📘The Star Pirate's Folly | 4: Bounty

Privateer, pirate, bounty hunter... the lines get blurrier out past the Core planets.

Dec 22, 2023

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Chapter 4: Bounty

Emergency workers and police officers only took minutes to arrive. Luckily the elevator had stopped almost level with the second floor, so Bee and Hargrove were easily released. While Hargrove dealt with questions from the police, Bee slipped up the stairs to her room and sat in front of her projection display. It woke at her presence and a keyboard lit up on the desk. Bee ticked her password in with a familiar flurry and opened the Hotel Employee Portal program. She used Hargrove’s administrator credentials—she’d learned long ago that he never bothered changing his password and he had more permissions in the system than she did.

She clicked through some files and folders until she found the security footage from the camera outside Slack Dog’s room. She sped past her confrontation with Lee. When the doors closed, Lee touched the lock to open the room. A few minutes went by and he emerged from the room, took the stairs down to the ground floor, and made his exit.

Bee thought again of Lee’s bounty and cursed herself for not recognizing him. He’d been wanted for years in the belt—piracy, kidnapping, murder. And now this.

She’d heard the pirates were growing stronger and bolder every year, but Hargrove always dismissed such talk as bad for business. This was different. Brazen. They’d never come to Surface before. It was always quick strikes on the shipping lanes, one or two vessels captured or looted, and then they would vanish before anyone could respond. Or they’d blockade some outlying moon base and ransack it.

The explosion didn’t make sense either. Jensen Lee could have just shot, stabbed, or strangled Slack Dog—the old fool was in no state to defend himself. It was suicide for Lee to broadcast his presence when he still had to get off-planet.

But then, Lee hadn’t been expecting anyone to see him. And certainly not anyone who would recognize him. A bounty hunter wouldn’t be looking for him where they weren’t expecting him—most of them stuck to the belt, where the biggest bounties were. Maybe the bombing was supposed to be a distraction.

If that was his intention, it backfired completely. There was no way he had time to get off-planet. If he’d left his ship at the orbital station, they’d flag it and alert the guards that Lee was headed their way. Most likely, if he hadn’t been caught already trying to get offworld, Jensen Lee was stuck in the city somewhere.

And he’d just kicked the hornet’s nest. Half the police force would be after him. With its domed roof and airlocks, the city was practically a prison already. The police would post guards at all the exits and comb the city for him. It would only be a matter of time until Lee was caught. Bee opened a browser window and searched for news on the incident.

The local media was having a field day—this was the biggest story in years, outshining even the Fated Lovers Festival. Bee swiped through news video after news video, talking head after talking head, and learned nothing more than she already knew. Then she landed on a live feed where the reporter was standing with his back to one of the sealed-off airlocks. Two Overlook City officers leaned against the airlock in the background, protected from the gathering crowd by police barriers.

Jensen Lee’s face leered at her from a graphic next to the reporter, the same picture she’d seen on his bounty page. The one she’d failed to recognize. Above his face, large flashing letters spelled, WANTED: 20,000 REWARD. They’d quadrupled the bounty after the attack.

“—and there is also a smaller, two thousand credit reward for information leading to the capture of Jensen Lee. Viewers, please don’t hesitate to call. This man has been on the run from interplanetary authorities for more than five weeks and Overlook City’s Commissioner Norton has warned us that the fugitive will not hesitate to kill again. Until further notice, the city’s walls are closed to pedestrian traffic, meaning the cancellation of tonight’s Fated Lovers festivities. We can only speculate what will happen from here—perhaps this is just the prelude to a larger, more devastating attack.”

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Bee closed the window and leaned back in her chair, bathed in the cool glow of the projected monitor. She realized she’d been sitting in the dark, and as she got up to turn on the lights, Slack Dog’s datapad vibrated in her pocket. She’d completely forgotten about it. Startled, she grabbed for the pad and the screen lit up as she brought it out of her pocket.

Bee saw with horror she’d answered a video call. An older man with a red floral-print bandanna on his head squinted at her from the tiny display, trying to make out her face. She covered the camera with her thumb, thankful for the darkness. It looked like he was in a kitchen. She hovered a finger over the “end” button, but didn’t hang up.

“Well, you’re not Slack Dog,” he said. “You’re far too pretty.”

So he had at least gotten a look at her. Bee considered ending the call. She was still wearing her uniform—the gaudy dark magenta outfit was unmistakably that of a hotel employee, and it even had her name on it. She had no idea who the guy was, or what connection he had to Slack Dog, but she didn’t want him to know anything more about her than he did already.

“Who are you?” Bee asked.

“An old friend of his,” he said. “And you?”

“No one. I’m sorry to tell you this, but he was the one killed in the explosion. I guess this is his pad—I found it, I didn’t steal it or anything. I was going to return it.”

