“How long?” Burke asked.
“Four days at most. Do you want another job in the meantime?”
“No,” he answered. “I’ll take the time as a break.”
“Hah, that’ll be the day. I’ll be lucky if you’ll come back out here. You’re in the ship too much.”
“He’s right,” Cass said.
“I’ll see you, Geoff.”
Burke paused when he was back on his ship. The doors closed behind him and sealed him away from the rest of the station. He stood in the cargo hold and closed his eyes. His right leg felt like it was throbbing, a temporary side-effect of the transplant. Without an augmentation he thought he would be experiencing phantom limb pain in those moments.
Instead the situation was met with a conflict, as if he was rejecting the synthetic muscle. The leg itself was made out of the same material as his aegis. He no longer wore that part of the leg’s armor and had it was permanently a part of him. The leg was bulletproof and felt like steel to the touch. He couldn’t feel pain from the connected nerves there, just pressure and the presence of different temperatures. He was told the instances of pain would lessen in time.
When it subsided, he started walking through the ship. It was still a constant reminder of his time spent stranded with only Cass, even if they had changed so much of the inside to suit their needs. The cargo hold had been halved and filled with the single jail cell. The rest of the lower level had originally been the crew’s quarters. They had been changed to the armory and supply storage. The engine was behind them at the rearmost point of the ship.
The top floor was now only two larger rooms: Burke’s room, the control room, and the corridor that connected them. He disliked the layout but he had to admit it met his needs. The rest of the ship was less pleasing. It had no weapons and was too slow. The only tools he now had at his disposal were ones he added himself: Cass, the identification blocker and, soon, the identification tracer.
“Cass, did you copy everything Geoff said?”
“Yes. He gave you two openings to ask him for help. He has enough money to lend to you to buy two new ships, never mind one. He’s your friend, Burke. He saved your life.”
“No. He did save me, but I won’t ask him. No debt to anyone. That’s one of our rules. We didn’t buy a single thing until we paid him back for his help. We’ll get the new ship ourselves.”
Cass huffed. Burke was always surprised by how human she could be. He continued talking. “Did you hear what he said about the tracer?”
“Yes. Do you want to start sorting through the open contracts now?”
Burke nodded. His leg still ached as he climbed the stairs to the upper floor and walked to his room. It was barely furnished: a small bed, a computer terminal, and a space for clothes built into the wall. He walked to the corner farthest from the door and pulled out a compartment from the wall. He’d had a treadmill installed when he first got the leg to make sure he was adapting to it enough to run. Whenever his leg ached he found running could get the pain under control.
“There are hundreds of open contracts. Any preference?” Cass spoke a few minutes into his run.
“The most expensive.”
“Are you sure? Shouldn’t we ease back into this?”
“No,” he said. “No more Eva Pond’s getting away so easily. The most expensive, as long as the work meets our standards. Nothing questionable. I’ll trust you to be the judge of that, you’re good at it.”
Burke was sweating by the time Cass had collated the results. He slowed his run to a comfortable jog so he could speak without losing his breath. His other leg hurt now as well but it was a good pain, one he was used to.
“Five top contracts that meet out criteria,” she began. “Two military contracts. Three public ones.”
“Give me those three first.”
“First up is someone willing to pay an absurd amount of money for rhymaw horns? They want five of them. What are those?” Cass explained.
“A large, dangerous, pissed off animal. That would be tough. Do they want the heads attached as proof?”
“Uh, let me see. Yes. Yes they do.”
“Then no. The horns grow back. We don’t have the equipment anyway, but we can restrain and cut them off. I’m not killing the things for no reason.”
“A man is looking for his missing wife,” Cass began. “She’s been missing for several years. This contract has been up for a while now.”
“No,” Burke wiped sweat from his forehead. “Maybe when things are slow. Too high of a chance that she just left him and he’s too rich and stubborn to admit it. What’s the last one?”
“Someone is looking for a thief here in Prime. The pay is better than the other two. It says there’s no interest in what was stolen, only catching the person who did it.”
“Hah,” Burke shook his head. “Sounds like someone has a lot of pride and even more money. There are a lot of planets in this system and the ones around it. Someone would have a lot of hiding places without using a gate. Keep that one for now. What about the military contracts?”
“A criminal and a deserter, I—”
“Not interested in deserters. I don’t agree with them but I understand them. They don’t deserve the execution they would get. Tell me about the criminal.”
“This one has a name. Frank Copper. He was last seen the in Stratos system. Wanted for undisclosed crimes.”
Burke let out a low growl. “Is he wanted alive or dead?”
“Either, but preferably alive. They are paying much more for that. You usually don’t like it when they don’t say why they’re wanted.”
“Yes,” he said. “But if they want him alive then I’m open to it. That’s the most promising one, but look into the other thief as well. Will four days be long enough for you to sort through all the data?”
“Please,” she said in such a way that if she had a face, Burke knew she would be smiling. “I’ll have it done in two. There’s something I don’t understand. Why are these open contracts paying more than the private ones we get?”
