Hired Gun - A Bounty Hunter Space Opera Adventure (Aeon 14: Machete System Bounty Hunter)

by M. D. Cooper

  “That’s mighty helpful of you,” Reece said. “Will things go smoother than they did back in your bunker?”

  Seven nodded. “Yeah. I actually didn’t mean for that to happen. Arnie got the signal wrong. I’d say I’m sorry, but I think you already got your revenge.”

  Trey snorted from the driver’s seat. “Got the signal wrong. Right. Sure.”

  “Let’s assume he’s telling the truth. Or at least pretend we do,” Reece decided. “We have their leader, or whatever role you serve, Seven. I think they’ll be hesitant to try anything again.”

  She fixed Seven with a look. “Unless your people will actually be glad to see you dead. Oh, dear, that would be inconvenient for us both.”

  “You won’t see a single Lee,” Seven promised.

  “We do need a pilot,” Reece muttered.

  Trey said privately.

 

  Trey countered.

 

  She could hear Trey’s sigh from the front seat.

 

 

 

  Fifteen minutes later Trey pulled the van up to the shuttle on Cradle 1129. He stepped out and walked around the shuttle, then disappeared inside.

  “Oh damn…he’s taking too long,” Fitzmiller said.

  Reece shot him a look. “Hush. Just wait.”

  A minute later, Trey came out of the shuttle’s airlock and opened the back doors on the van.

  “All clear. Pilot is just a contract guy who got a call to make the flight to Upper Wadish and back.”

  Reece directed Fitzmiller to help Trey with their luggage while she secured Seven on the ship.

  Ten minutes later they lifted off. Seven had gotten them bumped up in the departure queues thanks to having a friend on the traffic control crew.

  After a routine hour-long flight, they arrived without incident at Upper Wadish station.

  “I can’t believe no one is trying to stop us,” Reece said at one point as they walked through the terminal.

  “I saw stuff like this a few times while I was here,” Trey replied. “Part of why I didn’t stick around. Kidnapping as a way of life just doesn’t work for me.

  “Me either,” Reece agreed.

  “Look, there’s your departure gate.” Seven pointed at a security arch a short distance away. “Now give me the antidote to whatever bioweapon you used on me.”

  Reece chuckled as they approached the gate. “Nah, you were right before. I don’t have anything like that. Not that I’m not dangerous—because I am—but yeah. No turn-you-to-goo death ray or anything.”

  “Seriously?” Seven said, his eyes wide with a combination of skepticism and disbelief. “You’re not just lying and waiting for me to turn into a puddle? Because I think you’d do that.”

  “I might,” Reece replied with a wide grin. “But only if I really hated you, and you just don’t rate that high. So you can go now.”

  To her surprise, Seven gave her a respectful nod. “Nicely done. I really thought you had more likely than not given me something. You’re probably quite the King Sweep player.”

  He made a gesture that she guessed was a tip of an imaginary hat, and casually strode away, as if he hadn’t just had a fairly harrowing experience.

  “Eleven people just moved to shadow him,” Trey said as they surveyed the crowds in the terminal.

  “I count fourteen,” Reece said. “And look, our ship’s departure got delayed by an hour.”

  Trey gave Seven’s receding figure a respectful nod. “Smooth. He’s probably going to get checked over before he lets us flit off out of the system.”

  “This kidnapping stuff is bogus,” Reece muttered. “I hope I don’t have to do that again. I’d much rather just shoot someone.”

  They boarded the ship and found their private cabin. It wasn’t as nice as the one on the luxury liner they’d taken to the Eashira System, and there were only two rooms.

  Fitzmiller would be sleeping on the couch because Reece sure wasn’t about to.

  She was glad to be off Wadish though, and would be downright delighted to get out of the system entirely.

  More importantly, she needed Fitzmiller to download the research. And—to her exasperation—before he would do that, he insisted on telling her about it.

  Like she needed the details. She just wanted to get her job done and go home.

  Yet she was compelled to sit down with Fitzmiller, Trey, and Dex to hear his story. The monkey was happily running back and forth between her and Trey, delighted that his favorite people had not, in fact, abandoned him.

  Truth be told, she was glad to see him, too.

  She wasn’t as thrilled about all the science words Fitzmiller threw at her. She tried to keep up at first, but eventually she settled for letting his voice drone on while she nodded and muttered “uh huh” from time to time.

  He launched into a particularly boring section where he said ‘telomere’ and ‘chromosome’ a lot. “You’re not listening, are you?”

  “Uh huh.” She nodded, then sat up straighter, realizing what he’d just said. “I mean, I’m doing my best. I’m not a scientist.”

  “I thought that working for Rexcare meant you had a grasp of the basics.”

  “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that your idea of basics and my idea of basics are very different.” She glanced over at Trey, but he was playing a game with Dex where he tossed the little guy pieces of popcorn. He’d tuned out of the conversation a long time ago.

  Fitzmiller blew out a breath. “Okay. Let’s try it like this. I found an herbal compound that convinces a certain kind of healthy cells to attack cancerous cells like a virus.”

