The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection (5 page)

“A few years now,” Burke lied.
“Cass and I go back further than that though. We worked together while I was
still a mercenary. It’s where we made most of our money.”

Rylan nodded once but still had the
odd look in his eyes. Not for the first time Burke wondered if the pilot’s reaction
to Cass might cause problems. It was unusual for an AI to be unrestricted and
unheard of to be called a partner or a person rather than a tool. So far they
had functioned without any incident. He wondered if Cass had been speaking much
to the man.

“We’re still getting our name out
there,” Burke added.

“Which brings us to our next job, actually,”
Cass said. “I was thinking we should take a high profile posting. Something
difficult. We’ll do it for the fame. The money won’t be unwelcome either.”

Burke considered her proposal.
Before changing his name to Jack Porter, Burke Monrow was becoming well known
in the galaxy. Many of their better jobs came directly to him or through Geoff,
bypassing the public postings and paying extravagant sums of credits. The funds
would be good to have more equipment or a backup ship if the current one was damaged
during a battle.

“I agree,” he said out loud. “What
do you have in mind?”

To Burke’s surprise, Rylan remained
in the room and listened to them going over potential contracts. They discussed
navigating the warp gates between systems and how long it would take to reach
the different locations marked in the candidates. Most of the head hunting
contracts required extensive use of Cass’s capabilities: hacking through
surveillance networks, warp gate passport logs, and facial recognition scans.
She had already completed rudimentary scans for the targets in their suspected
systems, resulting in tens of thousands of possible matches for them to sort
through.

“This is more complicated than I
thought it would be,” Rylan said.

Burke gave a short laugh. He was
surprised that the pilot was so interested; it was the most he remembered the
man speaking since he arrived on the ship.

“It’s difficult to find someone in
the billions of people out here,” Cass explained. “Hunters like us are useful
because of that. Investigators are usually chained to certain planets and
systems. They don’t have the authority to officially move around like we can.”

“Officially?” Rylan asked.

“Well, what we do isn’t always
legal,” Burke said. “Nor is it really illegal. It’s a gray area. One that
society might want to be rid of, but we’re still a necessity.”

Burke resumed his conversation with
Cass. Rylan looked toward the news screen while they reviewed information on
the terminals built around the table—they were finally being used for their intended
purpose. Burke was barely paying attention to the news when Rylan broke into
the conversation.

“How about that?” he said.

“How about what?” Burke replied.

“On the news. I mean, we’re here
already. They’re talking about Liveria.”

Burke turned to the screen. He
heard the volume of the report increase and guessed it was Cass’s doing. Oliver
Black was still reporting on local news from the planet.

“Once again, the following images
may be disturbing for some viewers.”

Warning or not, Burke saw that the
report had been dramatized as much as possible. There were many close up shots
on mutilated humans and vruans, both left dead in the damp streets of the city
below. Legs and arms were missing and, in one case, a whole head. Some of the
corpses had been shot, others looked to have been stabbed. Each one looked to
have been cut up after they had been killed.

“The latest in a spree of murders,”
Oliver Black’s voice over began. “Authorities are exploring all possible leads
but it is currently believed that it is the work of two escaped convicts that
were undergoing volunteer experiments at Spectrum Industries in an exchange for
a reduced sentence. The man and woman are Shaw and Lumen Greer. They are
extremely well armed and believed to be currently hiding in the lower streets
of the northern quadrant. Any information on their whereabouts will be
rewarded.”

The report continued with an
interview with a police investigator issuing the typical warnings about being
safe when out in the city at night, blissfully ignoring the fact that the lower
levels were usually kept in a perpetual state of darkness. The recorded footage
cut back to the live feed of Oliver Black at his news desk. He shook his head.

“As if the lower streets weren’t
already dangerous enough.”

Burke narrowed his eyes at the
screen.

“Looks promising,” he said. “Plus,
you’re right. We’re already here.”

Rylan looked pleased with himself.

“Shaw and Lumen Greer?” Cass asked.
“Was that a mistake or do they have the same last name?”

“I thought the same thing,” Burke
added. “It’s strange.”

“What do you mean?” Rylan asked.

“They called them escaped convicts.
Are they married or related? The same last name is odd.”

“I’ll look into it,” Cass said.
“They might not be the killers.”

“Regardless, there’s still a
murderer,” Burke said. “We’ll head back down to the planet tomorrow.”

He got up and carried their used
plates back into the kitchen. He set them to be washed and then walked into the
armory. He surveyed his collection of weapons: handguns, rifles, submachine
guns, and sniper rifles. There was a small collection of grenades and other
explosives—he rarely used them. He turned from the weapons and to his battle
aegis in pieces in the middle of the room, not yet put back on the armor stand
that could hold all the pieces as a single unit. Each of the pieces had at
least one dark smudge from the contact of a bullet but no scratches or dents.
He decided to clean the armor before he went to sleep. Despite how tired he
was, it didn’t feel right to leave the suit dirty.

* * *

The sound of water was driving
Lumen crazy. No matter where they went, the water was following her.

In the higher levels of the city,
the rain fell against every window and roof of every building. Lumen would sit,
arms wrapped around her legs and her knees tight against her chest, and rock
back and forth next to the window. Each rain drop would slam into the glass and
pulverize itself. Watching it happen would settle her but only for a moment.
She didn’t hear the gentle pitter-patter that most people did when it was
raining; she heard each individual rain drop as a separate noise as it met her
ears and then continued through her, the sound wave crossing the room to Shaw
and then she’d hear it again. Hearing it twice was driving her crazy.

