Thunder cracks as the blackened sky envelops the Northern frostlands of Kaavari.
The snow and wind slowed him to a crawl.
Making his way with great effort to a small settlement, hopefully with a tavern in it. As any bounty hunter would.
The wind came in sideways, cutting through the gaps in his collar. The Jaeger pulled it tighter and kept moving. Each step forward cost him two; the snow was loose and deep in places, solid ice in others, and there was no way to know which until his boot broke through.
The settlement was closer now. Three, maybe four structures. Smoke from one of them, thin and pale, barely visible against the grey. He fixed his eyes on it and stopped thinking about anything else.
His fingers had begun to feel numb in the past hour of travelling through a snowstorm.
The first building resolved out of the blur, low, heavy-roofed, stacked stone with a door that had warped in its frame. He pushed his hand on the door.
It didn’t move.
He pushed again, this time with his shoulder, swinging it violently on the other side, banging on the wall beside it.
Heads turned. A small gust of wind followed him into the tavern. The warmth of the tavern hit him like a wall.
He pulled the door shut after wiping off the snow that caught onto his coat and stood there for a moment, turning his head to take a good look inside before walking to the bar.
People in the tavern who briefly took a look thought him another adventurer taking shelter from the snowstorm.
But those who looked too closely would think otherwise.
At a table in the far corner of the tavern, four Talkonians were harassing a single Gilldoran, inspecting him the way a butcher sizes up a cut. They'd turned from the Gilldoran now, eyes on the Jaeger, one of them with a wet sleeve and a flat expression.
He just stood at the bar, and didn’t look around.
One of them spoke in Talkoween with an accent.
“Oi, Mogi, look at this one,” circling around the Jaeger, taking a good look at him.
“Bet he’d fetch a high price on the market,” the tall one said.
The one who owned the spilled drink walked closer to the Jaeger.
“Oi, bastard, you owe me a drink.”
The Jaeger didn’t respond.
He reached for his shoulder. “I said, you owe me a dri—”
He caught the wrist, twisted it, the elbow went the wrong way, he went down with it.
The other three moved on instinct.
The Jaeger let go of the wrist and moved to close in on the tall one, he aimed for his legs, bringing him down, before driving an elbow onto the man’s jaw dispatching the tall one in an instant.
He was already turning when the third came in low and shoved him back into the bar’s edge. Something knocked over behind him, he grabbed the man by the back of the head, and introduced him into the counter’s edge.
The fourth one was already halfway through the door when Jaeger caught him by the ankle and dragged him back.
The onlookers were quiet, shifting in their seats.
The Jaeger moved to the Gilldoran across the room.
He spoke in the common tongue. “T-thank you, my good sir.”
“I-I would have been dead if it were not for you. P-please take these credits as a thank you.” The Gilldoran fidgeted in his seat and produced a small pouch of credits.
The Jaeger did not speak, he only placed a puck on the table, showing a “WANTED” hologram of the Gilldoran’s face.
“I-is that me?”
The Jaeger picked up the puck and waited.
“I-I’ll give you all of my money! If you just forget that I was even here.”
The Jaeger balled up both fists.
“I could bring you in Alive or dead. Choose.”
Heading back out into the frostlands, the gusts of snow had died down significantly.
The Gilldoran walked ahead, wrists bound, towards the Wayfarer of the settlement.
“I’m headed out to the yards.” Tossing a coin to the wayfarer.
It blows into a small flute like instrument, calling a skiff with an open passenger seat.
“Hop on,” said the driver.
Speeding across a frozen lake, the driver took out his binoculars.
“We’re half a mile out.”
A snowstorm on the other side of the horizon is beginning to brew.
Nearing the Yards, four sky ships are moored to a post.
The driver closes in the one the Jaeger owns.
The Gilldoran taking a look a little longer than he should. A slight disdain across his face.
“I think I could call a better mode of transport.”
They hop off. The driver is turning his head in all directions.
