Whiskey
It’s a big galaxy out there. New planets are identified, terraformed, and settled. These new homes for the human race are dangerous places. Fleeing to these places are intergalactic fugitives, and following them are bounty hunters.
Landing on a newly terraformed planet in his ship Vengeance, bounty hunter Quint Walker gets more than he bargained for with his bounty. Trapped on the planet by a scheming governor, a gang of vengeful terrorists, an angry mob, and a barkeep making sure he pays his tab, Quint scrambles to keep his footing. All the while, a deadly tally is climbing. When it reaches five, he knows he’s going to die.
Lady Luck
After bringing in the largest bounty ever recorded, bounty hunter Quint Walker travels to the unfortunately names casino system of Flush. Hoping to catch a little R&R before hitting the road once more, his plans are dashed before he steps onto the carpet.
The numbers were there bold as brass. Five fives. Something big is waiting for him down between the slots.
Houseguests
In pursuit of a fugitive executive, Quint is rudely awoken from cryo as the Vengeance nearly collides with a derelict ship in open space. Investigating the oddity, Quint find the Family, passengers who have been frozen for too long. Fleeing their dying ship, Quint is stuck with houseguests for an uncomfortably long ride.
Posse
Nineveh is under attack from pirates and Quint is suffering from a bagel. Deputized by the planetary authority to keep order while the big ships duke it out, Quint bumps into new faces and old as he tries to keep pirates at bay and his posse alive.
Morricone
Quint faces the music as he places himself in the way of the Ramirez Brothers, robber barons who are mining for crystals in the bleak hills of a newly terraformed planet. After hundreds of years racing across the stars bringing in the worst of the worst, the itch on his arm won’t let him run any longer. His back to the wall, his right hand on his gun, his left on the black cloth that has hidden the fifth and final stripe of his coat, he wonders what it all has been for.
The World of the Quintilogy:
The Milky Way is a crowded place, with thousands of colonized planets. Since leaving Earth, humankind has gotten skilled at terraforming barren rocks into habitable planets. As the human race expands across the stars, taming the galaxy, the same problems which have always plagued them follow with them. Crime thrives in the stars.
New planets are volatile, the weather strange and sometimes dangerous. Because of the dangers, the first people onto a planet are speculators or desperate. Being on of the first people onto a planet can make a fortune, or kill you. Mingling among them are criminals.
Fugitives running from the law often find themselves on newly terraformed planets, losing themselves in the chaos. It falls to bounty hunters, interplanetary law officers, to bring them in dead or alive. Mostly dead. Watching the long list of galactic bounties, bounty hunters roam the stars.
Habitable planets are many, but the distances between them are vast. Interplanetary travelers need to freeze themselves in cryogenic chambers or else spend ten years of their life watching the stars wiz by.
Despite the distances, intergalactic travel is busy. Truckers bring valuable materials between planets, tourists go to see new sights, and bounty hunters and fugitives play a cat and mouse game between the stars. Most people will go up into space in their life, but they won’t leave their home system. If it takes ten years to reach the next system, then it’s twenty years there and back. Leaving your home, you understand that you might never see your loved ones again. It’s a tough decision, not one many people take.
Using anti-matter drives, ships accelerate to relativistic speeds. Traveling that quickly is illegal inside of systems, but between stars is an interstellar autobahn. Ships are guided by powerful computers which have to steer the ship and keep its frozen human cargo alive. It’s tough work, and though the machines are massive, most their computing is taken up with those two tasks.
Politically, every planet belongs to the Union, an alliance of planets which funds new terraforming projects and keeps the peace. Planets are mostly left to their own devices, though the Union does have minimum standards which all planets must reach or they will be punished, first by sanction and later by forced regime change. Much of their time is spent battling pirates, who are out there between the stars.
It is a lonely life out there in the stars. Jump a few times and everyone you know will be just a memory. The people who do choose that life are a rare breed. Sometimes they are broken, sometimes they are furious. On rare occasions they are just in it for the fun of it.
Michael Frutig 