The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning (6 page)

The rest of her body took hours.
She stopped often. She ate more and wished she had brought more water to drink,
but she dared not stand until she was finished. Her back was the worst part,
least of all because she couldn’t see what she was doing. There had been three
of the crawlers on her back and each of the lacerations they had left felt
deeper than any others. Each time she stretched her arms back to rub in the
paste, the muscles she used to curve her shoulders were the same ones she was
trying to reach, effectively pulling and irritating them even as she worked to
fix them.

She used half of the regeneration
packs that had been in the container and most of the bandages, but she didn’t
care. She knew that without using them she may not live to see the next time
she’d need them. As she curled into a ball on the bed, she considered herself
lucky that she hadn’t broken any bones in the struggle.

Jess stayed in bed for the next day
and night cycle on the planet. She made herself get up a few times each day:
one trip for water, and other smaller walks to stretch her muscles and relieve
herself. The rotting corpses in the small room near the stairs were getting
worse but she ignored them as much as she could. The dead crawlers and sand
still littered the floor but she couldn’t waste the energy or risk reopening a
wound to clean them. She did her small walks and then went back to bed.

The portable computer near the bed
became the only means to occupy herself. She found that Burke had used it for
similar reasons. She wanted to get a different computer from the hundreds she
had found when she saw he had used it but decided against it. She would have to
move boxes and search for them. It wasn’t worth the energy just to avoid using
something he had, even if she had replaced as much of his bed as she could
manage.

She planned out potential repairs
that she could do to the base. She spent many days detailing all of the
available parts she had seen, from memory, into a compiled list. The computer
parts and the salvaged ship components were the most useful, and she confirmed
her suspicion that she could recharge the power cells where Burke had failed.
She made plans to repair and extend the solar array to power more devices in
the base and the distress signal she planned to construct.

The necessary materials to build
something capable of broadcasting her location were limited. She could reach a
large portion of the planet around her, but making something strong enough,
while still ranging far enough to reach potential rescue ships in space, would
be difficult. She knew her augmentations, both her arm and the bridging implant
in her skull, had many of the parts that would make it possible to build such a
device, although it would still be difficult. She looked over her arm and
decided against taking it apart; she needed the arm to survive and might not
even be able to build the beacon with only one hand. Still, the knowledge that
she carried around the piece of hardware that could potentially save her, but
was unable to use it, felt like the most aggravatingly unfair predicament she
had ever been in.

Half way through her second night
cycle on the planet, when she was finally able to walk without much pain, she
found Burke’s recordings on the computer. There were nearly six hundred of them
in total and, by looking at the dates, she quickly matched them up to the night
cycles that he had been on the planet. She opened the first one and was
surprised when it was a video recording as well as audio. He wasn’t wearing the
helmet piece of the aegis and the still frame picture of him, before she
started the video, stared up at her. It was the first time she had seen his
face and felt a rush of anger boil up inside of her at the sight of him. It
made her even more furious that she thought he was handsome; she was angry with
herself for noticing.

“My name is Burke Monrow,” the
recording began. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “This is fucking
ridiculous. I feel stupid. I’m talking to myself. Cass is,” he stopped and
thought for a moment, “asleep. Let’s call it sleep. Do AIs call it sleep?”

“No, of course they don’t,” Jess
said bitterly at the screen. “You fucking idiot.”

“I can’t talk to her. I barely know
her anyway but she’s kept me alive so far. I can’t talk to her because it’s
dark here now and we can’t waste the power on keeping her functional. And now
that I can’t talk to her I feel like I’m going insane. I thought the day cycles
would be the worst here with the heat and the scorching light but no, no, it’s
the night. It’s not even the rats or those, those fucking
things
that
crawl around. It’s the silence. It’s so fucking quiet.”

She nodded at the screen without
realizing it.

“The crawling things come out and
their screams sound so much like a person. And that’s bad enough at first but
then you remember how alone you are when the silence comes back and, and this
is fucking stupid. This isn’t helping.”

