Rou sat back in the comfortable pilots seat of his modified fighter, the Masked Return, at ease now that the cursed renegade fleet was now in atoms spread across the far reaches of space. The bounty hunter had completed so many missions harder than the one he was about to take on.
Simply, he was mostly well respected around quite a bit of the inhabited sectors. He had been from the far reaches of Miranu space to the battle-scarred stations of the renegades. He preferred to not choose sides, keep in the middle and join the victorious side.
"...Please, please let me go. I could give you whatever you want..." as Rou came back to reality, he growled with mock anger, "Shut up! You know nothing of what you are worth!" Then he realized, again? Why now? Why before I take you back do you haunt me? He had been yelling at the long empty cages, and just remembering the voice of a long gone hostage as she pleaded with him, over and over, to let her go, he could have everything, sobbing as he dragged her away to her destiny. ΒShe was only a girl, a girl worth millions of credits, at that.' Back to reality, he swung the nose of the ship around and prepared to jump into hyperspace.
Waking, he found his ship cruising slowly towards south tip station, where the girl he was to take back to sol was supposed to be. 'This is where I left her, at least. With pirates you can never tell,' he thought to himself dimly.
'This is the hard part...' he thought to himself, as he slid on the battered plastoid alloy armor. He strapped a few blasters onto his hip and concealed another spare in the pocket on his breastplate. Blaster rifle at the ready, he hurled himself out of the ship.
Clearance was hard for him. Even with the fake ID, the renegades had been on high alert. The girl would be in the far ends of the station, if he knew the scumbag right, she would definitely be there. He went to her owner's quarters first, and after finding nothing there, he sort of wandered aimlessly around. He searched everywhere. Through all the repair shops and merchant shops until he found the enslaved girl.
'Ah, finally!' he thought as he found the skinny ragged girl wiping down the counters of a repair shop, somewhat near the bay where his ship was. He walked out of the shop with the girl, dragging her roughly along. She obviously remembered him, so she struggled fiercely. He told her, "don't worry. The UE Gov. wants you in their grasp, for safe keeping this time." Finally, she relaxed, and as she did, a squad of men came at them, firing. He drew his blasters and tossed the rifle to the girl. They fought doggedly, backing up to the bounty hunter's ship. And then, Rou was hit! He hit the floor with a shot in the leg. He told the girl to run for the ship, and wait for him.
Cursing, he fired his jetpack and flew away as fast as he could in the tight space, firing shots behind him in a vain attempt to finish what he had started. He reached the ship with immense relief. He lowered himself into the pilot's seat and powered up the heavy ion engines. He was relived to see that the girl had been faithful, and was strapped next to him. As Rou was leaving, remembering his wound as the pain swept over him, he planted a remote mine as he took off and blew the bay and it's holders into atom particles. As soon as he made a lockdown check, he jumped into hyperspace.
"You will need to fix up that wound..." came a voice out of nowhere.
'Huh?' Rou thought, 'oh, yes. The girl.' "Don't worry. I'll do it as soon as we are safely in another sector, away from those renegades," he responded, groggily. "For now, we sleep."
Rou lay down, in extreme comfort and a feeling of safety and self-assuredness, he fell asleep.
Rou was woken with a jolt. Forgetting his wound, he jumped into the pilot's seat and told the girl to do the same. He powered up his main phase beams, and readied the custom pursuit missile rack. He had run into a patrol renegade Helian. Turning out to be not such a big deal, he relaxed and fired a few missiles and fired off a few phase bolts. That should take care of him. And, as usual, it did.
He then set to work dressing his wound and repairing his plastoid armor. "So," he said, "how did you manage to stay alive on that god-forsaken place?"
"Oh," said the girl, "I just avoided falling asleep on the job while doing the most that I could, so I was never impaled on Electro-jabber or a force pike to shake myself to death, like all my friends. They always made us watch it happen, too." She said with the slight sound of sadness and fear in her voice.
Rou sat back as he entered the Eletor system. He told the girl, "we will be in the Sol sector in about thirty-six hours."
"Yippy." Said the girl with dripping sarcasm in her voice.
