It had been two weeks since they had a lead. Small fries, hackers, big money bounty heads, nothing. Time meant money, which they were losing more and more. Jet knew they were burning fuel by being at the ready, but now it was getting pointless. Both his and Spike's monoships were in need of overhauls and he just didn't have the parts to do so. There were tools needed to go into the deepest parts of the engines to fix and neither of them were small enough to fit. Don't get them started on the food problem. A few weeks ago it would only cause some mild tension, but with the addition of Ein to the crew, mild would be putting it lightly. Try passive aggressive. Now they were getting low on cigarettes. Things were going to get bad really fast if they didn't catch any collars.
He had one option, and since it was his ship, Spike was going to have to deal with it. He knew Olympia, an asteroid colony just barely settled in the last ten years, had an incredible petty theft and minor felony rate. It was a safe haven for the small fries because the established law wasn't what you would call established. He remembered hearing and scoffing at the high ISSP turn-around rate of cops. At this point it was just used as training grounds, which meant those precincts were next to useless. Jet made the decision and set coordinates for Olympia. At the rate they were going they would be there in six hours.
Spike on the other hand was asleep, as per the usual, on the couch in the commons. Nothing out of the ordinary except for Ein licking the bottom of his shoes. He slept like the dead, anywhere, anytime, but lately, with the lack of food and action, he could easily wake. He jolted awake when he felt the ship lurch and groan with new movement. "At long last," he sighed.
He made his way to the central control where Jet was sitting, watching the stars pass. "Finally got a lead?" he asked.
Jet nodded, "A few dozen. We are going to be busy for a while."
Spike perked up, "Seriously, thank god. Where are we heading?"
"Olympia."
And then came the disappointment fused with frustration, "Fuck, why? Might as well head to Earth if we are going there. It's just about as profitable."
"Do I need to remind you that what we do also costs money or did you completely forget that your ship is out of commission. Can't catch the big fish until you have the means to chase them down."
"Small fries aren't worth the effort," he grumbled.
"They're worth food, fuel, and parts. We're burning more fuel wasting time waiting for leads and both our ships need work done."
Spike couldn't argue. It's not like you can catch anyone when you are floating around space stranded. Lady Luck had a twisted sense of humor and a way to make men desperate enough to chase down their scum equivalents. "Fine, how long until we get there?" he asked in defeat.
/
Each new twenty-four hours started the same. Wake up from a nightmare to a dog licking her face, full weight on top of her to keep from bolting out of bed and using the gun in her bedstand against the invisible enemy on her ship. There is proof on the walls adjacent to the door. Her Great Dane whined and nudged her arm up, time to wake up. She obliged and she fed the grey dog, Junior, first and foremost in the galley of her space skipper. Never one for silence she slapped the side of the ancient stereo system she found on earth to fill the ship with music. Music shuffle by force. Today she greeted the new twenty-four hours with an old MP3 from The Black Keys. Music from Earth was the best, she would argue. It was the music she grew up hearing. Nothing new ever came back to Earth which essentially left the planet stuck in time.
Nightmares always left her sweaty in the morning which lead to the regimented schedule. Feed the dog, turn on the tunes, work out to some old programs also found in the ruins of Earth, eat, shower, pick and choose her bounties to chase, and check her bank accounts for the veterans benefits and bounty pay. Repeat every twenty-four hours while passing and collecting relics of Earth. Music, movies, books, the occasional piece of art, and engine parts adorned her walls along with the few pictures she had. They were of places to go and her old regiment buddies gone too soon or dropped of the face of the universe.
Lather, rinse, repeat. It was that way for as long as she could remember. The orphanage on Earth that she grew up in had schedules to maintain its establishment and control the chaos of kids from the ages of infancy to eighteen. Joining the military made it seem like there was no other way to live. The only thing that changed was the context. She lived for the day. She lived to look for people, good and bad. Regimens were all she had, at least for now.
There was one person she had been spending years looking for, and his name was Johnny B. Goode. A funny name, but that was what he came with when he showed up to the orphanage at the age of four to her five. The place was a revolving door, no need to get attached, but they were. They had a secret collection of things they found in their free time on earth's rocky and waterlogged landscape of what used to be New Orleans. They liked music and movies the most and found an old store that wasn't looted to claim as their own hideout. It only made sense for them to reach for the stars when they turned into angsty teenagers who were more aware of their status. They would leave Earth one day and head to Mars or Venus, no plan in mind except to get off the rock they were on.
The only way out was to have money or join the military. They enlisted together on the day of his eighteenth birthday and out of luck they managed to stay together from training camps to ranks. They became rangers. All it took was one firefight in some far off-world urban jungle to pull them apart. It was supposed to be a rescue mission of POWs and civilians, but anything that could've gone wrong did. Hence the nightmares. It scarred her literally and figuratively. Good people, her people, died. Johnny was MIA. After the incident she was dropped off back on Earth with promise of full wounded warrior benefits. She took what she could and threw herself into finding her friend, her little brother so to speak.
No one could find him though. She combed through the ranks to get intel and found nothing. No trace of him. She waited on Earth for two years for him to return, but after two years the military declared the MIA dead. She didn't believe it. She stayed and lived in their secret place waiting for him for a few more months. He's not dead, she kept saying. The lifetime pay was more than enough for one person to live on, even more when you get wounded on duty. She bought her space skipper, which she named affectionately Orleans, from an old drifter and took to the stars. Maybe he was out there, waiting for her. After catching two bounty heads she was convinced to buy a motorcycle on Mars to make ground travel less of an exhausting pain in the ass.
As the three years passed, there was no sign of him. She never gave up. She bought a monoship called Bobcat to make planetary scouting easier. It was there she realized that even the best lifetime benefits couldn't pay for her search and then there was the part that the training to search and destroy from her active duty days that wouldn't leave her alone. Bounty hunting seemed like a decent way to go to scratch that itch for action. Kill two birds with one stone, as the Mother Superior once said.
She had no desire to chase the big bounties, for everyone's safety. Old habits die hard and those old habits she picked up in training and in the field made her deadly. The small bounties were cheap thrills, just enough to take the edge off. In the last two years the information and lack of leads slowed and thus so did her search of Johnny. She learned to accept his absence and to move on, but there was that little sliver of hope that they would find each other.
This was the life for Annali Willis, veteran of the War on Titan, Earthling, and small-time bounty hunter. Not even worth a blip on the radar. Not at the age of twenty-nine.
It was hour eighteen and she decided on a whim to land on Olympia seeing that she could catch a few bad guys to replenish her food rations. Everything was cheap there including the docking fees. Junior stepped beside her and barked the change of direction. She scratched her companion behind his ears, "It's just for a week, boy. A little gravity and fresh air will do us some good."