The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1)

by Jasper T. Scott

  As soon as the probe is done, I get it to deactivate Richard’s locator beacon and use the stolen data to mimic its signal. Next, I put on his holoband, fold mine up, and stuff it in my pants pocket. Finally, I strap on my belt with the modified thermal shield, and then strap Richard’s gunbelt on over the top. I holster the standard enforcement-issue DX-19 laser pistol and leave my modified DX-22 on the floor.

  Then I go striding out of the stall, fiddling with the clasp on my gun belt like I just took a piss. Technically, the real Richard did.

  In the same moment, the door of the men’s room bangs open and fetches up against the two dead cops. The guy standing there glances down at them. Stares hard, not believing what he’s seeing. Then his gaze comes up, big and panicky.

  I put on a pained grimace and grab my side as if I just bruised a few ribs in a fight. “Did you see him?”

  “W-who?”

  “The guy who shot them! He just left!” I go striding for the door, pretending to storm out on a righteous quest for vengeance.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Get out of the way!” I shove the man aside and go running out.

  Then I use Richard’s holoband to call his last contact, a Sergeant Daniels.

  “Hello?”

  Based on the comms logs, I have to assume the Sergeant is in on this. “Sarge, he got away,” I say, my voice high and whiny like Richard’s.

  “What? How? There were four of you!”

  I open my mouth, pull out a fake molar on the lower right side and click it on with my nail.

  “He surprised us. I’m the only one left. In pursuit. He’s on the move. Headed for gates fifteen to thirty.” A nice bit of misdirection there. We’re actually headed for gate 12. With that, I toss the fake tooth into a crowd of bustling travelers ahead of me. It attaches to the side of a bag on a hovercart and starts broadcasting Roman Arovitch’s ID.

  “Shit...” Sergeant Daniels mutters. “Stay on him, but don’t get too close. I’m sending reinforcements.”

  “Copy that,” I say and then end the call.

  Just as I do that, I notice the green blip that represents the locator beacon of my decoy jump off the stack of bags I attached it to and zip across to another hovercart going the other way. The decoy has limited intelligence and a tiny grav lift. Due to its minuscule size it won’t last more than fifteen minutes before it runs out of juice. But that should be enough time for what I’m planning.

  I break into a run, heading for the restricted access area where Omar and his family were taken.

  It’s time for a jail break. Which is ironic considering that the arrestee is an innocent cop and the real criminals are the cops who detained him.

  Chapter 11

  While security is busy chasing my ghost, I stop in front of the door to the area that was grayed-out on my holoband’s minimap. Officer Richard Mason’s map tells a different story. The simple gray-painted security door in front of me leads to a long corridor with holding rooms, storage for contraband, offices, and security monitoring stations.

  I stare at the blinking red light beneath a physical control panel beside the door. Time to test out my new access credentials.

  I mentally access the door and trigger it open. It slides away, revealing the long door-lined corridor I saw on the map. Hurrying through, I head straight for the security monitoring room, open the door again, and draw my sidearm.

  A bored-looking desk officer looks up from his desk. Sees my sidearm pointed at him, and reaches hastily for his own. He collapses in a jittering heap as I shoot him with a stun dart.

  Striding through, I use my stolen access codes to access the security system. Connecting my neuralink to it, I use a back door that I bought access to as part of my getaway plan after killing Mohinari. There goes another ten thousand credits. With the back door figuratively open, I transfer a virus from my neuralink into the system. It will completely incapacitate the spaceport’s security cameras and ID tracking system and even erase the logs for the past twelve hours. It won’t happen immediately, so I’m not expecting a reaction from anyone yet. I need time to get away, after all.

  Striding out of the security room, I shut the door behind me with a thought, and head for a holding room three doors down on my right where I’m reading three yellow blips. A brief mental query brings up the holocam feed from that room. It’s Omar, all right. And his wife and daughter. No officers in there with them. They don’t look like they’ve been harmed. Not yet, anyway.

