Exo-Hunter Read online

  “We’re a minor salvage team,” Burnett says. “Worst job in the galaxy.”

  “In the galaxy…”

  “Could be worse,” Morton says. “Least we’re not Exo-Hunters.”

  “Excuse me,” I say, lifting my pistol toward the new man.

  He stutters to a stop, eyes wide, mouth formed into an O. “Ohh,” he says, “Oh, geez. I’m sorry.”

  I’m about to ask him what he’s sorry for, when a nozzle extends from the side of his suit. It violently sprays a stream of yellow liquid onto the pavement.

  Burnett shakes his head in shame. “Every single time, Porter. Every time!” To me Burnett says, “He does this whenever he’s caught off guard.”

  The laser beam of urine comes to an end with a sputtering spray that keeps any and all drips from striking his suit. The nozzle retracts, and the suit seals back up.

  “That going to happen if you shit yourself, too?” I ask.

  Porter’s nervous smile confirms it, so I lower the weapon. These three are not a threat. “Anyone have a problem with me taking charge?”

  I take their uncomfortable silence for compliance. “Great. Burnett, Morton, get my big friend inside. Tie him up. Do a good job of it.” They get to work, grabbing the Soviet by his hands and feet, hauling him toward the spaceship.

  A fucking spaceship…

  “Porter.”

  “Yes, sir!” he says, and he salutes. I nearly tell him not to bother, but maybe he recognizes me as military. If so, Larry, Curly, and Moe here might actually do what I tell them. “You have a way to find out if anyone else is buried in…” I motion to ruins behind me. “…all this? Life sign scanner or something?”

  “Only way to know is to look,” he says.

  “What the hell kind of future doesn’t have life sign scanners?” I mutter, rolling up my sleeves. “Hope you’re not afraid of a little physical labor.”

  “Uhh,” he says, clearly not built for clearing rubble, let alone touching his toes. He lifts his forearm and speaks into the tight black sleeve. “We have Taks for that.”

  “Taks?”

  Four square chunks of black metal fall away from the spacecraft’s hull. By the time they reach the ground, they’ve unfurled into boxy robots that move on all fours. I grip my pistol tighter as they rush toward us, but the machines dive into the debris, hauling out concrete and metal far faster than a hundred men could.

  An hour later, most of the debris is cleared, and no one has been found.

  “You sure there were other…” He gives me a once over, like he’s not sure what I am.

  “People,” I say to Porter. “I’m a person. A human being. Same as you. How can you not know this? Are there not black people in the future?”

  “Hasn’t been for a long, long time.” He swallows, appropriately afraid of how I’ll take the news.

  I’m staggered. My knees weaken. What kind of white supremacist future hell have I been shunted into?

  “Hey!” Morton calls out, rushing up, waving his hands. “I found something!”

  “Where?” I ask, ready to charge in whatever direction he points.

  “It’s you!” He lifts a device. Turns it on. Static hisses. Then he points it toward me, and the thing squeals.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “Radio waves! You’re emitting radio waves. Technically it’s impossible, but—” He demonstrates again, unleashing another squeal. “The same thing happened with your friend inside.”

  “Not my friend,” I say, and I snatch the device from Morton’s hand. I sweep it left to right out over the debris field. I’m about to lose hope when it squeals. I continue a full 360-degree sweep, stopping when the high-pitched sound makes my ears cringe again. Same location. I turn to Porter. “What are you waiting for?”

  Ten minutes later, the Taks have cleared five feet of heavy debris from a twenty-foot-wide area.

  “Pull them out,” I say.

  “But they’re—”

  “Too heavy,” I point out. “They could crush anyone beneath them.”

  “Do you really think someone could survive under there?” Morton asks.

  I look him in the eyes. “The people I’m looking for have survived worse.”

  When I storm into the clearing, sweeping back and forth with the radio detector, zeroing in on the source, I hear Burnett ask the others, “Who are these people?”