They moved from abandoned home to
abandoned building. The city was full of them: empty spaces that were more
expensive to fill than to leave alone. They were cold and neglected but still
far above sleeping in the rain. The augments helped keep them warm but not dry.
They often went out for food, breaking into stores and carrying as much as they
could. They tried to move further down through the city to get away from the
sound of rain.

In the lower level of the city, the
rain dribbled down the sides of the buildings and poured from the bridged
streets above them. The murky waterfalls were everywhere, a constant mass of
filthy water that swept the streets clear of trash and stray animals. Lumen
would see the bloated bodies of dead rats, cats, and dogs floating through the deep
channels built into the sides of the streets. Sometimes a larger corpse, a bag
of rubbish, or a body of a human would get caught in the channels and cause a
street to flood. The temporary dam would remain for a few hours, maybe a day,
and then break loose with a rush of water.

The polluted mess would fall to the
street below it and build up again, until it finally met the ground and the
permanent soup that permeated the foundations of the city. The water would
drain away but not quickly enough to leave the ground visible. At its roots,
the city looked like it was built up from a black ocean of filth. Somehow, the
water was filtered and cleaned and drawn up through the city to be boiled,
drank, and splashed over its citizens. Some water would turn back to rain and
fall again. The city felt like it was drowning but never allowed to die. Lumen
drowned along with it.

She couldn’t decide what was worse:
the  pummeling of the rain higher in the city, or the ceaseless pouring and
trickling down below. Both sounds ran through her and then through Shaw,
grating against her like the sound of static that never settled into a drone
she could phase out. When Shaw slept, she had a moment of peace. Something
about sleeping made the neural link regress for whoever remained awake. Lumen
would have a few hours isolated with her own thoughts, hearing only what her
ears heard and seeing only what her eyes saw. Fleeting thoughts came from
Shaw’s dreams, and sometimes horrific images from his nightmares, but it was
still a welcome break. When one of them slept, it was the other one who rested.

If the two slept at the same time,
then the results could be disastrous. They had woken up to find that two days
had passed in seemingly no time at all. Another day passed without either of
them being able to differentiate themselves. So attuned were they that the
sensation of their clothes brushing against their skin would be felt by the
other. They sat huddled in a corner until their minds finally settled, staying as
close together as possible so it didn’t seem like they heard the sound of rain
falling twice.

After that, they never slept at the
same time again. The fear of losing themselves was strong enough to make them
remember, even while all other memories were washed away and then slowly
reformed each day. Lumen would sleep for ten hours. Shaw would sleep for ten
hours after that. They would stay awake together for ten hours. Then the cycle
would repeat.

Strangely, they found they could
talk to each other without any issue. The words formed in the space that their
mind shared and took the painful edge away from hearing each other’s voices
twice. They spoke rapidly, however, sometimes talking over each other—the
thoughts and sentences formed faster in their shared space and that was where
the conversation took place. Not the spoken words.

“We need to go out for food.”

“We need to go out for parts.”

“We need to move lower. We need to
get out of the rain.”

“We need to get out of the rain.”

“We need to get out.”

On good days they remembered what Spectrum
Industries had done to them. They remembered how they were coerced and forced
into an experiment they didn’t want to do, and how they should have listened to
all of the ominous feelings they had while they signed the scant few legal
waivers. They knew they had killed people and that they needed to hide. They
knew the world wouldn’t understand what was done to them even if the
researchers deserved the punishment they had dispensed. On good days they knew
they hadn’t always been broken.

On bad days they walked through the
streets and couldn’t remember their own names. They didn’t see people on the
streets. If they passed a human that wasn’t augmented, they literally saw an
empty space in the street—a curious spot where the rain stopped in midair and
collided with an invisible object. Other humans that were augmented were seen
only as moving parts. They would see the pieces first: look at those legs
walking themselves in the rain, look at that arm holding an umbrella—is the
wind keeping the arm floating like that? The flesh around the prosthetics was
the unimportant junk parts, seen as a life support system to keep the
augmentations alive and not the other way around. On bad days they couldn’t
remember when they hadn’t been broken.

The insanity gripped them the
tightest when they went out for parts. They only went out on bad days. They
thought the sensation of being broken came from a fault in their limbs and went
out for replacements. They stopped augmentations in the street, introduced
themselves to the fleshy parts that carried them, and then liberated the
hardware and carried it back. Lumen liked to use the stabbing parts in the arms
that Spectrum had given her: her fingers and forearms would shift and peel
away, breaking apart and reforming into sharp bits. Shaw found that one of his
arms had bullets inside. His hands could break apart and put themselves back
together if he thought about it hard enough. He could fire the bullets then.

Arms and legs were the most commonly
found parts. They rarely found bionic eyes but they took those too. They
carried the collection of parts with them when they moved from place to place.
They used bags first, ones they found when they went for food. Then they found
abandoned carts and took one each. They took clothes from some of the people
they killed to hide the parts. They draped them over the carts.

On the worst days, they would sit
in their current hiding spot and try on their treasured collection of body
parts. They knew each time that it would be different. This time the new leg
would fix them. This time, even if it was a leg or an arm they had tried on
before, days before, this time it would be different and fix them. They would
walk with different length arms. Sometimes their limbs would be different
colors. Sometimes their legs wouldn’t match and they would walk around with a
limp. Shaw tried on a leg from a vruan they killed and couldn’t move. Lumen
tried on an arm and it fell apart while she tried to force it into the left arm
socket.