“So they made it too, huh?” I said to Zozo, who had, true to her word, saved me a seat (albeit a rather prominent seat close to the front of the class).

  “We all did,” said Zozo. “Everyone on your team during the BHA entrance exam. I don’t know what you said to the bounty hunter supreme, but whatever it was, it worked. Mistress Gome overturned Examiner Jardone’s decision, and, well, here we all are.”

  I nodded and gave a short smile. “I’m glad. I wouldn’t want to be stepping into this classroom all alone.”

  “Me neither.”

  “How sweet,” said a familiar, drawling voice. “I think I’m tearing up.”

  I sighed. Why was it the universe couldn’t give me a break just once? After everything I had been through in the entrance exam and in the runup to the start of the semester, couldn’t fate or God or whatever the hell was pulling the strings up there just give me a teensy, tiny bit of respite from the tedious, gnawing crap that I had to deal with on a daily basis?

  “Pygott,” I spat as I turned around.

  “The one and only.”

  The chief tormentor of my school years was leering at me with a pleased expression on his face, like he had just won the Tri-Galactic Lottery. (Of course, if Pygott had won the Tri-Galactic Lottery, he probably wouldn’t have been bothered about it, what with his family already having more zenthars than most class nine planets.) His face was just as ugly as always, but apparently unsatisfied that his physical appearance was still lacking in repulsiveness, he had now opted to add in a hideous bright green mohawk. The result was more comical than it was menacing, what with those rosy, pudgy cheeks contrasting with that loud, innocuous haircut.

  “I thought you failed the entrance exam,” I said, half hoping it would be true and that he was only here to say a few unpleasant words, and then be on his way. It had been during the second phase of the entrance exam that Pygott had walked out, abandoning the examination process after receiving a vid call. At the time, I hadn’t thought much about it, but in the aftermath of the events of that day, I had realised he must have got a tip-off about the incoming Konrosh ship and scurried off to hide.

  “It’s true that I didn’t complete the entrance exam,” said Pygott, beaming with undeserved pride, “but I think they saw enough to know that it would be in their best interests to include me in the cadet roster for the coming year.”

  “You mean your father threw his weight around and had the decision overturned.”

  Pygott glanced around as if to see if anyone had overheard what I had said, then he leaned towards me, and a thick shadow fell across his pudgy features.

  “You’d better keep your mouth shut about that,” he said, “if you don’t want to find yourself being expelled before the first day is even over.”

  I snorted. “You couldn’t get me expelled.”

  “My father—”

  “I didn’t say your father couldn’t. I said you couldn’t. If I was your father, I’d be pretty sick and tired right about now about your incessant whining, and I doubt I’d be inclined to go waltzing back into the bounty hunter supreme’s office just to get a little girl thrown out of the BHA because my porky little disappointment-of-a-son can’t stand to be in the same room as her. In fact, I’d be more inclined to ask my son questions - questions like ‘Why are you so obsessed with beating up on a little girl who is no threat to you whatsoever?’ and ‘Why do you keep drinking bioenhancement serum even after your balls have started to scrape against the floor?’.”

  Pygott winced, and his eyes flashed around again to see who had overheard. I immediately regretted the comment about his private parts. It was well known that overuse of bioenhancement serum could lead to low-hanging genitalia, and I had once overheard Startide make a cryptic reference to Pygott’s medical records. It hadn’t taken a genius to put two and two together, and now I was in possession of some rather explosive information about Pygott that could give me an edge in the upcoming semester.

  Or it could get me killed. It was hard to say for sure.

  “I don’t know what you think you know,” said Pygott, “but you had better be damn careful about what you say around here. I might not be able to get you expelled, but I can still beat you to within an inch of your life - or even send you underside, if I have to.”

  I gave a wry smile. ‘Underside’ referred to the graveyard level of the colony (so called because it was on the underside of the colony’s plate-like structure). I had never been there before, but I had seen pictures - pictures that had made me vow never to go exploring there.

  “Look, Pygott,” I said. “Why don’t we just agree to stay out of each other’s way from now on? Don’t you think that would be a good idea for both our sakes? You don’t make any more of your lame threats, and I won’t laugh in your face and tell everyone in the BHA about your little, ahem, problem.”

  I flicked my gaze towards his crotch.

  “What do you think?” I said. “Do we have a deal?”

  I stuck out a hand. Pygott looked down at it, then back up at my face.

  “You can take your deal,” he said, “and shove it out the airlock. I’ll be coming for you, Red Dwarf. It could happen anytime, anywhere, when you least expect it. But it will happen - on that you can be sure.”

  Pygott lifted the flap of his coat, and for a brief moment, I glanced at the handle of a shimmerstick. The piece of alien tech was surreptitiously tucked away, but it was well within reach, ready to be unleashed at a moment’s notice. If I had any sense left in my head, I would be wise not to risk incurring the wrath of that deadly weapon.

  Unfortunately for me, sense was something I was extremely short on.

  “Diakon Pygott,” I yelled, raising my voice over the clamour of the classroom, “has low-hanging ba—”

  “Silence!”

