The Bounty Hunter
(Cade Korbin Chronicles, Book 1)
(1st Edition)
by Jasper T. Scott
JasperTscott.com
@JasperTscott
Copyright © 2020
THE AUTHOR RETAINS ALL RIGHTS
FOR THIS BOOK
Cover Art by Tom Edwards
TomEdwardsDesign.com
Content Rating: R
Swearing: Some strong language
Sexual Content: Mild
Violence: Moderate
Author's Guarantee: If you find anything you consider inappropriate for this rating, please e-mail me at [email protected] and I will either remove the content or change the rating accordingly.
Acknowledgments
As an author, sometimes deadlines creep up on you, but other times you see them coming a long way off and have to scramble to finish on time. With this book, I knew what I was in for in advance: one month to write and edit. That meant long hours and precious little time off, it also meant working through Christmas day and many a weekend. Many thanks to my family for putting up with that. And a huge thanks to my editor, Aaron Sikes, and to my proofreader, Dani J. Caile, both of whom worked over the holidays with me to finish their parts in record time. This was a team effort, and I’m forever grateful to my team.
And finally, many thanks to the Muse.
For Jay Smith, who said that I should write a book with a main character like John Wick. This one’s for you, Jay. I hope you enjoy meeting my friend, Cade. Just whatever you do, don’t piss him off.
Prologue
The Year 532 UGC
Aquaria, Alliance Space
I’m lying fifty meters up, on the edge of a pillowy canopy of glossy red and orange leaves. Dead ahead lies an island community built entirely on stilts. Twin suns, one small and red, the other yellow, beam down from their mid-afternoon positions, turning ripples on the water into shards of rubies and flecks of gold.
From outside the island paradise looking in, I see lavish mansions ringed with reflective picture windows, and restaurants with expansive outdoor dining areas. Elevated walkways connect the restaurants to touristy souvenir shops over a channel of water. Hoveryachts sit motionless in docks all over the island.
Behind it all, a soaring volcanic mountain is carpeted with red, ocher, and black foliage. I can’t see the beaches, but I remember seeing from the air that the sand is clear and white. The natural beauty of the islands of Aquaria, with all of their unique flora and fauna, has been preserved by confining construction to the shallow oceans around the islands. And even then, only where coral doesn’t grow. Everything is built on high stilts between the reefs, designed to have a minimal impact on the environment.
To my back and under my belly is a vast forest of gravity-defying salt water trees that soar up from the shallow ocean. They form an interlocking canopy of branches, frilled with glossy red and orange leaves at altitudes as high as sixty meters. These trees are an ideal vantage point from which to surveil my target. The canopy is actually strong enough for me to walk on, not that I would risk it. I’d be too visible if I stood up now.
I’m not even using the screen on my holoband to keep my target in sight. The light from the holo display, or the glint of metal on my forehead might give me away. Instead, I’m doing this the old-fashioned way, with my right eye lined up behind the scope of my Lex&Coros G42 rifle. I have a suppressor on the barrel, a guided round in the chamber, and plenty of spares in the waterproof bag beside me.
The target, Cristophe Zabelle, of Zabelle Enterprises, is in full view, tanning himself on the back of his hoveryacht. His wife, Nadine, and teenage daughter, Bella, are beside him. A fleet of bots waits on them hand and foot.
Cristophe looks like an easy target. Already tanned to the tinge of burnt caramel; his black hair is wet and slicked back. Eyes shut. Arms flat at his sides while he inches down the color chart from burnt caramel to charcoal. Lying out in the open like that looks like an immense risk for someone in his position, but it’s an illusion. The hoveryacht is shielded, and if I shoot a round at him, it would only disintegrate a dozen meters off the back of the yacht. All that would do is expose my position. So today, I’m here strictly for surveillance. Unless the target slips the noose. Then I might have to get up close and personal. And I really don’t want to do that with four cyborgs and two full-on bots providing security.
“The target is in sight.” I whisper into my comms.
“Copy that, Charlie Kilo.”
