The Legend of Ivan Read Free

loud. "Oh, I know this one. Cobb'd been spewin' this story for years. I always kinda wondered how much there really was to it." He shrugged. "You being here means that there's gotta be some truth to those tales about Ivan, yeah?"
    I gave a nod. "My employer seems to believe so, and the sparse records left from Hunter's End do state that someone called Ivan, whether imposter or otherwise, came and left during the time when Cobb was employed there."
    "Oh yeah," the barkeep nodded seriously. "I know exactly what yer lookin' for."
    I sat back down. The ever familiar hunger, the allure of fresh information, settled into my mind. "Tell me."
     
    Chapter 2: Ivan and the Dinosaurs
     
    "There was something Cobb always said every time he started this story. I believe it wouldn't do this Ivan fella or Cobb himself justice if I told it any other way.
    Ivan punched a dinosaur.
    Hunter's End just so happens to be on the ass end of the ass end of the galaxy, as I'm sure you're so keenly aware, good Archivist. The usual devices were set up to fix the unlivable conditions, only take a few hundred or so years to accelerate nothing into proto-goo. Before you know it, they got eating, breathing, shitting life. Well in that time, administrations changed hands, documents and hard drives fell into the incinerator, people moved on with their lives, and, whoops, someone misplaced a planet.
    The terraforming processes were a set it and forget it type of arrangement. In this case, "forget it" was key. Plenty of ambient life sprang up in the meanwhile, and, by the time the damn place was re-discovered, some monstrous lizards had the run of it.
    The usual pack of rough-edged explorers found it teeming with all manner of life, thinking it was some monumental discovery that'd make them stinking rich. They thought they'd claim and sell it off to some corporation or another. One of the people, however, took one look at the size of the critters down below and thought of something else.
    He figured that the big lizards were like the ones found on prehistoric Old Earth, so the guy came up with a different idea: one that stuck.
    They turned the whole damn planet into a game preserve.
    All across the galaxy, the most daring folk dropped in to try and bag one of the bigger beasties, and hell if a few didn't end up with some mighty fine trophies in the end.
    Many more of 'em ended up torn to shreds.
    There was something a little funny about the way they ran things there, Cobb always told me. Some of the finer hardware in life, energy weapons and the like, seemed a bit finicky down on the planet. The folks in charge talked about how the electromagnetic interference from solar radiation or something like that screwed 'em up. 'Course, most everyone else thought the proprietors ran some kind of device to make the challenge more...
    Well, challenging.
    It added to the thrill of it, using archaic metal shooters to take down some giant lizards. Flechette guns were still allowed, but they didn't have the same punch against the thick hides of the bigger beasties. And thank goodness the world sat too far out to bother with because our lovely core government probably didn't think much of the fifty percent or so fatality rate. It's no wonder they named the place Hunter's End.
    In any case, Cobb found himself less sober than usual, laid off of a recent mining gig somewhere within a few weeks travel to Hunter's. The owners came by lookin' for warm bodies to be employed in their fine establishment.
    "The pay was good," he'd always say, "if you could survive the term of the contract."
    The amount of money the owners were raking in could afford a pretty high premium, and most of it went back into services in the tiny colony anyway. If the employee happened to pass on, well... let's just say that wills didn't often enter into the equation.
    Cobb hopped from job to job down there, either by some bloke getting eaten or too scared to stick around. Drunk as he was most of the time,