The man shook his head regretfully. “I called as soon as I heard about the bombing. Damn shame. He was a decent man.”

“What was he doing here?”

He frowned. “Why so interested?”

She didn't want to reveal that she worked at the hotel. Between her face and her job, he'd be able to find out who she was for sure. She considered hanging up. Whoever the guy was, it wasn't her business. She could feel the silence after his question growing, and a flutter of panic brought the first thing that came to mind tumbling out of her mouth.

“I’m a bounty hunter,” she blurted. “Looking for Jensen Lee.”

Bee had to cover the speaker as the man howled with laughter. Embarrassed, she felt her cheeks flush. Her mouth had a way of working on its own when she was flustered. The man wiped tears from the crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes as he shook with mirth.

“Goodbye,” she said, and went to end the call.

“Wait, wait,” the man said, still chuckling. “Please, I’m sorry. I’m a very rude man. Name’s Bill Silver.”

“I’m not telling you mine,” she said. “Now tell me what’s going on. Why was Slack Dog killed?”

Silver hesitated for a moment. He looked deep into the camera, and even though she knew he couldn’t see her, she understood she was being assessed somehow. Calculated. Again, she felt the urge to remove herself from the situation, but she didn't hang up.

“He had something very valuable,” Silver said.

“What was it?”

“A map.”

“A map of what?”

“Buried treasure,” he said with a growl.

Bee snorted. “Really.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard of Dreadstar.”

“Dreadstar,” Bee said. The name brought a bad taste into her mouth.

The body of the ruthless space pirate Dreadstar was on display at the Overlook City Museum. Bee only saw it once as a child, accidentally. Back when everything was still normal. Mother didn’t know what they were walking into.

The image flashed in her mind. Every visible inch of his pale body was covered with tiny black numbers in intricate patterns—his infamous tattoos, the still-unbroken code that hid the location of his treasure hoard. The Governor of Overlook had ordered his corpse to be put on display at the museum and contorted into a snarling battle pose like some kind of morbid action figure. He held a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, his bionic eye still blazing with a red light—his namesake. Everyone in the city had seen him at least once.

People said Dreadstar was a code breaker for Earth’s Interstellar Fleet who got stranded when the gates went down during the war. His vessel was forced into hiding in the asteroid belt Styx, where he went mad and murdered the entire crew before piloting the ship, alone, into pirate territory. No one knows how exactly he brought the pirate clans under his heel, but when they joined forces they claimed nearly the whole system as their territory. It took more than a decade for the Core planets to bring him down and contain the pirate fleets within the asteroid belt.

Dreadstar’s body was mounted in a display case just inside the museum’s front doors. It was the first thing Bee saw after she and Mother walked in. He seemed to be charging forward, straight for the door, posed as though he were perpetually in the midst of staging an escape. Six-year-old Bee immediately vomited from sheer terror, making for a short museum trip. Mother left her in the crowd that day.

Bee clapped a hand over her mouth, dropped the datapad onto her desk with a clatter, and scrambled for the bathroom. Before she could quite make it to the toilet, she puked, some of it streaming through her fingers and down her chin. The rest splashed into the water, chunky soup that stuck to the bowl. Bee dry heaved, but nothing else came up except bad memories.

She flushed the foul contents down the drain, washed her hands and face, gargled some water, and dried herself with a towel. Luckily, she hadn’t gotten any on her uniform or in her hair. She heard Bill Silver’s deep baritone on the pad in the other room, but couldn’t make out his words over the noise of the toilet.

Bee flicked on the lights. She picked up the pad again, but didn’t bother covering the camera this time; he’d already seen her, what did it matter? She peered into the small display. Silver had set his pad down on a metal countertop. He had his back turned to the camera, and seemed to be engaged in a conversation with himself as he chopped a bulbous green vegetable of some kind on a cutting board.

Bee took the opportunity to study the man and his surroundings. It looked like a ship’s kitchen—from this angle she could see stars through a round window in the wall. Silver had a white apron tied around the great girth of his belly, and Bee noted with some curiosity that his left hand appeared to be bionic. She saw glints of metal shine off the hand in the artificial light of the kitchen. He used his real hand to cut.

The kitchen itself was clean and organized, with spices, herbs, and other ingredients arranged in neat rows behind glass cupboard doors. Silver lifted the cutting board and slid the edge of his knife across it, sending the diced vegetables tumbling into a large tub, and glanced over his shoulder at the datapad’s screen.

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“Ah,” he said. “The bold bounty huntress returns.”

Bee’s ears burned at the jab. “So, Slack Dog got blown up for a treasure map,” she snapped, and saw Silver flinch. She regretted her sharp words.

