An opportunity arose. A contact whose identity Lorric could not confirm, and thus did not retain an ounce of trust for, provided a sighting. Normally, Lorric would have disregarded it without question, but aside from coming from an anonymous source, nothing rang false about the message. Not enough time for the usual levels of preparation, he took a risk in simply going against his meticulous nature.
Perhaps it was fatigue, perhaps it was concern over his contract falling apart, or perhaps it was a simple misjudgment.
He announced the pursuit without hesitation, a rash and impulsive act.
Twelve ships they had of various shapes, sizes, and bizarre nomenclature including that of Eternal Loss, Red Tide, Broken Spit, and so on. Lorric piloted his own, called Sapient Grace. They swept into the system without scouting first, blazing with weapons hot toward TF-235, a desolate ball mined hollow centuries earlier.
As the stream of vessels dipped into orbit, Lorric dispersed exactly one order through his comm. “Gambler and Fredricksburg,” referring to two of his company’s ships, “begin surface scans immediately. Life signs, traces of fusion exhaust, I want to know about whatever you can find in three minutes. The rest of you—”
Lorric’s statement went unfulfilled as a rail projectile, launched from a hair’s breadth out of the shadow of the first moon, shattered his engines. A fireball engulfed Sapient Grace as the ship careened down into the atmosphere and dissolved into a million smoldering bits.
The offending vessel swung around the moon into full view, a squat and hulking single-man gunship toting enough weaponry to bring down a frigate-sized craft. Ballistic rocket, energy, and rail gun fire spewed towards the group.
“It’s not Ivan!” someone screamed through the comm. “Who the f—”
Two more of the hunters’ ships detonated in high orbit, snuffing six of the party in half an instant, and three more vessels sustained heavy damage under the onslaught. Eternal Loss, containing Platt and Denko, dove under a volley of missiles, unlucky blasts damaging orbital thrusters and sending the vessel, trailing purple-tinged smoke, to the roughest of landings.
Screeching through the radio, the team desperately tried to rally with evasive maneuvers, threading through the assault. As the vessels came about, ready to exact retribution, the gunship veered, breaking towards the planet.
In hot pursuit and spewing vulgarities, Fleur Benoit, piloting the speedy, one-manned fighter she called Blitz, slammed nose-first into tracking mines dropped by the gunship. The fireball of her ship trailed in the atmosphere, gliding through the sky for near to fifteen seconds before the reactor blew and took one more of the hunters out of the fight.
Before any of the chaos and confusion could be sorted, the gunship disappeared from scopes, and a flurry of noise jammed sensor readings everywhere. Short wave transmissions became garbled and incoherent. As the various hunter vessels dipped towards the planet in search, surface to air missiles boiled up out of the brittle crust of the rocky, volcanic landmass.
All of the ships that remained of Lorric’s team were grounded by the pilots to avoid being shot down or blasted to fragments. Three ships and seven more died in the never-ending ambush. Scattered across hundreds of miles, desperate attempts at coordination failed as a hover-vehicle blazed overhead and scoured the earth at the sites of each landing.
Denko and Platt extracted themselves and a tiny amount of their gear before the silhouette of their assailant loomed in the sky. They ran, diving into the cragged cover of a ravine as Eternal Loss was blasted into an even deeper crater.
“Holy shit…” Denko breathed, tears in his eyes at either the stinging dust in the air or the demise of his beloved ship.
Four more were killed, careless enough to remain too close to their vessels as they were hunted down by the relentless and still unidentified foe.
After hours of hiding, the distant explosions that marked the deaths of their former comrades faded into an eerie quiet. Hours later yet, Denko and Platt extracted their terrified selves, bruised and bleeding from the rough, volcanic stone, and set out in search of any survivors.
Night had settled, and the two crawled over ridges and tripped over tangles of thorned shrubbery. They heard soft scurrying of tiny, resilient animals, the evolutionary fortunate of the desolate world. The eclipsed moon hung in the sky, a bloody red bathing them in the memories of the recent slaughter.
They started arguing.
“We can’t use the radio,” Denko clutched it in his hand, threatening to dash it upon the stones. “Whoever that crazy shit is’ll find us if we do.”
Platt shook his head. “We’re gonna starve to death if we don’t find a way offa here.” He threw a gesture towards the barren landscape. “If one of our ships made it, if there’s enough parts to fix another one, we gotta find out. Or maybe we can band together and find the sumbitch who did this and take his. Either way, we gotta see if anyone else made it.”
Denko had all but cracked. Terrified but obedient, he allowed Platt to quietly make the calls. He kept his gaze flitting about the horizon, paranoid of the hovercraft returning at any moment to finish them off.
Not that prior knowledge of a gruesome death would have done any good; they didn’t have much with which to defend themselves. Platt carried his energy pistol, but Denko’s came loose during the struggle to exit the ship, and it’s absence went unnoticed until after Eternal Loss detonated into tiny fragments.
Considering the damage and what little remained of the vessel, it seemed unlikely, even hopeless, that any other ships could be salvaged, but still Platt tried.
Whispering into the radio, Platt managed to find four other survivors from two ships: one alone and three in a group. Through painstaking description of star and moon positioning, they managed to get a rough interpretation of how best to cover the many miles separating them.
Days passed as the bounty hunters hiked across the near-barren landscape. Though most were in excellent physical condition, the thin and abrasive air left each gasping with only moderate exertion. The miles crawled beneath them, and their pitiful amounts of emergency rations and water dwindled.
They passed crevices containing small surface to air missile launchers, silent now and empty of payload since grounding all of the hunting party. Denko, having dropped into dismal acceptance, checked over and scavenged a few useful, non-heavy parts.
Denko and Platt came across the loner first, whose ship came into a soft landing before being detonated much like Eternal Loss.
Misfortune fell upon the other group, still dozens of miles away, as one member sustained a serious fracture stepping into an unseen crevice. The whole group sported injuries from a rough landing, but the man with his broken leg slowed them down for several hours before infection took hold. With no medical supplies, it became quicker for the hikers and more merciful for the man to put him down.
On the evening of the eighth night, bright flashes resonated from the eastern horizon. “Are you all right?” Platt whispered into the radio to the other party, whose position roughly lay to the east.
There came no response.
Hopeless, the remaining three of twenty five traveled in the direction of their former companions, finding nothing but charred bone fragments when they arrived at the smoldering site a few days later.
That night, they made camp, and no discussion of what happened to the other group or what would happen to them occurred. There was no discussion at all, as each man assumed their time was short.
Brilliant lights and muffled explosions from miles distant filled the air on their final night. It punctuated with a deafening boom, and everything then went quiet. There was no talk, no speculation of what it might had been. The hunters had given up.
Tears formed in Platt’s remaining eye as he lapsed into a grim silence. His remaining hand, whether he was conscious of it or not, ran along the tangled scarring pattern of his shoulder and neck.
During his story, I cultivated more than a couple of theories. A thought struck early on, and I continued listening under different assumptions. Some of the fear Platt displayed and this sorrow he moved into: it appeared for the most part genuine. I certainly would admit a gradual starvation of the physical body and hope of survival would be terrible indeed.
The story itself held no particular lies, but I could tell in each moment that elements were arranged carefully,
