Artemis the hunter

Space Drifters

       Artemis's ship was once an infamous war machine that brought pain and suffering to whatever system it happen to come across in. Now it was just a glorified living space, it's intimidating exterior was perfectly cloak avoiding all forms of detection least by direct contact. It was originally made for a crew of 5 people and had a shared locker and shower room, which would have been fine if the ships cloaking system ate up all of the ships power and only allowed the both of them a space of 20 minutes to take a shower. This obviously made the following conversation a hundred times more awkward.

     "You know that the federation is hunting you down," Max said trying to avoid eye contact, an unspoken rule of shower rooms.

     Artemis couldn't help but laugh at the use of words, it was him that hunted the federation's corrupted and cruel leaders. How the times change. "The federation has searched for the past 3 decades, let them keep running at their tails blindly."

     "But they found you."

     "Because I let them." 

     The water began turning cold, then freezing. Artemis grabbed his towel and dried himself off, putting on a casual t-shirt, and a pair of shorts then headed for the control room. Colonel Max stayed, he looked up at the shower head, he close his eyes and stayed there as long as his body would allow him to.

     The control room was a mess of exposed wires and rusting panels but it was functional. Artemis sat on the commanders chair and started to mess with it. He had taught himself how to do most things, and fixing a broken navigator was one of them. Colonel Max's curses echoing trough the ship made him laugh, he had tried that too albeit he lasted much longer it was still humorous. 

     After a few hours and a sailor's worth of cursing he managed to fix it. He stood up in front of the control panel, he looked over at the screen and the mess of exposed wires. He had managed to hook up the mainframe of the ship to his personal computer, when it came to his life outside of hunting he was lazy to the point of genius. After fixing and setting everything up he headed to sleep, but not before inputting a new destination for the ship to drift to.

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I used to spend hours researching everything about my prey, to a point that I'll will get to know them better than they know themselves. I've met with hundreds of moral monsters and ended them, mourning the person they were before this universe corrupted them. I eventually stopped, it got tedious and made my job painfully slow and more painful than it ought to be. To this day I think back to it and wonder if I had made the right choice, for what monster sacrifices morality for efficiency.

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