I spent last winter on Callisto Station watching the signal boards go dark. The bounty trade — once the backbone of every outpost from Titan to the Belt — was losing contracts faster than anyone could count. Three agencies shut their doors in February alone, and the remaining dispatchers were posting more coffee runs than captures.
The Mathematics of Collapse
The numbers never lied. In 2018, the average bounty netted twelve thousand woolong after fuel and docking costs. Last quarter, it was thirty-four hundred — barely enough to cover the run from Europa to the Belt. The targets were still out there. The problem was that everyone had become a hunter, and nobody was left to post contracts.
Everyone had become a hunter. Nobody was left to post contracts. The signal boards knew it before we did.
I pulled my last contract on a Thursday in March. The target was a data thief on Europa, already waiting at the café counter when I arrived. “Took you long enough,” he said. We split a coffee. The signal board was empty by the time I made it back to the dock.