The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1)

by Jasper T. Scott

  The FTL drive spins up with a rising whine, followed by a jolt as stars turn to elongated lines that swirl around us in a maelstrom of light. Relative silence endures, and then the FTL kicks out with another jolt several seconds later. We’re right at the edge of Arkania’s FTL inhibition field.

  The comms crackle with an automated greeting from system traffic control aboard Arkania’s Orbital Transfer Station.

  “This is Arkania Traffic Control to the Seraph. Welcome to Arkania and the Coalition! Please power down your engines and prepare for scanning.”

  “Copy that Arkania TC,” Aurora says.

  “While waiting to be scanned, please be sure to declare the purpose of your visit, all crew and passengers, and a full manifest of the cargo and personal items on board. Please remember, any misrepresentation of manifest, crew, or purpose of travel is a criminal offense that may be punishable by a fine of up to fifty thousand credits or seven years in prison.”

  Aurora snorts and shakes her head. “I’ll try to remember that,” she mutters to herself. Twisting around in her seat, she nods to Violet. “Name and ID code?”

  “Dreana Morgan,” Violet says. She doesn’t rattle off her ID, but I notice her name pop up on my holoband as she changes her neuralink’s privacy settings. Now Aurora can pull up Violet’s ID code for herself.

  “Dreana, huh?” I ask.

  Violet nods.

  I didn’t bother asking her real name earlier because it didn’t seem to matter. It was pretty clear that Violet wasn’t a threat to me. Also, it didn’t seem fair to ask for her real name when I wasn’t going to tell her mine.

  “Anything I should know before I declare you to Arkania TC?”

  “Like what?” Violet asks.

  “Like any outstanding warrants for your arrest.”

  “None. I was a law-abiding citizen.”

  “You mean until you got to Margrave.”

  Violet doesn’t reply, but I glare at the side of Aurora’s face. Kind of bitchy to throw that in her face.

  “What about you, Erin Thul?” Aurora asks.

  “I’m clean.”

  “Better be. All right, here goes...”

  Moments later the comms crackle with another message.

  “Thank you, Seraph. Stand by for scanning.”

  “Copy.”

  “What about Brighten and her kids?” Violet asks.

  Aurora makes another face.

  “Arkania is skies strict about xenos,” Violet says.

  “Shit,” Aurora mutters. “She’s right.” Keying the comms once more, she says, “Arkania TC, this is the Seraph. We have additional passengers to declare. Slipped my mind, but we have an exotic Xeno aboard, along with a few dozen of its chicks.”

  Chicks? I think to myself. That makes Brighten sound like a bird. But maybe that’s accurate. What the hell do I know.

  A sigh rattles back. “You will not be allowed to land on Arkania, but you’re welcome to berth at the transfer station and take a shuttle to the surface.”

  “Copy, TC,” Aurora says. “We’ll do that. Thank you.”

  Aurora turns her seat to face me and Violet.

  “There is no reason for us to ride down with you. Think you can get home from the transfer station?”

  “I don’t have any credits,” Violet says, glancing briefly at me. She quickly adds, “Don’t worry, I’ll call my husband. He’ll send the money.”

  Will he? I wonder.

  Violet gets busy with the controls in the armrest of her chair. A comms display springs to life, floating in the air in front of her with the number already dialed.

  It starts ringing.

  Someone picks up on the second ring and a handsome man appears, lounging in a reclining chaise lounge by the shimmering blue water of an outdoor pool. The sky behind him is bright blue and cloudless. Palm trees are soaring in the background.

  A comm drone. Has to be, because he’s not wearing a holoband. There is a sliver of a woman visible lying beside him on a matching recliner, face down in a bikini, her head turned away from the comm drone.

  “Hello?” he says.

  “Hi, Grant. It’s me. Dreana.”

  Grant’s face pales as he recognizes her from the video feed on his end. He sits up suddenly, looking confused, blinking rapidly.

  “Dreana? How...”

  “Someone rescued me.”

  He hesitates for several seconds. “Thank Deus!” he finally says.

  But he’s not actually that happy to see her. My guess is that the woman lying beside him is Dreana’s replacement.

  “How are the kids?” Dreana asks.

  “They’re great. They’re at school right now, but... yeah, great. They’re great. What ahh...” he scratches the side of his face. Then runs a hand through his thick brown hair as if his scalp just started itching furiously. “Who rescued you?”

  “A freelancer passing through Margrave.”

  “Margrave! Is that where you’ve been? I thought... we thought you were...”

  Dead? I think to myself.

  By now Dreana has to have noticed the woman lying beside her husband. She has to know that two years is a long time. He gave her up for dead, so he moved on.

  Dreana doesn’t seem surprised or dismayed. Resigned maybe. But not surprised.

  “Grant, darling, who is it?” A familiar voice asks from his end of the call. The woman beside him sits up and turns to the camera.

  And suddenly I get why Grant is acting so frazzled to see his wife.

  Dreana’s jaw drops. Now she’s definitely surprised. She expected him to move on. She just didn’t expect him to move on with a resurrected bot lovingly recreated in her image.

