A Bounty of Love (Love Between the Stars Book 1)

by Willow Walker

  A Bounty of Love

  In another time, in a galaxy on the far side of another universe, you can find love between the stars.

  Yeva Hawthorne is a bounty hunter looking to fill a bank account with 20 million credits to repay a debt.

  Tobias Hawk is also a bounty hunter and he is going after money to fund a secret he has kept for over a decade.

  They are going after the same bounty and things are about to get tricky.

  1

  Yeva Hawthorne sat reclined in her pilot's chair, feet up on the dash. The view of her favorite nebula, the Lovers, took up the entire width of her cockpit window. Its red, green, and yellow gas clouds forming the shape that the early explorers of the galaxy had seen as two people in an embrace. She had parked her small Deva-class ship, the Black Feather, just in sight of the nebula but far enough away from the tourist lanes so she wouldn't be bothered by idiot pilots in rented day ships. Yeva pressed the tip of her finger to the screen of her tablet, scrolling down a list of bounty jobs. Most of them were too far away, required a crew of multiple people, or were just too low in reward to justify going out of her way. She wasn't planning on leaving the southern part of the galactic ecliptic for at least another week, so any side jobs would have to be in the area.

  Yeva prefered bounties that didn’t require a lot of people, so she tended to go after the ones that were just item pickups, cargo transfers, and information gathering. Other people complicated things, or when the reward was low, often required a 50/50 split of the profits. Yeva had a plan for all the money from her bounties, and she wasn’t about to sacrifice needed profit just to make things easier.

  Yeva stopped on one that caught her eye.

  50,000 credits for an artefact hunt. That was way too high for an artefact. There’s got to be a catch. Yeva tapped the “inquire” button on the screen, and after a short load time, the screen changed to show the full details of the bounty.

  To be paid out in the sum of 50,000 credits to anyone who can obtain the gem of Veritas from the planet Veritas in the system of Truth.

  The picture of the gem was an artist's rendering of an intricate necklace adorned in not just one gem but dozens. It was hard to tell from the drawing what kind of gems they were, but they were green and blue; the centerpiece was a circular gem in a more aquamarine color. It was beautiful but horribly impractical. A show piece.

  Yeva snorted. “Veritas? System Truth? What kind of pretentious knob head decided on those names?”

  She keyed a call number into the comm, and Beks, her sometimes partner in crime, answered. “Beks Shipyard. You kill ‘em, we’ll clean ‘em.”

  “Hey, Beks,” Yeva said.

  “Yeva, you coming to the west side?” she asked happily. Beks lived on the western edge of the ecliptic where she ran a ship repair yard. They’d been friends since they were barely able to walk, went to school together, and had been roommates during Beks’s shipbuilding and repair training and Yeva’s early bounty hunting days. Yeva hadn’t had much use for formal education after primary and secondary school but had quickly found her calling as a local bounty hunter on their home planet of Avertus, which eventually led to hunting across the entire galaxy.

  “Not today, I’m following the lead on a bounty. Can you double check the info and see if any one else has laid a claim?”

  “Sure thing, Yeva.”

  Yeva sent along the bounty profile and after a minute of hearing Beks hem and haw over it, Beks said triumphantly: “I’m sending along the detail, also it looks like only one other claimant, and it was over a month ago.”

  “A month? How long has the listing been up?” A month was a long time for a claim to be in on a bounty. A week at most for the harder ones, and a few days for the easy ones.

  “Listing has been up for six months. Fifteen claims have been laid since it posted, but other than the current one, it looks like they all pulled out.”

  Yeva frowned. That was highly unusual. “Who’s the one with a claim in?”

  “The name attached is Tobias Hawk.”

  Yeva nearly dropped her tablet. “T-Tobias Hawk?”

  “Yeah, you know him?”

  “Know him? Beks, he's only the best bounty hunter in the galaxy!”

  “Aaand you know him?” Beks asked again, the amusement evident in her voice.

  “Well not personally… Ugh, we need to get you out more.”

  “You're the one that needs to get out more. Too much nerd stuff will rot your brain.”

  “Bounty hunting isn’t nerd stuff!”

  “Well it’s nothing like the glory days, that’s for sure,” she laughed.

  The “glory days” were the days when bounty hunting was primarily about hunting people. Back when the galaxy was a mostly lawless place. Today the galactic senate was the rule of law, and while illegal stuff still happened, the mobs and gangs didn’t control everything and everyone anymore. If a bounty hunter was called to find a person, it was usually a missing person and not a criminal.

  Yeva carried a side arm, but she’d never used it to kill a sentient being. It was more of a deterrent when other bounty hunters thought they could steal her bounties or claims.Though she made sure to keep her skills up by training every couple of days because she didn’t want anyone to call her bluff and find out she wasn’t trained.

  “So is it a good thing or a bad thing that this Tobias guy is on the claim, too?” Beks asked.

  “Bad thing,” Yeva said. “I’m small time, but this guy… he’s got a list of resources so long I’m pretty sure I could cover every millimetre of my ship with it.”

  “Long, huh? What about his physical resources?”

