Bounty hunter academy 2, p.17
Bounty Hunter Academy 2, page 17
“I didn’t say I went inside the forcefield,” said Tartrian defensively. He looked left and right, presumably checking to make sure he would not be overheard, then he leaned in closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “But Krain did.”
“Krain went inside the forcefield around the climate control station at night?”
Tartrian nodded. “That’s why I followed him. When I saw him slip inside the forcefield, I wanted to know what he was up to.”
“So you did go inside the forcefield at night, after all?”
“Not at the beginning. Only after I saw Krain go inside first.”
I gave Tartrian an unimpressed frown. If he was going to be a bounty hunter, he would have to get better at not looking so embarrassed all the time.
“Anyway,” he said, seemingly keen to move the conversation along quickly, “after I followed him inside, he crept onto that derelict hoverbus. I thought about leaving at that point, but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to go.”
“It’s called ‘curiosity’,” I explained in mock seriousness, “and it’s killed more cats than you could possibly imagine.”
“Well, whatever the reason was, I hung around. I didn’t try to look inside the hoverbus - not at first, anyway, but when I saw a strange glowing light coming from inside the vehicle, I climbed up onto the rim that runs around the edge of the hoverengines and looked inside.”
My breathing slowed to a ghostly whisper. I was utterly captivated by Tartrian’s story - more so than I was by the plot of any holomovie I had ever seen.
“And what did you see?” I asked, fearing to hear the answer.
Tartrian studied my face as if he was still trying to make his mind up about something. Finally, he said, “I saw a glowspider.”
I nodded like a zombie. “A glowspider.”
“Krain was holding it in his hand. I guess he must have taken it out from one of his pockets, because I hadn’t seen it on him when he went into the station grounds.” Tartrian’s eyes glazed over as he seemed to relive the memory. “Anyway, he—”
Tartrian broke off. Whatever happened next, it had caused Tartrian a great deal of emotional turmoil. But what was it? What had Krain done with that glowspider? Or what had he done to it?
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” said Tartrian, seeming to read my concerned expression.
“He didn’t kill it?” I asked.
“No, he killed it. But not in the way you’re thinking. And that’s not what—”
Tartrian broke off again. Sensing he wanted to continue telling his story, despite how painful it was for him to relive it, I tried not to throw any more questions in his way, even though I knew that some great terror lay in wait at the end of his words.
“He took out a vacuseal container,” said Tartrian, “and he put the glowspider inside. Once it was in there, he shut the lid, then he pressed the button to syphon out the air. The spider was dead a few seconds after that. I could tell, because the glow had all gone out of its body.”
I blinked, unable to match the sadistic behaviour with the Krain I once knew. I knew as well as anybody that many children liked to murder tiny insects from time to time. But Krain had never been one of those children. He was always so compassionate. It was part of the reason why it made it so hard to live without him around. When he had been taken by that outsider all those years ago, it had felt like the part of my brain that was related to kindness had ruptured. With Krain gone, it had been much easier to turn my mind to darker thoughts - thoughts that Krain himself would have avidly tried to dissuade. But still, even if it was true that my brother had killed a glowspider, it was hardly the shocking revelation that Tartrian had appeared to be on the verge of presenting.
“So what?” I said, irritation creeping into my tone. “He killed a spider. Big deal. It’s nothing to get worked up about.”
“No, you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand, Tartrian?” I snapped. All this blackening of my brother’s name was starting to get on my nerves.
Tartrian’s face grew even more grave, and his eyes looked pained as he wrestled with some monumental inner dialogue. There was still something he wasn’t telling me, but why was he taking so long to get it out? Did he enjoy playing with my emotions?
“Tartrian!” I yelled, the word exploding unbidden from my lips.
The blond-haired boy’s eyes snapped to meet my own, and in them I saw an ocean of inner pain.
“Wait,” I said, as a related realisation dawned in my mind. “Are you telling me Krain sabotaged your hoverbike just to get back at you because you watched him kill a glowspider?”
