HUNTER'S BLIND

The Hunter has been out here for seven months now; the shattered corpses of a dozen Pirate Frigates littering her wake across this sector of dead space. Now she lurks at the periphery of a colossal planetary nebula, her ship a speck of dust in a churning sea of blinding crimson.

The last remaining frigate should be here within the next thirty-six hours, if her astrodynamics ring true. There's nowhere else for them to refuel this far out - their two supply ships already fallen prey to the Hunter - so now all she has to do is wait.

Waiting.

It's not something that comes naturally to the Hunter. She was born to be moving, to be doing. As she sits at the helm, looking over a content analysis of the surrounding stellar material, the concept of having time to kill starts to weigh on her mind.

She suddenly can't remember the last time she shed her second skin; the weave of biomechanical armour skeined to her bones. She hasn't had a good reason to risk the 1.7 seconds it would take to redeploy since coming out here.

She hasn't had to speak to anyone. She hasn't even seen anyone. She hasn't had a meal beyond the base nutrients the ship sieves directly into her veins through her suit every twenty-four hours. She hasn't had any real sleep beyond semi-regular blasts of highly condensed slow-wave.

"LONG-RANGE COMMS REESTABLISHED"

The ship's flat, metallic voice snaps her out. The Hunter hadn't been expecting it. She can usually feel when something's wrong before the information has made its way through the circuits. She disengages her chair from the helm position and it's dragged deeper into the ship, over to a larger bank of screens and buttons and lights and exposed cables.

"CONNECTING TO FEDNET. RECEIVING ENCRYPTED PACKETS FROM COMMAND."

This shouldn't be possible. They've been long out of range of even the deepest Federation presence for half a year at this point. She verifies the connection herself, attempting to identify the source - unclenching the cannon at the end of her arm back into an armoured hand as she taps at heavy keys.

It's a weak signal, not useful or replicable for anything large scale but doubtlessly interesting to someone back in the core. A complex interaction between the higher-than-average nickel content and the photons stirring in the heart of the nebula. She saves the scan and flicks thorugh the high priority communications that have bled through the noise.

The Admiral that sent the Hunter out here seemes agitated about something of no consequence. Somes techs have sent her intel the Hunter has already extracted from pliant Space Pirates. The Admiral, again, increasingly exasperated.

None of it means anything.

She thinks about compiling a mission report. Detailing the physical and digital contents of the ships she's torn apart, the tactics the Space Pirates fruitlessly threw against her - first in space and then up close, corridor by corridor. Uploading her star charts, now the most up to date for this miserable corner of any which exist. Her thoughts on why she still hasn't found what she's looking for.

Instead, she dumps the messages. It will be like she never saw them, never had to think about any of it.

"WARNING. PRIORITY COMMS CANNOT BE ERASED. FEDERATION PROTOCOLS DICT-"

The Hunter slams her fist against a bundle of whirring drives jutting out from the console.

"PRIORITY COMMS SUCCESSFULLY ERASED."

She sits for a few minutes, enjoying the quiet - exhaling slowly as she feels civilization drift away from her again. Then she feels something else. A tiny little needle deep in her head. Her chest tightens and she suddenly wishes she was outside, breathing the clear air of some sylvan planet. She waves a hand in front of her visor, recalling the helmet and one vambrance back to wherever it is they go.

The Hunter's matted hair pours over her shoulders, clinging to her forehead - suddenly damp from a cold sweat. She leans forward and pinches the bridge of her nose, closes her eyes. The pain slowly pulses towards her back teeth, and she suddenly rises from her chair. She stomps towards the elevator at the rear of the cabin, and slams the button which quickly lowers her to the small sleeping quarters she mostly uses for extra storage.

The doors of the elevator open to a wall of black metal cargo crates, covered in blast marks and overflowing with uncatalogued junk. The Hunter quickly sidles through the one narrow gap leading through the maze. By the time she's through, she's stumbling - sending the contents of one of the smaller crates sprawling across the cold, metal floor of the cramped living space tucked away in the furthest corner of the ship.

She finally unclenches, letting all of the armour pour back into her flesh. She stands in her black bodysuit, just letting her skin breathe in the slight breeze from the one creaking ceiling fan. The Hunter takes a few minutes, before walking over to the sleeping alcove and calmly tidying away the collection of half-disassembled space pirate salvage covering the bed.

She takes the blanket and shakes it out over the most disorganized corner, scattering a few more stray bolts and chunks of rust to be dealt with later. She throws it back on the bed, before allowing herself to finally sit down. She exhales and lifts her legs onto the bed, turning to perch an arm against the small observation port on the other side of the mattress.

The Hunter loses track of time. Loses herself in the broiling depths of the nebula. When she eventually draws her awareness back inside, she has a red mark on her forehead from where she's been leaning on the glass.

She lays on her back, fingers crossed behind her head as she stares at the ceiling. A small, blinking blue light catches the corner of her eye and she rolls over to find her portable terminal tucked between the bed and the wall. It must have caught the weak FedNet signal too. She pulls it out and dusts it off - a thick, chunky screen with a fold out set of rubber keys.

The terminal whirs to life, alerting the Hunter to the ongoing updates to various useless programs and features she has installed on this mostly forgotten toy. She smiles lightly at the adverts for the latest IS-series hypercars, of promised discounts on package holidays to the Volupta cluster. The frivolities and distractions filling the days of people working in offices and living in apartments half a galaxy away. Her smile fades as her eyes land on a pulsating icon in the corner. Suddenly, without warning - she remembers Kenzie.

