The Ballad of Bessie Bishop

[Big Bison Bessie]

“That’s… a bit much…”

“Well now, ain’t this easy?” She dragged him up by his hair with a yelp before tossing him to the floor with a loud thud that left his temple stinging from where his head bounced off the faux wood with a loud thwack.

“Oh you bitch!” He snapped. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” She yelled back. “You stupid horny bastard, how did you even live this long?” A solid kick from her heavy boot sent him reeling and knocked the wind right out of him, and Ryan couldn’t help but gasp for air as she hauled him to his feet.

“To think I relied on you to have my back at all…”

Her voice trailed off as a quiet rage simmered within her, the kind she swallowed down. Words died in his throat, and Bessie didn’t give a shit. Her feelings of nostalgia for her old friend had been tempered down into a dull nothingness by his betrayal of her and Andre all those years back. As Ryan gasped for breath, she hauled the naked skinny bastard up and threw him over his shoulder. She stomped her way out of his bedroom, briefly stopping in his kitchen to steal some of his chips before hauling the barely conscious target out into the hallway like an unconscious dog. She wiped her hand clean of grease and salt on his hair, just adding insult to injury for the fun of it. She was sure to steal the keys to his truck before leaving, not like he’d be using it. And not like she had a ride out of here.

“Wh-what are you doing?”

“You know how much you’re worth, Ryan?” She drew her hand cannon and cautiously raised it to the elevator as she approached. She kept talking, pivoting and checking down the hall as she moved, warily watching for uninvited guests. “Eighty thousand alive.”

She couldn’t see his face, but she felt how his body tensed like a coiling spring.

“You’re a bounty hunter?!”

“Uh oh, sounds like you’re in trouble.” She let the sardonic words drip from her mouth with that classic venom. “I can’t believe you fell for such a stupid trick. You never could stop thinking with your dick, could you?”

“Fuck yourself, you fucking fat bitch. You’re not much better, I’ve seen how you look at Andre.”

“I’d shut your mouth if you knew what was good for you. You shit and fell back in it.”

The elevator arrived with a ding, and Bessie hauled Ryan inside, constant curses and complaints left his bruised body. Bessie’s heartbeat was starting to inch higher as she made her way back into the garage. Every sound that crept out of the darkness now could be a potential danger to her completing this job. There was a reason she was sure not to drink as much as Ryan had during their night at the bar after all. Plus she could handle her liquor, unlike this moron. She kept her gun in hand as she made her way to the truck in the dull red light of the garage, eyeing the dark corners where shadows pooled like ink.

The quiet was broken by Ryan’s commlink ringing out like an errant alarm as he was hurled into the truck. Her hand hesitated a moment as if the commlink was hot and dangerous to touch, before she snatched it up and looked at the screen. ‘Marco.’

“Who’s Marco?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Bessie rolled her eyes.

Unceremoniously, she dropped the comm into the cup holder and fished out a roll of duct-tape from the side door, taking a smug bit of satisfaction in covering Ryan’s stupid mouth. He lay in the back and groaned like a pig as he trashed in his restraints. A punch to the face shut him up quickly, bloodying his nose at the same time. As she threw herself into the driver's seat and the vehicle rocked beneath her, she quickly yanked the battery out of his beeping commlink and dropped it to the floor. If someone came looking for Ryan now she’d be shit out of luck she figured. Now she just had to get this loser to the LPI and get that bounty payout.

The truck rumbled to life, and Bessie made her way out of the garage amidst the darkness of the night. Her turn onto the main road was punctuated by a lonely car passing her by. The bounty hunter’s mind started to churn and chew on the best way to get to the local LPI base in the city. Ryan’s truck did have a GPS map of the town… though thoughts of her plans slowed to a halt as she saw the car that she’d passed suddenly stop and make a K-turn before it would have entered the garage. That struck her as peculiar enough to warrant some action. Her heavy boot leaned just a tad harder on the accelerator, leisurely she picked up speed without trying to attract too much attention. Those headlights in her rearview mirror kept pace. Thoughts of that car being Marco’s entered her mind, and the thought of one of Ryan’s friends showing up and causing trouble made her hand drift to the grip of her hand cannon on her belt and draw it from its holster with a quiet rustle. She was sure not to act out or do anything especially alarming to let her know her tail was onto them. If this was a tail. Either way, Marco was a sudden variable she had to account for.

