Seven Stars

“They say the stars above Hegemon-5 number in the exact amount of tears shed for the inmates housed here. Can you believe that?” The prison warden, Galymedes, had two of his four appendages folded behind his back, while the other two gesticulated about in the air, pointing at walls and punctuating his words as he walked. Keeping pace behind him was a man with vibrant pink hair shaven down to the scalp, wearing a simple brown and black vest and loose fitting blue pants. He walked with one hand on the butt of the gun holstered at his hip, and he responded to Galymedes with a simple, “Mhm,” and continued to gawk at his surroundings as he had been doing for the past five minutes.

Galymedes turned his slug-like head around to glare at the young man, as if in disappointment. “Oh? Well, Mr. Castell, how many stars do you see in the sky right now?”

Raleigh's hazel brown eyes widened and focused on the warden, as if the man had broken him free of some sort of trance. “Huh? Oh!” He tilted his head skyward, taking in the sight of the stars hanging in the night sky above them. Hegemon-5 was a planet with very little cloud cover, and had a very clean atmosphere, so the sky was clear, and bespeckled with brightly twinkling stars that illuminated the dark sheet of space of above them. While taking in the sight, Raleigh began to count, reciting the numbers under his breath.

“Uh. One… two… three-“.

“THE ANSWER IS SEVEN.” His slimy green and yellow face was close enough to Raleigh's that he could smell the acrid odor lingering from his pores. “There are seven stars above our heads right now! Count all you like, but that number won’t change.” He turned from Raleigh and started to slither across the titanium plated floor once again. On both sides, the two were flanked by armor clad prison guards toting plasma carbine rifles in the arms, the visors on their helmets obscuring from view their faces. There were four of them in total- two in front, and two behind- and each of them were close enough to the prison cells that a few of the inmates had managed to scrape their fingers across their glimmering white shoulder pads. In the center of their armed entourage stood another man, his skin and hair both varying shades of blue, wearing a hot pink full-body jumpsuit and trudging along behind Raleigh with both his hands and feet bound with metal manacles that hummed and pulsed a low red light. His head was lowered towards the ground, and he was slack jawed, with a bead of spittle lingering by a thread of saliva from his bottom lip. 

“No one weeps for these scum,” the warden continued, still gesturing with his hands as though he were beckoning the words from his mouth to different points in the area around them. “List of all the criminal you’ve brought to us today- and sedated, I see! Very nice.” He smiled, flashing rows upon rows of grimy yellow teeth. “They are the worst of the worst. Lowly garbage not fit for reentering our proud society, and yet still our system is engineered in such a way that allows these scum the opportunity to find a new purpose in life!” 

Raleigh looked upwards again. They had to be at least five hundred feet below the surface of the planet, down in the deepest depths of Hegemon-5. It was a prison planet run by a council of power sharing wardens, one known throughout the system for three things: being impossible to escape, privately funding contractors such as himself to find and deliver wanted criminals to their waiting cells, and being home to every flavor of criminal within the Hellion Cluster.

The prison itself did not share its name with the planet, however, and had only come to be associated with it as it is home to little else, given that the planet began as a gas giant that was eventually occupied and turned into a mining planet for its excess metallic hydrogen deposits, before eventually being repurposed into a prison planet over the years. As far as he was concerned, Raleigh figured that the only noticeable difference was the change in staff between the miners and prison inmates. 

While counting the stars above for what he figured was the fifth time since the warden had called attention to them (“There’s no way there’s only seven stars… this slug's been hitting the salt one too many times,” he thought), he let out a weary sigh, and allowed his mind to drift, absentmindedly following after the warden, who continued to talk as they lumbered along at a literal slug's pace.

I just want to be done here, get paid, and be done with this gloomy planet.

“I just want to be done here, get paid, and be done with this gloomy planet.”

Galymedes quickly rolled his head all the way behind him, locking eyes with Raleigh without turning around. The armed escorts armor shifted about loudly as they turned their heads to look at the young hunter.

