When the ship finally answered and began its descent toward her, she stared up with a mix of trepidation and excitement. She wasn’t sure if it was good that people like Marcus would pass her signal by: the ship must have either more generous people than him or far, far worse.
The ship landed almost exactly where her’s had been a year earlier. It was a larger ship, but not by much. She immediately saw that they had no outer weapon systems: they were either a transport ship or smugglers like Marcus had been. Jess stood with Eric’s rifle in her right hand, barrel casually pointed to the sand at her feet, and Burke’s computer in her left hand. The ship’s doors parted and an additional compartment opened up to make a ramp to exit and board the vehicle.
The interior of the ship was dark. The lights were off and a lone woman stepped out and walked down toward her. Jess peered into the darkness clearly with her bionic eye and saw at least six more people: three men and three women. Half of them had rifles of their own pointed out at her. The others had handguns at their hips. She judged the woman walking toward her as the captain and guessed that she thought the brightness of the planet made it so Jess couldn’t see the armed crew far behind her.
Jess kept the rifle pointed at the sand and took her finger away from the trigger. The captain made a point of showing the gun on her belt but didn’t make a move to hold it. She stopped a few paces from Jess and looked straight at her.
“Name?”
“Jess.”
“Marie. Scanner says you’re Jess Martin. That right?” She spoke with a drawl that Jess didn’t recognize.
“Jess Richmond. Your scanner is broken or you’re testing if I’ll tell the truth.”
“Clever, good,” Marie smiled, her teeth were too white and caught the light. “What happened here now?”
“A year ago we came to find a corpse. Turns out the corpse wasn’t dead and killed most of us and took our ship,” Jess spoke slowly while feeling her heart race in her chest. She wasn’t scared of being shot. She was scared that they would take off without her.
“That right? Well Jess, it took some time to fly over here and land. I hope it’s not just pretty old you here or we’ll be mighty disappointed.”
“No. Yes,” Jess closed her eyes. “I’m the only survivor. There are more than thirty boxes in the base behind me. You can have everything. I don’t want any of it.”
“Anything else?” Marie had stopped smiling.
“Me. I’m a mechanic. A good one. Probably a damn sight better than the one you have.”
“Probably,” Marie pursed her lips for a moment. “She’s not that great, but I’m awful fond of her. She’s my wife after all.”
Jess winced. “Shit.”
“Oh your face,” Marie burst out laughing. “I’m in a good mood so it’s all right. You can teach her whatever you know but keep your hands on the engine, right? Now, you walk back on there and someone will show you a bed and shower. You shower now, first. There any traps or funny business waiting down with those boxes?”
“No ma’am.”
“Well all right then. It turns out you’re lying and we’ll leave you here a lot deader than we found you. Go on now.”
Jess stepped up to the ship and didn’t exhale until she saw the crew had lowered their weapons. She turned the filter off on her eye to make her dazed look genuine as she stepped into the dim light of the ship. Five of the crew walked passed her and joined the captain on the sand. One man stayed behind and wordlessly showed her to a tiny room, more a closet than a room, and an even smaller shared shower down the hall.
The ship was tidy and well kept. The engine was in a better state than Freedom’s but she could still see where improvements could be made. She looked it over while the cargo hold was filled with all of the boxes she had been surrounded with for months. She was grateful that Marie never asked her to help load the ship. She had no intention of setting foot back on the planet again.
An awkward first night passed as she sat with the crew. They were more welcoming than she could have hoped for, which only set her more on edge. After the best meal she had eaten in a year, she went back to her tiny room and sat on the bed. She ran her fingers down her right arm and activated the tracer she had kept on Freedom, one she hadn’t activated since she last saw the ship leave her behind. The trace was routed through the ship’s connection to the star system’s network and then slowed to a crawl as it pinged her old ship. The connection had always been terrible, even if it was only the tiniest of packets sent and received to confirm the location.
An hour passed before her arm blipped back. She had fallen asleep while she waited. She stared down at the confirmation and felt like she had stones weighing her down in her stomach. She was off the planet now and could feel the raging necessity for retribution begin to crumble away. The option to leave it alone, and let Burke be, presented itself as a possibility, perhaps even the better choice—she knew that just because she tracked the ship that Burke didn’t necessarily still occupy it.
She closed her hand around the arm’s display of Freedom’s location. She closed her eyes and felt her other hand tense into a fist. She thought of Eric’s head and size of the bullet wound that she was able to use to scoop out his implant. She knew what she had to do.
* * *
Marie’s wife had been a skilled mechanic despite what Jess had been told. They worked together in the weeks it took before they reached a jump gate. She had little to teach the woman and decided that it was only her augmentations that gave her an edge. The rest of the crew left Jess alone and she wondered if Marie had found an excuse to help her without it seeming like a weakness to her people. The seemingly tight, maintained ship fascinated her because it was the polar opposite of Marcus’s despite doing the same work. Jess would have liked to stay on with them longer but she still left the ship when they docked into the jump carrier. She knew she had more important things to do.
