He said nothing.
“I’ve been on this planet for three years, two months, and sixteen days. I never want to see another grain of sand for the rest of my life. Every minute I stand here is another minute I spend in my own personal hell.” I jabbed the barrel of his own sniper rifle directly into his scalp. “I’m going to give you one more chance to answer my question before I get on your ship and you never see me again. The only thing you can change is whether or not I leave with one less bullet in this fine weapon of yours.”
The man glared up at me and for a moment I thought he was going to be stubborn enough to make me kill him.
“I don’t know. He was some hotshot, retired merc. Marcus acted like he was some sort of celebrity, and he only ever spoke to the boss.” He tilted his head to the side, looking over to the pile of bodies I had made from his dead crew. “Who I see is in your pretty heap of assholes over there. Good job.”
I gritted my teeth. Inside the helmet, Cass whispered to me, “keep it together. There’s no need to kill this one.”
“Look,” Edward said after letting his lungs deflate in a defeated hiss. “Whoever hired us is the reason I’m fucked here. If I knew who he was I’d tell you. If that’s not good enough, then just fucking shoot me.”
I lowered the rifle and stared down at him for what felt like a long time. He was silent and stared right back at me. I tossed the weapon in the direction of the ship and knelt down. I cut through the line around his legs and pulled him upright. He turned around and held his tied up arms to me expectantly. I shook me head.
“Go down the stairs there. Follow the blood to the right. There’s a few blades you can use. You might cut yourself. You might have to do it for hours. Trust me that it’s still a damn side better than the welcome that I got on this shit hole. There’s food and water. You’ll have to hunt at night. You’ll learn.”
“So you’re really going to fucking leave me.”
“Yes.”
His face furled up in anger and I thought for a moment he would lunge at me, arms tied or not. He turned instead, and walked in a dejected slump to the stairs. He took his time, dragging his feet through the sand, as if he didn’t even see the point of it.
“Let’s go, Burke,” Cass said to me.
I picked up the sniper rifle on my way to the ship. It was obviously Edward’s most treasured possession. When the cargo door was beneath my feet, I turned around and took a final look at his back. I was doing to him what Adam did to me, I suddenly realized. It wasn’t as bad, I tried to convince myself, since I was leaving him with his body whole and the means to survive. Still, his spirit looked as battered as mine had felt the day I found myself stuck down here.
He probably wouldn’t survive, I argued internally. He would probably die on his first night from the crawlers swarming down the stairs that he didn’t know needed to be blocked when it got dark. I wondered if Adam had the same thought about me probably not surviving the fall. The odds were even more stacked against me than they were on Edward, but here I was, on my way to go back and kill the man who did this to me.
I raised the scope to my face and kept Edward’s head steady in the cross hairs. He was walking so slowly that it took next to no effort. I squeezed the trigger and closed my eyes. The sound of the blast echoed into the ship behind me and was followed by silence. I threw the rifle into the sand before I turned around and walked into the ship.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Cass said in a tight, small voice.
“I disagree.”
The ship’s door raised behind me and my right leg felt sore as I moved to the cockpit. With each step it felt like I limped a little more.
* * *
The space station was a bustling hive of people. After so many years of being alone I found it extremely disorientating. I had to stop often before I adapted and relearned to walk with a crowd, and move with the flow of people to where I wanted to go. Geoffrey’s bar was still open, and I planned to be waiting there for him when he showed up.
The station was like a city and space port rolled into one, with arrivals and departures coming at all hours. It was placed between solar systems, and as such relied solely on artificial light. Different sections were adjusted to different day and night cycles, and the effect could be mesmerizing as you walked inside it. I was wearing a large coat over my armor to lessen the attention I may attract. My helmet wasn’t so odd. Many people liked to be in constant contact with the artificial intelligence that helped run their lives.
“I still think you’re making a grave error,” Cass said to me.
“I know, and you’re probably correct.”
“Then why won’t you listen to logic and reason!”
“Because,” I repeated, for what must have been the third time. “Reason has nothing to do it. It wasn’t logical to hold out and live on that world for years on the small chance that I would make it off. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of doing to Adam what he tried to do to me.”
“I still don’t understand. Take some time to fix your leg! Repair me!”
“That thought consumed me,” I continued, as if I hadn’t heard her. “Through the nights when you conserved power it’s all I would think about. I can’t just push it aside now that it’s not needed anymore. It’s still there. It’s keeping me walking on this leg right now.”
Cass didn’t respond and I kept on walking. The trip to the station had taken a few days and I had gotten an opportunity to rest. My leg ached but it was tolerable.
Geoffrey’s bar looked the same as it did years ago, aside from a new bartender. That suited me fine since I didn’t want him to know I was there until he could find out in person. I took a drink and sat in the booth closest to the door, tucked into a corner that you couldn’t see from outside the bar.
I nursed the drink and worked my way through the possible outcomes like I had a dozen times during the flight here. Geoffrey would remember me, but he would have been told I died years ago. I considered different scenarios, ranging from a warm welcome to discovering that he had been the one who pushed Adam to betray me in the first place.
