Bounty Hunter 1: The Bounty Hunter's Revenge

by Joseph Anderson

  I decided to sleep so I could resume refreshed and not be tired when I explored the inside of the base. I crawled back up to settle down on a flat service and about to sleep when I heard the too-human screech of a group of crawlers in the distance.

  “Shit.”

  “They’re early. Attracted by the sound of the blast, maybe?” Cass proposed.

  “Shit.”

  I dove back down the stairs and started to dig. The original plan was to clear everything out to make sure nothing collapsed after being moved so I wouldn’t be trapped inside, but there wasn’t time for that. I couldn’t risk them infesting the basement level. I shoved my arm into the large gap and pulled out whatever I could.

  The sounds of the crawlers were getting closer. I thought I heard the noise of another animal, something they may have been hunting, but I didn’t dare stop to confirm it. When the gap looked large enough for my chest to get through I propped myself up through it and pushed with my good leg.

  I stretched out my arms in front of me and nearly screamed with the effort of moving my left arm all the way upright. Cass said nothing, knowing that it was necessary, and I didn’t have time to worry about what permanent damage I may have done. I gripped the inside of the gap with my right hand and pulled myself through.

  The lower part of my torso caught between the rocks and I was stuck. A shriek sounded from behind me, so close that I swear I felt the sound of it vibrate through my bones. I thrashed my left leg about trying to find anything to catch onto and push myself. I twisted as much as I could and my chest felt like it was on fire from the effort. All those weeks of careful movements from Cass were being undone.

  I screamed in agony in the last moment before I knocked myself free and fell through the hole. There were more stairs left than I realized and it was a longer fall than I expected. I must have turned from the effort of twisting out of the gap, and I landed directly on my right leg as a result. The pain was so intense that I couldn’t even make a noise. I couldn’t even think. I don’t know how long I lay there in the dark or when the pain subsided enough for me to realize where I was again.

  “Burke! Are you back now? You need to block the hole!”

  My eyes were rolling in my head and I couldn’t tell if the black spots I was seeing were from my eyes or the broken display showing errors. I crawled up the stairs for what felt like an eternity, involuntarily whimpering as I did so. I leaned against the rubble at the top and felt around for any loose stones on the stairs around me. I placed them into the gap, slotting them together, trying to block the moonlight from getting in at first and then packing them tightly so none of the crawlers could get in.

  The screams still came from outside but nothing breached inside. My leg throbbed, like a shock of pain that pulsed out in tune with every beat of my heart. My arm was numb. My head was pounding. I still don’t know if I fell asleep or passed out.

  Part Two

  I woke to a sliver of light creeping into the hole in my visor. I tried to move and found that the suit was powered down. Alarm gripped me as I suddenly feared that I may have been unconscious for days, trapped under the ruins of the base. It was late in the planet’s night cycle when we had escaped down into the darkness, and the suit’s power was already low from the lack of sunlight for many day’s worth of time. I was scared that I may have sentenced myself to a slow death trapped in the same thing that had allowed me to survive this long.

  A few moments passed until I woke up properly and promptly berated myself for being so stupid. Light was what had woken me up, so the suit could manage to collect at least a little power from that, if it needed any at all. I peered through the crack in the visor and discovered, to my surprise, that it wasn’t sunlight. I was still inside the base, but in a different area than I was when I was last conscious.

  “Cass?” I tried to call out to her and found my throat was hoarse. My mouth was dry; my tongue was an uncomfortable lump of flesh in my mouth. I tried to coax what little saliva I could into my mouth and tried again. “Cass?”

  The suit came to life around me. I moved carefully to stretch my muscles while trying not to awaken any pain of my injuries.

  “You’re awake!” She sounded too happy to be only pleased about that one thing. “I had to move you. I wasn’t able to wake you up, but I had to risk it or we’d have run out of power. You were right about coming down here, Burke. I found power cells in a crate down here. I hooked some of them up to what remains of the network down here and—”

  “Slow down. One thing at a time. Let’s get me up first.”

  The faceplate released and I was temporarily blinded by the flood of light that it had been holding back. It had only been a few weeks since we had been stranded here, but artificial light already looked foreign. Cass wouldn’t let me move myself upright and I didn’t argue. The fall had been the most painful thing I had ever experienced and that included the times I had been stabbed and shot. I didn’t want to consider the damage it must have inflicted.

  I was able to get a better feel of the room when I was on my feet, and I confirmed that I was in the same room that Adam and I had found the stolen cargo for our client. The room was mostly undamaged, with only two points of collapse that had buried a crate or three. Most of the crates were intact and still held whatever the thieves had managed to accumulate over the time they had been here. A smile crept onto my face. The very thing that Adam refused to haul back in his rush to kill me was now what would save us.

  We spent what must have been an entire day going through the supplies. Most of them were food and water. I suspected that they must have had more food stores elsewhere in the base but they were likely buried in the ruin or suffered a failure in refrigeration when the base lost power. Cass had only been able to restore the lights in this room by rigging some of the stored power cells to it.