  I’m about to respond when the radio squeal ceases. I stop in my tracks, aim it straight down, and hear the sound again. I drop to the ground and dig until my arms are sore. Then I push through the pain. I’ll stop when I’m done, not when I’m tired.

  I reach an old metal door. Find the handle. Pull as hard as I can.

  “Look at the muscles in his forearms,” Porter whispers. The three men are standing a few feet away, watching me like I’m a sideshow attraction. “He’s so strong.”

  The door groans, shudders, and then gives way. Dust and debris falls to the side with the door, blocking my view for a moment. I’m greeted by the back side of a parka. No idea who it is until, “Hijo de puta, what took you so long?”

  “Chuy!” I say, grasping her shoulders and lifting her up.

  She’s weak on her feet, so I support her weight as she pulls her hood and mask off and takes in our surroundings. “Where the hell are we?”

  “Wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I say. “Not sure I believe it yet, myself.”

  When her survey ends at the spaceship, “El maldito futuro?”

  “You know I don’t speak Mexican,” I say.

  She gives me a weak smile. “That’s a spaceship, right?”

  I nod.

  “This is the future?”

  Another nod.

  “Whip owes me fifty bucks,” she says, and then she falls unconscious in my arms.

  “I’ll let him know when we find him,” I say.

  I pick her up and carry her toward the spaceship I’m about to commandeer.

  1

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  Every time I visit a new world, I run through the same checklist. First, I give myself a moment to feel awe. Every planet is unique, and I—well, my crew and I—are the first human beings to see them up close and personal.

  Before we arrive, the exo-planets are pin-pricks of light and data, nestled into the Goldilocks zone of a star. Sometimes a red giant. Sometimes a blazing white dwarf. But most, like the one I’m looking at now, orbit a yellow star that reminds me of home. The planet is Earth-like enough. An atmosphere swirling with clouds. Blue oceans. Continents. The only big difference is that the land masses have a purple hue, which doesn’t mean anything. We once found a perfectly habitable world where all the vegetation grew pink. The My Little Pony paradise made me queasy to look at, but it went from a human population of zero to four billion in just a year.

  Step two is a scan for any signs of advanced intelligence. The kind that can fight back. Life is plentiful throughout the galaxy. IQs above that of a chimpanzee (which are extinct, along with most everything else on Earth) are in short supply. So, we look for satellites. Cities. The usual markers of civilization. And here, like everywhere else, there are none.

  Step three involves an up close and personal analysis of the atmosphere. For the most part, Predictors—the nerds who tell us where to go next—are pretty good at their jobs. They find planets via telescopes, or whatever, figure out which ones look ripe for a billion settlers, and send an Exo-Hunter team on their merry way. They haven’t steered me wrong yet. But if there is sulfuric acid in the air, I’d like to know about it before heading to the surface for a looksee.

  And that’s the dangerous bit.

  From space, planets are sterile and harmless, like a virus outside the body. But once you’re on the ground… Nine times out of ten, a planet is rejected for settlement because it’s too dangerous. Sometimes, the atmosphere is killer, and terraforming takes too much time. Sometimes the native life—plant and animal—is too hostile for immediate settlemen
t, but the Union isn’t opposed to wiping out entire species…

  Or ethnic groups.

  Back in the day, more than nine hundred years ago, they managed to cleanse the human race of everyone without pale skin. But those were darker times, fueled by fear and misguided religious zealotry. While most people populating the galaxy are a shade of peach, pink, white, and sometimes translucent veiny weirdness, there is no one left alive (that I have met) who remembers why anyone with different colored skin was feared or hated.

  There are only three people alive today who have seen a more colorful humanity, and they saw the racism and bigotry that came with it.

  It took three months of living on the cusp of the year 3000, for our crew to get used to our darker skin tones, mine something like dark chocolate, Chuy’s like milk chocolate. It didn’t bother them, but they had a hard time not staring at us the way people used to look at Picasso paintings. And that’s why we decided to stay off the Union’s radar. We’d not only stand out, we’d make a scene, and it wouldn’t be long before everyone in the known galaxy would hear about us. My guys might be cool with varied skin tones, but I honestly have no idea how the Union would react, and I’m not in a rush to find out.

