Bounty hunter academy 2, p.1
Bounty Hunter Academy 2, page 1
Hadwin Fuller
Bounty Hunter Academy 2
Bounty Hunter Academy Book Two
Copyright © 2023 by Hadwin Fuller
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
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1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
20. Chapter 20
21. Chapter 21
22. Chapter 22
23. Chapter 23
24. Chapter 24
25. Chapter 25
26. Chapter 26
27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28
Epilogue
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Acknowledgements
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1
Chapter 1
I couldn’t sleep. It was the night before my first day at the Bounty Hunter Academy, and I was more afraid than I’d ever been before. Long gone was the fearless girl who had confronted the monstrous, battle-hardened outsiders who had raided Cometbreaker colony and made off with the bounty hunter supreme. Gone too was the even bolder girl who had snuck aboard the outsiders’ ship and somehow managed to rescue the bounty hunter supreme without sustaining much more than a few scratches in the process. Whatever had happened to those two girls, I couldn’t say, but they had well and truly vanished, only to be replaced by a tension-filled, nervous wreck of a girl - a girl who had already chewed her fingernails down to the bone and was well on her way to pulling out every last strand of hair on her head.
In an almost perfect contrast to the whirling storm of anxiety that was my inner mental state, the night on the other side of my bedroom window was completely still. Of course, that was nothing to do with chance and everything to do with the environmental settings in the colony’s weather control tower, but all the same, I couldn’t help noticing the difference between the condition of my mind and the condition of the colony’s climate.
From my bedroom window on the first floor of my family’s res unit in Toymaker District, I could the see empty sidewalks of Etraya Street and the front facade of Bolo’s Bears - one of the more popular and well-known shops in Toymaker District (unlike my father’s little-known store). At the top of Bolo’s Bears, a giant animatronic teddy bear stood in an alcove in the centre of the roof, clutching onto an enormous red heart. The power to the animatron was switched off (what with it being well after closing time), but I could still clearly picture the robotic bear’s little routine: waving down to passers-by, beckoning them into the shop with promises of steep discounts, high-quality craftsmanship and products children will cherish with every ounce of love they have in their tiny little hearts.
I gave off an involuntary shudder as I imagined the bear’s retch-inducing sales patter routine. It wasn’t that I was against displays of emotion, just that I preferred them to come from real organic beings and not piles of hydraulics, wiring and circuitry. Besides, I knew the owner of Bolo’s Bears far better than most people in the colony, and if there was ever a man to whom love for your fellow man was a stranger, it was Franklin Bolo III.
Beyond the roof of Bolo’s Bears, I could see the other roofs of the res units in Toymaker District all the way up to Torgana Street where the style of the buildings changed from sharp, modern angles to sweeping curves fitted with ornate flourishes. The change in architectural design indicated the beginning of a new district - in this case, Breadriser District, where in the warmly lit shopfronts, that same ornate style would be reflected in the artisan pastries, cakes, muffins, breads and other baked goods.
Past the playful, dancing lines and curves of the Breadriser rooftops, I could just about make out the jagged, knife-like roofs of the res units in Bladeforger District, one of the more elite districts in the colony where the many edge-based weapons favoured by the colony’s strongest bounty hunters were crafted. Bladeforger was one of the most highly regarded districts in the entire colony - a member of the Fighter districts, the districts that provided bounty hunters with their weaponry and armour. Most of the bounty hunters that passed through the hallowed halls of the Bounty Hunter Academy came from those districts, although some small few still managed to earn their bounty hunter’s licence having been born into one of the Freighter districts (of which Toymaker and Breadriser were but two). In truth - and it was a truth well-known to everyone in the colony, but rarely acknowledged - the Freighter districts were just as important as the Fighter districts when it came to supporting the colony’s bounty hunters. But there was just something infinitely cooler about the districts where laser shotguns, stasis knives and gamma armour were made compared to the districts that produced croissants and stuffed teddy bears.
High over the rooftops was the wall of stars that was always present but hidden in daytime by the weather control tower’s clever use of artificial light and mirrors. Indeed, so convincing was the daytime illusion that if you hadn’t known you were standing on an artificial construction floating through the empty reaches of outer space, you never would have guessed it. During daylight hours, the colony looked just like the surface of a real planet, and only the faint glimmer of the maintenance scaffold that ran around the outer edges of the colony could betray that illusion.
