Beyond the Stars: At Galaxy's Edge

THERE I WAS, surrounded by five of the deadliest scumbags in the galaxy. Five guys who had murdered some of the baddest of the bad. They were taking aim at me, and all I could think about was making sure she was safe.

But I wouldn’t exactly call it a love story.

A lust story, maybe. Is that a thing? All I know is, I would have done anything for her. Anything at all. And she wasn’t even human.

Don’t go getting any crazy ideas. It’s not like she was a lizard or a Tovarian Devil Slug or anything like that. She was humanoid. Ish.

She had mostly the right parts, except for the third mammary appendage and an extra orifice that I won’t discuss in polite company. But other than that, she could have walked around any city on Earth without getting too many second glances. Well, not for the fact that she wasn’t human, anyway. She certainly got a lot of looks on account of how beautiful she was.

A few too many, if you’re the jealous type. Not that I’d know anything about that...

Maybe I should start from the start now that I’ve laid down all that interesting foundational info.

You know how you’ve seen a million holo-vids where some rich yahoo hires a scumbag to track down his girl because she got tired of him, or left with a bunch of his credits, or fell in love with another yahoo, or some combo of the above? Well, there’s a reason there’s a million of them. It’s because it’s something that happens when a woman thinks all she needs is a rich guy to take care of her and she’ll be happy, and then it turns out that being rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when you’re not attracted to a guy who feels like he has a right to slobber all over you any time he gets the urge.

Buuuuuut it also turns out it’s hard to give up the credits once you’ve been mainlining them for a stretch. So, you try to get the best of both worlds. The easiest way is the divorce route, but most of these yahoos are smart enough to get a prenup, so that’s usually out. The nastiest way is to make sure he has a big insurance policy, or added you to his will, and then off him the first chance you get and hope you don’t get caught. And then there’s the dangerous way, which is finding some scumbag to help you get a hold of a good portion of his credits, and then escape into a life where you can spend the credits without the hassle of all that slobbering.

I’m sure you noticed I mentioned both sides making use of a scumbag. And that’s because, in this particular case, I happened to be said scumbag for both sides.

You see, Xiomara‌—‌that was her name, or rather the Earth standard approximation of it‌—‌had decided to try to extricate some credits for herself without any assistance, knowing full well that anyone she chose to assist her would probably insist on some slobbering of his own. And, because she’s good at pretty much everything she does, she darn near got away with it. In fact, if her husband hadn’t hired the best of the best to track her down, she would have.

Now, I don’t usually toot my own horn unless there’s a serious need to toot it, but I should probably clarify here that I happen to be the aforementioned best of the best. It’s a formerly disputed fact that is no longer in dispute. Because if those who disputed it had been correct, then they would currently be considered the best rather than what they are considered.

Which is deceased.

So this guy‌—‌let’s call him Big Hank (since that was, after all, his name)‌—‌hired me to track down his wife and his credits, and return the one he still actually cared about (hint: it didn’t have three breasts) and get rid of the other.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that she fell for me as soon as we laid eyes upon one another, or even that I fell for her. Especially the former, since I’m not much to look at myself. But she knew she was dead if she didn’t get me over to her side somehow, and she happened to have certain attributes that I found very appealing. So we quickly came to an... understanding.

Interlude: There’s an ancient Earth song that still streams the metanet occasionally with the metaphor of driving in the passing lane of a land highway, by a band named after an extinct bird of great import to the old Earth United States of America. You may know it‌—‌I’m not going to quote it because I don’t want to owe half a year’s pay just to mention it, but you can still find it without too much effort. In the song, there’s a couple of ne’er-do-wells who run around drinking and snorting intoxicants and generally having one big party all the time.

Well, our life became a lot like that song, except instead of driving around what’s now become the great salt flats on Earth in a vehicle running on combustible fossil fuels, we were blasting around the galaxy in my ship, the Red Raptor, spending Big Hank’s credits like they were about to expire. We also may or may not have stopped by some of the galaxy’s most affluent neighborhoods and financial institutions on occasion to refill our coffers. I’m not one to incriminate myself, so I’ll leave all that to your imagination.

In addition, we often made an appearance at the best pasta joints we could find. Xiomara loved her some pasta, and couldn’t get enough of it. We’d always get extra to have later on board ship. I even got pretty good at whipping some up in my small galley when she got desperate. Turned out she enjoyed my pasta as much as the stuff at the fanciest places. At least, that’s what she told me.