  “We may be able to restore some of the network in time. They must have been using a similar technology to draw power from the sunlight that we use. When your arm heals we may be able to fix at least some of it.”

  I nodded at her words and realized that she was preparing for a very long period of time on this planet. It hit me that I had been holding out for some sort of quick fix—Adam’s return, or whatever ship the thieves had used to transport their spoils here. Something like that happening was unlikely, and it dawned on me that this may be my life for some time. Perhaps for the rest of my life.

  At the end of the day Cass displayed an organized list of all we had gathered from every crate. One had been medical supplies, which I felt a twinge of guilt over being ecstatic over finding. They must have been ransacked from a hospital ship, and I was benefiting from the misery of others, even if it was inadvertently.

  We had pain killers, antibiotics, and regeneration packs that could heal wounds, but nothing to treat broken bones. Still, it was reassuring to have something, and I was quickly in the least amount of pain I had been in for weeks.

  The base had been intended for over a dozen people for extended stays over the course of a few months to a year. There was ample food and water for only me, a single man, to survive on. Cass even suspected that I may have been right in my theory about an underground water source, but even without it I had enough to last for years.

  Other containers were filled with clothes and tools. Some contained luxury goods, such as jewelery or unrefined materials—things that were mostly useless to me. One crate had been brimming with holotapes of movies, books, and music. It was almost too good to be true, that I even had something to occupy my time in addition to food and water.

  The remainder of the containers were weapons and ammunition. I planned to move them all to another part of the base when I was fully healed. There was nothing we found that could repair the damage done to the battle aegis, but we hadn’t expected to get that lucky.

  I ate and drank as much as I wanted before I slept at the end of the day. I could pile crates against the door to keep any crawlers out if necessary during the
night cycles. I had enough time for my body to fully heal, as much as it could heal without a medical facility. I settled down to sleep that night unaware of the length of time that was about to pass before I could leave the planet. If I had known, maybe I would not have slept so soundly.

  * * *

  My arm and chest made a full recovery before the end of the first year. My leg should have also, but I was only able to get limited movement and a slight bend of the knee without feeling like my muscles were being pulled apart. It no longer caused constant pain, but the strain of moving it was too uncomfortable to bear.

  The movement I did get out of my leg became natural over the years, and I walked with only a slight limp. Still, Cass refused to let me remove the armor from that leg out of fear that I wouldn’t be able to strap it back on.

  I wore the suit less and less during the planet’s day cycle. The hardware had its own capability of keeping its interior clean but after more than a year there was only so much it could do. The first time I took the suit off I was greeted to the sores and rashes I had developed from keeping it on for far too long. I boiled water and washed myself each part at a time with tiny bits of soap that had been with the medical supplies.

  Unable to remove the armor from my right leg, I had to rinse the inside of it out with water. Cass would then let it slowly drain away using the same mechanisms that would remove my sweat after a battle. It wasn’t an ideal way of cleaning the leg, but was better than nothing.

  I took to wearing standard clothes again as much as possible, but I almost always kept the suit’s helmet on, with the faceplate open. It was the only way for Cass to communicate with me. She was the only person I had to talk to.

  Over the second year I was able to repair part of the solar array on the top of the base. I had cleared away almost all of the rubble of the collapsed ruin. I had buried what had been left of the thieves after months of the animals feeding on them. It wasn’t much, but I felt compelled to do it. I moved the rubble over onto the same area, as if to mark them in a protective layer over where they were put to rest. As consumed with anger as I was toward Adam, I still tried to maintain some part of my prior dignity.

  The repaired array didn’t generate enough power for the entire base, but I only used one room. It was enough to keep the lights on when I needed them, and enough to power the water filtration system when I finally cleared my way into it. At first I was terrified that the drilled hole would be another entrance for the crawlers to get into. None ever came, and after months of being paranoid and keeping the room sealed when I wasn’t collecting water, I finally resigned myself to the idea that nothing was coming to get me. I left the room open.

  I began to hunt during the nights. I learned that the rat creatures usually emerged several hours before the crawlers and, combined with the new water source, I was able to feed myself indefinitely off the planet. The crawler’s shrieks never ceased to unsettle me, and I always sealed off the basement area with rows of stacked crates after each rat kill. I never took any chances about letting them down the stairs.

  At the end of the third year I had stopped shaving. At first it was a matter of maintaining some visible connection to my former self. My body had been battered and, even though it recovered, I still felt the scars of being stranded. I used the smaller shards of the broken blade from the suit’s arm as a razor, and kept my hair short. Into my fourth year I had to admit to myself that I no longer saw the point in doing it and, as if that resignation was what the universe was waiting for, the ship arrived the very next week.

  * * *

  The roar of the ship woke me up immediately. We had made some tentative plans for this event over the years, but in those first moments I relied on my instincts. I sprang from the makeshift bed I had constructed out of broken down cargo containers and spare clothes. Cass’s helmet, which I only took off for sleeping, was promptly put on. She starting spewing ideas at me while I slid on the rest of the armor, piece by piece.

