Bounty Hunted Read online

  A roar boomed across Guilder’s Mix like thunder. It hadn’t come from Ben. It wasn’t the Krutt. No matter. From the other side of the table, Ben felt something big slam the Krutt off its balance and send the creature twirling across open space hard and fast. The game table lowered in Ben’s grasp and he watched the Krutt smash into the opposite side of the club, right into the far mezzanine. The bounty hunter shook his head, sparks arcing from his helmet. A thick, powerful hand snagged Ben by the scruff and reeled him up over the railing.

  He looked up with shock all over him and found himself face-to-face with Tub’Num. The Tremusian’s big, square face gave him a mad look of fellowship. He had a swath of dried blood across his chest. There were burn marks and scoring. He’d been blasted during the raid. Now, he had just sailed angrily across the open space and rammed the Krutt off Ben, landed on the third-floor mezzanine and pulled him over the rail. Lucky lucky.

  Ben said, “Tubs, how ya doing?”

  “I have a feeling of anger, Benjar.”

  “Understood.” There was no time. Maybe a minute. Perhaps less. This whole place was going to evaporate. He had no vent control for his atmo-suit. He floundered helplessly, couldn’t thrust in any direction. Tubs was at the mercy of a weightless environment, too. They were both floating free with nothing to grab on to. The drop ship was still a level above them. They’d never make it in time. Ben looked out across the vast open canyon of Guilder’s Mix. The Krutt was recollecting himself, checking his instrumentation. Below the Krutt was eighty feet of empty space.

  We need gravity …

  An idea.

  Ben called into his wrist mol, “REX, you copy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We need gravity.”

  “Huh?”

  “Gravity, REX, gravity! Now!”

  REX had positioned himself a hundred meters off the hub’s upper deck. He could see the drop ship still nestled over the open shaft. Everything seemed quiet enough, the overall situation notwithstanding. Now his captain was calling for gravity.

  Gravity? How the hells was he supposed to do that?

  His primary system processes flittered through several dozen possible solutions to such an odd request, all within the micro-second speed of his preponderance computer.

  Energy mechanics: Feed arti-grav through an energy transfer generator—no.

  Spatial positioning: Supply enough orbital velocity to craft a temporary gravity field—no.

  Theoretical engineering: Construct a polar field using neutrino collectors—no.

  Planetary mechanics: Tug the hub into the Speculus atmosphere—no.

  Just plain stupid: Grab the damn thing with the mag-spires and give it a good spin to create enough centrifugal force to … oh!

  REX fired his retros shooting toward the station, expanding his mag-spires and igniting the electro-mags. They glowed their deep, electric blue, and as REX positioned over the hub, the spires clamped down with a big thump. He and the station were now one, belly to belly. Big portside rockets boomed rolling REX over and swinging the entire hub with him.

  Ben stared across the divide watching the Krutt realign his suit’s guidance vents. He and Tubs floated, feet off the ground. They had no motion control. The Krutt did. They were open to attack, defenseless against it.

  “Let him come,” Tubs barked readying for a fight in midair.

  There was a big thump outside. Ben looked up licking his lips. He knew what that was. REX latching on to the station.

  He shot a glance at the Krutt. The bounty hunter spun the plasma lance once, then tucked it under an arm poised for attack. He punched his suit’s jump vents and blasted across the space directly toward them, his weapon leading the charge, coming fast, getting closer … then dropped straight down over the ocean of negative space with a howl of surprise. Everything floating across Guilder’s Mix suddenly plummeted straight down with him—tons of debris and a dozen bodies flumping and banging through the club and crashing down to the floor way below with the sudden, powerful advent of gravity.

  At the same time, Ben and Tubs crashed to the third-floor mezzanine as the centrifugal force caused by REX’s thruster spin pressed against them. Ben groaned shaking his head and getting to all fours. Tubs rolled over cradling his injured chest. “Come on, Tubs,” he said helping the Tremusian to his feet. It was like lifting a barrel of concrete. Together, they stumbled toward the stairs at a canted angle with the skewed lean of gravity, both leaning on the other. “Tawny …” he called desperately.

