“Ground Team, this is Flyby One, we’re almost to the target location, are you in position?”
“Roger that, Flyby One, we are ready. Go ahead and send them on in.” Jekar replied. She switched to the channel for the rest of the ground team. “Okay people, get ready. The flyboys will be going in any second now which means we are going! Check weapons, find your firing arcs. Remember, stun settings only, repeat, stun only. Good hunting!”
As she said this, Jekar put action to word, yanking back the thick camouflage netting which had covered the small fox hole she’d been crouched in for the last 23-standard hours that made up the planet’s night cycle. Nearly a full Terran-day sweating in a muddy pit, slapping at the native bugs which her environmental suit didn’t seem to do much to stop, waiting for the hunt to begin.
Things used to be a lot easier. Hunting on a backwater planet of primitives who’d never seen off-worlders and whose idea of advanced technology was beaten bronze. All you had to do was drop the shuttle right in the middle of one of their villages and you could stun the lot of them while they were still gaping. The hardest part was lugging all the primitives you’d bagged into the cages then back to base to grab some synthbeer and celebrate another successful hunt.
But alas, you couldn’t expect even primitives to stay blissfully naive for so long. Once the slavers had missed one or two, word started to spread among the locals and more and more they learned to scatter at the first sign of offworlders. And once the larger settlements, the ones that could be easily spotted by recon satellites, had been rounded up and cleared out, all that was left were the smaller, often nomadic camps in the most remote areas of this damned world.
“Not that the suits back in the coreworlds get that...or care.” Jekar grumbled as she readied her ray-pulse rifle. As she warned the rest of her team, she checked to make sure it was set to the appropriate stun setting for the local inhabitants. The ways things were, they couldn’t afford to lose a catch to a hot ray. “Far as the suits are concerned, we should have no trouble hitting the same quotas we were making six S-months ago, before we’d cleared half the mega-continent. Need to hit those sales figures some pencil pusher on Earth dreamed up between getting coffee and banging his secretary.”
Under the circumstances, spotting this small village was a stroke of luck. Under the thick canopy of the jungles here, it was little wonder the recon satellites had missed it, until a shuttle returning from another hunt had happened to pick it up on their thermals. Bagging a group of locals this large would go a long way towards helping them meet quota...or at least not missing it too badly. As for what they’d do next cycle...well Jekar would worry about that when the time came. With luck, she’d do well enough on this lot to wrangle a transfer. Bound to be some other backwater worlds yet unspoiled and ripe for the picking…
“Preliminary High Altitude Sweep completed. Thermals confirm the locals are still present. Not a lot of movement at the moment. Starting our low-level attack run.” The shuttle pilot commed in. Jekar grinned. There was going to be a lot of movement in the village pretty soon. Soon as the shuttles had dropped to a low enough altitude to be seen and heard, they’d be up in a flash, heading into the jungle in the opposite direction...right into the ambush and and her team had set. Five days of humping through the jungle, doing everything they could to stay unnoticed were about to pay off…
A couple minutes later, Jekar heard the high pitched whines of the shuttles’ grav-engines as they swooped in. It was soon followed by a lower rumbling, coming along the ground towards her and her squad’s position. She grinned. Just as expected. The slavers had picked their position well, situationed at the ridge of a hill, looking down a low gully winding down from the village, the exact route one would take if they were trying to leave in a hurry.
“Hold fire.” She commed the rest of the slavers. “Anyone gives our position away too soon will have their guts ripped out by me personally.” Through the trees, she could see foliage and underbrush rustling. A large group was heading towards them fast.
Without warning, a group of natives burst from the trees into the gully. The locals here were humanoid, a bit on the tall side, on average a bit more then 2 meters when fully grown, with long, slender arms and legs that gave them a grace to their movements, even as they fled through the underbrush in terror. Their smooth skin ranged from blues to turquoise to green and some small scales gave it a beautiful luster that helped make them a valuable commodity on the intergalactic slave market.
Jekar raised her rifle and sighted a trio of natives: three females, all in late adolescence. Sisters, perhaps, or maybe co-wives separated from their husbands. One of the Xeno-biolegists the company hired could tell her, but she didn’t care all that much, truth be told. She tracked them for a couple long seconds, waiting till a large enough crowd of the natives had left the cover of the underbrush and were vulnerable in the open.
“Fire!” She commed and put action to word, squeezing the trigger. The ray-pulser whined and let loose a beam of faint blue energy which arced, near instantly, across the hundred or so meters to her target: the rear most female of the trio. She stiffened, going limp instantly and wordlessly. The other two, lost in their panic, didn’t notice their companion had been lost and kept running, straight ahead for several fatal seconds. Long enough for Jekar to realign her aim to the next female and drop her with another, precise beam. The third now realized she was alone, but made the mistake of stopping and turning to look back. The third beam in as many seconds hit her in the back, sending her dropping to the ground.
Hurriedly, Jekar looked around for another target. There were about two hundred or so natives, running from their village. Half that number had been out in the clearing when the firing had started and now at least two thirds of them were down, dropped instantly by the stun beams. The rest were dropping quickly. Those further back, just on the edge, had seen what was happening, but their fellow natives, still behind them in the woods, unaware of the ambush, were still coming on, driving the unfortunate wretches out of the cover and into the fire of the slavers.
In less then a quarter of an hour, it was all over. A couple of natives, those lucky enough to have been at the back of the crowd when the ambush was sprung, had managed to slip off into the woods. Jekar sent a couple of her men to chase after them. Hunting primitives with pulse-rifles and thermal sights was hardly sporting, but if it added a couple more bodies to what they’d bagged so far, Jekar wouldn’t complain.
“We’re just about done here.” She commed the shuttles, which had adopted a holding pattern over the village after scaring them into the ambush. “Time to bring ‘em in.”
A minute later, the first of the shuttles dropped in, finding a spot to land near enough to make loading the captives convenient without risk of squashing a valuable slave. Jekar and the rest of her squad had meanwhile moved down into the gully and were busy securing their catch. She bent over one of the unconscious natives. It was a female, in late adolescence. She wore a skirt woven from some native grasses and a few beads and bangles for decoration. Jekar ripped these off, taking a moment to check these. There was a native creature that produced something not unlike pearls, which the natives sometimes used for their jewelry. They could be worth a tidy sum of credits above what she’d fetch on the market.
No luck here, though. When the girl was stripped naked, Jekar took a slave collar and snapped it shut around the alien’s neck. She locked a pair of shackles on her captive’s wrists, pulling them behind her back before activating them, locking the metal cuffs together. She hoisted the limp slave over one shoulder, not for the first time appreciating the planet’s lower gravity. Made carrying the catch to the shuttles much easier.
This one was an old, beat up cargo shuttle, though it had been modified by the slavers. Under each wing of the shuttle, where the standard cargo pods were usually slung, two large cages had been fitted. Jekar carried her burden to one of these and stepped through the barred door. Inside, half a dozen other females had already been deposited. She added her own to this growing pile.
Jekar and the other slavers repeated this process again and again. When the cages of the first shuttle were full with captives, it rose into the air, carrying its living cargo back to the slavers base. Another set down with empty cages, ready to be filled. Back at the base, the now conscious slaves would be unloaded into large pens, to wait for the arrival of the next starship which would carry them far from their homeworld to a the distant slave markets of another.