Galactic Outlaws (Galaxy's Edge Book 2)

by Nick Cole

  “I no longer give thanks for the taking of life,” Ree said, not unkindly.

  Keel winked. “Truth be told, I’m in it for the money, not the thanks.” He clapped his hands together. “So! How do I find Maydoon and make myself some real money?”

  Mother Ree inhaled deeply, then took time to let it out slowly. “There are many events in play. More than you could possibly imagine. The end you seek will happen at Tusca. Go there, and you will find Maydoon.”

  “Tusca,” Keel repeated. “Just like that?”

  Mother Ree’s face was sorrowful. “Take care of this gift, Captain Keel. It is a secret that I am forbidden to share with any but you. I can violate this trust for no reason—not even for the one I love.”

  Keel didn’t bother to respond. He bent down to retrieve his helmet and marched up the ramp of his starship. “C’mon, Ravi!”

  The hologram bowed to Mother Ree, then followed his captain.

  20

  The Brotherhood was all hands on deck in the old dreadnought’s one remaining hangar as the Crow was hauled in from deep space via tractor. A motley collection of savage bounty hunters, from almost every race in the galaxy, dark circles drawn under their eyes and curling bladed tattoos on every limb, watched the light freighter pass through the hangar deck’s force field and atmospheric barrier. In some parts of this derelict ship, power had been restored; in others, grim, guttering torches burned where once deck lighting would have sufficed.

  All of the bounty hunters were dressed in the black leather ceramic-weave armor of the Brotherhood. That was the one thing that was the same about all of them—apart from the drawn dark circles and blade tattoos. Beyond that, there wasn’t a thing alike in any pair of them. Hair, weapons, scars, all were singular—and yet somehow they were all part of a universal uniform adherence of which only they knew the arcane standards of. All of it designed to communicate exactly what kind of nightmare you were unlocking should you choose to mess with the Brotherhood. They war-whooped and hollered as the Crow dropped her landing gears and set down in the hangar.

  Most bounty hunters operated independently and alone. But long ago the founder of the Brotherhood, a man Rechs had once known, had formed a small posse to pursue a renegade Zhee who’d murdered a trader’s daughter on some planet whose name Rechs could never remember. The trail of blood and vengeance those seven bounty hunters had left across the spiral arm in the Altara cluster—which was the frontier in the pre-Repub days—was so infamous that countless entertainments had been made to tell what supposedly happened, and how it all culminated in the violent confrontation known as The Coke Plant Shootout. That Rechs had been one of those men, known by another name then… that was a part left out of most movies. And something even Rechs barely cared to remember.

  He remembered Riley, though. The man who had gone on to form the Brotherhood out of what remained of the posse, not including Rechs. He remembered that Riley had been cruel and hard, and yet there was a fairness in the infamous killer. Riley was eventually hanged with an actual rope by a detachment of Terran Navy Spartans on Vaalcava IX. But that, as with most everything, happened long ago.

  “What do we do now?” Prisma asked. She looked out the cockpit at the sea of seething killers waiting to plunder their prize.

  Rechs grabbed his helmet and inspected it. He looked at the wobanki.

  “Get your weapon, Catman. They won’t respect you if you don’t have one. If you have to pull, pull fast and fire. Don’t think twice. I’m sorry, hairball, but that’s the way it is here.”

  The wobanki levered itself up out of his seat and went aft to retrieve his gear.

  Rechs turned back to Prisma. “Tell your bot to stick close to you.”

  “I’m right here,” announced KRS-88 politely.

  “Anyone tries to touch her,” Rechs said to the old war bot, “I authorize any means necessary to protect her. Override order nineteen.”

  The war bot’s voice instantly switched to something out of a nightmare—as though it were slowed down to the point of dripping Denariian syrup. The voice of a drowned ghoul. “By your command, General Rex.” The old war bot stared intently at Prisma.

  “Prisma,” Rechs said, “there are laws… laws of the bounty hunter. You’re becoming one now. It’s time you learn them.”

  Prisma nodded solemnly.

  “One: always shoot first. Two: don’t trust anyone. And three…”

  He watched the tiny girl. Felt as though he was ruining some precious thing that, left untouched, would have lived a perfectly normal and ordinary life of not murdering people for money.

