Jajaqin looked around. The forest was absolutely silent.
The hunting party was spread out, keeping in touch by translators and locators so they weren't likely to fire on each other, but still. A hunt was always a risk. The hunting implements deployed today were supposed to be nonlethal, but hunting is hunting. People get hurt. It happened.
Some hunts against particularly dangerous prey, they used live ammunition and the buy-in was far higher, safety not guaranteed but the rewards could be tremendous. They never hunted anything that wouldn't be eaten, and of course the most dangerous food was the most highly prized, so the hunters' greater risk-adjusted share was of a naturally larger total. A skilled hunter could attend an eight or two of hunts and retire for the rest of its life, comfortably wealthy and revered as a celebrity.
Or it could wind up dead. It happened.
This hunt was not with live ammunition, however. This hunt introduced prey that had never before entered the consciousness of the greater community, and it wasn't a food animal. Of all things, this hunt was...a demonstration? Or an exercise. He hadn't made up his mind exactly how to view it.
The creature called itself human. In Jajaqin's own language the sound was gibberish; in a couple of other hunters' languages the sound was quite rude and in another one yet, a subtly erotic exclamation of pleasure. Privately Jajaqin guessed that the rude translation was related to the pleasure translation, but he was only moderately curious about languages, not skilled enough to actually pursue the idea. No, his pursuit was far more visceral.
Jajaqin knew of the promoter Booj by reputation since they moved in similar circles, and had wondered if the human Booj brought to the public consciousness was fully sapient. Watching it in the news feeds, Jajaqin had concluded that it indeed was. So he had been astonished when Booj had announced that the human had offered itself to be the target of a hunt.
The idea of a sapient prey was...decadently fascinating. Even the smartest prey were never more than animals. They didn't plan; they fled or attacked. Always Jajaqin's skills in hunting were about contending with those two circumstances. How did you hunt something that might do something different? And how different could it be?
The human had been the startling contestant in a number of combat sport bouts, beginning with a few bar fight-level contests consisting of rough-and-ready shiphands in dockside bars, to a few increasingly strenuous context matches that drew large numbers of viewers from across the entire system. Booj's reputation as a promoter had grown exponentially and so far, the human had proven unbeatable.
He would have to stop using the word human in his mind. It was making him vaguely aroused, linguistic indifference notwithstanding. Jajaqin had entered the bid lottery early, certain he would never luck out on a chance at the bidding round as the lottery round was a recordbreaking size, but his name had come up and he had entered his top bid immediately. A few heartbeats later, the system announced that all bids had been evaluated. His own and seven other names were announced.
He didn't wonder how the system had evaluated the bidders. Obviously highest bidders got first consideration, but the system was well known for its process. Jajaqin could have entered an empty bid and been on the short list of contenders; he knew he was a popular contestant with skill, integrity and just enough style to be a fun watch. Even offering no money up front, Jajaqin would draw in the paying viewers and be a sure moneymaker.
The silence of the forest was unnerving. Usually that meant that there was not a large predator nearby, but a swarm of smaller, nimbler ones that could easily chase down the usual sources of noise. Little brachiators would usually stay close and fuss at Jajaqin for straying too close to their nests. This quiet, however, was just eerie.
Jajaqin fired up the info screen of his locator, looking up more details on the human. Some general descriptions of the species - singularly unappealing to look at, and some of the arousal around the word went away - though the tuft of cilia around the topmost appendage was at least interesting to look at. He flipped through entries to examine notes on this specific human.
"Terran Human Gina Rassmussen," the entry read. It went on to specify that the creature was female, originally from a far distant solar system and only here by an accidental meeting, an orbital miner by trade - interesting, a miner who worked alone. That spoke to her skills and resilience, mining was not for the weak or stupid, and gamely exploring far from home suggested she was uncommonly fearless. Height and width, not big at all. Body mass...damn. That much?
That much. Human Gina weighed at least as much as Jajaqin himself, while being only about one-fourth his volume. Ah, there was why. Her planet of origin was a rocky world with...damn again. She was from a very heavy gravity planet. Where the human came from, the surface gravity would squash him flat. And she stood erect under it. Ah, there it was: bones. Muscle. Fascinating. If rendered for her meat, the human GinaRassumussen - no, wait. He remembered this from the news vids. "Just 'Gina' is fine." Human Gina represented a mass of meat that would feed him for nearly two turns, and that would be if he was eating only meat. He couldn't do that in any case, his digestion got bad if he didn't have a salad once in a while.
Hmm. Nonlethal hunt, though. I wonder what human tastes like.
Never mind. Don't eat sapients. Don't hunt...well, okay, this time we do. Probably too tough to eat anyway. You'd die of starvation, still chewing the first mouthful.
A brachiator squeaked from the massive tree branch directly above his head, startling him badly. He jerked and looked up.
Human Gina was right there.
End of Part 1
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