  “Those hybrid plants from the farm we visited,” she said.

  The doctor nodded. “Yes. Injecting the compound into a person’s extracted cells, then returning those cells to the patient makes a person’s own body fight off the disease. It’s like flipping a switch in the cell to make it a superhero. This means no surgery, no damaging healthy cells, no getting sick. I think it can even be developed as a cancer preventative, rather than just a remedy.”

  “That’s great.” She’d known a few people stricken by Akon’s unique, particularly aggressive, hard-to-eradicate cancer.

  “It is. I think in time this could wipe out that variety of cancer entirely. And not just that. Other than the ones from excess sunlight, Akon doesn’t suffer from a great many difficult-to-treat cancers because it’s so agrarian and doesn’t have the toxins some planets do. Those places have some horrific cancers that often kill a patient before they even know they have it. And this research I did could put an end to that, too.”

  “Okay.” She could tell he wasn’t done yet.

  “And you’re probably thinking fine, no problem, let those planets license the patent for that treatment from Rexcare. Then everyone can have it. But it doesn’t work that way. Some of those planets wouldn’t be able to afford it. Others would need to further develop that research to tailor it for their particular disease. But Rexcare sells medicine and supplies, not the research it makes its money from. And it’s not going to develop those tailor-made treatments either, because there’s no profit in it. So you see? That’s why I took the research.”

  “If not for Rexcare, that research wouldn’t exist,” she argued.

  “Agreed,” Fitzmiller said. “That’s why I work for corporations. They have the money to make the research possible. A
nd that’s worked out in the past. But not this time. I kept thinking about all the people that would keep dying unnecessarily, and I couldn’t sleep at night. I thought about all those people consigned to die just because they weren’t profitable to save, and I decided I had to do something.”

  A picture of Kippy appeared in her mind. When he was eight, he broke his arm. Dirt poor at the time, he wasn’t able to get it properly cared for. Reece remembered him, wearing the handmade sling Aunt Ruth had made for him, and holding back tears for what seemed like months while it slowly healed on its own. His forearm had had an odd curve to it ever since.

  She tried to imagine him wasting away from cancer. Or Aunt Ruth. If Fitzmiller’s cure had been available, they still wouldn’t have been able to pay for it.

  And there were entire planets of people with the same problem.

  Then Reece remembered something about her initial meeting with Schramm.

  “What about the genetic biotech part of this?” she asked. “My handler at Rexcare said you were doing illegal research.”

  “I went over that when I was talking about telomeres and chromosomes,” Fitzmiller replied. “It’s not really illegal, just depends on how you use it. I could see some exciting longevity treatments come out of this though.”

  “Aka, the illegal stuff.” Reece gave him a stern look.

  Fitzmiller nodded slowly. “Yes, the treatments that the OFA won’t let us have, making certain that we live out our short years as proper humans.”

  The doctor’s tone bordered on vehement, and Reece wondered if it was because he didn’t want to grow old, or if it was because he was a believer in science solving all problems.

  Even so, his science—without the illegal longevity treatments—could save a lot of lives. Lives that would suffer, or go deep into debt if Rexcare got its hands on the Fitzmiller’s research.

  She sighed. “I get it. But you’re contracted to provide that research to Rexcare, and I’m contracted to retrieve it. I’d like to help those people, but I’m just a fixer with my own bills to pay. What can we do?”

  “What if we fight them their way?” Fitzmiller asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We write a new contract. How are you at negotiating?”

  She straightened. “I am to negotiating what you are to science.”

  Fitzmiller lit up with a smile. “That’s what I was hoping. And the way you phrased it actually makes me like you a little.”

  “Don’t think I’m not still mad at you for dragging me all the way out here,” she warned. “But if there’s a way to fulfill my contract and help you take your research to those places that need it, I’d like to find it.”

  * * * * *

  Since Fitzmiller resolutely refused to download and supply the research, Reece resigned herself to trying to find a way through the legal quagmire that separated Rexcare’s and Fitzmiller’s interests.

  “If we could just strike this line here,” Fitzmiller said, indicating a section of just eight words, “we could write a new clause that would make this work.”

  “No.” Reece shifted in her chair. Her foot had started to go to sleep. “We can’t strike anything you already agreed to. Rexcare doesn’t renegotiate a contract that has already been signed. We can only propose a secondary contract as a rider or a companion to the first.”

  Trey sat on the couch next to the table in the common room, his feet propped up on the table. He had to peer over Dex’s head to read because the monkey refused to venture beyond of touching distance and had installed himself on Trey’s lap.

  Reece and Fitzmiller sat at the small, round table. Given the amount of legalese they were staring at, they’d all switched to external devices rather than using their implants.

  Though Reece had a strong background in contract law, after three hours of occasional terse conversation that punctuated long silences, the words began to swim in front of her eyes.

  They adjourned briefly for food, which restored her vision, patience, and deep reasoning abilities. She longed for some whiskey, but that would have to wait.

  Again, they settled in and began dissecting the terms of the contract.

  Her eye caught on the section regarding methodologies and protocols. The wording reminded her of a job she’d done two years before.