“Time’s ticking, give me the fare,” showing an open hand to the Jaeger.
The snowstorm, brewing larger, is heading their way.
The Jaeger tossed him 3 small silver plaques.
The driver quickly pocketed them. “Stay off the ice.” and rode off in the opposite direction of the storm, before something from below swallowed the skiff whole.
“HOLY MOTHER AGEA!” the Gilldoran stumbled back and began banging on the ship’s door.
“H-hey! Open up!”
The doors open. The Jaeger’s hand reached for the Gilldoran’s collar, pulling him into the ship.
The ship began to gain height, before something from below leaped up and grabbed onto one of the ship's anchors. The bite of the creature was strong enough to make hardened steel creak.
The Jaeger let out a disgruntled sigh and grabbed a shock lance from one of the weapon racks before opening the side doors of the ship.
The creature’s struggle dragged the hull into a louder creak, shaking the ship.
The Jaeger temporarily lost his balance before catching himself on the ship’s handles. He threw down the shock lance, stunning the creature. It released the anchor. The ship retracted it and climbed into altitude, flying off world.
The Jaeger didn’t watch the viewport during transit. There was nothing to see in warp space, not darkness, not the star, nothing worth looking at. Just the pressure against the glass that made looking at it feel like a mistake. He kept his back to it.
The Gilldoran sat across the hold with his wrists still bound and said nothing for the last three hours.
The ship groaned once. A long, settling sound from somewhere in the hull, and then went quiet again.
The Gilldoran looked up. “How long?”
The Jaeger didn’t answer.
“I only asked because my wrists—”
“Four hours.”
The Gilldoran nodded and went back to the floor.
Ten minutes before arrival the viewport filled with color. Stars settled into place first, then the brown-gold curve of a station ring lit from below by a port city that never went dark. The Jaeger rose, moved to the controls, and began the descent.
The station ring came into view four hours later.
Solenne Depot, a waypoint city bolted onto the inner curve of a refueling station older than most governments in the sector. It never went dark. The port district ran three shifts and the commercial quarter ran all of them simultaneously, which meant the lights below were constant and the noise, once the ship’s bay doors opened, hit like a second atmosphere.
The Jaeger brought the ship into the private docks and cut the engine.
He hauled the Gilldoran out by the collar and walked him through the dock corridor, through two checkpoints that waved them through on sight, and up into the Guild hall’s main floor, a wide space with high rafters and the particular noise of people conducting business they’d rather not have overheard.
He found Maret at his usual table near the back wall, a half-eaten meal in front of him and a ledger open beside it. Maret was a heavyset man with a careful way of looking at people, like he was always pricing something.
He looked at the Gilldoran, then at the Jaeger.
“Alive,” he said, not quite a question.
“Alive.”
Maret produced a scanner from his coat, ran it across the identification puck, and studied the result for a moment. He set the scanner down and reached into the ledger.
“Alive surcharge applies.”
The Jaeger said nothing.
Maret counted out the payment and slid it across the table.
The Jaeger looked at it without touching it.
Half the stack was imperial plaques. The old kind, thick, heavy-minted with the Rethian seal still on them, credits that had been losing value since the civil war fractured the empire’s trade routes. Technically still currency. Practically, a gamble.
“I’m not taking imperial.”
“They still spend,” Maret said, not looking up from his ledger.
“It was legal tender. Half the sector stopped accepting it eight months ago.” The Jaeger pushed the imperial stack back across the table. “Sector credits. Or equivalent.”
Maret leaned back in his chair and looked at him properly for the first time. “You know what my overhead looks like right now? Half my contracts are coming in from empire-side factions. Imperial is what I’ve got.”
“Then convert it before you pay me.”
“Conversion rate right now is—”
“Your problem.”
Maret held his gaze for a moment, then let out a short breath through his nose. He pulled the imperial stack back, reached into his coat, and produced a credit chip. He tapped it against his ledger terminal, checked the figure, and slid it across with the remaining stack.
