Extremely belated Cohost-era writing prompt: Bounty Hunter who’ll be back for you
Niva Kilperson-2Grady has business cards, which she hands out sometimes on planets nobody knows her. There’s one in the archival cube of documents and other evidence provided by the client, to help track her down. It says she’s an archaeologist.
The Interstellar Commonweal Archaeological and Cultural Preservation Initiative are fronting quite a lot of money to get her to not.
The dossier, cube and all, are just over the ridge in the shuttle. Hevvy could go and review them, if she likes; she thumbs the radio again instead.
“Come out of there,” she says angrily.
In Hevvy’s experience, you can slice people-in-general a lot of ways, but the one that her work brings her back to again and again is a sort of Punnett square of haves and have-nots versus want-mores and content. Only, of course, you never meet a have who doesn’t want more, and if they’ve already got everything they’re working themselves sick to invent a new way of having things, so they can have it that way, too.
So much for the clients. But the square that breeds just about everyone in the bounty hunting business, hunter and hunted alike, including Hevvy herself, is have-not and want. Hevvy scrabbles for more by chasing down assholes and throwing them to the wolves; Niva Kilperson-2Grady by finding the lost treasures and trinkets of the era of human expansion across the stars, and selling them to the haves who want to own the past. One Weird Get-Rich-Quick Trick; Actual Archaeologists Hate Her.
“There’s a decade’s worth of deep cryopreserved meal bars down here,” Niva Kilperson-2Grady says placidly, over the channel. A wrapper crinkles; something crunches. “Hm,” the tomb robber adds thoughtfully, chewing, then, with her mouth full, “artificial banana, I think?”
“Come out of there,” Hevvy says, in the full futile rage of someone who knows they’re outfoxed.
It seemed like it would cut down her quarry’s options to run, if Hevvy tailed her out to the airless planetoid containing her latest site for plunder — newly discovered: survival bunker, never used. Some plutocrat-of-the-past’s paranoia bolthole. And it did — when she realised Hevvy had her cornered, instead of trying to make a run for it, or throwing herself on Hevvy’s mercies, she tripped the bunker’s seal and shut herself in.
“You can’t eat meal bars for a decade!” Hevvy adds.
“I dunno,” Niva drawls. The wrapper crinkles again. “Says they’re nutritionally complete.”
“You’ll get sick enough of them to shoot yourself!”
Niva makes a comfortable noise. “Thing is,” she says, “I’ve got air and water and a decade of food. And you’ve got a supply problem. How long is your little ship going to hold out until you have to head back? And then nobody’s keeping me in here.”
“There’s enough of a bounty on you to make it worth chasing you out here,” Hevvy says through gritted teeth. “You jet a klick off this rock and it’ll all be in somebody’s traffic control logs. I’ll find you.”
“If I do it this week, sure,” Niva says. “While the heat’s on. I’ve got a decade of ration bars; are you gonna camp out there for a decade? The heat won’t last. The bounty will expire. You’ll go broke waiting for me. And any time you have to head back for air or food or tampons or whatever, I can take off.”
“I can get someone else to watch the door in shifts.”
“Gonna pay ‘em?” Niva says sceptically. “Go broke twice as quick?”
“Fuck,” Hevvy fumes.
“Cut your losses!” Niva suggests. “Take off now, go kick back in a spaceport bar. Hang around the area for as long as you can afford, bribing people for those traffic logs. Maybe I’ll get bored in here really quick and you’ll get lucky!”
“Fuck you, you asshole,” Hevvy tells her, with feeling.
“No thank you,” Niva says sweetly.
