Hard Luck Hermit

Corey turned his back to the mirror and examined the body armor from another angle. Kamak’s recommendation had been worth every penny, at least as far as aesthetics were concerned. The composite material of the armor was lighter and more flexible than any earth counterpart, yet offered greater protection. Or so they claimed. Corey personally hoped he’d never have to find out.

“Everything good? All fits right?”

“Yep, we’re all good,” Corey said, giving an approving nod to the tailor. He was glad enough cultures had independently recreated the nod that it was still usable in space.

“Very well then, I shall send you the bill.”

“Bite down on something, Corey,” Kamak said. “This is where he gets you.”

Corey pulled out his datapad and waited for the bill to hit. The armory tailor flicked a fingertip across the screen of his own datapad, and Corey tried not to bite his tongue.

“Twenty thousand cece, huh?”

“Twenty thousand,” Kamak said, his outrage clear. Corey thought he was getting scammed, until Kamak turned to the tailor and continued his rant. “You charged me twenty-seven!”

“We’ve streamlined our process somewhat in the decades since then,” the tailor said, his face an impassive wall of professionalism. “And this one did not request lantum weave lining around the joints.”

“Your stock stuff chafes and you know it,” Kamak protested.

“At twenty or twenty-seven thousand, the armor is well worth the cost,” Farsus said. “Mine has saved my life many times over, and repaid it’s investment ten-fold.”

With a sigh, Corey swiped on his datapad and transferred more than half of all the money he had to his name. Farsus was right, good body armor would be a literally life-saving investment. He’d signed on with bounty hunters now. It’d be idiotic to think he wouldn’t be facing down a lot more bullets in the future.

The tailor waved his hand through an alien gesture of gratitude and dismissed the crew so that he could serve his next client. Having no reason to linger, the crew moved on rapidly, back into the crowded streets of Centerpoint.

“Alright, now that Corey looks the part, how about we hit up the Guild? Always helps to make an in-person appearance when you’re just starting out.”

“Oh, yeah, got to let all the criminals in the universe know Corey Vash is coming after them, right?’ Tooley mocked. “Got to make a big debut, look like a hotshot.”

“Oh, cool it, you blueberry bitch,” Kamak said. “I’m not talking about walking in guns in one hand and dicks in the other like all those hotshots who get shot in the ass on their first mission. Just getting in and getting networked. Knowing people is important, you know.”

“Knowing people is worthless,” Tooley said. “I know shitloads of people and most of them hate me. Having friends is what’s important. And you don’t really make friends, Kammy.”

“It’s bounty hunting, it’s literally a cutthroat industry,” Kamak said. “Connections are important, let’s go make some.”

The headquarters of the Bounty Hunter’s Guild was significantly more ostentatious than Corey had been expecting. Given how Kamak and the others behaved, Corey had assumed the whole guild would be filled with hard-hitting high functioning alcoholics lurking in underground bars. The facade of the guild had more in common with an opera house than a speakeasy, however.

Corey’s subverted expectations were quickly reverted when he walked through the door and found himself face to face with a partially scorched carpet, a desk that had clearly been broken and repaired roughly fourteen different ways, and a dartboard that had several pictures of cops taped to it. Down a hallway to the right, Corey heard glass breaking.

“Yep, Centerpoint authority only makes us keep the outside looking clean,” Kamak said, his face beaming with pride. “Interior’s still got character, though.”

“And several stenches,” Farsus added.

“That’s part of the character.”

After about twenty seconds of waiting, someone sidled up to the front desk they should’ve been sitting at the whole time. The poorly-attended attendant looked up at Kamak, swiped through a terminal at his dusty workstation, and then nodded.

“Kamak D-V-Y-B, and four unregistered. What brings you here?”

“Work, if you’ve got it,” Kamak said.

“Right, I’ll let some of our liaisons know you’re here and...it looks like you have an outstanding ‘possible internal conflict’? Seems like you crossed paths with another bounty hunter while on an assignment?”

“Oh, yeah, happened to jump on board a slave ship about the same time as the Heart Rippers. I let them handle it, you know how they are,” Kamak said, giving an exaggerated grimace that the desk attendant matched. “What do I have to do to get that cleared out?”

“Well, let me see,” the attendant mumbled, as he clicked through several tabs on his computer. “Looks like you’ll have to...oh. Uh. Nevermind.”

“Not a fan of the way you said that, champ,” Kamak said.

“Oh, well, it’s just, the thing is, the Heart Rippers are, well, uh, dead.”

“Oh. Well, bounty hunting, death’s an occupational hazard,” Kamak said.

“The Rippers were competent warriors,” Farsus said. “They would not fall easily.”

“Well, we never really stuck around to see how that gunfight turned out,” Kamak said. The attendant shook his head.

“No, they claimed that bounty,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. Looks like they got intercepted in transit.”

“Could be a lot of things,” Kamak said. “Rippers got messy even by bounty hunter standards, made a lot of enemies. We’ll drink to them tonight.”

