“All this hiding is only gonna work for so long, and it’s not workin’ so good already, considering Bighands Ben find us easy enough, a little too easy for my comfort...” I say to Reverend Jo. “We needs to get somewhere we can hunker down and be safe for a minute, this will hopefully give the bounty hunters time enough to lose interest the fat bounty on my head, because having the law-dogs and bounty hunters on us is just too goddamn hot, we got no room to breathe or nothin’ neither.”
Jo looks up at me from whatever inner thought processes they was doing, with no expression on their pretty looking human female face, “the diocese in Thunderbird might offer me shelter, but it’s not like I can simply make a new identity and a new body and start a new existence somewhere because all Sentients are highly regulated and registered. I have already broken about a half-dozen laws by hiding out. If the Sentients Comity has not already sent out Hunter-Seekers, they soon will, and I doubt even your odds defying streak will save us from that; as you know, I was once one of them, a long time ago, before I joined the clergy… in another life.”
“Well shit on a shingle! That’s exactly what we don’t need right now. Troopers, bounty hunters and Hunter-Seekers all barreling down on our sorry asses. But if’in truth be told, I can’t say I know too much about them Hunter-Seekers, I’ve only heard the stories and legends and such. Also, I didn’t know they had any stationed in this part of the system here though, won’t they have to come all the way from Hope or something?”
Jo replies back to me, like they are giving a lecture in a schoolhouse, “I’m not sure if there are any in this vicinity, but they will come by military transport so it will only take them a week to get here, they will not be coming by standard, slower civilian transport. Only law-enforcement and the military have access to their whereabouts at any given time when they are on a mission. And even then, that is only roughly where they are, for security reasons, any rogue Sentient is likely to monitor or possibly breach secure networks.”
I waitt a few moments to respond because I gets an idea, “Hmm, okay, here’s how I figure it though; this is a good thing if the Hunter-Seekers are involved. They will give you some kinda special, Sentient military tribunal or something such, and they will certainly give a more fair shake over the local system and their crooked legal system, you think?”
“Your thinking processes seem to be sound. So what shall we do, Black Crow?”
“We just gotta duck and dodge everyone but the Hunter-Seekers, it’s best if they find you first, right?”
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“Yes, their jurisdiction supersedes all local authorities.But there is a catch.”
“Yeah, there always is, what is it, Padre?”
“We will have to make it clear that I wish to surrender, because if they calculate that there is even a fraction of a percent of a chance that I have truly become a rogue Sentient, they will treat that threat as an absolute, and likely destroy me with a particle cannon or missile strike from orbit, if they find my location. And to be clear, this constitutes a military-level threat that considers casualties and collateral damage acceptable. So, using you or even a regular law-abiding citizen, or even a child, or even a whole town as a human-shield will not stop them from getting an executive-order to do an orbital strike. They will likely be coming via the fleet flagship, the ‘SS Delta Icon’ refit. She is 120,000 tons of calamity; level 10 Hyper Photonic capability, four 25,000 megawatt particle weapons, twin 250,000 megawatt Fusion reactors, ten fuel air bombs with a 1-kiloton yield, twentyfive 10-megaton nuclear warhead cluster bombs, 100 of the latest generation of tactical smart missiles, twenty Gen26 interceptor starfighters, 100 Elite Shock Troopers with a 1200 man complement. I know the Sentient that designed her.” Says Jo as a matter-of-factually.
“So you’re saying if we hid in Browntown?” I ask reluctantly because I’m not sure if I wanna hear the answer.
“Tragically, they would definitely destroy it.”
“What about Bigville?”
After a moment of pondering, Jo responds, “maybe.”
“Well, shit, what about the capital city, Thunderbird?”
“No, there are millions of civilians and hundreds of innocent, law-abiding Sentients that reside there; so, they would likely send in a military strike-team, probably half of the Elite Shock Troopers on board with one, two or possibly three Hunter-Seekers, and aerial-support via a squad of starfighters with a high degree of collateral damage and casualties acceptable.”
So, I takes a moment to think about this and let out a long sigh, “Okay then, we make for Thunderbird, that’s a long way though, and we can’t use regular planetary transports. We can only suppress our identifiers and signatures so much, some bounty hunters are gonna catch wind of us, likely. This is probably gonna be a hard ride and I can’t guarantee you that ain’t nobody gettin’ killed along the way.” I can clearly see Reverend Jo doesn’t like that last part, but there’s nothing for it.
After I gather up our supplies and I take the pistol and that assault carbine of Bighands Ben and retrofit a repair on it; now, it won’t have the range it used to but it'll be more like a close-range scatter-gun, I figures. “We gotta pass Bigville on our way, but I’m going to swing kinda wide around it, see, hopefully pass-on-by unnoticed and such...”
“May the Lord guide us and be our shepherd,” Jo says to me, or maybe to the sky, I’m not really sure which, they might-could be talkin’ to both.
It’s still in the middle of the damn night as we high-tail it on outta there, across the arid red deserts of Blasted Lands.