For the next eight seconds, only the cacophony of the inmates rattling about in their cells could be heard above the relative silence that fell over the seven figures standing in the walkway. 

“Oh. Uh. Sorry,” he said with a shrug. “That was supposed to be in my head.”

Galymedes narrowed his eyes and huffed, before rolling his head back and continuing onward. “Keep pace, contractor.” His left eye stalk swiveled about to glare back at Raleigh. “That is, if you’d like to see a few extra zeroes in your pay by the end of the day.”

“Right. Rest assured, professionalism is what I’m all about.” He followed in the warden's wake.

One of the four guards shoved the butt of his rifle into the back of the handcuffed man, prodding him forward. 

“Hey!” One of the two female guards present piped up, closing the gap between herself and the other guard without hesitation. “Don’t be so forceful with the prisoner!”

“Yeah? And why shouldn’t I rough him up a little bit? Little back-biter has had it coming for the past few years, given the amount of grief that he and his goons have brought to the good folk of this sector.” He puffed out his chest and peered down at the female guard, who was only a few inches shorter than him. “You getting cold feet rookie? Sympathizing with inmates ain’t gonna earn you any friends around here.”

The tinted black glass of their visors made facial expressions difficult to discern, but for anyone willing to focus their gaze and concentrate past the reflection in the glass, and scrutinize the face behind the mask, that person could discern even the smallest of micro expressions so long as they paid attention.

It was Raleigh's job to pay attention. He’d never claim to be the greatest bounty hunter this side of the Hellion Cluster, but he was good. And in this life, being good meant you get paid well, and being paid well means you get to live beyond tomorrow to see yet another sunrise. The moment the guard had spoken up, he had turned his sights onto the two of them, sizing them up. Just as it paid to be a constantly alert and scrupulous individual, it was also imperative to his line of work that, regardless of the situation or whoever the players upon the board of whatever game he had chosen to involve himself in were and what roles they played, one is always prepared to end someone’s life in order to preserve your own.

So, he did just that. He watched.

It was dark, and he could barely see beyond his own reflection in her visor as he glanced from the peripheral of his vision, but he could see it. 

She bit her lip and shot sideways glance at the prisoner. His mark. The one he had been chasing across the system for. 

“Anyway, I heard he took you for quite a ride!” Galymedes’ sudden jovial tone pried Raleigh from his thoughtful trance yet again. “Huh? Oh, right. Yeah. You said as much in the hologram transmission you sent three days ago, but he was slippery.”

“Yes! Very much so.” He slithered along, further down the hall to the massive cell door that was at the end of the hallway, with Raleigh taking care to keep an equal distance between Galymedes and the prisoner. One was his employer, and the other his paycheck- one hinged on the other. He had learned years ago when he entered this line of work that keeping a closeye on both was just a important as having eyes in the back of your head. “We’ve had a bounty out for him for quite some time. He’d manage to evade arrest quite a few times, and he’s sent back the heads of other freelance contractors, presumably as a scare tactic.”

Raleigh nodded. One of them was an acquaintance of his. He looked back up to the sky, at that cloudless skyline five hundred feet above them, and he tried his best to conjure to mind her face. Short red hair. Green eyes. Gap teeth. 

He remembered her gap tooth smile when she was alive, which was a pleasant memory that, unfortunately, was juxtaposed with the image of her bloodied head and left eyeball hanging from her socket from where her eye had been forcibly wrenched from her skull. 

Raleigh glanced back at the prisoner again. His people were the ones responsible, and when he had confronted them about it when his ship had finally managed to catch up to theirs, they laughed.

Suddenly, he was overcome by the urge to hit the prisoner as hard as he could.

“One of his own sold him out,” Galymedes continued. He seemed to talk more to hear the sound of his voice than he did to provide any exposition for Raleigh's sake. After all, he had already been given the file. “They were little more than a-"

“They were just a ragtag band of outlaws and misfits, right?” Raleigh interrupted. “Descendants of the miners who once worked on Hegemon-5 before someone came up with the idea of using prisoners as a free source of labor rather than paying a mining company.”

