Bounty hunter academy 6, p.1
Bounty Hunter Academy 6, page 1
Hadwin Fuller
Bounty Hunter Academy 6
Copyright © 2026 by Hadwin Fuller
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
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1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
20. Chapter 20
21. Chapter 21
22. Chapter 22
23. Chapter 23
24. Chapter 24
25. Chapter 25
26. Chapter 26
27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28
29. Chapter 29
30. Chapter 30
31. Chapter 31
32. Chapter 32
33. Epilogue
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Acknowledgments
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1
Chapter 1
I stalked through the casino, my eyes wide with keen vigilance, my ears straining to listen for unusual sounds, and my hand ready to reach for the concealed blaster under my jacket.
To my right, a group of players sat around a holocard table, their holocards hovering vertically in the air above the table like obedient bees. The faces of the holocards were not visible—only the player to whom the cards belonged could see what holocards they held—but the faces of the players were quite discernible.
A middle-aged man with scruffy purple hair, a metal nose, and rectangular sunglasses. A younger man with long black hair down to his shoulders, the tips decorated with softly glowing neon spheres. An elderly woman so old that she looked like she would be thrown into a cremation furnace any moment, but with sharp, dangerous eyes that reminded me of the eyes of a Vakian ultrawolf.
To my left, a row of lucky hit machines ran from the hangar entrance all the way to the bar, where a female server in a skimpy gold uniform collected a tray of bubbling blue drinks. Behind the bar, the bartender pulled a moon-shaped bottle of purple liquid off a shelf and proceeded to fill a row of triangular glasses—one of which he surreptitiously necked himself when he deemed no one was looking.
Beyond the bar, the casino opened out into a wide hall filled with more holocard tables, as well as laserhop tables, black magnet tables, and a few miniature turboball sims. The hall was dome-shaped, and the duraglass dome was largely transparent, with the exception of what looked like a galvanium frame.
Beyond the duraglass was the rocky, crimson surface of Iksor VII, a sparsely inhabited world in the Torgon System—about as far away as you could get from the centre of the Tri-Galactic Territories. A few pockets of argonium had been found on the planet half a century ago, but they had been mined to depletion, and now only the remains of the planet’s once-prosperous inhabitants remained, stuck in place by the prohibitively expensive cost of space travel as they scratched out a living from day to day, doing whatever they could to make enough zenthars to buy their nightly glass of moonjuice.
The casino had come to Iksor VII almost ten years ago. It was not in any way unique or unusual. Just your standard, run-of-the-mill, corrupt casino. The only thing that made it different from the casinos elsewhere in the Tri-Galactic Territories was its willingness to offer every legally available form of gambling—as well as every legally unavailable form.
Being that it was so far out of the way, Iksor VII was hardly ever subjected to official inspections by the Tri-Galactic Gaming Bureau—and any inspections it was subjected to were almost always performed by local inspectors who could take a bribe better than a turboball arbiter. The selection of games on display in its main hall were but a small selection of what was really on offer. Just give a nod and a wink to the bartender, and you would find yourself being escorted underground to where the real gambling took place.
Space rat duelling. Mindmelting. Tripleflip dark.
The casino on Iksor VII had it all. As such, it was just the sort of place where the worst sorts of people in the Tri-Galactic Territories congregated.
People who tended to find their names listed on the bounty boards.
“Hey, watch where you’re going!” said an obese gentleman in a one-suit made out of what looked like Engorian lion fur. He was carrying one of those glasses of bubbling blue liquid the serving girl was giving out, and judging from the rosy sheen of his cheeks, it wasn’t his first. As he staggered through the casino, we had almost collided, but my well-trained instincts—the result of months of physical training under the merciless Shade Brekum—shifted my body out of the way at the last moment. Instead of a collision, we had merely brushed against each other, and he had accidentally spilt a splash of his drink over his hand.
I ignored him and kept going. The target was here somewhere. I had to find him—and fast. If I left it too long, he would make his drop and slip away on the next shuttle, and I would be left looking like a damn fool.
My eyes tracked over the faces of the people at the tables. The place was half-full, but it was steadily growing fuller as the second of Iksor VII’s suns sank behind the backs of the distant mountains. Like space rats slipping out at night to nose around a biorecycling pit, the gamblers were coming out in all their finery to try to scale the casino’s unsurpassable wall of probability.
It wouldn’t end well for them.
And it wouldn’t end well for me if I couldn’t catch the target in the next few minutes.
“Dammit, he’s not here,” I cursed.