  I step up to the door, open it. Omar bristles as I step in. I’m wearing the wrong face, so he doesn’t recognize me.

  “You need to come with me,” I say. “Right now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what this is about,” Omar says. “I know my rights. We haven’t done anything wrong, and we’re about to miss our flight because of you.”

  “My apologies, Lieutenant Trevos,” I say. Stopping in front of the table in the center of the room where Omar sits with his family, I add, “There has been a misunderstanding. I’m here to escort you to your gate.”

  Omar’s brown eyes squint up and crease into crow’s feet at the corners. He’s suspecting a trap. He should be, but we don’t have time to stand around here and argue, or for me to explain myself in a way that will blow my cover too soon.

  “You have a flight with Luxor, correct? As you said, it’s departing soon. I’d hate for you to miss it because of me.”

  A light of understanding dawns in Omar’s eyes. He bought tickets for the cheapest starline, not Luxor. The fact that I was supposed to meet him at the Luxor gate is something that only he and I should know. He shoots up out of his chair.

  “Thank you,” he breathes, his eyes searching mine wonderingly, as if to ask how I managed to morph into someone else so seamlessly.

  But there is no time to explain.

  “Please follow me,” I say.

  “What about our bags?” his wife, Damaris, asks.

  Apparently they elected to keep their bags as carry-on rather than check them on the cheap flight that Omar actually bought tickets for. That means their luggage will be somewhere in here, confiscated.

  “They’ll be forwarded to you, don’t worry,” I lie. Losing their go-bags and having to buy new underwear on Earth is a small price to pay for their lives.

  We breeze out through the gray security door I used a moment ago. No run-ins with security officers yet. No sign that they’ve put two and two together and realized that there are actually two Officer Richard Masons. They must be pretty busy hunting my false tooth.

  Breaking into a run as we leave the restricted area, I lead Omar and his family past the glowing holosigns of the last few stores between us and the flight gates.

  Omar pulls up alongside me with his daughter wrapped around him like an octopus. He’s huffing and puffing to keep up. His wife is just half a step behind.

  “What gate is it?” he asks.

  Rather than reply, I open my digital inventory and send him the tickets that I bought in his family’s names.

  “Thank you,” he whispers.

  “Make it count,” I say.

  “I will.”

  We cut through a bobbing sea of travelers and hovercarts to reach gate 12. I can see from the slowly snaking line that the flight is already boarding. Looks like last call.

  I lead Omar and his family straight down another scanning tunnel to the secure waiting area on the other side. This time the scanning tunnel doesn’t sterilize us with pulsing lights and misting sprays. It just scans us for weapons. It sees mine, obviously, but also my stolen identity as a security officer, so no alarms are raised. On the other side of the corridor I stalk straight up to the life-like female bot at the entrance of the gate. She wears an unwavering smile as she checks people’s IDs and faces against the registered passenger list.

  “Three passengers for tier one boarding of Archibold’s Legacy,” I say.

  The bot regards me steadily, then looks to Omar and his
family. “Their tickets are tier two.”

  “These passengers are an exception.”

  “Very well,” the bot says cheerily, recognizing that I have the authority to override whatever protocols I want. “Welcome aboard Mr. and Mrs. Trevos.”

  “Thank you,” Omar says quietly, and then hurries by the bot, heading for the open tunnel to safety. He casts a backward glance at me just before passing around the corner and out of sight.

  I check the time on my stolen holoband.

  01:42.

  That flight leaves at 02:10.

  There is still enough time to pull Omar off the ship and take him back into custody, but with that virus in the security system, the bodies that I left in the bathroom, and the decoy I sent to draw security away from here, there is a chance that no one will notice where Omar went until he’s safely away and unreachable in FTL.

  And if he does get yanked back off this flight, at least he still has those evidence logs ready to go. He can always send them if he gets backed into a corner.

  Maybe that will be enough.

  Either way, I’ve done as much for him as I can. It’s time for me to bug out, too, before this shit catches up with me and bites me in the ass.

  I smirk at that image.

