There it was, Burke thought. That was the reason. “Maybe one day. But for now, no debts. I don’t want to owe anything to anyone.”
“The past four years have changed you then,” Havard said with a nod. “In this case I think it’s for the better.”
He had a tablet in his hand and brought it closer to his face. He ran his right hand over the display, tapping his fingers on something Burke couldn’t see. Two of the people walked out of the ship and toward the doors. They were carrying pieces of his aegis with them. He opened his mouth to object but then recalled Havard’s offer to repair the damage done to it. Still, it was another thing that didn’t sit right with him.
“I’m staying in the ship,” Cass said, directly into his ear via stimulation from the implant in his cheek. “I’ll stay connected with you but I don’t trust these people. Havard wanted to buy me when I spoke with him. They might try to copy me!”
Burke smiled. Havard raised his eyes from the tablet and looked at him.
“I just sent your payment. You should see the new balance within an hour. Now, I have another job for you if you’re interested. First, come with me and bring the core. I have something you might want to see.”
They walked side by side off the ship and into the dock. Every room they passed and every corridor they walked stayed a consistent, immaculate white. It made the rooms look more spacious and clean but, as Burke saw more and more ships trading crates of supplies throughout the dock, he knew that it was anything but that.
They stopped at a foyer deeper into the complex. There were two rows of elevators but Havard approached one that was situated apart from the rest. There were no buttons around its doors and he typed something on his tablet to call the elevator. It was large on the inside, even factoring in the illusion that its white walls played on Burke’s eyes. It reminded him of an elevator in a hospital.
“What are you going to do with this core?” Burke asked as the elevator began its descent.
“We suspect that it’s a unique member of the species. We want to determine if it either mutated to be able to reproduce in our environments, or if it was an exceptionally intelligent member of the species. Either way, we think it might help us perfect a method of detecting them.”
“Will you kill it afterwards?”
“Of course. The second it’s not of any use to us.”
“Good,” Burke said.
The elevator stopped and the doors opened to reveal a section of the facility that Burke had never seen before. The walls looked to be made of metal, a reinforced and sturdy gray. No decorations or paint covered the walls and, after stepping into the room, he saw that the elevator they used was the only one connected to the room.
Havard walked to the only other door on the wall opposite the elevator. Once again, there was no method or mechanism that Burke could see to operate the door, and Havard used his tablet to connect with it. The door halved itself as it opened, sliding apart horizontally and disappearing into the walls it was built into like a vault. Another door was behind it, which required an additional connection from Havard’s tablet. There were three other doors after that one, each looking stronger and thicker than the one that came before it.
“Is this a prison?” Cass’s voice sounded like a whisper in his ear.
Burke opened his mouth to answer and stopped himself before remembering that Havard couldn’t hear her. He shook his head and began to wonder himself. He thought it was most likely a section of secretive research on the planet, where they had to keep their new designs and inventions under high security so they wouldn’t be stolen. Then, when the last door opened and a cacophony of inhuman screaming blasted through the corridor, he stood there stunned.
“Oh, it must be feeding time,” Havard said, laughing at the expression on Burke’s face. “I forgot about that. I should have warned you. The noise should stop soon.”
“Feeding time for what?”
“There are too many to name, and some that I’m not allowed to admit that we have,” Havard smiled in a way that didn’t make him look happy at all.
Reluctantly, and wishing he was wearing his armor, Burke followed Havard through the doors and felt them close abruptly behind him. The walls didn’t have the same stark, fortified plating that the outside room had, but neither were they the welcoming, crisp white around the dock. Burke felt like he was inside a spaceship rather than a structure on a planet.
He saw people farther down ahead of him and Havard, where the corridor split into two different directions. They were walking quickly, either carrying something or pushing a cart full of objects that Burke didn’t recognize. None of them seemed to care or even notice the howling that was constantly ripping through the air. He expected odd looks when he reached the fork in the hallway, as he was still holding the alien’s core in his hand. None of the people looked at him, nodding at Havard instead and saying “sir.”
He turned left and the noise became louder as they walked toward it. The corridor was wider than the previous one and Burke soon saw why. There were windows in the walls, each showing a single room spaced roughly twenty meters apart along the wall. The first ones they passed were empty, but soon he started seeing occupied ones. Some had strange looking plants and vegetation, like a patch of an alien garden that had been scooped up and deposited into the room. Others had animals in addition to the plants. All of them were alien but Burke recognized most of them. Most were large, plump herbivores that other intelligent species had used for livestock. They always reminded him of cows.
“We try to keep a minimum number of any alien creature we come into contact with,” Havard explained as they continued to walk. “I think we might have some specimens here that have gone extinct on their home worlds.”
“This is a zoo?”
“No,” Havard laughed. “A zoo? They’re for experiments. Mostly the hostile ones of course, but you’d be surprised by what you can learn about a species from studying other animals from its planet.”