At the first red light she ran into, she switched lanes and turned right down a street heading towards the commercial district. The lights followed her around the corner. A block up she threw on her left signal light, then swung a right at the intersection near the fast food place that bathed the area in a blue light and cloying advertisements. The lights followed her. This guy was following her for sure. With a sigh she reached down and tapped the GPS screen on the truck, showing a map of the city in dim green light. She needed a plan, she was at a disadvantage here, she didn’t know the area very well at all. This guy may have known shortcuts or oddities in the roads that’d give him an advantage over her in a pinch. The trick would be disappearing somehow. Losing a vehicle isn’t about speed. She had to play this stupid until the guy made a mistake. It’s less about winning a chase, but being unpredictable until you can make the other guy lose.

The engine of the truck rumbled as she down shifted, and as the headlights of the car behind her filled her rear view mirror she brake checked him. The lurch that came with it caused Ryan to let out a muffled yelp like a pathetic animal, but she shut him up when she shifted back into a higher gear and put her foot on the gas, palming her wheel into an illegal U-turn and gunned it onto one of the long roads towards the warehouse district. The whole truck shook as she took the curb and sent the bounty hunter bouncing in her seat. A construction site up ahead lit up half the road. Distant movement briefly caught her eye as massive automated Samura Heavy Industries loaders and backhoes moved like lumbering giants beyond the orange lit perimeter. If push came to shove, she could cut in through those automated construction machines and try to lose the guy, but that didn’t strike her as an especially smart move. But if you’re stupid you gotta be brave. She would cut in there she figured, but her thoughts were immediately side tracked. Speaking of stupid, in her rearview she caught a glimpse of Ryan sitting up in the midst of being tossed around in these maneuvers.

“Get the fuck back down on the seat!” She grunted over her shoulder.

Ryan didn’t listen, and in her mirror she saw him throw his back against the door, and an instant later it went swinging wildly open and he soundlessly tumbled from the car. The cool night air flowed wordlessly into the car in the awkward aftermath. A fleeting look of disbelief crossed her face before her anger got the better of it and snapped her out of it.

“Son of a bitch!” The wheels squealed as she stomped the brake into the floor with a mighty force that would have broken something on an older truck. Rolling down the window, she had just enough time to look out and see the other car stop. A figure stepped out, hidden behind the blinding high beams. With a loud clunk, she threw the truck into reverse and gunned it, but the vague shapes that were Ryan and probably Marco already were stumbling back to their car as she closed the distance. It was a rushed act that came with a trio of loud bangs that echoed through the streets as someone started blasting. Immediately her driver’s side mirror exploded into sparks and bits of shrapnel, the flash burned hot on her face as she punched the accelerator and rammed into the car tail first. The impact nearly threw her from her seat as the metallic crunch jerked her violently into the steering wheel’s airbag that smacked into her with a thunderous force that left her dazed.

A roar from the other car came as the smashed vehicle lurched away and bolted down the street like a startled deer. Her world was still spinning. With a loud ka-clunk, she threw the truck back into drive, but the engine sputtered and stalled. She slammed her foot down on the gas and nothing happened. She swore and punched the deflated airbag as the engine died properly and grew dead silent. Time was quickly ticking down and she had to act immediately or risk losing both of these idiots. She threw the door open and took aim at the car speeding away and fired twice, the hot red blasts from her hand cannon ripped through the cool night air. The stench of ozone came with the electric crack of the laser. One shot went wide and blew a smoldering hole into a distant street sign, but the other blasted one of the car’s tail lights clean off in a sputter of sparks. They were going to get away, she realized. She reached up and tapped the NN implant behind her ear to try to snatch a scan of the truck. But it was too far, she couldn’t make out the barcode on the plate at this distance, but it was some kind of red, off-road vehicle. If she could get a bit closer she could link a scan back to her ship’s computer and try to find a matching registration in the LPI database. She had run a short distance after them, but quickly gave up as they sped off into the night. With a huff she stopped in the middle of the road, the light above her turning yellow, then red quietly as it beckoned the imaginary traffic to stop.