I frown at that. Not much of a call sign—CK. My initials. That’s what you get in the military. Alphabet soup for everything.
I roll my shoulders to work out some of the tension. But Cristophe never leaves my sight. I watch him without blinking, until my eyes burn. Nestled in my hideout, with only my weapon’s muzzle sticking out, I’m completely invisible up here. Only an air car would have a chance at spotting me, but I’ve thought about that too: I’m lying under a digital ghillie suit that hides me from visuals as well as thermal scanning. As far as anyone from the air can tell, I’m just a collection of leaves. Unfortunately, that means the cloak must be the same temperature as the leaves, so there’s no power-cooled lining to keep me comfortable.
With two suns overhead, my back is drenched with sweat, which trickles down to collect around my waist, itching like hell. To top it off, there’s water, water everywhere, and my mouth is dry as a desert.
Hurry up and wait. That’s the job of a Paladin. Not as glamorous as they made it seem in the recruitment vids and the holo posters. See the galaxy, they said. Be a hero, they said. Protect and serve the Coalition. Preserve our utopian ideals for generations to come. They made it seem like I’d be grav surfing on shock waves, and spraying lasers at the bad guys. And don’t even get me started on all the promised attention from the ladies. Most of the time I don’t get to stop and breathe, let alone speak long enough to use a pick-up line.
They didn’t say anything about drowning in your own sweat and dying of thirst while surveiling a target either. Or worse, wearing a diaper because you’ve got to sit in the same damn spot without moving for an entire day. Sometimes two or three.
At least this job is supposed to be a relatively quick one. I got here less than thirty minutes ago. Swam over from Cirim, the neighboring town, in nothing but my trunks, snorkel gear, and a belt with a UV shield attached.
I found the bolter rifle dangling from a branch on the designated tree along with some other gear that I may or may not need. I’m hoping not.
Thirty minutes and counting before Christophe’s meeting with the CEO of the Chronus Mining Guild. It’s too far for him to take the yacht in that short of a time. Besides, the CEO of Chronus is a rough character, so Cristophe wouldn’t take his family to that meeting. He’ll take the air car parked on the roof of his yacht, and he’ll go alone, which means he’ll die alone, and the company will be inherited by his wife. The brains behind Zabelle Enterprises will vanish, taking down the Alliance’s most promising line of research into FTL Rifts—a possible means of FTL travel which would be nearly instantaneous and untraceable.
If the Alliance were ever to develop a safe, reliable way of using the rifts, it would give them deadly first strike capabilities against the Coalition, and that would end the cold war overnight.
We already stole Zabelle’s research data, and we tried to get him to switch sides, but no joy. Christophe has it in for the Coalition ever since they drove him out with their antitrust lawsuits and high taxes.
Since then, Christophe and Zabelle Enterprises became the primary supplier of the Alliance’s FTL tech, and
it’s now leagues ahead of what we have in the Coalition. Their FTL drives are faster, harder to track, and they have shorter spin-up and cool down times. That already gives them an immense edge, and the Coalition can’t let them to get any farther ahead. Numbers only count for so much in a fight before superior tech wins the day.
But if Christophe dies and his backup neuroscans are all found to be riddled with a data-corrupting virus, then the Alliance’s research into FTL Rifts will hit the same wall as ours, and the Coalition will have a chance to catch up to the Alliance in FTL tech.
So here I am, a Coalition Paladin, assigned to sabotage Christophe Zabelle’s air car and then watch from a distance to make sure he goes out with a bang.
Is he a bad guy? Does he deserve it?
Maybe, maybe not. It’s not my job to know, and this isn’t about him. It’s about the war that we’re trying to prevent and the billions of lives that will save.
At least, that’s what I tell myself at night to keep the ghosts in their closet. They shouldn’t call us Paladins. It makes us sound heroic and noble. They should call us what we are: assassins. Killers. Wraiths that sneak up behind people in crowds and snap off nanoblades in their backs.