He turned off the treadmill and stepped off it. The back of his shirt clung to him with sweat and his leg no longer hurt. He stretched while he spoke.
“Some private ones can be more, but not until we build a name back up. The cheaper ones usually know the location of their target. They pay less because there’s less chance involved.
“The open contracts usually have little information. They’re open because there’s too many places for one person to look. They rely on people getting lucky and looking out because the price is so high, or they attract higher caliber hunters that have better tools to get the job done.”
“Tools like me?” Cass said proudly.
“Exactly like you. And the tracer we’ll get in a few days. There’s still a measure of chance involved. Before I got you, we had our own share of empty attempts. If the target has access to an identity blocker like we have, then the chances of finding him are nearly impossible unless he’s reckless. Most often are.”
“Because you’re never reckless either.”
Burke laughed and went for a shower. Cass began her search for relevant data. They had four days of time to kill.
* * *
Frank Copper’s face was on the screen at the helm. They had undocked the ship from the station after receiving the tracer and replenishing the ship’s supplies. Burke was eating his final fresh meal that Geoff had sent him. On the screen, Cass was cycling through the information she had gathered.
“This is all I could find,” she said. “There are no reports of him leaving the system but I still went through all the matches to his facial structure that I could find since the bounty was posted.”
The display became a blur of images. Thousands of pictures of faces that looked similar to Copper’s. Burke knew that there would be many false matches from the different angles, perspectives, and qualities of the pictures. They all came from dozens of different systems.
“That’s a lot more data than we used to get. Adam used to handle this side of things. He’d hire outside help too, but they never came back with this many pictures,” Burke said.
“I like being thorough,” Cass said, her voice higher than usual. “Hacking comes more naturally to me than a human, anyway.”
Burke smiled and took another mouthful of potatoes. They were much better than the dry food, plump with salt and preservatives, that he would be eating for the next few weeks. Once again, he missed his old ship and its larger storage space. Soon, he thought. He chewed while he stared up at the screen.
“If Copper got out of the system then we’ll have to let this one go,” he stated. “Let’s commit a few weeks to this and take a chance. The pay is good enough. I’ll set the ship for the Stratos system and we’ll narrow down our search on the way there.
“How many pictures are you displaying right now?”
“Currently: 146,762.”
“Fuck. Give or take a few?”
“No, 146,762.”
“Hah. Okay. Remove those that didn’t come from Stratos. What does that leave us with?”
Parts of the screen started to go blank as Cass sorted through them. Burke set his plate aside and entered the coordinates for the first gate they’d use on the way to the system. It would be two jumps and more travel time in between them before they arrived.
“Done,” Cass said before he finished at the computer terminal.
“How many?”
“Ten thousand, roughly. Give or take a few.”
“That’s still a lot. The trip should take about eight days,” he said and then shook his head at the task in front of them. “Well, we should start right away. Separate each set by planets and stations first.”
The information was categorized and labeled as the ship hurtled toward the first gate. Burke never stopped working even during the jump, choosing to stay in his own ship instead of enjoying the amenities of the jump carrier. The work was painstakingly slow and required a lot of comparison between pictures to rule people out.
Cass was little help during that work, stating that all the pictures looked like the same person to her, and she didn’t understand how humans could always tell each other apart. She instead took over navigating the ship and reminded Burke when to take a break so he didn’t strain his eyes.
Over half of the pictures were discarded. Although they shared similar distances between the eyes, nose, and mouth, he was able to clearly see the difference when put side by side Copper’s original photograph. When they completed the jump into the Stratos system the possible locations had been narrowed to nine. They were all spread across five of the inhabited planets in the system. It was more than Burke would have liked, but he had dealt with worse.
“That’s a lot of possibilities,” Cass said, sounding skeptical. “How does the tracer help?”
“We go physically from planet to planet and go into an orbit low enough to scan for their identity chip, just like the jump carriers scan for mine. We have to be close enough for the tracer to pick up the response from their chip.”
Burke put his hand on his left thigh. His chip had been in the leg that he had lost. Geoff had given him the new one with the forged identity, Jack Porter. Jack was older than Burke, which had been a source of amusement for both Geoff and Cass. The chip was embedded into the bone in his thigh. Two implants and an augmented leg. He wished he could tear at least one of them out of him.
“That could take a while if we go to the wrong planet first,” Cass said.
“If these people were easy to find they wouldn’t need to hire us to do it. Let’s hope we find him at all and that this trip wasn’t for nothing.”
They started with the planets closest to the system’s star and worked their way outwards. Each time the ship had to be lowered down near the boundary between the planet’s stratosphere and troposphere. Burke would stay at the helm for most of that time and look at the worlds below them. Some had less dense atmospheres than others: few clouds and a clear view to the planet’s pale surface. The inhabitants on those kinds were crammed into smaller cities, loosely scattered over the world. It was faster for the ship to travel to each settlement separately rather than systematically loop around the planet.