  “Who is that?” The Dreana in front of me asks. And the exact same question echoes back over the comms from her synthetic twin after only a second of delay.

  Chapter 38

  “If you ever come back to Arkania, you’re welcome to come stay with us,” Dreana says as she hugs me goodbye in the airlock.

  “I’m not sure your husband will agree.”

  She pulls back with a frown. “You saved me. He owes you, too.”

  I’m still not convinced that he’s glad to have her back, and I’m definitely not convinced that their plans to conduct a three-way marriage will last, but I acknowledge Dreana’s point with a nod and a shrug.

  If Grant is as much of an asshole as I secretly suspect he is, then he probably convinced his resurrected bot wife to use her newfound dominion over her mind and body to mold herself into his idea of the perfect wife.

  If it comes down to a competition between the original bio version of Dreana and her artificial clone, then the bot will win, hands down, every time. Hell, that’s even a pretty decent motive for him to have hired the Raiders that abducted Dreana in the first place. In the Coalition you can’t legally resurrect someone unless you can demonstrate reasonable proof that they’re dead. Maybe that was what he wanted. Out with the old and in with the new.

  But then why recreate the new wife in his old one’s image? There are plenty of resurrected women out there who’ll guarantee a rich man (or woman) that they’ll craft themselves into the perfect spouse—in exchange for a few reasonable guarantees in return.

  Whatever the case, Grant has what he wants now, so hopefully Dreana will be safe. She’ll wind up filing for a divorce, or maybe just an annulment to the addendum they’re about to file to make their marriage a three-way affair. They’ll probably get shared custody of the kids.

  “Speaking of debts,” Dreana says. “Send me your contact details and an account where I can reimburse you for your trouble.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “It is. I’ll make sure my husband pays you. At least as much as Aurora charged. If you want to be noble, you should at least make sure that you cover your expenses.”

  “I suppose that’s fair.” Pulling up Erin Thul’s contact card and account details, I forward both to Dreana.

  “Got it.” S
he smiles prettily at me and sends her contact details back. “See you around, Erin.”

  I nod and back out of the airlock. Aurora triggers the inner doors shut, and a moment later we hear the outer ones cycling open. Footsteps echo quietly down the tunnel to Arkania Orbital Transfer Station, and then the airlock seals up and even that sound is gone.

  “Hell of a life she’s going back to,” I say, and I hope she doesn’t wind up right back where I found her. A custody battle is another fine motive for Grant to want to get rid of her.

  “That’s her business. Let’s get on with ours.”

  Aurora turns away and I follow her back up the ramp to the top deck. Along the way, I hear echoes of the ongoing chaos in the mess hall. Bry’s kids are about three times the size that they were when they hatched. They’ve gone from the size of marbles to golf balls.

  Pushing those thoughts from my head, I glance at Aurora. I notice that she’s scowling, and there is this aura around her that makes the air feel brittle and sharp, as if it’s electrically charged.

  She just got a visceral reminder of the strongest argument against resurrection. You can resurrect someone from their neuroscan data, and they might think and act the same way and have all the same memories, but is it really them? And if so, how is it possible that you can create infinite simultaneous copies of a person? Which one is really you? All of them? Or is it only the original that’s the real you?

  It all depends on which theory of mind you ascribe to. One theory says that there is nothing special about the individual, that what we think of as us is just a unique set of memories and experience influenced by a unique set of DNA and brain structure. You can duplicate it, simulate it, or change it as many times as you like, and each subjective experience of consciousness will go on with each individual stream believing itself to be the most authentic, real version of itself.

  But there is another school of thought. One that says consciousness can’t be transferred without destroying it. Those are the one who’ve resigned themselves to death, either because they believe it’s inevitable, or because they believe in some kind of afterlife. And some of those people have found a middle ground by becoming cyborgs, slowly transitioning one neuron at a time from biological to synthetic life in order to prevent any abrupt cessation of their original consciousness.

  When we reach the cockpit, Aurora sits and stares silently into space, making no move to detach from the transfer station. Aurora didn’t bother to pull into a closed hangar this time. Since we weren’t planning to stay for long, she simply docked with one of the station’s external airlocks instead.

  “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “I died,” Aurora says slowly, confirming my assumptions about her current train of thought.

  “More than once, right? You said this body is only ten years old. That implies you’ve had more than one. I assumed you meant more than one synthetic body.”

  Aurora nods. “But it’s the first time that really counts. Transfer from one synthetic body to another doesn’t feel like death, but that first time... you go from flesh and blood, to this...” Aurora holds up her hands and slowly turns them over, studying them carefully. The nanites have long since finished repairing the damage she did to her synthetic skin when she forced those doors open on Margrave Station.

  “Must be a strange feeling,” I say.

  “Intellectually, I know that I died, but it feels like that happened to someone else. I couldn’t have died, because here I am.”

  “Right. I can’t say I have any experience with that, but it must have some benefits. You’re stronger now. Harder to kill. And all of those annoying little biological needs can be ignored or turned on and off at will. Sounds like you traded up to me.”