“Yes, back to business. The long-lost treasure of the space pirate—well, I’d better not say it,” he said with a grin and another glance at the camera. “Of course you must know the story. You can’t live in Overlook City without hearing about him.”

So he did know where she was—of course. He probably knew which hotel Slack Dog would be staying at if they were supposed to meet. The thought that he knew her location made her uneasy. He’d revealed it on purpose, she was sure.

“I grew up there too,” he said, and took on a reflective tone. “Spent most of my young days on Surface. Best times of my life.”

“The map,” she said. Her voice was quiet.

“Of course,” Silver said. “It’s an encoded list of coordinates. Dreadstar’s crew spent months spreading their stolen goods across a vast, complicated network of asteroids in the belt. But before they could finish, some members of the crew mutinied. No one knows which asteroids are filled with loot and which ones are just rock, ice, and ore. Total chaos out there.

“However, we do know that the orbits of many asteroids have been, ah, bumped, shall we say, which is very common, of course, due to illegal mining operations and the like—unavoidable, unpoliceable, that kind of thing out there—”

Bee’s heart started pounding as Bill Silver continued to elaborate on the significance of the map, and she couldn’t concentrate. His voice droned out and her ears started ringing. Why was she still talking to him? He was right up there, probably parked at Overlook Station.

What if he already had more men on the way to get this treasure map and he was just stalling her?

“Hey, little bounty hunter,” Silver snapped. “Don’t you see?”

“See what?” she said.

“You’re holding the map,” Silver said. “Well, a copy of it.”

Bee looked at the datapad, confused. Silver’s impatient face scowled back at her. She asked, “If it’s so valuable why are you telling me all this?”

“You have it. I want it.” He shrugged. “No need to involve anyone else.”

“Whoa, whoa, I am in no way involved here. Why don’t you just come down here and get it?”

“That wasn’t the plan. Slack Dog was supposed to bring it to me this afternoon. Things always work better when you stick to the plan,” Silver said. “Besides, you can scurry it up to me just as well as he could have.”

Bee laughed. “Yeah, except that he was killed by a bomb because he was carrying this map of yours. Jensen Lee is still out there, you know, and if this is what he’s after—”

“Jensen Lee thinks he destroyed it. Slack Dog wasn’t the real target, the map was. I know for a fact a backup copy was saved on that datapad. Come on, it’s easy money. You’ll have plenty to spend during the Festival. Have you not got any steel inside you at all? You just scared?”

Bee straightened her spine and glared into the screen.

“No, I’m not scared. But for one thing, I don’t trust you at all.”

“So you’re not empty-headed, that’s a start.”

“And for another, why should I risk my life for you when I could take this to the police and be done with it?”

“The police?” he sputtered.

Now she had his attention.

“Well, it is evidence,” she said. “Actually, it seems like it’d be illegal not to turn it in.”

“You don’t want to do that, girl,” he said. There was a growl of anger in his voice. He used his robotic left hand to clean the knife, rubbing the rough fabric of his apron against the blade with dexterous metal fingers.

“I really do.” Bee said. “Why should I get involved?”

Silver put away the knife and wiped his hands with the apron—first the dark metallic one with its eerily natural movements, then his real hand. He seemed to reconsider his approach and shrugged. “Fine. I can see your point. Go ahead, take it to the police. They’ll be looking for it after I report it stolen.”

“I told you I didn’t steal it,” Bee said with a snarl. “Your slobbering drunk accomplice left it sitting on the bar before he went up to his room and passed out with the door open. I was trying to give it back to him, which is the only reason I’m talking to you. Asshole. I’ve got people who trust me here, okay, so don’t think you can just go making accusations like that and expect them to hold up.”

Silver waved away her indignant bluster. “Fine, fine. I can see you’re just a daft girl who doesn’t know a good offer when you see one. Absolutely no ambition, no drive at all. I can see it. In this world, you’ve got to reach out and take things. Enjoy your lot in life, girl, because you’ll only ever amount to what you’re given.”

She didn’t like the derisive inflection he used when he said girl. Her eyes flashed with anger.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“With enough money you can fuel any ambition you’ve got. And I can pay you a whole lot of money for that map. But since you don’t want it I’ll have to find someone else.”

“I notice you still haven’t given me a price.”

“A thousand credits. Five hundred up front.”

Bee’s heart jumped. It would take years for her to save that much. It was enough to make it all the way to the belt—and on a decent ship, too. In the back of her mind, she heard Mother’s familiar whisper. She kept her expression flat, suspecting Silver may be lowballing her based on her age. If it was worth as much as he said it was he’d be willing to pay.

“One thousand now,” she said. “And another thousand after.”

“Seven-fifty before and after.”

“One thousand or I walk.”

Silver balked and squinted at her, but she kept a thin-lipped silence.

Finally, he rumbled his acquiescence: “Fine.”