The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1)

by Jasper T. Scott

  I’m betting on the latter. For what he charged, he’d better have covered his bases. I’ll have to remember to give him a good rating through his guild.

  Freelancers like us live and die by our reputations, which is how I knew we could trust the one we hired on Hades.

  Setting one foot in front of the other, I start trudging toward the shore again, but I leave my armor and gear bag in stealth mode just in case.

  Colorful coral reefs come into view as I near the shore. Equally colorful alien fish scatter around me as I approach—they can’t see me, but they can feel the water stirring.

  As I’m walking down a narrow crevice between six-foot-high reefs, the one on my right stirs to life and goes lumbering away from me.

  I watch it go. It’s a coral fish, not a reef. They lure their prey in by looking exactly like the reefs they inhabit. But as a consequence of spending most of their lives sitting in one place, they’re far from the fastest thing in the water.

  After another five minutes of walking, my head and shoulders emerge from the water. Gentle, three-foot swells curl into shimmering tunnels as they crash over me, pushing and rolling me the rest of the way to shore. Clean white sand sweeps up to a volcanic mountain covered in towering trees of red, orange, and yellow leaves.

  Before I even reach the beach, I spot a white hoveryacht parked there. It’s pinned invisibly in place by opposing grav fields.

  Just up the beach, Aurora is lying on a colorful towel on dry sand, suntanning in a bright green bikini with one arm draped over her eyes to protect them from the double-barreled glare of the system’s twin suns.

  That was fast.

  I hurry out of the water, splashing heedlessly to reach her side. She doesn’t appear to hear my approach through the crashing roar of the waves. I stop right next to her, with one of the two suns directly at my back. Then I deactivate stealth mode, and a pale red shadow falls over her. I’m blocking the bigger of the two suns, the G-type yellow one. The red one is still shining on her. I notice the outline of my own double shadow lying on the sand. Pale red for the bigger outer shadow. Regular black for the inner.

  Aurora stirs lazily and removes the arm from her eyes to glare up at me.

  “Took you long enough,” she says, neither looking nor sounding surprised to see me.

  Of course, she probably watched my approach on her integrated sensors. I was invisible, but not silent, and I made plenty of footprints in the sand.

  “A patrol came and I had to wait for them to go,” I say, giving a reasonable-sounding excuse.

  Aurora holds out a hand to me. I take it and yank her up to her feet.

  She flies up higher and glides down slower than I’m expecting. Low gravity. Right.

  Aurora bends down to grab her towel, and then fits feet to sandals and leads the way to the hovering boat.

  My brain’s still catching up.

  “Did you find out where Rama landed?” I ask Aurora as we walk down the beach.

  “Yes.”

  “And who the ship was registered to?”

  “What do you think I am, an amateur?”

  Maybe. I would have done that legwork myself, but she’s the one who passed through the orbital transfer station, not me, and I had to stay off the net to avoid leaking EM signals from that drop pod.

  “So who are we looking for?” I prompt as Aurora puts hands and feet to a gleaming silver ladder on the bow the hoveryacht.

  A comms from Aurora pops up on the display inside my helmet. I open it to see what she found. It’s the public dossier and ID for one Lara Eston.

  She has long brown hair and lackluster blue-gray eyes. A square jaw and a broad face. Not ugly, not pretty. Forgettable. A face that can blend into most crowds.

  “Where did her shuttle land?” I ask as I start climbing the ladder.

  “Cirim.”

  A frown creases my face. I’ve been there. Once. A long time ago.

  This mission is starting to dig up old memories that I’d rather stayed buried.

  Chapter 43

  “Lara Eston, huh?” the bare-chested scuba shop owner asks while scratching the golden stubble on a deeply-tanned cheek. His holoband flickers to life with imagery as he hunts through his records. Long wavy blond hair completes the image of a reformed surfer bum.

  I glance around while waiting for the result. I left my armor and the rest of my gear oboard our rented yacht. The only weapon I have on me is a small, concealed stun pistol inside the wide-brimmed hat on my head. I’m wearing clean white shorts and a loose, button-up T-shirt with bright green flowers on it.

