Jess scrambled to her feet to uselessly watch the ship leave her behind. She brought up her right arm to her face and emitted the image of the ship’s engine once again. She changed it to track the ship’s distance instead, a quick pinging of how far away it was. As the ship flew farther away, the pinging slowed. The connection was always terrible when it wasn’t physical, she reminded herself, but it still felt like the signal vanished too quickly.
She looked down at the indent the ship had made in the sand. She turned to face the pile of corpses behind her. Blood was still spreading in the sand around Eric’s body. She closed her eyes and felt a gust of wind blow around her. The hot air scraped against her face; the warmth of it made her feel no less alone.
* * *
Jess stared at the bodies of what had been her fellow crew. She had grown to dislike them more over time but she hadn’t wished death on them. After watching the ship leave, she dragged Eric’s body to the rest of the men and then stepped back. She knew full well what she had to do next but she stood paralyzed, feeling like her mind detached itself from her body. She stared at the corpses as though she could make the task of burying them disappear if she left them alone for a moment longer.
There were three ruined buildings around her that she could pick out from the larger chunks of rubble. She guessed the base had been bombed years ago. One of the buildings had been knocked clean away, leaving only its foundation as evidence that it had ever been there.
The second had kept half of its walls and a portion of its roof. Inside, a disgusting mess was waiting to greet her. The floor was layered with blood stains, both new and old. There were discarded furs and bones in the corners of the room. There were no tables or work surfaces, only scattered tools around the floor with no discernible order to how they were arranged. Jess guessed that Burke had used the room after the hunting he had mentioned to Eric before he killed him. She winced as the thought came so casually into her head. She didn’t walk on the bloodied floor. She turned and stepped back onto the sand.
The last building had been the largest of the three. It had fared the best of them but half of it had still been levelled. A section of the roof was still standing and there was a stairway leading down into a basement. She saw evidence that it had once been collapsed and then cleared away. Chunks of different steps were missing or had been blasted away. There were occasional droplets of blood from when Burke had carried up the corpses of Marcus and the new guy. She felt like Marcus then, unable to remember his name.
She stepped down into the sub level and judged that it had been the majority of the smuggler’s base. She guessed at some older defensive fortifications that had worked better in the corridors underground, and then dismissed the thought. She concentrated on exploring.
There were two potential directions at the bottom of the stairs. A larger, thick blood trail led to the right and only sparse droplets to the left. She went left first and discovered that many of the rooms had been blocked off in whatever destruction the base had endured. Some had been cleared away and contained more of the crates and boxes that she had seen Burke load onto the ship. Farther down the halls she found Marcus’s gun and a single bullet casing laying not far from it. That had been the gunshot she had heard, she assumed. She stepped over it and stopped in the final room at the end of the hall. There was a water filtration unit in the last room, seemingly built into the far wall and, she knew, stretching down underground. She was thirsty but she turned away from it. She wouldn’t feel comfortable until she had made a mental map of the entire facility.
She retraced her steps back to the stairway. She followed the thicker trail of blood. It looked like Burke had dragged a body along the floor, leaving a wide streak over it. There were no other corners or turns to explore, only a straight line of blood to what Jess immediately knew had been Burke’s main home.
There were more crates in the large room. It must have been full of them at one point, she guessed, seeing as how many were left even after he had taken so many with him. Some of the boxes had been broken apart and used to build things with varying success. She saw many shattered pieces of wood and plastic. A crude bed had been made out of some of the pieces, combined with piles of torn up clothes. They smelled terrible.
There were metal components that had been stripped down and then put together, as if by someone who knew what they were doing but lacked the experience and practice to do it. There were too many beginner mistakes for the complexity of what Burke had attempted to do: a transmitter that was half finished, salvaged scraps of solar arrays, dozens of meters worth of cables that had been pulled out of the destroyed walls. She thought it looked like he had someone with technical knowledge instructing him on what to do, but without the capacity to step in and show him how. For a moment she considered that he hadn’t been alone and then discarded the thought. The base was certainly empty now.
“Except for me,” she said to herself and then closed her eyes. “It’s far too soon to be talking to myself already, isn’t it?”
She started to laugh. It was a slow, quiet thing at first but it quickly grew into a loud, obnoxious, horrible noise. She thought if anyone could see or hear how she laughed she would have imploded with embarrassment, and the realization that there might never be someone to see her again made her laugh even harder. She cursed her intelligence during those moments. She knew the planet, Meidum, was massive. It could support human life but the system it was in had a plethora of other worlds that could do the same without the hassle of sand, little water, and elongated day and night cycles. She laughed because she knew the chances of being rescued were next to nothing. No one would ever come looking for her like they had come for Burke.
She marched purposefully out of the base and back to the surface. She walked into the room where Burke had slaughtered the animals he had hunted. Hysteria still threatened to consume her entirely and she forced herself along, busying herself so she didn’t have the chance for idle thoughts to be filled with madness. She walked over the bloodied floor without a second thought. She made multiple trips, taking every tool that lay on the floor with her. They were arranged neatly behind the wall of the building and then she went to the pile of bodies.
