The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1)

by Jasper T. Scott

  “I’ll send you coordinates. Open flight clearance will be pre-arranged, so you can fly straight here—after dropping Cade in whatever hole he thinks it will be safe enough to curl up in.”

  I nod Aurora’s head again. “Understood. See you soon.” I wait for Mohinari to end the call, which he does promptly, but not before sending me the coordinates to our meeting point as promised.

  I study the location on the surface of Terra Novus, zooming in on the satellite imagery to see a black-walled fortress on a cliff overlooking a massive waterfall. The vegetation around the fortress is black and red, patched white with clumps of ice and snow: razor trees and sparkflowers.

  This isn’t some abandoned stim packing center or warehouse on the edge of the glaciers around Liberty City. In fact, it’s about five hundred klicks south of Liberty City, right smack in the middle of nowhere.

  This is the same place that Mohinari showed me in that holovid transmission of him pissing on the side of my ship.

  My heart is pounding furiously as I zoom in still further to see my ship, sitting right where I last saw it, on a tantalizingly accessible landing pad that extends some fifty feet over the side of that cliff.

  Scowling, I look up from the display to see that the Seraph is second in line for the jump gate. I watch as it sails through that shining circle of distorted space-time. The transition to FTL comes with a bright flash, and then the stars turn to swirling patterns of multicolored light.

  I break the connection with Aurora, and my holoband clears.

  Fourteen hours, twelve minutes and counting.

  And then Mohinari is going to regret that he ever messed with me.

  He thinks that he has the upper-hand, that I’m just a fly caught in his web. But he should know better.

  You can’t catch a ghost.

  Chapter 52

  Fourteen Hours Later...

  Terra Novus,

  Alliance Space

  The swirling tunnel of light dissolves, and I’m left staring at a familiar planet from the high orbit where the system’s gate sits.

  Bright, glacial domes cap the poles. A thick, cloud-wrapped band of blue, black, and red rings the middle where the more temperate zones lie. The blue is from liquid surface water.

  Terra Novus is a highly-populated world in the temperate zone. A dense mesh of city lights glitters brightly along the dark side, girding the planet like a belt, while scattered patches of light indicate large cities around the stim-mining operations near the poles.

  The coordinates that Mohinari sent me are highlighted as an open green diamond at the edge of the glaciers. That puts out meeting place right along the ragged white transition zone, between melting walls of glacial ice and the lower reaches of scraggly black and red vegetation. That flora grows progressively thicker and taller the farther you get from the glaciers and the frozen soil of the tundra.

  “You want to go over the plan again?” I ask Rama.

  She shakes her head where she sits in the co-pilot’s seat. “I saw the bots. It looks like you have everything in hand.”

  Chirr-up! Bry adds from her perch on my shoulder.

  I turn to regard her with a smile.

  Aurora is sitting like a statue behind me, on hand in case Mohinari calls, but still out of the way so that I can fly the ship without remote-controlling her.

  The comms chirp, and I glance at the board to see that it’s Alliance Patrollers, demanding that I lower the shields and submit to a scan of my ship.

  Mohinari claimed that he purchased open flight clearance. Here’s hoping the scan is just a formality. The bots in the hold are powered down, so I doubt they’ll register on the scan. But if these guys want to board us for a closer look, that’ll be a whole different story.

  Two dart-sharped, Alliance IF-19 interceptors appear flying to either side of the cockpit. The scanning ship isn’t in view, but sensors show that it’s hovering above us.

  I glance at Rama. She stares back at me, looking about as nervous as I feel.

  The scanning ship hails us again a moment later.

  “Everything appears to check out. Carry on, Seraph. Have a nice day.”

  “You, too,” I manage to reply.

  “I guess the scan was just for show,” Rama says.

  I nod noncommittally at that and set the autopilot to take us down to a town about fifty klicks away from Mohinari’s fortress. He’s expecting Aurora to drop me somewhere first. With that course laid in, I stand up from the pilot’s seat. Bry wobbles on my shoulder, then grips my neck with one arm to stabilize herself.