  A sudden stillness fell over the room as every eye turned towards the front of the class where a mysterious hooded wraith was now standing. How long he had been standing there, I couldn’t say, but I felt sure I hadn’t seen him walk into the room. Sticking out the corners of his hood were tendrils of dark brown hair, but that was about as much of his physical appearance as I could make out. His face was hidden behind a curtain of shadow that even eclipsed his eyes, his hands were covered by black leather gloves, and his chest and legs were masked by the folds of a flowing black cloak.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” said the stranger, and he made a deft circular motion with the fingertips of his right hand. A moment later, something foul, green and rotting appeared out of the wall holding a hololight pen.

  It was…

  A hand.

  A dead hand. A hand that had come from the grave. A hand made of rotting, putrid flesh stretched out over blood-blackened bone. A hand that had no rights to be moving, let alone writing on the board in hololight.

  But write it did, and after a length of time that was either a few seconds or else an eternity, the writing was complete, and a name - an instantly recognisable name - was glowing on the board in bright red hololight.

  It was a name that elicited fear - not just throughout the colony but throughout the entire Tri-Galactic Territories. It was a name that, if I could have chosen, would have been amongst the last I would have wanted to have seen written on that board. It was a name that made me want to run screaming from the classroom, give up on my dream of rescuing Krain and never return to the Bounty Hunter Academy so long as I lived.

  And the name was…

  5

  Chapter 5

  When Pygott had threatened to send me ‘underside’, he had meant as a corpse. But there were people who actually lived on the colony’s graveyard level. Not a lot of them, but they were still there, sort of like an unofficial district. They didn’t produce any products or services that supported bounty hunters (unless you counted cadaver disposal as a helpful service), but they were hard to ignore - especially since they regularly churned out high-quality bounty hunters who were amongst the most fearless ever to graduate from the BHA.

  Chief amongst their number, and the most famous of their kind, was a shadowy figure about which little was known, save that he had been born inside a grave when his pregnant mother had correctly been pronounced as dead but he himself had falsely been registered as deceased. The unfortunate child had grown up on the graveyard level, raised by those that lived there like one of their own - only he was never really their own and always did things his own way. Soon, they came to fear him, spurned to terror by his unusual (even by their standards) closeness with the dead. It was with the deceased that he felt the strongest kinship, and when he one day developed his own dazzle (at an age when most bounty hunters weren’t even aware of what a dazzle even was), no one was in any way surprised that it was a hellish, demonic dazzle - a dazzle that never should have been, a dazzle that had no place amongst the living.

  The boy who was born inside a grave could conjure the hands of the dead.

  And as he had grown, his skill had become more powerful, but it had, for the most part, remained hidden behind a veil of rumour and whispered hyperbole. No one knew for sure just what Shade Brekum was capable of, but all were in agreement that it was best to stay out of his way.

  That was, if you didn’t want to make premature contact with the other side.

  “There’s got to be some kind of mistake,” said a burly boy with a shaved head and a pierced eyebrow. “You can’t be our teacher.”

  “And why not?” growled Shade Brekum. “Am I, for some reason, unfit for the position?”

  The boy who had asked the question froze, and a river of sweat began to pour down his forehead. Evidentially, he seemed to suffer from the same kind of talk-without-thinking disease of which I myself was a victim.

  “Is there something lacking in my record as a bounty hunter?” asked Brekum, his intense stare - a stare that was somehow enacted without the use of any visible eyes - lasering in on the boy. “No, that can’t be it. I have over four hundred and twenty-three slimes to my name. It must be something else.”

  Four hundred and twenty-three slimes? I thought, my jaw dropping at the number. The thought of any bounty hunter throwing a captured target into the strange bathtub concoction that rendered the target immobile until they could be brought back to the client - a concoction that so resembled slime that it had informed the unofficial name for the successful capture of a target - that many times was just unthinkable. And, if I recalled correctly, Shade Brekum hadn’t even been a bounty hunter for that long. How had he amassed such a huge haul of slimes in such a short space of time?

  “Could it be something lacking in my technical proficiency?” Brekum continued, now stalking up the aisle towards the offending boy. “Let’s see. I have a master ranking in every one of the twenty-five foundational skills along with master rankings in an additional twelve advanced skills - eight more than the average. So that can’t be it either.”

  Brekum came to a halt next to the desk at which the shaven-headed boy was seated. By now, the boy had slid way down into his seat. A few tectars further and he would be all the way under his desk.

  “Is it, then,” said Brekum, his shadowy figure leaning in towards the cowering boy as a retch-inducing stench stung my nostrils, “something in my character that makes me unsuitable to instruct this class?”

  Brekum held his graveyard stare, but still the boy made no reply.

  “Answer when I talk to you, Slickersby,” said Brekum, either reading the name off the boy’s uniform or else reciting it from memory (the latter of which wouldn’t have surprised me in the least). “Is there some fault in my character? Some problem with my personality that marks me out as defective in some way? Speak!”

  Brekum slammed his hand down on the table. At least, that was what I (and probably everyone else) thought at first. But after a moment’s reflection on the telling fact that Brekum still had two other hands at his sides, my eyes turned to inspect the appendage on the desk, and it was then that I realised the truth of the matter.

