Taming the Hunter

Marnie had to make money. The second she stopped making money, an irreversible chain reaction would occur. First, she would lose money. Second, she would lose food. Third, she would lose her ship, and her house, and the other things she needs to live. Fourth, finally, she would die. And Marnie, despite everything, did not want to die.

That’s why she’s at the bounty office. That’s why she’s making herself do this—no matter how much she hates the lady at the desk. And no matter how much she hates being outside. And no matter how much she’d rather be anywhere else.

She drags herself to the counter, anyways.

“Name.”

“Marnie Stari.”

“Rank.”

“Regional class C hunter.”

“How can I help you?”

She takes a deep breath.

“I need to see your bounties. High-paying ones.”

“Yeah, don’t you all.”

Marnie bites her lip. If she could just clock every single sarcastic person in the face and eviscerate their skulls, she would. But then, she’d get arrested. And then, she’d have no hormones. And then, she’d die. She does not want to die.

The receptionist drops a heavy folder on the desk.

“You look like you can handle yourself. You been following the news? The invasion?”

Marnie’s fist clenches. She’d heard enough about the Affini. Warlords, apparently. Reports from the outer rim told horror stories of giant, invincible plant-monsters with hordes of enslaved xenos, even some Terrans. Soon, soldiers were vanishing—ships and all—and reappearing in Affini propaganda. Scouts and freighters were next. Even civilians were targets, now. The Affini knew no mercy; they would steamroll the Terran Accord. And probably enslave Marnie. And then she’d have an awful miserable life forever, which she didn’t want.

“Yeah.” Marnie says.

“If you really wanna earn your keep, one of those plant-monsters has been wrecking Cassio Burner satellites and taking the techs with them. If it’s a scout, this whole colony could be in trouble, so there’s a high bounty for whoever brings it in. 70,000 credits high.”

In an isolated colony, 70,000 credits went a long way. It was obviously way too small for the job, but hunter-owned bounty offices were a thing of the past, here. It’d be more than enough, even if it was unfair and Marnie could—but wouldn’t—rant on and on about the social ramifications, and her complete helplessness against the fascistic capitalist boot.

She put in a pin in those thoughts. Rage was best saved for the battlefield.

“Tell me more.”

***

“You? Fighting the plants?! How dumb are you?!”

“Pretty dumb.”

Steph scoffs. Marnie had been down this line many times before and probably would be many times again. But she didn’t really understand the problem this time? Steph was usually her voice of reason. Hell, she cared. But she babies Marnie like this all the time. And yeah, being seen was nice, but, like, this is Marnie’s life?

“Steph, Stephy, I’m a bounty hunter. This is what I do. And I’m good at what I do.”

“Yeah, when you’re hunting, like, lessors and space pirates. Not the invincible plants from hell!”

Marnie takes a long slurp of her soda. The longer she drank, the longer she had to make up a rationale. Also, it’s just really good soda. She’d been living off well-water and nutrient cubes for the last week, so this felt like some bourgeois shit. After she gets paid for killing the plant thing, she should buy more drinks. Like, cola drinks.

“Lessors are space pirates. And technically, so is she. It’s taking out—what’s it called—Cassandra Boost satellites, or something.”

“A corporation? You, Marnie Stari, are going to work for a fucking corp?!

Shit. Marnie kind of walked right into that one. She scraps through her awkward bounty office exchange for a better argument.

“It’s for the greater good. I mean, come on, haven’t you heard the stories?”

“Yeah, stories, alright. Sounds like just another xenospecies the Accord wants gone.”

Marnie clenches her jaw. Steph’s right. Fuck, she’s always right. She vaguely understood that Steph did humanities, but couldn’t think of the field. Something that pays way too little for how much she puts in. They’ve hardly had time to talk, lately. But whatever, yeah, the Accord had been looking for excuses for a full-blown galactic war for awhile now. The Accord had manifested its destiny across rivers, oceans, the stars themselves. The interests of its people—even less other people—came second to the scope of its hegemony. And yeah, the other xenos were guilty of that too, but… fuck. The Accord still wasn’t the Affini. It could still be worse. Marnie takes a deep breath.

“I’ve seen photos. The lady at the bounty office—she showed me this Terran girl. Literally had a chain around her neck. And her eyes were like… empty.”

Steph blinks.

“Whatever. It’s your choice, and I know you’ve got to make money. Just use your head, Mar.”

Blep. Her tongue pokes out.

“That’s what I’m good at.”

***

Marnie had been living on the NM-16 colony for the better half of a cycle. Back then, she still called it “NM-16” whenever she went out, and the locals would brush her off worse than usual. Everyone really calls the colony Ehnehm. It like “N-M” if you sound it out. It’s as stupid as it sounds. One time, while she was out getting her cruiser fixed, she heard this sweet older lady call it “Sweet Sixteenth,” and that was adorable. But “sweet”? No, no. This place was bitter.

