Young Writers Society

A harsh jolt startled me out of my sleep. I opened my eyes to darkness and thought I was still dreaming. My body was as light as air, a prickling sensation spreading through every limb. My heart should have been pounding but I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t feel anything —

A second shock rocked me and a blinding flash of light forced my eyes closed.

And I wasn’t in that dumpy hotel on Vetan anymore. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know Harsh fluorescent light pressed against my eyelids, and the air hummed with that unavoidable whir of a cooling system, something far too luxurious for Kryoth’s Best Bed Inn Town. I was laying on a padded surface, each beat of my heart pumping loudly again inside my chest.

When the tumult in my mind cleared, a cold thought coalesced: my blaster was missing. The empty sheath strapped to my leg made my skin crawl. How long had I been laying here? Who had taken it? I wasn’t strapped down. Why take my blaster without restraining me?

I opened my eyes and nearly bolted upright, heart racing. A sheet of semi-transparent plastic curved overhead, trapping me. I threw out a hand wildly and sagged in relief when the barrier lifted easily, hinged on the right side. I pushed it open and sat up.

“She’s awake. The transfer was a success.” A Madalurin woman with webbed fingers and mottled green skin put her hand on my shoulder with a reassuring smile. I shrugged her off and glared at her. She was the only person in the tiny, blank room.

“Where am I? And what do you want from me?” I struggled to extract myself from the… bed I had woken up in. Raised to waist height on some kind of stand, it was a small, sleek pod of metal and plastic, hooked up to a bunch of inscrutable machinery.

“We’ll explain,” the woman said, offering her hand, which I took, finally managing to slide free of the machine. “How are you feeling?”

In response, I closed my hand around hers like a vise, spun, and within seconds had her in a very painful grip. Her hairstrands writhed. I could smell the sea on her, sharp and distinct, with a particular twist I couldn’t quite place.

“Give me my blaster back and let me out of here,” I demanded. “I don’t work for people who kidnap me. I assume that’s what you want.”

A door hissed open. “Jan!” a dark man reprimanded. He was human and bald, with tattoos crossing his arms. He carried himself as if he were in charge, the other two people who entered trailing behind him. “What are you doing? Let go of Ashira.”

Fear lanced through me. My name. These people knew my real name, the one I’d run from ever since I… killed Kirn. But if they were with Kirn’s empire, why hadn’t they killed me already, or even restrained me? They wanted me dead. It was why I had stuck to the eastern part of the galaxy for the last six months.

I tightened my grip, twisting Ashira’s arm further until she whimpered. “Jan, please, you’re hurting me,” she said.

“Let me go,” I repeated.

The man’s hand darted downward. The table blocked my view, but I knew he had reached for his blaster. “I don’t want to pull a blaster on you,” he stated. “We want you to work with us of your own free will. But if you don’t let go of Ashira right now, I will force you.”

Our eyes locked. He wasn’t bluffing and really, my threat was completely without teeth. Sure, I could probably kill Ashira before he shot me, but he would shoot me, and besides, the very thought of killing so casually sickened me. As a bounty hunter, it wasn’t a side of me I usually let show. I preferred people to think I had eccentric taste in jobs.

I released Ashira. She stumbled away from me with an accusatory stare, hurrying to stand behind the dark man like the others. I drew myself up and faced him. “All right. Talk.”

The two people standing behind him were both human. One was clearly security, but the other was a young man with a mop of black hair, dressed in rugged, functional clothing. A rappeller, a spider wrap, and a small vial hung beside a blaster. So. Another bounty hunter. I looked him up and down. Amateur. He flaunted who he was too clearly. Nobody would trust him.

“I am Vorlis,” the man said, flicking through his holopad. “You’re on Ceygawa, north sector. I’m sincerely sorry — I know how this must appear to you. We aren’t trying to kidnap you; this was the only way we could talk. We would have asked you first, but we had no way of contacting you without bringing you through.”

“Bringing me through?” I managed, incredulous.

“Jan, when you went to sleep in that inn on Vitas, what was the Galactic Standard Date?” Ashira broke in.

I recited it. “16-45-11256.”

“Today’s date is 14-32-11274.” Ashira presented her holopad to me with a grin.

“Welcome to the future,” said Vorlis, with an odd smile. “Don’t worry, we can put you back when we need to.”

