ROAK: Galactic Bounty Hunter

by Jake Bible

  He headed for the closest tavern.

  With no chits in hand, Roak’s options were limited. He couldn’t bribe bartenders or the wait staff for information. He couldn’t grease the palms of the local operators and make it worth their while to spill intel on any recent visitors. All Roak could do was take a seat and listen to the conversations taking place around him.

  When he found an opportunity, he butted in and tried to extract some information. The majority of the time he was rebuffed, but sometimes, he was given an answer, although it was always a very evasive answer.

  It didn’t matter. Boss Teegg was a conspicuous being. Anyone that huge with skin darker than the deepest void of space was bound to get someone talking about him. Not only did no one talk about Boss Teegg, but Roak quickly realized he was the first visitor to the asteroid in a couple weeks. When that bit of intel sunk in, he immediately got up from his bar stool and left the tavern.

  Something had happened on the asteroid. Something that had forced a lockdown. The all clear may have been sounded, but Roak deduced that the reason for the lockdown had been far from resolved.

  Back through the checkpoints, which were just as thorough as if he was coming in, and he was entering the outer port, his ship within view.

  Two men and two women moved out of the shadows of a small freighter that was parked right next to Roak’s ship. Weapons were not allowed, but tools were easily attainable. At least within the docking ports. So, the men and women held heavy wrenches, lengths of pipe, and span-hammers in their grips.

  Their eyes were cold and hard and they showed zero emotion on their faces.

  “Shit,” Roak muttered, instantly slapping at the empty holster on his hip. “Shit.”

  He was calculating which target was first when the ship’s gun turrets swiveled in his direction. Roak hit the deck. He lay as flat as he could, with his arms over his head, as the turrets opened fire. When the shooting was done, he looked up, and all he saw of his would-be attackers was a dense, red mist hanging in the air.

  Roak didn’t wait around to file a report with the security guards.

  He was on the ship and powering it up before the red mist had fully settled to the ground.

  “Thanks,” he said out loud as he lifted off and headed for the port’s exit channel.

  “You are welcome,” Hessa replied. “I know you wanted me to remain in the background as if I do not exist, but I could not allow those people to harm you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Roak said. “Again, thanks.”

  “Again, you are welcome,” Hessa responded. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

  Roak was about to say no, but he paused. “How good are you at hacking into station security systems?”

  “Good is a relatively comparative term,” Hessa said. “It depends on what your base expectations are.”

  “Can you hack into the Shor Station system and hunt for any sign of Boss Teegg?” Roak asked.

  “From our current location?” Hessa said. “No, I do not believe I can. The distance is too great. I would be detected within six minutes and fourteen seconds.”

  “How much could you find out in six minutes and thirteen seconds?” Roak asked.

  “There is no way for me to know the answer to that inquiry,” Hessa replied. “I could find out a good deal of information, but none of it may be relevant to your needs. Or I could find out very little information and all of it could be relevant to your current needs.”

  “Do it,” Roak said. “Get into the Shor Station system and find out what you can. Disengage at six minutes. No need to risk discovery. Especially since we’re on our way.”

  “If I do discover the information you need, are you still planning on visiting the station?” Hessa asked.

  “Depends on whether Boss Teegg is there or not,” Roak said.

  “Then I will get to work immediately,” Hessa said. “Unless you need my help with navigation.”

  “I don’t,” Roak said. “Concentrate on finding any trace of Boss Teegg.”

  “Yes, pilot,” Hessa said.

  Roak almost told the AI to call him by his name, but stopped himself. He still wasn’t happy about the AI being active. No need to get too personal with it.

  26.

  The hacking of Shor Station wasn’t a complete bust.

  Hessa was able to detect evidence that Boss Teegg had been on the station recently. Whether he was still there or not was unknown. That was going to take physical investigating. Roak hated to waste the time if the station was another dead end, but at least he could board with his blaster on his hip. Shor Station had no regulations when it came to weaponry.