  We took our hijacked space-faring vessel, which turned out to be a lander, and commandeered its much larger mothership, formally designated A-154-B7 and renamed it the USSS Bitch’n. While there is no longer a United States—or any other country—the name is still funny to me, to Chuy, and to our Soviet comrade, Vladimir Ivanov, whose name is so Russian it hurts. I sometimes call him Vlad, or Ivan, but mostly I call him by the callsign I bestowed upon him: Drago.

  Once he cleaned up and shaved, he didn’t look much different from the Union people clogging up the galaxy. White. Blond. Blue-eyed. The only real difference is that he’s a monster of a man with more hair than an ox. With technology performing most physical labor tasks, and leisurely life spent indoors or in spacecraft, people just aren’t that physically fit anymore. Gone are the days of fluorescent tank tops drawing the eyes to ripped biceps and shoulders. Men and women of the Union mostly wear BCSs: Body Care Suits. Aside from eating, they facilitate the body’s every need, from pissing and shitting to self-cleaning and, I shit you not, erection detection. Given the proliferation of a human race with nothing better to do than hump like rabbits across the galaxy, I’d say that feature is working.

  Our three crewmen from the future still wear the suits, despite my refusal to and despite constant mocking from Drago. Those of us who call 1989 home wear a combination of custom-made military BDUs and modern body armor. We look badass pretty much 24/7.

  With the Bitch’n under my command, we created fake identities with white faces, and we acclimated to life on the fringe of the future. Then we took on the job that kept us out of sight and was best suited to those who kick ass for a living: Exo-Hunters.

  It’s a dreaded post for most people these days.

  Average life span for a new Hunter is one year.

  We’ve been at it for nearly five. We’ve discovered enough new worlds to make William Shatner shit himself silly—thirty-seven of them habitable. As a result, we’re well paid, and we’re never without a mission. Which is exactly how I like it.

  I can usually tell just by looking at a planet if the air is breathable. If it’s not, we move on. The Union needs habitable worlds to satiate its perpetually booming population. With sixty-four planets hosting populations ranging between fifteen and twenty-five billion, the human race is multiplying faster than suitable worlds can be discovered. Side note: people also live a lot longer, so there are untold billions of geriatrics squeezed into BCSs, many of them still managing to pop out kids.

  I swear, the whole galaxy is sex addicted.

  It all started when a genetically modified plague was unleashed against people of color. Earth’s population took a serious hit. As did the work force. The white supremacists who unleashed it didn’t realize how thoroughly mixed people’s DNA had become, and many of their ‘pure’ super-race fell victim, too. The human race nearly went extinct—the Fourth Reich and all. Breeding programs and genetic manipulation solved the problem. They created human birthing farms, where women could pump out up to thirty children before being discarded. That stopped when, thanks to genetic tinkering, women started churning out litters of children with each pregnancy. The master race proliferated, and Earth’s population soared.

  So much of the future is fucked up, but the genocidal darkness is ancient history to these people. Farther back than the Revolutionary War was from me in 1989. The human race that we have encountered now is placid, nice, and naïve. War doesn’t exist because no one wants to bother fighting, and no one really knows how. As long as we keep finding planets for people to colonize, there’ll be nothing to fight over.

  “What the fuck are you waiting for?” Drago shouts at me from across the bridge.

  “Fuck you,” I say. “I was thinking.”

  “What is there to think about?”

  “I was ruminating,” I tell the big man, “about how we got here.”

  “About how magical object transported us into future?” he asks.

  “Not exactly.” Pondering that mystery has been a waste of time. It doesn’t make sense to those of us from the past, and my future-crew is even more baffled by it. While mankind has conquered space travel, time is still a mystery. Morton, Burnett, and Porter are scavengers by trade, but they’re also really smart. Too smart for manual labor. They’re here because they don’t fit the Fourth Reich’s quality standards for one reason or another. But they’re not theoretical physicists. There are people in the Union we could ask, but I prefer to stay hidden from the Union, even if I find a quadriplegic penguin more threatening.