“...fuck…”

“Excuse me ma’am.” With a start she turned to see one of the man-sized construction robots standing next to her. Its yellow reflectors and flashing beacon light made it stand out in the darkness amidst the wreckage of the truck. The branding for Samura Heavy Industries was stenciled across its yellow chassis with black paint. “You have been in an automobile accident. Would you like me to contact medical services?”

“What, no.” With a huff she stuffed her gun back into her holster. “Thanks though, I guess.”

The machine gave her an affirmative nod, before turning its torso, then legs, and walking back towards the much larger automated vehicles it and a couple other man sized machines seemed to be supervising. She turned back down the street and faced the direction the car had fled.

They can’t get away that easily. An idea formed. As they vanished beyond the buildings, Bessie pulled out her own commpad and brought up the controls for her Magpie scouts. These things found Ryan, so she just had to set them to find that car. Simple. She’d never done this, but she knew the drones could do it. Gotta learn the features sometime after all. So she punched in the details for the vehicle and her location. Soon, one of them found the little car and managed to snatch a scan of its plate before someone shot the little thing out of the sky.

Hopefully that would be eight hundred credits well spent on that drone. His bounty would more than make up for it. A slight grin pushed her plump cheeks back as she copied the license plate data into the guild accessible part of the LPI database. Turns out the truck did belong to a man named Marco Bailey. Scruffy red-head, boney looking man with a face like a ghost and an awful looking mustache. Apparently he had ties to the Zoners, specifically their militant elements who were more violently opposed to Liberty taking over the planet. Suspected smuggler, a small bounty on his head too it seemed. Marco got up to some trouble, and she wondered if that’s how he tied back to Ryan. The guy even had a ship registered to him at the nearby spaceport. That could be Ryan’s ticket off world, he didn’t have a ship registered to him nearby… though that wouldn’t stop him from using an unmarked or stolen one she figured. Bessie called up a taxi, the odd feeling that these guys were going to try to get off-world burned in her mind. And it was a feeling that came with the confident excitement of laying a trap for your prey. She told the cabbie to gun it to the space port, paying him a generous tip to run the lights. Something he accepted with glee, maybe it was a reprieve from his ill paying work, or a brief moment of excitement in his life. Whatever it was, that old man seemed happy to help.

Somehow, Bessie had beaten them to the spaceport. If they were heading to the spaceport that was. Maybe that cabbie was that good? No. Her instincts were telling her this was the place to be, Ryan would want to book it ASAP, and Marco was also a wanted man. How long could they be sought out by a bounty hunter before the cops or other bounty hunters caught on after all? So, Bessie took her time, and found a dark corner to hide within the hangar. It was warm and quiet amidst the dull bits of orange light that slowly leaked in from the poorly lit yard outside and open air above. She wondered if they were grabbing something, what was it? There was probably something stashed away he couldn’t afford to leave behind. Money? Cardamine? Weapons? Ryan’s clothes?

Maybe it was a ship in better condition. She looked up at the Rhino, the bulky old block of a freighter was like a big silver brick. Or it had been silver at one point in the distant past. Years of use and lack of maintenance had ruined its glamorous Liberty stylings, leaving it crusty and dented up. It looked like at some point someone had wanted to do some maintenance and cleaning on the ship. A rolling tool cart and some cleaning supplies sat near the cargo loader. Though with just one guy a job like this would take a year. This Marco guy didn’t take very good care of his ship. It looked like the rest of this town, struggling to get by as time marched on.
At the very least this Marco guy would make for a nice bonus. Not a big fish by a longshot. But it would be a nice bonus. Something she mused about spending as she nursed her cigarette, though the notion of her debts sucking up most of the money came to mind.

