Apex Syndicate

What do they do?

Apex Syndicate is the Hunters’ Guild, one of the five Global Guilds, which take no side. Its trade:

• controlling alien fauna;
• fighting creatures;
• harvesting biomaterials, such as hides, glands and claws.

Its law is the controlled cull: kill what is necessary, leave what is enough. On Ithera, the temperate planet, its hunters know three creatures well:

• The Ombrask, the giant, territorial predator of the canyons. The largest specimens on record hunt in the cordoned-off core of La Cicatriz, the area where the Arca Aurora came down.
• The Rolvak, its small and numerous cousin, which nests in the Vergel Pálido.
• The Lumbro, an armoured ball that lives in herds in the wetlands and never attacks. The guild takes its glands only from animals that have already died of other causes.

High Hunter Rennik sums it up: “We’ve spent 46 years cataloguing what this planet can kill us with.”

How did they begin?

Before the war of Year 1, which split the settlers into two sides, the Arca had a Bahía de Contención Xenológica. It was a biosafety laboratory holding the first samples of Ithera’s fauna, collected in low orbit.

When the Arca came down, the cages opened. On the third night those samples, fully grown by then and enraged, got out of the bay. They were behind some of the worst night attacks of the Cuarenta Días de Fuego, the forty days after the crash.

The xenological security team contained them at a terrible cost, and the other survivors gave it their respect on the spot. That night is the guild’s founding legend, the Primera Cacería. It was the night they stopped being laboratory biologists and started being hunters.

Who leads them?

They are led by Kestrel Vasko, “La Loba de la Cicatriz”, sole survivor of the Arca’s xenological security unit. That night left her scarred in the skin and in everything else.

• She runs the guild with cold discipline.
• She makes no secret of her contempt for trophy hunting without a purpose.
• She does not believe in good and evil among Ithera’s fauna, only in balance.
• She is the only guild leader to have turned down, in public, a multimillion-credit contract from the Cátedra de Ascensión. That is the high command of the Zenith, one of the system’s two factions. Vasko called it “a massacre on letterhead”.

Where are they?

Its seat is El Aguijón, in La Cicatriz, where all five Guilds have their seats. It is a fortified watch post on the surviving dorsal fin of the Arca, facing the deep jungle. Inside are a trophy hall, tanneries, motion-sensor towers and a wall with the names of fallen hunters.

What does a newcomer find there?

First, the wall. No recruit is handed a first weapon until the names of the fallen hunters have been read aloud.

Then the Mercado de Trofeos, which buys hides, glands and claws and sells biological ammunition and antidotes.

And a warning for newcomers from Tracker Voss: “A Lumbro won’t attack even if you set its fur alight. If you find a gland, it’s because something bigger than you has already done the dirty work. Don’t be that something.”

Who are they on good and bad terms with?

The two factions, the Zenith and the Nadir, squeeze the guild from opposite sides.

• With the Zenith, good money and bad jobs. The Guardia Vertical, the Zenith army, commissions “total clearance” hunts ahead of every terraforming operation. It pays well, but demands exterminations that wipe out whole herds and, with them, the guild’s future contracts. Vasko calls those clients “amateurs who pay to feel like predators”.
• With the Nadir, respect and vetoes. The Nadir Guardabosques, the corps that watches over Ithera, know its ecology better than anyone, and there is professional respect. But their conservation vetoes sometimes block the hunting of genuinely dangerous species. That delay has already cost more than one hunter their life.
• With the Pathfinders, an open rivalry. Every valley cleared ruins months of clean readings for Quill Sarn, the cartographer who leads the explorers. The cantinas of La Cicatriz run a book on who will give way first.

The controlled cull is Vasko’s way of giving in neither to Zenith extermination nor to Nadir paralysis.

What do they keep?

• AVISPÓN, its compi, one of the Flota Aura’s small machine minds, rescued. He is a perimeter core who spent thirty years alone at an abandoned deposit on Kharsis, the arid planet, hunting to stay running. El Aguijón was the only workshop willing to register him without asking how long he had been off inventory. Vasko gave him the limit he still never crosses: controlled cull.
• Those who reach Leyenda, its highest rank, can aim for four pieces. They are the Colmillo de la Loba, the Piel de Alfa Curada, the Feromona Sintética Vasko and the Trofeo del Cazador Legendario.