He stepped off the ship before the doors fully opened. Rylan had chosen his spot well and the drop was only a few meters. Burke barely felt his knees buckle as he landed on the bridged street. The Brisbane started moving again the moment his feet touched the floor. He heard the air rip around the ship as it turned and rocketed its way back up through the city. He watched the glowing exhausts of the vessel, blue and bright, shrink and then vanish into the upper mesh of the city.
The lower levels felt like a sewer system rather than interconnecting streets. The rain was thinner but edges of the streets were teeming with water. Burke looked over the edge of the bridged road and saw the water pouring down to another street below him. He was still too high up to see the ground of the planet. The light of the planet’s sun was also lessened, similarly lost to the buildings above like the rain. The lower streets felt like they were shrouded in perpetual dusk.
“Which way, Cass?” he asked.
“Straight forward.”
He knew that an arduous search lay ahead of them. If they were lucky—and they were rarely lucky—they might catch a glimpse of the two murderers within a few hours. It was more likely that it would be more than a day before Cass’s monitoring matched up with their current location. In the meantime, he would wander the streets near where the fugitives last struck while Cass saturated herself in the surveillance network around them.
The weight of the aegis sent high splashes of water as Burke trudged through the puddles littered in the streets. In the more flooded areas, he took each step slowly, firmly slamming his foot down before he took another step. He did not trust what might be hidden under the water. Heavy as his armor was, he could still slip and fall if he moved too quickly.
He saw two people early on in his search and then no one else for several more hours. Although the city was vast, most people stayed highly concentrated in certain areas: the better maintained buildings, the rare stores of the lower levels, and the even rarer heat exhausts that spilled out from the inner workings of the city. Most groups he passed that were unfortunate enough to be outside were huddled together. He hoped that he didn’t frighten them as he passed.
“This place is awful,” Cass commented.
“I know.”
“Why is it so bad?”
Burke knew she could have found the answers herself. She was still connected to the network of both the city and their ship. He knew that she preferred the conversation with him rather than clinically research things on her own. He appreciated that.
“Earth and Mars,” he began. “They’re the root of a lot of problems, it seems. Most of the billions of people were evacuated but it didn’t stop at the planets. The rest of the system emptied as well. Liveria, at the time, seemed like a perfect place. The city is built on top of older layers of itself. There are hundreds of thousands of empty sections down here. Too much space to use or even sell. Now, there are over a billion people stuck here.”
“And there’s no work for them. After they lost everything.”
Burke nodded solemnly.
“It’s better than being dead,” he said. “They might not see it that way, though.”
“There are too many people here,” Cass said quietly. “They should limit how many can live here. It would solve a lot of problems.”
“It would,” he agreed. “But who gets to decide who gets in and who doesn’t? There’s no denying the vacant buildings down here. There’s more water than anything else. It’s a problem spawned from another problem, one that didn’t have a solution.”
“There are new worlds being colonized every year,” Cass offered.
“With their slavers and hostile aliens,” Burke shook his head. “No, I’m sorry. You’re right. There should be more work put into transporting people there.”
“Take a left here, and then go down.”
The stairways that connected the levels were the most dangerous places in the lower streets. Most were slick with rain and grime that didn’t fully wash down the steps. The few that were dry were inhabited with criminals: petty thugs and gang members that infested the neglected underside of the city. He saw them in other places too, typically gathered around the paid elevator access points that connected to the higher streets. They stood there waiting for anyone unfortunate enough to choose that exit while carrying down supplies from above.
The criminals he passed mostly left him alone. When he walked passed them—the thugs were unable to see whether or not he was glaring at them through his helmet, which he was—they would shout and jeer when they decided he was leaving them alone out of fear. It took a great deal of willpower not to turn around and teach each group of them a lesson. Cass usually soothed him, reminding him that causing too much trouble might interfere with the fugitives coming out of hiding. Although Burke despised the gangs, he also felt sympathy for them when he couldn’t think of any alternative way for the men and women to scrape by.
“You a fucking alien in there?” one said to him, on the second day of his search.
Burke stopped and made a show of turning to the man. The armored face plate of his helmet stared silently at him.
“Fucking aliens,” the man cursed and spat on the armor. The gang members behind were not as brave. They hung back while the man put his face as close to Burke’s as he could. The man’s nose nearly touched the outer armor.
“Must be an alien to be sealed up like that,” the man continued. “There ain’t enough down here already without your kind.”
The man raised his hands and put them on the chest plate of Burke’s armor. Cass sounded exasperated as she urged Burke not to fight back. The man was wearing thin even on her nerves. She locked the arms and legs in place when the man pushed against them, effectively making it so he was trying to shove against a solid wall. Instead of moving the aegis, he merely pressed himself away from the armor. Immediately, the annoyance turned to amusement and Burke let out a low laugh. He turned and walked away.
“You better run!” the man called out.
Burke shook his head.