  “Oh, Beks, stop it. There’s no way!”

  “Oh, come on, think about it. You do the same kind of stuff. His profile image on the claim registration is very nice. Is he married? Got a wife or husband?”

  Yeva rolled her eyes. Every conversation with Beks about a person of the opposite sex eventually resulted in this kind of talk. Yeva’d had a few boyfriends in the past, but none of them lasted very long. She knew what she wanted, and most of them hadn’t been it. Also, she was horrendously demisexual, and most of the men she met just wanted to jump right into bed. Boring!

  “Even if I was interested, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be! I’m competition to claims, and the stories I hear about him are terrible!”

  “Stories?”

  “People who’ve worked with him say he’s angry all the time or rude, or just has no time for idiots.” He’d left a trail of broken hearts across the galaxy, and Yeva wanted nothing of that.

  “Sounds like someone I know.” Beks laughed.

  “I am not rude or angry. I’m focused,” Yeva said flippantly.

  “Focused on filling a bank account!”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Well if you meet him, and he’s just like you, and you fall in love, you have to give me 100 credits.”

  “When did this turn into a bet?”

  “Just now!”

  “So if you lose, then you pay me 100 credits?”

  “Well let's not go that far.”

  2

  The timer for the drop out of hyperspace dinged, and Yeva jumped from her seat in the resting area of her ship to the cockpit. The ship would drop out of hyperspace on its own if she let it, but unless Yeva was in the middle of something, she usually liked to take the controls and drop out manually. It was also usually a good idea to drop out manually because if there were people waiting on the other side of a hyperspace vent it was good practice to be able to run at the first sign of trouble.

  The Black Feather was a
sturdy little ship, but the kind of firefights she’d seen in the past, over claims that were half what the Veritas touted, made her cautious about what she’d find over the planet.

  She checked the levels of everything on the dash, and when the timer went off once more, she placed a hand on the lever and watched the small dialogue box on the console that had a countdown for when she should drop out.

  5...4… Yeva started to slowly pull the lever down.

  3...2… She pressed the button on the side of the lever and yanked it down.

  ...1.

  The brilliant blue lights of hyperspace shifted until they darkened and the spectral lines became the backdrop of stars and the planet below. The hand on the hyperspace lever was ready to push it back up, and the other hand was ready to preempt it by pressing the escape vector into the computer.

  There were no other ships in her near orbit.

  Yeva did a transponder sweep, but there was nothing. No ships were broadcasting their transponders, and both active and passive sensors found no other ship activity. She frowned. This bounty was looking more and more unlikely. A fifty thousand credit bounty with only one, now two, active claims. No orbit activity that she could find. If someone was hidden on the other side of the planet or hidden behind any of the other celestial bodies in the solar system she wouldn’t see them until they moved into passive sensor range. Yeva wasn’t about to be caught unaware and sent out a transponder beacon that would keep her up to date on any ships entering or leaving the solar system. It would zoom vertical north of the solar ecliptic and scan the solar system, sending any telemetry back to her ship as long as she was within the system.

  She did another scan of the landing site on the planet below. There were no ship energy signatures, no signs of any active transponders.

  Yeva’s ship sensors weren’t good enough to tell if there were any life signs on the planet, but the area where the landing site and location of the bounty was in the middle of a dense jungle just outside of the planetary equator. Jungles were usually rich with life, and any life sensors she could have would have just been a huge blob of data. There’d be no way of telling which was a frog and which was a man. The kind of ships with those sensors were well outside of her price range.

  “Well, Mr. Tobias Hawk. If you’re down there, I guess I’ll see you soon,” Yeva said aloud and began to program the landing coordinates into the computer.

  The flight through the atmosphere was fascinating. Thick clouds were moving in from the west where a hurricane was building up power from the warm waters of the ocean at the equator, and where the clouds ended just above the jungle canopy, a grey fog rose up to meet it. It was beautiful and eerie all the same. The Black Feather crested a line of trees, and she saw a tall building at the edge of a clearing. In the center of the clearing was an empty landing tarmac.

  Yeva rested her ship down on the cracked and battered tarmac and peered out the window. It looked like any other misty morning in a jungle region on any normal planet. Curls of fog rolled out of the treeline, and the thick grey soup obscured the base of the only building next to the tarmac. It was two stories high, and the windows appeared to be made from black tinted glass. The glass was the only thing that held any of the vague glimmer from the sky. The sunlight shining down didn’t peirce into the fog at all, and the clouds moving in obscured any definition the sun might make in the sky.

  Yeva turned off the ship and engaged the theft lock. She didn’t know if or when she would run into Tobias Hawk, but she especially didn’t want to find out too late by having her ship stolen. The mythology that had bloomed around the bounty hunter was hard to pick truth out of. What she’d told Beks was true enough; every story that had made its way down the bounty hunting grapevine had pretty much the same thing to say: he was angry, rude, and unyielding. He was very good at what he did, but he didn’t play well with others.

  Yeva would be lying if she said she played well with others. Truth of it was that she just had little trust for the vast majority of people anymore. Except for Beks and a couple of her family members, most of the people she’d gotten close to or trusted or let have just a centimetre of her life had used and abused it. So she had learned to keep others at arms length. It was also one of the reasons why she preferred to work alone.