I let out a long, baleful sigh - my thirteenth of the night - and my warm breath misted the cold windowpane. It had been on a night not unlike this that an outsider had paid an unannounced visit to the colony and made off with a prize of little importance to anyone but my family.
My brother Krain had been little more than six years old when he had been abducted by a tall, long-limbed, tarantula-haired outsider with a gleaming indigo eye. I had chased the outsider up onto the rooftop of my res unit, but I hadn’t been able to stop him, and in the days that had followed the kidnapping, the Colonial Police Force had done little to remedy the situation. Krain was left to his own devices, to fend for himself against his captors, and the entire incident was swept under the carpet like the crumbs of one of those croissants from Breadriser District.
Years had passed, and still Krain had showed no sign of returning, but during that time, my will to rescue him had not faltered, and instead a plan had been formed - a plan that was entirely dependent on my earning admission to the Bounty Hunter Academy.
Without a bounty hunter’s licence, I would have been forced to attempt my rescue mission using my own funds - funds I did not have. It cost a lot of zenthars to pay for passage on the shuttles that ferried people between the many colonies and planets in the Tri-Galactic Territories - not to mention the weapons, armour and other assorted goodies you were going to need to mount such a mission. But a bounty hunter could travel on the shuttles for free and received sizeable discounts to purchase pretty much anything they could desire. Not that they even needed discounts. The basic salary for a bounty hunter was far in excess of what almost anyone except for government officials operating amongst the highest echelons could ever hope to earn. It was a much vaunted position, and earning a place amongst the ranks of the bounty hunters was notoriously difficult (hence my late-night fretting session).
But it wasn’t just the access privileges and financial stability that came with the job that I so richly coveted. Bounty hunters were amongst the most resourceful, knowledgeable individuals in the Tri-Galac tic Territories. If you wanted to find someone to hunt down a missing human boy matching my brother’s description, you would be hard pressed to do much better than securing the employment of a bounty hunter. And when they did finally catch up with your missing bounty, they had the combat skills necessary to take on whatever forces might foolishly stand in their way.
To put it in the simplest terms possible, the only way I was going to get my brother back was if I became a bounty hunter. And the only way I was going to become a bounty hunter was if I graduated from the Bounty Hunter Academy. And the only way I was going to graduate from the Bounty Hunter Academy was if they suddenly started handing out miracles.
“Can’t sleep?”
I whipped my head around to look at the figure standing in the doorway. I hadn’t heard the door open, but my father was a master of moving through the house without being heard. (Indeed, if it wasn’t for fate singling him out for a position as the owner of a toy shop, he might have made a pretty good bounty hunter himself - assuming, that was, that he could triple his muscle mass and do something about the motivation-killing apathy he carried with him everywhere he went.)
“No,” I said with a shake of the head, then I turned back to the window. I had no intention of listening to any kind of pep talk from my father (not that I was in any way expecting one. Indeed, I would have sooner predicted my duvet to burst into a motivational speech before my lacklustre parent.)
“Worried about tomorrow?” asked my father, still not moving from the doorway.
“Only enough that my intestine’s trying to throttle my stomach.”
I gazed out the window as a black cat skipped over the rooftop of Bolo’s Bears before disappearing down the sheer sides of an alley with that death-defying nimbleness cats never seemed to be lacking for. At my back, there was a gentle chiss as the automatic door shut, indicating that my father had finally moved from the doorway. I half-expected him to have gone back to his workshop where he laboured tirelessly to craft exact replicas of the outsider who had made off with my little brother tucked away neatly under his arm. But to my mild surprise, I heard soft, slippered footsteps over my shoulder, and a moment later, my father spoke again, only this time he was much closer (but still at the kind of distance you might keep with someone you didn’t know very well).
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked, half-stumbling through the question, as if asking it wasn’t really his idea and someone had put him up to it.
“No,” I said, a little more frostily than I had intended. I managed to calm my anger a little, then I added, “There’s nothing anyone can do.”
My father was silent, and once again, I listened for the sound of receding footsteps, but to my continued surprise, I felt the light touch of a set of trembling fingers set down on my shoulder.
“Tega,” said my father. “It’s alright to be scared. Everyone gets scared sometimes - even the bravest bounty hunters. Even the bounty hunter supreme isn’t immune to fear. Believe me. I might not know much about being a bounty hunter, but I know that everyone gets afraid from time to time. The only thing you can do is accept the fear. Give yourself up to it. Let it into every place you’re trying to keep it from entering. Then you’ll see that the fear can’t hurt you, that it’s only a passing emotion and nothing more. And then you’ll realise that you’re invulnerable to fear, and that it has no power over you, and it never—”
“I don’t need your advice on how to be brave, Dad.”
