The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1)

by Jasper T. Scott

  Chapter 45

  The sub runs aground on the island. By this point Rama and Eristof must have realized that something is seriously wrong, but their comms are mine, and I’ve jammed outgoing signals.

  I disable the nano-velcro pads and clamber off the hull just as the cramped, one-man airlock at the back of the sub opens up. Eristof gets out first. He goes frog-swimming to the surface in his shimmersilk pajamas. I shoot a stun dart in his ass, and he goes limp before he even realizes his mistake. He’ll drown if I don’t drag him to shore quick, but I can’t do that yet. My target hasn’t come out.

  Rama comes clambering out before I can get too anxious about Eristof. I shoot her in the chest before she even clears the airlock. Her eyes bulge and she bats blindly at the dart before losing consciousness.

  Underwater, the electrical impulses delivered by the darts shorted out instantly, doing little or nothing to immobilize their targets. But the sedatives still worked just fine.

  Disabling the stealth setting on my armor, I reach in and pull Rama out by one arm. Then I grab one of Eristof’s ankles and drag them both to shore as quickly as I can.

  As soon as I have them out of the water, I pull off my helmet and begin administering emergency CPR to Rama. She’s had less time with water flooding her lungs, but she’s the only one of the two that I technically need to bring in alive.

  Still, I don’t want Eristof to join the ghosts that follow me around the galaxy, so as soon as Rama comes to, vomiting the water out of her lungs, I switch my focus to her boyfriend.

  Rama is still drugged as hell, but she makes a sloppy grab for the stun pistol on my thigh. I scuttle sideways, draw the gun, and aim it at her chest.

  She freezes and sits glaring at me, still coughing sporadically.

  “You,” she says, then coughs out more water. I keep my pistol trained on her while administering CPR to Eristof with one hand.

  “Better... use both hands,” Rama says, heaving in a breath. “If he dies, you’re going to wish your mother was a sterile whore.”

  Eristof comes roaring back to life and starts flopping around like a fish, cursing and spluttering. I shoot him in the shoulder before he can try anything, and he goes back down. This time bright blue arcs of electricity spark around him in the wet sand. A smile curls my lips as Eristof pisses his priceless pajamas.

  Rama glares sleepily at me, fighting through the sedatives in her system.

  “Don’t worry. Your sugar daddy isn’t my target. You are.”

  Rama smiles lazily at me. “You don’t even know who I am, do you? Let me guess, his wife paid you.” She’s still wearing Sola Brune’s face, and that combined with what she just said gives me pause.

  I feel the first trickle of doubt. “You’re, Rama Drakos,” I say.

  “Who?”

  This is a bluff. It has to be. She’s Lara Eston. And Lara Eston is Rama Drakos.

  “Turn off the biomask,” I say, hefting my gun at her.

  “My what?” Confusion ripples across her features.

  Either she’s a really good actress, or she’s stalling for time.

  But the submarine and its jamming field is still too close for her to have called for help on the comms.

  I decide to try a bluff of my own.

  “I’ll tell you what, Rama. If you don’t turn off the mask, I’ll stun you and pry it off, and you’ll wake up without a face. But at least I’ll have the confirmation I need.”

  Sola’s expression turns suitably fearful. “Don’t! Please. I’m telling the truth!”

  But she’s just given herself away. “I thought you didn’t know what a biomask was? How do you know it’ll rip off your face if I try to remove it?”

  Sola’s expression flickers, and I see hesitation there, followed by resignation. A cold light of fury enters her warm amber eyes.

  “Have it your way.”

  Her face blurs and writhes as her features rearrange themselves. Her hands and arms blur and shimmer, too. In seconds, she goes from an ebony beauty to a pasty white creature who looks like she’s never seen the light from any sun, let alone two. She was wearing a whole biosuit, not just a mask.

  But that makes sense. She was hiding out with a man who must have seen her naked at least once, and on a planet where walking around in swim wear all day is the norm. A mask alone wouldn’t have been enough to turn her skin from pasty white to ebony black.

