The Winner

2002 short story by Jonathan Hicks

Four years after Episode IV – A New Hope

The base was littered with bodies.

High walls surrounded the complex with self-targeting blaster emplacements every twenty metres. A single double-thick electrified gate allowed access into the kill-zone courtyard, then a short walk across pass-activated mines led to the blast-proof double doors of the building proper. Mister Spyte took care of his weapons research and development centre and made sure that no one got close enough to spy on his work or intentions.

Which was why, after half a day of no communications from the base on the pristine snow-covered world of Hynra, Mister Spyte decided to send Droob Hunstat and Kaile Mirrener to find out what had happened.

The two men were dressed in cold-resistant gear, white overcoats that were fluffed with fur at the openings, thick leggings and sealed boots, backpacks with rations and shelter equipment and a communications pack that had enough power to send a signal through the planet’s thick atmosphere.

The weather had turned nasty on the two men as they had been dropped off by the freighter five kilometres north of the facility so that any surface-to-orbit defences didn’t track or fire on them. The pilot had hovered, dropped his ramp, more or less had his Barabel co-pilot push the men off, and then ascended to a safe distance before the snow had settled. Two hours of arduous walking through knee-high snow and the men had finally arrived at the base, cold and tired.

Droob Hunstat knew there was something amiss as soon as he saw the clouds of black smoke smearing the white mist of the blizzard.

He pointed and turned to Kaile, who nodded and reached up to his face to remove the strap that covered his mouth from the cold.

   “Looks like something big went off!” he shouted over the high wind. Droob leaned in close and nodded at his words.

   “We’ll have to assume the base defences are still active!” he shouted back, un-slinging a long thermo-pack which contained his pulse blaster and unzipping it, taking the weapon out. Kaile pulled his own smaller compact blaster from a large pouch at the small of his back.

   “Can the self-targeters track us in this weather?” Kaile shouted, tugging the cloth at Droob’s elbow to get his attention.

   “I’m not sure!” Droob hollered. “The emplacements look as though they’re either destroyed or deactivated!” He pointed to the wall and Kaile followed the direction of his motion, seeing smoke rising from the ruined sections of the perimeter where the weapons used to be.

   “Well, we ain’t getting paid to speculate!” Kaile patted Droob on the back and started forward. “Let’s get in there!”

Slowly, with weapons ready and eyes alert, the two men moved into the kill-zone between the outer wall and the main building. The automated defence guns hung limply from their mounts, their searchlights off and the gyros still. As soon as they passed under the main gate, now just a melted pile of slag that hung precariously above them, they saw their first indication that maybe the base wasn’t as secure as they had been led to believe.

Bodies of varying species lay frozen in the courtyard. Different poses were indications as to how the different beings met their end. Some freezing whilst wounded, held forever in a pose of agony, others lying haphazard, dead before they hit the ground, others lying flat as if they had time to consider their end before expiring totally.

   “This looks like it was a good party,” Kaile said morosely.

Droob shrugged. “And we missed it,” he said, his voice returning to normal volume now that the howling winds were blocked somewhat by the high wall. He took a small scanner from his belt pouch and held it up, sweeping it back and forth across the courtyard. “Looks like every mine has been detonated.” He turned sharply as Kaile exclaimed.

   “Ugh!”

   “What is it?” Droob stepped forward.

   “Every mine, huh? That explains what I just trod in, then…”

A few moments passed as Kaile scraped off his boot, then he moved over to the path of the yard where the damage was minimal. “Makes me cringe as to what we may find inside,” he said.

The two men approached the doors, their concern over what they might find increasing as their worry over the threat to themselves decreased with the amount of bodies they were finding. They reached the door, ploughed through the snowdrift that had gathered there, and found the portal slightly open.

Kaile motioned to the opening with a nod of his head.

   “Grab the other side and we’ll pull it open.”

After several attempts and a little more snow clearing, the doors were finally prised open enough to allow access into the complex proper. The smell of burning and smoke drifted out of the darkness that confronted them and they held back for a few moments for the air to clear enough for them to proceed.

Beyond the door was carnage. Bodies lay all over the place, some armed, others not. The automated defences were active but damaged beyond use so that as soon as Kaile stepped through the opening he saw something drop from the ceiling and spin in his direction.

