The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection (2 page)

“Hello. My name is L,” she’d say
and stab them in the throat.

* * *

Burke Monrow knelt on the roof of
the building and knew that his target was standing below him. The city
stretched around him: the towering structures blocked his view of the horizon
in every direction. When he looked down, he saw dozens of connecting bridged
streets that linked the network of sprawling buildings. He was too high up to
see the ground, only the darkness. When he looked up, the perpetual rain that
soaked the city fell on the visor of his full suit of armor. The image of the
buildings above him, stretching tall enough that he could only see the tops of
a few of them, came through as distorted blurs through the blobs of rain on the
visor.

There was a window in the roof near
his feet. He lowered his head and looked through it and watched the rain drops
boil away. Cass, the AI that embodied his battle aegis when he left his ship,
activated the wave of heat that washed over the visor. She made sure that
nothing disturbed his view.

“Is that Taggus?” Burke asked
inside the helmet. His body was fully sealed and protected under the heavy
layers of power armor he wore.

“Yes,” Cass replied. Her voice came
through the internal speaker inside the suit’s helmet. She sounded as human as
Burke did; a stranger hearing her for the first time would have sworn they
heard another person speak and not an AI. To Burke, there was no need to make
that distinction.

The visor’s display split
vertically in half. On the left side of the display, Burke could still see
through the window below him. He could see his target below a drop of fifty
meters and the plethora of guards around him. In the right half of the display,
Cass cycled through the cameras of the building’s security network. She had
hacked effortlessly into their systems and showed Burke the other angles of the
room: the positions of the guards he couldn’t see through the window. As the
display shifted, she marked each of their positions relative to his vantage
point. When the visor returned to its normal view, he could see red target
reticules through the roof of the building.

“Taggus is the only Vruan in the
room,” Cass explained smoothly. “The others around him are human. They’re armed
but it’s nothing that my armor can’t withstand.”

“Your armor?” Burke asked with a
grin.

“Someone has to keep you safe.”

He was still grinning as he
tightened his grip on the assault rifle in his hands. He gave one final look
through the glass before he stood upright. He knew the window had been made to bear
the weight of far more than a single person, but his armor was heavy. Heavy
enough that hundreds of mechanisms shifted to assist his movement. Cass helped
coordinate that. He had to admit, sometimes the armor felt more hers than his.

He jumped forward onto the glass
and it crumbled beneath his feet. The cries of the guards below rushed up to
meet him as he fell. The rain came down with him, mixing in with the spraying
shards of glass. The room was brightly lit and the light was caught as it
pierced through the falling glass and water. It shimmered around him for the
first few seconds of his fall and then was lost as the guards began to fire.
The bullets replaced the sparkling glass as they crashed into him and were
obliterated in a hot burst of sparks when they failed to even scratch his
armor.

Burke landed in a crouch. The floor
cracked beneath his feet. He stood slowly as the guards continued to fire at
him. He held the rifle casually at chest level but made no movement to fire
back. Cass split the visor once again to display both sides of the room and he
could see all of the guards as they fired at him. He waited only a few more
seconds before the clicking sounds of empty weapons trying to be fired replaced
the deep percussions of propelled bullets. Burke cracked his neck and rolled
his shoulders.

“Stop showing off,” Cass said.

“I’m not. Watch,” he replied,
unable to hide his smile.

Two thirds of the guards threw
their weapons to the floor. They were the most intelligent among the group,
those who had landed more shots than they missed and had witnessed how it had
done nothing to their opponent. The stubborn ones began reloading to try again.
Taggus was bellowing out orders to them.

“They’re thieves, not killers,”
Burke said. “We’ll wound. Not kill.”

He shifted the rifle in his hands
then. He moved faster than heavy armor should have allowed, turning with the
rifle and in time with Cass’s help. Five of the guards still held their
weapons: two in front and three behind. He lined up the first two shots without
stopping, bobbing the rifle up and then down. He sent a bullet in the shoulder
of the first guard and into the thigh of the second. They both staggered back
and fell to the floor.

The three behind Burke opened fire.
He turned into the barrage of bullets and aimed each shot unperturbed as the
gunfire slammed into him. He downed two more guards with shots to the legs. The
final one, a man, had shielded his lower body behind one of the crates they had
stolen. Burke lined his last shot carefully and punched a bullet into the man’s
arm. He recoiled when the bullet hit, falling back and vanishing behind the
crate.

Taggus held a vruan-made pistol,
specifically designed for the alien’s three fingered hands. The vruans stood on
two legs and were one of the rare humanoid races in the galaxy. They were
typically a few centimeters shorter than most humans but Taggus was tall for
his race. His skin was a chaotic mess of differing colors and textures: it was
common for vruans to be heavily augmented. Burke looked closely at the alien’s
face and saw the hexagonal pattern shift like scales instead of skin. More
orders were screamed into the room. None of the guards responded.

“What am I paying you for!” Taggus
roared, in the shared language that most alien races agreed upon. Both Burke
and Cass were perfectly fluent in it.

“Hold out your hands,” Burke roared
back. His voice boomed through the outer speaker from his aegis. “Or I’ll have
to break them.”

The alien’s face contorted, the
hexagonal scales changing color as the look of rage spread over his face. He
punched forward with his handgun and fired what remained of its magazine. Burke
marched forward and felt each bullet deflect off his armor as if they were
small pebbles.

