1
"HA! Safari Joe does it again!" In the stifling heat of the jungle world, the feared hunter of the galaxy had made yet another capture. The tall, muscular human swiped a hand over his bald head and leered down at the creature. He was deciding whether he wanted to keep this one alive, skin it for its fur and cut the head off for a trophy, or just stuff the whole thing.
"Ahh! You'll regret this, you...sick maniac!" the creature growled as he struggled in midair from where he hung in the suspend-net.
Safari Joe laughed. "I don't think that you have any room to be talking about regret, cat," said the hunter. "You'd best be watching your tone of voice if you want to keep your hide." The grim, cruel glint in his otherwise smiling eyes told the trapped Thunderian that he meant that quite literally.
"You-you wouldn't."
The hunter's only reply was to laugh boisterously and drop the net on the ground. Before the feline had a chance to recover, Safari Joe knelt on his gut and searched him for weapons. Finding only a dagger, he grinned and placed it in his own belt.
"Hey! That belonged to my father, and his father before him!"
"And now it belongs to me, how convenient." Safari Joe clicked a couple of buttons on the keypad on the small control at his belt, uncloaking his ship and unsealing the door at the same time. Using the same keypad, he maneuvered the net to rise once more and float into the ship.
The Thunderian mixed breed struggled wildly to free himself from the net, but it had sealed itself, and the strands were unbreakable. Safari Joe decided to show this one his trophy room before dumping him in a cage. There were a couple of his species whose pelts hung on the wall of his ship until the hunter could return to his resort estate and hang them in his trophy room.
The feline's eyes widened in horror. He was a relatively young man, in his early twenties or thereabouts, and had seen little atrocity. He was shocked by what he saw. He tried to stammer something, but words quite failed him.
"Cat got your tongue?" the hunter asked in his thick accent, and laughed uproariously at the joke. The feline only looked at him with a horrified expression on his pale face as his captor's laugh trailed off. "Better watch yourself, cat." The hunter's eyes were once again unkind and mirthless.
The feline said nothing. When he was dumped in a cage, he only looked around as the lid was shut and padlocked, then leaned against the barred wall and watched his captor with wary eyes.
"That's better." Safari Joe sat at the controls of his ship and lifted off. This one was young and handsome; he would keep him alive. People liked to see the young ones. If his trainers got him tame enough he could be in the petting allowed section of his safari planet's display, the largest and best in the galaxy! And it was out of the jurisdiction of any law enforcement agency. Since he controlled the whole small planet, he made the laws, and there was nothing that CONTROL, or anybody else could do about it.
As the ship sped off for another untamed planet, the Thunderian looked at his three cellmates, as it were. In the large hold with its clear plastic divider, were a feral tiger, who yowled angrily once in a while, a strange looking thing that looked like a combination of a fish and a snake, but it was over twelve feet long; and a Mutant. A cub. A hyena cub. He lay in his cage curled up, naked as the day he was born. Sentients, this hunter preyed on sentients. He realized one more thing; there was Thundranium in the bars. It was only a small amount, but enough to keep him manageable.
Sickened, the young Thunderian closed his eyes and tried to sleep. For days, he had wandered the jungle planet his suspension pod had landed on, hoping each day that he would be picked up by someone as the pod's emergency supplies were depleted. Now he wished he had never been found.
Usiko, exiting his capsule
Usiko
Part 2
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