I doubted that he was involved, but I also never considered that Adam would betray me. I had saved Geoffrey’s daughter once. It had been one of my first jobs, back in the early days when Adam and I would take separate, smaller contracts to get our names out to more clients in a shorter amount of time.
The girl had been taken on the station. No ransom. No demands. Just gone. I tracked her down to a small moon in the closest system that had been set up as a base for human trafficking. I hadn’t been fast enough to save her from the unspeakable initiation process they put all of their new “stock” through, but I did manage to bring her back alive.
I had gone back after that and killed every man involved that may have laid a hand on her, which had been every man on the base. I never told Geoffrey, but I’m sure he found out. He was well connected, and something like that wasn’t quiet business. He never mentioned it to me, but from then on he never haggled me over work contracts. We worked together smoothly.
I sat there, almost certain that he couldn’t have been involved. Almost certain.
Geoffrey walked into the bar some time later. He had aged poorly, and only tufts of white hair remained around his ears and on the back of his head. He didn’t notice me and I watched him busy himself around the bar, talking to his employees in quick, half words and getting himself updated on the day’s events.
I finished my drink and lowered my faceplate before I got to my feet. Geoffrey noticed me before I was close to him, and his eyes bulged to the point that they looked close to popping out of their sockets. He gave me a series of nods with his mouth hanging ajar.
“Fuck,” he said, a little too loudly. His face may have aged badly but he was still a tall man. No one seemed to notice that he had just cursed in front of a room full of his customers.
I nodded to him and he waved me toward the door at the back of the bar
. It was the usual place that we would conduct business, and I let him usher me through it and up the stairs to his office on the second floor. He had a large window that ran along the far side of the room instead of a wall. Outside you could see nothing but distant stars. There was nothing but reinforced glass between the room and space.
“You’ve got some balls coming in here wearing that. He’d be pretty pissed if he saw you like this.”
I couldn’t help but smile. I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t known better to trust him from the start.
Geoffrey continued, “My old friend would be even more pissed. You’re lucky he’s not around to see this.”
I furrowed my eyebrows together. I didn’t understand.
“What?” he said. “Are you going to stand there and say nothing? Fuck, Marcus, why did you even come here with that on?”
I raised my hand up to the helmet and nearly tore the faceplate off by pulling it up so hard. I grabbed him by his shirt in the next moment with both hands and raised him off of his feet.
“Marcus?!” I spat the name at him with my face close to touching his.
“Oh fuck. Fuck. Burke. You’re alive! No, no, this isn’t what it seems like.”
“Isn’t it?”
I felt repulsed and disgusted at the same time. I hauled him across the room and he flew over his own desk before slamming into the window. He bounced off of it and landed flat on the floor. I walked in a straight line to him, grabbed his desk and smashed it against the nearest wall instead of walking around it.
“Burke, no, really. Burke,” he was winded from the fall and stammering. “You were dead. He said you were dead.”
“Who said?”
“Adam. He said you died. Shot on the job. How are you alive?”
“Where the fuck is he!” I screamed.
I picked him up with my left hand and slammed him against the window. I pulled my handgun out of my hip compartment and pointed it at the window next to his head.
“Fuck! Burke! Why are you doing this?”
“Why!” I squeezed the trigger on the handgun and the shot went off right next to his head. The bullet crashed into the thick glass and was trapped there. Fracture lines sprung out from where the bullet was held. It wouldn’t break immediately but after a few direct hits it would. We both knew it.
“Because I did die! And he was the one who fucking killed me!” I screamed.
“Burke,” Cass said gently, but I ignored her.
“And you! You sent someone to go get the body, is that it? Some fuck named Marcus. Did Adam want my head as a fucking trophy? Tell me!”
I fired again. Another bullet was nestled in the glass next to the first one. The fissures were concentrated in a white haze around the two projectiles, with dozens of lines spiraling out from them over the entire window.
“No, no, fuck, stop,” Geoffrey was rambling. “He said you were killed. Killed on a mission. Someone got the drop on you when you were both leaving. He brought back the cargo and blamed the client. Said it was a set up. He called off the contract and kept the cargo himself. That’s what he said, Burke, I swear it. He never told me anything else.”
“Then why the fuck did you think I was Marcus?”
“Adam wanted me to do it. Said he was setting up a memorial to you on the station. I, I don’t understand anything now. Your armor is worth millions. Did he just get around to getting it now to sell?”
“What station? What memorial?” I punctuated each question by hammering the barrel of my gun into the window. Geoffrey flinched each time. He looked terrified.
“Th-This station! He owns it. He’s, oh, Burke. No. You can’t go after him now. That cargo he brought back. He never told me what was in it but it must have been a fortune. Your aegis is just loose change compared to that. Petty cash. You can’t touch him.”
I let him go and he slumped against the window. He must have been too frightened to consider the cracks he was leaning against.
