The gun twitched in his hands. "Don't move, jackass."

Great, just fucking great. The first living Human I'd come across after spending hours in this shithole had to be a Year 7, one who was holding a gun up to my face no less. Like, sure, our species weren't exactly known to be looking out for each other and that. But I at least expected some decent first impressions.

This was definitely going to be a mugging, I was sure of it. It might as well have been with a kid instead any of the armed thugs who were literally chasing me across town like ten seconds ago. It wasn't even like I had anything of value on me, anyway. Except the American Express card. Yeah, I could do without that, couldn't I?

"Hey, listen. I've got a-"

The boy interrupted me. "Shut up." he gestured his gun to the open back door. "Move."

Worth a try. I complied, and entered the junk-filled yard, with the barrel of the gun gently pushing my back from behind. I stepped over the broken fence and into the labyrinth of alleyways ahead of us.

"What's this about, mate?" I asked, sighing as we moved through the alleyways. Surprisingly, the boy didn't tell me to shut up immediately. Maybe he could bring up the credit card again. "Look, I've got an old credit card on me. Worth a few thousand DCs. Quite a hefty sum, don't you think?" That was if digital-credits had any value out here.

"You are the hefty sum," the kid said. That sounded better in his head, didn't it?

"You what?"

He stuttered for a second. "I mean you've got a bounty on your head."

Oh great, another nutter out to hunt me. Hey, at least they spoke English this time. I had to find a way out of this situation. Should I have played clueless? Yeah, I could have played clueless. "I don't know what you're on about. You've probably got the wrong guy, mate." I maybe could've gone without the 'probably', but that was decently convincing, right?

"Don't try weaselling your way out of this."

Keep up the act!

"I'm serious!"

"The description said 'Human male, brown-skin, massive beard, British accent, early thirties."

No name then, huh?

"Oh come on, this is racial profiling! And I'm twenty-four!"

"Well, I don't see anybody else matching it in this town. Besides, those guys back there can't've been chasing you for nothing."

"Those lot just had one too many," I said, cringing at my lies. "It was just a bar scrap. You know how the Liquorice can be!"

"Liquorice?" The boy repressed a smirk.

Fuck! "Laci- Loqer- no wait... what are they called again?"

"Loreqi. They didn't seem drunk to me."

"Well, you'd be very surprised what people can get up to when they're pissed on moonshine. Look, I'm just a... contractor from Blackliver."

A bit of offence sprung into his voice, "I'm from Blackliver."

"No the other one."

"The massive strip club?"

"No, the other other one. Point is, you got the wrong guy." Jesus Christ, my argument was in shambles. I had to find something else. Hold on, the name! "Um... I- oh, did the description say anything about my name?"

The boy paused for a second. "Just called you the 'Feral'."

The Feral? Eh, I'm pretty sure the 'Zodiac Pisser' would've made more sense. No, that was terrible. It didn't matter, I was now out of ideas.

We made our way to some sort of combat modified jeep, again Human made. Imprinted with the hundred-starred flag of the United States on the back door. I wanted to say it was former military, but the whole vehicle clearly had a massive revamp so it could've just been a decoration. The boy opened the door, gesturing me to get inside.

I complied again, and the second I stepped inside I basked in the glory of the air conditioner. The barrel of the gun pressed on me again, and I sat at the far end of the cramped vehicle.

"Ryan, who the hell is this?!" I looked to the driver's seat, witnessing a massive humanoid avian, with her large, feathered head pressed into the headliner. It wasn't exactly anything I hadn't seen before, I knew this race quite well, everyone in Human space did - this was an Arvan, a Pyerin ethnicity I guessed. I don't know their ethnicities that well. "Where's the shopping?!"

"I've got ourselves a bounty," the boy, now known as Ryan, stated proudly.

"I haven't got a bounty on me," Nolan argued.

"I already know you're speaking bullcrap, you're not gonna gain anything from continuing."

The Arvan looked at the weirdo sitting in the backseat, noticed the subtle 'I'm so fucked' expression on my face, and facepalmed. "Why do you keep doing this? You can't keep pulling stunts like this!"

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

A stunt? Yeah, right.

"Eyha, he's worth-"

"I really don't care, Ryan. You could've gotten yourself killed!"

Gotten himself killed? The boy was tasked with shopping in a town dubbed the 'biggest backwater' by a Comfort-Bot on his own. And she was worried about him taking the muppet in their backseat hostage?

I wasn't the only one thinking this, it was already clear it got into Ryan's mind too. "But-"

"But nothing. You don't get to call the shots around here." The Arvan, Eyha, turned to me. "I'm really sorry about him."

"Um... it's fine, I guess?" I said. This was a joke right? Was I, some bloke who wrote magazine articles for a living, with a massive bounty on his head, going to get off the hook because of the incoherent logic and weird drama of the kid's bird mum? Christ, talk about a deus ex machina. "Does this mean I can leave now?"

"Yeah, sure," she said.

"What the hell, Eyha?! You're throwing away five-hundred grand here!" Ryan cried, just as I opened the car door, already scot-free.

Before the Arvan could answer, the sound of a dent impacted the car's window. Eyha looked to the window on her left, it was a gunshot. No doubt, it was the guys from the bar. Son of a bitch, they really had firearms on them? Thankfully, the glass was bulletproof, otherwise she'd have probably been dead by now. Okay, maybe Eyha had a point about that whole 'getting yourself killed' thing.

"Ryan, what the hell did you do?" The Arvan asked calmly, right on the brink of throwing a fit.

He immediately pointed at me. "All him."