“The bounty file shows this as his most probable location,” Zozo said through the commpiece embedded in my ear. “He’s got to be here somewhere. Keep looking.”
I took a deep, calming breath.
Zozo was right. The bounty file we had consulted before the start of our mission had clearly indicated that the target’s most likely location was the casino on Iksor VII. During his nefarious work as a mid-level supplier of cosies—the most infamous drug in the Tri-Galactic Territories—Argulen Lott moved about quite a lot. He had no fixed abode, although he was rumoured to own a condo on the third moon of Koranous Vega under an assumed name. Still, he hardly ever spent any time there and instead drifted from system to system unloading his nefarious cargo—his line of business affording him with sufficient capital to pay the exorbitant ticket fees on the intergalactic shuttle service. That particular part of his travel itinerary was so meticulously well-planned that he was basically able to disappear without a trace until he emerged—all out of cosies and with pockets stuffed full of zenthars—in the Torgon System, where he liked to splurge his substantial profits in a matter of days on gambling, girls, and vintage moonjuice.
The dealer on Uldana Prime—Lott’s last stop on his cosy-dispensing journey—had confirmed that Lott had made the drop. Well, he hadn’t confirmed it at first, but when Zozo had hung him out the window of his 333rd-floor apartment using her extremely extendable robotic arms, he had swiftly given up the information. That meant Lott had to be on Iksor VII, enjoying his brief period of celebratory debauchery.
But where…?
In the name of Destron, where…?
“I think I see him,” said Zozo.
I jolted to full alertness. “Where?”
“Black magnet tables.”
I was already on the move. “Which table?”
A pause, then, “Thirteen.”
I weaved through the foot traffic in the aisle that ran up the centre of the main hall, narrowly avoiding half a dozen collisions. The serving girl in the skimpy gold outfit was coming back the other way, her tray now filled with empty glasses that she struggled to keep from falling as I swerved around her at the last second.
The movement put me on course to collide with a skinny man in a worn brown suit with one of those light-up ties. After another piece of nimble footwork, I was around him—but not around his enormous girlfriend, who had appeared out of nowhere carrying a tray of pink chips. She could not be sidestepped around—at least not without jumping up onto the holocard table to my right (something that was liable to get me booted out of the casino with immediate effect). Thinking fast, I dropped to the floor and skidded along the gold and black carpet through the legs of the hefty girlfriend. When I got back to my feet, I was standing next to a line of square tables covered with what looked like dozens of tiny staircases.
Black magnet tables.
I glanced up at the holographic numbers above the tables. The nearest table was table four. A glance down the line of tables revealed that table thirteen was all the way at the end of the row, right next to the duraglass window that looked out on the planet’s undulating red surface.
I hurried towards the table, moving at a speed that was just short of a run. A real run might have got me there quicker, but it would have also attracted attention—something that would have either drawn the target’s eye, or had me stopped by casino security, or both.
As I moved, I passed a short, stout woman with bright blue hair and thick, circular glasses. She was draped in flowing indigo robes with three thick white horizontal lines across the centre of her chest—the robes of a cleric of the Order of the Four.
When Zozo and I had read the mission briefing on the bounty boards, there had been no recommendations about using a disguise—only to avoid looking like an out-and-out bounty hunter. But Zozo appeared to have a thing for disguises, and so she had opted for the robes. I had judged it a bit unnecessary at the time, but I had kept my opinion largely to myself. Just so long as those robes concealed the many mechanical tricks Zozo kept hidden inside her half-cyborg body—a dead giveaway that she was from the famous Tinkerer District, and thus a potential bounty hunter.
I gave Zozo a deft nod, then I hurried on towards the far wall.
Table thirteen was largely empty, with only a tall woman in an angular white dress and a silver-haired man wearing a green transparicoat—a partially see-through coat that was steadily (and unjustly) becoming an item of considerable fashion throughout the Tri-Galactic Territories.
And there was another man.
A man with a holotattoo of a Vakian ultrawolf on his upper left arm.
“Tega?” said Zozo over the comm channel. “Do you see him?”
“I see him.”
“He looks pretty big, doesn’t he?”
My eyebrows pushed down on my brow as I considered the target’s size. “I suppose. But it doesn’t make any difference. He’s coming with us—no matter how big he is.”
“Well, I’m just glad you’re the one tasked with making the capture.”
I smiled wryly. “Hey, you’re still supposed to be my backup, remember? If things go sideways, you’ll step in, right?”
