The Legend of Ivan (21 page)

But Lorric was different. For certain, over the years he had to put down a number of colleagues whose eyes outmatched their appetite and wit, but he never did so unprovoked. Intelligent, careful, shrewd, and completely honorable, Lorric always kept his agreements and came up with the plan most likely to succeed.

He was perfect for the job, his magnum opus, of putting together a team to take on Ivan. The biggest challenge, save for the task itself, was to make as sure as possible that no individual would jeopardize the mission by becoming too hungry.

This even extended out to they who would collect the prize and pay out. No more highest bidding was allowed: only cooperation. Due to three years of failed hunting, he managed to convince all contributing corporate parties to agree to an equal share of whatever they wanted out of Ivan.

The thought of what he might hold, including the threat of getting nothing, outweighed the advantage of having a leg up on the competition. Through careful negotiation, Lorric managed to get them, as a group, to endorse his efforts and even provide advances to the members he chose.

In short, he managed to convince everyone that he and only he had the greatest chance of bringing Ivan in alive, intact, and ready to spill the secrets behind the destruction at Atropos Garden. The deal was beyond excellent, and Lorric was perfect for the job.

Hoping to get a piece of the action, hundreds flocked to the interviews. Individuals from across the galaxy came to display their impressive skills. Fighting for favorable position outside of the evaluation site ran rampant, and many were killed in the chaos. Fortunately, due to corporate sponsorship and security, nothing within light years of the interview complex itself went amiss.

Lorric did not choose the best of the best, as evidenced by the presence of Richner Platt. Employing a stringent battery of physical and mental testing, he crafted his group by two main criteria: the ability to co-exist in the crew as a whole and the ability to fit a niche.

Well-rounded skills with certain strong points filled the ranks. Pilots, marksmen, demolitions, scouts, electronics experts, ground vehicle drivers, hand-to-hand combatants: the group as a whole, and each of the five individual teams of five, could handle about any task. Psych evaluations ensured no large amount of personality clash between individual members.

Every possibility was thought of, laid out, and carefully considered. Every conceivable scenario was mapped, every individual loss was survivable, and every detail was accounted for. Even so, Lorric's brilliance in strategic planning could always be counted upon in the heat of a losing battle, including the cooler head necessary to figure out how to turn the tide.

Which became the primary reason why, when Lorric was among the first of his finely crafted team of expert bounty hunters to die, everything went to hell quite rapidly.

The planning and hiring phase took months, delicate persuasion and a healthy living stipend keeping the impatient members satisfied. During this time, aside from planning each possible encounter and scenario, Lorric developed the sources, leads, snippits, and conjecture required to actually find the man they sought.

Locating Ivan was a formidable challenge by itself, considering the man had all but disappeared from the galaxy. Even so, details were gathered in an effort not simply to locate Ivan but to understand him, to learn how he fought, how he ran, and how he managed to defeat and destroy anything he came across.

Lorric understood this. The way his mind worked, even without any impressive alterations or upgrades, he would have made a most impressive Archivist.

Of course, much of the useful data was gathered by an actual Archivist by the name of Quinn. Repeated and somewhat desperate attempts were made by Lorric to convince Quinn to join up, to be a part of the crew, but the Archivist in unsurprising fashion refused. Regardless, Quinn's work became instrumental, and Lorric's hunt would have extended into years without his assistance.

Finally, after many long months of planning and recruiting his twenty-four doomed souls, they were ready to depart, full-well knowing the risks and time the task might take. Having put together the most formidable hunting party ever seen in galactic history, Lorric deemed a speech quite necessary.

"I hope you all understand," Lorric spoke as the motley assortment looked on, "that this is not all tea parties and social clubs. This isn't a weekend getaway, and there's no fast grab for easy cash. Two hundred and fifty billion credits are promised to us upon successful delivery. Ten billion each, in addition to the healthy stipends you've all enjoyed thus far. Two hundred and fifty billion for Ivan," he repeated, "alive."