“Alive surcharge is on the chip. Rest is hard currency. Best I can do.”
The Jaeger checked the chip, pocketed it along with the remaining stack, and stood.
Two hall runners appeared from somewhere nearby and took the Gilldoran through the back corridor before he had the chance to say anything.
The Jaeger turned to leave.
“There’s a hold on your account.”
He stopped.
“Came in two days ago. Priority tier routing, someone paid to have it flagged for you specifically.”
Maret picked up his fork. “Whoever it is, they’re not short on credits.”
The Jaeger turned back.
Maret produced a data chip from the ledger’s inside cover and held it out without looking up from his meal.
“Don’t bring me another live one,” he said. “The paperwork takes years off my life.”
He read the file in a corner booth of a food stall two levels up. The depot’s noise was a constant roar around him, ship traffic, vendors, the occasional argument carrying across the floor, and he let it stay in the background while he worked through the brief.
The contract was a protection and locate job. A person of interest had come to the attention of a mid-tier political faction currently backing one side of the Rethian Civil War, the conflict that had been quietly destabilizing the eastern sectors for the better part of two years. The faction needed something found. They believed this person knew where it was, or could lead to someone who did.
The person of Interest’s name was listed simply as Karina.
He turned the chip over in his hand once, then looked at the image attached to the brief.
She was well known, apparently. The file had three pages of background on her public profile, performances, appearances, coverage across half a dozen sector outlets. The kind of visibility that made her both easy to find and difficult to approach without drawing attention.
He read the rest without expression.
The connection to the Rethian conflict wasn’t explained in the brief. It rarely was at this clearance tier. Someone above the faction’s public facing operation knew something about her, enough to pay the priority fee, enough to want a specific contractor rather than an open post.
That alone told him more than the three pages did.
He pocketed the chip, finished what was left of his meal, and checked the last known location listed in the file.
She was currently on Verath Station. Sector four. A public engagement — ticketed, broadcasted, attended by several thousand people.
He left the booth and walked back towards the docks.
Verath Station was everything Solenne wasn’t. Clean lines, high ceilings, commercial surfaces polished to a shine. The kind of place that spent money on the parts people could see. The venue district sat in the station’s central ring, and the engagement listed in the file was already underway by the time he arrived, some kind of live appearance, the details of which he hadn’t bothered to read closely.
He didn’t need to.
He found a position at the upper level of the venue hall, back against the wall, and looked down at the floor below.
The crowd was large and orderly. Floor lighting, a raised stage, sound that carried cleanly through the space. She was on the stage, composed, unhurried, moving through whatever the engagement required of her with the ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times.
He wasn’t watching her.
He was watching the crowd.
It took him four minutes to find what he was looking for. Two figures on the far side of the floor, ground level, not watching the stage. Positioned near the secondary exit. One of them had his hand inside his jacket and hadn’t moved it in the time the Jaeger had been watching.
He moved.
Down the side stairs, through the crowd’s edge, cutting across the floor at a pace that didn’t draw attention. He reached the stage-side barrier and kept moving along it, getting between the two figures and her without coming into either sightline.
The engagement ended. The crowd applauded. She stepped back from the front of the stage.
He was already at the stage door when she came through it.
She stopped.
He was blocking the corridor, and he knew he looked like exactly the kind of problem she’d been trained to walk away from.
“There are two people on the floor behind that door,” he said. “They were watching your exit, not the stage. I’d suggest not going back through it.”
She looked at him for a moment with the particular stillness of someone deciding very quickly whether to trust a stranger or run from one.
“Who are you?”
“A contractor. I was hired to find you.”
Something shifted in her expression, not fear, exactly. More like a confirmation of something she’d been waiting to hear.
“By who?”
“I’ll explain that somewhere that isn’t here,” he said. “But I need an answer in the next thirty seconds because whoever sent those two didn’t send just two.”
She held his gaze for another moment.
Then she moved.
“Then stop talking,” she said, and walked past him down the corridor.
He followed.