It was Kenzie who had given her this terminal and filled it with nonsense. Kenzie, the rookie comms officer the Hunter had been assigned to protect for a simple recon op two years ago. It was simple enough, even if it had ended with the Hunter and the rookie stuck waiting to be picked up in an escape pod for eighteen hours.

The girl had been nervous even before the dash to the pod. It was her first ever field experience, and she had clung to the Hunter like a shadow - a nervous waif in standard fatigues tiptoeing behind a hulking mass of alien metal. The Hunter had caught her a few times, just glaring at her over the top of her glasses while she was supposed to be analysing traffic or relaying the situation to command.

Within the first few hours of their time in the pod, Kenzie had breathlessly relayed most of her life story to the Hunter - who had been communicating back with a handful of thumb-ups and thumb-downs.

At some point, Kenzie had left her seat opposite the Hunter and planted herself in the seat next to her. The adrenaline had finally left her, and she settled into a calmer pace as she continued to talk - about her friends back home, how they never wanted her to sign up in the first place.

She had taken out her slick private terminal and started pawing through it, showing the Hunter photo after photo of smiling civilians as she spooled off a list of names; willing The Hunter to take an interest in a world utterly alien to her.

The Hunter must have made too affirmative a noise, because at some point Kenzie had started rummaging through the pod's supply bin - eventually producing the cheap portable terminal included as standard.

Kenzie had come back over while typing into it, plopping herself back down beside the Hunter and leaning against her. She had held it out in front of both of them and threw up a gesture, before a loud click had emanated from it.

The Hunter remembers just staring at Kenzie in bewilderment - her expression hidden in safety behind her visor - as the girl hunched over the screen and typed away without explaining herself. Eventually, Kenzie had looked up to glare deeply into her own reflection in the neon green of that visor, and asked -

“Oh, um - what’s your name?”

And to her own surprise, the Hunter had just told her.

“That’s just, such a cool name.”

Kenzie had spent the rest of their time before they were eventually picked up trying to show the Hunter how to use the FedNet program she’d added to the terminal to keep in touch, from whichever inhospitable spit she found herself next.

The Hunter had nodded, thumbed up. Occasionally uh-huhm’d - not really intending to do any such thing. But she had kept the terminal, nonetheless.

Now, for the first time, she clicks on that pulsating blue icon - out of nothing but professional curiosity, she tells herself - and glimpses at the world Kenzie lives in, forty thousand light-years away.

Kenzie is back on Daiban, the glittering jewel at the heart of the Galactic Federation - a world covered in sprawling cities the size of continents. A good fit for her, in the Hunter’s opinion - far away from combat but drowning in information.

The Hunter taps through, carefully studying each of Kenzie’s mundane little updates about the food she’s eating and the people who are annoying her at work. The silly things she does on weekends, the people she’s spending time with. She sees photos of Kenzie smiling, posing next to robots she meets and the shimmering fish she catches - the images loading one line at a time as the impossible connection of the nebula starts to slow.

That needle is back in the Hunter’s head as she catches up to the week when she had been sent out here. She starts tapping through faster, and the needle burrows deeper. As each week goes past for Kenzie with little consequence, The Hunter remembers what she had been doing at the same time. Which frigate she’d been ripping through, which charred rock she had been mapping - the memories stabbing through her.

kenzie points at an ancient computer in a crowded museum

The pirate fires off a blast, deflected by a metal panel the Hunter has torn from the wall. She hurls the panel at the pirate to knock it off its feet. By the time it scrambles back up the Hunter has closed the distance, splattering its skull against the bulkhead with her knee.

kenzie beams, arm in arm between two other women as they saunter along the waterfront

The Hunter's ship strafes across the hangar bay, its cannons turning the pirates into mist before they can even reach their fighters.

kenzie dances beneath a sky of glimmering holograms

Yet another of the feral beasts comes tearing out of the underbrush, latching its fangs into the Hunter's thigh before she can get a bead on it. She grunts, hooking her left fist into the creature's eye socket. It loosens its grip enough for her to wrench its jaw open and stuff her cannon down its gullet.

kenzie is half-asleep in a tangle of limbs, covered in bite marks

The needle is pulsating, the Hunter’s chest growing tighter. She finally catches up to today. Kenzie has been hiking.

The Hunter almost snaps the terminal closed, when she spots the little indicator at the side of the screen. Kenzie had spoken to her. Sent her a message, two months ago - finally reaching her now, on the other side of the galaxy.

“Are you still out there?”

Just like when she had given the girl her name in that escape pod, she finds herself answering before she can catch herself - typing something and hitting the key which sends it. The Hunter holds her breath, staring at the rotating symbol indicating that her message is trying to make it’s way back along a flimsy thread of bounced ions.

It won’t go. Of course it won’t.

The needle dissipates and the Hunter smiles lightly.

She leaves the terminal running, but returns it the nook it came from. She’s had enough. She doesn’t need anything else.

After allowing herself four hours of real sleep, she gets up and wills the armour back out of her bones. She takes the elevator back up, past the cockpit - into the small airlock at the top of the ship. After a few moments, the hatch hisses open and the Hunter takes a few magnetised steps along the hull, before gently allowing herself to float a few feet away from the ship - knowing the automatic micro-adjustments to her suit’s EM field will keep her safely tethered.

She can hear better out here. See better out here. She lets a fraction of the signal chaos around her slip into her helmet, and waits to feel the hum of her quarry. A billion scraps of corrupted data bathe her senses, zipping into and out of the nebula at the speed of light.