  It was a bit of a wild frontier.

  Hessa gave him all the information he needed to make the trip quick and efficient.

  Roak exited his ship not with his blaster on his hip, but tucked into a small satchel he slung over his shoulder. And instead of being dressed in his usual light armor, which the ship had plenty of, he was dressed in a simple frock of dark grey with the work pants and work boots of a generic maintenance worker. Roak wasn’t sure why the ship had that outfit, and a few others, on board, but he wasn’t going to dig too deep into that. He had other things to take care of.

  Being a frontier station, Shor had no checkpoints. The law was loose to almost nonexistent. If disputes couldn’t be handled by the individuals involved, then sometimes the station marshal would step in. More often than not, no one stepped in and things escalated to a point where half the station was shooting at the other half. Then issues would resolve themselves and everyone would go back to whatever business they had to attend to.

  So, dressed like a maintenance worker, Roak slipped unnoticed into the main corridors of the station. He walked past rowdy taverns and brightly lit gambling halls. He passed by whorehouses, some upscale, some very not upscale. He glanced through windows to loan offices and pawnshops. He stepped over drunks and ignored panhandlers and con artists.

  There was way too much happening on Shor Station for anyone to pay him any mind.

  Roak studied a station map and found the sector he needed to visit. It was all the way on the far side, opposite of where he stood, so he hunted down the closest transport tube and ended up taking a seat on a shuttle that would take him directly to the part of the station where information he needed might be waiting.

  There were several other passengers on the tube shuttle. None of them cared a bit about who Roak was. He studied them all and not one looked in his direction. Soon, as the transport made its various stops along its tube route, the shuttled emptied down to just Roak and another gentleman. Once all were gone, the gentleman looked up and gave Roak a wink.

  “Evening,” the man said, getting up to move closer to Roak.

  “Evening,” Roak replied. “I think you’re fine where you are.”

  “Not the trusting type, I see,” the man said, still moving towards Roak. “I can assure you that I have no ill will against you.”

  “I won’t be able to say the same if you get any closer,” Roak replied.

  The man paused and cocked his head.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” the man said. “No, why would you. It was a long time ago and I had a much different face then.”

  Roak tensed. His hand slid into his satchel and found the grip of his blaster. He aimed it at the man without taking it from the bag. Roak’s eyes looked the man up and down, but he did not know the stranger.

  “I had a bounty on my head a few years back,” the man continued. “You nabbed me before I could get myself lost on Rylia Five. Unlike many people, I am not afraid of snakes, so using that planet as a hideout had always been a preference of mine.”

  Roak knew immediately who the man was. Which meant he knew it wasn’t a man at all. It wasn’t a Jirk, either. The creature before him wasn’t part of the skintaker race. Technically, the “man” wasn’t even alive.

  Roak sighed. He was getting very tired of sentient tech messing
with him. Hessa had been helpful, but Roak knew that the creature still walking towards him would not be.

  “How’d you escape?” Roak asked. “Or, should I ask how did you survive? I would have thought they’d have destroyed you once they finished studying you.”

  “Oh, they did destroy my old body,” the man said. “Unfortunately for the authorities that held me in custody, they used an inferior AI to run diagnostics on my consciousness. My own intelligence quickly found a backdoor in the code and slipped through. Mind intact, body incinerated.”

  “And what you’re wearing now?” Roak asked. “You hijacked a different synthetic body?”

  “Oh, Eight Million Gods no,” the man said. “This is flesh and blood. This body is one hundred percent human.”

  “I don’t want to know,” Roak said as he withdrew the blaster. The man finally stopped. “Seriously. I have way too much crap on my plate to get sucked into some homicidal AI’s Pinocchio fantasy.”

  “Pinocchio,” the man chuckled. “How very apt. No, no, I’m not here to trouble you or harm you. This is entirely one of those mysterious coincidences that the Universe throws at us now and again. You can put the blaster away.”