It sullied her mood for a time, until the distinct echo of an old metal door creaking open called through the dull and stagnant air. It was something that drew energy into her body from some unseen source, and with the approaching footfalls she drew her gun.

Lights flickered on as Marco and Ryan rushed in, hauling hard cases towards the ship on hand trucks. Marco was in the lead and he pressed something on his commpad, causing the Rhino to clack and unlock its cargo ramp as they ran towards it. But Bessie was not about to let them get away. A quick tap on behind her ear and her NN implant ran a facial recognition just to confirm, and it blinked back positive in her vision, flashing small ID photos of Marco and Ryan after it briefly outlined their faces. Bingo. She stepped out from her hiding spot near the maintenance equipment with her hand cannon raised, confident in her position.

“Ryan!”

The roared name echoed loudly through the landing pad.

“Aw shit…” He spun and froze as he spoke, his companion stumbling to a stop.

“The bounty hunter.” Marco’s gruff voice trailed off in a dreary bit of expected disappointment.

“Ain’t it just? You wanna come quietly, boys?”

“We haven’t done anything.”

“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining…”

She smiled, and stepped up towards them, her gun not leaving the two of them as she did. In the dull air of the storage yard, the Rhino’s ramp finally reached the ground with a loud clunk that echoed off the dusty walls. Bessie’s fingers moved on her gun’s grip as she flexed, and a look of curiosity entered Marco’s eyes.

“Why don’t you shoot?”

“I blow the bounty if I blow you away.” She snatched the cigarette from her mouth and snapped it in half with her fingers, flicking it towards Marco and nearly hitting him. Dead to rights. She reached to her belt and grabbed a set of cuffs, and Marco eyed her all the while, a silent rage in those eyes of his.

“Well then…” A snap movement drew her eyes to Marco as he brushed his coat back.

Her eyes left Ryan long enough for him to raise a gun he’d been hiding behind the crate he had been lugging around, he had always been good with slight-of-hand. She had caught the movement, and forced her momentum and focus to shift, and from her perspective she dragged the ironsights of her gun from one target to the other in slow motion. Her heart pounding in her ears, her muscle memory guided her hand more than her focused mind. She reflexively found Ryan’s body and her trigger finger squeezed as his gun was drawn level to her.

A bright red flash of her cannon’s laser briefly smeared her vision as a wet pop echoed through the chamber. Ryan stumbled backwards and away as a puff of sparks and smoke erupted from his right shoulder as it flashed black from the laser’s blast of light and heat. Her ears filled with his yelp, his arm contorted and the pistol tumbled to the ground, but Marco suddenly rushed forward. A distinctive gleam of metal in his hand. The weight of her arm moved in slow motion through the air as if it were molasses as she trained her gun on her next target.

She fired, scorching Marco’s hair and ear but missing a fatal shot. As he moved into arm’s distance from her, a distant flash of sparks blew from the Rhino’s cowling as another blast overshot him. Bessie’s feet twisted under her as she shifted her posture, forcing herself backwards as he swatted her gun hand up despite her attempts to steady her arm. The gleam of the knife kept moving towards her chest, and she instinctively backpedaled and rotated out of the way. He lunged past her like some mad dog, stumbling into some of the nearby maintenance supplies, a fumble she punished him with a crack over the head with her gun. But he was up and slashing towards her face alarmingly quickly, and he caught her right hand with the blade.