  “We’re ready,” she said. “What’s going on down there? REX is going crazy up here!”

  “Nothing. We’re coming. Get ready to disconnect.”

  “Hurry!”

  “Yep,” he mumbled helping Tubs along, “just keep the fires warm, honey.”

  They made it to the airlock hatch feeling the increasing weight of REX’s spin weigh on them, pull them down. They couldn’t move. Couldn’t hardly breathe. “REX!” Ben called through gritted teeth. “Let … go!”

  “Copy, Cap!”

  Gravity switched as suddenly as REX initiated the space brakes and everything inside Guilder’s Mix floundered again. Their feet rose up off the floor. Ben barked out thrusting his hands at the airlock. Grabbed it. The spin wheel cranked over and they shouldered powerfully into the shaft. Ahead, the exterior lock had still been disengaged. He could see the drop pod’s interior. He snatched Tubs by the scruff and wheeled him headfirst up and through the tube, then followed, smashing shins and elbows along the way. Once inside the pod he yelled, “Go, Tawny!”

  The airlock clanked shut and they were off.

  “REX,” Ben said, “prime the inner-warps at point-two-max. We’re getting out of here.”

  The ship ditched the hub’s superstructure and initiated a positive roll opening the drop pod’s connection umbilicus. Tawny rotated the pod on the fly and slammed the connection home. Everything jolted inside.

  “Go, REX, go!”

  The freighter, now reunited with his crew, rotated toward open space and …

  Guilder’s Mix erupted with a sudden, violent series of explosions, shredding the hub into huge spires of wreckage, coalescing into one, big blast, then turning into an expanding sphere of energy.

  … and they were a point among the stars, quick—BOOM—gone.

  Nine

  They lowered the all-terrestrial vehicle from its storage position overhead down to the cargo bay floor, disconnecting it from its gimbal crane. They needed a place to put Tub’Num. They had no medic bay, no science facility. All they had was a dusty cargo space and a flatbed. It would have to do.

  Heaving the Tremusian up onto the makeshift operation table required a lever winch. He was in and out of consciousness, had been for two days just hovering around Guilder’s Mix, injured and waiting to die. It was tough to kill a Tremusian. Not only was their physiology designed to withstand the rigors of extreme gravity having come from the moon Tremus, but their spirit had been sculpted into hearty, defiant warriors. That, as Ben had concluded, was due to their cultural disdain for Malybrians, the scaly half-bull half-gator people from Malybur, their closest planetary kin. It was a disdain Ben shared, having been subjected to his share of Malybrians. Nevertheless, whatever Tub’Num had inherited from his specie had certainly saved his life from a body shot as well as the frozen tomb they’d just plucked him from—Tremusians were poikilothermic, or cold-blooded. It just didn’t make it any easier to load him onto the ATV’s flatbed.

  Lying flat at five feet long and nearly as thick, Tub’Num growled in agony with each motion, his big round shoulders settling on the platform. Tawny cringed gazing back and forth across his body. He wore the orange and brown security jumpsuit of the Guild with a silver vest. The uniform was in tatters at the blast point which had ended his day. There was blaster scaring and brown blood which had turned scaly in the sub-freezing environment that marked his torso. “Oh, Tubs …” she groaned and began cutting away the fabric. She had to get
down to the injury.

  He reached up and took her hand. Hers was dwarfed inside his big, meaty clutch. “Sorry I am,” he said. She looked into his smallish, glistening eyes set far apart on his big square head and gave him a sympathetically ridiculous look.

  “Tubs, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was,” he moaned. “Security I am.”

  Ben came over looking morose and said, “Let’s cut it with the small talk. We have to clean these wounds.”

  “No. Die I will,” he said.

  Ben rolled his eyes reaching toward one of the utility bots and snatching a can of bio-foam. “You’re Tremusian, Tubs. You’re not going to die.”