Between each day of searching, Cass would find an abandoned place in the city for them to stop. Burke rested in the armor, kept warm and sustained by its systems, while Cass continued her search. Although he preferred his bed on the ship, he was comfortable sleeping in the aegis, having already done so hundreds of times. It was too much trouble to call the ship down each night and wasn’t worth leaving it to chance that the murderers might venture out while they’re resting in orbit.
On the third day, Cass found them. She finally broke through the security in Spectrum Industries and used their collected records to better narrow down their search. Burke had just walked down a set of a stairs much closer to the ground level of the city than when they started. Cass changed half of the visor’s display as she rambled out directions for him to follow. He took off into a run down a partially flooded street, risking reckless steps through the murky water and toward the sound of a man screaming. The visor’s view reverted back to its original state, displaying what Burke’s eyes would have seen if the armor didn’t block them.
“Turn left here and then the first right,” Cass said quickly.
He followed her directions and turned in time to see the two murderers closing in on a man on one of the longer bridges in the city. Cass zoomed in one corner of the visor to allow Burke to see that the man was bleeding. The fugitives were slowly and calmly walking toward him, as if they were confident that their target couldn’t escape. The man screamed again and Burke rushed forward.
He felt the compartment on his hip whirl open and his handgun snapped within his reach. He grabbed it quickly and came to a stop half way across the bridge. The weapon was brought smoothly up in front of him and he aimed naturally at his targets—he remained steady and focused, it was simply another gunshot amongst the tens of thousands he had already fired in his life. The bullet ripped through the air and passed the bleeding man’s head. It collided into the woman behind him and was the
n disintegrated against whatever armor was under the woman’s skin. The bullet burst open and fell onto the street in pieces, as though it had been made of ash.
“What the fuck?” Burke said.
“I don’t know,” Cass replied.
The murderers stopped in their tracks. They both angled their heads to the side in unison—more than just unison, Burke noticed, but perfect synchronization. He found it deeply unsettling. The bleeding man let out a third and final scream, like he mirrored Burke’s thought, and then raced away down the bridge. The fugitives didn’t chase him. They simply stood in place and looked at Burke. They tilted their heads again, to the left side this time, and he shuddered.
“I don’t like this, Cass,” he said.
“The pictures were right,” she replied. “Are you seeing this?”
Burke still held the gun pointed at the two in front of him. They weren’t moving and he took the chance to look them over. They were barely clothed: each wore a torn shirt and pants that were ripped below the knees. They wore no shoes or socks. The man’s chest was exposed and looked just as covered with modifications as his face. The woman’s shirt didn’t cover her stomach and her skin looked similarly strange.
He tensed as she walked toward him. She took each step as if there was no weapon currently pointed at her, walking as naturally as any other person on a street during a normal day. Burke suddenly remembered their names from the news report: Lumen and Shaw. The man stayed in place a few meters behind the woman.
“Hello, my name is L,” Lumen said.
Burke was about to answer when he heard a sound like something cracking open and then crunching into place. He looked down in time to see Lumen’s arm part-way through its transformation. Her hand split between her middle fingers and then curled open like there was a set of hinges in her wrists. He saw that her arms were fully prosthetic, just like his leg, and peeled away to reveal the inner mechanics beneath the artificial skin. In a second he saw the blade eject out from her forearm to replace where her hand had been. In another second, the blade was thrust up at his neck and scraped its way along the armor plating of his aegis. A hot shower of sparks frothed up from the connecting metal and it was then that Burke shoved her away.
A warning of damage flashed on the visor in front of him. Whatever the blade had been made from, it was enough to take a thin shaving from the outer armor. He looked up to see Lumen once again angling her head at him.
“Minor damage,” Cass reported. “She’d need hours to stab her way through us.”
Burke watched Shaw raise an arm at him from behind Lumen. He saw that the murderer’s arm was now equally changed, but sporting multiple barrels of a firearm instead of a blade. The bullets spewed toward Burke before he could get out of the way and he fired back instead of wasting time trying to dodge the bullets. Cass channeled energy into as many kinetic barriers as she could, afraid the man’s weapon might be enough to deal damage to them like Lumen’s blade. The projectiles bounced harmlessly from the aegis, however, and she soon reverted to conserving the suit’s power.
Unfortunately, Burke’s shots also ricocheted from his opponent’s armor without any effect. Shaw lowered his weapon and Burke reloaded his handgun in the same moment. They stared at each other then, for one absurd moment when neither side knew what to do to the other.
“What did Spectrum Industries do to them?” Burke said. “How can their skin be as bullet-proof as our armor?”
“It isn’t. It can’t be,” Cass answered.
She was still talking when Lumen broke the momentary truce by lunging forward. She wrapped her left arm around Burke’s neck and clung onto him. He was too heavy for her to pull onto the floor but she kept her grip on him as she started to stab relentlessly into his chest with her bladed arm. Each strike sent a fresh wave of sparks onto the bridge and a new warning that they were sustaining damage.