  I watch as Rama’s real face appears: soft, pixie-like features match her twenty-one chronological years of age. Her eyes are a dark blue where before they were amber.

  She looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t figure out why or from where I might have seen her. Maybe we bumped into each other at a Syndicate enclave back when she was in my guild.

  It’s a big galaxy, and there are a lot of enclaves, but coincidences still happen, I guess.

  “Happy now?” Rama asks through a paper-thin smile.

  “I will be when I get paid.”

  Her smile fades to a scowl. “You should have let me drown. Mohinari is just going to kill me anyway, you know.”

  I incline my head to her.

  She lets out a weary breath and looks away, muttering bitterly to herself, “Justice is served by the living, not the dead.”

  And then it hits me like a laser bolt, and I know exactly where I’ve seen Rama before.

  Except that I haven’t seen her; I’ve seen her mother, and Rama is the spitting image of her. Of Vera—the only woman I’ve ever loved.

  Chapter 46

  “Who was your mother?”

  Confusion flashes across Rama’s delicate features. “Why? If Mohinari put a contract on her, too, he’s going to be disappointed.”

  “That’s not why I want to know.”

  “Then fuck you.”

  “I think I might have known her.”

  Rama looks dubious. “It’s a big galaxy. That would be a hell of a coincidence.”

  “Okay, fine. Don’t tell me about your mother. How about this—how many pets did you have when you were growing up?”

  Rama snorts. “What is this? You trying to steal the password to my holoband?”

  I feel a frown crease my features. My helmet is off, lying in the wet sand, so Rama sees my expression clearly, and she smiles smugly back. This runaround is giving her some satisfaction.

  A wave comes swishing up past my feet and washes away Eristof’s urine.

  “Fine, you don’t want to talk? How about this: your mother was Vera Jethrati. You had two dogs and a cat, and you grew up on Earth.”

  Rama’s blue eyes widen substantially, and her jaw drops. “How do you know her name?”

  “Because you’re her daughter. I saved her life. We were together on Dramos, right before she got married and had you.”

  Rama’s gaze narrows, then turns speculative. “How long ago was that?”

  This time it’s my turn to be confused. I feel a tickle of warning, like someone is just about to turn the tables on me because of some minor detail that I overlooked. I realize what that detail is just before Rama says it. How the hell did I not see this coming?

  Rama looks subdued now rather than defiant and smug. “How long ago did you meet my mother on Dramos?”

  Rama’s figured it out, too.

  The numbers add up. They overlapped so closely that when I finally tracked Vera down and saw her with a young girl and a husband on Earth, I naturally assumed that the girl, who looked maybe ten or eleven at the time, was his. I should have stayed long enough to figure out her exact age.

  “Almost twenty-two years ago,” I say.

  Rama nods slowly, her eyes unblinking as she takes that in. “Now that’s a big fucking coincidence.”

  A distant whirring and whooshing sound reaches my ears, the pitch and volume rising as it approaches. I’m not wearing a helmet or a holoband, so I can’t see what’s racing up behind me.

  “Looks like your ride is here. What are you going to do now, Dad?”

  It could sti
ll be a coincidence. But I’m not a scrigg. Coincidences this monumental don’t just happen. And there are a few others niggling at me besides the one staring me in the face.

  Like the fact that someone had to come and convince me to go after Rama, and that Mohinari is the one who put the price on her head.

  The timeframe of that contract and of Rama’s subsequent disappearance—both more than two months ago—line up with the timing of me taking the contract from Rina Mohinari to kill her husband. Which means he knew the instant that she hired me, even though her contract didn’t specify him as the target—I had to meet with her in a hellhole on Terra Novus to get specific details.

  But Rajesh Mohinari knew that I was gunning for him, and he immediately began plotting this elaborate revenge.

  It wasn’t enough for him to chase me out of the Eden System and steal my ship. He doesn’t want me dead. He wants me to suffer.