"Oh, you wiry cu-" I refrained from the insult as a couple more bullets dented the windows. "Hi, Eyha was it? You mind getting us the hell out of here?!"

"First of all, you're grounded, Ryan."

"Oh come on!"

Eyha looked at me again, clearly convinced by the bounty on my head. "You? We'll get Bryce to sort you out." Right after that, she stomped right onto the gas, hauling the jeep right through the ribcage and out of the town.

I summarised just about everything to the two, from the corpse in the desert to the... incident in the bar. First tried whitewashing bits of it hoping to get out of this whole bounty situation. But after all the questions and all the stammering, I just spilled everything else. All except the tattoo on my belly, the old guy's reaction in the bar wasn't something I wanted to repeat, even with a gun still held up in my face.

"That has got to be the biggest pile of bullcrap I've ever heard," Ryan remarked.

I mean he did have a point, summarising the whole thing just sounded like someone half-arsed a space opera at two in the morning.

"That's what happened!" I said.

"You expect us to believe you don't remember anything at all?"

"Mate, even if I was still this whole 'Feral' thing, I wouldn't be cooped here in the jeep with you, would I?"

"You killed a guy in a bar."

"What, you think I'm proud of that?"

"And in the desert apparently."

"That was self-defence!"

"Okay then, maybe the whole nickname was just your style."

"It would've been my style because I was drunk the whole time, you muppet." Jesus Christ, he wasn't going to run out of money-hungry excuses any time soon.

"Can we not throw insults around in the car please?" Eyha said. "So, you can't remember anything? Like at all."

"Just bits. Everything else is... foggy."

"All right? What's the last thing you remember? Before you 'killed' that guy, I mean."

Hopefully she was able to believe me, unlike the little prick next to me. "It was a party... in London." Again, the word 'years' itched on the tip of my tongue. Party. Years. Oh for God's sake, how didn't I think of this earlier? "It was a New Years Party."

"Who still does New Years Parties?" I heard Ryan mutter.

"And how long ago was this?" Eyha said.

"I don't— what year is it?" I asked.

"Twenty-three-oh-two."

Christ, new century already?

"You're talking about the London on Talon IV, right?" Ryan questioned.

"No, I mean massive clock, overpriced apartments London."

"The one on Earth?" The Arvan questioned, clearly surprised.

"Yeah?" It seemed nobody could think of an original name for a place anymore, not Earth, not a thousand light-years away. I mean to be fair, even I couldn't think up a fake planet name. I was already beaten by Ryan's home... something, and a strip club apparently.

"Hold up, you've been drunk for fifteen years?" Ryan said, still calling bullshit.

Fifteen years? There was no bloody way I was drunk for that long. "Where'd you pull that number from?"

Before anyone could answer, the squeaky melody of a phone ringed from the front. Eyha picked out a mobile from her side, it was pretty old fashioned - didn't have a holo-screen or anything, just physical buttons and a really tiny screen, something that belonged in a museum.

She answered it, "AT-6."

It was probably their captain, Bryce I think his name was. I managed to overhear a bit of chatter, it was an English guy on the other end.

'AT-6, status report,' I could overhear.

Eyha rolled her eyes, deciding to respond casually, "Listen, Dave." Never mind, it wasn't their boss. "Some things have popped up. We don't have the shopping."

'Explain?.'

"So, uh, Ryan claims he got a bounty."

'How much?' He sighed.

"Ryan, how much did you say his bounty was again?"

"Five-hundred grand."

"Yeah, five-hundred grand according to him," she said to Dave.

All professionalism in his voice was suddenly tossed out the window. 'You serious? Ryan? Hold on, what's the bounty's name?'

The Arvan looked at me, holding her feathered hand over the speaker. "Sorry, we didn't really catch your name."

"It's Nolan," I said, ultimately accepting the fact I was fucked. "Kumar. Nolan Kumar."

"You don't look like a Nolan," Ryan said.

"Nor do I look like a fe-" I shut my mouth the second I glanced in the rear view mirror, noticing my mess of a face; gunk, a scar or two, they weren't even messing about the beard. "Never mind."

'Nothing's come up, I'm afraid.'

Eyha spoke again. "Okay? Try Feral. Feh-ral."

'I know how to spell feral, Eyha. I'm an AI.'

Really? He seemed a bit slow for one.

There was a quick silence. 'Are you sure this is the same person? The one I'm guessing's just sitting in your back seat?'

"What exactly does it say?"

There was more silence this time.

'Oh God, something's come up at the spaceport, I'm afraid. I'll notify the captain, we'll sort out what to do with him when you arrive.'

Bryce hung up. Eyha put the phone down.

"So..." I said. "Who exactly are you people?"

"We work on this ship called the Centaurus. Officially, it's this shipping and scavenging company," Eyha stated. "We take up contracts all throughout the frontier."

"I'm guessing, what, you just do bounty hunting for your Sunday job?"

Eyha snorted. That was a snort, right? I’ve lived with Arvans all my life, and I still couldn’t tell things like this. "Sunday job. I'm stealing that. But yeah, we do quite a lot of mercenary work."

"Everyone else does mercenary work," Ryan whined. "We just run their damn errands."

"Would you rather be cleaning the Centaurus’ toilets?"

Ryan went silent.

"I didn't think so."

"So... what's going to happen to me?" I asked, understandably worried.

"That's honestly up to Bryce. He'll either let you off or we get a higher pay check."

That wasn't helping anyone. "What do you think's going to happen to me?"

Eyha simply shrugged. "I didn't wake up this morning expecting some scruffy British amnesiac shoved into the back of my car. So really I don't know why you're asking me."

And then I went silent. Awaiting the fuckening ahead of me.