Hank...

Well, Hank was not happy.

There were a lot of reasons why Hank felt that way. Not the least of which was that he’d hired me, and there’s obviously no way the second-best scumbag would be able to take me down, even in the awful state I was in a good deal of the time. Or even the second and third best scumbags together, for that matter. But the second through sixth best? That would be a problem. And, thanks to Hank, it did become my problem.

I took to calling them the Cinque, just because I thought it sounded cooler if I was being chased by a posse by that name instead of just five regular scumbags. I’d been working with and against these guys for years, depending on the circumstances, with the exception of the guy who was Number Five with a bullet. Never met him because he was new to the business of doing what we do, but he was what you might call a “rising star.”

Plus, I didn’t actually know any of their names. I hadn’t bothered to learn them before, even when I was working with them, and I wasn’t about to start then. So I just referred to them as “Two” through “Six.”

Before I get into too much detail about these new scumbags, let me first tell you a little bit more about myself. I could tell you I had a horrible childhood, but that would be putting much too rosy of a spin on things. I was orphaned on a barren rock of a planetoid called Finnegan’s Centaur, way out in the middle of the Reach, which had been abandoned by the mining company because it hadn’t been turning much of a profit.

You’d think they’d let the miners and merchants who were there know, and maybe even provide some transport out of there. But that would be giving them too much credit. They decided it was cheaper just to leave everyone and everything there, figuring it would sort itself out one way or another.

And, boy, did it.

At first, everyone just thought the supply ships were running late. Maybe a schedule mix up or some such. But then it started to be a while, and supplies were running low, so the supervisors attempted to call out to headquarters to find out what was what.

But the comm stations were one of the few items that were actually worth anything on this miserable rock, and the last ships out had quietly taken them, along with anything else they thought was worth saving. From what I can gather, one of the crew thought my mom fit that category, because I never saw her after that last ship left. I’d like to think she was forced into leaving and pleaded for them to take me along too, but I wasn’t so young that I don’t remember what she was like, and I find that version of the story to be highly unlikely. The truth is, she was probably passed around the crew until they were tired of her, and then tossed out an airlock.

My dad was the closest thing to law enforcement that existed in our small community. He wasn’t a pleasant man, which actually helped him in his job, and he was highly proficient with a blaster. But when the truth about the company had been discovered and the rioting started, he was one of the first to be killed.

Which left me in quite a predicament. Because I was barely seven sols old.

Being the only kid on that godsforsaken rock actually had its advantages, including the fact that nobody ever thought to childproof anything. I don’t mean putting guard rails up and plugging empty sockets. I mean there were lots of ways someone my size could get in and around pretty much everyplace in that small settlement because nobody thought to make it otherwise.

I swiftly learned that I could go practically anywhere without being seen, and that meant I could take whatever I needed from whoever had it. And if what I needed to take was a person’s life, then I took that. Within a few months I was so good at sneaking up and slitting someone’s throat that they never even knew I was there.

Sneak.

Slit.

Steal.

Repeat.

That was my life for years‌—‌I lost track of how many‌—‌until there was no longer anything to steal, or anybody to steal from. Eventually, I was on my way to starving, and there was nothing that was going to prevent it. Truth to tell, I had become somewhat feral.

Then a ship showed up. From what I gathered, they needed to do some repairs that required them to land, and this was the closest place. While they were taking a look around, I stowed away aboard the ship.

I sometimes wonder if they might have treated me okay if I had just explained my situation, either before or after I snuck on board the ship. But after they discovered a couple of crewmembers with slit throats, there was no way they were going to welcome me.

Unlike the mining settlement, this ship was too small for me to stay hidden forever. The smell alone was enough to give me away.

I’ll give them credit. They didn’t just shoot me once they caught me. That’s what I would have done in their shoes.

But that might have been a favor compared to what happened next. They dropped me off at an Imperial hub and had me arrested. They showed holo-pics of the carnage at the mining town, and said I had murdered some of their men the same way.

Turned out I had actually killed more people than anyone they’d ever heard of. I didn’t even get why it was a big deal, considering it had been my life for so long.

Imperial trials being what they are, it didn’t take long for me to be processed, convicted, then tossed onto a prison station orbiting a gas giant. Nobody had ever escaped from this place in all the decades it had been spinning around the planet. Until me, that is.

But it took years for me to do it. By that time, I had grown a lot. I wasn’t the biggest, but I was big. And I wasn’t the toughest, but I was tough. Nobody could fight like me.