“No, he did it because he wanted to send me a message.”
“That bad things would happen to you if you ever told anyone he had killed a glowspider?”
Tartrian shook his head. “That bad things would happen to me if I ever told anyone about what I’d seen after he killed the glowspider. That was when he saw me, you see. The hoverengine rim gave out a loud creak, and he glanced at me for just a second before I ran. But before that, I saw…”
Again, words seemed to fail Tartrian.
“What?” I said, almost too afraid to continue. “What did you see? What happened after Krain killed the glowspider.”
Tartrian took a deep, weary breath, and he seemed to suddenly grow much older. Lines of worry were etched around his eyes - marks of an old pain that only this singular memory could bring out. Finally, he seemed to gather himself together, forcing himself through to the end of the unhappy memory.
“After he killed the glowspider…”
My grip on the bedsheets intensified. Before Tartrian had even finished speaking, I knew what he was going to say. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew it all the same, as sure as stars were born and died. And when I heard Tartrian’s final words, they fell onto ears already dumb with shock - not merely shock at the revelation, but shock that I already knew what the revelation would be before I even heard it.
Still, I heard the words all the same.
After he killed the glowspider…
“He brought it back to life.”
Epilogue
Mato wiped the sweat from the underside of his proboscis. According to the clima gauge on the wall, the temperature in the sunroom was almost one hundred and forty thermions. If it went any higher, Mato was in danger of suffering from wingburn, and for a Skeetraxian like Mato, wingburn was just about the worst thing that could happen to him. Unlike most species, Skeetraxians couldn’t regrow their organic material. A reJEN tank did absolutely zip for Mato, except for cauterising the wound and leaving a rubbery taste at the back of his mouth (courtesy of the oxygen tube the med droids stuffed down his throat). Damage to his delicate, lattice-like wings could result in permanent disfiguration that, at best, meant you flew a little wonky and, at worst, meant you couldn’t get off the ground at all. That was why he hardly ever used his wings (except for in emergencies), preferring instead to keep them wrapped in their specially designed heatproof coverings.
The dangerous intensity of the heat was all his own fault, of course.
It had been Mato who had chosen the sunroom atop the temple-like structure erected in the dead centre of Blood Desert - the unimaginatively named, red-sanded wasteland on the northern pole of the planet Xarn - to conduct his clandestine surveillance operation. The temple complex had contained a whole host of potential hiding places, but Mato had opted for the sunroom because he had figured it would be the last place the temple’s occupants would look for intruders.
Of course, that was all based on Mato’s own shaky understanding of Unumatan religious beliefs. The owner of the temple was an Unumata of high standing (if you believed what you saw on the inter-G news holos), and he was said to be even more religious-minded than most of his strange species (and most Unumata were extremely religious-minded).
Assuming all that was true, that meant the sunroom, seated atop the pillar-like temple complex, would only ever be entered on religious festivals, none of which were due for at least another two intergalactic standard months. It was the perfect place to set up the control hub for the surveillance equipment Mato had rigged up throughout the temple, bit by laborious bit, over the course of many, many sleepless nights, when the only danger of discovery came from the security scanners placed around the temple. Being ‘an expert bounty hunter of no short order’ (as it said on his Jool League of Bounty Hunters holocard), Mato had succeeded in avoiding the security scanners without too much difficulty, and now all of his surveillance equipment was in place, he could sit back, relax and slurp the synthetic nectar he had bought from the surprisingly well-stocked gift shop on the shuttle to Xarn.
Or, at least, he could have, if it hadn’t been for that damned heat.
“Feeling a little hot around the thorax?” croaked Yathul.
Mato looked up from his equipment with one of his sixteen eyes. The rest he kept mostly focused on the screens relaying footage from the many surveillance cams he had installed around the temple, but he kept a few eyes pointed in other places, too - most importantly, the door, through which any number of the temple’s Unumata guards could come at any moment.
