The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection (3 page)

* * *

The ship ascended smoothly into a
low orbit around the planet. Burke had spent days on the surface with Cass and
was happy to be back in his home. They had owned the ship for less than a year
but he already felt the most comfortable when he was within it.

He had asked Cass to name the ship.
At first, she had been ecstatic to be the one to name the vessel and then spent
the next few days agonizing over the decision.

“Brisbane,” she said, trying to
hide the fact that she was nervous. “I think we should call the ship Brisbane.”

Burke had been taken aback by her
choice, so much so that he hadn’t noticed she was worried about offending him.

“You’ve been reading my war
records?”

“I read them a long time ago,” Cass
said. “Are you happy with the name?”

In truth, he had been uncertain. Brisbane
had been the last city on Earth to fall to the animalistic aliens that now
infested the planet. He had been present on the surface the day that the planet
was abandoned, ready to defend the city while the last few inhabitants made
their escape. In the months after hearing her choice, however, he had grown to
appreciate it. He liked the name.

The Brisbane reached orbit before
Burke could deposit Taggus into an empty jail cell on the upper level of the
ship. He untied the vruan and then pushed him into the cell. The alien had his
hands clutched around the bars the moment after Burke locked the barred door. Taggus
pressed his head between the bars and hissed out words in his native language.
Burke couldn’t understand it.

“Your race helped construct the
universal language. That’s why we have so many clicking sounds to make when we
talk,” Burke said. “Use it.”

Taggus continued to hiss.

“He says you’re not worthy of the
effort,” Cass announced, translating quickly.

The vruan continued to ramble.

“I was worth the effort on the
planet,” Burke pointed out.

Taggus’s skin shifted abruptly to a
scarlet purple. He hissed and clicked out more words.

“He’s swearing at you now. A lot,”
Cass said slowly.

“It’s nothing personal,” Burke said.
“You stole some things. You’ll be imprisoned for a while. They’ll let you out.
Hopefully I won’t have to find you again.”

The alien let out a low roar. His
eyes widened as a sucking noise emitted from his throat. His cheeks puffed out
for a moment and then he spat on the floor between them. The blob of mucus at
Burke’s feet was thick and the same color as the vruan’s skin. Taggus hissed
again.

“I don’t think I need to translate
that,” Cass said.

“Yeah that part was pretty clear,”
Burke agreed.

He turned and exited the room,
leaving the light on for Taggus. The jail cells were on the starboard side of
the ship and were the closest room to the engine at the rear of the vessel. The
port side was entirely made up of three bedrooms: the middle one for himself,
the closest one to the helm for Rylan, and an unoccupied one near the engine
room. The kitchen, meeting area, and armory took up what remained of the
starboard side.

Burke walked into the armory and
put away his rifle and the holdout pistol he kept in a hidden compartment in
his armor’s hip. He removed the helmet of his aegis first, already aware that
Cass transferred herself back into Brisbane’s network and was synchronizing
herself with its systems. He frowned when he looked over the torso portion of
his armor. He had sustained enough hits to leave blackened streaks that he
would have to clean. He was happy to see that he had taken no damage—sometimes
it didn’t seem fair, he was virtually invincible against the standard firearms
that common criminals used. It took military grade firepower to break through
the protective layers of armor, and even then it would require a number of
direct hits. The battle aegis was one of the most advanced pieces of hardware
he had ever seen, and had also been the most expensive. It had taken him years
of saving before he purchased it.

Stripped of all the pieces of the
armor, he felt light and exposed standing in only thin underclothes. He looked
down at his augmented leg and knew he carried a piece of the armor with him,
always. He had lost it years earlier, when his leg had been broken and crushed.
He had requested the leg portion of his aegis be used in the construction of
the prosthetic and it interlocked perfectly with his armor. He looked down at
the small insignia of the company that had made it—Spectrum Industries. That
piece of hardware had not been cheap either.

He walked out of the armory and
into his quarters. He barely gave the room a glance as he moved directly for
his shower. Spending days in his armor had left him feeling unclean. He felt
instantly better when the hot water hit him, scraping the feeling of dried
sweat from his skin and hair. He felt fully at ease by the time he began to
towel himself dry in the middle of his room.

“You should come and speak to
Rylan,” Cass’s voice spoke quietly throughout the room. He was used to her
unannounced presence.

“I’ll be a few more minutes,” Burke
answered.

He looked around the room as he
dabbed himself with the towel. The room was far larger than his previous ship.
The luxurious conditions had been surprisingly difficult to adjust to after so
many years of scraping by. His bed was twice the size than was necessary for
only him. There was a robust collection of exercise equipment and free weights
stored in the far wall across from the bed. The room’s private computer system
was of a similar high quality, complete with a display screen that encapsulated
the wall opposite the private bathroom. They were small features in comparison
to the millions of credits they had spent on the ship’s engine, reinforced
hull, and outer weapons. Still, he had been shocked to find that the smaller
details had been the hardest to adapt to.

Burke used the wall display as a
record of his life since he became a bounty hunter. After he got dressed, he
looked over the information he had collected and organized on the wall. The top
left corner had been devoted to Earth and the aliens, the dross, that had
claimed it. Next to it he listed out everything he knew about ACU, a secretive
branch of the government that hired Burke at least once a year. His last job
for them had been to return to Earth to retrieve a crashed drone. He had been
paid well but the task had never made sense.

“Cass,” he said out loud, keeping
his eyes on the screen.

“Burke?”

“Any messages from Havard since
we’ve been back?”