  “I will. I shall,” he grunted.

  Tawny gave him a sharp look. “You’re our friend, so shut up. Give me that,” she snagged the bio-foam from Ben, pointed and sprayed. It flowered across Tub’Num’s chest. It had a pain relief agent making Tubs roll his eyes in ecstasy. From there, they were able to remove his vest and shirt revealing his enormously-muscled Tremusian biology, then they wrapped nylon cargo netting around his whole body from under the armpits to close the wound and set a big bandage. With what meager supplies they had for such an occasion, they injected him with an antibiotic agent to ward off infection. Tawny readied a zap-syringe of a floxa-sedative, but again, Tubs took her by the hand.

  “No,” he groaned. “I not want sleep.”

  “You need to rest, Tubs,” she argued.

  “Rest I will. Sleep, no.”

  She gave Ben a look. He only shrugged, so she relented and put the syringe away. Tubs fingered the bandage, a large swath of fabric and first-aid adhesive. He approved and thudded his head back against the table. “Thank you, my friends. Died, I would have.”

  Ben positioned himself at Tub’s feet, both looking into the other. “Tubs, who did this?”

  He swallowed, shook his head, thinking. “I not know, Benjar.”

  Tawny sat down on a stool, touched his cheek. “What happened?”

  “An infiltration it was. A raid. A team of them it was. They positioned themselves, they did. I saw them. I knew. Their plan was clear, it was. I acted, but … too late.”

  “How many of them were there?” Tawny asked.

  “Many.”

  “Tubs,” Ben said, “what did they want? What were they after?”

  The Tremusian shook his head. “I not know. They took people.” He took a big, beleaguered breath and moaned, “They killed others.”

  “Who’d they take?” Ben asked.

  “Many Guilders. They took Guilders, they did. They …” he coughed up a plug of Tremusian serum, a bi-product of his alien biology, then settled. “They were above. The leadership. They took the leadership, they did, yes.”

  “The liaisons?” Tawny asked.

  “Yes. And others,” Tubs said beginning to struggle.

  “Who? What others?” Ben said needing to know.

  “I saw members, other Guilders. They …” he coughed in painful wretches.

  Ben reached over, grabbed the Tremusian’s big hand. “They were taking members of the Guild?”

  Tubs nodded his head weakly, said, “Yes. Guilders. They targeted Guilders, they did. There was a man … leader … a red man ...” Tubs hacked in a tremendous fit, fighting for air before his eyes rolled into his head and his whole body went lax. Ben perked up anxiously, watched for signs of life. Tawny covered her mouth with her hands, both looking on horrified.

  “Tubs?” Ben said.

  The Tremusian lay motionless for several seconds. No breath, no life … before taking a tremendous gasp and settling into sleep.

  They both sighed in relief, Ben rubbing his face. Tubs had said … a man, a man in red? He shook his head in thought. Was it the ramblings of an injured Tremusian, or their leader? Could it have been this man in red who’d staged the invasion, planned it out, launched it? Ben bit down on his lip pondering the ways he’d destroy such a man.

  Tawny backed away, absorbing the moment and began taking off the her atmo-suit. Her jaw clenched. Little muscles rippled under her cheeks. Ben eyed her anxiously. Here it came.

  She spun around and said, “Benji, what the hells is going on here?”

  He drew in a breath and began unclipping his own atmo-gear. “I wish I knew.”

  “What happened down there?”

  He looked at her apprehensively and admitted, “I ran into an old friend of ours.” She squinted, looked at him from the side of her face. He continued, “And I don’t know what it means yet.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  He sighed, “That Krutt, remember?”

  Her demeanor dropped to the floor. “That bounty hunter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Him again!”

  “Yeah, he cornered me.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  Ben moved to a storage closet and pealed away the halter bracing of the suit before hanging it up. “It would only be smart to assume he was looking for us.” He turned to look at her seriously, and finished, “Specifically.”

  She did the same, removing the top of her suit and peeling the rest down to her waist. “Why would he be looking for us?”