“Not so hot that I can’t laserknife your hydraulic compressors,” Mato replied in the gravelly, ultra-masculine tone of his intergalactic translation unit. “I’d like to see you try jumping around after that.”
Mato had got the non-standard ITU voice as part of a special package deal that had included the Skeetraxian-to-Tri-Galactic-standard language pack - one of the few language packs that could translate perfectly into the ugly language humans used. Unlike most races that had to rely on the far-from-perfect droid-made translations on the rare (and unpleasant) occasion when they were forced to converse with a member of the human race, Skeetraxians with the language pack could be understood in perfect clarity, right down to the translation of all sorts of odd Skeetraxian idioms, such as ‘Dance in the nectar, but don’t drown in the pollen’.
Mato wasn’t sure how the language pack had come into existence. Presumably, some human had been stranded on Skeetraxia for long enough to pick up the native dialect. Either that or a Skeetraxian had spent inordinate amounts of time in the Tri-Galactic Territories (but, as far as Mato was aware, he was the only Skeetraxian who had ever even entered human-controlled space). It didn’t matter either way. The only thing that mattered was that Mato could be understood by the humans when he called them ‘two-eyed groundcrawlers’.
Yathul made an irritated, throaty sound. It was the same sound she made every time her own attempt at goading humour was hit back at her by a cutting remark from Mato. She had been his AMIGO for six years now, ever since his last AMIGO was destroyed on a mission to capture a nefarious bounty-hunter-turned-space-pirate.
Now what had his name been again?
Sungleam? Moontide? Starwave?
Mato couldn’t remember. The only thing he could recall, aside from springing his magnificent dazzle on the BHA traitor, was the moment when he had fastened his neural inhibitor bands around the target’s wrists. At that moment, he had caught a strange look in the traitor’s eyes, almost like a look of satisfaction.
It was almost like he had wanted to get caught.
But not before he had blown Mato’s AMIGO to pieces with his twin plug zappers. (Honestly, who went around using weapons that dated back to the time when the Earth wasn’t just a pile of floating space rubble?)
Mato hadn’t been able to believe the hunterNET bulletin he had received a few weeks earlier. First, this ex-space pirate had been made Chief Examiner. And then, he’d only gone and been made Hunter Commandant. Mato couldn’t imagine what dirty secret this Starwave knew about the bounty hunter supreme, but it must have been a good one to make her so pliable to his will.
“He’s heading for the holocomm room,” said Yathul, his long legs bent sharply as he sat next to Mato. As his bright blue eyes went from screen to screen, his head gave off a mechanical whirr.
“I can see that,” said Mato, irritated that his AMIGO was acting like she was some kind of equal partner and not merely a specialised droid that was built in the likeness of a frog.
Mato studied the screen Yathul was looking at. He hadn’t, in fact, seen that the person he was supposed to be watching, the owner of the temple, was on the move. But now that he looked, he saw that it was true. The unmistakable shape of the towering Unumata - towering even by Unumata standards - had left the rec hall and was now steadily moving down the long corridor that led to the temple’s only holocomm room.
“You did manage to get a camera in there, didn’t you?” asked Yathul.
“Of course I did,” Mato snapped, his irritation growing with the heat. With a few button presses, he had adjusted the feed on one of the screens to display the feed from the overhead cam he had inconspicuously installed in the holocomm transmitter relay in the top corner of the room. “See?”
Yathul said nothing, but she watched the screens closely. Not for the first time, Mato wondered at the strangeness of his pairing with the AMIGO. The Automated Mission Interface for Galactic Operations that was given to each bounty hunter upon graduation from the Bounty Hunter Academy was not chosen by the bounty hunter in question. Rather, the AMIGO itself made the decision, coming forth from a robotic zoo of hundreds - if not thousands - of animatronic animals. And the fact that Mato, a person from a race that had many similarities to what humans termed ‘flies’ or ‘mosquitoes’, could be paired up with an AMIGO built in the image of a frog (a natural predator for the aforementioned flies and mosquitoes) seemed to be either a cruel joke of fate, or else a real, actual joke. The former seemed the most likely, as the only person who could interfere with the AMIGO selection process was the bounty hunter supreme, and Mistress Gome didn’t seem like the sort of person to go around making practical jokes - not then, not ever. The humour hadn’t, unfortunately, been lost on Mato’s fellow (human) graduates, most of whom had already decided that Mato was weird enough to make a concerted effort to avoid.