Zozo’s hesitation was brief but long enough to be discernible. “Sure. Sure, I will. But just try not to make it go sideways, OK?”
“No promises.”
I took another look at the man with the Vakian ultrawolf holotattoo.
An interesting consequence of Argulen Lott’s frequent use of public space travel was that he got to spend a lot of time in the While-U-Sleep gym available to shuttle travellers. As such, his arms were thicker than zubarin tree trunks, and his chest looked harder than the hull of a starship. His head was shaved, but a small shadow of stubble had grown back. He was missing the top half of one ear—a souvenir from a previous run-in with a bounty hunter. He wore a bright yellow tank top with the logo for some turboball team in the centre—an avian creature with six sets of claws and a long, needle-like beak. A leather jacket was draped over the back of his chair, one side hanging lower than the other from the weight of the concealed weapon he had somehow smuggled into the casino.
“Alright,” I said, stepping forward. “I’m going in.”
“Good luck. Don’t be afraid to use your dazzle if things go south.”
“I’m not going to use my dazzle, Zozo.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to have to depend on it all the time. A good bounty hunter only uses their dazzle as a last resort.”
“Where does it say that in the Bounty Hunter Guidebook?”
“I wouldn’t know, but I’m sure it’s in there. And if it’s not, it should be.”
I arrived at the black magnet table just in time to witness one of the rectangular magnets arrive at the top of one of the sets of tiny staircases. Not knowing how black magnet worked, I didn’t know what this meant, but the dealer scooped up some of Lott’s chips from a tray with lots of little compartments that was embedded in the table.
Lott’s expression twisted. He was already wearing a grimace, but now it was a double grimace. And by the time I was done with him, it would be at least a triple—perhaps even a quadruple.
“Alright, let’s go, Lott,” I said. “Cash in your chips and come with me. If you do it fast, I might even make a note about good behaviour on your capture report.”
Lott frowned as he brought his gaze to rest on the fourteen-year-old girl standing at his elbow. He had to be almost twice my size (not a truly astonishing feat, considering my diminutive size, but still nothing to be sniffed at), and being that he was sitting on a raised stool, that meant he seemed pretty much like a giant.
The drug dealer took one long look at me, his expression now one of mild puzzlement, then he laughed once before turning back to the table.
“Get lost, kid,” he said, waving his hand in a shooing motion. “I ain’t got time for jokes.”
“I’m not making one,” I replied, holding my ground. “You’re a wanted bounty. I’m a bounty hunter. And now I’m taking you in. If possible, I’d like to do it without you getting hurt. There’s a bonus on the bounty file if I can bring you in unharmed. But if I have to get nasty, I’m not going to hesitate.”
Lott shot me a pitying look. “Get nasty? What are you? Six years old?”
“I’m fourteen. Fourteen and a half, actually.”
Lott took a sip of a triangular glass of moonjuice. “And you’re a bounty hunter.”
“Last time I checked.”
“Well, good for you. Now get lost. You’re starting to get on my nerves.”
Lott turned back to the table. He dropped a few chips into several of the compartments of his tray. I stayed right where I was and waited. When it had become abundantly apparent to Lott that I wasn’t about to go anywhere, he hit me with another mean stare—this one meaner than all the others.
“Last chance, kid,” he said. “Don’t think I’m going to be nice to you just because you’re a little girl. If you don’t beat it in the next six seconds, there’s gonna be trouble.”
“Why six seconds?”
Lott considered this. “Dunno. Just the first number that came into my head.”
“Really? Or is it because it’s as high as you can count?”
Lott’s face registered the insult in slow motion. When he was done, the grimace was gone, and an expression of malevolent anger was in its place.
He got down from his stool.
I looked up at his distant head.
Maybe the stool hadn’t added that much height after all…
“Alright, bounty hunter,” he said. “Here I am. Well, what are you waiting for? Throw me in an SCU already.”
I looked Lott up and down.
Would he even fit into a stasis containment unit?
“Fine,” I said as I pushed up the sleeves of my jacket. “You asked for it.”
Lott smirked. At the black magnet table, the tall woman in the angular white dress and the silver-haired man wearing a green transparicoat turned to watch the developing spectacle. Their motion caught my attention for just a moment.
And that was all the time Lott needed.
He moved before I had time to react. One moment, he was standing by the table. The next, the casino had gone dark, and I had something meaty wrapped around my head—Lott’s hand. I felt a sudden force, and I was sent flying backwards. When I hit the ground, the back of my head smacked into the black and gold carpet, and my vision momentarily faltered.
