Dead Man's Hammer

Action! Adventure! Assassins! Deanna was just another third-rate colony in the Terran Empire, and it was pretty much as boring a lump of rock as could be expected. Boring, that is, until Gary Beck - aka Beck the Badfeller, Deanna's most famous bounty hunter - ran over an obsidian crow with his jeepo on the highway to San Fedora one Saturday morning and didn't have a spare tire. Things pretty much went downhill from there. An assassin had come to Atro City, an assassin with a score to settle. She was refined and pretty - but as poets might say, beauty can be deceiving - and the same poets who described Helen of Troy as the face that launched a thousand ships, might have written about Villainessa Tittle as the bitch that sank them. As an assassin, she was the worst kind: she took pride in her work, enjoyed what she did for a living, was bloody good at it, and above all, she was absolutely terrifying. She'd come to Deanna on business, and this time, unfortunately, it was absolutely 100 percent personal.