The colony wasn’t liveable at all for the longest time. In the old, old days of the Accord, back when intersystem travel was prohibitively expensive, Ehnehm was an essential, resource-rich pit-stop for freighters. All the good stuff was mined out years ago, so now it’s a glorified fuel station. In the busy season, though—when Ehnehm was especially close to the sun—you could expect a freighter every revolution or so, and every freighter carried a slight risk for piracy.

Piracy is a bunch of little things that Marnie really doesn’t give a shit about, like selling tanker fuel without a license or bootlegging drugs from Station ϴ. In another life, Marnie would totally be a fucking space pirate. But through some cosmic accident she grew up terrified of authority, and having the balls to at least save face in front of a Terran Navy official was a prerequisite for all the cool jobs. So fuck it! Bounty hunting. That’s legal. She did that instead.

Whatever, Ehnehm sucks. Whatever it used to be like just made for an interesting backdrop to whatever crisis Marnie was having that day. Like most colonies that used to be important, Ehnehm died hard, but not fast. All the older folks here were still bitter about the low traffic, which made them a bitch to deal with. They had a point; it’s pretty depressing to live in the corpse of a cool locally-famous colony. But, like, why are they depressed? Because their conditions are ever-worsening and they know precisely why, and they’re completely helpless to stop their downward spiral? Nah, they just miss the corpos. Fuck, the corpos.

That’s what Marnie hates the most about Ehnehm. The place Marnie used to live was sad and old too but, like, kind of in a romantic way. Ehnehm is probably even more tragic, particularly from Marnie’s point of view, but evil fucking bastards will claw their way into anything and everything, so there are advertisements everywhere. Marnie went through great lengths to get a condo on the outskirts of the central city and try to live off-the-grid and shit, but targeted ads still show up on her computer, still follow her on the bus to work, still play when her fucking ship counts down. Stars, if she could just consent to receive ads—to not receive ads—it’d be one thing. But she can’t, so it’s not.

It’s even worse in the city. She calls it a “city,” but it’s really just a cute little downtown area and then miles and miles of chain grocery stores and hot-and-ready food. For freighters, ostensibly, but it’s how everyone else lives, too. Hungry? Go to Cosmonaut Queen. Or Taste of Terra. Or Cubefood. There were maybe two decent restaurants deep, deep in the old town, but even they were kind of weird? Shake Station was good, her and Steph went there a lot, but the staff were always really mean? Whenever Marnie needs a weird substitution on her food they just sort of sigh and go “Suuure.” all dismissively. And, sure, she gets that, people who need specific things are annoying, but like. She didn’t choose to be this way! Marnie wishes, she really does, that she could have all the onions on their onion-themed burger, but then she’s going to feel like shit for the rest of the day because her body sees onions like a munitions effort.

They were the exception, at least. Most people weren’t outright mean to Marnie, just dismissive. Like the lady at the bounty office. She was like that before Marnie was Marnie, but now that Marnie is Marnie it stings a little worse. Like, damn. Anytime she wants, this lady can just stand up, eyes like knives, and go “Get out of my store.” because she knows, and the Accord is very transparent in its hatred of trans dyke bounty hunters. She probably won’t, but she always could.

By now, Marnie had been sitting in her car for, like, twenty minutes. She vaguely remembers a radio ad triggering all this, but can’t bring herself to remember exactly what ad and exactly how it triggered this.

She should go inside.

***

Most hunters lease out their equipment from a third-party. Not Marnie. She used to work in ship maintenance, so she’s used to building and scrapping her own stuff. Her power armor is a fucking achievement. It’s light and airy and easy to move around in, but also, like, reasonably durable. It looks badass. The shoulders are these massive polyurethane spikes with neon colors painted on. She’s got chainmail—legit chainmail—for the torso to handle your everyday cuts, plus a bullet-proof layer as a contingency. Not that things ever got that bad, usually? But whatever. The best part was the mask. It’s an opaque glass visor with homebrewed iron sights, heat-tracking, and toggleable noise-canceling headphones built right in. Plus! It’s got a little respirator on the end. Perfect for toxic environments and covering your face when you haven’t shaved in awhile.

It’s too late to start the hunt today, so Marnie just takes apart her armor and starts shining it, piece-by-piece. In her neverending quest for maximum efficiency, she reviews what she knows about her target.

Her name is Cynthia Evergreene, Fifth Bloom. Ten feet and nine inches. She has six eyes and a body covered—or made of?—thick green vines. Fuck. That was one of the scary things with the Affini. They had hundreds of squiggly little prehensile tendrils that could, allegedly, morph into any sort of weird shape. On the—what was it?—Corporal Behemoth satellites, they’d been getting in through inch-wide cracks in the hull and traveling through the ventilation shafts. This girl could literally be anywhere, and that made Marnie’s stomach churn. Soooooo many places to check. Soooooo annoying.