  Aurora looks to me with one eyebrow raised. “Then why haven’t you?”

  That’s a good question.

  “You’re not even transitioning, are you?” she asks, pressing the issue.

  “No.”

  “So you believe in an afterlife?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have a death wish.”

  “I get regular neuroscans.”

  “And you have a bot waiting to receive them?”

  I nod.

  Aurora smiles. “You’re lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I traded up, remember? Biologicals have plenty of tells.”

  “Fair enough.” I’m quietly unnerved by what she just learned about me. It’s bad news in my line of business for a potential adversary to know that if they kill me I won’t be coming back to avenge my own death.

  But that’s not exactly true.

  “If you don’t believe in an afterlife, then why not buy yourself some insurance?”

  “I do have neuroscans,” I remind her.

  “But no bots to copy them to? What’s the point of that?”

  “My insurance will cover it.”

  Let’s see if she makes the connection.

  Aurora hesitates. Then her eyes turn flinty and she appears to grasp my meaning. “So you can be resurrected, but only if whoever you’ve assigned as your executor makes that call? Like if you need to avenge your own death.”

  “That’s right.”

  Maybe knowing that will make Aurora think twice about betraying me when it comes time for payment.

  “But if you die under less aggravating circumstances, you stay dead.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay. Again... why? You’re obviously not against resurrection on principle.”

  “Whenever my time finally comes, assuming it comes by the hand of fate and not my enemies, then that’ll be the universe’s way of saying, that’s enough, Cade.”

  “Enough of what?”

  I shrug. “Just enough.”

  “Enough killing?” Aurora guesses.

  “Enough of everything.”

  Aurora’s expression becomes perplexed. She leans back and shakes her head. “Well, you’re a fucking enigma. What drives you Cade Korbin?”

  “What do you care?”

  “You don’t have any family. No active relationships. You didn’t try anything with Dreana—or me.” Her mouth twists wryly with that. “So what’s your deal? You don’t seem to enjoy life, and you’re not taking steps to hang onto it. But you’re still getting out there every day, doing your job, and doing it better than ninety-nine percent of other hunters. Yet somehow, you’re not rich either. So it’s not about the credits. What exactly gets you out of bed in the morning?”

  “What makes you think I’m not rich?”

  “Because if you were, you wouldn’t be taking up space on my ship. You’d be out there flying your own.”

  “I told you—Mohinari took my ship.”

  “A hunter with a rating as high as yours and as many completed contracts as you should have his own fleet by now.”

  “What can I say, I’m bad at managing my finances.” This little interrogation of Aurora’s is getting too close for comfort.

  “Then what do you do with all of your credits?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Fine. Keep your secrets. But if you really do have a death wish, you’d better not be planning to get me killed along with you.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  A loud crash draws our attention out the open cockpit doors and down the ramp to the lower deck.

  “We need to do something about those fucking xenos.”

  “Agreed, but Bry stays with me.”

  “You think she’ll want to part with her kids?”

  As if to answer that question, a familiar white furball with matted green streaks of vomit in her fur comes hopping up the ramp. She flies through the open doors to the cockpit and launches herself into my lap. She tucks herself into a tight ball, and doesn’t emerge again.

  “Looks like she’s hiding,” Aurora says.

  Chirr-up! Chirr-up! Chirr-up! A wave of tiny fur balls comes hopping up the ramp.
<
br />   “Shit, they got out,” I say.

  Aurora slams the cockpit doors in their faces and a locking bolt thunks into place, but I can still hear the echoes of their tiny voices on the other side.

  “They figured out how to open doors,” Aurora says. I notice that she’s playing back a recording from the ship’s security system that shows Bry fleeing the mess hall and shutting her kids inside. Then one of those tiny furballs mimics what their mother did to open the door—a skinny black tongue darts out to trigger the physical door controls. And then a wave of greenish-white furballs goes chirruping after her.

  Bry is shivering in my lap and chirring pitifully to herself.

  “I think she’ll be okay with us ditching them at our next stop.”

  “What a great mother they have,” Aurora quips.

  “If you had fifty kids, you’d be itching to get rid of them, too.”

  “I’m a bot. I can’t have kids,” Aurora says. I glance at her, but her attention is on the flight controls now, muscle memory directing her hands over physical controls while she mentally accesses and controls the holoscreens around her.

  Bots are notoriously hard to read, but I could have sworn that Aurora’s tone was angry, even begrudging. She definitely misses being a biological human, and the fact that she can never have children might just be the reason.

  Strange. She’s a bot. Why doesn’t she just tweak herself to turn off the biological imperative to procreate?

  It’s like she wants to be miserable, always longing for something she can never have. The only reason I can think of for that is because missing her biological body is a part of what drives her. And that makes me think that what drives her is revenge.

  Just like that, I’m more curious than ever about Aurora’s past. I wonder what happened to whoever killed her that first time.

  And then I wonder if it was me.

  I’ve killed a lot of people, but I remember all of their faces, and none of them looked like Aurora.

  But who’s to say that she wasn’t wearing a different face back then?