  Rina was plotting to divorce him and claim custody of their daughter, but when that looked like it wasn’t going to work, she hired me to kill him instead. I got in the middle of their fight, so Rajesh began plotting to take my daughter.

  The one I didn’t even know that I had.

  I don’t really need confirmation at this point, but I decide to ask Rama for it anyway. “The contract you broke with Mohinari, the one that led to him putting a price on your head—did it seem like a setup to you?”

  “Why do you think I broke the contract?” Rama asked. “His goons tried to capture me. I escaped. And then you found me here.”

  The pitch of the approaching vehicle changes, dropping a full octave into an idling whisper.

  Risking a quick glance over my shoulder, I see Aurora’s hoveryacht. It’s close, and slowing as it cruises over the breaking waves.

  “Did you know that he sent me after you?” I ask Rama.

  “How could I?” Rama counters. “I still don’t even know your name. You’re jamming my neuralink, and I’m guessing that’s not your real face, anyway.”

  She makes a good point.

  “Listen. My partner is working for Mohinari.”

  Rama rolls her eyes. “Duh.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. This isn’t a coincidence. Me, finding out that I’ve been hired to bring in my own daughter. And my partner is the one who convinced me to take the job.”

  A light of understanding dawns in Rama’s eyes.

  “In a few minutes, I’m going to shoot this into the sand beside you. You might get a little shock. Make it look good.”

  Rama nods slowly, her eyes fraught with uncertainty, but she says nothing. Smart. Soon Aurora will be close enough that she could overhear our conversation.

  And I’m not planning to ride back to Terra Novus in a holding cell beside Rama’s.

  Chapter 47

  The stun dart buries itself in the sand beside Rama’s thigh. She gets the requisite shock: teeth gritted, bright blue arcs of electricity licking off her pajamas. The tendons stand out on her neck; then she pretends to succumb to the sedatives that the dart would be injecting if I’d actually shot it into her leg.

  She’s still drugged from the first dart, so it’s not a hard sell for her to go limp and pass out in the sand.

  I walk over and retrieve the dart from the sand. Followed by my helmet.

  Pulling a pair of shockcuffs off my belt, I depress a button. The cuffs deploy, folding out from a single ring into a double with a flexible cord in between. I holster my sidearm and turn Rama over to cuff her hands.

  If she’s alarmed by this development, she doesn’t show it.

  The bow of the hoveryacht drifts up alongside us, and I hear a subtle hum as the anchoring grav fields dig in to keep the yacht from moving. I turn toward the sound, and a moment later, Aurora emerges from the bridge atop the yacht and waves to me as she makes her way down the staircase to the weather deck. I almost forget to wave back.

  It’s too soon to let her realize that the jig is up. The fact that I scanned Aurora’s neural data and found nothing means she might not even be aware that she’s Mohinari’s pawn. Or at least, she might not be aware anymore.

  Chances are she knew exactly what she was doing when she caught up to me in the secured-area of the Rikard Spaceport in Liberty City and asked for my help taking on this contract. And I probably didn’t bump into her on the tram that took me and Omar’s family from that garage to the spaceport. It was all deliberate at that point.

  And then some time later, maybe right before she agreed to meet me on Margrave, she scrubbed those memories and stored them somewhere for retrieval. Or maybe she found my cam jackers and realized that I was suspicious of her. For all I know, she circumvented them and while I thought her security system was playing old loops of footage, it was showing her in real time what I was actually doing on her ship.

  But it doesn’t matter at what point Aurora scrubbed her own memories and lulled me into a false sense of security. The fact is that she did it, and I can’t allow this charade to go any further.

  Aurora reaches the front of the ship and this time she gives the ladder a skip to rather jump the twelve feet to the beach. She lands heavily beside me despite the lower than standard gravity.

  “Our plan worked,” she says, nodding to Eristof and Rama, both stunned. The latter cuffed and ready for extraction.

  “You were expecting otherwise?” I ask.

  “With a hunter as deadly as Rama? Maybe.”