And nobody could beat me.

Of course, someone with my history doesn’t have a whole lot of options when it comes to a profession, so after I escaped I went with the one that came naturally. The polite way to describe me would be bounty hunter. A closer term would probably be assassin, at least in most cases. But the reality is that I usually get paid to be a cold-blooded killer.

So. Back to my story.

As I was saying, Xiomara and I were blasting around the galaxy, slobbering all over each other and having a grand old time.

Then the Cinque showed up.

They caught up to us on Synius Prime, out on the edge of nowhere. We had landed the Raptor on a plateau with an astonishing view of Broneah Falls‌—‌you’d have to see it to believe it‌—‌and had been holed up there for about a week, enjoying the scenery and each other, when these boys showed up in their ships.

The first thing we did was try taking the easy way out. I powered up the Raptor’s reactor in emergency mode‌—‌not the safest move in the world, but then, neither is being shot at by a quintet of the galaxy’s best bounty hunters. We were out of the atmosphere in seconds, and past Synius Prime’s orbit soon after. They were fast, but I own a modified Imperial recon vessel (I’ll explain that some other time‌—‌I don’t want to slow down the momentum), so we were going to be outrunning them right quick.

But one of their better shots‌—‌probably Four, from what I’ve seen‌—‌hit us with a blast from his ion cannon. We felt the ship jolt violently as the beam tore into our starboard engine. We weren’t going to be going anywhere for long.

I performed my fanciest flying maneuvers through that system, but I couldn’t shake them without the extra juice. And I’m a fairly decent pilot. May have even won some pretty big piloting competitions (oops, there I go tooting again). I whipped around asteroids, flew through the rings of a gas giant, and reversed course a few times to try to lose them.

But, again: Five to one. And so it goes.

I pulled up the nav charts, desperate to figure something out.

Then I realized where I was. Coincidence? Probably. Or maybe I’m just so good that my subconscious figures these things out without me noticing. Toot, toot.

As the Cinque closed in on us, I kicked in the afterburners and blasted out toward the furthest planets in the system, including Finnegan’s Centaur.

We almost didn’t make it to the barren rock that had been my first home and my first prison. Almost.

When we were getting close to the former settlement, I slowed down just enough to make them think they’d be able to hit me. Then I flipped around and flew between Four and Six. Four got off a shot, since that was his area of expertise, but I dropped down right when I knew he’d shoot, and the beam sliced through Six’s ship. I didn’t watch for long, but I did see it fall toward the planetoid in two pieces.

I finally began firing back instead of just running, now that the odds were slightly more even. I almost hit a couple of them, even with my damaged ship. That was enough to scatter the four scumbags who were left long enough for me to get down to the settlement.

I managed to nestle the Raptor into the main landing port and get off the ship with Xiomara before the other ships had a chance to land. There were no lights, and it would have been exceedingly difficult for someone to put a ship down if they weren’t already familiar with the place, especially in the smaller auxiliary ports.

We headed for the main warehouse, since that would offer us a lot of chances to stay hidden. It was also where I’d set up shop as a kid after nobody else was left, since it was so big that I would occasionally come across a crate of supplies that hadn’t been found by anyone else and extend my miserable life another week or two. Ah, good times.

The past couple of decades hadn’t been kind to the abandoned settlement. It was a ghost town, with most of its ghosts having been created by yours truly. It was in such bad shape that it looked like nobody had been there for hundreds of years. Structures were crumbling, wood was rotting, and a heavy layer of dust covered everything.

The warehouse was just a smaller version of the settlement itself, full of stacks and shelves of crates that were either empty or filled with things that were no longer needed after the mining company had abandoned it.

It didn’t take long for Two through Five to find me, since they had tracking equipment just like I did. But I knew the radiation from some of the rocks they used to mine there would foul up their scanners enough that they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint us exactly.

Their first mistake was splitting up. They probably figured they’d find us faster that way, and that it would’ve been easier for me to kill them quickly if they were in a group.

But individually, they’d lost their only advantage over me. Now that it was one on one, they didn’t stand a chance.

Once Xiomara was relatively safe and had her blaster at the ready, I climbed up to one of my favorite spots, on top of the highest rack of shelves in the warehouse. From there I got a bead on the locations of Three and Four, with Three being just below me. Three was from the planet Morivar, which meant he was taller than a human, and much thinner. Morivarians were good at a lot of things, especially tracking, but hand-to-hand combat was not one of them.