  The hand on the desk was one of Brekum’s zombie hands.

  “Speak, boy,” Brekum growled as the undead hand drummed its fingers impatiently on Slickersby’s desk. Only the hand and the lower part of the forearm were visible, the rest of the ghastly corpse being hidden on the other side of the tiny portal through which the hand had emerged. “Speak now, or I’ll give you a personal demonstration of some of those advanced skills I was talking about.”

  Slickersby’s jaw trembled, and his mouth opened, but no sound came out.

  “Speak.”

  The zombie hand inched across the desk, moving closer towards Slickersby’s own hand. All the colour disappeared from the boy’s face, and I felt pretty sure that in amongst the stench of rotting flesh I could detect the hint of spilt urine.

  “Speak.”

  “I think what he wants to say,” said a voice from across the room, “is that you’re a little bit too scary to be our homeroom teacher.”

  The shadowy head whipped around, and the unseen eyes now fixed themselves upon the speaker.

  “Moonstorm,” Brekum growled, his voice laden with contempt (although whether it was contempt for the Moonstorm family or Tartrian in particular, I couldn’t tell). On the other side of the classroom, Tartrian stood erect, his body posture neutral.

  Brekum drifted across the room towards the outspoken cadet, his footsteps not making a sound. On the desk of the nerve-wrecked Slickersby, the zombie hand gave a friendly wave before disappearing back into the pocket-sized portal it had come out of.

  “Scary, am I?” said Brekum as he approached Tartrian’s desk.

  “To some,” said Tartrian.

  “What about to you, Moonstorm?” The wraith-like figure stopped inches from Tartrian, his towering height setting his head a good twenty tectars or so above Tartrian’s own cranium. “Do you find me scary?”

  Tartrian looked up into the impenetrable darkness beneath Brekum’s cowl.

  “Not in the least,” said my fellow cadet. “But then again, I don’t scare easily.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Brekum sneered. “I’m sure you’ve undergone all sorts of fancy Moonstorm training to purge you of your fears, sharpen your skills and hone your talents. But it’s not going to be enough. It takes more than that - much more than that - to become a bounty hunter.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Tartrian.

  “I can see that.” Brekum bent forward until the darkness that was his face was pressed right up against Tartrian’s own features. “But you have other doubts, don’t you, Moonstorm?”

  I studied Tartrian’s face for any flicker of emotion, but if it was present, I didn’t see it.

  What doubts was Brekum referring to exactly?

  “How could you possibly know—”

  “I warned you about those advanced skills,” said Brekum, cutting Tartrian off mid-sentence. “Psychoinfiltration was one of the easiest skills I ever learned. I don’t know why, but it just came naturally to me, just like how I’m sure looking pretty and having lots of girlfriends comes easily to you.”

  Brekum locked eyes with Tartrian, but Tartrian said no more. The bounty hunter gave off a triumphant sneer (I couldn’t exactly see it through the shadow that masked his face, but I felt sure it was there), then he spun around and headed back towards the front of the class.

  “And I’m not your homeroom teacher,” he said as he stalked down the aisle. “At least I’m not just your homeroom teacher. I will be your teacher for every class during your first year at the BHA. It won’t be until the second year that you begin to have different teachers for different classes.”

  A wave of shocked silence passed through the room.

  Shade Brekum was going to be our teacher for every class in the first year? What had I -what had any of us - done to deserve this?

  “Power on your desk terminals,” said Brekum, turning around to face us as he reached the front of the class. “Your first year at the Bounty Hunter Academy is about to begin.”

  6

  Chapter 6

  I stared at the blinking cursor.

  The questionnaire that had appeared after I had powered on my desk terminal - a chalk white slab that emerged from the insides of my desk at the mere press of a button - had seemed simple at first. Just the usual name, date of birth, district of residence. Nothing I hadn’t typed into a terminal a million times before.

  But then I’d been hit with a real turboball.

  WHY DO YOU WANT TO BECOME A BOUNTY HUNTER?

  The question bounced around my mind like someone flying a panzersuit for the first time. What was I supposed to do? Answer truthfully? Say that I wanted the financial privileges and the training to go off on my own unsanctioned mission to rescue my brother?

  I chewed my lip.

  No. I couldn’t say that. I had to give some rote answer, something that was probably printed in the first few pages of The Bounty Hunter Guidebook (a tome I had never even laid eyes on). But what? Something about upholding law and order in the galaxy? No, I couldn’t say that. Bounty hunters didn’t uphold law and order. Sure, most of the people they were sent to capture were bad eggs, but not all of them. There were plenty of innocents who had ended up being thrown into bathtubs of paralysing slime. Law and order? That was for the Tri-Galactic Police. Bounty hunters answered to money - and money alone.

  Maybe I should write something about that?

  “Psst! Tega!”

  I looked up from my terminal. The voice had sounded like Zozo’s, but she was at the front of the class, discussing something with Shade Brekum in an animated manner that appeared to be as perplexing to Brekum as it was to the rest of the class.

  “Psst! Tega! Down here!”

 

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