“Time travel doesn’t exist,” I snapped. “Nice try. A date on a holopad doesn’t mean anything.”

Vorlis and Ashira exchanged amused looks. “We thought you would say that,” Vorlis said, nodding to the man standing behind him. The man handed him a bundle of cloth and a blaster. My heart leapt — it was my blaster. I knew every dent in the thing. Even from here, I could see the scorch marks from when Kirn…

I pushed that thought away. Damn you, Kirn. In hindsight, that had been a warning sign.

Vorlis handed both the blaster and the bundle to me. I raised an eyebrow at him. “Arming me already?” With one smooth motion, I slipped the blaster back into its holster. Its reassuring weight settled into place. Then I pulled the bundle open.

Inside was… also my blaster.

It was older, more worn and scratched, a few extra scorch marks joining the ones that Kirn had made. I ran my fingers over it, disbelief turning my stomach. Every flaw was perfect. Though the metal was clean and polished, it felt its age, more fragile in my hand. Unconsciously, automatically, I keyed the code that only I knew, a long string of numbers and letters, and angled the retina reader to align with my eye.

It powered up. And I believed. There was just no way, no way these people could have made such a perfect replica in the short time they’d had my blaster. Getting my biometric data would have been nearly impossible — I would have felt them fingerprinting me, and there was no way they could have conducted a retinal scan either. And good luck finding the data otherwise. My blaster and a few other pieces of essential equipment were the only things I allowed to register my real data.

But the code sealed it. To crack the code and program it into the other blaster? Impossible, at least in the timeframe. The code was too long, my blaster too layered with security protections. I thumbed several more codes in quickly. Every layer was there and working.

“It’s my blaster,” I whispered. “But older.”

“It’s yours,” Vorlis confirmed, pleased. “From your future.”

“Where did you get this?,” I demanded. “How do you have it? Wouldn’t — wouldn’t a future me have it?”

“You gave it up oh, five years ago,” Vorlis said. “You hated admitting it, but the newer model was better. You keep that one as a memento.”

“So you know future me.”

Vorlis frowned, reluctant. “Yes,” he admitted.

I folded my arms. “You want me for a job. Apparently enough to somehow get ahold of time travel, technology less than twenty years old if you’re not lying to me about the date, and pull me out of the past. But you know future me. You know her well enough to have her old blaster. Why aren’t you asking her?”

This was a question Vorlis didn’t want to answer — I knew it by the way his spine straightened and his eyes flickered away from my face. “She is unavailable,” he said, curt.

I tapped my thigh. “You know my conditions. I only take certain kinds of jobs.”

Vorlis relaxed visibly. “We know.”

“Trust me,” Ashira broke in. “This job qualifies.”

I looked from her to him and back again, then spread my arms wide. “Guess I’m game. Convince me.”

I would go along with this, for now. In truth, despite Vorlis’ stiffness, his ragtag but commanding air carried a sense of genuine benevolence I hadn’t expected. For one thing, he was definitely worried about something, something big and out of his control. As for Ashira… I had seen the way her eyes lit up when she had handed me the data pad with the date, how she had been smiling broadly as she told Vorlis I was awake. And they had made no attempt to use the fact I was now stranded in time as a threat, not even a subtle one.

“Come with me,” Vorlis said. I followed him out of the tiny room and through a small maze of white hallways, passing scruffy people hurrying up and down doing… something. We passed several stylized rising suns emblazoned on the wall, and connected them to a similar patch Vorlis wore on his shoulder.

“So who are you?” I asked. “A gang? A company A government?”

We reached a large, heavyset metal door that Vorlis unlocked with a swipe of his card. He gave me a grin and pulled it open. He gestured for me to go through.

I stood of a balcony overlooking a vast room that seemed a bizarre mix between warehouse and command center. In one half, the room overflowed with boxes and crates, tiny figures weaving between them, loading and unloading small hovercraft. I scanned the open boxes — food and… weapons. At the other end of the room, enormous monitors flashed with detailed information: diagrams of the planet, Ceygawa, and population metrics. High-ranking officials conversed anxiously in small groups. The rising sun was emblazoned on the far wall, the largest of the symbols I had seen so far. Underneath it was written “For freedom, health, and peace.”

