The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection (6 page)

Each time they put back on their
original limbs until the next day came around. The next day that they were
certain that this time the new parts would fix them.

* * *

Burke woke up, ate a small
breakfast, and then went into the armory. He slid the pieces of his armor onto
himself from the bottom up: the one leg piece, the central torso section, and
then the arms and helmet. Cass integrated herself primary to the suit and kept
only a faint tether to the ship. The pieces of the aegis locked together,
sealing Burke away from any environmental hazards. The padding on the interior
of the armor slowly inflated, filling out to press comfortably against his
skin. It was important that there were gaps and that his body moved freely with
the assisted power of the armor. If his body moved against the armor he could
injure himself.

He did the initial tests of the
armor’s features, as he and Cass always did before leaving the ship. They
triggered both of the blades in each of his forearms, projecting them forward
out of his wrists and then backwards from near his elbows. He knelt down and
locked the jumping mechanism in his legs in place, feeling the potential
strength building there. He gently released it and stood up again in the
armory.

Cass tested the kinetic barriers
the suit could generate over his armor—a relatively new feature that the armor
had been upgraded to utilize. If she was fast enough, she could soften the blow
of projectiles. It required an immense amount of calculating power to properly use
the barriers, but that was something she had in excess. The effect drained vast
amounts of the armor’s energy and so she used it sparingly.

Finally, Burke picked a handgun
from his assortment of firearms. He decided against taking an assault rifle,
seeing as they were investigating heavily civilian areas on the planet. As it
was his only weapon, he chose a high caliber handgun with a twelve shot
capacity. He opened the compartment at his right hip and loaded the gun before
he slid it inside, then filled the two magazine slots next to the weapon. The
compartment closed and Cass immediately linked herself to the modest circuitry
that all of their weapons had installed: the twelve bullets remaining in the
gun’s magazine were displayed on the visor, ready to visually deplete each time
he fired. It was a small feature but one he sorely wished he had had when he
was in the military.

“Everything seems fine, Burke,”
Cass said happily.

“I’m comfortable,” he confirmed. “What
did you find about the murderers?”

“Many things. The police records
were easy to access. I collated the confirmed sightings by the investigators with
the highest public reports. Some people on the street who thought they saw them
and called in. Things like that. This is a rough estimation of their movement
over the last two weeks.”

The visor changed to display what
looked like a schematic of the northern city sprawl on the planet below them.
The thousands of buildings were faint, dotted outlines with the colors of the
city scape behind them. Cass displayed a red dot on the research headquarters
of Spectrum Industries. The dot began to move and then vanished, symbolizing
when the two disappeared shortly after escaping. It then reappeared several
kilometers away and below the starting point. It moved slowly at first and then
abruptly shifted downwards, as if the two fugitives suddenly fell through the
city. The dot vanished and reappeared several times until Cass ended on an area
near the bottom of the city. She displayed a red spherical shape in the space,
showing the boundaries of where they could have traveled since they were last
spotted.

“That will take a few days to
search,” Burke said. “Good work, Cass.”

“There’s more,” she replied, her
voice serious.

The display changed again to show
the escaped humans. There were hundreds of captured images of the two, mostly
from far away. Many of the pictures showed them attacking isolated people in
the streets. The weapons they held looked strange to him.

“Well, that confirms that they’re
the killers at least,” he said. “What are they using to attack those people?”

“I thought the same thing,” Cass
said. “And then I found these.”

The visor was dominated with two
close up shots of the two killers: Lumen on the left and Shaw on the right.
They were the only brightly lit pictures Cass had shown so far. Burke looked
them over and felt a growing dread build up in his stomach. Their skin looked
closer to vruan than human, with the faint, tiny hexagonal scales around their
eyes and neck.

“What did they do to them?”

“Exactly,” Cass agreed. “I’ve
started looking into it but Spectrum Industries has much better security than
the streets of Liveria.”

“Will you be able to get into it?”

“Please,” Cass said. “They’re not
ACU. I’ll get through in a few days, maybe less. What’s more troubling is that
the police have apparently given up.”

“What?”

“The latest internal orders state
not to follow the murderers into the lower levels. Some are saying they don’t
care about the safety of the low streets. They think the gangs will sort out
any killers down there in their own way. Others think Spectrum called them off.
There’s an official bounty posted for them now. They want them brought back,
alive or dead. They don’t care.”

“They’re killers. This doesn’t make
sense,” Burke said. “We’ve seen them kill. You have the proof of that. Why the
sudden secrecy?”

“I’ll find out,” Cass replied.

He nodded. The visor cleared away
and returned to his view of the armory. He walked into the main corridor of the
ship and turned to the helm. He saw that Rylan was already at his terminal. As
Burke walked in, he saw that Cass was displaying coordinates on the main
screen.

“Captain,” Rylan said without
turning to him.

“Pilot,” Burke replied.

The ship turned to face directly
down at the planet below them. They descended quickly until they entered the
planet’s atmosphere. Rylan altered the trajectory of the ship then,
compensating for the planet’s gravity as it took over for the ship’s artificial
systems. Flying a ship smoothly between a planet and space took skill to do
well, and Burke barely felt a lurch as they approached the surface. He was able
to stand at the main screen and watch the city below them.

