“And now I guess I can’t show Cass these logs. Maybe that’s for the best. No, she did the right thing. I want to kill Adam. That’s all that’s keeping me going now. My right leg is the only thing that’s still broken and I think Cass isn’t telling me how bad it is. That’s okay, it doesn’t matter. The armor can hold me over until I kill Adam and then I won’t need the leg anymore. I won’t need anything.”
Jess’s mouth was a thin, straight line as she heard his words. She thought they could have come out of her own mouth, only with the names changed. She slammed the computer closed and slumped back onto the bed. Her situation was different, she told herself. She hadn’t deserved what Burke had done to her even if he hadn’t known he was doing it. That made it worse, she decided. She thought of Eric and how Burke had shot him from behind and knew he would have done the same to her. She nodded to herself, assured that she was right, and then tried to sleep. She had a lot of work to do over the next few weeks.
The sandstorms of the new day cycle came and went and Jess felt well enough to work. She moved the crates for the first time and boggled at the mess of claw marks on the outer side. The crawlers must have tried for hours to get at her, she thought. She dragged the rotten carcasses out immediately, pulling them up the sand along the stairs. Her back and right leg still hurt but the rest of her wounds had healed perfectly. As foul as the regeneration paste smelled, it had worked as well as every other time she used it.
She cleared the sand away after dealing with the corpses. She rested then, at first on the surface. The heat of the day cycle hadn’t built up yet and she was more than happy to be in the fresh air and natural light. She went back down into the base and stayed there for a few more hours, knowing not to push herself too far after being inactive for so long. She spent the rest of the day taking the computers apart and sorting through the pieces.
One of the largest crates was used as a table. She sat on a smaller one and piled up a stack of the tablets. She had found no tools in the base but she had no need of them. Her arm had been modified after she earned her license to work on starships. She tapped along the arm’s surface and part of it released, opening up to show a series of tools. They had been designed to work both in space and inside a ship. Each of the tools had a tension line built into the base of them: she dragged the tool out of her arm and then placed it in her right hand. The line stayed connected into the limb and would be reeled back in if she let go. It made it impossible for her to lose a tool if she accidentally dropped it in space and it drifted out of reach before she noticed. The lines were color coded also, so she knew what she was holding at a glance.
Several containers were emptied so she could store the parts she harvested from the computers. Some were damaged or were too weak to be used for what she had planned. She put them in a separate container, never knowing what she might need if the beacon failed to reach any ships. The realization that she was planning to fail didn’t sit right with her and felt like a jab to the stomach the first few times she put a part in the back-up crate. She had forgotten it by the time she went to bed but that box had far more parts than the others when she was finished.
Another night cycle came and went by the time she had dismantled most of the computers. She went out to hunt again during the night and killed two more dog-rats. She skinned them and was more successful in gathering the meat. She cooked it badly and thought it tasted like burnt bacon. Then she cooked some more and ate it anyway. She sealed off the stairs long before the crawlers came out. She didn’t risk going out into the dark during the final forty-eight hours of night.
She worked on the solar array first, hoping to luck out and find that some of the base’s communication hardware had survived. Burke had done a terrible job but she had to admit that she was impressed that he was able to get it working at all. She wondered if that was his tenacity or evidence of Cass’s patience while guiding him through; she had realized it was her work when Burke had mentioned the AI on the recording.
He had tried to fix several broken solar panels in the basement. Jess had fixed what he had failed to do and dragged them up onto the roof. She saw that he had unknowingly used part of the communication array to restore power, but it wasn’t a powerful enough component to reach out as far as she needed. Still, she removed it and replaced it with pieces she had fused together herself and doubled the absorption rate of the base.
Next, she completed a method of recharging spent power cells. That was something she had done before and was an easy task once she had all the parts from the computers and their batteries laid out in front of her. That, combined with the solar array, let her have ample heating in the colder parts of the night. During the hottest parts of the day she wished she had found a pair of evaporator and condenser coils amongst the scrap pieces, both for cooling and to extend the lifespan of the fresh meat. There were small fans in each of the cheaper computers and she used those to increase airflow around the main room. It made the unbearable heat merely uncomfortable.
Over the months she made additional changes. She made a small boiler out of spare cooking plates and a small metal drum. She could have a heated shower with no soap but it was many times better than nothing. She stripped several of the container’s lids down to size and then slit them part-way in half. She interlocked them inside each other and then placed them over the top of the stairs during sandstorms, with the lid handles facing down so she could weigh them down against the wind. It wasn’t perfect, and she still barricaded the stairs at the bottom, but it dramatically reduced the amount of sand she had to clear each week.
She constructed her distress signal. It was a simple thing that could only send out blips on focused frequencies. It took her many weeks to finish the device and make sure it could withstand the heat and sand on the surface. She kept it on the roof, hooked up to the solar array and consuming as much power as it possibly could to boost the signal. She knew it would only reach other parts of the planet and low orbit but she spent an anxious few days after first putting it up, hopeful that there was another base within a few hundred kilometers of where she was. When no answer came she took the device down to protect it from the storms, only putting it back up when it was safe from the strong winds. She reflected bitterly on the hardware in her skull that could have perfected the beacon and how its presence inside her head taunted her.
