“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.
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 warni
ngs 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.
The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection Page 4