He walked to the hangar bay, to the Swordfish II. The fighter, too, had been rendered in punishing detail. Every scratch on the canopy. Every frayed wire in the cockpit. The faint, almost invisible bloodstain on the ejector seat that had never quite come clean. He ran his hand along the fuselage.
“Just admiring the resolution,” he said flatly. “You’ve got a smudge on your chin. And a price on your head. 800,000.”
“I’m not taking this job,” Spike said, standing up.
He found his mark in a pachinko parlor called “The Last Honest Man.” Laughing Bull was a weasel of a man with a sweaty upper lip and eyes that twitched like trapped flies. He was surrounded by four goons in cheap synth-leather jackets. In the old resolution—the grainy, 4:3, slightly scratched reality of the Bebop ’s day-to-day—Spike might have paused. He might have calculated, improvised, taken a few hits.
He’d taken a job. Simple bounty: a data-dogger named Laughing Bull (no relation to the shaman) who’d sliced a mob-controlled bank on Callisto. The reward was a paltry 150,000 woolongs, but Jet had grumbled about the Bebop ’s coolant coils freezing up for the third time this month. “We’re not a charity, Spike. We’re a business. A very cold, very broke business.”