When Bessie was a kid, her whore of a mother (rest her soul) had taught her the intricacies of the art of the knife fight. Mainly, that there were few. When your opponent had an edged weapon, engaging and grappling with him were suicide. She had shown Bessie this by giving her a big fat marker, and had her try to fight one of the other street punks with it. Every smudge and bit of ink represented a gaping wound, a slash through skin and muscle and tendons. It wasn’t something you could try to ignore like the pain from getting punched, this was your body being torn apart. The best thing to do in a knife fight is to not be in one. Second best thing to do in a knife fight, find a way to ensure you can stay away from your opponent.

As the slice on her hand burned her and grew warm and wet, she caught a glimpse of her gun tumbling away from her with the drops of blood that were flung from her hand. Marco’s manic face twisted wildly as he lunged again, and Bessie stomped backwards gracelessly. Her boots smashed into and through the pile of haphazardly stacked tools and storage bins, throwing them wildly to the side as she dodged his slash. She was strong and had reach, but she was big, bulky, and slower than he was. Bessie bumped ass first into something light enough to grab, something leaning up against that cart. Blindly reaching behind her, she found the handle to the push broom and swung it into his face. He gagged as a cloud of dust filled his eyes and nostrils, an opportunity that Bessie pushed as she thrust it up into his jaw and smacked him backwards with a loud thwack. She pushed her advantage. Marco still had that knife, but Bessie suddenly had a range advantage of four or so extra feet and she was intent on force feeding him that broom right through his teeth.

The glittering blade of the knife came in wildly, and she spun the broom vertically and caught it in the shaft where it dug in. Marco realized too late that it was embedded deep in the wood as it was wrenched out of his hand with a violent spin of the broom. There was an attempt to steady himself, and Marco never managed to do that as the tail end of the broom was thrust towards his face, something he barely ducked under. He used the momentum from his sidestep to rotate into a punch to Bessie’s gut. With a gasping grunt she planted her elbow into his skull with a loud thwack that she quickly followed up with a wild swing into his ear, sending him spinning to the side. With a clattering crash he stumbled over his hard cases that were discarded near the hand truck, flipping them over and spilling orange ampoules all over the deck. They’d rushed out to grab their stash of that narcotic Cardamine before getting off world it seemed.

Her eyes went from the drugs to the ship, where she caught a glimpse of Ryan, who had struggled to his feet and up the gangway of the ship. He was badly hurt, the smell of his burnt skin and clothes stank up the landing pad even more than it already was. Soon the smells of grease and smoke and stagnant water mixed with ozone and blood. And Ryan was determined not to remain here. Slippery little bastard. If he got in there it would be hard as hell to get him out, and that was the last thing she wanted. Hell he may even be able to fly with that fucked up arm of his still. Her train of thought was interrupted as Marco wrapped his arm around the end of the broom and yanked it hard, but Bessie’s bloody grip didn’t relent. The shaft slid backwards, not leaving her hand, smearing blood all along the wood. But it was enough of a yank to get the knife back into Marco’s hand. The bounty hunter had no intention of letting the tables get turned again. With a quick crouch she snatched a wrench from the scattered tools and hurled it into his face, cracking it off his nose with a nasty sound that had to have been something breaking. And as he reached up to grab his bloody face Bessie retracted the broom and quickly whacked it across his reeling body, sending the knife spinning wildly into the air.

The Bison lunged, seizing the opening.

The broom was dropped and with one motion she stepped up and planted a fist up and under his ribs with a hearty crack that nearly folded him over. He didn’t have time to reel before the massive woman smashed him across the jaw with her left, blood chasing after a tooth as it was flung from his mouth. Marco tried to counter attack, but his attempts were sloppy as she countered blow for blow, Bessie adopting a boxer’s stance as they matched off. Grunts and shouts filled the garage as they bobbed and weaved around each other. Marco was fast, but each one of Bessie’s hits knocked him around, leaving him dazed and bruised with her sheer force. His strikes against her were all either countered away by her impressive strength or straight up didn’t seem effective. And he knew he was on the backfoot now that he lost his weapon. Bessie saw him trying to disengage and his attempt to backpedal landed him a high kick that properly broke his nose and knocked him on his ass.
“Ack!”