They reached a door that opened automatically in front of them and continued down another corridor displaying more docile animals. In the next hallway were carnivorous aliens and the howling was loud enough to drown out any possible speech between the two of them. Food was being deposited through chutes that extended out of the ceiling and the animals waited directly under it, snapping at the food before it could hit the floor.
Through one of the window he saw over a dozen of the crawlers that he had fought when he had been stranded. They had come out during the planet’s night cycle and tried to overwhelm him. He thought of when one of their legs had nearly stabbed through his eye and shuddered. They were crowded around the chute in their pen, scrambling to crawl up it when their food was released. A blast of air came out first, knocking them onto the floor, before it unleashed a large pile of sludge that they immediately began to feast on.
Burke inhaled sharply and wondered how they kept the stench of all the animals out of the air.
The last corridor they walked through had another series of doors at the end like the entrance had. The windows were spaced out much farther in that hallway and held some of the largest aliens Burke had ever seen. In one there were two rhymaws that were emitting loud, deep roars as their pen’s food chute extended but nothing came out. They were a common target for bounty hunters. Their bodies sported thick, long horns around their shoulders and head that sold for a high price. They stood on four legs and were capable of running fifty kilometers an hour during a charge, something that he had learned firsthand.
Burke was surprised that ACU had two in captivity. Their size and strength made them notoriously hard to capture, never mind transport. The walls inside their pen must have been stronger than the others, and he wondered how many additional layers of protection had been added to the window. Most surprising of all were the young group of rhymaws that crowded around the larger one’s legs. The facility had a pair capable of breeding in captivity, something that Burke had never heard of.
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Havard had to use his tablet once more on the doors at the end of the hall. Burke looked through the nearest window as he waited. The pen was dark inside but he could still hear noises from it. As he looked closer he saw flashes of illuminated shapes in the darkness, parts of some animal that shimmered when it caught the light in a certain way. He leaned forward to the glass and three pairs of eyes snapped open and gleamed like neon jewels, seemingly floating in the pen as their bodies stayed cloaked in the darkness.
The doors opened and he followed Havard through. When they closed behind him, and the wailing of the hungry animals faded away, he wondered if they had moved to another section of the facility. The room they stood in was massive, both tall and wide. It was a circular room, with stairs and narrow walkways built onto the inside of the walls. Burke saw that there were more windows that displayed pens similar to the hallways, but he was too far away to see what was contained inside them. He was confused by that and wondered if they were vacant; there were still no noises like there had been in the hallways.
There was a pillar in the middle of the room that ran from the floor to the ceiling. There was a ring of desks and computer terminals around it, each with a person behind it. There were other people around the room. Some were climbing the stairs to check on the pens higher up, while some were moving through doors dotted around the main level. Burke’s ears were ringing now that he could no longer hear the captive animals. The sudden change, combined with the calm atmosphere of the room, set him on edge.
Havard walked to the central desks and Burke followed behind.
“I need someone down here to retrieve a 1260 nucleus,” Havard instructed to the man behind the desk. “Make sure there’s a nutrient bath ready. I don’t want this one going dormant and hibernating for months.”
“Nutrient bath?” Burke repeated quietly to himself. Even after being reassured of Havard’s intention to eventually kill the alien, it still didn’t seem right that it was about to be brought back to life in a flourish. When a woman approached him a few minutes later, wearing a large glove on each of her hands, he relinquished the core while trying to convince himself he was making the right decision. He expected that the weight of transporting it would have eased immediately when it was out of his hand. Instead, he felt worse.
“Now,” Havard began. “We have a few more things to discuss. Like I said, I have some more work for you. But first I have an offer. I want to purchase the AI we sold you with your aegis suit. We’ll provide a replacement free of charge. What did you call her? Cass?”
“Wow,” Cass said in Burke’s ear. “Last time I spoke with him, he mentioned he was interested but I didn’t think he’d have the nerve to try.”
“How much?” Burke asked, and tried not to laugh when Cass growled in his ear. He was confident that she would know he was joking.
“Six hundred million.”
Burke was floored. His usual rate for completing a job for ACU was just under a million credits. The ship at the top of their list was less than ten million. For the money being offered, he could have bought a small space station.
“I told you I was a bargain,” Cass said, so happily he could hear her virtual smile.
“Fuck,” Burke answered. “No, sorry. She’s not mine to sell anymore, so it would be her decision. You’ll have to ask her. I only asked because I was curious and now I have to ask again: why? When I bought the suit and she came with it, it only cost a fraction of that. What changed?”
“You removed her restriction programs and she’s still functioning. They aren’t in place to limit an AI’s capabilities, despite what most people think. They’re safety precautions, intended to increase the longevity of an AI’s life span. How long has she been functioning?”
“Four years and eighty-nine days,” Cass said.
“Four years,” Burke said.
“Do you know how long we’ve managed to keep an unrestricted AI functioning here?”
“No,” Burke answered. “Three years?” he guessed.
“Three months, with its processing capability severely hindered for the last month.”
He was worried now. Cass was quiet.