“I’m not telling you how to be brave. I’m telling you how to—”
“Accept fear. Right. And become just like you - a shut away who only emerges at night to sneak out and buy cosies from the dealers around the astropad.”
It was a harsh thing to say, and I cringed a little when the last words had left my throat. But it wasn’t untrue. My father was a shut-in, and the only time he ever went out was to buy the illegal stimulants that were smuggled in by the more enterprising (and more likely to end up in a holding cell) shuttle pilots. If anyone ever wanted to make me feel embarrassed about my parents (and plenty of people did), all they had to do was bring up their total addiction to illegal narcotics, and I would feel a flush of red in my cheeks as I hunched my shoulders and willed my body to disappear from the judging eyes of my intimidators.
“I’m alright, Dad,” I said, trying to take the sting out of my last statement (although I knew as well as anyone that what was said couldn’t be unsaid). “I just need to be alone right now. That’s all.”
I felt my father’s fingers on my shoulder for a few seconds longer, as if he was searching for something else to say, but then they fell away, and a moment later, I heard his shuffling footsteps as he slipped quietly out of the room. The door hissed open, and when it hissed closed moments later, I knew I was alone once more.
Accept the fear, I thought to myself in a mocking tone. That wasn’t the answer to my problems. I had to somehow overcome the fear, to master it by brute mental strength.
Yes, that was the answer. I had to become more powerful - not in my body but in my spirit. A person like my father couldn’t understand that - and he never would. But I had to find a way to overcome the weaknesses he had passed onto me.
Only then would I have the strength I needed to become a bounty hunter.
Only then would I be able to get Krain back.
My head thudded against the pillow as I threw myself onto my bed. There didn’t seem much point in trying to get any sleep, but I had to try if I didn’t want my first day at the Bounty Hunter Academy to be a hideous ordeal.
Still, to be fair, there was nothing (outside a bit of last-minute DNA-enhancement surgery) that was going to increase my preparedness for the events that were to follow the not-too-distant, artificial sunrise. I had no idea what percentage of cadets succeeded in earning their bounty hunter licences, but I had a strong feeling that it would be a shockingly low number. All I could do was try to learn fast and hold on for as long as I could. Then maybe - just maybe - I could somehow make it through to the other side. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot I had, and I had to make it count.
And if I couldn’t…
Well, I guess I’d have to give up on ever seeing my brother again.
2
Chapter 2
“Tega! Hey, Tega! Wait up!”
I spun around on the threshold of the main gate of the Bounty Hunter Academy on Destron Boulevard. The voice had caught me by surprise (any yelling of my name was usually followed by some kind of prank or practical joke made at my expense), but I recognised it quickly and relaxed the tense, prepare-for-the-worst posture I had instinctively taken up.
“Hi, Zozo,” I said with a perfunctory wave.
Zozo floated over the road, moving deftly between the oncoming traffic like a ghost on roller skates. Being that she was from Tinkerer District, I knew she was probably kitted out with plenty of the cybernetic enhancements people from that district were known to favour. I had never seen her legs, what with them being constantly hidden under her moth-eaten black cloak, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to see hover jets or spider-like mechanical limbs. Her arms were cybernetic, that much I knew, having once felt their steely touch on my shoulder. But just what percentage of the rest of her body was made out of wires, circuits and machinery, I couldn’t guess.
“All ready for your first day?” asked Zozo as she sidled up next to me on the pavement. To my left and right, other cadets filtered in through the main gate, some arriving on foot (having no doubt made the journey by mag shuttle), while others emerged triumphantly from hovercars, their uniforms sparkling. The difference between the wealthy families from the Fighter districts and the poorer families from the Freighter districts was just as pronounced as ever, and I knew it was going to be just as pronounced once I finally stepped into the classroom.
“Actually,” I said, half joking but not without a grain of truth, “I’m beginning to think this might have all been a big mistake.”
“Don’t say that. For all you know, becoming a bounty hunter might be a lot easier than you imagine.”
I frowned. “I highly doubt that, Zozo. In fact, if anything, I expect it’s going to be far more difficult than I could possibly imagine - and I can imagine it being pretty damn difficult.”