Blood was collected when she drained the dog-rats that she hunted. She learned the wisdom in Burke’s choice to gut them in the shattered building on the surface and she devoted the room to the same use. She brought all the tools back underground when she was finished and kept them in a more diligent state of cleanliness than Burke had left them. She used the blood to color the tally marks he had left on the inside wall of the base. Each of the etches were filled in to account for the days she had been on the planet. Burke’s totalled up to over three years. When she was finished catching up with the days she had missed, she had colored seven months worth of the wall carvings. It became a weekly ritual for her to fill in the previous days when she made her first kill of the planet’s night.
She resumed watching Burke’s recordings. Many of them lasted several hours when he had taken to leaving the computer recording throughout long stretches of night. She tried to always have one of them playing during her own nights on the planet, even if she didn’t always listen to what he was saying; even when he wasn’t even saying anything at all. The sound of someone’s voice or the low drone of static was enough to make the silence of night bearable when she wasn’t out hunting or asleep.
As she subconsciously began to doubt that she would ever get off the planet, even as she unknowingly approached the day she would leave, she began to pay more attention to Burke’s ramblings. She looped multiple recordings back and saved new ones for the end of the night cycle, when she closed herself off from the surface and had nothing to do. She watched as Burke’s face grew darker from more time spent out during the day. He often had small cuts from shaving with a rough blad
e and eventually no cuts at all as he let his beard grow out.
“This was meant to be our big break,” he often said, repeating over and over how Adam had wronged him. “Enough money for us to be set for life, or live richly for a little while. I wanted to use the money to be able to take smaller contracts, help people instead of just doing it for money. He always disagreed. I should have seen it then. Stupid. Stupid to be sentimental. If I had treated it like a partnership instead of a friendship, instead of thinking like we were still two people on the same side of the war. I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have let this happen.
“I don’t think I was wrong to trust him. Even though he did this to me, I don’t think I was wrong to trust him. He’s the one who’s fucked up for doing this to me, not me for blindly trusting him. Right? Cass understands more each time I ask her. We’ve been here for two years and she’s as human as any other person I’ve known but it’s still strange to think that. And I can’t tell her that it feels odd. Maybe it won’t feel strange soon. Maybe I just have to let go.
“I wish I knew why Adam did this. More than anything else.”
Sometimes Jess would feel sympathy for the man and would feel as if her sanity could start to unravel around her as she did so. It had been a pact she had made with herself to keep herself moving on: a goal, a target, something to live and work for. She would kill Burke Monrow. She would kill Burke Monrow. Burke Monrow who did this to her only because it was done to him, and she would still kill him. Because if she didn’t have that to live for, then what was the point of even struggling alone on the planet. There was an injustice out there, far away from her lonely hovel on Meidum, and she stared at its face each night on the computer screen. She burned with reckoning, to right that wrong he had inflicted on her because it wouldn’t be fair any other way.
“I wish I had known Cass in the war,” Burke’s recording began. It was nearly the end of Jess’s ninth month on the planet. She had just sealed up the stairs several hours in advance to the crawler’s emergence. She liked to give ample time before they usually came out, just to be safe.
“I wish I could hear Cass instead of you,” she said acidly at the screen.
“Instead of Adam, I mean,” he continued. “I trust her, even now. I think we work better together than me and Adam.”
“Adam and I,” she spat again.
“We fought on Earth. I think this is the first time I’ve spoken about this.”
Jess sat upright suddenly on the bed. Her left hand instinctively went to her right arm and clutched around the metal surface. She squeezed it tightly at the mention of Earth.
“I was seventeen when the dross were first discovered,” he closed his eyes. “My parents were killed. My family. I used all the money I was left with on a forged ID. Same name but a year older. I only had to wait a few months before I turned eighteen but I couldn’t wait. I needed to fight them.”
“I was fifteen,” Jess whispered back. “Too young. I was evacuated and then couldn’t bear going back.” She squeezed her arm tighter.
“I can’t even remember the amount of times I nearly died and I hate that. That should be a happy statement, maybe. I don’t know. I’m lucky to have lived and here I am complaining about it. If I had Cass and her armor during the war I could have done so much more. I’ve felt invincible inside the aegis. People have shot me in the head and it feels like a raindrop against my helmet. It’s what made me—let me—survive the fall onto this planet. And that was a good thing. It was a good thing. I can’t let myself question that again. I survived to kill Adam.
“There were so many augmented soldiers that I saw during the war. Replaced arms and legs, some could fight better with them but others could fight worse. I never understood that sense of power until I got the armor. I understand now, the sacrifice those people made to protect something they thought was worthy. I would do it too to have another chance to kill those fucking aliens. A chip in my head and a metal limb or two. I barely noticed it toward the end of the war, the same people with the different arms and legs. They were other soldiers. I saw them instead of the augments.