The fourth planet was an accommodating one for humans. The clouds were thick and sprawled out over the world. Underneath was a shining surface of greens and blues, seemingly covered with thick vegetation and hardly any desert that Burke could see. He knew such planets usually had a breathable atmosphere and were among the most heavily populated in human space; however, he saw few signs of people as the ship lowered down.
“I’ve never been here before,” he said to Cass. “Is there something wrong with this planet?”
“Stratos VI on the maps. Brontes to the locals. Earth-like conditions.”
“They shouldn’t say Earth-like anymore,” he muttered. “No one’s been able to live there for decades. The infestation took care of that.”
“Ah,” Cass continued, seemingly not hearing him, “higher concentrations of oxygen in the atmosphere have led to a more hostile environment than anticipated. Indigenous wildlife is much larger than commonly found on other planets of the same type, especially in the amphibian and insect populations. Storms are more common, and lightning strikes result in large forest fires most of the year.”
“Sounds lovely. I can’t see why no one would want to live here. We found our retirement—”
The command room came to life with a siren and a message on the screen: Frank Copper Located, calculating exact position. Cass started to slow the ship while Burke huffed.
“Fucking typical. Next job we take, we should look up which is the most dangerous planet in the system and fly to that one first. Save some time.”
He got out of his chair and left the room. In the armory he put his aegis on while he trusted Cass to lower the ship and land a few kilometers away from where Copper had been found. Each section of his armor was slid on separately: the second leg, then the two halves of the torso that locked together with the legs. The arms and helmet went on last. The suit was loose on him until all the pieces sealed together.
His aegis was the most expensive and useful tool he owned, since it was also how he had acquired Cass. The armor served multiple purposes, both for defense and survival. He was kept safe from environmental hazards by having the suit supply all of his needs: oxygen, hydration, and even sustenance during longer expeditions off the ship.
Once all the pieces were equipped, Burke initialized the aegis’s systems and felt the interior of it expand around and fit his body. There was a gel-like substance under the fabric of the interior, one that responded to his movements and assisted him when trying to move in the otherwise overwhelming heavy armor.
Cass was the final piece of the arsenal. She knew his combat behavior and tactics and could anticipate his needs. She could display hazards from outside Burke’s field of view and estimate target locations on the suit’s visor display after seeing them once.
The ship came to a stop and Cass transferred herself from the ship’s network to the aegis. An indicator blipped twice on the visor to let Burke know that his system’s start up was complete.
“We should leave the weapons,” he said. “The hidden handgun should be enough. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get near him before he runs off.”
“Agreed. I’ll keep watch for the wildlife.”
He unlocked the opening at his waist and withdrew the grapple line from it. He detached the hook and let the line ravel back inside. He made sure the handgun was in the compartment at his hip and that it was loaded. Finally, he twisted his arms and the blades hidden along his forearms sprang out of the armor. They ran out and behind him from the elbows, a weapon he rarely used unless things were desperate. With another twist, the blades retracted back inside.
He stepped out into the cargo hold. His footsteps were heavier now, sending small tremors through the ship. The doors opened slowl
y and Burke stepped outside and onto Brontes.
* * *
The ship had landed in a clearing a few kilometers from the nearest settlement. There was forest a few hundred steps in every direction, but nothing hostile that Burke could see. There were birds flying above the trees. No, not birds, he thought, more like dragonflies.
“Make sure the ship is sealed up tight. I don’t want to take anything back with us.”
He lifted off his faceplate and was hit with a wave of heat. The planet was far warmer than he was used to, and the air was heavy and humid. He couldn’t see any soil through the thick grass around his feet. He had no idea what might be slithering around unseen, and was suddenly thankful for the armor around him. Oddly, his augmented leg felt more exposed than the rest of him. He tried to push the thought aside as he walked on.
The faceplate joined back into the helmet and Cass displayed a map of the area over his visor. There was a river to the east that ran south toward the settlement. A stationary dot signified Copper’s location. He was a kilometer east from the town, across the river and through the forest.
“He didn’t pick the safest spot, but it’s a good one to avoid people. Smart,” Burke said.
“Be careful in the trees. Spiders here are responsible for more deaths than anything else. Humans are food for them, to put things in perspective. I don’t think they’ll get through our armor but they’ll still try.”
“Noted.”
He marched across the clearing and into the forest. Things fluttered out of the corner of his eyes but there was nothing that Cass marked for him. At the river he saw the first animal: a large, bloated amphibian that sat lazily next to the river. He estimated that it was too big to fit through his ship’s doors.
“The locals call them grollon,” Cass explained. “They’re not hostile, but not friendly either. They won’t bother us if we leave them alone.”
Burke walked farther away from it before approaching the river. As he advanced he saw the beast open its mouth and whip out an elongated tongue into the water. It snatched what looked like a fish from the river and yanked it into its mouth with its tongue. It chomped on it once, only once, and then swallowed.
Bounty Hunter 2: Redemption Page 2