  But I’m not doing that, he tried to tell himself. She’s already ruined.

  He nodded once.

  Goth Sullus, whoever he was, had done that to her. And as Rechs studied this innocent little girl sitting in the navigator’s chair of an old bounty hunter’s ship, having just murdered some pilot in space combat, for the first time he wanted to kill Goth Sullus for doing this to her.

  He hadn’t felt that way in a very long time.

  “You’re all you have,” he told her. “That’s rule number three.”

  ***

  The hangar was a sea of angry jeering and drunken threats. The occasional blaster got pulled and fired into the air, or at someone. But when they saw the wobanki walk down the boarding ramp wearing a bandolier of fraggers and carrying a double-barreled blaster, and then a small girl and a hulking eight-foot-tall war bot, a silence fell across the apocalyptic remains of the old hangar deck.

  Perhaps this wasn’t as easy as everyone had talked themselves into. Suddenly weapons were being drawn and priming switches thumbed on.

  But it was the old Mark I armor that really drew the hissing hush from every murderer. That gear was old school. Back during the Golden Age, as some called it, it was full of tricks the legends told of that weren’t just myths. And of course there had been all those rumors for years of someone calling themselves “Wraith.” Dealing out justice, never mind the competition. If the rumors were even half true about that operator, then now was the time to be very careful. And every hardened killer on the rotting deck of the ancient war machine knew it.

  Except that one guy.

  Because there’s always that one guy who doesn’t read the situation. Even among the Brotherhood, there is that guy.

  “Hey, Grandpapa! Where do you be getting old relic to play bad boy in?”

  The catcall came from a Lahursian, which explained the ridiculously mangled attempt to speak Standard. Not that anyone ever pointed out the snake-like creature’s linguistic challenges. When you could strike or draw a blaster so fast your opponent’s head would spin, most people weren’t going to call you out on your flaws. Unless they weren’t all that interested in going on living.

  “Me Rabu the Ripped,” hissed the Lahursian seductively. The humanoid snake strode to the front of the crowd of hired killers, clearly relishing its moment in the limelight.

  Rechs halted before the challenger, waiting. The hand cannon remained in its holster on his thigh.

  “Well…” crooned Rabu. “Me Rabu claim all your stuff by battlefield salvage laws. And girl child.”

  Rechs remained motionless like the dark jungle statue of some nameless warlord long gone and unconsidered. The wobanki’s paws caressed the wooden stock of his double-barreled blaster. Cats, like the Lahursians, were among the galaxy’s most lightning-quick uber predators.

  But everyone forgot about the catman after what happened next.

  Like a snake. That was what some of the Brotherhood would say, ironically, when they recalled the event over strong drink later that night. That was how fast the hunter in the old Mark I moved when he reached out and simply crushed Rabu’s neck. For a brief, stunned moment Rabu couldn’t believe what was happening. He flared his hood—probably some dying automatic response—bared his fangs, and sank them into Rechs’s mailed arm. Both fangs shattered, and that was the last thing Rabu felt before he drowned in his own neurotoxi
n.

  It was a horrible and violent death, and though they would never admit it, many of the Brotherhood were emotionally scarred for what remained of their lives.

  Every one of them took one step away from the guy in the Mark I armor.

  The wobanki purred with admiration.

  “Oh my, young miss, do look away,” KRS-88 rumbled.

  But Prisma could only imagine Goth Sullus’s fate at the hand of Rechs. Or at her own hand, if she had a Mark I suit of her own. Finally she’d witnessed real power—the power to fight back. And she found it utterly intoxicating.

  Across the deck, off in the darkness, someone began clapping. One lone pair of hands, sounding above the mortified silence that had fallen over the crowd.

  “Tyrus… Rechs.”

  The slow clapping continued, and now the entire hangar deck, once alive with the whine of engines idling for takeoff, and the growl and beep of heavy machinery loading weapons, and men and women scrambling to rearm as shields collapsed and hull integrity was breached, held its breath and dared not move a muscle. Now there was only this sound of slow, sarcastic, and utterly confident clapping.