Since I didn’t want to give away my position, I jumped down on him from above, knocking him to the permacrete floor in the process. After that, I shut him up with a few punches before he was able to yell for the others. Then it was just a matter of hitting his head hard enough against the floor to make sure he wouldn’t wake up again.

I went back to check on Xiomara and told her where Four was, and she informed me that she had spotted Five. I tried to convince her to stay where she was, but she insisted on going after Five herself. The truth was, she could take care of herself better than almost anyone I’d ever met. I had no right to tell her to stay put, any more than she had a right to tell me.

We went in opposite directions, and I found Four right away. His species had four arms, and he was a two-gun man. At the moment, both were drawn and at the ready. I climbed on top of a crate to get the advantage, but the top had started rotting away, and it splintered as I stood on it. As I lost my balance, Four spotted me and took aim.

Then, the sound of blaster fire echoed through the warehouse. He turned for just a split second when he heard it, and that was a split second too long. I fired and put a smoking hole through his forehead before he had finished turning his head back in my direction.

I ran toward the sound of blaster fire, but I couldn’t find Xiomara right away. I started to worry, but then Xiomara came back around and told me she had taken out Five. I was relieved to find out that the sound I’d heard was her blaster killing him, and not the other way around.

One left: Number Two. I told her to wait there while I circled around. That way she could get him if he came to her, and I could get him if he was still out there. I knew which direction he’d probably be approaching from, and I also knew how to get back behind where he’d be coming from.

While Four had been the best shot of the bunch in a ship, Two approached my own skill in hand-drawn blasters. He was from a colony with heavy gravity, so he was quick, and his reflexes were faster than any non-enhanced human I’d ever seen. I had to be extra careful, since it would probably be a matter of who drew on whom first. I spotted him creeping up on Xiomara’s location, so I started creeping up on him. I couldn’t fit in the same small spaces as I used to back in the day, but I hadn’t lost my touch, either. I probably should have just pulled out my gun and finished it fast, but something came over me.

I pulled my blade instead.

I don’t know what was going on in my head‌—‌whether I wanted to see if I could still do it, or if I thought it might give me some kind of thrill I hadn’t felt in decades‌—‌but I made the spectacularly stupid move of trying to slice his throat. Within seconds, I was behind him, and I saw him tense for a split second as he realized I was there.

But it was too late. I grabbed him by the hair, pulled his head back, and sliced.

As I let him fall to the ground, I saw that Xiomara was at the end of the aisle I was standing in. I smiled at her and thought about how great things were going to be now that those scumbags were taken care of. Nobody else would even be able to come close to taking us out.

I found it curious that she didn’t smile back, but I immediately found out why.

I heard the quick whine of a blaster, and the next thing I knew, I had an extra orifice of my own. Before I felt the pain, I noticed my legs were no longer working, and I dropped to the floor like a sack of plantains. I held my hand over the hole through my middle to stem the extensive bleeding, and twisted around as best I could to see who’d shot me. The handsome face that smiled at me was not one I was expecting to see again.

Number Five was still alive. Xiomara was a good shot‌—‌almost as good as me from what I’d seen the past few weeks‌—‌so I don’t know how she could have thought she’d gotten him when he obviously looked perfectly fine.

That meant there was a problem. But before I could fully figure it out, I blacked out.

Luckily, I wasn’t out for long, and Five hadn’t bothered to shoot me in the head in the interim. I guess the crimson pond beneath my body was enough for him to assume I’d died when I passed out.

It didn’t take a whole lot of calculating to figure out what was going on here.

Sure enough, when I popped my head up to check out the situation, Five and Xiomara were making googly eyes at each other. And not the love at first sight kind, either. More of the “Soon we’ll be together forever, my love” kind.

I might not be the brightest star in the sector, but I know when I’ve been had. That’s right: I had an honest-to-goodness femme fatale on my hands. Apparently, she’d made a deal with Five‌—‌or maybe they were genuinely together from the start, I don’t know‌—‌and now they were getting rid of all the competition, including me.

But they’d made the colossal error of thinking I was dead. Not that I was far off. The shot had gone through my lower abdomen, and not only did it hurt like hell, I wasn’t able to walk. Depending on which organs were hit, I may or may not have survived long enough to get patched up. But I was determined to take them both down either way.