The ostracisation he had suffered at the hands of the other graduates wasn’t at all surprising. Being one of the only ‘outsiders’ (the repulsive human term for an intelligent species that hadn’t gestated on the humans’ long-destroyed homeworld) ever to graduate from the BHA, Mato was a weird unknown the moment he stepped into the main hall to take the entrance exam.
But he had made it through the perilous exam, and through many more years of near-fatal training, only to find himself lumbered with a robotic partner who had a list of put-downs as long as his mechanical tongue.
“Who do you think he’s holocomming?” asked Yathul.
“Beats me,” Mato said, scratching an itch behind one of his antennae. “Let’s just hope it’s about our target. I’ve had just about enough of this place as I can handle.”
Yathul’s robotic head swivelled to point in Mato’s direction. “So you are getting a little hot around the thorax.”
Mato ignored the bait. If the holocomm really did relate to his target, then he would have to ensure he listened to the entire conversation with his utmost attention.
It had been two standard intergalactic months since he had taken the job to track down ‘the widow’, a serial murderess who had been drifting around the Tri-Galactic Territories marrying rich men and disappearing with all their inherited wealth after their sudden and untimely deaths. None of the deaths had ever been linked directly to the widow, and they had always appeared to have been simple accidents - a starship crash, asphyxiation in a faulty airlock, a turbolift malfunction - but the pattern was undeniable.
Thirteen dead husbands in three years.
It would have been enough to make Mato sick in all of his stomachs, if he hadn’t been a member a species whose females cocooned their males moments after copulation, then slowly fed on their still-living semi-carcasses over a period of three intergalactic standard years.
Still, regardless of Mato’s own personal opinions, the humans seemed to find the whole murdering business thoroughly improper, and some of the families who had suffered as a result of the widow’s actions had pooled together to pay the BHA’s exorbitant bounty fee. What was more, they had even managed to scrape together enough to offer a bonus upon delivery - a rare event that only ever happened about as often as the Skeetraxian team won the Intergalactic Deathdisc Championships (which was to say, not very often). Mato had been extremely fortunate that he had been browsing the BHA jobs feed the moment the job had been posted. Mato had snapped it up faster than if it was a ticket to the Annual Lingerie and Nightwear Exhibition on Skeetraxia. (Despite being from a species that engaged in sexual cannibalism, Skeetraxian males still enjoyed gawping at the female members of their species in skimpy clothing just as much as their male counterparts from most other races.)
After plotting out the widow’s murder sites on a starmap of the Tri-Galactic Territories, Mato had noticed something strange. Every one of the planets, colonies or spacestations where the widow had ensnared her lustful prey had been close to the border of human-controlled space. Suspecting the widow might have been using an escape route that took her outside the Tri-Galactic Territories (flaunting yet another well-established human law), Mato had done some snooping around, and before long, he had uncovered a connection between the widow and the Unumata inside of whose sunroom he was now hiding. Mato wasn’t quite sure about the reason for the connection (it probably had something to do with interworld monetary tokens), but reasons weren’t important. All that mattered was that Mato brought the widow in alive, claimed his own hefty reward and spent the next six months sitting on a beach on one of the moons of Harmonia sipping nectar cocktails.
“Speak,” said the Unumata, his voice reverberating through the speakers of Mato’s surveillance equipment. If there was a sound in the universe deeper than the voice of an Unumatan male, Mato hadn’t heard it. It was like the distant rumble of thunder being fed through the resonance chambers inside a starship engine.