Marcus had a massive wound in his chest, which Jess guessed was from some sort of blade. His shirt was soaked in his blood but his outer jacket hadn’t been zipped up and had avoided being soiled. She took the jacket from him, as well as his pants and boots. She left his under clothes and blood drenched shirt. She dragged the body behind the building where she had placed the tools.
She stripped the other corpses in a similar way. Eric and his partner were the cleanest of the four, having been shot in the head and bled out onto the sand rather than over themselves. She couldn’t bring herself to remove Eric’s clothes. He had been the only one she had bonded with on the ship and she refused to tarnish that memory.
The new man was in the worst state, having had his throat slit open and then left to lay in his blood. She took only his shoes and searched his pockets, and then dragged him, near fully clothed, to the rest of the bodies.
In the hours it took her to bury the dead, she reached some sort of calm. It would have been deep into the night of her sleep cycle when she was finally finished with the graves, but the planet’s star still shone as brightly in the sky as when she first arrived. She made many trips down into the base for water and was only happy to elongate the task. She barely noticed the sand that slid back into each hole that she dug, effectively filling up the grave as she made it.
Those first hours alone were a blur of aching muscles and sweat from the unrelenting heat of the planet. She dug each of the men a separate grave and placed no marker to distinguish each of them. When the final grave was filled she stood up and felt the pain in her back from straining it for hours. She exhaled and felt no nagging doubt or hysteria pressing against her. She was steady and realized that she had made the decision to persevere and survive—she had decided, she repeated to h
erself. It was important to her to acknowledge that it was a decision.
She would scrape by and live alone on the planet, but not forever. She knew that she would find a way off the planet or die in the attempt. She knew that when she filled the final grave, because that was when she decided that she had to kill Burke Monrow.
On the second day of her year on Meidum, Jess scrubbed the base and took inventory.
She replaced the clothes and furs on the makeshift bed frame that Burke had made. She put the dirty clothes in the water room but used the furs to mop up the blood still streaked along the floors. She decided against using what little soap she found amongst the containers and used copious amounts of water and time to clean. She knew most of the stain would be permanent without the right chemicals but she did what she could. A stain looked better at a glance than a drying pool of blood.
Each of the containers were moved into the main room. She recognized the crates as a typical stash collected by thieves and smugglers. She had no doubt that most of the items were stolen or scavenged from crashed ships, perhaps even ones that were shot down by the thieves themselves. She didn’t care; she wasn’t the one who killed those people and she felt no shame in benefiting from the goods that were left behind.
There were several dozen boxes despite what Burke had taken with him. She found no stores of drugs or other contraband and knew that he must have taken the most expensive things with him. Smart, she begrudgingly admitted, and was pleased that she could benefit from his decision. He had left many of the functional, cheap things that most people took for granted. Some were small appliances and plain clothes, but no blankets. There was one small box with medical supplies: regeneration packs, bandages, antibiotics, and automated antitoxin kits.
Many of the crates were dried meal packets and canned food. Burke had had no idea how long he had to wait on the planet and had hunted as much as he could to stretch out those supplies. She decided to follow his example and separated the food from the rest of the items.
Most of the containers were weapons and electronics. There were hundreds of handguns, rifles, mass produced tablets, and portable computers. She had seen one of the computers propped up near Burke’s bed, one that he must have used but she hadn’t checked it yet. There was a crate without a lid with depleted power cells discarded within it. She saw that some of them had burst open and were charred around the edges. She knew instantly that he had tried to recharge the cells and failed, not knowing how to control the flow of power and overloading the cells instead of energizing them.
Jess ended the day by organizing her supplies into orderly sections. Burke had had his own method of keeping things that she could make no sense of. There had been several of the crates in the hall at the bottom of the stairs that she could see no reason for. They had been filled with some of the heaviest things found in the base and even pieces of concrete from the surface. Two of them had been too heavy for her to move and she had left them, puzzled why he had placed them there in the first place. It wasn’t the first time that she found herself resentful of the powered armor Burke had to help him, while she had been stranded with nothing but her single augmented arm.
On the third day, she reviewed all the information she could find about the planet. Her arm could serve as well as any tablet computer, and she viewed what data she had on there. The arm’s display emitted from her right hand and she manipulated the interface with the fingertips on her left. She ignored the constant error messages she got as she cycled through the information: connection lost, network not found, wireless signal missing. Many times she followed a link to view that message, working only with what data she had saved locally to the arm’s drives that assumed she still had a consistent galactic internet connection.
Most of the information she already knew or was useless to her: Meidum was officially uninhabited, there was unusually high amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere for a desert world, it was suspected that the planet had large subterranean caves that was home to most of the planet’s indigenous lifeforms. She looked for weather patterns and exact timings on the length of the planet’s day and night cycles. Each day and night lasted a week and she estimated she had landed in the middle of the day cycle by the star’s position and direction of movement in the sky.