  I wonder if Rama’s guild rating is somehow a part of it, but no, ratings can’t be hacked. That part has to be real. Which means we really did outsmart her.

  I wonder what the hell happened in Rama’s past to turn her into this. She was born into a life of luxury and privilege on Earth. Everyone who lives there is. The Coalition doesn’t get to call itself a Utopia for nothing. So what drove Rama to become a hunter, and such a deadly, callous one at that?

  I looked through her job history. Ransoming children to their parents?

  I have a code, but Rama clearly doesn’t. She probably deserves whatever fate Mohinari has in mind for her. Except she’s my daughter.

  “What do you want to do with the guy?” Aurora asks as she goes to pick up Rama.

  “I’ll get a brain spider from my gear. Scan him and steal his face. Might need it to get off Aquaria.”

  “And then kill him?” Aurora suggests.

  “No need. The cover just has to last long enough to get me through customs and back to your ship.” There is no record of me or any of my aliases coming to Aquaria legally, but using Eristof’s face and ID should do it.

  “We still have to figure out how to get the target out,” Aurora points out as she kneels on the sand beside Rama and then drapes the girl over her shoulders like a sack of flour.

  “Shouldn’t be too hard to find a smuggler to do it for us,” I suggest. But my plan is much simpler than that. Now that I know the score, Rama won’t be leaving Aquaria bound and gagged as our prisoner. She’ll walk aboard the nearest shuttle of her own volition, the same as me. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Aurora.

  She stands up with Rama and starts toward the ladder on the side of the yacht’s bow.

  But I don’t let her get that far. My hand ducks down to activate the last EMP grenade on my belt.

  Aurora doesn’t notice at first. I walk along close behind her, but not close enough to arouse suspicion.

  Then Aurora freezes and her hand drops to her sidearm. She’s halfway through twisting around to shoot me when the grenade goes off and she collapses in the sand. My suit loses power, too, and I have to fight against its weight and the pneumatic pistons that drive the exoskeleton.

  Rama hits the sand with a grunt and rolls over, wincing as the cuffs on her hands deliver a shock.

  “Couldn’t you have taken her out before she picked me up?” Rama asks.

  “Maybe,” I admit as I kneel beside Aurora and open the access panel in her neck to slot in another bot jacker. As soon as her automatic protocols try to bo
ot her up, the jacker takes over. My suit reboots in the same instant, and displays flicker back to life inside my helmet. I send a command to the jacker to keep Aurora powered down. She starts twitching to life, her glowing orange eyes darting to me—and then she goes still and her eyes darken once more.

  “Now what?” Rama asks from where she lies beside me within spitting distance of the gun on my hip. But she can’t reach it with those cuffs holding her hands behind her back.

  I send a mental command for the cuffs to release her.

  Rather than make a grab for my gun, she sits up and massages her wrists.

  “You’re not going to take me in? What kind of bounty hunter are you?”

  “It’s a trap.”

  “Well, duh. So that’s it? I’m free to go?”

  “You still have six million credits on your head,” I point out. “And I have half a million on mine. If we take care of Mohinari, those contracts will automatically expire.”

  Rama shakes her head and pushes off the beach, dusting wet sand from her pajamas and her bare legs. “He’s your client. You can’t touch him.”

  “Technically, he’s not. I never accepted the job. Aurora did.”

  “Nice. But killing a guy like Rajesh won’t be good enough. You’d have to find all of his scans and any bots he has waiting to resurrect him. It has to be a permadeath or he’ll just return as a bot and renew the contracts. Maybe even double the bounty out of spite.”

  “So we find his bots and wipe the scans. It can’t be that hard. He’ll be backing up daily. All we need is to take him alive and use a neural probe to find out where the scan data goes.”

  Rama arches an eyebrow at me. “And then figure out where the data goes after that? It could get copied to a dozen different locations.”

  I shrug. “If we find the hub, we’ll find the rest.”

  But Rama still looks skeptical. “How are we supposed to storm his fortress and drag him out alive? You’d need an entire army.”