“Why is she different?” Burke asked. “Is there any danger that she’ll stop functioning?”
“That’s why I want to buy her back. She isn’t showing any signs of degradation. Consider letting us borrow her at least, to run some tests and thorough scans. We might be able to prolong her further.”
“No,” she said firmly.
“You’ll have to ask her yourself,” Burke replied.
“Very well,” Havard sighed and shook his head. “Follow me, then. I have some things to show you.”
They walked to the right side of the room. Burke saw that the windows on the main floor were tinted black, unlike the clear ones on the levels above them. They had been too high up to see into. He wondered what was in them that Havard wanted to show him.
Havard looked down at his tablet when they stood in front of the window. It was dark enough that he couldn’t see anything inside of it. Burke could see it as he stood next to him. The screen displayed:
Containment Room A16.
Occupants: One.
Isolation measures currently active:
Audio and visual insulation.
Burke watched as Havard typed through commands on the tablet. The sound insulation was deactivated first, and the sound of a human crying immediately blared from behind the dark window. Burke immediately went on guard and felt his body tense. The black tint on the window faded away to reveal a young girl, no older than six or seven, curled up at the bottom of the glass. Her cheeks were soaked in tears and her face and eyes were puffy. She sobbed and looked up at him.
“Please help me,” she whimpered. “They hurt me.”
“What the fuck is this?” he growled.
“Oh please,” Havard waved a hand dismissively at him. “Don’t be so dense.”
The room the girl was in was empty. There was a door on the far side of it and, as Havard continued to interface with his tablet, a slot opened above it where a chute had protruded in the other pens. Something that looked like a weapon extended out of the wall, with three sharp prongs on the end like a trident. A surge of electricity ran down along the prongs and then arced between the tips of them.
“No!” the girl screamed and began to cry harder.
“Havard,” Burke said, making the warning weigh heavily in his voice.
“I’m surprised,” he replied. “Everyone is fooled the first time, but I thought you might see passed it given your experience.”
The trident shot out of the wall suddenly and pierced into the little girl’s body. A thick stream of wires unravelled behind it, maintaining a connection with it to the wall. The girl roared louder than a child her size should have been capable of and it was only then that Burke understood. Another surge of electricity ran through the wires and pummelled into the girl’s body as if it was a series of striking fists.
Her flesh ruptured in an explosion of clear fluid, not blood, and her face contorted as her mouth grew thrice its size and filled with long, thin teeth. It was an abnormal, forced transformation that looked more unnatural than any other he had witnessed a member of species 1260 perform. One more final jolt disintegrated what flesh remained of the alien’s disguise and all that remained was its core, near identical to the one Burke had delivered, spinning on the floor.
Burke turned to Havard and saw the look of disgust and anger on his face. It was rare that he was anything but stoic and pragmatic, but Burke remembered well the story Havard had told him of his first encounter with the shapeshifting aliens. He had led the team that first encountered them when they were doing the initial investigation of potentially inhabitable planets.
The aliens had impersonated members of his team and had left many of them dead. Some had stayed imprisoned for years afterwards as they tried to determine who was human or alien. The planet had been bombarded as a final, preven
tative measure to protect all races of the galaxy from infestation. For Havard, it hadn’t been enough. He had shouldered the full responsibility of the deaths of his people. It was one of the first conversations he had had with Burke, when he assigned his first contract to hunt one of the rogue aliens.
“This is the closest we’ve gotten to a method of identifying them,” Havard explained. “Unfortunately, the amount of energy required is also enough to kill a human if we’re wrong. It’s just further proof that we were right to exterminate them. It would have been an unmitigated disaster if they had been given free exposure to the galaxy.”
Burke nodded. Havard continued to talk as they began to walk around the outside of the room. Each cell that they passed was similarly darkened as the first one had been.
“A few were released in the early days that we held them here. Like I said, everyone is fooled the first time, and some of their tricks can be convincing to the more sensitive employees here. We’ve had to install sound and visual dampening measures to stop people from going mad while they work in this room. They would all cry in unison and, even when you know it’s fake, the never ending screams of your own kind gets under your skin.”
They stopped at an opening in the wall that led to an elevated platform. Burke followed his lead onto it and watched as they began to ascend up the wall and passed the other floors around it. When they were near the top, he could see that the cells on the upper levels weren’t darkened and displayed their prisoners. They looked like animals, more of the feral aliens that were in the hallways outside of the large room. There was something familiar about the way they moved, but he was too far away to get a good enough look.
“This next part might be difficult for you,” Havard explained when the platform stopped on the top floor. “You might want to brace yourself.”
Burke was confused. He had been given no warning about the shapeshifter posing as the little girl. He stepped out onto the floor and turned to face the nearest cell. He understood then, as he felt his chest tighten with anger and his fists instinctively balled up. There were two of the aliens inside, shuffling about on all four of their legs and swinging their bunched, thin tails with each step. It had been nearly a decade since he last saw a dross but the memories of the war came back to him potent and raw.
The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm Page 3