She read about frequent sandstorms when the planet switched between day and night, when the changing temperatures would draw together fierce winds. Suddenly, she thought she understood the stacked crates—to protect the underground from being flooded with sand. She made a note to replace the heavy crates and keep a pile of the worst worn clothes to stuff through the cracks between them.
On the fourth day, the system’s star began to set. Jess inspected the repairs Burke had made to the solar array and found that he had done a terrible job. Her years of experience as a mechanic made her able to see improvements immediately, but the heat that had built up on the surface near the end of the day cycle was too much for her to make the changes. She retreated back down into the basement level and prepared for the week-long night that lay ahead of her.
Burke had burned through many of the power cells in his stay as he was unable to restore them. She was confident that she could recharge them where he had failed, but not in a week’s time. She had no idea what would remain functional when the star’s light set and the solar array was no longer able to accumulate power.
She collected as many plastic containers from the boxes that she could find and filled them with water, unsure if the filtration system would still function during the night. She emptied another crate and filled that with soiled clothes and water and then sealed it away. All of the weapons were collected and placed in the opposite corner of her bed. Burke had left Eric’s rifle and she decided that was the weapon she would use when she went out to hunt during the night, as she had heard Burke suggest before he put a bullet in Eric’s head.
She thought of his final words as she cleared the last things of his old room. Had he intended to shoot Eric all along, or was it a decision he made on impulse as Eric walked away? Jess looked over the wall nearest the bed and saw lines etched into it that she hadn’t noticed before. They were a tally, and she counted the first hundred before deciding they had to total up to the days Burke had spent on the surface.
“He must have killed Eric to spare him from what had been done to himself,” Jess whispered as she ran her fingers through the tally marks. “Why though, when he had just proved that he lived through it? A fuck load of good it did in the end, someone’s stuck here after all.”
The base felt suffocating to her after that, and she suffered the lessening heat to watch the hours of sunset before the darkness of night fully fell around her. She had no idea how long it would be until the animals came out of their refuge from the day’s heat. She sat on top of the base with her rifle, alternating between looking through its scope and sizing up the components needed to fully repair the solar array.
The winds came before the animals did. She sealed away the base with the stacked boxes and clothes and spent the first storm miserably staring at her barricade, unsure of whether it would hold and unwilling to leave it and risk being buried.
When the sandstorm cleared, she moved the boxes and dug away the sand to find that things had crawled out after the storm. She found what initially looked like dogs snuffling around where she had buried the men. She shot one and found with disgust that it resembled a rat more than a dog, with a squashed snout and coarse hair.
While stumbling her way through her first time skinning an animal, she thought that she had completed her first steps and acquainted herself with the basics of survival on the planet. She had found water and hunted her first meal, even after botching the preparation of the carcass. She had survived most of a day and night and protected herself from a sandstorm. As the night approached its week-long end and cooled to its lowest point, she thought she had seen all that the planet would throw at her. She was wrong.
* * *
There were
less than thirty hours left of night, and it was starting to get very cold.
Jess sat on the roof with Eric’s rifle and Marcus’s jacket wrapped around her. When she exhaled, she could see her breath froth in the air in front of her eyes. She longed to huddle in the basement level and waste a power cell on heating her room but resisted the temptation. She had killed four of the dog-sized rats and had ruined most of the meat as she learned how to properly gut her kills. She wanted at least one more attempt before the sandstorms and returned heat drove both her and the animals underground.
She used her bionic eye to scan the horizon instead of the rifle’s scope. With the low light filter, she could see clearly all around her. The eye was also capable of zooming in but she didn’t utilize that function yet; she was familiar with firearms but not as good as Eric had been with the rifle. Even if she saw one of the creatures from a few kilometers away, she would have to wait for it to get closer.
A disturbance in the sand caught her attention and she turned her head toward it. Sand was spewing into the air as if from a geyser, and she wondered if there was some sort of alien weather phenomenon that she was unfamiliar with. She scanned the rest of the landscape around her and saw that it was an isolated incident. She heard a scream next and she shivered, not because of the cold. The sound was like a human’s scream—as if forced out by a shock of pain. She sat up and zoomed in on the moving sand as three more screams pierced through the air.
There was one of the dog-rats in the midst of the shifting sand but something else was moving around it. She looked closer and saw even more figures skittering over the animal. They looked like small spiders from the distance, but with more legs than she had ever seen on any spider from a human world. Her skin begin to itch as she stared at the crawlers swarm over the animal and overwhelm it. They had mouths bigger than their bodies would have suggested and it was their screams that she heard. One was at the animal’s throat and reared its body into the air, letting out a howling screech, sounding too close to a human’s, before piercing its teeth into the beast’s neck.
The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning Page 3