  “As I live and breathe,” said the voice within the parting crowd. “Do you realize there’s a bounty on your head, Tyrus? Republic’s paying a planet’s worth of credits for you… dead.”

  Only a blind man could have failed to notice every killer’s hand, claw, or paw reaching for their blaster. Very slowly. All of them figuring how a planet’s worth of credits got divided up six hundred ways.

  “Goth Sullus,” said Tyrus, his bucket’s amplification system making him sound spectral.

  A man appeared within the crowd. An ordinary man. He wasn’t wearing the ceramic-weave armor. No. He was wearing… a bathrobe. A red silk bathrobe that was rather frayed. He had long dreadlocks and pasty white skin. A small bot followed him. It rolled along on two omni-directional balls, and it chirped and beeped softly at everything and everyone. On its head was a steaming bowl of rice from which two chopsticks protruded.

  The man swept aside the dreads and moved forward as though he were a dancer approaching some dangerous jungle beast. Which was very wise of him. Because he was.

  He smiled. “I don’t know of any… Doth Sullast. Never heard of him. Nope. But Tyrus Rechs, man… The Republic would pay well to have very dead. Yes. Have heard much.”

  If this bothered Rechs, no one could tell. He remained immobile, and it was this immobility that concerned all the murderous murderers on the deck. Everyone was trying to get as close to their blasters as possible. Fingers gently drifting in that don’t-upset-the-guy-in-the-ancient-armor-who-just-crushed-Rabu’s-throat-like-it-was-nothing sort of way.

  But Rechs… he seemed as though he couldn’t have cared less about that massive piece of slug-throwing iron on his thigh—the piece that people from the Savage Wars called a hand cannon.

  He didn’t seem concerned in the least.

  The men on the hangar deck were used to people being concerned when they were just about to kill those very same people. They were hyenas that way.

  They had grown accustomed to the scent of fear, and they liked it.

  Except this time… no fear.

  And that was beginning to bother them.

  “One of your clans…” Rechs began, his voice echoing hollowly off the darkened reaches of the abandoned deck, “is pulling security for him. They were on Wayste two weeks ago. I’ll ask one more time.”

  And if they were bothered by the fact that he couldn’t have cared less about his weapon, then him telling them he was going to ask all six hundred of them “one more time” and didn’t bother to add any kind of “or else” to the end of his statement… well, that was just too much.

  They were officially freaked out.

  “Who’s the psycho?” asked some nervous killer in the silence.

  The man with the dreads spun about to face the guy who’d talked out of turn.

  “Who is Tyrus Rechs?” he asked the suddenly ghostly white dude. “You’ve never heard of the Butcher of Andalore? Never read any history about the Savage Wars? Never heard of a little slice of hell called Diableaux’s Durance? No?”

  The man with the dreads cast his beady-eyed gaze about the crowd. Then he returned his attention to the guy who’d spoken.

  “Wow. You are just too stupid to live.”

  He rushed the guy, robe flapping, and gouged out the guy’s eyes with long dirty fingernails. The same fingernails he’d been rubbing across his teeth while he talked.

  Just like that.

  The others hauled the blinded man into the crowd, though his screaming was heard for some time.

  The man with the dreads whirled on Rechs and smiled. “See? I can do that crazy killer thing too!”

  “Goth…” Rechs began. He was heedless of showmanship and antics, making good on his promise to ask one last time. The air suddenly felt heavy and swollen with unstable thermite. This was where people, a lot of people—everyone in fact—was about to get good and killed.

  “I know!” shouted the man in the dreads, cutting off Rechs before he could finish repeating his request for the last time. He began to babble quickly. As fast as he could. As though only his life depended on it, and not everyone else’s.

  “I know you said you’d ask just one more time, and it’s pretty clear at this point that you can kill a discount-sized bunch of us real dead, dead, dead if we don’t give you what you want. Okay!” He slapped his fists against his robe. “Got it!”

  He snapped his fingers. It was like the sound of dead wood breaking in a quiet forest. The bot that had followed him rolled forward.

  The man in the dreads picked up the two chopsticks from the bot’s bowl and began to tease out some rice. He blew on it and stuffed it into his mouth, making exaggerated chewing motions. He let out a brief maniacal laugh.