“Oh!” The warden chortled. “That’s rare. We don’t get many contractors who do their research.”

Raleigh shrugged. “I do my homework. I figure I have to if I don’t want to die on the job. And, as it so happens, I don’t.”

“Hurr hurr hurr.” The warden's laugh sounded more to him like a broken vacuum cleaner than an actual laugh. “It seems that barbed tongue of yours can speak some wise words when you want to.”

“I try to be professional.” He glanced at the female guard from the corner of his eye. She had gotten back into her position in the guard formation, but had inched ever so slightly closer to the prisoner. The other guard had fallen back into his previous position without so much as a word. “You run a pretty tight ship here.”

“I have to! It’s a necessity when one is given authority over the lives of heinous criminals who would seek to abuse the freedoms afforded them by society. My men know this as well as I do.”

“They do, do they?” He glanced back at the female guard. 

She was closer to the prisoner now, directly behind him.

“You seem to have a lofty opinion of your position here.”

“And why shouldn’t I?” Galymedes snapped. “Without us, the filth behind those bars would spill out into the star system, occupying space and contributing nothing but waste and chaos to our way of life. They are animals, and they belong in a cage!” 

The guards had all been walking with their plasma rifles angled down at the ground. As Galymedes quickly spun around and slithered past Raleigh, drawing closer to the prisoner until his green and yellow hands were now pressed against the sides of the prisoner's drooling face, smashing his cheeks and laughing as he did so, the female guard shifted about. Her rifle was now angled upwards, and pointed over her shoulder.

Raleigh narrowed his eyes. Something was off.

“We’ll get you paid, throw this filth in his cell, and our galaxy will be richer for it! Hurr hurr hurr!” He turned back to Raleigh, swiveling his slug-like tail as he did, hands still gesticulating about wildly. “I mean, you saw what he did to the contractors before you! He massacred those poor working sods! He deserves to rot. He deserves to live with the knowledge that he will never see the light of day again. You said you did your homework, contractor, so you know that that hole above us, five hundred feet up, has a lid. When you leave, it will close, and this scum will never see the light of day again! He’ll eke out the rest of his days here, subsisting off of whatever his fellow inmates leave for him that they haven’t already taken for themselves, and eventually, he’ll die, never having seen the light of day ever again.”

“Sounds kind of excessive.”

Galymedes scoffed. “Oh, please. Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly gone and grown a conscience. It’s just as I told you before. Seven. Seven stars in the sky. He continued past Raleigh, all four of his arms now folded behind his back. “Exactly seven people will weep for the thousands of animals housed within these walls. I don’t see eight, so don’t bother sparing any tears.”

A sudden high pitched whine filled the hallway just then, followed by the sound of metal clanking against metal as the prisoner's handcuffs clattered to the ground. The female guard threw off her helmet, revealing a cerulean blue skinned woman's face with matching blue eyes, and neck length sea foam green hair. She quickly leveled the barrel of her plasma rifle at the guard closest to her and, as the squeal of the rifle charging up reached its peak, a bolt of red light rocketed from the barrel, and exploded into the chest of the guard. She quickly turned on her heel and fired another, and another, both of which found their Mark’s into the head and chest of the other two guards.

“W-w-what is the meaning of-" 

Galymedes words were interrupted by the high pitched squeal of the gun charging for yet another round. “No one puts my brother in a cage, you slimy sack of-"

Streaking blue light arced out from the barrel of Raleigh's gun, hitting its mark between the woman's eyes before she could finish her sentence. She stood still for a moment, then her weapon clattered to the floor, followed quickly after by her now lifeless body. Just as quickly as he had drawn and fired it, with a spin and a twirl, the pistol was back in its holster. 

Raleigh turned to face a shocked and bald-faced Galymedes. 

“You might want to spring for a casket instead of jail cell for that one.” He raised his head to the sky again, and chuckled softly. 

“Huh. Will you look at that? I see six stars now.”