   “Scanner gun!” he roared, diving headlong into a roll, made difficult by his cumbersome cold suit, and behind a wall strut. The machine tracked his progress and started buzzing, the barrel pumping back as if firing but no energy was discharged.

Droob dived in also, coming out of the roll to target the automated security device, but he saw that the whole one side of it had been blown away, the energy coupling severed. He stood and brushed snow from his suit.

   “It’s been decommissioned,” he said, helping Kaile to his feet. He motioned down the long wide corridor. “They all have.”

The passage was high and wide, about eight metres by eight metres, and was a more contained scene of what they had seen outside.

   “They’ve been massacred,” Kaile said with a shake of his head. Volume had returned to almost normal now they were inside the building although his ears still rang from the raging wind.

   “What do you think? Mercenary band?” Droob speculated as they began to pick their way down the passage to the central control room.

   “I don’t think so. An attack wouldn’t have been so local. There’s no enemy bodies, no signs of the occupants not getting shots off.”

   “Single attacker, then. Feese?”

   “Nope. He’s an assassin, not a combat specialist.”

   “Galletti?”

   “Smells of him, but there’s far too much collateral damage.”

Droob thought in silence for a few moments and then said, “Queed?”

   “ No, he’s single target only. What about Ranth?”

   “Not his style, too high a body count.”

   “Centaur?”

   “Possibly, but he would have come in with extra guys, he’s merc trained.”

   “Luschia, then.”

Droob laughed aloud.

   “Definitely not her. The place is still standing.”

They came to a huge door, which appeared to have been blown apart by a planted explosive. The thick metal bent inwards in huge, rigid, melted clumps.

   “Someone was definitely trying to get in,” Droob said, his gloved hand caressing the globules of melted alloy, “and managed to get this far. If the layout is as Spyte described then they only had to get past the storeroom and up to the control suite. If they survived the gun battles and automated defences…”

   “Which they apparently did.”

   “… then we have a winner.”

The storeroom was the location the men entered next as they passed through the melted doorway. Once again bodies lay strewn across the wide floor, but this time technicians and workers joined armed gunmen. The roof was high, terminating in a domed plasglass roof that had been hit by blaster fire so many times it resembled a huge pepper pot. Snow entered the holes and covered the scene with a thin layer of white, drifting gently down despite the violence of the storm outside. The holes whistled in varying crescendos as the wind rose and fell.

Whatever equipment had been built and tested in this room had been utterly destroyed. Cables twisted and bent in all directions, whole units atop blasted tables had been turned to slag, sparks still rained down from shorting systems, weapon pods and launch systems were ruined by explosion, blasters and fire. The whole room was a mess.

Kaile whistled through his teeth.

   “Ooh. Party time.”

Droob let out a long, deliberate breath.

  “Unbelievable. I can’t believe it took anything less than a platoon to take out this place. Look at the impacts – all precise and…” he stopped talking. He kept looking from the bodies to the walls and Kaile noticed his scrutiny. He tried to ascertain what Droob was thinking, noticing more damaged scanner guns mounted on the walls, but as he came to a conclusion Droob was already speaking.

   “The automated defences,” he said in a small voice. Louder, he continued, “The automated defences. Look at those blast marks on the bodies, really precise, and all the guns have been shot at or blown up. Not a sign of an infiltrator’s body, or weapon, or any difference between weapon impact types. Somebody must have turned the scanner guns on the people who worked here!”

   “Good thinking,” Kaile agreed. “After all, all the defenders are in the kill zones of the security weapons. If they were fighting off an attack they wouldn’t be stupid enough to stand in the middle of the bolt rain, would they? Or for that matter, the minefield in the front courtyard.”

Droob’s mind was working furiously.

   “Which means someone either managed to break their way in, worm their way in or hacked in from the outside.”

   “Hacking is out – there’s no external data access, through either terminal or transmission.”

   “The break in is out, too. The scanner guns would take care of any intruder.”

Kaile nodded in thought.

   “But worming in – that’s a possibility.”

There was a chuckle as Droob thought aloud.

   “Starting to sound like Luschia, now. Anyway, lets get to the control suite. It should have some answers.” He motioned to a staircase that climbed the far wall to a single heavy blast door that, from this distance, looked as though it had been breached. Bodies lined the stairs, hanging from the railings or stretched along the steps. The two men had to negotiate the corpses to get to the room, where the door had also in been blown inwards like the entrance to the storeroom.