  Aurora is still in her green bikini, but now she’s added a loosely-woven white wrap to partly cover her shoulders and thighs. We’re both wearing open-toed footwear.

  I feel clumsy and exposed, but my belt is concealing an energy shield, so I’m at least partly protected.

  I’m still idly checking the sweaty press of scantily-clad tourists in swimsuits and colorful shawls walking down the elevated wooden streets around us. The whole town of Cirim is up on stilts in the shallow water.

  No signs of trouble yet, but Rama was smart enough to bug the scuba shop where her alias was last seen. We already scanned for the bugs and removed them from under the service counter before asking about her.

  Even so, Rama could be watching from any one of the stores or restaurants around us. She could even be listening if she has the right gear pointed our way.

  But I’m counting on that.

  “Oh yeah, I remember her,” scuba guy says, and I turn back to face him. His name is glowing above his head on my holoband, and this time I bother to read it. Raf Credo. I can just imagine the long line of surfer bums he must come from with a name like that. “She went for the Blue Spalooga package.”

  I don’t even want to know what that is. “When did she return it?”

  “She didn’t, Brah. She’s still got my gear. A whole week late returning it. I really hope she didn’t get drowned or something. You find her, you tell her Raf wants his stuff back. And tell her to remember the late fee!”

  I nod along with that. “Sure. Did she say where she was going?”

  “Nah, Brah, she wasn’t the talky type, ya know?”

  As opposed to you, I think but don’t say.

  “Thanks for your help. We’ll let you know if we find her,” Aurora says.

  As we’re walking away and bumping shoulders with greasy, sweat and sunscreen-covered tourists, she mutters under her breath, “Well, that was a dead end.”

  “No it wasn’t. We’ve got an admirer,” I whisper back. I’m watching someone on a PIP window from my right peripheral camera: a stunning, dark-skinned woman with bright amber eyes and long, straight black hair is periodically glancing our way from a cafe across the street.

  She’s pretending to listen to her date prattle on about whatever it is he thinks will make him sound more interesting to her. Using the optics in my holoband’s cameras, I zoom in on their table. He has a tan line around the ring finger on his left hand, but she doesn’t.

  So he’s married, but not to her.

  And if his designer shimmersilk threads are anything to go by, this guy is filthy rich.

  Based on how much talking the guy is doing, I’d say the affair is recent. Old affairs typically devolve into fewer dates and more awkward silences; it’s easy to find a companion for your bed, harder to find one for your brain.

  The woman is nodding politely and smiling in all the right places of the conversation, but she keeps glancing at us as we shuffle away through the crowds. Of course, it helps that I stand a head taller than almost anyone else here. At one point, I even catch her glancing back at Raf’s scuba shop.

  And that clinches it. This is definitely not idle interest.

  I grab Aurora’s arm and gently tug her toward a souvenir shop near the end of the street. We pretend to study colorful chunks of coral and shells. Aurora’s silence tells me she’s at least looking for the admirer I mentioned.


  Meanwhile, I’m keeping her in view via the rear cameras in my holoband.

  And she’s watching us right back.

  That’s Rama. It has to be. Except now her public name reads Sola Brune, not Lara Eston. And she’s Black, not Latina. Her date’s name is Eristof Sarconi. Sounds like a mob boss from an old holo vid.

  How did Rama know to be here at the same time as us? Does she just hang around this street with her boyfriend all day, waiting to see if someone goes to Raf’s place and asks about her other alias?

  Unlikely.

  Which means that she knew we were coming. Which means that Aurora’s queries on the orbital transfer station must have triggered a silent alarm. Some customs official or desk clerk that Rama paid to warn her. Probably the same one that Aurora paid to tell her whose Baron-class fighter is sitting up there.

  As if to confirm my theory, Sola grabs her date’s hand and says something through a lopsided smile. He blushes, and they both get up.