  Penguins. Also extinct. Limbed and otherwise.

  All we really know is that we’re here, and that radio waves scream from our bodies. Anyone listening to 104.1 MHz gets blasted with a high-pitched squeal. I kind of wish we were broadcasting Blue Monday—because future music blows—but the radio waves emanating from our bodies is the one detail about all this that gives me hope.

  While the Union thinks I’m someone else, out here on their behalf, shopping through the JC Penneys of planets, I’m actually looking for my missing teammates.

  When we arrived in the future, the Bitch’n registered bursts of energy—three of them on Earth (myself, Chuy, and Drago) and five more launched out into deep space. Assuming that whatever brought us here wasn’t made by complete nimrods, my hope is that those other energy bursts found their way to habitable worlds.

  If not, then Benny, Brick, Whip, BigApe, and Carter are all dead.

  And that brings us to step four of my new world checklist. “Turn on the radio.”

  Morton flips a switch. The bridge is filled with the sound…of static.

  As usual.

  “You see?” Drago says. “Nothing. We are wasting time.”

  “That took all of three seconds,” I point out.

  “Three seconds I could have spent rebuilding Mother Russia.” He grins at me and gyrates in his seat a bit. Drago has a fantasy of finding a bunch of wives—totally legal for the past nine hundred years—and fathering a new Soviet Empire. I’ve pointed out that his replacement master race would look a lot like the current one, except all deformed and inbred.

  “Not even a grizzly bear would have your children,” Chuy says. She’s my second in command. Got my back every step of the way. Wants to find our people as much as I do. I’m not sure Drago has given his team of Spetnaz a second thought.

  “Is possible with genetics, no?” Drago says. “Grizzly children. Ruling the stars. Eating all the people. Space bears!” He has a hearty laugh, and I can’t help but chuckle at the image of bears, floating through space, gobbling up naïve future Nazis.

  Ach! Vut iz dish madness! Ein Bears Shpashen!

  Everyone in the future has a fake-sounding German accent. Not to say they’re pretending to have an accent. It’s real. It
’s just not genuine. Sometime during the early Union, the powers that be revered World War II Germany, and they wanted to sound like good ol’ Adolf. But they were also too lazy to learn the language, so they forced a generation to fake an accent. Every generation since has passed it on. Everyone in the future has silly German accents, but they no longer remember why.

  That’s right, the Fourth Reich didn’t come from the Aryan motherland. It came from the good ’ol U.S. of A. Chuy and I missed the official start of the new white supremacy movement by a few decades, which means the human race got just a few decades of viewing racism as bad before… Well…

  Genocide…

  I shake my head, good humor fading at the thought of all those people succumbing to a plague created to selectively exterminate most of the human race.

  Sick fuckers.

  I wish there were someone responsible still alive to kick in the nuts, but unless the present-day Union is being led by Yoda, the assholes who wiped out billions of people are long since dead.

  Now in a mood, I stand from my commander’s chair. “How’s the air?”

  “Looks muy bueno,” Chuy says. “Should feel like home. Gravity is a little lower than Earth, but everything is within safety limits.”

  “Dandy,” I say. “See you down there.”

  The Bitch’n and every other spacecraft in the galaxy moves through space, over massive distances, almost instantly, using something called a Slew Drive. How does it work? No clue. Don’t care. Someone once explained it like this: the Bitch’n ‘rotates’ into the fourth dimension—which is not time, but some other kind of place where time or space moves differently, or is compressed… I don’t know. But in that fourth dimension, the Bitch’n can move just a small distance—let’s say a kilometer—and then rotate back out and have traveled ten light years. Everywhere in the galaxy is just a quick hop, skip, and a jump away for those brave enough to face the unknown dangers that lurk on the far side of a rotation.

  Which is mostly boredom, and sometimes Porter’s swamp ass. His BCS body-odor scrubbers work overtime, and sometimes they short out.