  “A small ship, from what I can gather from the vibrations caused by the engine. No way to tell how many people are on it. I wish we had managed to get some sort of surveillance working. Do you remember what we agreed on?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “No kills unless there’s an opportunity to do so without being noticed. Listen first. They might be friendly.”

  “And?” she prompted.

  “And no gunshots until I’ve made sure the ship can’t take off and leave us all fighting. Winning a battle won’t mean anything if the pilot just leaves.”

  I had the suit’s legs, torso, and left arm when I heard the noise from down the hall of the base. I couldn’t risk spending any more time with the final arm of the suit and started moving. Cass locked and sealed the pieces I had managed to equip but I still felt exposed with right arm, my dominant arm, having no armor.

  There was a gun in the hip compartment of the suit but I needed something that wouldn’t make a lot of noise. I grabbed the blade that I had fashioned out of the broken armor pieces, with the same hilt of layered wrapped cloth that I had made so many years ago, and held it with my right hand as I walked to the entrance of the room. I used the tip of the blade to knock the power cell from the wall and the lights of my room went out.

  The door was open and I leaned against the wall next to it, with my right leg straight and my left slightly bent. I listened.

  “—telling you Marc, someone has been living here. The kind of bombs that were used here wouldn’t have done all this.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” another voice, a little deeper than the first, answered. “Look at this place. It’s been falling apart for years. We’re here for some dead guy in a battle aegis. Or just the hardware. Just shut up and look for it. And you call me Boss when we’re off-ship.”

  From the way the sound of their voices traveled to my ears I estimated that they were only just walking down the stairs and onto my level. I had cleared the path as much as I could but enough remained that I still heard the crunching of shattered concrete and rubble below their feet. It would be harder to pinpoint where they were when they got onto the clear floors of the hallway but they would be closer then.

  “Did you catch all of that, Cass?” I whispered.

  “They’re here for us. Someone has been talking about us.”

  “After all this time?”

  “Maybe Adam didn’t want to say what happened until now. Or maybe you’re a story. You were very close to being famous, and I am a very expensive piece of machinery. At least I was. I better still be.”

  The smile on my face from what she had said soon faded. They were moving closer. It was difficult to tell their footsteps apart as they echoed down the hallway but it seemed like one was moving toward me and the other was searching the other way, toward the water room. I secured my grip on the blade and waited.

  “Some sort of set up in this room, boss,” yelled the man that was closest to me, walking to my room. “Everything is dark, though. You were probably right about it being abandoned.”

  “Of course I was,” the other voice sounded distant. I could barely hear it. “Didn’t I say to shut up and search?”

  “Asshole,” I heard the closest one mutter.

  He was in the doorway, nearly right next to me, and he had spoken so quietly that only I had heard him. I held my breath. He was so close that all he had to do was turn his head to the left and he could have seen me. My heart was pounding from the intensity of the moment, being so close to a kill or being seen and caught. It had been years but it was still a rush. I had missed this life.

  Just as quickly that rush turned to anger. At Adam, for stealing this away from me. Four years of work, of danger, and the payoffs that it brought. The muscles around my mouth curled up into something close to a snarl. This man in front of me wasn’t Adam. He hadn’t wronged me yet, but he was here for what was mine, and the rifle that I saw in his arms showed me that he was ready to fight for it.

  This man wasn’t Adam, but he was the c
losest thing to it at that moment.

  “Burke. No.”

  I exhaled as I turned into the swing. My bad leg may have restricted my movements after I had first fallen but I had adapted over the years. I kept it rigid and used it as a point to turn my body around, putting my weight into the turn and focusing the momentum onto my right arm and the blade. I kept my eyes locked on the target: the man’s neck, fast enough to silence him but not hard enough to sever the head.

  The blood came out of his neck like vomit, hot and heavy, and spilled down over his chest. He barely had time to realize what had happened before it was over. I grabbed him with my left, armored hand and threw him into the corner of the room behind me. His body landed on the floor and slid into the wall with a dull thud, and I didn’t have to look to know that he would die of the blood loss in a few moments.

  “That was risky,” Cass said.

  “I was angry.”

  “That’s what I mean. You can’t be angry. The pilot will leave.”

  She was right. I looked down at the floor and saw the blood in the entrance way. In the dark it was hard to see, but not so hidden that someone wouldn’t notice it before they got close enough for me to strike. I had to intercept the other man before he saw it.

  I stepped forward over the blood with my left leg, knowing that I’d have to bend down far enough to carry my right leg over. The weight of my armor caused audible footsteps as I made my way down the hall, but the other man was out of sight and must have been searching the water room. Any footsteps he heard he would have attributed to his partner, or whoever the man I just killed had been.

  When I reached the stairway I hid myself from the view of the hallway against the wall. The planet was at the beginning of its day cycle and light streamed down the stairs, casting my shadow on the floor. They hadn’t even waited for nightfall before coming down here. They were either cocky as Adam and I had been, or amateurs. Judging by the civilian clothes the first man had been wearing, I assumed the latter.