[color=silver][h3][sup][sup]The Maverick Model 12 inspired little in the way of awe or reverence or raw, virile sex appeal. It wasn't the kind of weapon they made generate-on-demand beamfilms about, starring laconic detectives or flinty-eyed gunfighters; too lumpy, too awkward with its bulbous air tank and a magazine wide enough to row a canoe with. And quiet, so pathetically quiet. Compared to the twitterboom from an arc blaster or even the [i]tzzzzzzk[/i] of a laser pistol, how was the Model 12's sharp, wiffley little [i]psss-tunk[/i]—more of a fart than a roar—supposed to terrify and demoralize? Leave a jackrat pissing his off-designer cargoes in horror and not in laughter? Fibrodiamond darts—[i]gas-propelled[/i] fibrodiamond darts! Like something outta the fucking Middle Ages. What next? Maybe the bounty hunter would trade in his atmosuit for a banana-leaf loincloth, his RetNet visor for a nosebone. Maybe while he was at it he'd tie them off to his elbow and go spearfishing, or dip them in neurotoxins for a monkey-hunt through the jungle.

Well—fair enough. Maybe the first slackjaw at the end of the pan-sec corridor would've laughed, too, as so many had before him. Maybe. Had it been his buddy's hand on his shoulder jostling him awake from the stim nods and not a 7.22mm caliber flechette splattering his throat across the camera room door. Instead the usual. From the gun its wimpy hiss-thwunk-wheeze, the recoil shuddering through Zardok's arm, then—in less time than seemed possible for a subsonic delivery system—a wet clatter off the wall. The jackrat thrown awake, his eyeballs welling with tears, his lips with a pink foam spurting down his chin all over his stylish a-symm jacket. His hands searching, grasping for the piece of ice he could feel still lodged in his windpipe, finding only the leaky hole, his lungs burning hotter and hotter as he took breaths which embarked yet never arrived, and confusion, so much bursting, bug-eyed confusion. Like an ant colony pouring from a log that smoldered on both ends. Like a kitten in a microwave.

It was the second guard wrenched out a startled and grief-throttled scream, the sight of his pal's blood dribbled down the wall leaving little to conjecture. He opened fire, and yes, skinny arms struggled to control the backcharge from a too-big weapon, and yes the terror trembled through him and the rage and the panic but these didn't make him miss, it wasn't these which caused the arc to streak past the mercenary into the corridor behind him—sparks frolicking, oxide fumes frizzing from the freshly pockmarked durasteel. Not really. While the jackrat wondered whether he could beg instead, or bargain or backtrack into the safety of the armored room behind him, Zardok raised his plated vambrace to his face, unceremoniously shielded his eyes from the flash and his naked face from its burn; and brought the fight [i]with[/i] him, step by strident step. While the jackrat wrestled with the thought of killing—not indirectly, not slaughter-by-proxy, but with his own two hands—how different it seemed from the overdoses, the unpaid debts, the "warnings to the rest," all out of sight, easily rationalized, [i]"deserved"[/i]—Zardok had already closed the distance. Hesitation. Simple hesitation had determined this exchange's outcome before it had ever begun.

Unbraced arm leaping from the recoil, he'd squeezed off the next dart as the last ribbons of plasma fizzled past, as the hairs on his neck stood down from the charge in the air petering off. The dart bit breastplate, screeching, sparking; not penetrating, but slamming the punk backward into the wall with a concussive shove. Zardok steadied, reacquired, and fired another. And another, every punch to his carapaced midsection staggering the punk's breathing, his stance. His aim, his very composure, until he laid crumpled in the corner, wincing and wheezing, and above him loomed the bounty hunter's muzzle trained on his forehead from a distance unworthy of maybes and perhapses. A distance at which the jackrat could gawk down the barrel and see the glitter of the nitrogen-ice condensation gathered on the rifling. And behind that twinkle the twinkle of the next fibrodiamond tip. Staring back at him.

"How many guys inside?"

A squinting, bleary blink. "Fuh—wha—"

"How many, chucklenuts?"

"Tuh—...two. Please don't kill me. Not like that. Anything but—"

"You know," the bounty hunter said, leering aside, "I'm a gambling man. Comes with the career choice I guess. Nothing beats a quick-draw duel at high noon; a last-ditch close call squeeze out on the Asteroid Belt; chasing, casing, tailing, you name it. And I'd put down ħ50 heels, right here, right now, that your retinal signature open-sesames that there door console. Am I right?"

"Uhmn—" blubbered the punk.

Zardok sighed, grabbed him by the oversized jacket collar, flopped him out of the corner and onto the floor like an angler tosses his catch into a cooler. The jackrat floundered and splayed not far from where his buddy's combat-booted feet, also trout-on-icelike, still kick-spasmed their last. Lips yearning, tongue lolling, eyeballs bulging, but the kid couldn't look at his friend's face, not the face or anything else. He just glowered at the floor, wincing each time the boot soles squeaked against the mirror-polished floor, maybe counting the ceiling tiles in the reflection; playing any little mind-game he could, to block out the sight the sound and most of all the reeks, his friend's evacuated bowels collecting in his underwear, blood and sour bile frothing from the ventilation in his neck.

"Aw, man. You got pretty eyes," growled Zardok. "Real puppydog heartbreaker eyes, yeah, and they're breakin' mine somethin' bad. Figures. You bat your lashes and the world just eats outta your hand, huh? And you work your magic on a big ol' softie like me and—well, shit, kid, you win. You win already! I'll tell you what then. You get one more shot—you give it to me no bullshit this time, you get to keep your pretty blue eyes. Lie to me again, I go down to the cafeteria and I find me an ice cream scoop. Privy?"