Marnie first heard of the invasion in her old system. It’s closer to Terra than Ehnehm, so she saw the war escalation firsthand. Of course, she’d never seen an Affini for herself. Back in those days, they were a whisper among far-flung pilots and freight captains. She remembered hearing, like, some old guys at work talking about it? So, maybe not firsthand, but secondhand, at least. Whatever, the Affini only made themselves known a little bit ago, and ever since then, little incidents like the Cassowary Bullet break-ins have been popping up everywhere. It’s a good time to be a bounty hunter, honestly.

Bounty hunter. Damn, Marnie thinks. Since when was she a bounty hunter? At what moment did she stop being a sales clerk or freight mechanic or whatever and start being this? She runs her fingers down the cool, dark glass of her helmet. She was lucky not to live somewhere busier, where landlords and crime bosses would send her on hits. I mean, shit. Steph’s been in debt before. Marnie was almost homeless before she came here. Like, that could be her with a price on her head.

But whatever, that’s a hypothetical. Marnie isn’t that. She basically just hunts weird animals and bootleggers. All the cool weapons—the glaives, the guns, the knives—she had crammed in her suit were collecting dust. She could use them, finally. And that should have made her excited, but it just made her feel, like, kind of gross. Violence is awesome in movies in stuff, but if Marnie thought too hard about how she’s taking someone’s life, like, violently ending their existence, she’d throw up or something.

She stands up, halfway through polishing her glaives. The shaft is lovingly engraved with little “DYKE”s and “FAGGOT”s to really spite whoever’s on the business end. Stupid imperialist plant will know they were killed by a punkass trans bounty hunter. She tightens her grip on the hilt and points the blade toward an obscure 21st century band poster.

“Nice eyes, nerd. They’ll look—no. That sucks.” She takes a breath, readjusts her battle stance, and tries again. “Your head’s worth a lot of credits. I’m here to cash in.” She pauses. That sounds sort of cool? But really try-hard? Okay, feet spread apart. Blade pointing out. One more go. “This is for Terra, weed.” She punctuates it with a stabbing motion, just shy of tearing up the poster. Yeah, that. That’ll work fine. It’s not perfect, but it’s short and sweet. And vaguely patriotic.

Marnie’s body starts to hurt. That means it’s time to crash. In the morning, she’d rehearse again, down some breakfast-y cubes, and go into orbit. She sets her glaive aside, satisfied with how clean and shiny her armor looks. Badass.

***

“Now arriving at the Cassio Burner A-26 Research Satellite. Cassio Burner has been at the forefront of consumer-market spacecraft since 2511 CE. The upcoming Champion model supports—”

Marnie mutes her guidance system. She’s been meaning to overhaul her ship’s programming and install an adblocker, or something, but software development—even software installation—is well beyond her skillset. Once she got this bounty, she’d be stable enough to start another time-intensive hobby.

The satellite looks a lot bigger up-close. It looks disgustingly sleek. The type of sleek you only see on consumer-grade corporate shit, with bright, reflective whites and shiny, glossy blacks. The Cassio Burner—stupid fucking name—logo was printed in big lettering on the side. It’s the new, hyperminimalist logo that doesn’t even look like a fucking exhaust pipe anymore. Nobody likes it, from what Marnie’s gathered. But that’s never made a difference to corpos.

Her ship is tiny, so it only takes up a quarter-or-so of the docking platform. Like her suit, it’s custom-made; the engine comes from a Model SM, the frame is lifted from a low-orbit exocraft, and the plating is 80% welded scrap. It’s clunky, but has the same scrappy me-and-my-glaive-against-the-world energy as its pilot, and that’s something Marnie appreciates.

A-26 looked soul-crushing from the outside-in, but the inside’s somehow even worse. Two steps out of the vacuum seal and there are thin, dirty hallways and sharp, plastic plants everywhere. There are no windows, only harsh fluorescent lights. No chairs, only standing desks. It has everything you’d want out of a 9-to-5 hell dungeon.

Marnie stiffens up. Imagining the day-to-day of these poor saps made her stomach flip. It almost makes her want to turn back, make a mad dash for her ship, and hide in her apartment for a week. Almost. But she needs the money. Needs it bad enough to kill. So she keeps going, guns and glaive at the ready. Gripping the hilt a little tighter than she needs to. Thinking about how nice the hilt feels in her hand. How much safer she feels.