  “Where are you going?” Rama asks.

  “There is one thing we need to do before we go see Mr. M. Come on, I’m going to need your help.”

  Rama gets up and follows me out of the cockpit. “What are we doing?”

  I glance at her as we head down the ramp to the lower deck.

  “We both need fresh neuroscans. In case we don’t make it.”

  * * *

  “You first,” I say, nodding to the neuroscanner.

  Rama glances at me, hesitating. With a disgruntled snort, she moves to the scanner. She finds the casket I pulled out earlier when I had to scan myself for Captain Thorn. I still feel like I’ve made a deal with the devil, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.

  I watch while she primes the casket. With her own bio-encryption, the data will be completely private.

  If I try to jack in or access the neural data, it will be corrupted by the attempt. I don’t need to know Rama’s secrets. That’s not what this is about, and she probably knows that. But she also knows that a careless hunter is a dead hunter.

  As soon as she’s done priming the box, she lies down on the bed. “Don’t let me sleep too long. I don’t want to miss all the action.”

  I nod my agreement. “Don’t worry, you won’t.”

  Rama activates the scanner. A small robotic arm unfolds and descends to her neck. I watch the gleaming tip of the needle inject a fast-acting sedative. Rama watches me right back until her eyelids grow heavy and then slide shut. If she’s uneasy about going to sleep in front of me, she doesn’t show it.

  “Sleep tight, kiddo,” I whisper as the scanning helmet whirrs to life, dropping over her head.

  Chapter 53

  When Rama wakes up, almost a full hour later, I’m standing right where she last saw me, but now I’m holding a pair of shockcuffs. Her eyes flash with a hint of distrust before she appears to remember our plan.

  “It’s time to go see our mutual friend,” I say, hefting the shockcuffs.

  She sits up and rubs her eyes. “We landed already?”

  I nod.

  “You have somewhere safe to send your scan data?” I ask her, nodding to the back of the scanner where the casket sits.

  “Yes.”

  “Do it.”

  I’m looking at the ship’s comms log on my holoband as she uses her own to send the data straight to her guild. The logs don’t even tell me which guild she belongs to, only that the servers are anonymous, and their locations obfuscated.

  Rama swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands up. “Your turn,” she says.

  “I already did a scan, just before we left the rendezvous at Nomra.”

  That’s true. What she doesn’t know is who the scan was for, or that it was payment for the army of A-MAWs in the hold.

  “Hmmm,” Rama says, but she doesn’t push it. Turning her back to me, she puts her wrists together and says, “Let’s get this over with.”

  I cuff her and lead her out to the Seraph’s holding cell. It’s on the lower deck, right off the cargo bay, first door to the right. Opening that door, I see two bunks, a toilet, a sink, and lockers for clothes and personal effects. The room matches the utilitarian crew quarters on the upper deck, except that the door controls have been removed from the inside.

  “What about your reinforcements?” Rama asks before I can shut her in.

  “They’re already moving into po
sition.”

  “That fast? You landed us fifty klicks out.”

  I arch an eyebrow at her. “Someone was paying attention. I arranged a transport to get them there while you were being scanned.”

  “And your VR pod? You’re going to use one to control Aurora, right?”

  “Packed up and ready to go in a hover truck outside. Speaking of which, I’d better go.”

  “Where are you going? What if this op goes sour and I need to find you later?”

  “Here.” I send her the coordinates for a rendezvous in the middle of nowhere, just outside the town of Frostwall where we landed. “We can meet here if we need to, but we won’t. Relax, I’ve got this. Nothing is going to go wrong.”

  Rama nods, but looks uncertain, and I shut the door, locking her in.

  From there, I run back up the ramp to my bunkroom. I grab my pack off the bed and say goodbye to Bry.

  Chirr? she asks as I pat her on the head.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be safe in here,” I say, and then hurry out and shut the door behind me.