“You annoying bastard!”

She shook the pain from her hands before snatching up her gun, knowing she’d have to clean the grip now that she got blood all over it. It was enough of a moment of her breaking eye contact with Marco that when she looked back, he had Ryan’s gun in his hand. Her chest tightened and her heart lunged inside her. Instinct took over, and Bessie twisted her gun hand up and over to Marco’s center of mass, pulling the trigger twice.

His body slumped over with a barely audible sigh as the force of the blast knocked him flat on the floor, crackling smoke creeping up from his chest. The pistol fell from his grip and clacked against the floor, echoing quietly through the pad. Suddenly she was alone. Bessie stood there, nearly dumbfounded a moment as she realized what her body did on pure reaction alone. What she’d been trained to do, what she had grown up doing, what she was good at. She blinked, taking it in a moment. One of her bounties lay there before her, dead. There goes a chunk of that paycheck.

“... fuck.”

There was a loud clunk as the Rhino’s boarding ramp finished retracting.

“Fuck!”

She raised her hand cannon and fired twice at the side of the Rhino, blasting scorch marks into the hull as it rumbled to life. The gun failed to penetrate the ship’s armor, something that didn’t surprise her at all. One more shot into the cockpit, but it simply scorched the reinforced transparent metal window without blasting through it. Bessie wasn’t about to stick around and watch him launch, and instead she bolted into a sprint, stampeding her way through the spaceport, shoulder checking through doors and blasting the locks off of anything that refused to open to her brute force. She nearly bowled over a DSE repair robot as she cut through maintenance, stumbling over cables half hidden in the dim light. Behind her, she heard the echo of the Rhino’s engines as the ship roared, and soon the sound peaked into a crescendo of noise before fading away.

The Bison blitzed her way through the halls to landing pad twenty four, catching the corner with her bloody hand to force herself around the corner without losing momentum. She’d already entered the code on her commpad as she was running to start her ship’s boot sequence. And as she charged up the gantry rack to the boarding hatch on the Coyote II the ship rumbled to life amidst her thundering footfalls that rocked the ramp.

She threw herself into her seat with a mighty force and rammed it up forward into the piloting position, instinctually slamming the emergency umbilical jettison as she did. A loud series of bangs sounded as fuel lines and cables hooked up to her power cells blew themselves clear and went crashing to the floor below. Ryan was gaining ground fast, and she took off after him even as systems on the Coyote II were still coming online. The landing pad fell away from her, the feeling of motion in the ship muddled by its inertial dampeners as it ascended up above the space port. Formerly bright streets became glittering vestiges down below as she hit the throttle and climbed after him, the air traffic controller sending her repeated hails all the while. She had to spy him visually, her targeting scanners only fully booting a few moments later. Red outlines appeared around his ship and she gunned it after him, its wireframe appearing a moment later in her targeting computer. A glance at her indicators showed that her shields hadn’t even finished spinning up.

Night was peeling away into the red and orange dawn. Mountains framed with flame like colors blazed beneath her as the Coyote II closed in on the Rhino. The clouds he was climbing towards had that same glittering orange intensity that the sea below had adopted as the sun crept up on the horizon. The Rhino stood out as the single dark spot amidst all the color. Thankfully that hunk of junk had outdated engines… a more modern Rhino could have gotten away. Bessie bounced in her seat as the turbulence picked up as they crossed pressure zones, but her steady aim and targeting assist software quickly vectored her ship’s guns onto Ryan. A kill was worth far less in this case… but maybe she could force him down.

