Chapter 1: The Hunt

    With a rush of air, the corridor door sealed, shutting out all sources of light except the slight illumination provided by Leonnardo Alexander Craft’s eerily bright green eyes. He brushed a lock of his red hair out of his face. Realizing that the hair was impeding his vision due to a lack of his own concentration, he focused his cybernetic-amplified psychic powers on the simple task of restoring his hair to its spiky, intimidating standard. He then turned to his physical needs, massaging and stretched his aching, nano-gel enhanced muscles. He removed his sweat-soaked training shirt, revealing the network of scars across his arms and body; his almost translucently pale skin was criss-crossed with dozens opaque white scars, and several fresh pink ones. Several of them were inflicted in the process of alloy-grafting his bones, but the majority were supplied by close encounters engaged in the perilous job of bounty hunting. A firm believer in not wasting any time, he set into the meditative state that supplied a day’s rest due to another one of his chip’s enhancements. At the same time, he triggered the network link, projecting information onto the inside of his eyelids. Leonn Craft floated in the null-gee tube, viewing the wanted board posting inside his head while recouping his strength after a lengthy and thorough training session. He scrolled through the millions of postings, adding filters as he went. Within a few minutes, he had narrowed it down to a couple of dozen posts. The few at the top had multi-million bounties. The third down the line had a couple specifications that Leonn approved of. For starters, there was a very definite area in which the criminal could be stationed. Second, the area was somewhat secluded, and so very few other bounty hunters would be there. Also, the words Extremely Hazardous in bright red lights and a warning klaxon would keep the newer hunters out of the way. Newer hunters could be a real hindrance sometimes. He clicked “accept”.

     The “whoosh” of tubes opening echoed in the hall as Leonn walked to his destination in the station’s artificial gravity corridors. Other bounty hunters of various species, mainly the six-armed Mjynxi, made their way to the launch hangar, the cafeteria, the bridge, or back to their tubes. Leonn noticed Greticii rhetoon Koranti, whose name could be somewhat more easily pronounced GrK, undulating down the hall. He quickened his pace to catch up.

     “How are you today, Leonn Craft?” GrK asked while slipping an access card into the hangar door lock slot. The creature talking would have looked like a nightmare to someone seeing it for the first time, but to Leonn’s eyes the chitinous carapace, jointed arms, and bulging tentacles were an accustomed sight.

     “I’m fine. What’s new with you?” Leonn asked casually, ignoring the proper format.

     “You know I do not approve of your style of speech, but I am fine as well. What bounty are you working on?” GrK entered the hangar and punched in his code for his suit. Leonn followed and punched in his own code. The mechanical arms in the hangar selected the suits and placed them in the entrance tubes.

     Leonn snapped on the parts of his suit and sealed them together. “The Khraz case, two billion for a single DOA.” He attached his gravitic implosion lance projector to his left arm. His triple barrel bolt cannon’s grip fitted into his right hand, the bulk of it latched to his upper arm’s armor. He checked the power cells on the autocannons and EMP rocket launchers mounted on his back and shoulders. He did a quick check of the hidden sidearms and various other weapons on the suit.

     He commanded the hangar to reapply a frictionless coat to his armor and restock the low cells. He was then launched out of the hangar by the gravity catapult. GrK was waiting for him outside in the void of space.

     “We are on the same bounty, it would seem. Would you be willing to work together and split the most generous bounty instead of fighting one another like animals?” GrK proposed. Leonn nodded and switched on his jets.

GrK and Leonn reached the border of the hangar’s space and warmed up their rift drives. Within seconds, they had begun the rift trip to ZarachOn space, where their bounty resided.

The border of ZarachOn space was complete chaos, as most ZarchOnian things are. Hundreds of battlesuits, fighters, cruisers, and even some gigantic dreadnaughts stood by for inspection so they could enter ZarchOnian space.