  Back in the cargo hold, I cycle the airlock, wait for it to sterilize me and my gear, and then step into the frigid air of Frostwall.

  The red sun is up, shining bright on the patches of ice and snow that cover the gleaming blacktop of the landing pad.

  I landed the Seraph around the back of an abandoned stim mine, looking for all the world like just another smuggler come to pick up stims.

  Two gleaming black rental hovertrucks are waiting in front of the landing ramp, each of them with two A-MAWs in the back.

  The assault teams already left in separate trucks. They’ll fly low over the razor forests and glaciers to a designated point near Mohinari’s fortress where they’ll wait for my command.

  But these trucks aren’t joining that assault. They’re carrying two of the VR pods from the Seraph’s remote ops center. One of the trucks is a decoy, while the other is mine.

  As I approach the back of my truck, one of the A-MAW bots holds out a hand to me. It’s the team leader, Echo One. I grab its metal hand with a faux leather glove, and the bot pulls me inside. My VR pod is already open and ready to go.

  “Move out, Echo Leader,” I say, as I take off my pack.

  “Copy that, sir,” Echo One replies.

  My head hits the cushioned interior of the pod just as the doors at the back of the truck go sliding shut. Then the cover of my pod swings down, sealing me in and shutting out any hint of my surroundings.

  A panicky sense of dread clutches me as I experience what it’s like to lie inside of a coffin.

  But it only takes a second to connect to Aurora in the cockpit of the Seraph, and all of my senses come alive once more. The view out the cockpit is relayed to my eyes through Aurora’s synthetic ones. If I hadn’t just climbed into the VR pod, there’d be no way for me to know this isn’t real. The illusion is seamless.

  Controlling Aurora directly like this, with all of her synthetic senses feeding directly into mine is a lot different from what it was to steer her around like a puppet with my holoband. I raise Aurora’s hands in front of her face and flex them into fists a few times, feeling the synthetic skin and muscles tighten and release, tighten and release.

  The illusion feels just as real as it looks.

  This isn’t the first time I’ve controlled a synthetic humanoid from a VR pod, but it’s been a while. The sensation of being out of my body and in someone else’s is never any less unnerving.

  I don’t expect I’ll have very long to get used to it. Once I spring my trap, I fully expect Mohinari to turn Aurora’s body into a molten puddle on the floor.

  I pull up the Seraph’s landing ramp, then push off with the grav lifts, and raise the landing skids.

  Opening the comms to the holding cell where I left Rama, I say, “Get your game face on. We’re heading for the fortress now.”

  “Good luck,” Rama says.

  “Thanks,” is all I can think to say before killing the connection. Despite all of my preparations and safeguards, I know there are still a hundred different ways this can go wrong.

  Bounty hunting is like a chess game. It all comes down to who’s can think more moves ahead. Mohinari believes it’s him, and I’m pretty sure it’s me. The only way to know which of us is right is to play the game.

  I turn the Seraph away from the town of Frostwall and toward the patchy expanse of tundra that lies between the town and Mohinari’s fortress. Spiky black razor trees and gleaming fields of red and green sparkflowers swing into view. Patches of melting snow gleam in the sun. More distantly, a shining river snakes down from the melting blue wall of glacial ice that gives Frostwall its name. That river leads to the waterfall beside Mohinari’s fortress. At fifty klicks away, the fortress isn’t visible yet, but it soon will be.

  I push the throttle up, and the landscape turns to a blur of black, red, green and white.

  Chapter 54

  Mohinari’s fortress looms large on the horizon, a massive black rectangle that looks just like a medieval castle—complete with parapets on the roof and balconies. A heated infinity pool steaming along the edge of the cliff clashes with that anachronistic image, as does the muted, fuzzy blue glow of the energy shields, and the barrels of gun turrets peering down from the roof.

  As the Seraph draws near, I spot the landing pad around the back with the Cloven Hammer on it. My ship and that landing pad are poised over thin air, as if Mohinari is dangling it over the cliff to threaten me with its imminent destruction.

