Drifter

Globs of melted metal floated around. Many still glowed. Jagged pieces of debris drifted to and fro. Frozen blood of every color mixed with the plain hues of metal and plastic. Occasionally, he would see a charred and mangled corpse.

A few of the local government’s ships were in the area, trying to find survivors and contain the damage. A handful of civilian craft had joined the search.

A half an hour of careful scanning and Eli hadn’t spotted a single survivor. No large sections of the ship remained, and no one had time to get to any escape pod.

He also had yet to see a single sign of his quarry. Perhaps the strange organic ship had been caught in the blast. He had to admit to himself that if that turned out to be true, it would be as much of a relief as it would be a disappointment.

No sign of the bounty hunter called Bohoat Mog. No sign of the force of merciless destruction known as Jiraa, either. Jiraa might have also been caught in the blast, or, he might be floating around somewhere, biding his time, waiting for Bohoat Mog to make his move.

Ironically, the only one that he could see was the one that was equipped with the cloaking device. Gami was flying around in her sleek ship, searching. She had finally stopped broadcasting. It seemed that she had given up hope of finding any survivors. Now she was looking for the fiend that had caused the disaster.

Eli decided to contact her, “It’s Gami, right?”

“Yes,” whatever language she was speaking consisted of short, vaguely cute sounding words.

“I’m Eli. Why’d you let me live?”

“That first time? Killing you seemed unnecessary. I have since reconsidered this.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. So, does that mean that you see me as a threat?”

“I could tease you and say no, but that mark on your neck proves otherwise. Why don’t you get rid of it? The bounty for escaped Sad’Daki slaves is generous. I know that Jiraa got rid of his.”

“That thing was a victim of the Sad’Daki?” Eli asked.

“Yes. He earned his freedom on the battlefield. Now he’s a mercenary and a bounty hunter.”

“They didn’t give me that opportunity. They captured me during a raid on one of their bases. I was freed when the facility I was being held in was liberated. I hunted them during the final days of their occupation.”

“I’ve read reports about the invasion of Earth. They eventually buckled under the pressure, both on and off world. But not before a lot of damage was done.”

Eli laid out the facts, “Over seven billion dead. Every major city in ruins. Most of the natural resources stripped.”

“To the Sad’Daki, everything is just a resource or a hindrance, something that helps them obtain their goals or keeps them from obtaining them. It’s a sick way to think.”

“Yes. They claimed that they invaded because we were starting to develop robots and A.I. It was an excuse to conquer easy prey.”

“If your people were really developing A.I. then you needed to be stopped. Maybe not like how they did it, but one way or another, it had to be done.”

Eli frowned, “Is it really that bad?”

“You can’t understand how bad it would be.”

“Then we should have been allowed to make that mistake for ourselves.”

“Your people never hit the point of full automation, didn’t have advanced AI. But you were close. You tasted it. Your philosophers and your pop culture warned you about it. You can comprehend the horror, you can envision the mass unemployment, the robotic troops, but you haven’t lived it. So many species have reached that point, and those dark times left a scar on their societies.”

There was a pause, long enough that he started to wonder if she was still there, “My people leave home when they reach adulthood, traveling the universe for a period of one hundred years. When I first started, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I wondered aimlessly, taking on random jobs. But that all changed when I had to fight to defend myself.”

“A lot of people find their calling in violence,” Eli observed.

“True. I ended up joining a group. It was part police, part military. Their mission was to protect the nearly lawless systems in the Isenmok cluster. I learned over the course of my enlistment that people have to be protected, even if it’s from themselves.”

“If your people are as long lived as I suspect that you are, then I’m probably a lot younger than you. But even in the relatively short time that I’ve been around, I’ve learned that approaching things like that can only end in disaster.”

Gami didn’t respond. Eli wondered if he had offended her. At least she didn’t take aim at him. She just continued to drift around, scanning the debris.

Eli concentrated on the task at hand. A piece of wreckage looked similar to the ship they were after, but a focused scan confirmed that it wasn’t.

“What were you planning to do with the bounty money?” Eli asked.

Gami answered, “Interesting wording. You really think that you’ll take the prize away from me?”

“To go into it with any other attitude would be an invitation to fail.”

“Very true,” a brief pause, a change in her voice that was difficult to pin down, “There’s a little orphanage on Xad III. It’s in bad shape. It’s not that far from Ujita, so I figured that I’d stop by after I turned Aydem in.”

Eli went wide eyed, “Wait, you’re taking him to Ujita?”

Before she could answer, the scanner chirped. Bohoat Mog was making a break for it. He’d let his ship drift in the direction of a nearby hyperspace lane, probably firing off the occasional short burst of a maneuvering jet when neither of them was nearby.

Eli and Gami turned in the target’s direction. With any luck, one of them could get him before he reached the lane. But then they saw that his destination wasn’t the lane.

A new vessel dropped out of hyperspace. The ship’s transponder gave its name as Shimmering Devil. It was a sizable vessel, which sported heavy armament and Lashua syndicate markings. Eli had smuggled things for them once before. The broker had warned him to stay on their good side.