I snuck another peek and saw Five grab Xiomara in his arms and plant a kiss on her lips. Those luscious lips. It made my stomach turn and my chest clench up. Of course she’d want to be with that jackhammer with his holo-flick good looks. Why would I ever think she’d really wanted to be with me?

While he was macking on her, I slowly crawled back around to find my weapon, which had flown out of my hand when I was shot. As far as I knew, they didn’t notice me moving, but I stopped cold when I saw what happened next.

Still locked in Five’s arms, Xiomara pointed her weapon at the back of his head and blew it clean off. Interesting twist there. That would have left her home free.

If I’d actually been dead, that is.

Gravely wounded as I was, I still managed to grab my weapon from the floor next to me and point it at her. She sensed it, just as I was ready to shoot. Her surprised expression momentarily morphed into that seductive gaze that had conned me for weeks. I almost couldn’t do it.

But I squeezed the trigger. The blast went clean through her middle breast. Dammit, that was my favorite one, too. She dropped to the floor immediately. As the blood pooled under her body, I managed to drag myself along the floor to be near her. Our blood was mingling together, my red and her blue, as our lives had briefly done up until that point.

“Was it worth it?” I asked.

“It... would have... been...” she replied, with a great deal of effort.

“I take it none of it was real?” I had a hard time getting it out, but I’m sure that was just due to my injuries.

“The pasta was good.” The slightest smile. Then the lights went out in her stunning violet eyes, and she was done.

For some reason the hole in my gut was also causing my eyes to leak. Not sure what the connection was there.

I returned to Earth as soon as I was recovered enough to fly there, and with the help of a Tranrian vorpal blade, six electrocell crystals, and some duct tape, I soon had Hank telling me everything. Actually, he was ready to talk as soon as I walked into his office, but I needed to release some of my frustration on someone.

I want to say I let Hank live after he spilled the truth along with the contents of his stomach. But we don’t always get what we want.

Not only had Xiomara not stolen his money, she had paid him to play the part and to hire me to put everything in motion. That was her plan. Get me on her side, then hire the rest of the best to come after us so we’d all take each other down. Which would have left her as the new Numero Uno. Instead, she just put a bigger distance between me and whoever was the new Number Two.

She was never a trophy wife at all. She was just another bounty hunter.

Q&A with Christopher J. Valin

What made you decide to write this type of story?

I’ve had an idea for a space opera story about a bounty hunter anti-hero kicking around in my head for quite some time now, but I was busy writing other stories and screenplays. After working mostly on my YA superhero series recently, I felt like I needed to do something a little racier, more adult, with a humorous tone. When I saw the call for submissions for this anthology (I really enjoyed the previous two), it prompted me to finally sit down to write it. I had a really good time working on it.

Why a bounty hunter?

People seem to like the whole idea of bounty hunters (including me), especially in science fiction. I mean, Boba Fett hardly does anything in the Star Wars films, and he’s one of the most popular characters. There’s kind of automatically a certain element of danger and badass-ness to them.

I take it you’re a Star Wars fan?

Most definitely. At the age of nine, I read the novelization before the film even came out. Then the movie blew my mind. I had already been a Star Trek fan since I was even younger, but watching that story on the big screen was a life-changing event for me. I was even in the documentary The People vs. George Lucas, which is about Star Wars fans.

What projects are you currently working on?

At the moment, I’m finishing up the second part of the Red Raptor Files, which is my YA superhero series. The first book was called Sidekick, and the second will be Super-Team. I also have stories appearing in a couple of other anthologies right now: The Legacy Fleet anthology set in Nick Webb’s universe, and Capes & Clockwork 2, which has my second story about my steampunk superhero, Agent Eagle.

How can readers keep up with your writing and follow you?

I have a page on Facebook, a Twitter account (@valinchris), and a website, christophervalin.com. And, of course, there’s always my author page on Amazon at Amazon/ChristopherJValin.

Christopher J. Valin is a writer, artist, teacher and historian living in the Los Angeles area with his wife and two children. He has written stories of all kinds since childhood, including novels, short stories, comic books, and screenplays. In 2009, his biography of his 5x great-grandfather, Fortune’s Favorite: Sir Charles Douglas and the Breaking of the Line, was published by Fireship Press. In addition to writing and inking for independent comic book companies and writing screenplays for production companies, Christopher has had numerous short stories published in anthologies such as Capes & Clockwork: Superheroes in the Age of Steam and Doomed: Tales of the Last Days.