What little money she had saved up before being stranded on Meidum was still available to her. The identification chip that she knew had been meshed to the one in her skull was still active and accurate, and passed through the jump carriers interiors with no trouble. Marie had given her a change of clothes and a hauling bag as a parting gift. Combined with the disassembled pieces of Eric’s rifle and Burke’s computer, they were her sole possessions. She had painstakingly traced her old ship to a space station in Prime system, named Foras. Its location hadn’t moved in the days she had been travelling; it wasn’t a good sign that it was still in use but she headed directly for it regardless.
There were hundreds of ships to choose from that were heading to Prime. It was the most populated system in human space. She offered little conversation to the crew and other passengers on the transport ship. She stayed in her room and constantly checked for any sign of movement from Freedom.
Jess searched continuously for any signs of Burke, even delving into bounty postings and active hunter listings. She was shocked to find him listed as a current target, rather than available for work. There was a warrant out for his capture and a price on his head, dead or alive for the murder of Adam Bancroft. There were details of the crime: Burke had broken into a high security control floor of the Foras station and killed Adam in his own office, in the station that he owned.
She closed her eyes and inhaled slowly. Freedom was still docked in that same station. It was possible, even likely, that Burke had been injured while he killed Adam and died anonymously somewhere on the station. The alternative might be worse: she was hunting someone capable of forcing his way into the heart of a secured station, killing its leader, and getting out alive. She remembered vividly how systematically he had torn through her old crew and decided that she needed to be careful. She needed a plan to even the odds against his near invincible battle aegis.
On Foras, she walked purposefully to the level that Freedom was docked on. She rented out a room on the same floor but on the opposite end of the station. She left her bag, rifle, and comput
er there and then went out and waited. She was confident that Burke didn’t even know she existed and wouldn’t recognize her, but she needed to be certain. She stood for hours outside of the hangar doors that housed the ship and waited. And waited. The hours became days but her resolve never weakened; standing on a climate controlled station with ample food, water, and noise around her was nothing compared to the solitary silence of Meidum’s nights.
Jess checked the hangar’s terminal and knew that Freedom was the only ship in that particular section. There was no way of telling how often someone entered or exited the facility. On the first night she saw a man enter with a delivery of food and leave shortly afterwards. The night next, a different man arrived with a similar delivery. Someone was inside but she had no way of telling if it was her target. Still, she waited.
Five days passed before Burke finally emerged. Jess maintained outwardly calm even as her heart rate spiked and searing vitriol boiled inside her chest. She recognized him easily from all of his video logs she had watched. She swapped a filter on her eye to look closer at him and check for weapons: he was wearing no armor, only simple clothes, had a handgun on his belt, and a military grade augmented leg. He had paid some price for his revenge on Adam then, she reasoned, and knew that it wasn’t enough.
The leg became an easy mark to follow as she trailed behind him. He moved directly toward a bar half way around the level and she recognized the name from all the deliveries he had received. She didn’t follow him in and stood outside instead, glancing casually back inside every few minutes. He was standing at the bar at first, then was sat alone at a booth, and was then joined by another man. They began to talk and Jess started to move.
She went back to her room, marched toward her bag and heaved it up over her shoulder. She walked back around the station, passing the same bar on her way to the hangar and turning her head, only for a brief moment, to confirm that Burke was still at the table. She marched onward, faster when she was passed the windows to the bar, until she arrived at the hangar. The terminal was easy to bypass. The ship’s alarms were meant to serve as the real deterrent to thieves, and its locks and pass codes as the barrier to unauthorized access.
She walked quickly into the hangar and passed the ship’s main doors. She longed to look over the ship’s hull and check for changes or new damages, but she had no idea how long Burke would be gone. If he left the bar shortly after she passed it, he would be only a few minutes behind her. She found the opening on the ship’s side and saw that the grating had never been replaced. She slipped easily inside of it and then pulled her bag in behind her. The compartment was as filthy and greasy as ever but the smell of it was oddly welcoming to her.
At the end of the compartment, she put her hands on the hidden door and took a breath. The next part was the only section of her plan that relied on luck. She was leaving it to chance that there was no longer anything blocking the door on the other side. If there was anyone else inside the ship, or if Burke’s AI was monitoring the interior, then she was ready to deal with that. If the door didn’t budge, however, then she needed to leave and formulate an entirely new plan.
She exhaled and pressed against the door and felt it give to her strength. She pushed herself up with her arms, sticking her head up into the ship as the doorway parted and pulling herself up. The bag came next and then she stayed crouched, hands on the floor, and peering around in the dim light of the ship. She could hear the faint hum of the engine and the air rushing through the ship’s ventilation. Immediately she could tell that alterations had been made and old rattling, damaged parts had been replaced for the ship’s innards to sound so smooth. She pushed the thought aside and strained her ears for any other sounds: footsteps, voices, breathing. She heard nothing and slowly stood upright.