Cass magnetized the chest plate of
the aegis and displayed a prompt for Burke on the visor. He let go of his rifle
and it fastened itself onto the front of his armor. He unhooked the grapple
line he kept in his belt and unraveled it. Taggus took two steps backwards
before Burke rushed out and grabbed one of his arms. True to his word, he
twisted it hard enough to give the alien a warning of a broken arm and then
loosened his grip when he stopped resisting. He tied the vruan’s arms and legs
up quickly and then heaved him up over his left shoulder. Cass locked his left
arm in place then, using the strength of the armor to bear the load of the
alien’s weight.

Burke looked back at the broken
window in the ceiling. He judged the distance to be too great to reach, even
with the launching mechanisms in his leg and armor. Cass displayed the exact
distance over his vision and confirmed that they would fall short of reaching
it. He looked across the room and to the single door on the other side.

“There are stairs in there,” Cass
explained, cycling through the building’s cameras as she did so. “A quick climb
to the roof. I’ll call the ship.”

“The new pilot better respond,”
Burke said curtly.

“He will. Trust him,” she replied.

He moved quickly across the room.
He felt empty bullet cases and broken glass crunch beneath his feet with each
step. The guards that he hadn’t fired upon were shifting awkwardly on their
feet, unsure if they were allowed to leave or were being apprehended like their
boss.

“Useless! All of you!” Taggus
screamed while he was carried across the room.

“Quiet,” Burke growled.

There was another stolen crate near
the door. He was a few steps away from it when one of the guards wheeled around
from behind it. Burke saw the shotgun in his hands and then felt the blast of
it being fired at point-blank range into his face. The visor’s display was a
frazzled mess of static and played tricks on his eyes before his vision fully cleared.
The guard looked horrified that his weapon had done nothing even after being
fired so close. Burke twisted his right arm to trigger the front blade out of
the aegis’s forearm. He held it up in a mocking strike over the terrified
guard’s throat and then lowered his hand. He twisted his arm again to retract
the blade and then shoved the man out of the way instead.

“No killing, only wounding. Good,
Burke,” Cass commended.

“Useless,” Taggus muttered again.

Burke shouldered open the door and
stepped inside. The stairwell was a generous size, enough to accommodate a few
people at a time. It was poorly lit, however, and Cass adjusted the visor to
help him see. He could hear people shuffling up the stairs below them. More
guards he guessed, rushing to where they heard the sound of gunfire.

“Up here!” Taggus yelled. “He’s up
here!”

“There’s still time to break your
arm,” Burke said.

He turned to the stairs and began
ascending, two steps at a time. He judged the weight of the alien on his
shoulder before he began to run. The guards below them could do him no harm,
but they might be foolish enough to open fire and kill Taggus. The bounty on
his head specifically wanted him alive.

“Faster!” Taggus roared. “He’s
getting away!”

They were near the top of the
stairs. Burke rushed up the final steps quickly, put his hand on the door
handle, and twisted his arm so that Taggus collided hard into the wall of the
stairwell. He heard the alien groan on contact and grinned.

The door wasn’t locked. Burke
stepped through and closed it behind him. He was back on the roof and could see
the broken window a few meters ahead. He looked up and saw the rain falling
between the towering buildings of the city. He did not see or hear his ship.

“Cass, did you stay linked with the
ship?”

“Yes, but we won’t need it. Rylan
is a good pilot. He’ll be here,” she answered.

“Check on him.”

“That’s not necessary. I trust
him.”

“I’m still trying,” Burke said.

The sound of the guards stomping up
the last few stairs came through the door. Burke leaned back against it and
lodged his foot to block it. He felt someone barge into the door and then fall
away from it. A few moments passed before they opened fire. Cass unlocked
Burke’s left arm and he stretched it out, holding Taggus away from the door and
away from stray bullets that broke through. Burke looked up at him and saw the
rain falling into his face.

“Just kill me,” he spluttered.

Burke stood against the door. He
felt a second attempt as someone rammed themselves into it. Another torrent of
bullets railed through the door and into him. He gritted his teeth and turned
back to look out over the roof. He was about to once again condemn the new
pilot, Rylan, for abandoning him before he saw the ship appear in the distance.
It tore its way through the rain after weaving dangerously between two nearby
buildings, barely large enough for the size of the ship. He wanted to shake his
head.

“And you accused me of showing
off,” Burke muttered.

“He’s just as good as flying as you
are at fighting,” Cass replied, sounding like she had a smile on her face.

He huffed and then felt a third
collision into the door behind him. Bracing it or not, he knew the door would
likely break soon. He kept his eyes locked on the ship. Usually he had time to
admire the vessel he and Cass had purchased, with its sleek exterior in the
same black and white colors of his battle aegis. On the roof, he urged it to
move faster and then wanted to curse himself as his wish came true. He watched
as Rylan recklessly swung the ship into a spin, turning into the momentum of the
ship for a last burst of speed before it abruptly came to a halt a few meters
away from the roof. The sound of the engine was enough to blare out the gunfire
from behind him.

The front doors of the ship, on the
lower level and below the helm, began to open and Burke pressed away from the
door. One of the guards rammed into it just as he pressed away and he heard the
door crash onto the roof. Burke held Taggus out in front of him, as if he was a
war banner he was leading into battle. The alien screamed in fear as he was
held out over the roof, seemingly about to fall off of it. Burke slid over the
final meter on the roof and crouched down as a wave of gunfire slammed in his
back. Cass triggered the launch mechanisms in his leg and armor and he was
propelled forward. He felt the moment during which he hung in the air and the
ship elongate: the bullets crushing themselves into his back, Taggus screaming,
and the roar of the ship’s engine. Then he felt his feet on the floor of his ship
and the doors snapped together. The floor lurched beneath him as the ship
turned and flew away. The bullets smacking into the broad side of the ship were
lost in the rain.