The bounty of Janu Coons 

The contract came through like any other bounty — a name, a price, and a last-known location that didn’t mean much on its own.
Janu Coons.
Hurston jurisdiction. High risk. Still breathing.

It took us days to pin him down. Five different locations across Stanton, each one colder than the last. False leads, abandoned shelters, half-burned camps. He knew how to move, I’ll give him that. But eventually patterns repeat, and people get sloppy.

The trail ended in an unmonitored region of Hurston, far from anything resembling civilization. No landing zones. No infrastructure. Just rock, heat, and a cave mouth that didn’t belong there.

We brought the Cutlass Black as close as we dared, but we couldn’t land right on top of it. Surface temperature was brutal — 223°C. Outside the ship, we had maybe ten minutes before things started failing in very real ways. Underground would be cooler. That was the only reason the cave made sense.

Ghostkiller7 didn’t wait.

I barely had time to register what he was doing before he was out the ramp, wearing nothing but an undersuit and helmet, sprinting straight into the cave like he had a death wish. About twenty meters in, he jumped one of Janu’s crew and boxed him unconscious with a bare fist.

That set the tone.

We started taking fire from deeper inside. My sidearm chose that exact moment to malfunction. No fix, no warning — just dead weight. We scavenged fast, pulling an SMG off one of Janu’s people. Thirty rounds. Not ideal, but it would do.

As we pushed farther in, we turned their own gear against them. Another SMG, this one with sixty rounds. Med pens. Ammo. Anything not bolted down. I used my tractor beam to stack bodies in one place — not out of respect, but so we could find them later. Gear matters. Waste gets you killed.

The deeper we went, the stranger it felt. No shelter. No visible oxygen supply. Nothing that explained how they were surviving down there for any length of time.

Then we found the pink flare.

All the others had been white. Utility. Disposable. This one was deliberate. A marker. A signal that we were close.

O₂ was running low after about thirty minutes underground. We used injectors to buy ourselves time. Enough to finish it.

At the very bottom of the cave, we found Janu Coons.

He wasn’t hiding.
He wasn’t aiming a weapon.
He was just sitting there, staring at a datapad like he’d already accepted how this was going to end.

Ghostkiller7 shackled him without ceremony.

We marched him back toward the surface, stopping long enough to collect his crew. We made Janu strip their armor, med pens, and gear himself — load it into the lockers. No shortcuts. No favors.

Back at the Cutlass, we lifted off and headed straight for the nearest UEE office. Janu went into custody without a word. No resistance. No speeches.

Afterward, we sold the excess armor at Port Olisar. Nothing fancy — just enough credits to make the risk feel justified. We wrapped the night with a few beers and a couple of double dogs.

Hurston doesn’t make things easy.
But it does make them simple.