Burke twisted his arm so that his gun was aimed at her despite how close she was. He fired off two shots and they were lost in the mess of strikes she was pummeling into his chest. His visor abruptly changed to the video feed from the handgun. He could see two blackened circles where his two shots had hit into Lumen’s stomach.
“Fire at her again!” Cass directed, circling one of the black marks with a red reticule. “The same place. The whole magazine!”
“But—”
“Just do it!”
He followed her orders. Each strike from Lumen’s blade set his aim off for a moment. He timed two shots after each of her attacks, firing ten more bullets in total into the same place on her stomach. The eighth one caused Lumen to suddenly freeze in place, still clung to the armor. The final two shots sent snaking fissure lines of damage around the point of impact, cracking their way through the armor plates at her stomach. She let out a guttural howl and let go of him. She fell onto her back and writhed on the floor of the bridge.
Shaw let out the exact same howl in the exact moment, a perfect replica of her cry. He then moved independently of Lumen, leaping forward as Burke rushed to reload. The man’s augmented legs moved him quickly over the bridge. Burke was expecting him to strike the gun from his hands, and was taken off guard when he instead jumped at the last moment and led with both feet into Burke’s chest. He felt the prosthetic legs make contact with his armor, press down, and then release with the same jumping mechanism that he himself had used many times before. Shaw’s legs launched him from Burke with enough force to knock the heavy aegis over and send it sliding along the floor of the bridge.
By the time Burke was back on his feet, the two killers were gone. He stepped forward and leaned down to where his gun had been flung during his fall. He finished reloading it, just in case they were hiding, and then moved along the bridge to see any trace of them.
“I’m tracking them,” Cass said. “They’re moving lower through the city. I won’t lose them.”
“Call Rylan,” he said lowly. “Tell him to find a place to land after picking us up. We won’t be on the ship for long.”
He kneeled down where Lumen had attacked him. There were small mounds of crumbled bullets and shavings of metal from his armor. There were a few droplets of blood, a much darker red than any normal human blood he had seen. He shook his head.
* * *
In Brisbane’s armory, Burke looked over the chest plate of his aegis that he had just removed. He ran his fingers through the thin scrapes left in the metal, feeling the ragged edges of the indentations biting into his fingertips. At a distance, the marks wouldn’t be discernible in the black color of the armor. Still, the armor was something he took pride in owning and he hated when it sustained any damage. Repairing it was expensive but he never hesitated in paying that cost.
He didn’t bother with a shower or a rest. He knew that Cass may lose her tracking on the murderers. Instead, he looked through the armory and picked out a rifle. The weapon was too large to fit into the compartment in his aegis but was small enough to carry in the open without risking too much trouble. As low in the city as they climbed, there were hardly any people to frighten by carrying the gun.
Below the rows of weapons, secured into the racks while they were on display, were large drawers full of ammunition. The bullets were kept tightly packed in boxes, each of them built into the drawers as a solid unit to prevent spilling their contents if the ship ever lost gravity. He searched quickly through the drawers until he found the correct caliber for the gun he had chosen. Then he picked out rounds specifically designed to pierce armor—barriers, doors, and personal infantry protection. The bullets he had previously used were tailored for soft targets, breaking apart in flesh to cause massive damage. The bullets he chose now, he hoped, would be capable of punching through whatever protection Spectrum had installed on Lumen and Shaw.
Burke loaded the rifle gun and set extra magazines to insert into the armor. He then put his aegis back on with the intention of leaving the ship immediately; however, when he stepped out into the main corridor of the shi
p, Cass asked him to come to the helm.
Rylan was still sitting at the front of the ship. Cass was above her podium. Burke released the faceplate on his helmet as he walked in, so that he could see with his own eyes instead of the suit’s view.
“Did you lose them?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. “But I looked over the other records I found in Spectrum Industries. I think you should see this.”
He stepped around the podium. In front of Rylan, the ship’s main screen showed the city outside. The rain fell and streaked along the front of the ship and then was boiled away a moment later, keeping the view clear. Cass took over the display and it changed to show a video log. An empty, white room was on the screen instead, from the perspective of a camera in one of the corners of the room’s high ceiling. Cass jumped through the recording until he saw Lumen and another woman occupying the room.
“How are you today?” the woman asked.
“I’m good. But I’m cold,” Lumen answered.
Burke narrowed his eyes. He knew Cass would have a good reason to show the recording. He braced himself for something that was going to make him angry.
“This is the final stage of the preparation before you will be restricted to this facility,” the woman continued. “This is the last chance to speak up if you’ve changed your mind about participating in the study.”
“I’m certain,” Lumen said. “I want to help.”
“Excellent. Now, you’ve been chosen for multiple reasons. Chief among them are your extensive augmentations already present. Your arms were lost in an accident and you chose to work for the company after receiving the prosthetics we created. Is that correct?
The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection Page 5