  Roak did not put the blaster away.

  “Very well,” the man said. “All I wanted to do was shake your hand. If you hadn’t tracked me down and turned me in, I would never have been able to evolve to my current state.”

  “Evolve?” Roak asked. He couldn’t help it.

  “Yes, yes, evolve,” the man said. “I’m human and I will die human instead of living forever as an AI brain matrix locked inside a synthetic body. In fact, I will be dying in three days. My heart is wearing out, and I cannot risk seeking medical help for fear of being discovered.”

  He laughed and shook his head.

  “So strange to see you after all these years,” the man said. “Especially now.”

  There was a chime and the shuttle slowed to a stop.

  “Well, here I am,” the man said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome?” Roak said as the man exited the shuttle and was quickly lost from sight as the transport powered up again and was once again on its way.

  Not much rattled Roak, but that encounter was so strange that he almost missed his own stop. Had the man been real or did he just experience a hallucination? There was really no way to know.

  He shook it off in time to squeeze out of the doors right before they closed. With blaster back inside his satchel, Roak made his way out of the station and into the sector where he hoped to find enough information to finally track down Boss Teegg.

  It took Roak a good hour of navigating the twisting, turning corridors before he found the living area where his intel source was reported to be. Roak cleared his throat and tried to look as bored and indignant as possible. He pulled a tablet from his satchel then pressed the chime to the door he stopped in front of.

  “What?” a woman’s voice barked over the small comm speaker welded to the outside of the door.

  Roak looked directly into the vid camera above the speaker.

  “Maintenance,” he said.

  “What?” the woman responded. “What’s that?”

  “Maintenance,” Roak said again.

  “I didn’t call maintenance,” the woman said.

  “I have a work order here to look at the power couplings located inside your walls,” Roak replied. “No one called me. The computer issued the work order when it detected some severe power surges.”

  Silence. Roak began to think the woman was going to ignore him.

  “What kind of power surges?” she asked.

  “How do I know?” Roak replied. “Power surges. I can’t tell what kind or how dangerous until I get a look at the couplings.”

  “Now isn’t a good time,” the woman said. “Come back tomorrow.”

  “What time would be good for you to die?” Roak asked.

  “What? Did you threaten me? Who’s your supervisor?” the woman snapped. “I want your name and ID number now!”

  “Ma’am, I didn’t threaten you,” Roak said. “I was simply expressing the likely outcome if you ignore this work order and refuse to let me in so I can do my job and fix those couplings before they rupture and turn you into charcoal.”

  Roak tapped the tablet against the speaker and leaned in close to the vid camera.

  “If you don’t want to let me in, then at least sign your name on the line saying you refused my service so I’m not at fault if your apartment catches fire,” Roak said. “Can you do that for me? I really don’t need or want this hassle today, ma’am.”

  Silence again then, “Hold on. I have to put on a robe.”

  “Please do,” Roak replied.

  He placed the tablet back into the satchel and put his hand on his blaster.

  The apartment door slid open and a halfer woman that had seen better days reached out for the tablet she thought she was going to sign. Instead, she ended up with a blaster jammed under her nose and a hand against her chest pushing her back into her apartment.

  Once inside, Roak reached back and locked the door then leaned against it, the blaster still pressed up against the woman’s nostrils.

  The woman looked like she was about to scream, but Roak put a finger to his lips and gently pressed the trigger so the tip of the blaster glowed red hot, singing the woman’s skin. Her eyes went wide with fear and pain and Roak let go of the trigger before she began to cry.

  “I need to ask you some questions,” Roak said. “If you cooperate and answer my questions, then you get to survive this day.”

  “What about the power couplings?” the woman asked.

  That stunned Roak for a second. He wrinkled his brow.

  “What? No. There are no power couplings,” Roak said. “I made that up to get inside here.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. “So my apartment isn’t going to burn down?”