Tooley nodded in a rare moment of agreement, though mostly for the excuse to drink. Not that she needed one. Kamak tapped his knuckles on the desk and got the attendant back on track.

“So, about that consultant meeting...”

“Oh right. You’re in luck, one of our consultants is available right now,” the attendant said. “Third door on the left.”

“Alright, thanks for the help.”

“Do we really have to talk to someone?” Tooley whined. “Can’t you just scroll through a terminal or something?”

“I could, but like I said, connections are important,” Kamak said.

The captain found the third door on the left, and opened it without bothering to knock. The interior of the office matched the rest of the ramshackle building decor, with several scuffed floors and a hole in the wall barely covered up by a dusty shelf. The shelf contained numerous trophies, presumably from past bounties: aged guns, broken body armor, and jagged knives that still had flecks of dried blood on them. Kamak barely even looked at the office’s sole occupant before pointing to one of the knives.

“I thought I told you to get my blood off that thing.” Kamak said.

The woman behind the office desk chuckled coldly.

“I did. Somebody tried to hold up my office a few cycles back. That’s their blood.”

Kamak walked up to the desk, and the woman behind it stood to give him a firm clap on the shoulder, though the stiffness of the gesture implied very little actual affection.

The alien woman had relatively human features, with dark brown skin and a long, narrow nose, though her forehead was punctuated by a crown of five short, jagged horns. The most striking feature of her face was not her alien anatomy, but what appeared to be a prosthetic mask attached to her face. The natural skin of her face had a thin line of visible scarring where the rubbery prosthetic took over, comprising roughly half of her jaw, a small portion of her nose, and her entire right eye socket, as well as a small portion of her forehead. The eye and mouth mimicked the full range of natural motion, and Corey could even see the false nostril flare slightly as she spoke.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon, Kamak.”

“Wasn’t expecting to be back so soon. But I got some lucky breaks out in the boonies and figured I had enough pocket change to afford to live in civilized territory for a while.”

“Nothing civilized when you’re around,” she said, only half joking. “Doprel, good to see he hasn’t chased you off yet.”

“Not yet, Ghul.”

“And Farsus, you’re still working with him? No problems there?”

“None we cannot endure,” Farsus said. “Our arrangement is mutually beneficial. He requires my guns, I require his ship.”

“And you two are new,” Ghul noted. Kamak held out a hand to his two new hires.

“This is Tooley, my pilot-”

“You still haven’t learned how to fly that thing?” Ghul said. “She’s what, the thirteenth pilot you’ve had to hire?”

“Seventeenth,” Kamak admitted, to Tooley’s visible delight. “But hey, it helps to have someone on the ship sometimes. Makes for quick exits.”

“Which is more useful for you than it might be for some people,” Ghul noted. “So who’s this thing?”

“This is Corey. He’s new. To a lot of things. Slavers picked him up off an Uncontacted planet, we set him loose and gave him a job.”

“Bit of an unorthodox recruiting scheme. You really feel up to this, Corey?”

“Don’t have many other options. None of the skills from my planet are really useful up here,” Corey said with a shrug. “But shooting a gun is shooting a gun.”

“Pragmatic. You might be cut out for this after all,” Ghul said. She relaxed and took a seat behind her desk again before folding her hands together atop her desk and leaning forward. “So. Time to talk shop.”

“It’s why we’re here,” Kamak said.

“I have something I can line up for you in a few swaps,” Ghul said. Both halves of her mismatched face were edged with severity. “A client has been looking to have something handled with professionalism, and discretion. If you can vouch for these two new hires of yours, I’ll put in a good word for you, Kamak.”

“How ‘professional and discrete’ are we talking here?” Kamak asked, glaring at Tooley specifically.

“The client reached out to me specifically because of the Farot job,” Ghul said. “I’m retired, but you were on that hunt too. He’d be willing to trust you. And expecting roughly equivalent results.”

“Okay, but he knows what the Farot job is,” Kamak said. “We clearly weren’t that discrete.”

“We got the job done, and none of Farot’s men found out he’d been taken out until after it was too late,” Ghul said. “As long as you’re quiet when it matters, I’m sure the client will be perfectly happy.”

“Yeah, we can handle that. I’ll stay in town long enough to hear out the offer, but I’m not guaranteeing anything until I know what I’m doing and who I’m doing it for,” Kamak said.

“Understandable,” Ghul said. “I’ll get in touch with the client. Try not to get into trouble, and don’t come back to the guild hall if you can avoid it. I’m not the only old acquaintance in town, but I’m the only one who owes you half a face.”

“I see. Let’s get moving, gang, the lady has made her point clear. Good to see you again, Ghul.”

“Try to stay alive, Kamak,” she said coldly. That was about all the sentimentality she could muster for Kamak. He quickly excused himself and led his crew out of the guild hall entirely.

“Sounds like you got some bad blood in the business, captain,” Tooley noted.

“Bounty hunting is messy work,” Kamak said. “Some people take those messes more personally than others.”

Kamak offered no further explanation, and dismissed the crew to take some well deserved R&R.