A whisper of fabric and a soft footstep told me Vorlis was right behind me. “We are freedom fighters,” Vorlis said, voice bursting with soft pride. He turned to walk down the staircase on the right-hand side, taking me down into the command area.

“For thirteen years, now, Ceygawa has been under the control of an organized crime ring,” he explained as he walked. I had to hurry to keep up with him. “The government was corrupt. A blind eye to the crime ring turned into favors for them, and before we knew it the government was dissolved in a coup. We’ve been fighting back ever since.”

I nodded, uneasy. I didn’t like dealing with extremists. But if my older self had worked with him, then surely they were genuine? “I’m going to need more proof if you want an assassination.”

Vorlis stiffened. “That’s not it at all.”

We were walking among the desks and screens now. The technicians and leaders fell silent, all eyes turning on me. Flickers of recognition crossed many faces that I had never seen before.

“Watch,” Vorlis said. A swift gesture and the screens around me were filled with a model of the planet crisscrossed in red lines and patches. A model of some microscopic organism revolved beside it.

“This is the Red Death,” he said quietly, looking at a young woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail who was sitting at a terminal but watching them.

The woman took her cue. “First recorded cases were six months ago,” she said. “Long, wasting disease. It incubates for weeks and is contagious the whole time, and then the next thing anybody knows you’re on your deathbed, but it still takes weeks to die. It only took two months for it to reach epidemic status, four to reach pandemic.”

As she spoke, small gestures from Vorlis brought up more statistics on the screens. Statistics, and pictures. Thin, horribly weakened, and disfigured people, lying together in huddles as a few healthy souls bent over them, trying in vain to tend to them. Entire streets, abandoned except for the dead and dying.

“A hundred million people are sick,” Vorlis continued in an almost reverent, somber voice. “Millions have already died. In some places nearly one in every ten people are dead already and the disease is still spreading.”

“We’re nowhere near the peak,” the woman, who I guessed was a biologist, added. “For the foreseeable future, it’s only going to get worse.”

“Over there — “ Vorlis gestured to the other side of the room, “is our infirmary. Full, just from those of us who have caught the disease. Millions more suffer outside.”

I looked. A long window revealed a white, sterile hospital room, lined with beds. Every one of them was full. Five doctors and nurses paced up and down the room, monitoring, everything from their head to their feet encased in a protection suit.

A lump rose in my throat. “And the crime ring has done nothing?”

“Very little. No quarantine, no protections. All the food there? That’s us, struggling to feed the sick population because the ‘government’ doesn’t give a damn,” Vorlis said. “They have, however, been working on a cure. And last month, they found one.”

“They won’t release it,” I guessed.

“They’re going to sell it,” Vorlis spat. “Sell it for half of what most of us make in a year, and if half the people on the planet die, what do they care? Everybody important will have the cure.”

He breathed in deeply, visibly calming himself. “We knew we needed to find and distribute the cure ourselves. It took weeks of maneuvering, but our top spy in the government, Dink, escaped with the cure yesterday morning. Unfortunately, he was seen.”

“And?”

Pain tightened Vorlis’ gaze, a pain I didn’t understand, more than the frustration of a plan that didn’t work as well as hoped. “They’ve hired the best bounty hunter in the galaxy, a woman named Elana, to catch him. He’s running, but he won’t escape her. She’s too good. Our Jan is unavailable, so we stole this machine and took our next best option.”

I stared at him, incredulous. “Your next best option was to pull me out of the past? You can’t get ahold of any other bounty hunters at all?”

His jaw set. “You’re here now. Your job is to stop their bounty hunter and deliver Dink and the cure to us safely. Will you help, or won’t you? You’ll be paid handsomely and returned to your own time.”

“You think I can stop the best bounty hunter in the galaxy?” My heart raced. I was good, yes. I had dreamed of being the best one day, yes. But I was years away from anything like that.

Vorlis met my eyes. “You’re our best hope,” he repeated. “Our only hope with any chance of success.”

I took a deep breath. He could be lying. But I could easily confirm the severity of the disease independently as soon as I started tracking Elena, as well as the galactic date. How did I know he really would distribute the cure if I gave it to him? I didn’t, but if the government was already restricting it, I couldn’t make things worse.

I put my hand on my blaster, its grip warm against my sweaty palm. “I’ll do it,” I said. “I’m in.”