“Tell me where he is.”
“Burke, I won’t.”
I bashed the window again with my gun and all he did was shake his head.
“Cass,” I said. “Magnetize our boots to the floor. We don’t want to go out the window before the emergency shutter has a chance to come down.”
“Burke, he’ll kill you. I won’t do that to you,” Geoffrey said.
I felt my feet seal to the floor with a dull thunk. I grabbed Geoffrey’s collar in my left hand again and shot at the glass for a third time with my right. One or two more shots would cause it to shatter.
“Tell me!”
“You saved my daughter. I won’t be what causes you to throw your life away after you did that for me. I won’t.”
My hand gripped his collar tighter and emptied the gun’s magazine into the window. A ripple ran over the glass as it shattered and the window cascaded out into space. The room immediately began to lose pressure. The remnants of the window were first and were blasted out into the vacuum of space. My gun followed and was ripped out of my hand. I clung to Geoffrey with both hands and held him from the void.
“Fucking tell me or I let go!”
The boots held me in place as everything else in the room was vented out. The broken pieces of his desk and the rest of his furniture shattered around us. I heard something slam against the door and knew it was effecting more than just this room. The emergency shutter was already starting to come down and protrude out of the ceiling, lowering to seal the room.
“You have ten seconds, Geoffrey. Tell me where he fucking is!”
He shook his head despite the air whipping around his face. I leaned forward and his legs dangled out of the station. The shutter pressed against them and pushed him down as it lowered. All I had to do was let go.
“Your lungs will rupture. You’ll hold your breath and your lungs will burst into themselves. It won’t be quick. You’ll feel all of it. Don’t make me fucking do this. Tell me!”
“Fine! Fine! I’ll tell you! Pull me in!”
I yanked him back from the shutter just before it closed the final meter and inserted into the floor. The air in the room stabilized and Geoffrey lay panting on the floor, with his back to the sealed shutter.
“Now you’re going to tell me everything. Where he is. How to get there. And then you’re going to call him. Tell him Marcus has come back from the job and is on his way.” I lowered myself down to face him. “And if you warn him, Geoffrey. I will come back and kill you. But before that, I’ll kill your daughter. Do you understand?”
He looked at me, horrified, and as if he had never seen me before. In that moment, I didn’t care.
* * *
Cass and I were on the station’s main elevator going up to the highest level. We had stopped briefly back on our ship for a replacement handgun that I had stashed in the hip compartment on the armor. I couldn’t walk into Adam’s facility and get any live weapons passed their sensors, but we had planned around that.
“Did you mean what you said back there?” Cass asked during the final minutes of the elevator’s ascension.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I had to make him scared enough not to turn on me.”
“But you still said it.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Because I can’t trust him. I wouldn’t hurt his daughter in either case.”
“You don’t trust anyone anymore?”
“I trust you.”
“I’m programmed to help you.”
“I think we both know there’s more to you than that.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “I hope you make it through this alive, Burke. You owe Geoffrey an apology.”
I nodded. The elevator doors opened and I stepped into the hallway. The walls were bleached white to the point that they looked like they were made out of bone. The floors were a sleek black, polished to the point that you could see your reflection in them, a mirror image that matched your steps. I walked down the
hall and passed the two guards. Nothing set off their alarms. No live weapons.
If anyone thought that I looked odd strolling down wearing a full suit of combat armor, no one made any mention of it. I had left the coat back on the ship. Geoffrey should have told Adam in advance how the suit was being delivered to him. I had no need to hide it.
At the double doors to the final room at the end of the hall I stopped to brace myself. I was strangely calm, despite being so close to something I wanted so badly that it burned through the muscles of my body. I had thought it through so many times. I would burst into a room guns blazing, taking out Adam’s guards in droves, and then kill him with a single bullet without a word.
I fantasized about doing to him what he did to me, in a literal sense. I imagined stalking him when he was out for a client, knocking him unconscious, and dragging him back to that damned desert planet. He’d wake up having no idea how he got there, and I would sit in orbit and wait, watching him fail the same struggles that I had to persevere through. I would intervene and help him when things went too far, just to prolong his suffering. After years I would land and he would think he would be saved. And I’d remove my helmet and kill him.
I stood there with my hands on the doors and knew that those fantasies were confined to my imagination for a reason. I had to take what I could manage. I pushed open the doors and walked in.
“Finally!” Adam roared at the first sight of me. “Out! All of you! Out!”
He waved his hands toward the door. The room was full of guards and what appeared to be businessmen. I was interrupting a meeting of some sort and got more than one dirty look as they rushed passed me. When it was just me and Adam, I closed the doors and walked further into the room.
“Look, I appreciate the theatrics,” he extended the index and middle finger of his right hand and moved it up and down at me. “Or whatever this is, but I thought I made myself clear. You can keep whatever you find. I just want the body and that obviously isn’t with you, so you’re already wasting my time.”
Bounty Hunter 1: The Bounty Hunter's Revenge Page 7