Red flared around her in the cockpit as she fired, a burst of her ship’s lasers screeching through the clouds and cutting them away as they drew a line straight into the back of the rhino where the shields flashed brightly. Her scanners showed his power cells flare as the backup batteries for his shields quickly began toggling on sequentially to desperately preserve the integrity of the ship’s defenses. He felt that one, and soon the ship pulled away and up towards a patch of sky where clouds lay thick like fog. It wasn’t enough to lose the hunter, and she chased after the glowing trail of his engines as it vanished into the gray and orange fog. As water splattered across her canopy, her comms garbled with indistinct chatter that she realized was on one of the encoded police frequencies. Police ships were nearby. Someone must have caught wind of this. She was on a timer now.

“Shit.”

She had to act fast. The clouds may have blocked her vision of Ryan, but her scanners and targeting computers tracked him clear as day, unimpeded by water and the airborne pollution. A toggle of a switch and another pull of the trigger sent a rapid series of EMP blasts into his aft shield, lighting up the sky like lightning as his shields blew away and he dove down to escape. His flying was sloppy, that bad arm of his wasn’t helping, and even if he was up to his usual game, that fat ship couldn’t come near the maneuverability of Coyote II. He had to know that. He had to know this was a losing game. Bessie had him outmaneuvered and outgunned. He had to land.

She eased the stick and rolled over and after him, the glitter of the sea and a narrow rocky beach appeared down below as she sped after him. There was a shuddering bang as she descended, one that coincided with a shockwave from the Rhino as well as they broke the sound barrier as he refused to slow down. Bessie kept on his tail, closing the distance as her Hammerhead cut through the air like the blade it was. Now the Rhino sat in her canopy before her, looking as big as her fist at arm’s length. With her targeting computer sounding a solid laser lock in her ears, she reached up and clicked the radio on, and left it on.

“Land the ship, Ryan.” She spoke plainly, strictly, driving her point home as hard as she could.

“Not a chance, Bishop.” The garbled comms spoke back.

“Don’t be such a God-damned idiot!” Her finger toyed with the trigger, the smooth plastic slippery with blood.

“Heh. Big words coming from you, b’unter. Way I see it, you’re the one who’s the fool. You’ve burnt your old life away, all your friends. They’re gonna want you dead for turning on them like this. You what, hunting us? For a paycheck? And you’re pissy with me about leaving you and saving my own skin?! You fucking traitor. We were friends, damnit, Bessie!”

There it was. The forbidden thought of hers. The notion that sat in the corners of her mind. Her greed, her pride, her ambition and lust for revenge was stifled by a simple, quiet thing. Nostalgia? Guilt? Shame?
She wasn’t even sure anymore.

“Shut. Up.”

He didn’t answer. And she didn’t pull the trigger. She just stared at him, keeping pace turn for turn as she listened to the target lock sounding in her ears. She started to squeeze the trigger.

“... would you have forgiven me?” The comms broke that silence with a sorrowful garble of words that blindsided her.

And Bessie didn’t have an answer. Sometimes, things seem so clear in your own head. Sometimes your best path is obvious, what you will do is obvious, how you will feel is obvious. But how we imagine things playing out can vary so wildly from how they actually do, no matter how sure of the results one is. Seeing it play out before you, it’s different. Bessie didn’t answer, because despite all her dulled fury and near hatred of Ryan, she genuinely did not know the answer to his question.

Ryan’s Rhino exploded amidst a flash of blue lasers that came from somewhere behind her. Yanking the stick back, she forced Coyote II up and over the blast as the ship cracked in half and went tumbling down to earth amidst fluttering plates of metal and clouds of fiery debris that filled the air like confetti. A pair of LPI fighters raced past her, slowing down and looping back around as they too watched the flaming ship crash into the sea below them. Bessie watched the smoldering wreckage glitter in the swell of the sea in the morning light, feeling hollow.

In the end, the LPI did not pay for a capture or kill for Ryan Petrov, but instead a ‘generous finder’s fee’ that barely amounted to a fifth of the bounty payout.

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End

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☆The Ballad of Bessie Bishop☆ | ☆Elizabeth Bishop LPI Records☆ | ☆Feedback☆