Zardok watched the unfolding in real time, right there at his feet. Disbelief first. Then confusion then anger, the kid almost daring forth the death which didn't come, sick of waiting, of dreading. Then at some point enough seconds had passed that it must have dawned on him maybe the hunter wasn't toying with his food after all, maybe he really didn't have to die, maybe no one else had to die at all who hadn't died already and maybe, just maybe he'd get out of this alright. Fuck the money (it had blood on it anyway). Fuck the drugs. Fuck Van Zantz and his "empire" and his chromed-out gorillas. A one-way ticket off this glorified stripmine of a moon. If the kid had that he could get an indenture on an apartment, work a dead-end gig to pay it off, and sure it wouldn't be much but it also wouldn't be [i]this,[/i] on his knees on a toothbrushed corporate floor with a gun to his head next to his buddy's blood, backpedaling so as not to get it on himself as the puddle crept and crept and crept. Running out of room. It kept pouring out of him, the puddle widening, and he was running out of floor to crawl across to keep out of it.

"Three," said the kid, who'd caught his breath, whose ribs had stopped aching. "No, four, sometimes it's four. Are you really gonna let me go?"

Zardok shrugged. "Depends. I let you go you going back to school, getting your diploma, a part-time job? Or you gonna keep slingin' Kick for some wannabe slumlord?"

"Hell no, man, I'm out. I'm never touching this shit again I swear to fucking God."

"Good. Between you and me, you weren't much cut out for it anyway." The bounty hunter's eyes met his, giving him one of those fatherly, atta-boy kinds of looks. Next he nodded to the door. "Open it. And gimme the yap on your boss while you do."

"Uh, yeah. Sure." The kid circumvented the puddle on his way to the console, still ignoring the body, by then mercifully still and quiet, its suffering maybe finally almost through. Started navigating menus and plugging in passcodes. "Van Zantz doesn't leave the [i]brezhnevka[/i]; everything happens through cameras, bots, comms, fixers. They've claimed the whole second-from-the-top floor, him and his muscle. He's never alone. They got every stairwell, every elevator locked down. They peep it out all in shifts."

"Can't take a piss without his ten bodyguards giving the sign-off, huh? That's some kinda life," scoffed Zardok. "What the hell do you kids even idolize in a chickenshit like that?"

"I dunno...the money. Made it seem easy I guess, easier than going legit. You know how they treat people. The companies."

"I do." Above the doorway was a camera and sure enough, true to the kid's word, it didn't sweep the corridor indiscriminately, didn't just so happen to catch the events of the last few minutes in the glint of its peripherals; it was trained, focused, pan-tilt-zoomed on the two of them and the corpse. Zardok smiled and waved. "Keep talking," he advised. "It'll be over sooner."

"Right. Right, okay." Still hunched over the console the kid prattled off what details he could recall, messy and scrambled with the circumstances pressing down on him: floor plans, security layouts. Front door procedures; the way the hunter and his crew would need a resident's keycard to get in, unless they wanted to chance it with the doormen. The way the windows weren't barred and reinforced like on so many other moons (the gravity too low—unfeasible as a suicide method) and maybe that was a way in. The kid seemed to really think that was how things were going to shake out: monolith and underdog, climax and [i]dénouement,[/i] struggle and triumph, all guns and fire and glory. A shame. Retrieving the gas grenade from his duster, squeezing the spoon, and biting down on the pin, it was the singular time Zardok felt sorry for him. Sorry for the way things had to be.

The kid was stooped down at eye-level with the scanner squinting through the green glare when the doors hissed open. His friends had heard the whole exchange. Weapons drawn, furies stoked. "Corvik, you FUCKING TRAIT—" began their indignant battle cry cut short. Clink. Clatter. Hiss-thwunk-wheeze.

"Corvik's" cerebral fluid painted the door console, a dart tip jutting from the ruin of a forehead opened like an eggshell, the back of his mohawked head glittering with nitrogen-ice residue. He streaked down the wall into a slack pile on the floor. Meanwhile the safety lever sprung away down the hall ricocheting off the walls with a [i]ting-a-ting[/i], and the rest of the grenade arced along its toss, and it landed somewhere in the farthest reaches of the camera room. The panic struck wordlessly and all at once: one or two of Van Zantz's mooks taking quick action, thinking if they scrabbled fast and scrabbled hard they might find the grenade and hot-potato it back to the bounty hunter; or else they might evacuate the camera room before detonation, gambling on the nailer running low on ammo, its gas tank low on PSI, gambling on the hunter's reflexes being good but not good enough to take all of them in full awares the way he'd ambushed the two lunkheads outside. But the rest, paralyzed by indecision—taking a moment too long to decide, hunker or escape, hunker or escape—when Zardok shut the door and shot the console, shot it until the sparks and the electrical arcs melted plastic, superheated copper, the doors closed and the last that Zardok saw of them (three or four he couldn't say) was their gormless, slackjawed, sheep-meeting-the-wolf expressions.

He backed up; waited for the beating against the other side of the door to weaken, to slow, then to cease, only a minute or two in all, before spitting the pin across the floor [i]ting-a-linga.[/i] Growling into his RetNet unit. "Captain to crew," he said, finger to temple, retina navigating the visor UI with deft side-aside glances. "Rabgood, I'm tied up at the pan-sec room and I'm gonna need you to meet me here. Bring me more ammo and a gas charge. Oh, and the biggest laser we got. Gonna have to cut our way in."[/sup][/sup][/h3][/color]