Rou rolled his eyes and checked the digital navigation system and powered up his phase beam front rotators. This was dangerous territory for someone like him, especially with the hard merchandise that he was carrying. He set the coordinates and launched his ship into hyperspace.
Arriving in the Sol system he put on the afterburner and sped away to earth. After he landed he shoved the girl into a holding pen and bid her a short goodbye. He then raced off to the bar for the most powerful whiskey he could find.
Rou decided that he really didn't feel like working with hostages at the moment, so he took a nice, easy, calm assassination mission. He was to kill a planet king and prepare the planet for invasion. All that really meant was that he needed to bomb the hell out of the capitol and bring a few passenger transports and some pilots along to carry the remaining population away with their ships to a holding planet until it was safe to let them out. Nothing really major, except for the fact that he would need some heavy-duty bombs, like those expensive hydrogen fusion bombs that he saw back at the outfitting station.
He left for the planetary system DSN-4NS5A with the bombs the military had given him. Entering hyperspace was always a relief to Rou. No matter where he was, like where he just was, the most heavily guarded sector in the universe that he had seen, it could happen. Just like at the beginning of the war, when the Voinians attacked the Sol system and all of the UE navy warships and fighters went into mass production. Anything could happen. A Dreadnought could just fly into the Sol system, leading the main Voinian invasion fleet, class A. 'It could happen,' thought Rou sarcastically.
Popping into the DSN-4NS5A system, he powered his main phase beams and scanned the infested planet for the government area. He found his target, and powering his bombs, descended to bombing range. Dropping a few bombs, he detonated them and scanned the next target. There wasn't much left of the capitol city, a building or two. He dropped another two bombs. Just in case. He thought.
Then he activated the merchant COM channel and told the transports to go down to the surface and storm the small planet and take everyone they could find. Invasions never took more than a week with a planet of this size.
Escorting the transports back to the holding planet was a rather easy job, Rou found out. Just the usual Voinian fighters and transport ships trying to get their kin back. Man, thought Rou, this is a really easy million credits. And it was true. It was relaxing to, at least for him. He remembered his childhood, and how he had loved to watch Captain Hector and the pirates on his holo-vid projector. That was how he got into the bounty hunter business, anyway. He owed it all to Captain Hector. 'How ironic is it, that my favorite childhood holo-vid show star used to be on my "to be hinted" list. But I captured him and gave him to the UE for execution,' Rou remembered with a grin, 'I even used to think he was just a holo-vid character. How wrong I was.'
After collecting his credits Rou headed off for Miranu space. He needed to relax a bit, and the trading ways of the Miranu government were very calming for Rou. In that territory, even with the amount of renegades that had made their target the Miranu, the watchful eye of the Zachit, along with the other warring super powers, it was really safe for a bounty hunter of his class and nature. The ways people like him could live in the conditions that they did. Take Captain Hector. One of the best bounty hunters out there, had made his homes in anyplace he could find, from Volik to the Rock. For Rou, that was really something. To live in desolate and harsh conditions like that was astonishing to him. Rou was born into a rather rich family, his dad being one of the top pilots in Frontier Express. His dad really liked to take risks, that is, until he lost his Lizira, the Winged Reaper, and his entire crew and cargo. That was when he decided to take his final position as a foreign ambassador.
Entering the gate to Miranu territory, Rou was suddenly overtaken by a Lizira. The mighty ship fired rocket after rocket into Rou's small fighter. He fought back doggedly, hoping desperately that he would be ably to somehow land on the small desolate planet and wait for the bigger ship to leave. Rou was suddenly torn from his pilot's chair as the Lizira began to fire it's powerful SAD modules. Rou got up cursing, spitting blood and teeth. He made a scramble for the small escape pod that he kept near the main hatch of his fighter. As he did, he remembered a line from poem from his childhood, "When it all ends, we may be remembered as anything. As what we were maybe, or what we still are." As Rou began to close the pod's hatch, his ship was ripped apart by a sudden spray of lasers and rockets. He was blown into space, and with the pod hatch still open, he suffocated and imploded under the lack of pressure. This was the end of Rou's life.
(This message has been edited by moderator (edited 06-17-2002).)