  “I can’t honestly be expected to… to… to… rat out a fellow clan, can I?” He spoke as though talking only to himself.

  He looked at Rechs, then returned to his rice.

  “No. I really can’t. That’s quite ridiculous.”

  He erupted in an insane little titter, then put the bowl down and began to rub his teeth with one finger.

  “Listen…” he began, his head shaking, or nodding. Or doing both at the same time. “My name is…” He hesitated, to make clear that he was lying. “Beltazar Gex. I…”

  He twisted around and threw his hands wide to encompass the six hundred killers who surrounded him. Six hundred minus the snake and the guy whose eyes he’d gouged out. There was still blood and gore all over his hands. He seemed to realize this, as he walked over to one of the bounty hunters and comically wiped his hands across the man’s ceramic-weave vest.

  “Sorry,” he murmured. He made a sincere couldn’t-be-helped face, then returned to Rechs in long, quick strides.

  “Where were we? Oh, right—Beltazar Gex. Me.” He placed his long fingers on his bare chest beneath his robe. “The Tyrus Rechs. You.” He gave a courtly bow worthy of the most ham-fisted of tragedians.

  “You are a bounty hunter, too… right?”

  Rechs didn’t bother to reply.

  “Well, I’m going to assume you gave me an answer, and it was ‘yes.’ Clan leaders know all about you, and we don’t spread it around. Not even to the Republic. You see,” he turned to the crowd, “that’s how this works, everybody. Secrecy. Don’t talk to the Republic. Everyone knows that. Right, guys?”

  There were murmurs of acknowledgement.

  “See,” said Gex, turning back to Tyrus, “can’t give up Othgay Sullyay.” He winked broadly. “Because if we did, well, you know what happens next in the Brotherhood. We—or rather they, the rest of the Brotherhood— they come here and… and… well, I don’t want to be crass in front of little ears.” He indicated Prisma.

  He paused as though Rechs might tell her to plug her ears. When that didn’t happen, he gave a heavy sigh.

  “Well. They would come in
here and slit our throats—after they removed our hands, feet, claws for some of you, tentacles for others, tongues, and…” He cleared his throat. “Other things. Yeah, the way we do it—and believe me I’ve been part of this kind of reorganization thing—is we take all those things first and then we slit the throats. That’s the proper order, and that’s how you keep people in line. No talkee, no slittee. See?”

  He beamed at Rechs as though all this should make perfect sense.

  Rechs drew his hand cannon and stuck it into Gex’s cheek.

  The man whimpered and held up his effeminate hands.

  “I start with you, and eventually someone tells me what I want to know,” Rechs growled.

  “There’s… th-there is… another way!” Gex stammered. “C’mon man, honestly. This is savage. Straight up savage and… frankly it’s unprofessional. It’s not like I don’t have snipers trained on the little girl. C’mon, what kind of monster am I? Would I really splatter her brains all over the deck just by circling my index finger? Would I?”

  Rechs tilted the barrel back from Gex’s dreadlocked head. “Another way?”

  Gex smiled and snapped his fingers. The bot wobbled over. Gex took up the bowl of rice and the chopsticks and shoveled a few quick bites into his mouth. He smacked his lips as he talked.

  “Yeah, totally. We have this… this… clan law, you might call it. Beat our best guy and… you get anything you want. Even info—which is pretty much a sacred cow to us.”

  “Beat your best guy,” Rechs repeated.

  Gex shoveled in a few more bites, then set the bowl down on the bot again. He wiped his hand and sidled up to Rechs. He began to clean his teeth with his finger again.

  “Yeah. And actually, you’ll be doing us a big favor. We’d, uh… We’d…”

  He felt around in his bathrobe for a second. Finally found what he was looking for. He produced the joint and stuck between his thin lips, just above the barest of mustaches. He lit and inhaled.

  “Yeah… we’d uh, like to get rid of him. He went a little crazy—even for us. He’s down in the weapons vault, so we can’t really get to our weapons unless… well… it’s not like Montraxx hasn’t been awesome for us. And that’s saying a lot for a Kungalorian cyclax, big ferocious semi-intelligent beasts that they are. Really they’re just big old guard dogs.” He took a deep draw on his joint and laughed. Held the smoke, then let it spill out.