   “What is confusing,” Kaile said matter-of-factly, “is that if whoever got in managed to turn the weapons on the workers and defenders here, why are there signs of someone breaking in?”

   “Maybe the guns opened up and the people here weren’t totally decimated, tried to get into the control suite? I tell you something else as well; what the hell were they thinking of? If they were here to steal secrets then they failed. Everything in here has been vaped. Even the security closets are wasted. If they wanted to blow the place to bits, why didn’t they just bomb it from orbit?”

The thoughts of the two men whirled with possibilities. Was it an attempt at undermining the productivity of one of Mister Spyte’s operation? A hit of some kind? Spyte had already explained to the men that, as gar as he was aware, there were no threats from other gangleaders. A personal vendetta? That was always a possibility with any ganglord, but how could one being, or one group of beings, do so much damage just to get back at him?

The further in the two men went, the more confusing the situation became.

Finally, they came to the door to the control suite, blown inwards by a powerful explosion. The metal of the door had not been rent asunder or melted – it had simply been vaporised, the slight bending of the metal showing that someone had wanted into the suite.

Two bodies lay half-in, half-out of the door. It looked by all appearances that the men of the complex had tried to attack someone within the room and rushed it after the doors had been breached. Kaile saw that more men were lying dead in the room, weapons of varying designs in hand, blaster hits peppering their bodies. The scanner guns in this room were intact but deactivated – obviously the infiltrator had used the suite to kill the occupants of the facility but had kept safe.

Then, as Droob followed Kaile into the suite with weapon ready, they saw something that sent their suspicions of a raid or infiltrator flying out the airlock.

Two beings were lying across the suite’s only desk, a bank of monitors and switches that controlled the entire security system. Each man had a knife in hand; each man had the selfsame knife embedded in the chest of the other as if they had stabbed each other in the midst of a struggle.

Droob cocked his head in confusion.

   “I recognise them,” he said, pulling a datapad from his pocket and scrolling through the information supplied by Mister Spyte.

   “They’re the Director and Second in Charge of the facility,” he reported after a few moments, his confusion evident in his voice.

Kaile frowned and stepped over to the bodies.

   “I’ll check these guys, you check the console, see if there’s any data entries.”

There were a few moments as the two men searched about the room. Kaile tried to check the two bodies without the need to touch them but it was unavoidable. He pushed them over slightly as the one arm of the Second in Charge was bent behind his back, the hand of the Director locked around the wrist as if he was trying to pull the arm back around from behind his subordinate. He also noticed the Second had something clasped in his hand.

   “I think I’ve found something,” Kaile said, grabbing hold of the clenched fist and trying to prise the frozen fingers apart.

Droob, flicked switches and checked monitors. As Kaile spoke he acknowledged with a hum, and then said, “The security monitor says that the system was last accessed by the Second, every room active but this one. So we have our culprit. The data log says that the system was accessed three minutes after a transmission was received.”

   “What was the transmission?” Kaile enquired, finally getting two fingers prised back to reveal a palm-sized plastic card inside the fist. He took hold of the card and tried to slide it out.

   “Looks like an intercept of the Zelon Wave Exchange. Hold on…” He pressed several stud and turned a dial, and the crackling voice of an announcer echoed through the room.

   “And this months ten million credit winning Setnin Lottery number is – 47095126! All winners have one hour to claim their prize!”

Kaile had finally pulled the card free. On it was written; ‘Setnin Lottery Number – 47095126. Please contact the Chancai Lottery office within an hour of broadcast to claim…’ and there then followed several passages indicating claimant rights and the validity of the card.

He stood slowly.

   “Err… Droob?”

As his companion turned to him he tossed the card over. Droob caught it deftly and read the imprint. As the reality of the situation sunk in, he smiled broadly.

   “The greedy freckers,” he said, and both men began to laugh loudly.

The Winner

2002 short story by Jonathan Hicks

Four years after Episode IV – A New Hope

Histories – Just another day in the life and careers of both Kaile Mirrener and Droob Hunstat.  Mirrener, cousin of Jan Lomona, and Hunstat, a feared and efficient bounty hunter use their considerable talents to figure out the cause of the carnage on Hynra.  Another illuminating Jonathan Hicks tale, it comes as no surprise when the real culprit is none other than the sector lottery.

Cast of Characters

Droob Hunstat

Kaile Mirrener