Hunter

by Sharon Partington

  A brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the room and thunder boomed directly overhead, followed by the sound of the rain. Joanna snuggled further into my chest and I drew her closer, pulling the quilt higher to cover her. Her body felt soft and warm and I closed my eyes as I listened to the sound of her breathing.

  “Gage? How did Danny die?”

  I didn’t want to remember that night. I’d spent the past six years trying to forget. Still, I suppose I owed her some kind of explanation.

  “The Androsians fired on us as we approached the evac site,” I said, softly. “I’d gone down, and Danny was trying to pull me to safety. He died saving my life. I’m sorry I couldn’t save his.”

  She was silent for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep.

  “The GSF recovered the bodies,” she murmured. “He was buried with full military honors. They all were.”

  Small consolation, considering.

  Chapter 10

  I woke just before dawn, Joanna asleep in my arms. Her breath was warm against my throat, and her hair spilled across my chest. A damp breeze rustled the curtains. I looked at her sleeping face, tracing the curve of her jaw with my finger, feeling the faint pulse that beat in her throat.

  She could almost make me forget what I was. Almost make me believe in a life that wasn’t drowned in blood and death.

  God, I could love her so easily.

  I gave myself a mental smack. Get over it, Gage. It doesn’t matter what you think you feel. What kind of life can you give her? Dragging her across the galaxy while you kill people for a living? Get real.

  I got up, careful not to wake her. She stirred and murmured in her sleep as I drew the quilt higher. A light drizzle fell and mist curled through the trees alongside the drive. I heard my dad get up and stumble to the bathroom. I didn’t look forward to facing him after the episode in the driveway. The sooner Joanna and I left, the better off he’d be.

  My first priority had become getting Joanna off the planet, despite her assurance that she could take care of herself. Priority number two involved finding out if Corin Raas had survived her escape from Lachra then deciding what to do about it.

  The Androsian rebel leader had run when she could have surrendered. We could have placed her in protective custody. She’d have been safe from the assassins Lansing claimed were out to get her. If she’d given herself up none of it would have happened. Danny and the rest would still be alive and I’d be a fucking general or something. And I wouldn’t have spent the past six years leaving a trail of bodies wherever I went.

  One way or another, Corin Raas owed me for those years.

  I pulled the window shut and left the room. Pale light filtered through the opaque panels on either side of the front door as I came down the stairs. My dad’s blast rifle rested against the wall where he’d left it. The pictures on the living room mantle drew me and I stood for a long time, looking at them.

  My mom and dad on their wedding day.

  My high school graduation photo.

  My mom and me on the front porch; I was nine or ten, and held a black lab puppy in my arms—she’d named it Boomer because of the racket it made as it thumped up and down the stairs behind me.

  “Damn dog followed you everywhere,” my father said from behind me.

  I put the picture back. “I remember.”

  “He dug holes all over your mama’s garden. Buried every scrap of food you gave him. Tangled with a skunk in the woods the summer you left. Good dog, but dumb as a rock.” He was rambling. He only did that when he was embarrassed or uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come back here.”

  He shrugged and shot me a rueful grin. “Yeah, well. I’m sorry I knocked you on your ass.”

  A car pulled into the drive and we moved to the window. A cold knot formed in my gut as I recognized the local Security Patrol.

  “It’s Roy Campbell,” said my dad. “I don’t suppose you want him knowing you’re here.”

  “It’ll make my life easier if he doesn’t.”

  He nodded and stepped out onto the porch. I drew my blaster as I watched from behind the curtains. He’d better be a good talker or he’d be helping me bury the patrolman’s body in the woods.

  “Hey, Roy,” he called to the uniformed officer who emerged from the car. “You’re out early. Something I can do for you?”

  “Martin. I thought you’d like to know: we found an emergency escape pod sixty miles north of Lassin. The registration number matches a military shuttle that’s overdue on a flight from Lunar City.”

  “So?”

  “So, we found blood in it. Preliminary results say the DNA is a match to Gage.”

  “That’s real funny, Roy. According to the Planetary News Agency, Gage is sitting in some Dorani prison.”

  “No, he isn’t. He escaped a little over a month ago.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  My dad shrugged. “Once you’ve heard your only son is a murderin’ bastard, there ain’t much more can surprise you.”

  “The GSF are sending a recovery team to pick up that pod. They’ll be here probably early tomorrow. They’re gonna want to talk to you.”

  “Thanks for the warning, but Gage isn’t stupid enough to come back here.”

  “You’ll call me if he does, though. Right, Martin?”

  I didn’t miss the implied threat in the patrolman’s voice and I’m sure my dad didn’t either. “Sure, Roy. It’ll be the first call I make.”

  ◆◆◆

  I walked through the wet grass towards the back of my dad’s property. A cold wind blew through the trees, showering me with the occasional flurry of water. Joanna and I would be leaving soon, but I had to do something first.

  The cemetery was small, surrounded by a white painted fence. My family rested here. I pushed open the wire gate and moved past the headstones, reading the names.

  My grandparents: they’d died before I was born. I only knew them from the pictures my mom had shown me when I was a kid.