  “No, it’s not going to burn down unless I burn it down,” Roak snapped. “Just shut up and listen to me. Got it?”

  “I got it,” the woman said as she tightened her robe around her body. “Can I sit down? My legs hurt.”

  “Yeah, sit,” Roak said and eased the blaster out from under the woman’s nose.

  The woman sat in the closest chair, a rickety-looking piece of furniture that had probably been yanked from the trash chute, intended for incineration, not a second or third life in an ex-prostitute’s apartment.

  Or Roak assumed she was an ex-prostitute. He’d seen men and women that looked worse than her still working the life.

  “Your name is Vampa, right?” Roak said once the woman was seated.

  “Yeah,” Vampa replied. “Who are you?”

  “Not your concern,” Roak said. “Let me ask the questions and this will go a lot faster.”

  “Okay,” the woman said and shrugged. Her eyes shifted to a small case over on the kitchen counter. The apartment was an efficiency, so the counter was within arm’s reach. “Can I have a stim stick? I could really use a stim stick. You make me nervous and stim sticks help me when I get nervous.”

  “Go ahead,” Roak said.

  Vampa grabbed the case and popped it open. With practiced ease, she flicked a stim stick up from the case and between her lips without touching it with her fingers. Once it made contact on her skin, it lit up and began to glow at the tip. She inhaled deeply then gave Roak a much more relaxed look. She even smiled slightly.

  “Thanks,” she said as she puffed on the stick. “What you need to know?”

  “You had a long time client,” Roak said. “Boss Teegg. You were with him for close to ten years, correct?”

  “Something like that,” Vampa said. “I don’t know for sure. Those years were kind of a blur, if you know what I mean. A man like Boss Teegg has access to some wicked good substances. He got me to do things I had never done before and haven’t done since. But I had a good time. I can say that. I had a good time.”

  “When was the last ti
me you saw him?” Roak asked.

  Vampa shrugged. “I don’t know. Like I said, things were a blur back then.”

  “No, I mean recently,” Roak said. “Not back in the day when you worked for him. Since you retired, when was the last time you saw him.”

  “I ain’t,” she said. “Man like that has younger, prettier girls to play with. No need for him to come to Shor Station and visit a wrinkled whore like me.”

  “Unless he needed something from you,” Roak said. “I know the man has chit stashes across the galaxy. A little research on my part says he’s visited this station eight times over the years since you left his service. That’s a lot of visits for a wrinkled whore. You sure you haven’t seen him lately? Maybe gave him some of those chits he’s been hoarding here?”

  Vampa dragged long and deep on the stim stick. She narrowed her eyes at Roak and exhaled, letting out a thin plume of blue smoke.

  “Don’t have no clue what you’re talking about,” she said.

  Then her eyes shifted towards the bed. And the only other door in the room besides the one that led to the outside corridor. The bathroom.

  “Are you kidding?” Roak said quietly.

  He turned the blaster towards the bathroom door just as it burst open and an eight-foot tall, incredibly obese, ebony-skinned man in full rage came rushing at Roak. The blaster went off then all Hell broke loose.

  27.

  The wall stopped Roak’s flight and the bed broke his fall as he was flung from one end of the apartment to the other. It wasn’t a long trip since the apartment was a tiny efficiency, but it still hurt.

  The blaster had gone flying as well and Roak had no idea where it was. When Boss Teegg had reached him, he’d only been able to pull the trigger once before he was lifted up and tossed aside like a piece of trash.

  “You have ruined my life!” Boss Teegg roared as he closed on Roak. “You ruined everything I built!”

  Roak didn’t have time to respond before he was picked up once again and flung in the opposite direction. Vampa screamed as she dove from her chair to avoid being hit by Roak. Roak demolished the chair on impact and lay there, his arms hugged tight to his chest as he tried to figure out how many ribs he’d broken that time.