The ship was vacant. Everywhere she looked she saw evidence of change. The walls were clean. The floors were swept. The cargo hold had been halved and another room was between it and the engine. The battle aegis and an extensive collection of firearms were inside but she moved past them and into the engine room. Surprisingly, she felt cheated when she looked over the repairs that had been denied to her so many times. Still, there were at least three that she saw had been missed and were still in the rigged state she had put them in. She hunkered down next to the engine and assembled the rifle. When it was locked and loaded she made a final check over the engine and then lay flat on her stomach. She waited.
When the ship’s doors lowered, there was the sound of one person’s footsteps but two voices. Their words were muffled through the ships walls and their words were difficult to make out. One man’s voice and a woman’s. Jess strained her ears and could still only hear one person moving around the ship. The doors closed. She heard the voices in the control room above her.
“How long,” Jess heard Burke begin to say, and then the rest was muffled.
“Three days,” the woman replied, louder and clearer than him. “That’s one less day than when you asked me yesterday.”
He responded. Jess couldn’t make it out.
“Only a little.”
She stood slowly, carefully. She reached her hand into the engine and wrapped her metal fingers around the part she had placed in there over a year earlier. She tensed her arm and was ready to pull when another voice, a third voice, spoke above her. She froze.
“Actually, no. Something else.”
A man’s voice. It was loud, louder than the woman’s. The AI, she knew, but not the new man. A transmission, she guessed, at the volume of the sound and its vibrations through the ship. She kept her hand in the engine but waited. If it was the man Burke had just met then he might come looking if the communication was abruptly severed. She gritted her teeth together and, again, waited.
“Last time we spoke,” she heard. “I offered to purchase back the AI we sold you.”
“The answer is still no.”
Jess closed her eyes. That was the loudest thing said yet. She had never heard an AI convey any emotions before, never mind such blatant anger. She reminded herself that it had helped Burke murder her crew.
The conversation above her ended. There was a moment of silence. Burke spoke again and she couldn’t discern the words.
“Then I pity him,” the AI’s voice.
Jess gripped the part tighter and pulled it as hard as she could. The part grinded free of the engine and its turbines immediately began to slow. The lights stayed on around her and she reached in for the second component, yanking it out and severing the ship’s draw on the emergency power. The engine’s thrumming went dead. The ventilation stopped. She moved quickly into the armory and flicked her augmented eye to see perfectly in the darkness. She took a single handgun from one of the many racks and then moved onto the door, knowing that above all else she had to keep Burke from getting to his armor.
She stepped quickly into the cargo hold and heard two shots slap into the wall behind her and a third in front of her. She stopped and crouched down. It was almost unfair, she thought, to watch him stumble around in the dark while she could see perfectly. Almost as unfair as how he had been invulnerable while he killed Eric, Alan, Marcus, and the others.
Her footsteps were light as she crept around to the stairs. He was shifting his gun abruptly in all the places that she wasn’t standing in as he moved down. At the bottom of the stairs, she threw the handgun into the corner and watched as he fired at the noise. She saw him turn as soon as he realized he had been tricked but she was too fast. Her metal hand slammed into his cheek and another series of shots blasted out of the gun. She was temporarily deafened from the noise but kept her eye on him in the dark, punching him once again in the face before ducking away from him barrelling forward, swinging his fists in wild, wide arcs into the dark.
Jess slammed her fist into Burke’s back, low around his spine and sent him to his knees. She quickly put her left hand on her right arm and triggered electric prongs from her fist. A jolt of electricity jumped between the two tips as
they charged and she put them below his neck from behind. She sent several pulses in until she was satisfied that he was subdued. He wasn’t unconscious, she knew, but he would be soon.
She grabbed his legs and dragged him to the jail cells.
* * *
Burke opened his eyes. His head felt heavy and it hurt when he tried to move. He was restrained to something. The jail cell was behind him. He turned to look and saw that he had been sat down and tied up, his wrists were bound together through the bars. It was a good knot, and he quickly knew that he wasn’t able break himself out of it. He looked around the room and saw that the lights had been turned back on. The lights were still dim, as if only the emergency power had been reconnected. He scowled at that. Cass wouldn’t be able to function properly and call for help if they only had the back up power.
His assailant wasn’t in the room. He intended to be standing when they returned and he moved his legs to start pushing his back up the bars. His left leg moved and his foot slid uselessly over the floor. His right augmented leg didn’t move and that was when he discovered the true restraint. The leg was disabled and, without any assisted movement from it, it became a dead weight keeping him pinned to the floor. He cursed and growled when he realized his attacker had taken no chances. He was helpless.
The door opened and Burke saw the same dim light come in from the cargo hold. The woman walked in holding a long barrelled rifle and he made his face as expressionless as possible. He stared up at her and looked at her face as she walked toward him. He didn’t recognize her. Quickly, he mentally flipped through anyone that could possibly want him dead: it was a long list, but she didn’t match anyone on it. An assassin maybe? Part of the slave cartel? Another bounty hunter?
“Burke Monrow,” she said calmly as the door slid closed behind her. “Your AI is very loyal. I couldn’t risk having the ship on full power when she wouldn’t cooperate.”
The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning Page 6