A flicker of movement interrupts my thoughts. Christophe just sat up. Now he’s standing.
“Target is Oscar Mike,” I say into my comms.
“Copy.”
Christophe Zabelle drops a kiss on his wife’s lips. She grabs his neck to make it last. He pulls away and nods to his daughter. Says something. She sits up. Says something back. I risk tuning my comms to the nearest of the bugs that I planted on the yacht last night.
“...with you where?” his daughter, Bella asks.
“To see Dekari.”
Who the hell is Dekari? I wonder.
“He’s there?”
“Of course, he’s there. You asked me to put in a good word for him.”
“And Chronus hired him?”
“Do I look like a man who takes no for an answer?”
“Sparks! Thanks, Dad!”
Christophe waves off his daughter’s gratitude, but she leaps out of her chaise lounge and throws her arms around his neck. A moment later she pulls back with a beaming smile, and walks into the yacht leaning on her father’s arm.
The shallori fish wrap that I had for lunch is busy marinating in a roiling cauldron of acid. Sparks fly down my arms to my fingers as adrenaline surges in my system. This is not good.
“Charlie Kilo to Montauk Actual, target has flipped the script, now has co-pilot. Please advise, over.”
A new voice gets on the line in my ear. It’s deeper and grittier than my handler’s, but the hell if I know who it is. Deep cover assignments like this one keep operators in the dark as much as possible. “Montauk Actual speaking. Who is the co-pilot?”
“The daughter.”
A brief, buzzing pause hisses over the comms, followed by—
“Proceed as planned, Charlie Kilo.”
I try to reply, but my mouth is suddenly too dry to do more than hiss with exhalations of stale air.
“Charlie Kilo, do you copy?”
“Copy, Montauk.”
“Montauk out.”
A sigh builds like a balloon inside my chest, filling my lungs to the point of exploding. I try to let it out, but the air gets stuck behind a knot in my throat.
Twenty minutes later, I’m watching the air car lift off. Mrs. Zabelle is waving from the back of the yacht, smiling as her husband and their daughter fly away from her for the last time.
Twenty-two minutes later the side of the car blows open and it bursts into flames as one of the engines explodes.
The car lists sharply to the side now gushing fire, and goes into a whistling dive from five hundred meters up.
Mrs. Zabelle is screaming, then snapping up a holoband and calling her husband.
“Eject! ... Then fire the brakes! What do you mean it’s not working? Don’t you dare leave me alone! ... Resurrection! Christophe!” She’s sobbing now. Muffling her words. “...won’t be... same. Don’t you—”
I mute the audio from the yacht and struggle to swallow past that knot in my throat. Nadine Zabelle, wife and mother, clutches the ship railing with white-knuckled hands as the car with her husband and daughter screams into the gold and ruby-shimmering embrace of the ocean. The car hits at the speed of sound and explodes into a thousand glittering fragments. Through my scope I see tears racing down Mrs. Zabelle’s cheeks. She hammers the railing with her palms, screaming and raging against what she probably thinks was just a freak accident; fate; or maybe Karma.
Bots rally around her. Lifeless machines with no real sense of empathy. The only one who truly feels her pain is the one on the other side of this scope, the man who killed her family.
Mrs. Zabelle’s only hope is to bring them back. Resurrect them from their latest neuroscans, but like she said, it won’t be the same. Should work for the daughter, because we didn’t have any reason to corrupt her scans. But Christophe is permadead. Nothing left to resurrect.
A stale breath rattles past my lips, carrying with it a familiar phrase, “Target neutralized.”
“Good work, Charlie Kilo. Proceed to extraction point.”
“Copy.”
There’ll be no keeping the ghosts in their closet tonight.
PART 1: A HUNTER'S CODE
Chapter 1
Twenty-five Years Later...
The Year 557 UGC
Terra Novus, Alliance Space
I’m standing in an abandoned packing center on a glacial ridge outside Liberty City, the stim-harvesting capital city of Terra Novus. A creeping chill makes it through to my skin, prickling my neck and arms with goosebumps. It’s freezing in here, even below my heated clothes and thermal shield.