  She hated to admit that to herself, but there it was.

  Yeva grabbed her travel pack, water bladder, a small tool set, and a little camera that she clipped over her ear. The camera would be handy later if she had to return to the area or needed to review what she had passed or seen.

  The full description of the bounty hadn’t gone into more detail about the location of the necklace other than “in the building” so she wasn’t sure what she would find on the way in or out. It was usually a good idea to be prepared, so her travel pack contained rations for three days and compressed tent that would keep her safe from any bad weather. She had no illusions that she would walk in and find the necklace right away, but if the length of the open bounty was any indication, she could be here awhile. There was over three months of supplies in her ship that would keep her supplied for much longer if she needed it. She hoped she wouldn’t need it.

  Yeva stepped out onto the tarmac and closed the gangway into her ship. She pressed a couple buttons on her arm band that went from her wrist to her elbow and activated a small transponder in the ship so if by chance someone did get past her very rigorous security measures she could still track the ship anywhere in the galaxy.

  The fog was opaque at arms length but traveled in tight streams through the trees and over the tarmac. The closer Yeva got to the building beyond, the quicker she realized it wasn’t just some building erected to the tarmac, rather it appeared that the tarmac had been placed next to the building after the fact. The building was made of huge stone bricks that were older than the tarmac around it. Yeva hadn’t bothered to look up a planet profile other than to see if it was populated by sentients--it wasn’t--and to see if there were any long term stations in orbit--there weren’t--but the building looked like it could have been a temple for some long dead civilization.

  Pillars surrounded the building in regular intervals holding up the lip of the flat roof. There were no windows and only one opening in the front for the door.

  Yeva stopped at the base of the pillars and looked up. The clouds obscured the sun, but the white brick used the construct building appeared to glitter. Close up it didn’t appear to be anything more special than some kind of concrete aggregate, but looking up, she saw the sheen of sparkle that looked like a fuel leak spreading through water. In her twenty-seven standard years of life, she’d never seen anything so… beautiful. This wasn’t just some building out in a jungle. It had a presence.

  Yeva wasn’t much for superstition, but this place felt like it was inhabited by ghosts. She was regretting not looking up the planet profile before coming down.

  Yeva shook off the chill that wanted to get to her bones and stepped under the lip of the roof. It was only then that she saw the words written above the door.

  May truth escape your lips unbound, because truth is the only thing that will set you free.

  “Well that’s ominous,” Yeva said. The words were written in the standard galactic language of Uuet, which meant this place couldn’t be older than a couple hundred years. The standard language around 300 years ago had been Gennite but had changed when the emperor had pushed for something more unifying.

  There was a deep darkness beyond the open door to the building. In her travels, Yeva had seen the darkness of space, the darkness of moonless nights, and darkness in the hearts of humankind. But nothing compared to the darkness she saw beyond that door. It was fathomless but tangible. It was something that she knew she could touch. She took one step forwards and was about to take one step more into the dark when someone grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

  Yeva gasped and found herself staring into the incredulous eyes of Tobias Hawk.

  “What the...” Ye
va shook her arm free and stared at him.

  “Did you not hear me yelling at you?”

  “Yelling?” Yeva felt a vicious headache rising at her temples and tried to figure out what just happened. She had been about to step into the building, but she realized that she had lost control over her senses. Any good bounty hunter would know to scout before entering an unknown building, but it had been like she had forgotten every common sense thing a bounty hunter would know.

  “It’s a good thing I got to you when I did. When that happened to me, I was stuck in there for a week before I got out.” Tobias laughed.

  Yeva stepped back and considered the man. She hadn’t expected him to seem so light-hearted. He had kind light brown eyes, and a soft tilt to his mouth. He was just a few inches taller than her, and his hair was a little longer than the last time she had seen a vid or picture of him.

  He waved a hand in front of her face. “Ground control to strange lady. You alright in there?”

  The headache changed to a dull throb, and she had enough presence of mind to take one more step back and laugh. “I’m fine, don’t worry.” She felt as though most of her faculties had escaped her in less than a minute.

  “Tobias Hawk, and you are?” He held out his hand for a shake. She considered the hand and then slipped her hand in his. He squeezed lightly. Surprising; she had expected something more brutish.

  “Yeva. Hawthorne.”

  Tobias’s eyes widened. “Your ship! Is it still running?”

  “My ship? No, it’s off and locked.” Yeva scoffed. No bounty hunter worth her salt would leave her ship running unattended.

  “Shit.” Tobias cussed under his breath. “My ship hasn’t worked in a month. Something about this place… Are you here for the Veritas necklace, too?” The question held no accusation, only curiosity. This wasn’t the person she thought she was going to meet down here. He seemed more like a lost boy than an intimidating bounty hunter.

  “Your ship isn’t working? What about this place?” Yeva didn’t wait for him to answer and started jogging back towards her ship. She didn’t realize he was behind her until she was walking up the gangplank and heard his footsteps going up too.