  My stolen holoband starts chiming with an incoming call. It’s Sergeant Daniels.

  It’s about time they figured out I’m not Richard Mason.

  Rather than answer the call, I turn and hurry away, stepping over a green, laser-based queue barrier around gate 12 that’s designed to guide people through the scanning tunnel.

  I’m walking fast now, heading for the North end of the spaceport with the access tunnels to private landing pads. My ship is landed on pad nine, registered to one Lee Corvus. I remove the trilling holoband and toss it into a recycler bin along the way, then I deactivate my locator beacon via a black market mod to my neuralink, and hurry on down the broad, gleaming aisle between the flight gates.

  By this point the security system should be in the middle of a total meltdown, so I should be impossible to track, but I still look like Officer Richard Mason’s clone, and that’s going to make my life difficult if security spots me. I duck into the nearest restroom. This one has a few travelers in it. I ignore them, walk straight down to the family stall and proceed to peel out of my stolen uniform. My thermal underwear should pass for an odd fashion statement: a skintight black shirt and clinging black pants to match.

  Putting on my holoband and ditching the cop’s gun and belt inside the toilet, I switch my neuralink’s public name and ID to that of Lee Corvus and then mentally trigger my biomask and vocal modulator to match. But I don’t activate the locator beacon just yet. The security system must be totally offline by now, so it shouldn’t matter, but it’s better to be cautious. Lee Corvus has been lounging inside his ship ever since he landed, and I don’t want his tracking beacon to be seen teleporting into this bathroom.

  I wait in the stall until I see on my minimap that the bathroom has emptied out. No sense having someone witness my transformation, or having an eye-witness see Lee Corvus coming out of the stall where Richard Mason’s uniform and gun will be found.

  Within moments, I’m breezing back out of the bathroom before anyone else can come in. And a few seconds after that, I’m blending into the stream of travelers heading to and from the access tunnels to the private landing pads.

  No sign that anyone has noticed the security system is down yet. No alarms sounding or automatic lockdowns being initiated, but that’s also part of the system that my virus took out.

  A smile creases my lips. Lee Corvus will be long gone before anyone can even begin to secure the perimeter of this spaceport. And Roman Arovitch, the man with half a million credits on his head, will have vanished entirely. Just a ghost in the machine.

  Incidentally, that’s my call sign in the Syndicate—

  The Ghost.

  Chapter 12

  I stand on pad nine, with an icy wind whistling around the industrial-strength thermal shield that’s designed to keep it out. The cold barely reaches me, but still provokes a shiver. I’m effectively wearing nothing but a plain black set of long johns, after all.

  Now that I’ve thoroughly confused spaceport security, I can take a breath or two and calm my racing pulse. I spare a moment to admire my ship, the Cloven Hammer. Just Hammer for short. She’s an old “Type-7” corvette-class vessel, it looks exactly like the name suggests: like a hammer that’s been split in two. The back end is the cloven head with two bulky, cylindrical thrusters, currently facing down. The fuselage is shaped like a Y, and the front end where the cockpit sits is flat-nosed and only vaguely aerodynamic. It’s a sloping, twenty-foot wall of patched and welded terantium armor with a cockpit perched on top, and my IF-17 “Razorback” Interceptor docked upside down along the underside of the hull. A gun turret sits on top, and two more along the sides of the forking back end. Missile tubes wink at me from what could be gills beneath the cockpit. A mine-layer at the back.

  The Cloven Hammer is an old colonial-era warship from the Alliance that I found and salvaged legally from the neutral zone between Alliance and Coalition Space. The IF-17 Interceptor clinging beneath its chin was my original ride. I called it Vera, after the one and only serious relationship I’ve ever had. I rescued Vera back when I was with the Paladins. It was just before revolutionaries were set to overthrow the Shogrun Mining Corp. on Dramos by blowing up the administrative buildings.