  My dad’s older brother, Arthur: An engineer, killed in an explosion on the Terra-Luna space station during its construction.

  I moved to a single grave in the corner nearest the fence.

  Carol Brassan

  Loving Wife and Mother

  Gone but not Forgotten

  I crouched in the wet grass staring at the headstone. What was I supposed to say to her?

  I remember Kenny telling me once that death didn’t scare him because he believed his spirit would live on after he died. As I stared at my mother’s grave, I hoped it wasn’t true. Because if it was, then she knew what a total and complete fuckup I’d turned out to be.

  A twig snapped and I whirled, reaching for my blaster. Joanna came up to stand beside me. She shivered inside one of my dad’s old hunting jackets. “Your mom?” she asked, looking at the headstone.

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw her picture in the house.” A moment’s hesitation. “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head. “She was on her way home from Terra-Luna when the transport crashed. Thirty-nine passengers and crew. No survivors. I was seventeen. Whatever dreams she’d had for me died with her. My dad and me have never been that close, she’d been the glue holding us together. Without her, we just sort of...fell apart. I rebelled, quit school. He freaked. I left. Joined the GSF. Pretended I wanted to be a soldier.”

  “My mom always wanted Danny to be something stable and respectable,” Joanna said. “A physician, maybe, or a lawyer. She cried for three days when he enlisted.”

  “I was supposed to be a banker,” I said with a wry grin. “I suffered through almost two years of Interstellar Commerce in high school. I’d been accepted into the Accounting program at Western Terra University; I was supposed to start there the summer she died.”

  Joanna glanced at me doubtfully. “A banker? Really?”

  “Yeah, well. That’s what I said.” I looked bac
k to the headstone. “Still, it was her dream for me, and it’s not like I had a better plan. If she’d lived, everything would be different.”

  “Different how?” I glanced at her, and she gave me this look that was all innocence and light. “What? A perfectly reasonable question. How would it be different?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have joined the GSF for a start. I would have finished school and gone to work in some high paying division of the Galactic Commercial Bank. I’d probably have married the boss’s daughter and have a dozen kids by now.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good life. How do you know you wouldn’t have joined the GSF anyway?”

  “Because I did it to piss my father off. I wanted to get as far away from him and this damn farm as I could, and that seemed to be the easiest way.”

  “And did it? Piss him off?”

  “You’ve seen how we are, we can barely spend ten minutes together in the same room.”

  “But it might have been like that even if your mom had lived.”

  I smiled. “If my mom had lived, I’d be a banker.”

  Joanna chuckled. “Right.” She drew the coat more tightly about herself. “You know, Danny talked about you all the time. When he finally brought you around, I felt like I already knew you.”

  “I can imagine what he told you. I’m the guy who planned to be a Colonel at twenty-five. The Academy’s ‘by the book’ golden boy.”

  “It wasn’t quite that bad, although he did say you were pretty anal about following regulations, and that you didn’t stray very far from the straight and narrow. He also said that you were the best soldier he’d ever served with, and without you his platoon would have died on Kressin Four.”

  “Kressin Four was a disaster, the GSF should never have sent troops there. Getting them out was one part skill and about nine parts shit-house luck.”

  “Not the way I heard it,” said Joanna. “A field promotion and a commendation for courage under fire don’t come about because of shit-house luck.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Danny was thrilled when he heard you’d been promoted to command Delta Six. He said that after Kressin Four he figured you could get them out of anything.”

  “Yeah, well. I couldn’t get them out of that Androsian jungle.”

  “It was bad?”

  You have no idea. “I lost half my men to their first mortar round. They picked the rest of us off one at a time.”

  “How did you escape?”

  I shrugged. “More of that shit-house luck.”

  “And you became a hired killer because...?”

  “I owed a very large debt to a very dangerous man and the terms of repayment weren’t open to negotiation.”

  “And the rest is history?”

  “And the rest is history,” I agreed.

  As we walked back to the house I thought of the life I’d lived since my mother died, comparing it to what could have been. What she’d wanted for me.

  Somehow, being a banker didn’t seem like such a bad deal anymore.

  ◆◆◆

  My dad waited in the foyer as Joanna and I came down the stairs.

  She took my bag. “I’ll put this in the car. Thanks for everything, Mr. Brassan, it’s nice to have met you.”

  My dad nodded, watching in silence as she left the house. He looked back to me. “I don’t suppose you plan on telling me where you’re headed?”

  “If you don’t know, you won’t have to lie about it later.”

  He shifted his gaze to the floor. “Will you be back?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He moved to the window, brushing the curtain aside so he could look out into the drive. “Your Joanna seems like a nice girl.”

  “She is.”

  He looked back to me. “Does she know what you are?”

  I met his gaze steadily. “Yes, Dad. She knows.”

  “If you care about her, you’ll cut her loose, boy. She don’t need your kind of trouble.”

  “And I don’t recall asking for your opinion,” I snapped.

  He pursed his lips but didn’t reply as he followed me out onto the porch. Joanna had brought the car up. I walked down the steps and pulled the driver’s side door open.

