to go wandering off by themselves for a few hours at a time.
Gigantic constructions the size of entire star systems.