Havard was the head of ACU. He
oversaw many different research projects, ranging from alien biology to weapons
development. Burke had purchased his battle armor from ACU along with Cass, the
AI that came with the aegis. Throughout the previous year, Havard had been
pestering Burke to sell Cass back to them. She was apparently unique among AIs,
as she was still functional after five years of operations. The unrestricted
AIs in ACU rarely lasted six months.

“No messages,” Cass answered.

Burke frowned. He was certain
Havard was involved in far more than he let on, and it was unlike the man to
give up on something so suddenly. He had offered a ludicrous amount of money to
repurchase Cass or at least make a copy of her. Burke had left the decision up
to her and had been happy when she declined. He looked over the display and
wondered if Havard was plotting something. Cass often mentioned strange transmissions
arriving from ACU that she was unable to decipher. It made him uncomfortable.

Next to the files on ACU were the
ones on himself: Burke Monrow, Bounty Hunter, 32 years old, and a wanted man.
He felt instinctively at his augmented leg when his eyes looked over the open
bounty on his head for the murder of Adam Bancroft. They had fought together in
the war for Earth and went on to work together afterwards as bounty hunters.
Adam had betrayed Burke and left him for dead on an isolated world. He had lost
many things from that betrayal: his leg and name among them. He had acquired a
new name after getting his revenge on Adam. He went by Jack Porter to avoid the
problems that came with an active price on his head. He knew all too well how
many bounty hunters would be on his trail if he had not meticulously crafted
the new identity for himself.

He looked over the rest of the
display and was temporarily overwhelmed by the open files that needed answers. There
were dozens of profiles on suspected slavers, a target that Burke never hesitated
in tracking down whether there was an active bounty or not. He saw a picture of
Eva Pond, a slaver he had killed more than a year earlier, and wondered if her
associates would ever strike back at him.

Geoff, one of his main contacts for
high priority work, was next to the slaver groups. Burke had saved his daughter
many years earlier after she had been kidnapped. The leader of that group had
evaded him while he rescued her, and he often asked Cass to reach out and find
any information on the man. The latest update to the file had been years ago
but he still kept it near the middle of the wall. He hated that the bastard had
gotten away from him.

He glossed over the hundreds of
other names and faces—rival bounty hunters, old war friends that he lost touch
with, his contacts in the human fleet. Frank Copper. Admiral Viscard. Natalie
Ambrose. Burke’s look softened when he came to the name Jessica Richmond.

“Burke. Are you coming out?” Cass
asked.

“Soon. What’s the latest on Jess?”

He had unknowingly wronged Jess and
nearly killed her. She had tracked him down and had the opportunity to kill him,
and then forgave him instead. Burke still felt that he hadn’t deserved that
show of mercy. He asked Cass to gently watch her whereabouts if there was ever
an opportunity to repay that show of kindness.

“Her ship was last seen in Prime,”
Cass said slowly. “It went out of range of the system’s network two days ago.
Heading in the direction of the Stratos system. Smuggling through the trade
embargo there, I think.”

“That could be dangerous. Will you
keep an eye on her?”

“I like Jess,” Cass replied. “I’d
do it even if you didn’t ask me.”

Burke turned away from the display.
He knew the screen would automatically power off after he left the room. He
looked down the corridor to the open door to the command room and walked toward
it. The helm was alight with several screens of its own. There were four
terminals in total in the room: three on each side of the square room, with a
chair that raised and lowered so the user was surrounded by the consoles, and
one central podium. Each of the consoles handled different areas of the ship:
navigation at the front, and interior systems and weapons on the sides. The
central podium was for Cass and it hummed to life as Burke entered the room,
displaying the holographic representation of the AI. She was smiling at him.

“Took you long enough,” she said.
The speakers built seamlessly into the podium made the words sound like they
came from her mouth. In the early days, when she first received the
experimental projector, she had been unable to match the movement of her lips
with the words she said. After months of experience, she was now natural enough
to pass as a person being transmitted to the ship.

Burke walked around the podium to
look at Rylan, who was busy at the helm. The man had only been with them for a
month and was the direct result of Jess’s act of forgiveness. It had been the moment
his outlook on life had shattered. He realized he had barely recovered anything
of his life after Adam tried to kill him, living in isolation for too long.
Burke was trying his best to trust again and hiring the pilot had been one of
the first steps toward the goal. Still, he had not yet entrusted the man with
his real name.

“Welcome back Captain,” Rylan said,
looking at Burke in the reflection in the ship’s main window.

“Call me Jack, please,” Burke said.
“Captain makes me think of the war.”

Rylan nodded and said nothing else.
Burke always felt awkward around the man: he was used to leading people, but
the pilot was skilled enough that he required little direction. Rylan said even
fewer words. The only times he could get a conversation out of him was when he
asked about flying the ship.

“That was some maneuver you pulled
off down there,” Burke commented. “You turned the ship faster than I thought
was possible.”

“I’m still getting a feel for the
Brisbane Cap—Jack,” Rylan closed his eyes as he misspoke. “I was a few minutes
later than I should have been.”

“You got us out of there in the
end. That’s all that matters today,” Burke said. He turned and saw Cass beaming
proudly at him for paying the pilot a compliment. He rolled his eyes and Cass
silently laughed.

“If you say so,” Rylan said. “Thank
you,” he added.

Burke nodded once and turned to the
terminal closest to him. He cycled through the ship’s security system until he
settled on the feed from the ship’s jail cells. He saw that Taggus had huddled
up into one of the corners of his cell and was ignoring the bed. The vruan’s
skin had reverted back to its calm greenish blue from the agitated purple it
had been earlier.