"The prize is excellent, and hundreds have died from incompetence or ridiculous in-fighting. No one has even come close to bringing Ivan in, and very few have survived the attempt. We put this group together,
I
... put this group together because no one else in the galaxy, individually or as a team, has a prayer of doing what we can. You're all professionals, you're all bound by contracts that say ten billion is enough, and you're all well-aware of the costs of betrayal or disobedience. Though I have no doubt that dozens of other offers have come through, let me assure you of one thing: the only way we succeed is by cooperation. If we work together, our names will go down in history as the men and women who took down the most infamous bounty ever to walk the galaxy."

Lorric grinned, seeing his words sink into the many faces hungry and ready to begin. "Oh yes," he continued with a laugh, "and we'll also become exceedingly rich."

Properly motivated, they set off. Ivan, knowing full well of the efforts against him, led them upon a merry chase for the better part of a year.

Close calls numbering in double digits filled the lives of the pursuers and pursued. Stations, moons, planets, cold vacuum: Ivan was hounded with every step he took, not even able during this time to thin the numbers. Lorric was too careful to allow such a thing.

"Divide and conquer," he told them, "is the biggest strategy and planning cliché that has ever
existed
, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. We all stay alive and in the hunt because of a few simple rules, and which one's most important?"

A few individuals sounded off, others already weary of the repetitive mantra. "No solo missions."

It wasn't the only rule Lorric had either, not that he was pretentious enough to emblazon them anywhere. He knew how he liked to have things run, and those who wanted to stay didn't question.

Everyone wanted to stay.

But the long months of fruitless chase took their toll upon group morale. Cohesion began to slip. With too many narrow escapes by their prey, frustrations rose, tensions mounted, and a few voiced concern about the leadership.

An opportunity arose. A contact whose identity Lorric could not confirm, and thus did not retain an ounce of trust for, provided a sighting. Normally, Lorric would have disregarded it without question, but aside from coming from an anonymous source, nothing rang false about the message. Not enough time for the usual levels of preparation, he took a risk in simply going against his meticulous nature.

Perhaps it was fatigue, perhaps it was concern over his contract falling apart, or perhaps it was a simple misjudgment.

He announced the pursuit without hesitation, a rash and impulsive act.

Twelve ships they had of various shapes, sizes, and bizarre nomenclature including that of Eternal Loss, Red Tide, Broken Spit, and so on. Lorric piloted his own, called Sapient Grace. They swept into the system without scouting first, blazing with weapons hot toward TF-235, a desolate ball mined hollow centuries earlier.

As the stream of vessels dipped into orbit, Lorric dispersed exactly one order through his comm. "Gambler and Fredricksburg," referring to two of his company's ships, "begin surface scans immediately. Life signs, traces of fusion exhaust, I want to know about whatever you can find in three minutes. The rest of you-"

Lorric's statement went unfulfilled as a rail projectile, launched from a hair's breadth out of the shadow of the first moon, shattered his engines. A fireball engulfed Sapient Grace as the ship careened down into the atmosphere and dissolved into a million smoldering bits.

The offending vessel swung around the moon into full view, a squat and hulking single-man gunship toting enough weaponry to bring down a frigate-sized craft. Ballistic rocket, energy, and rail gun fire spewed towards the group.

"It's not Ivan!" someone screamed through the comm. "Who the f-"

Two more of the hunters' ships detonated in high orbit, snuffing six of the party in half an instant, and three more vessels sustained heavy damage under the onslaught. Eternal Loss, containing Platt and Denko, dove under a volley of missiles, unlucky blasts damaging orbital thrusters and sending the vessel, trailing purple-tinged smoke, to the roughest of landings.

Screeching through the radio, the team desperately tried to rally with evasive maneuvers, threading through the assault. As the vessels came about, ready to exact retribution, the gunship veered, breaking towards the planet.

In hot pursuit and spewing vulgarities, Fleur Benoit, piloting the speedy, one-manned fighter she called Blitz, slammed nose-first into tracking mines dropped by the gunship. The fireball of her ship trailed in the atmosphere, gliding through the sky for near to fifteen seconds before the reactor blew and took one more of the hunters out of the fight.

