STILL LOOKING FOR HARRY HOPI
Sandstrom sighed as he watched the Bushwacker's frame shudder and collapse on the steep snow covered slope and become instantly shrouded in a thick mixture of smoke and steam as the red-hot wreckage hit the snow.
Dale had followed Harry Hopi up into the Alpine peaks after tracking him to three different planets. 6 months ago Harry had gotten paid out by his underwriters on Twycross after his Bushwacker had been "lost" to the Diabolis on that hot desert planet. His claim had stated that enormous never-ending dust storm that roamed Twycross had caught his patrol lance unexpectedly and buried the bushwacker so deep that it was irretrievable. The smoking ruins of the Bushwacker here said elsewise, someone who had helped Hopi secretly get the Bushy off-planet back on Twycross had talked... someone always talks.
As soon as word got to the Underwriters, they slapped a 350k c-bill bounty on Harry's head, along with +10% market price for whatever parts were recoverable of the Bushy when he was brought in.
To their credit and doom, Harry's lance refused to give him up... and they all paid the price to the last man. Unfortunate... but now it was going to be a pretty great day for salvage as well as bounties Sandstrom thought later in the day as he dismounted the Darkdeath and gingerly made his way across the re-freezing snow and ice, waving away the smell burnt Ferro and hyrdal fluids.
As the smoke cleared, Dale used a broken armor plate to dig out around the cockpit to find the yellow and black bordered ventral escape panel already discharged out onto the ice, leaving the cockpit looking like a grinning one-eye hound's head. Sandstrom cursed as he surveyed the empty cockpit and began calling out to the rest of the lance to search for Hopi... knowing in his heart that he had waited too long in his warm mech, and now the crafty pilot had given him the slip and could be dug-in and hiding anywhere in this Alpine wilderness by now.
Dale rubs his eyes in the white glare and shivered in the brutal cold... "Damn you Hopi, I hope you bloody freeze to death..."
Edited by Dale Sandstrom, 29 April 2021 - 12:20 AM.