-1Big Game Hunters

The shuttles were the epitome of stripped down.

Drives, basic hull, deck plating, a cockpit. And massive control arms and tow winches. They didn’t move much faster than their fully-equipped brothers and sisters, but their hauling capacity was increased by almost twenty-five percent. And in their line of work, that was the difference between a three and four-way split.

“Hey Randy, how much further?” The pilot asked over the com.

“Well, Jake” the lead shuttle’s tracker checked his console again. “The last pass of satellite thermals said they should be around here someplace. And those reports are only three hours old.”

“Allright,” Randy Calhoun flipped a switch on his com panel. “Lucy, do you have anything?”

“Trace thermals up ahead,” Lucy Donovan reported. Her shuttle was the only one of the three equipped with thermal tracing units, making them the optimal ship to run point. “Suggest we lift up another hundred meters, the thermals will get a better read.”

“Alright, sweep up. Gunners, get ready to jump,” Randy ordered as he watched Lucy lift another hundred meters into the air. A series of acknowledgements swept over the com from the six gunners in his crew.

Randy’s business wasn’t very extensive, only these three shuttles and the thirteen people aboard them. Three pilots, three trackers, six gunners and an operator back at base. They made runs every couple of months, whenever he could get a contract. Like today.

“Hey, hey, hey! We’ve got a herd up ahead. Looks like,” Lucy paused to count. “Six bulls, fourteen heifers and a dozen calves.”

True to Lucy’s word, as Randy’s shuttle lifted over a small line of hills, he saw their quarry below them, grazing peacefully.

Their targets, Rizarian Buffalo, loomed massively over a herd of native creatures that grazed nearby.

When humans first colonized Rizara they had brought with a herd of the last remaining buffalo on Earth. The creatures had taken to the planet quickly; something in the grass made them stockier and quicker growing. The single herd of less than one hundred original buffalo grew into over a thousand within twenty years of their arrival on the planet.

But growth in numbers was not all the grass on the planet gave the buffalo. The first three generations of buffalo had been stockier. They’d weighed more with each passing year but it had been all muscle. It wasn’t until the fifth generation that anyone had noticed that the buffalo were actually growing larger with each generation that passed.

By the tenth generation on the planet, the buffalo were almost five times larger than their ancestors.

By the tenth generation they were enormous, but had finally stopped enlarging. The average bull was ten meters tall, over twenty meters long and massed over twelve thousand pounds. Heifers were shorter but usually massed the same. The largest bull on record was over fifteen meters tall and had massed over ten tons.

From the original one hundred buffalo that had started on Rizara, over three hundred years earlier, there were over ten thousand. It had been fortunate that the planet was almost entirely grasslands and was far enough out of the way to be a mere colony.

Massive concrete walls kept the buffalo in their habitat and away from the farms and towns. A stampede of a dozen, ten ton animals could cause havoc for mere humans.

And that was how the business of buying and hunting buffalo had started. Scientists had estimated that the population of buffalo had reached its optimal point. Very many more and the food supplies would be exhausted. And so the first licenses to hunt, kill and process buffalo had been granted.

There wasn’t a massive market for the beasts; most of the towns could last an entire year on the meat from a single bull, but there was enough of one to keep at least a dozen small groups in business year round.

The meat from a ten ton bull could net a team three hundred thousand credits. The furs and ivory sold for more: worth another three hundred thousand credits to passing luxury goods traders.

Most of the teams took a portion of their payments in meats and furs, the tundra environment that spread across most of the surface of Rizara left much to be desired in the way of warmth and food supplies.

Randy’s team liked their payments in cold, hard cash.

“All right people, look alive. Tom, mark up the biggest bull. Paul, load up killers, everyone else is on crowd control.” His gunners answered with grunts while Lucy’s tracker laser tagged the biggest of the animals below. Their contract only called for one bull, the rest though would need to be controlled to prevent a stampede.

“Target tagged,” Tom Yancy reported as the three shuttles started circling around the herd.

“It’s hunting time, boys and girls. Gunners, go!”

When the buffalos had started growing, the people of Rizara had put in a request to Earth for something to help control them.

The answer had been one-generation old battle armor suits. They were capable of surviving a stampede and could lift thousands of pounds individually. The suits were sold to the planetary government at cost, who then turned around and sold them to companies that applied for hunting licenses. The weapons the hunters used were available through normal means, standard rail guns that could be either loaded with lethal slugs, or dispersal stun nets for non-lethal containment.

Most bulls only needed four or five suits to move, but an extra was always welcome.

The gunners dropped from their shuttles, tracking their target as they fell from three hundred meters up. They tucked and rolled as the ground came up to meet them, ending in a crouching position, facing in at the bull that had been marked.

The massive beasts stopped grazing and looked at the silver-clad hunters that had come for them. And the real hunt began.

Just a short one-shot that wandered along into my head the other day.