  I was told not to intervene, because Dramos was an Alliance world, and the Coalition was hoping to use the planet’s instability as an excuse to clean up the system and take its resources for themselves. Vera was inside the admin complex at the time when the bombs were supposed to go off. I’d seen her around, interviewing the locals about their grievances. Maybe I’d developed a bit of a crush, but any personal interest aside, I couldn’t just stand by and let her die. So I didn’t. I went in and pulled her out, and then everything went to hell and we had to spend the next two months hiding out in the jungles, dodging disgruntled miners and the deadly local fauna.

  We thought we were going to die, and acted accordingly. Nothing like a healthy dose of mortality for an aphrodisiac.

  A smile lifts my lips with those memories.

  But then we were rescued by Coalition forces come to make good on the threat to clean up the mess that the Alliance had allowed to fester. Vera and I left on separate ships for Earth, both promising to catch up with each other after we arrived. But she wound up shipping out on another assignment before that could happen, and a few months later, the whole Dramos incident blew up into blaming game, and I got burned by my government in the process. I was seen clearly on holocams running into the admin buildings and then running back out right before they blew up. That meant I knew about the miners’ plot, which meant that the Coalition knew...

  And so their underhanded attempt to annex Dramos failed, and my superiors drummed me out of the Paladins with a dishonorable discharge.

  A familiar ache crops up in my chest with that swirl of memories, but it’s not because of what happened next—dumped back into civilian life in a society that refused to give me either basic assistance, VA benefits, or a job. No, I’m long past the pity-me shit. This time, the ache in my chest is for Vera. I tracked her down ten years later, right after I got out of ARCmax on Mars, but she’d long-since moved on. Had a young girl, a husband...

  Two dogs and a cat.

  Fuck me.

  I let the past out in a stale sigh and start toward the boarding ramp that’s peeking beneath Vera’s modified Lormex J-27 Microthrust Engines.

  I admire the inverted, gleaming red hull of the interceptor as I walk underneath it to my corvette. She’s a fiery red beauty. Just like her namesake.

  That’s probably why Aurora caught my eye back in that tram car. A red head who looked a bit like her. Not much, but just enough to give my heart that old skip-a-beat kick.

  Better to have loved and lost, they
say...

  Chapter 13

  Striding up the boarding ramp to the Cloven Hammer, the door at the top slides open for me just as soon as I trigger it. I pass through into the ventral airlock. The floor is grated to drain away decontamination sprays that I haven’t bothered to refill. It’s cheaper to bribe port inspectors than it is to keep a ship up to legal specs.

  Just four steps to cross the airlock, and then I reach the cargo lift and ride it up to the hold. A few mag-locked crates of gear, weapons, food, water, and other supplies are stacked along the walls. An empty holding cell at the back that I sometimes use to bring in live targets. The stasis tubes are easier. I’ve got four of those on the other end of the cargo bay, leaning against the forward bulkhead, beneath the stairs that lead to the deck above this one. I head for the stairs now, my boots ringing on the metal floors. The palladium-glass covers of the stasis tubes gleam darkly at me, a reminder that I don’t have any paydays pending. This one was it. Mohinari. Months of preparation, thousands of credits spent, and I blew the whole thing to save a random cop.

  One of these days adhering to my personal code of ethics is going to get me killed.

  At the top of the stairs I head down the narrow corridor in front of me, aiming for the door to the cockpit at the end. I need to blast out of here before some scrigg decides that no ships are allowed to leave the spaceport until they figure out what happened to their security system.

  The door slides open. I drop into the pilot’s chair. The co-pilot’s chair beside me is empty. But I don’t need a co-pilot. I work better on my own.

  Powering up the ship, I set my holoband to HUD-mode, and a new set of icons crowds in along the edges of my peripheral vision. Keying the comms, I open a channel to Liberty City Spaceport, asking for launch clearance.

  “Clearance granted, Cloven Hammer. Stick to your flight path on the way out. Safe travels.”

  “Thanks, Control,” I say, then end the connection. I’m actually surprised they let me go. Maybe the authorities are busy trying to cover up their ineptitude rather than secure the spaceport. Whatever the case, I know better than to argue with a clean getaway.