  “What does this mean, this part about the intellectual property created by autosomal lysis procedures?” She understood the legal part, but not the scientific terminology.

  Fitzmiller looked up at her. “In basic terms, it’s how you slice open a patient’s chromosomes to implant the chromosomes of the hybrid plants. That’s what makes the cells start treating the cancer as a virus in need of conquering rather than a natural part of the patient’s body. The concept of it was the basis of the research.”

  “So this autosomal lysis, and everything you learned in the process of engineering it, and everything you learned from making it work, is all contractually the property of Rexcare, such that the process can’t even be used in the process of other, unrelated research.”

  “Yes. That’s my problem. I can’t publish or use this treatment, or use the methodology used to create it, for any other purpose because it belongs exclusively to Rexcare.” Fitzmiller’s shoulders slumped.

  “This doesn’t say anything about the plants.” Reece felt the fluttering buzz in her stomach that she always got when she was onto something.

  “No, it wouldn’t. I tested thousands of Akonwara’s plant species and came up with nothing. I thought the research was going to be a failed effort until I came across that herb grower.”

  “Fulton Farms,” Trey said.

  Reece looked toward him in surprise. She thought he’d fallen asleep.

  “Yes,” Fitzmiller said. “One of the hybrid plants was perfect. It didn’t have just one or two of the markers I needed, it had all of them. So, the original research proposal doesn’t have any mention of that discovery.”

  Reece felt a thrill of success. “We’ve got them.”

  “Rexcare?” Trey asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How?” Fitzmiller asked, looking perplexed.

  Reece grinned. “Have you ever heard of patent squatting?”

  Fitzmiller nodded. “Of course. It’s when you register a trademark for something that doesn’t belong to you, but legal loopholes make it possible.”

  Realization dawned on his face. “You want to register a patent for that Fulton Farms plant, preventing Rexcare from being able to use it.”

  “Yes. I had to arbitrate a case where one company had trademarked an ingredient in a competitor’s product. We can do the same thing here.”

  Trey came over to join them at the table. “Patent the plant and then blackmail Rexcare.”

  Reece was already accessing the patent application materials. “Blackmail is such an ugly word. I’d rather say that we’ll use the patent to motivate Rexcare to agree to non-profit use of the autosomal lysis procedure under certain circumstances. We’ll also ensure that any usage license does not involve research that will bring the Orion Guard down on our heads.”

  “Can we do that?” Fitzmiller looked wary, but hopeful.

  “Can we do it without losing our jobs?” Trey’s expression was mostly doubtful.

  Reece nodded slowly. “If we do it just right…yes.”

  She let out a long sigh.

  She was going home with a solid win under her belt.

  * * * * *

  As far as space travel went, going home was far easier than leaving it.

  Reece didn’t love the feeling of the vastness that separated her from the Machete system and she pretended that they never transitioned into the dark layer at all, but she liked knowing that the parsecs were going by at a measurable, consistent rate.

  By the time they made it to Iagentci, she, Fitzmiller, and Trey had received the patent for the hybridized herb, which they had decided, after much debate, to officially name Reecefitztrey. Sure, it was kind of stupid
, but at least she’d gotten them to agree to put her name first because it sounded the least awful that way.

  As she, Fitzmiller, and Trey walked through the entertainment district to the Bubble Club, she reveled in the feel of being back in Machete. One more hop and she’d be on her own planet again.

  In the meantime, Trey was getting a whole lot of strange looks, thanks to the monkey who rode along on his shoulder.

  If it’s not one thing with him, it’s another.

  Whenever someone stared a little too hard, Trey fixed them with a menacing look that convinced the person to immediately mind their own business.

  Reece found it amusing every time it happened.

  Though it was two hours before showtime, Ed was already decked out in all her glamour. A long, curly blonde wig and a shiny gown that plunged down to her navel while also sporting a slit up to her hip. She immediately captured Fitzmiller’s attention.

  “You brought that hairy creature with you again,” she observed, eyeing them.

  “Dex will behave,” Trey promised.

  “I didn’t mean the monkey,” she drawled, leaning in close to Trey with a grin.

  Reece laughed.

  “And who’s this?” Ed studied Fitzmiller, taking in his bland clothes and thoroughly unremarkable appearance.

  Reece had offered to buy Fitzmiller more stylish clothes, since he’d had to leave behind the few personal belongings he’d taken with him. The scientist, however, had insisted that his personal style was, in fact, plain and bland.

  “He’s the one I need you to hide for a little while,” Reece said. “You’ll make sure he’s off the grid, right?”

  “Uh huh. What did he do, though? Something exciting, I hope.”

  “Nah. Just dull arbitration stuff.” Reece never told Ed about the aspects of her job that were, in fact, rather exciting. She was pretty sure Ed suspected, though.

  Ed flipped some of her wig’s long hair back over her shoulder. Though it wasn’t real hair, the gesture was somehow completely glamorous. Ed was one of those people who had an innate special sparkle.

  “Dreadful,” Ed declared. “You should chuck all that nonsense and come work for me. It would be much more fun.”