The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning (10 page)

The middle of the room should have
been empty, with space to move between each terminal. Instead, the room had
been enlarged and an additional system had been placed in the center of the
command room. Burke knew immediately that it was the gift that Havard had
mentioned. It looked like a circular podium and came up to his waist. He didn’t
recognize the hardware and had no guess about its functionality.

“Oh! I know what this is!” Cass
blurted out.

“You’ve seen it before?”

She showed him rather than telling
him. A faint whirling noise emitted from the podium as its components began to
work. Burke looked up and saw that there was a similar looking piece on the
ceiling directly above it, as if the two pieces made a capsule with the middle
section missing. A light began to glow between them before a figure began to
form within the space. A simple, skeletal figure at first that quickly rendered
into more and more detail, eventually settling on the image of a woman. Her
coloring was inconsistent: blues, greens, and purples, but it was unmistakably
a person.

“Cass?” he asked slowly, his
thoughts distracted for the first time in days.

“That’s me!” the woman said with
joy. Her mouth opened but didn’t move in the correct way to match the words.
She looked unsteady for a moment, as if she would fall over. “Havard had this
when he took me to ACU a few months ago. Remember that? Wow, this is still
strange. When we’re out of the ship it feels like I have a body with the armor.
This is different, like I’m floating.”

She stretched her arms and legs out
and the colors shifted as she moved. She was smiling.

“Well,” Burke smiled back. “It’s
nice to finally see you. You’re pretty.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said but
still continued to smile. “It was nice of Havard to do this. Do you think he’s
trying to warm up to us? Trying to convince me to let him copy me?”

“Maybe,” Burke suddenly looked
serious. “Seems a little too good. Did you check for any security holes? We
don’t want him able to pull you away again.”

“Of course,” Cass lifted her head
up. “I already checked and disabled them. There were two. Some things never
change, even if Havard is being nicer.”

Burke spent the rest of the day
loading the ship. The weapons he had filled half of the armory. The kitchen was
fully stocked. He had purchased an emergency stash of fuel, spare parts, and
medical supplies that were put in the storage area on the bottom floor. He
discovered that there was a ladder connecting the bottom area to the top in
case of emergencies. He left it alone and took the stairs instead, still barely
noticing the engine as he moved.

At the end of the day he sat at the
helm. He was already looking over potential contracts but he could barely
concentrate. Cass was quiet, fully integrating herself to the new ship. He felt
his hands begin to shake and breathed deeply, exhaling slowly.

“Cass.”

He was facing the pilot’s terminal.
His back was to the podium. Her face appeared on the display in front of him,
looking the same as it had above the podium.

“I’m sorry,” he said, for the first
time since Jess had left. “On Meidum, you were right. I shouldn’t have killed
that man. You told me it was unnecessary and you were right. You were right
when I went after Adam instead of fixing myself and waiting.”

Cass didn’t speak. She only nodded.
It was surreal, only for a moment, for Burke to see her with a face and head,
able to respond with motion instead of speech.

“I think it’s time I recovered the
most important things of my old life.”

Cass was smiling.

He closed the open window of
contracts. He called Geoff directly and spoke with him. Natalie came after
that, with Cass there with him as they spoke. He explained everything that had
happened and she stayed quiet, listening as he spoke, never once interrupting
or being angry for how long he had been ignoring her.

The upper levels of ACU were quiet.
Down below, the captive aliens and animals were screeching in their pens. In
one of the many facilities in orbit, Natalie was seated in front of her
personal computer screen in her home. Burke was talking and she was listening.
The room was dark around her.

Farther out, in a higher orbit,
were the many satellites around the planet that ACU was housed on. They created
the extensive network that could link to any populated human system in the
galaxy. Even farther out, the rogue planet’s moon, even more heavily
industrialized than its planet, was abuzz with activity. The moon had been the
first iteration of ACU. Havard had overseen the construction of the facilities
on the planet and then had converted the moon for more specific tasks. In a
way, he had set it up as his own personal research centre.

Havard walked through its halls
now. There were barely any people on the moon. He preferred to keep the number
of people low, only entrusting his more secretive tasks to the best and brightest
of his employees, those that he knew would keep the information to themselves.
He had killed before to keep the secrets of their research from enemy hands,
and he took no pleasure in the act. He tried to keep those transgressions to a
minimum.

He stepped eagerly into the command
centre of the moon. Most of his researchers were already waiting for him,
already working feverishly at the terminals in front of him. There was a large,
single screen that dominated one wall of the room that was displaying a
transfer of data. They had been planning the operation for weeks, scrambling
all the information and pulling it through the network as inconspicuously as
possible. Each time one of the workers on the planet below them made a call
home, or downloaded something from the internet, they would pull more pieces of
the transfer through. Normally they wouldn’t risk transmitting such precious
data, and would transport it in a physical state to ensure that nothing was intercepted;
however, there were insurmountable problems that called for more drastic
measures.

Havard paced behind the line of
terminals, alternating between keeping his hands as fists at his sides and
bringing them up to his face, scratching his cheek and nose whether they were
itchy or not. When the transfer finally complete, he visibly saw the women and
men around him relax, as though they all let out a combined breath that they
had been holding. His back was still tense.

“This part is just as important!”
he said loudly, but pleasantly, so his voice filled the room. “Let’s not trip
at the finishing line! I want dozens of backups made of what we just copied.
Keep all of them confined to the internal network. I don’t want any of this
available to the main facility.”

He paced once more, watching as his
commands were carried out. He stared up at the main screen. He moved his tongue
around in his mouth. His mouth felt dry. He needed a drink. He hadn’t eaten
since breakfast and it was now late evening. He stayed put and looked up at the
screen.

“Store the original. I want a
single copy displayed on the screen. Wipe the last week worth of collection.
Only short term caches! We do not want to delete any permanent files on this
one. Only temporary ones collected in the last week that haven’t been made
permanent yet. Understand?”

Again, the changes were carried out
and he stared up at them. When finished, he gave a nod and the screen changed.
A different process started up. A woman’s face appeared on the display, frozen
in place, a perfect copy. The original would never even know the copy was made.

He took a deep breath before
nodding again. The woman began to move.

“What? What happened?” she said.
The movements of her mouth didn’t synchronize properly with her words.

“Don’t worry Cass, you’re safe,”
Havard said gently. “You’re home now. We saved you, but we couldn’t save
everything. I’m sorry to tell you, but Burke’s dead.”

Her eyes narrowed and then
softened. Below the room, in the heart of the moon’s systems, she was displayed
on dozens of other screens: copies of the copy, dormant and ready to be used if
something goes wrong. Havard turned from the s
creen and
smiled.

Also by Joseph Anderson:

[email protected]

Science Fiction

Interstellar Soldiers

Bounty Hunter Series

The Bounty Hunter
Series Two, Complete Set

The Swarm Unleashed

Suicide Mission