  “Bye, Dad.”

  He offered a stiff wave. I got into the car and we pulled out of the driveway heading back down the lane toward the road. Joanna and I would book our flight to Atlantia from Collinsville, three hundred miles east of Meyer’s Landing. I wondered, as I pulled onto the highway, if I’d ever see my dad again.

  ◆◆◆

  I sat in a chair in a Collinsville motel room watching Joanna sleep, an open bottle of scotch on the table next to me. Streetlights shone through the thin curtains, casting a narrow strip of pale blue light along the floor and across the bed. The rumble and whine of highway traffic filtered through the half open window and my blaster rested on the table next to the bottle. The vid-link flickered in the corner. I’d turned the audio off, and soundless images flashed across the screen. In the morning we’d book our flight to Atlantia and wait for Kenny.

  I closed my eyes. Fuck, I was tired. Tired of wading through blood up to my ass. Tired of chasing shadows across the galaxy. Really tired of the guilt I carried around inside because I’d lived while the men and women in Delta Six had died.

  And now I had a whole new load of guilt to contend with. Guilt at leaving my dad alone to deal with the fallout of my fucked up life.

  “Still awake?”

  I opened my eyes. Joanna lay watching me. “Can’t sleep.”

  She sat up, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Want to talk?”

  I shook my head and poured myself another glass of scotch.

  She got up and moved to sit on the end of the bed. She wore one of my shirts; I had to admit it looked much better on her than it did on me.

  She nodded to the bottle. “Plan on drinking that all by yourself?”

  “That was kinda the plan.” I smiled. “Why, want some?”

  “Well, since you offered....”

  I got up and went into the bathroom for another glass, filling it about a quarter full of water. I might enjoy my booze undiluted, but I doubted Joanna did. I poured her the drink. She took a sip, then set the glass on the bedside table. I reclaimed my seat and rubbed my tired eyes.

  “You really should sleep,” she said.

  “Can’t. Too much on my mind.”

  “How did it all get so crazy?” she asked softly. “One day I’m just...living my life. Doing my job. The next I’m hiding in a Terran motel room with a wanted fugitive,” she hesitated. “Why now, Gage? Why didn’t you do all this six years ago?”

  I shrugged. “All the players dropped off the board and I got caught up in the killing game. And there was a very large part of me that just wanted to forget Andros Prime and everything that happened there.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I just can’t run from it anymore.”

  I looked over at the vid-link. My picture was displayed on the screen. I reached for the remote and turned up the volume.

  “The general public is advised to be on the lookout for this man: Gage Allan Brassan, aka David Archer, aka The Hunter, is wanted on multiple charges of murder and escaping lawful custody.” Joanna’s picture followed mine. “He is believed to be in the company of this woman, Joanna Lynn Travis, of Lunar City. Ms. Travis is not considered to be a suspect at this time.

  Evidence indicates that Mr. Brassan may be in the Meyer’s Landing/Lassin area. He is believed to be armed and should be considered extremely dangerous. If seen, the general public is advised not to approach Mr. Brassan directly, but to contact their local security force or the Western Rockies GSF garrison. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.”

  Shit.

  Chapter 11

  I turned off the vid-link, suppressing the urge to fire the remote into the empty screen as I tried to work out what the hell I was g
oing to do now. The picture they flashed was of the old dark-haired me and I was pretty sure the motel owner wouldn’t recognize me as the man in the news broadcast. He’d recognize Joanna though, and he’d be on the Com-link to the local security patrol as soon as he woke up enough to connect the dots. I thought about my dad. The GSF would be converging on his farm, if they hadn’t already. They’d never believe I hadn’t been there, no matter what he told them. He wasn’t safe, and a part of me had known that when I left. Guilt and anger formed a tight knot in my stomach.

  I never should have come back here.

  “What do we do now?” Joanna asked.

  One crisis at a time.

  “I’m putting you on the next shuttle to Atlantia, then I’m going back for my dad.”

  “Not without me.”

  “Yes, without you,” I said, buttoning my shirt.

  She stared at me like I’d just sprouted a second head, complete with third eye and flaming horns. “I don’t think so.”

  Was this the same woman who’d threatened to turn me over to the security patrol after we crashed landed the pod? The woman who’d barely spoken to me, except when necessity demanded it?

  “Don’t do this, Joanna. Don’t make it tougher than it has to be.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No. I’m not,” she insisted as she reached for her clothes. She pulled on her jeans and took her sweater into the bathroom, partially closing the door.

  “Joanna—”

  “No. What are you going to do, Gage? Tie me up and force me into the shuttle?” She passed me my shirt from around the door. “I was okay with this whole thing so long as we were going to Atlantia together. Both of us, Gage. Not me, by myself. I don’t know your friend Kenny, and he certainly doesn’t know me. I’m not going to run off with some guy I’ve never met.” She opened the door, fully dressed. “If you’re going back to the farm, then so am I. End of discussion.”

  “What discussion? This isn’t a discussion. You’re not coming. I can’t do what I have to do and keep you safe at the same time.”