20: Assignment, Anomaly, Misgivings, Resentment, Approach
.Lee ducked the punch and came back up again with her gun jammed against the contract-breaker’s nose. Her phone chimed.
She ignored it while getting her target into handcuffs, but was worried. It wouldn’t chime except on a priority call, and she’d never before received one of those while this close to her quarry.
Captive secure, she opened her link. It was a live human, who had waited for her to respond—in itself a sign of something significant.
“You have a new assignment. Board the courier ship Integrity and Vision at the spaceport as soon as possible. You’ll get the details there.”
She was there thirty minutes later, with her captive in tow. The courier pilot gave her the docs. Her new contract-breaker target: Truder Redmane.
An ex-Board target? Only twice in her career had she ever pursued someone at Executive level, and Executives were like low-level minions in comparison to the Board.
She remembered hearing something about Truder Redmane a few days before. It was covered in what she read, namely that there was a reward for his capture. Or for his dead body. An open reward, meaning that anyone could collect, so it was a glorified bounty hunt.
Lee didn’t like that at all. She considered bounty hunting a dirty job. The dead-or-alive clause made it dirty and bloody. And she preferred to choose her targets for herself.
She left that aside and started to think about how to find him.
(250 words)