  “He’s a mercenary. Someone must have paid him.”

  “Like who?”

  “Babe,” he said hanging his twin B-7 blasters up. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Tawny leaned against the ATV pondering their next move. “Then what do we know? He’s a bounty hunter, right? A merc. Who would pay him to fetch us?”

  He leaned against the cargo bay bulkhead, addressing her. “Whoever they are, they hit the Guild in force.”

  “And there was a lot of them, according to Tubs.”

  “They were fast, efficient, in and out.”

  “And not afraid to kill,” she said.

  He looked away, whispered, “Targeting Guilders. Why?”

  A moment of silence shifted between them, tension growing like a sunrise. Ben’s mind danced through a number of exigencies. They all seemed unspeakable. He was reaching, stretching for answers. He heard Tawny gasp and looked at her. She said, “Wait. You don’t think it was …”

  Axum.

  The thought put a knot in his gut. His eyes danced back and forth before he said with more hope than certainty, “No. No way.”

  Tawny took a step forward, said, “He did say something about sending some cold-blooded henchies to come get us. Why not the Krutt?”

  “The Krutt … working for the Knave’s Blade?” he muttered full of dread.

  “Why not? It’s perfect,” she insisted.

  He paced to the right, stopped and turned, paced back, flicking his lips. The Krutt was a lone wolf, a solo character. Knave’s Blade was a seething pit of slum lords and criminals. It didn’t fit. “It doesn’t feel right,” he said. Or maybe he didn’t want it to fit.

  “Benji, they have the manpower for this,” she said.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t make sense. Why would the Knave’s Blade take out the entire hub?”

  She offered a reasoning gesture, “They don’t like the Guild. Knave’s Blade—they’ve never liked the Guild.”

  Ben shook his head still pacing. The growl that issued from him was one of denial. He couldn’t reconcile the possibility. Not yet. He said, “I don’t buy it, Tawny. All that over eight thousand yield? That was five years ago.”

  “It’s more than that,” she insisted. “It’s politics. It’s business. It’s Knave’s Blade and the Guild for criper’s sake. You know they’re competitors. Maybe that’s all Axum was looking for, just a reason to attack.”

  The idea made him stop pacing, freezing his feet to the floor. If that was true, it meant: “That would put us in the center of it.” He started pacing again, doubt creeping back up. “But how would Knave’s Blade even know where we’d …” he froze turning cold with a horrible thought, and finished his sentence with, “… be.”

  They looked at each other horrified.

  Th
eir open hail to Raider’s Bay. It tipped their location off, unzipped the proverbial old atmo-suits. The Krutt followed them … straight to the Guild.

  “Gods dammit!” Ben sneered. “How could we be so stupid?” He punched the ATV with an echoic gong. The pain shivered up his arm, cleared his mind. Something didn’t fit. Another thought struck him. “Wait!” he called and reached into his pocket, pulled out the memory cell. It had surveillance. Maybe the attack had been captured.

  Once it was plugged into REX’s onboard media system with all its data dumped into the main projector, an image zipped into 3-D visual content over the table screen. It was a time-coded shot of Guilder’s Mix in complete, real-time capture. The entire club shimmered visibly in the main hold allowing Tawny and Ben to rotate the image, zoom it in, pull it out. The patrons had been captured going about their usual activity. It was crowded. People from all walks of the twin solar system sat at the central bar, others along the periphery at the cocktail tables, several placed sporadically toward the edges lounging on couches, sitting at gaming tables.

  Tawny and Ben could identify a dozen Guild members they knew personally. Oonta Goomba, the big Prax-Noosian was over to the right with his entourage lounged across his mountainous girth. Vekter Ramm was there looking cool as a killer, sexy and serene, as usual. A number of others were chitchatting. The entertainment dais stood to the north of the bar area with its helmeted jockey blowing sounds and light over the dance area. Media screens flickered. Gaming punters actively hovered over their gambling tables. Everything seemed like business as usual.