  “She’s on the move,” Aurora whispers, revealing that she’s identified the same individual as me.

  “Follow them, but don’t let them see you.”

  Aurora nods and peels off to the next store in line. She promptly buys a white T-shirt with an animated picture of a school of fish swimming through a bright turquoise smear of water.

  She buys a pair of shorts and a hat to go with it, and then ducks into the change rooms and comes out wearing the new clothes and a completely different face. Aurora is using one of her aliases—Kara Triton.

  No one seems to notice that she morphed into someone else. Certainly not the dumb AI bot that the owners left manning their store.

  I buy a few shells and chunks of iridescent coral from another bot at the souvenir shop where Aurora left me. While I’m busy doing that, I notice a small, sleek white two-seater air car with an open roof pull away from the back of the cafe. It jets off toward a massive hoveryacht with a stylized black name scrawled on the back:

  Trista.

  Eristof’s wife?

  I wonder how she’d feel if she knew what he does on the boat that he named after her.

  Or maybe it’s a more progressive situation, like Dreana’s new three-way marriage back on Arkania.

  Either way, it’s none of my business.

  At least now Aurora and I know where to look for Rama. And it doesn’t seem like she noticed that we saw her.

  That gives us a short window of opportunity before Rama ditches her beau to find a new cover. Maybe even a new planet.

  We need to get to her before she takes a shuttle back to the transfer station.

  As I’m walking leisurely down the wooden streets, my comms crackle with:

  “I’ve got eyes on the target. They’re in an air car, now landing on a yacht called the Trista. I’ll put a tracker on the hull before they leave.”

  “Copy that,” I reply.

  Chapter 44

  Both suns are busy setting by the time we’re able to surreptitiously follow Rama and her rich boyfriend to a luxurious neighborhood of villas with their own private docks. The villas are built on thick stilts around a salt water forest about fifty klicks from Cirim. They stay just a few hundred feet off shore of a private island paradise with high, black slate cliffs wrapped around a shallow lagoon and a pristine white beach.

  We rented one of the villas on the opposite end of the forest and parked our hoveryacht there. Meanwhile, I suited back up, and hiked through the forest to Eristof’s place. Now I’m up in the trees behind his home with my armor set to stealth mode.

  Eristof has four security bots on the back deck while he swims naked laps in his infinity pool.

  Rama is inside. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of her walking around the palatial mansion in a fuzzy white robe and matching slippers. I use my rifle’s scope on the thermal setting to keep her in view, but there is no way to get at her from here.

  The villa is shielded.

  And even if I could shoot her, there is an army of security bots waiting to keep us from ever getting close enough to extract her.

  We’ll wait for nightfall to infiltrate. After Eristof and Rama have gone to bed, the only eyes watching us will belong to those security bots with their limited intelligence.

  Getting bored of watching Eristof make like a frog in his pool, my gaze wanders over the roof to the hoveryacht. It’s almost as big as the villa itself, which makes me wonder why he didn’t just stick with the yacht and call it a day. Maybe it’s one of those situations where he has more credits than he knows how to spend.

  Probably.

  Must be nice having yachts and mansions scattered all across the galaxy.

  Maybe Eristof Sarconi really is a mob boss. I wouldn’t be surprised. It would explain why security is so tight, and why Rama chose him for her cover.

  She probably feels safe with Eristof’s bots around her, watching the corners, the sky, the watery horizon, and these trees.

  But safety is an illusion when you have six million credits on your head.

  Thanks to my armor, I could waltz right into that place and take everyone out single-handed.

  Of course, Rama is the wild card. With her guild rating being almost as high as mine, she has to be a formidable opponent. I bet she has an exit strategy lined up and a whole lot of gear to help her make good on it.

  Which is the whole reason I’m out here so early. I need to figure out what her escape plan is and then circumvent it.

  So far, I can’t see anything obvious. I’ll have to swim over for a closer look.

  Before I climb down from the trees, I place a bug with a dish-shaped receiver pointed at the house. I’m going to need it later.