She breathes through her nose in counts of four. She’s here for the hunt. Not for ads, not for pity, for the hunt. So she keeps going, one foot in front of the other. Passing by gendered restrooms and laboratory doors. Observation hulls and engine rooms. Looking for something, anything—

Drip. She turns around. There’s a puddle on the floor; something glossy and amber. She looks up and barely sees a flicker of green. It’s gone too fast; Marnie’s not even sure where it could’ve gone. Lesser hunters would keep aimlessly wandering. But not her. She taps the side of her visor and her world turns to a blur of cold blues and warm reds. A heat signature blazes above the ceiling, inhumanly fast. It’s heading for the observation deck.

The observation deck is the only room that doesn’t make Marnie feel like shit. It’s pragmatic: one big, bubble-shaped window overlooking Ehnehm and its sister moons. Marnie never bothered to learn the real name of its host planet. Everyone just called it “the planet”. To some, it’s a big, boring ball of gas. Not to Marnie. To Marnie, it was—it is—awe-inspiring. She remembered looking for planets in the night sky, back at home, and turning inconsolable when she realized they may as well be stars. But this planet, it was different. It’s an auburn giant with bright, swirling clouds and constant thunder. On her ship, on her bike, wherever she went, the planet was there, stalwart on the horizon. She cried the first time she saw it from space. Even now, it made her hesitate. She takes a deep breath and lowers her glaive.

For just one moment, she forgets who she’s looking for.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

Her.

Marnie wants to turn around. She wants to scream. She wants to spit out the lines she worked so hard to memorize just hours ago. She wants to stab her glaive right between the weed’s eyes and see its fake smile—its insult of a face—break into a thousand little splinters.

That is what she wants, right?

Her hesitation costs her. She throws the weight of her pole backward, spins with it, and drops it on the ground. She expects a clatter, but her—that thing—grabs it. She sees the vines—dozens of them—swirling and twisting around her feet. Each one snakes precisely around its twins, coiling together in beautiful—horrible—synchronicity. The ends spread out like stars. Some are topped with nanoscopic thorns. Others are decorated with bright, pink petals. Others, still, end in mossy-green, gradient bulbs. All of them thicken at their bases, tangling together in mockery of limbs. An insult to human evolution.

The vines wrap around—and expose, at points—a rosy, wooden skeleton. A puppet. If Marnie focused, she could barely see the hinges where the makeshift bones split apart, ready to break into a hundred-thousand splinters. They widen into broad, oaken hips, hips caked in generous plant-flesh, that give way for a wide, pendulous gut of tangled, messy vines. She casts a tall, wide shadow, big enough to shroud the entire room in starlit darkness. Save for the glow of the cosmos behind her, Marnie’s only light source was the eyes. Stars, the eyes. The photograph didn’t—it couldn’t—show the richness of their cut. They were sparkling, warm spirals of amber. Marnie could taste honey. She could feel honey in her blood, in her brain, making time stutter and crawl.

The weed smiles—seems to, anyways. Marnie found the thorny mouth unsettling before, but she was never this close. Never tasted, felt, and saw it like this. She feels a familiar—an inappropriate—warmth in her chest, in her gut. And she wonders, fleetingly, what the plant’s tongue looks like.

“Little one,” it starts. “You’re a long way from home.”

Marnie properly hears its voice, now. Hears the depth of her tones, like echoes layered through every enunciation. It’s thick as molasses. Dripping with intent. Marnie reaches for her glaive—she can’t. No glaive. Fuck. She, she rapidly feels up her suit, searching for a weapon, and as soon as she fumbles toward her plasma gun, it escapes her. The vines found it first.

“And with such dangerous toys. You’ll hurt yourself swinging these around.”

Her glaive. It—it’s inside the plant. She can see the blade barely poking out of its shoulder. She lunges for it, and would’ve fallen on her face had the weed not caught her, trapped her in vines.
“You poor little Terrans. So fragile. I feel terrible… we all do.”

Marnie struggles—she tries to struggle. She tells herself that that’s what she needs to do. But the vines are so much softer than she expected. They’re coiling around her arms, her legs, her waist. They feel like pillows.

“I know you’re putting on a brave face, little one. You mean well, don’t you?”

She lifts Marnie close. A stray vine traces down her cheek, soft like silk. She’s so close to the weed’s eyes, now. She can see every nanoscopic swirl of color, bleeding and blurring into little nebulae. Impossibly complex. She thinks—tries to think—of Terra. Four billion years of painstaking evolution built Terrans’ eyes. Eyes so dull by comparison. How many eons had passed to carve these?

“You hate this place. I know you hate this place. That’s why we’re going, doll. So you don’t have to watch.”

Marnie’s body contorts, shifts around to face the cosmos. She feels a twang of disappointment in her heart, but its overshadowed by fear. Fear of the mines. Fear of the rest of her life. Fear for the planet, for the colonies, for Ehnehm, which she loathed.

She sees hundreds of ships.