The Bounty

The saloon door hissed shut, trapping Reese inside with the dust. It swirled in the red neon, a familiar haze that tasted of synth-ale and recycled oxygen. Fifteen years on the frontier, and the taste was always the same. Her boots scraped the metal floor as her gaze swept the room. Ore-dusted miners from the belt colonies hunched over their drinks, their whispers a low hum of rumor. Two Trinity Defense security types in the corner watched the room with dead eyes, their silence a threat. A drifter nursed a cheap drink, his vacant stare a dead end. Rosie’s was a bank of secrets, and Reese was here for a withdrawal.

She’d taken three steps toward her usual booth when the drunk stumbled into her path.

He was large, reeking of something that might have been synth-ale or industrial solvent. His heavy hand dropped onto her shoulder, gripping tight enough to bruise.

Reese didn’t have the energy for a brawl. The phantom shudder of her failing thruster was already vibrating in her jaw. Instead of throwing a punch, her free hand snapped up, her fingers finding the exposed nerve cluster at the joint of his hazard suit. She pinched, hard.

The man gasped, his grip instantly going slack as his knees buckled. Reese didn’t wait for him to hit the floor. She just stepped around his dropping bulk and kept walking.

“Red.” Rosie’s voice cut through the bar noise, flat and unimpressed. “You gonna pay for the dent in my floor?”

“He’s not that heavy.” Reese slid into her booth, the worn synth-leather creaking under her weight. From here she could see the door, the bar, and the emergency exit behind the bathrooms.

Rosie snorted. The saloon’s owner was somewhere past sixty, her gray hair pulled back in a severe knot, her hands scarred from decades of breaking up fights and fixing stills. She’d been on Meridian’s Edge longer than most of the settlement had been standing. “Usual?”

“Yeah.”

The synth-ale arrived a minute later, condensation already beading on the scratched plasti-glass. Reese wrapped her fingers around it without drinking. The surface threw her reflection back in pieces—silver at her temples that had no business being there yet, the scar above her collar that she kept meaning to get lasered off and never did. She’d checked her ID last month to confirm she was thirty-two. Thirty-two, and already she couldn’t quite trust what she saw.

She was here for information. Malone had promised a tip—a ten-minute head start on a high-tier bounty before it hit the public network. But Malone wasn’t here yet, and Reese had learned patience the hard way.

Every credit mattered. The math was a constant hum beneath her thoughts, steady as the failing oxygen scrubber’s whine. She could almost feel the phantom-shudder of the starboard thruster, a vibration that promised a catastrophic failure she couldn’t afford to fix. The numbers scrolled behind her eyes, red and unforgiving, a ledger of late payments to the crew and docking fees she couldn’t cover. It was why she was here.

She took a sip of the ale. Bitter. Lukewarm. Predictable.

Morgan would have seen the trap in it immediately. He’d have made a dry joke, one that cut straight to the truth of the matter and made her roll her eyes. He’d been dead fourteen years, but she could still hear exactly what he’d say right now, in his exact voice, with his exact timing. She dug her thumb into her palm, chasing the memory away.

The saloon hummed around her. Someone’s wrist display chirped. A miner laughed too loud at something his companion said. The neon flickered, steadied, flickered again. Reese catalogued it all without conscious thought, the same way she catalogued exits and potential threats and the weight of the plasma pistol holstered beneath her jacket.

Her comms unit pinged. A localized burst, heavily encrypted. Malone.

She pulled it from her belt, the small holographic display flickering to life above her palm. A bounty notification. High priority. She scanned the header, and her hand stilled.

DR. MIRA VOSS. GENETIC RESEARCHER. WANTED BY HELIOS BIOTECH. FIFTY THOUSAND CREDITS.

Fifty thousand.

Reese read the number twice. Bounties on the frontier usually ran five, maybe ten thousand for a high-value target. Fifty was the kind of money that made people disappear. The kind of money that could replace the oxygen scrubber, fix the thruster, and keep the crew paid for a year. It was the kind of money that could solve every problem she had. She’d seen what happened to the people who took jobs like this—most of them didn’t live to spend it.

She opened the full briefing packet. The woman’s face materialized in the display: dark hair, intelligent eyes, the kind of expression that suggested she was thinking three moves ahead of whoever was looking at her. The file was thin. All Reese could see were the basics: a geneticist, a breach of contract, a flight from corporate custody.

The corporation wanted her alive and unharmed. That was the catch. On the frontier, corporate retrieval usually just required an intact neural stack—you could bring the body back in a freezer and let the techs extract the data. Specifying ‘alive and breathing’ meant Voss was either a hostage, a living key, or carrying something in her bloodstream that spoiled if her heart stopped.

Reese’s jaw tightened. She read the file again.

A glass clinked against the table.

She looked up. Rosie stood beside the booth, her expression unreadable. She’d set a small, perfectly peeled citrus wedge on the rim of Reese’s glass. The fruit was fresh, or as fresh as anything got on the frontier. Real citrus, not synth. Expensive. A small luxury in a world that didn’t offer many.

Reese didn’t say thank you. Neither of them needed that. She gave a slight nod, the kind that passed for affection between people who’d learned not to expect it.

Rosie nodded back. “Don’t stay too late. You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“The one you get when a job’s about to go sideways and you’re going anyway.” Rosie walked away before Reese could answer.

Reese picked up the citrus wedge. The peel was perfect, no pith, the flesh glistening under the neon. She bit into it, the sharp sweetness cutting through the bitter aftertaste of the synth-ale. For a moment, the saloon felt less like a way station on the edge of nowhere and more like a place where someone noticed if you lived or died.

She finished the drink. The bounty file glowed on her comms unit, the woman’s face still visible in the holographic display. Dr. Mira Voss. Fifty thousand credits. A ship that needed repairs. A crew that needed pay. A future that needed to be secured.

Reese stood up. She transferred the bounty details to Jax’s secure channel with a flick of her wrist, the data packet compressing and sending in the space of a heartbeat. He’d have questions—about HELIOS, about the ‘alive and unharmed’ clause. But he’d also understand the math.

She headed for the door, her boots steady on the metal grating. The drunk was still on the floor, now snoring. The miners were still laughing. The neon couldn’t follow her into the dark.

The door hissed open. The dust-choked air of Meridian’s Edge hit her face, hot and dry and familiar. She stepped out into the night, the bounty details already burning a hole in her comms unit, and let the door swing shut behind her.