  * * *

  It’s the middle of Aquaria’s long, fifteen-hour night, and now both Aurora and I are in position. My armor is set to stealth, and I’m standing on the ocean floor, surrounded by the roots of salt water trees, waiting for Aurora to make her move.

  Earlier on, I jacked into the villa’s perimeter sensors to swim under the house and place my EMP grenades under the floor.

  When those grenades go off, they’ll take out the home’s power, its security system, the shields, and the security bots. After that, Aurora will have a short window of opportunity. She’s waiting in the treetops where I was earlier, her sniper rifle loaded with stun darts.

  As for me, I’m waiting right here for Aurora to commence her attack.

  Should be any second now...

  Any second...

  I watch as those seconds turn to minutes on my helmet’s holo display.

  According to thermal scans, both Rama and Eristof fell asleep about thirty minutes ago, so what’s taking Aurora so long?

  Maybe one of the security bots spotted her and she had to abort the mission. Or maybe Rama spotted her.

  Shit. If that’s the case, Aurora could be tied to a chair with a gun in her face and a bot jacker in her neck.

  Maybe it was naive of us to think we could get the drop on Rama after she saw us asking questions about her previous alias.

  I’d hoped her relatively nonchalant reaction to that was evidence of professional hubris. But maybe it was because she’d made even more elaborate preparations than we realized. Maybe those trees we’ve been using to surveil her are all bugged and wired with sensors that gave us away the second we arrived.

  Bounty hunting is like a chess game, and it all comes down to who can think more moves ahead.

  My instincts are screaming for me to get out of here before I find myself tied to a chair next to Aurora, wearing a brain spider for a hat.

  But just as I’m turning away, I hear the sound of glass breaking come over my comms.

  It’s from the bug I placed in the trees earlier.

  Aurora must have triggered the EMP grenades, and now she’s shooting a silenced laser rifle straight through the picture windows along the back of the master suite.

  Another sound comes to my ears over the bug.

  “Target’s going down th
e hatch.”

  I don’t risk transmitting any kind of acknowledgment. Instead, I get moving, as fast as I can underwater, heading for one of the concrete pillars that hold up the mansion. This one is actually hollow, and it leads to a small submersible that’s docked halfway down its length.

  That’s Rama’s exit strategy. Not the hoveryacht, or the air cars on the roof.

  A two-person sub.

  Of course, it was the first thing I spotted when I went in to place my EMP grenades under the villa.

  And while I was down there, I jacked it, and now that sub is mine.

  Taking long strides to reach it, I see the lights come on in the bubble-shaped canopy, then wink off just as fast. They’re in the sub. I’m out of time.

  Jumping off the sandy bottom, I activate the miniature thrusters in the palms and boots of my exosuit.

  That impulse sends me jetting across inky black water to reach the sub, and I clamp myself to the underside with the nano-velcro pads on my knees and palms.

  With the water so dark, and my suit set to stealth mode, I’m confident that they didn’t see anything.

  And I’ve already jacked the sub, so the sensors are only showing them what I want them to see. Just as it will take them where I want them to go—a remote island that Aurora and I picked, far from any possibility of reinforcements.

  Eristof and Rama are now prisoners of their own getaway vehicle.

  I feel a sharp jolt as the sub detaches from the villa, and then it goes rocketing away, and the water and my inertia are both tugging at me violently, threatening to rip me free of the hull.

  But the nano-velcro holds fast, keeping me clamped to the hull.

  “See you at the RV,” Aurora whispers into the bug.

  Then I hear leaves rustling, and I imagine her jumping up and running across the sturdy, broad-leafed tree canopy on her way to our side of the salt water forest. She’ll take our hoveryacht and follow the sub to our remote island rendezvous.

  But by the time Aurora gets there, I expect to have both Rama and her boyfriend stunned and lying on a moonlit beach.

  We’ll leave Eristof there, of course. He’s not the target, and the last thing I need is another mob boss after me.