Liveria was one of the largest
worlds in human space, and held the highest shared population of humans and vruans
of any planet. In the decades before the dross invasion, Earth had been a
highly developed planet with a stable population, capable of providing the
primary needs of its inhabitants without outside help. Conversely, Liveria’s
population was a staggeringly high number and was dependent on constant imports
of food from outside sources in the system—orbital farms and less densely
populated planets.

There were no separate cities on
Liveria. The entire surface was a heavily industrialized sprawl. There were
heavier concentrations in certain areas, dubbed quadrants by the planet’s
citizens, that had several more vertical layers and buildings that stretched
higher from the surface. To Burke, the planet looked like a circuit board, or
the inside of a piece of ancient electronic equipment. The concentrated points
looked like levels of a city stacked on top of each other. He appreciated how
the city was a marvel of engineering but he would never want to live there.

“Another place not to consider for
retirement,” he said lowly inside the helmet. Cass gave a small laugh.

The main screen became a mess of
incoming signals and warnings from other vessels moving through the city. Burke
couldn’t understand the slew of information but Rylan made navigating the city
look effortless. The lower they flew, the fewer vehicles they saw. As if to
compensate, the buildings became thicker and tightly packed together. More than
once, Burke braced himself for a crash as Rylan squeezed between buildings and
broke through wide gushes of rain water that were common near the planet’s
surface.

“How far down can you get us?”
Burke asked.

“As far as you want,” Rylan replied
simply.

Cass displayed the current distance
between them and their target, with an estimated time in the helmet’s visor.
Burke turned from the helm and made his way down to the lower part of the ship.
There were two ladders in the main corridor that could be used, but he never
risked it with the extra weight of his armor. He moved to the rear of the ship
and descended on the stairs in the engine room. The massive interlocking pieces
of machinery dominated the room, emitting a never ending thrum as they powered
the ship. He knew that as the ship aged that they would likely need to hire a
mechanic; however, so far Cass had been able to guide Burke through minor
adjustments on the engine. There was an additional small room at the far end of
the engine where they stored replacement parts and emergency stores of fuel.

The cargo hold took up the rest of
the lower level. He kept it neat and orderly, never leaving any crates that
could be unloaded and moved else where. There were only two containers full of
food supplies and ammunition that couldn’t fit in the upstairs rooms. Both of
the containers were securely strapped to the walls of the ship and safely
sealed.

Instead of the doors at the front
of the ship, Burke stopped in the middle of the cargo hold at the edge of a
similar set of doors in the floor of the room. He stood and watched the timer
on the suit’s visor count down to zero and then felt the ship come to a stop
when the timer elapsed. The roar of the ship’s thrusters settled to a distant
hiss, low enough that he could hear the rain tapping against the outside of the
ship. Cass displayed a visual feed of what was below their feet before
unlocking the floor entrance. The doors parted and he saw the damp streets of
the city below him.

He stepped off the ship before the doors
fully opened. Rylan had chosen his spot well and the drop was only a few
meters. Burke barely felt his knees buckle as he landed on the bridged street.
The Brisbane started moving again the moment his feet touched the floor. He
heard the air rip around the ship as it turned and rocketed its way back up
through the city. He watched the glowing exhausts of the vessel, blue and
bright, shrink and then vanish into the upper mesh of the city.

The lower levels felt like a sewer
system rather than interconnecting streets. The rain was thinner but edges of
the streets were teeming with water. Burke looked over the edge of the bridged
road and saw the water pouring down to another street below him. He was still
too high up to see the ground of the planet. The light of the planet’s sun was
also lessened, similarly lost to the buildings above like the rain. The lower
streets felt like they were shrouded in perpetual dusk.

“Which way, Cass?” he asked.

“Straight forward.”

He knew that an arduous search lay
ahead of them. If they were lucky—and they were rarely lucky—they might catch a
glimpse of the two murderers within a few hours. It was more likely that it
would be more than a day before Cass’s monitoring matched up with their current
location. In the meantime, he would wander the streets near where the fugitives
last struck while Cass saturated herself in the surveillance network around
them.

The weight of the aegis sent high
splashes of water as Burke trudged through the puddles littered in the streets.
In the more flooded areas, he took each step slowly, firmly slamming his foot
down before he took another step. He did not trust what might be hidden under
the water. Heavy as his armor was, he could still slip and fall if he moved too
quickly.

He saw two people early on in his
search and then no one else for several more hours. Although the city was vast,
most people stayed highly concentrated in certain areas: the better maintained
buildings, the rare stores of the lower levels, and the even rarer heat
exhausts that spilled out from the inner workings of the city. Most groups he
passed that were unfortunate enough to be outside were huddled together. He
hoped that he didn’t frighten them as he passed.

“This place is awful,” Cass
commented.

“I know.”

“Why is it so bad?”

Burke knew she could have found the
answers herself. She was still connected to the network of both the city and
their ship. He knew that she preferred the conversation with him rather than
clinically research things on her own. He appreciated that.

“Earth and Mars,” he began.
“They’re the root of a lot of problems, it seems. Most of the billions of
people were evacuated but it didn’t stop at the planets. The rest of the system
emptied as well. Liveria, at the time, seemed like a perfect place. The city is
built on top of older layers of itself. There are hundreds of thousands of
empty sections down here. Too much space to use or even sell. Now, there are
over a billion people stuck here.”

“And there’s no work for them.
After they lost everything.”

Burke nodded solemnly.

“It’s better than being dead,” he
said. “They might not see it that way, though.”