“Attention: Students in Sector A-2, report to the Main Deck. I repeat, students in Sector A-2, report to the Main Deck. This is not an emergency. Repeating, this is not an emergency.”

I woke up to the sound of our captain, Rick, speaking over the intercom. I rolled over in my bed, looking over at the clock with tired eyes. 10:45am, GGT. I got out of bed, clumsily. Our ship, the Aurora 7800, had been traveling for 9 weeks across the T24WB80 Galaxy. The mission was simple, nothing major. “Think of it as a school field trip” they said. My classmates, like myself, were all in-training Bounty Hunters. Whenever I tell someone I’m training to be a Bounty Hunter, they assume I’m going to hunt leaders of a pirate armada or capture massive drug dealers. That’s not what I do. At least, not at the moment. At this point in my career, I simply help the big guys catch the bad guys. That’s as easily as I can put it.

My name is Dexter L. Geminus, 19 years old. My messy, black hair was one of my main features back then. I never did anything to my hair. However I woke up was how I would look for the rest of the day. I originate from the planet Nextrosis, and so did the rest of my class.

I opened my cell door, and stepped into the hallway. Long pipes stretched across the walls and ceiling. The floor I stood on was a metal grating. Below, through the flooring, I could see one of the other students walking down the hallway from their cell.

We all met in the Main Deck. Our captain, Rick Lustrous, stood there, near the entrance gate. “Wake up, Larva!” he said. We all responded, half asleep. “You all better get ready, because today is an important day!” He shouted. “In exactly,” he paused to check his watch, “six hours, GGT, we land on that planet out there. Planet XYXSYS.” We all looked at him, some of us smiled in excitement, some of us were still yawning. I think I remember asking him a question about the plan, but I forget the details.

“I want you all to go eat some breakfast, get your suits on, and prepare yourselves for the day ahead. Dismissed.” Rick walked away, down another one of the hundreds of hallways in that mechanical mess of a ship.

I remember, about an hour later, I found the cafeteria. I never really kept track of where it was on the ship, I just kind of wandered until I found it or somebody led me to it. I got some food, you know, the usual. Ate, drank some milk, since that’s the only drink we have access to on the ship, and then I got dressed. The suits were locked up in some storage room in the eastern wing of the ship. There were about 20 suits, I’m guessing. 18 for the students, and 1 for our captain. They were low-grade suits, too. Really old fashioned. I remember thinking that the old, clunky suits fit the design of the ship, though.

“You excited?” a voiced asked me from behind. It was Tom, one of my classmates. “I guess,” I said, sticking my leg through one of the suit’s leg-holes. “I can’t wait to tell my parents about this once we get back home. They always doubted me, saying I couldn’t be a bounty hunter, you know?”

I nodded at Tom before I walked out of the room, leaving him and some others to finished getting dressed.

I was the last one to arrive at the main gate. Our ship had landed just a few minutes ago, and we were ready to step onto XYXSYS’s soil. From the window, the planet looked bare. It was a dark, dull, blue-ish purple. Just that, nothing else. No matter where you looked all you could see was dry ground.

“Now,” our captain started to speak. We all faced him, stood up straight, not looking him in the eye. “I’ll repeat our mission for you Larva again, just so we’re clear. We have landed on planet XYXSYS to recover something. Can any one of you tell me what it is we are seeking here?”

I think it was Tom who responded. “We are here to retrieve the corpse of a TXZ-XYXSYS, sir!”

The TXZ-XYXSYS are the only known species to inhabit that planet. They’re thin, ugly looking things. I had never seen one at that time, though. Our captain had described them as, “Long, fast, cunning little things.” He was mostly right. Not all of them are little, at least not the ones I saw.

“Correct! What is your name, child?” Rick asked Tom. Our captain always used to forget our names. “Thomas Patterson, sir! 15 years old!”

After that, we marched across the alien planet for a couple of hours, not complaining, not talking, not even stopping. Doing so would’ve gotten us severely punished or fired from our positions as Rick Lustrous’ underlings.

Finally, though, probably six or seven hours later, we found one. It was small, probably newly born. It was eating on the carcass of another one of its kind.

“Sir,” A girl whispered. It was either Jessy or Sam, I can’t recall. “I suggest we scare off the little one and take the carcass back as our retrieval.” Rick scrunched his nose and wrinkled his forehead.

“Unacceptable. The Bureau wants a freshly killed body, and it has to be older than five months. These two look like they’re only a couple weeks old. We’ve got to find the adults-!”

A long, sharp blade-like object emerged from captain Rick’s face. It swiftly retraced, splashing blood inside of his helmet.

We all stood up and scattered. A TXZ-XYXSYS, I’m assuming fully grown, had attacked us. Worse thing was that it wasn’t alone. A few, maybe four or five more surrounded us. These things were terrifying. They hunched over and gnarled like the savage beasts from Planet YTRSISM. These things were much more intelligent, though. These creatures… they hunted in packs. They talked to each other. They probably had their own language and their own social system. They weren’t just animals. I’m sure the Bureau would tell you otherwise, though.

I watched as two of the things slaughter Tom. Their long claws sliced through his suit like butcher knives going through a block of butter. Blood spewed out of his sides like a sink with a punctured valve. Just before he could scream, his helmet had shattered and his face started to grow. There’s absolutely no oxygen on that planet. Less than a second without your mask and your face will swell. A few seconds later, I heard a loud popping sound. My suit is suddenly covered in blood, the blood of our captain. I looked over to where Rick’s body had been. It had exploded into a bunch of pieces of suit and bone. One of the aliens was chewing on a piece of his skull.

I started to run as more of my fellow students were slaughtered. Quickly, though, one of the aliens confronted me. I stood there, frozen. It didn’t have any eyes that I could see, but I knew it was staring at me. Three long, black tongues slithered out from its mouth and started to vibrate. It extended its arms slowly, wiggling its fingers around at an insane speed.

I didn’t have a weapon. The only person who had brought one was our captain, and his gun had exploded along with him. I was defenseless. I took a step back, away from my predator, only to bump into another one behind me. It didn’t attack me, though. It only hissed and licked my helmet. The two of them started to have a conversation with each other, saying random hisses and occasional growls. The one from behind me quickly moved, and I crouched down in fear, covering my helmet. I braced myself for death, but it didn’t come. I sat there, unharmed, while the sound of screaming and growling played next to me. I opened my eyes and saw the two aliens attacking each other. I didn’t take much time to think about it, all I knew was that I could escape. I ran, as quickly as I could, and I continued running for hours, never stopping.

Nobody had made it back to the ship except me.

I stood in front of the pilot cabin, which hovered above me. I waved my arms and yelled for the pilot to open the doors, but there was no answer. I walked around, looking for a rock. I found one that was small enough to fit into my hand and threw it up at the pilot’s window. After a minute, the door closest to me opened, and I stepped into one of the ship’s decontamination chambers.

After decontamination, I ran straight for the pilot’s cabin. I was out of breath, but I explained to him what happened as best as I could. Afterwards, he contacted the Bureau and then started the ship. We were up in the air about ten minutes later.

We were supposed to leave with one alien corpse, but instead we left behind 18 of our own.