“Would others have looked at me the same way?”
Jess felt cold. A chill ran down from her neck, spreading across her shoulders, arms, and back. Her left hand loosened and fell limply away from her right arm. She was on the precipice of remembering something, something important. It was like trying to recall the name of something and it danced just out of reach, just out the mind’s grasp around it to fully see the letters that made out the word. She stopped the recording and jumped back a few seconds.
“—barely noticed it toward the end of the war, the same people with the different arms and legs. They were other soldiers. I saw them instead of the augments.”
Her mind grasped it and she closed her eyes and let the realization rush through her. She felt as if it the back of her head had been struck. She was caught between rage and rapture, simultaneously furious at herself and ecstatic.
She dived away from the bed and pulled aside the crates from the stairs. She pushed aside the cover at the top of the stairs and burst out onto the surface. She had a few hours until the crawlers came out but she risked it anyway, knowing how tormented and restless she would be if she didn’t act right away.
The night air was cold but she threw off her jacket when she made it around the back of the ruined building. She dug rapidly into the sand with her bare hands, raking her fingers through the sand and throwing it away from her. She couldn’t remember what order she had buried them and she didn’t stop to try to remember. She dug furiously and rapidly until her fingers made contact with a corpse. The face had decomposed to the point that it was barely recognizable. She thought it might have been Marcus but she pulled the body out anyway to check. The flesh of his arms and legs had shrivelled and dried but the evidence that they had all been flesh was unmistakable. She set the body aside and kept digging.
Eric’s body was in a similar state. She only recognized it by the metal leg and she grinned at the sight of it. Later, she felt guilt at profiting from their deaths but not defiling their graves; they were dead and gone and she knew she wasn’t disturbing a peaceful sleep. She dragged the corpse into the building where she gutted the animals she hunted. She braced her right hand over the skull and immediately drew it away. Even with her prosthetic hand, she couldn’t bring herself to plunge her fist down into what had been Eric’s head. She went back down into the base for tools instead.
The augmented leg extended farther up into his torso than she would have guessed, even after knowing how deeply her arm extended into her own chest. The insides of the corpse had decomposed more thoroughly than the outside, especially where bacteria had eaten their way out of his intestines. She worked the root of the leg out from where it had been grafted into his pelvis and spine. She inserted a tool into the exit wound that Burke’s shot had left in his skull, scooping out the implant that bridged the connection between the synthetic limb and the biological brain. It was no bigger than her thumb and she marvelled at how something so small could help her so much. A mess of thin, spidery threads came out with the implant and she severed them to complete the extraction.
She stared down at the pieces she had harvested and felt an overwhelming urge of nausea at what she had just done in a flurry of excitement. She knew she had the pieces to perfect her distress signal, even as she stumbled onto the sand and vomited.
The bodies were buried once again in the sand before she got to work. The crates were stacked against the stairs. The crawlers emerged and left the base alone, hunting the other animals on the surface. The sandstorms came as the planet began its day cycle. Jess worked tirelessly to be ready the moment the weather cleared.
The leg was opened and stripped for pieces carefully. Eric had used his augmentations for combat, she remembered. He had often coordinated attacks with information—projectile trajectories, weather patterns, and wind speeds for long shots—that had seamlessly been downloa
ded into his head and delivered to an interface over his eyes. He hadn’t worn that piece of hardware when he had been killed but the capability was still intact within the implant. Often that information was delivered over vast distances, usually through networks around the planets he fought on. She knew it wouldn’t be enough to boost the signal to reach the system’s network, but it would be enough to reach several times farther out and had a better chance at reaching a ship. The capability was better than if she had used her own civilian implant.
When the sandstorms abated, she had constructed a much larger transmitter. Any resemblance of the leg was gone; she had used almost all of the pieces, in conjunction with many long barrels from the rifles she had found, to create the device. She had to carry it to the surface in pieces and then assemble it on the roof. She ran a series of wires down into the base and connected them to the computer at her bed. The lights dimmed when she turned it on and watched as the display initialized the signal. She watched the feedback on the display eagerly and smiled when the strength of the signal covered her side of the planet and reached out into space.
Each night she climbed up and carefully took down the beacon. She packed it carefully next to her bed and reassembled it when she woke up. She guarded it in the middle of the night cycle, after the sandstorms but before the crawlers emerged, making sure that none of the dog-rats chewed through any of the pieces. They had never attacked the solar array but she took no chances. She shot at any that came near, zooming in with her eye after months of practice with Eric’s rifle. Each night she continued to add another red coat of blood to Burke’s tallies on the wall.
Almost three months passed before the signal got a response. Ninety more tallies were painted red. Several times the computer displayed a blip that the signal had been received by something but they never answered; she recalled all the times Marcus had refused to answer a distress message, stating plainly that it could be a trap.
The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning Page 5