Terra Novus is a mostly glacial world with a narrow band of temperate regions around the equator. The atmosphere, gravity, and overall habitability are about as close to Earth as a planet can be, but it’s still a frozen wasteland as far as I’m concerned. Back when it was first colonized, people thought it was an exotic paradise. Finding euphoria-inducing stims in the glacial rifts was a driving force for colonization, and it soon became the most populous world beyond Earth.
It’s also where the civil war began, and after its independence was officially recognized, Terra Novus became the capital planet of the Free Systems Alliance.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a den of accumulated human filth.
The dirty floor of the packing center is covered with a dusting of fresh snow blown in from a wall of broken windows. From there, I can see the gleaming blue, green, and purple lights of Liberty City’s hundred-story towers. Cold wavelengths of light to match the cold of the glacial rift in which the city was founded. The only other light besides that distant neon glow is from the hovering drone bulb that my partner Rex Brogan deployed when we got here.
“Not talking, huh?” Rex asks. “Okay.”
An inhuman shriek draws my eyes to the subject sitting tied with shockcuffs to a chair beneath the drone light: Omar Trevos, an average-sized man with curly black hair, brown eyes wrinkled at the corners, and a naturally tan face. At the moment, that face is streaked with tears and blood. One eye is swollen partially-shut, and his lips are split and bloodied. He’s wearing a black uniform with reflective silver piping and a matching silver emblem on his left shoulder. The octagon-shaped badge of Liberty PD. Two silver bars on each sleeve speak to his rank. Lieutenant.
There is a black device clutching Omar’s skull that looks vaguely like a metal spider with six legs. That’s actually the colloquial name for it. A brain spider. Officially, it’s an NSP-16, a bot designed to interact directly with a subject’s gray matter and neural implants in order to read memories and thoughts, or as it’s currently being used, to directly activate specific regions. Right now the spider has a hair-thin wire embedded directly into Omar’s dorsal posterior insula, otherwise known as the brain’s pain center. Imagine the ag
ony of being burned alive—an NSP-16 can simulate it without any of the mess or subsequent permanence of death.
This interrogation could have been as easy as using the spider to pull the information we need directly from Omar’s memories, but he was smart enough to scrub himself and dump the info in the bio-encrypted storage of his neuralink. The encryption keys are entangled with some random bundle of neurons, so that only Omar’s neuralink can access them. If someone else tries to crack in, they’ll destroy the data. That type of encryption only works for very specific types of information. Memories. Secrets. It was a smart move, except now we have to extract his secrets the old-fashioned way.
I frown and roll my shoulders, as if Omar’s horrendous screams are having no effect on me. As if this is just another Monday evening. As if torturing the one clean cop left on Terra Novus is a tedious assignment that I can’t wait to be done with.
But I can tell that Rex is getting off on it. He has this blissed-out grin on his lumpy face, like a stim addict who’s just had his first taste of Glo.
Sadism is a job requirement when you’re working for Rajesh Mohinari. Worth over a trillion credits, he’s the richest man in this system, and one of the richest in the galaxy. And since money is power, that also makes him one of the most dangerous men in the galaxy.
And he’s my target.
“Ready to talk yet, scrigface?” Rex asks in a dulcet voice.
Omar mumbles something, his head slumping to his chest.
“What was that?” Rex demands, cupping a hand to one of his spiked ears.
Who the hell puts a ring of titanium spikes through their outer ear? Apparently, Rex doesn’t just get off on other people’s pain.
“You’re gonna have to speak up, Omar. Or I’m gonna have to push this button again...”
Rex hefts the remote for the spider, flaunting his power in Omar’s face. Rex doesn’t need a remote. He could control the spider directly through his neuralink, but then Omar wouldn’t be able to watch Rex’s grubby thumb poised over that big red button. He wouldn’t be able to sweat blood and piss himself as Rex’s finger inches toward it yet again.
The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1) Page 1