ZarachOn inspections usually went two ways. Either a being passed through bribing the guard, or the guard “confiscated” all items of value on that being’s person. Of course, there were occasionally other ways of dealing with them, such as blasting the guard to pieces, but beings that performed such actions tended to get killed.

Leonn looked over the details of the bounty as he waited for the “inspection.” His target was a notorious ZarachOn crime lord by the name of Khraz-ayituanaak-aanaayatayya. The long string of letters represented the ZarachOn drones directly under Khraz’s control. Many a’s meant that Khraz was sporting a bunch of fighters. Many crime lords also commanded a batch of mercenaries of the same class as the guards. Though they have free will of their own, mercenaries and guards only do things out of greed. His eyes made a quick sweep of the ZarachOn waving him forward, and suddenly felt sick to his stomach. As revolting as the Mjynxi could look, ZarachOns were exponentially worse. Asymmetrically built, they had arms, legs, mandibles, and spines, all of several sizes and jutting out seemingly at random. If he would have spared a closer inspection, he would have noticed a slight symmetry to the asymmetry, two shorter appendages paired up with each longer one, but Leonn could not bear to look upon the hideous nightmare any longer.

His eyes glanced instead to the information on his case. Five other hunters were also marked as working on the bounty. Three of them were Mjynxi, one was a plant-like Krolokkon, and the other was a reptilian biped of the Sauric species. Not too many hunters for such a large bounty, he mused.

He scanned a little farther down on the information board. Near the bottom were the seven words he hated most: “Lacunians have taken interest in this case.” That meant an arrogant, cocky, annoying Lacunian would recklessly hunt down the target and try to eleminate it, just to “protect the weaker species from criminals”. It would probably ruin the whole hunt.

Just as he was reading this, the distinctive shockwave of a Lacunian dortran vortex laser cannon rippled through space.

Leonn sighed as he jetted towards where the shockwave originated. Just my luck, he thought, I run into the Lacunian already! He switched his comm to open frequency detection and heard the normal inaudible roar of bystanders. Several voices sounded extremely angry, and he focused in on these.

“-chOn scum! You will let me pass now or you shall suffer the same fate as this maggot!” the Lacunian broadcasted telepathically over comm, waving his laser in the direction of the mangled ZarachOn’s corpse.

“Arrogant Lacunian fool! We will destroy you and feed your carcass to the Nexi!” a ZarachOn bellowed back. Many ZarachOn guards were gathering, shouting catcalls over their comms and waving guns and blades.

The Lacunian’s laser began to spin, and the ZarachOns aimed their plasma rifles. A couple of larger ZarachOns drew Implosion Lances. As the Lacunian prepared to fire, a hushed silence fell over the crowd. A dark figure loomed up in the center of the ZarachOns.

<What are you doing, fools! You were supposed to alert me when the Lacunian showed up, > the dark figure said, seeming to be inside of their heads, beyond even the comm-amplified psi-capabilities of the Lacunians. Leonn tried to see what sort of being it was, but shadows seemed to emanate from it, obscuring view. <Are you trying to get killed? Not that that would bother me, but I’m sure that you would rather live. And we would not want to spoil the plan, now would we? >

The Lacunian turned to this new adversary. Leonn decided now would be a good time to be somewhere else. Preferably somewhere far away where there was money to be made. Many of the ZarachOn guards seemed to feel the same way. Leonn headed to the nearby planet, GrK following closely behind.

“Leonn, do you not think that we should have helped that Lacunian?” GrK asked, guilt riddling his voice.

“He brought the trouble down on himself. Whatever that thing was, it did sound pretty bad, though,” Leonn said, seeming somewhat concerned. GrK and Leonn matched orbital velocity with the planet in front of them and prepared to enter the atmosphere, thin as it may be.

The planet was small, and therefore had low gravity. This in turn led to a thin atmosphere, and very little signs of its own life. Alien life was far from abundant as well, this being a backwater ZarachOn slum planet.

Leonn and GrK turned up landing thrusters and set on their way.