The door to the private open crashed open and swung around, slamming against the wall. A ragged man burst inside with a strange pistol in his hand and an old shotgun in a scabbard on his back. He pointed the pistol at the head of the older, well-dressed man behind the desk. The business man waved off his two oversized henchmen who followed the desert ranger into his office. They shut the door and stood on each side of it like statues.

“Is that the gun?” the business man asked excitedly.

The ranger nodded and relinquished the weapon, tossing onto the desk with a thud.

The business man picked it up and carefully examined it, his eyes gleaming with excitement. “Did you have much difficulty getting it?” the old man asked.

“Much difficulty,” the ranger responded, brushing the dust off his faux-leather atmospheric encounter suit, fashionably cut to in the old retro style coat. “But they always give it up.”

The business man laughed and pulled a briefcase from below and slapped it onto his desk. “Your payment,” he said, as he inserted five .44 caliber bullets into the cartridge loading chamber underneath the barrel of the gun.

“Are you sure you want to be doing that?” the ranger asked, scooping up the case off the desk. “It’s dangerous.”

“Of course it is dangerous,” the businessman said. “That is why I have paid you half a million credits to retrieve it. The gun that never misses. This weapon is legendary. With it, I have become untouchable.”

“That’s what the other guy said before I pulled it from his cold, dead hand,” the ranger remarked. “Any man who uses its dark power becomes its victim, except for the one it was meant for. It was forged with Forbearers technology indistinguishable from magic, trapping the sorrow and regret of its maker into it forever.”

“Fairy tales,” the old man dismissed.

“Be careful with it,” the ranger warned as he stepped away from the desk towards the door. The henchman did not open it for him.

“Not so quick,” the business man nearly sung, clicking the slide into firing position. “You are not walking out of here with my money.”

The ranger turned around to face the old man pointing the enchanted weapon at him, as if he expected this to come to pass. “You don’t want to do that,” he said.

The henchmen grabbed the ranger by his arms and held him into place. “You never were going to leave this place alive,” the old man added.

“That’s what you think,” the ranger responded.

The business man laughed at the ranger’s absurd remark and fired the gun. The henchman on the right fell over, dead. The old man frowned. “It pulls to the right,” he muttered, firing another round at the ranger, having aimed the barrel slightly to the left. The other henchman fell dead.

“Last chance,” the ranger said, as the old man looked at the gun wondering how it could pull to the right and the left. When he pointed it again at the ranger, the ranger shook his head. “That is not what I meant,” he said.

The old man fired the gun. The bullet whizzed past the ranger’s left ear and ricocheted off the doorjamb, then a steel beam in the wall. The twang of the steel jacketed round was more ear shattering than the bang of the discharge. The bullet finally came to rest through the left eye of the old man behind the desk, flinging his head back against his chair. The backrest of the chair pushed his body forward, and the dead man’s head slammed onto the desktop, resting in an ever expanding pool of blood.

The ranger frowned and pulled the gun from the dead man’s hand. He put the barrel to his own temple and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked harmlessly. He then put in into his own mouth, and pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened. He spit out the taste of the gunshot residue and put the barrel of the gun underneath his chin, and pulled the trigger. Again, only a harmless click.

He laughed, pointed the gun at a couch along the wall, and pulled the trigger twice. The gun boomed twice as the last two rounds embedded themselves somewhere in the couch. He shook his head in disappointment.

The ranger opened the briefcase and poured the neatly banded stacks of bills into the garbage can next to the desk, keeping one stack for himself. He tossed the gun into the briefcase, shut the lid, locked the fasteners, and walked out of the office.

Stepping outside of the protections of the steel dome of the colony, he walked right out onto the surface of Ganymede without a spacesuit. He walked up the mountain with the briefcase until he reached the ridge known by the humans colonists as “The Edge of Forever”. A better view into the tumultuous clouds of Jupiter could not be found anywhere.

He was the last of his kind and had lived for too long. The Forbearer constructed the weapon, crafting it with the energy of his own being. It was supposed to be the catalyst that would permit his own destruction, but all it did was immunize him from ever being struck down by it.

With all his strength, he threw the briefcase at Jupiter. It spun like an out of control top as the gravity of the king of the planets grabbed it and pulled it in. He hoped it would be lost forever as he had hoped all the other times he disposed of it, but the gun would show up again sooner than later, just as he would to take it out of its next victim’s dead hand.