The Famous Con: A Story In One Part

Draker was a bounty hunter stationed out in the Bleak Colonies. He was on a job. All jobs are jobs, he reflected with a trace of bitterness in his sand-grain brain. It was true. No matter how many people wanted his job, the job was a job. Dreams should remain dreams.

What was the job? Lots of waiting. Lots of waiting on this dry dusty rock. Messages from the Big Group had come through: Alaxis IV was in the region. Draker was the only hunter nearby. By design. He had disposed of his competitors. His rib still ached from the last encounter.

This story was moving fast. It would no doubt burn out at any moment. Keeping up would be difficult for anyone who cared about it, Draker thought without a strong emotion. ALAXIS IV in the region! Finally. Six years hunting this con man and his antics across the Bright Reach, the arm of the Siperix Galaxy responsible for financial management and mining. Nothing exciting happened in the financial mining districts which made it ripe for cons. Alaxis IV had been operating in the area, jumping ship and dumping his supplies of Lightspace when they grew too volatile. Uncontained Lightspace posed hazards for the shipping lanes and disrupted the instruments responsible for calculating delivery times for the raw materials mined in the Bleak Colonies. Didn’t sound like much more than a headache but delayed shipments caused logistics issues for the relay runners responsible for transferring the supplies onto the larger capital carrier vessels for hardcore transportation into the Core Region. Inconveniencing the Core Region resulted in a complete shutdown of the Galactic Sector.

Draker sighed and kicked the red-orange metallic gravel that covered the surface of BL-32X. He was tired of setting the scene so often with uninteresting paragraphs. They went nowhere. He glanced at his time-reader: 373737:3033. Just as he’d feared. He pulled off his blasting armor and wondered why this story had flown off the rails.