  I stifle a scowl, and circle the fortress from the air, scoping its defenses while looking for a place to land. Besides the gun turrets on the roof and more than a dozen gleaming security bots walking endlessly around the perimeter with plasma rifles, there are a pair of Type-9 Corvettes, a dozen air cars, six heavy fighters and six more sleek, arrow-shaped IF-17 interceptors, just like the one I crashed on Brighten’s planet.

  The comms chirp at me. I glance at the display to see an automated warning about violating private airspace. That message blinks out, only to be replaced with a demand to set down immediately. Mohinari’s automated security directs me to a visitor’s landing area. Several snow-covered pads lie safely outside the shielded perimeter of the fortress.

  I send back non-verbal confirmation before flying to the nearest pad and setting down, facing off with Mohinari’s private fleet. His ships rest on their landing pads within the shielded perimeter, tucked against the side of the fortress.

  Those vessels could give me serious trouble during the assault, but I have two different contingencies in mind to deal with them.

  Standing up from the pilot’s seat, I drop a hand to check for the sidearm that’s holstered to Aurora’s hip, making sure it’s there. I’ll need it to escort Rama to the fortress, but after that, it won’t matter if I’m armed or not. Mohinari will search and scan us to remove any weapons before we can ever get close enough to use them.

  Aurora is just another pawn in his plot to get at me, but that doesn’t mean he’ll trust her enough to let her into his inner sanctum with a gun.

  It sure would save me a hell of a lot of trouble if he did, though.

  Hurrying down the ramp from the cockpit to the lower deck, I key open the door to Rama’s holding cell. She’s already standing there, ready and waiting to go.

  I draw Aurora’s sidearm and use it to guide her out. “Let’s go,” I say.

  Rama studies me with a frown as she leaves the holding cell, probably wondering who this charade is for. Mohinari’s men aren’t here yet. No one is watching us.

  But I’m already in character. We have to make this look good. One little slip-up is all it will take to compromise this operation.

  Rama wipes the frown off her face as we head for the cargo bay, telling me that she’s in character now, too, playing her part as my prisoner.

  I expect no less from her. We’re both professionals, after all.

  * * *

  A pair of Mohinari�
�s gleaming security bots scan and search us at the oversized rectangular doors to his fortress. They take Aurora’s sidearm and a handful of concealed weapons that I didn’t even know she had, because they’re squirreled away in hidden compartments in her thighs and abdomen.

  As soon as the bots confirm we’ve been disarmed, one of them grabs Rama by the elbow and marches toward the entrance with her in tow. The other bot falls in at the rear of our group, its plasma rifle ready to incinerate either of us if we make a false move.

  Red sparkflowers pulse brightly from the shadows to either side of the doors. The doors rumble open, sliding apart to reveal a long, surprisingly bright entry hall.

  We pass through the doors. Another pair of bots stand guard inside.

  Grand, glittering stairways stylized to look like they’re made of ice lead up to a second-floor balcony overlooking the entryway below. A domed skylight three floors up proves to be the source of the illumination. The floors are some type of clean white stone with gleaming flecks of quartz in it.

  The bots walk us under the balcony, heading straight down a corridor lined with doors to a central living area with a massive wall of picture windows stacked three stories high. Austere white, black, and chrome furniture decorates the space. Gleaming black stone columns soar up between the windows. Exposed rafters in the ceiling are once again stylized to look like glacial ice. Another second-floor balcony overlooks the living area from this end. The windows give a view to the infinity pool on one side, and the waterfall and the cliffs on the other. Smack in the middle is the landing pad with my ship parked on it like a trophy.

  The bots stop us in front of those windows, in the middle of the living room, right in front of the Hammer. A trickle of dread enters my system like melting ice, making me wonder who has actually outplayed who.

  How much does Mohinari know?

  I glance around, trying to figure out where he is. A crackling fireplace roars to my left. The kitchen gleams to my right.

  No one and nothing is here besides the two bots that escorted us.