Before any of the chaos and confusion could be sorted, the gunship disappeared from scopes, and a flurry of noise jammed sensor readings everywhere. Short wave transmissions became garbled and incoherent. As the various hunter vessels dipped towards the planet in search, surface to air missiles boiled up out of the brittle crust of the rocky, volcanic landmass.

All of the ships that remained of Lorric's team were grounded by the pilots to avoid being shot down or blasted to fragments. Three ships and seven more died in the never-ending ambush. Scattered across hundreds of miles, desperate attempts at coordination failed as a hover-vehicle blazed overhead and scoured the earth at the sites of each landing.

Denko and Platt extracted themselves and a tiny amount of their gear before the silhouette of their assailant loomed in the sky. They ran, diving into the cragged cover of a ravine as Eternal Loss was blasted into an even deeper crater.

"Holy shit..." Denko breathed, tears in his eyes at either the stinging dust in the air or the demise of his beloved ship.

Four more were killed, careless enough to remain too close to their vessels as they were hunted down by the relentless and still unidentified foe.

After hours of hiding, the distant explosions that marked the deaths of their former comrades faded into an eerie quiet. Hours later yet, Denko and Platt extracted their terrified selves, bruised and bleeding from the rough, volcanic stone, and set out in search of any survivors.

Night had settled, and the two crawled over ridges and tripped over tangles of thorned shrubbery. They heard soft scurrying of tiny, resilient animals, the evolutionary fortunate of the desolate world. The eclipsed moon hung in the sky, a bloody red bathing them in the memories of the recent slaughter.

They started arguing.

"We can't use the radio," Denko clutched it in his hand, threatening to dash it upon the stones. "Whoever that crazy shit is'll find us if we do."

Platt shook his head. "We're gonna starve to death if we don't find a way offa here." He threw a gesture towards the barren landscape. "If one of our ships made it, if there's enough parts to fix another one, we gotta find out. Or maybe we can band together and find the sumbitch who did this and take his. Either way, we gotta see if anyone else made it."

Denko had all but cracked. Terrified but obedient, he allowed Platt to quietly make the calls. He kept his gaze flitting about the horizon, paranoid of the hovercraft returning at any moment to finish them off.

Not that prior knowledge of a gruesome death would have done any good; they didn't have much with which to defend themselves. Platt carried his energy pistol, but Denko's came loose during the struggle to exit the ship, and it's absence went unnoticed until after Eternal Loss detonated into tiny fragments.

Considering the damage and what little remained of the vessel, it seemed unlikely, even hopeless, that any other ships could be salvaged, but still Platt tried.

Whispering into the radio, Platt managed to find four other survivors from two ships: one alone and three in a group. Through painstaking description of star and moon positioning, they managed to get a rough interpretation of how best to cover the many miles separating them.

Days passed as the bounty hunters hiked across the near-barren landscape. Though most were in excellent physical condition, the thin and abrasive air left each gasping with only moderate exertion. The miles crawled beneath them, and their pitiful amounts of emergency rations and water dwindled.

They passed crevices containing small surface to air missile launchers, silent now and empty of payload since grounding all of the hunting party. Denko, having dropped into dismal acceptance, checked over and scavenged a few useful, non-heavy parts.

Denko and Platt came across the loner first, whose ship came into a soft landing before being detonated much like Eternal Loss.

Misfortune fell upon the other group, still dozens of miles away, as one member sustained a serious fracture stepping into an unseen crevice. The whole group sported injuries from a rough landing, but the man with his broken leg slowed them down for several hours before infection took hold. With no medical supplies, it became quicker for the hikers and more merciful for the man to put him down.

On the evening of the eighth night, bright flashes resonated from the eastern horizon. "Are you all right?" Platt whispered into the radio to the other party, whose position roughly lay to the east.

There came no response.

Hopeless, the remaining three of twenty five traveled in the direction of their former companions, finding nothing but charred bone fragments when they arrived at the smoldering site a few days later.