The recording abruptly ended and
she clicked through to the next one. The date listed was several days later.

“Almost day time. Cass can wake up
soon and talk to me. I nearly died in the fall but I’m almost fully recovered
now. We’ve been here a few months. I broke my arm and a few ribs. Fighting
those things probably undid all the good work that Cass did but she still found
a way to fix me. I would be dead without her. Maybe that’s not such a good
thing, though.”

He looked away from the screen and
then back again. He had a small smile that Jess thought made him look somehow
sad.

“And now I guess I can’t show Cass
these logs. Maybe that’s for the best. No, she did the right thing. I want to
kill Adam. That’s all that’s keeping me going now. My right leg is the only
thing that’s still broken and I think Cass isn’t telling me how bad it is.
That’s okay, it doesn’t matter. The armor can hold me over until I kill Adam
and then I won’t need the leg anymore. I won’t need anything.”

Jess’s mouth was a thin, straight
line as she heard his words. She thought they could have come out of her own
mouth, only with the names changed. She slammed the computer closed and slumped
back onto the bed. Her situation was different, she told herself. She hadn’t
deserved what Burke had done to her even if he hadn’t known he was doing it.
That made it worse, she decided. She thought of Eric and how Burke had shot him
from behind and knew he would have done the same to her. She nodded to herself,
assured that she was right, and then tried to sleep. She had a lot of work to
do over the next few weeks.

The sandstorms of the new day cycle
came and went and Jess felt well enough to work. She moved the crates for the
first time and boggled at the mess of claw marks on the outer side. The
crawlers must have tried for hours to get at her, she thought. She dragged the
rotten carcasses out immediately, pulling them up the sand along the stairs.
Her back and right leg still hurt but the rest of her wounds had healed
perfectly. As foul as the regeneration paste smelled, it had worked as well as
every other time she used it.

She cleared the sand away after
dealing with the corpses. She rested then, at first on the surface. The heat of
the day cycle hadn’t built up yet and she was more than happy to be in the
fresh air and natural light. She went back down into the base and stayed there
for a few more hours, knowing not to push herself too far after being inactive
for so long. She spent the rest of the day taking the computers apart and
sorting through the pieces.

One of the largest crates was used
as a table. She sat on a smaller one and piled up a stack of the tablets. She
had found no tools in the base but she had no need of them. Her arm had been
modified after she earned her license to work on starships. She tapped along
the arm’s surface and part of it released, opening up to show a series of tools.
They had been designed to work both in space and inside a ship. Each of the
tools had a tension line built into the base of them: she dragged the tool out
of her arm and then placed it in her right hand. The line stayed connected into
the limb and would be reeled back in if she let go. It made it impossible for
her to lose a tool if she accidentally dropped it in space and it drifted out
of reach before she noticed. The lines were color coded also, so she knew what
she was holding at a glance.

Several containers were emptied so
she could store the parts she harvested from the computers. Some were damaged
or were too weak to be used for what she had planned. She put them in a
separate container, never knowing what she might need if the beacon failed to
reach any ships. The realization that she was planning to fail didn’t sit right
with her and felt like a jab to the stomach the first few times she put a part
in the back-up crate. She had forgotten it by the time she went to bed but that
box had far more parts than the others when she was finished.

Another night cycle came and went
by the time she had dismantled most of the computers. She went out to hunt
again during the night and killed two more dog-rats. She skinned them and was
more successful in gathering the meat. She cooked it badly and thought it
tasted like burnt bacon. Then she cooked some more and ate it anyway. She
sealed off the stairs long before the crawlers came out. She didn’t risk going
out into the dark during the final forty-eight hours of night.

She worked on the solar array
first, hoping to luck out and find that some of the base’s communication
hardware had survived. Burke had done a terrible job but she had to admit that
she was impressed that he was able to get it working at all. She wondered if
that was his tenacity or evidence of Cass’s patience while guiding him through;
she had realized it was her work when Burke had mentioned the AI on the recording.

He had tried to fix several broken
solar panels in the basement. Jess had fixed what he had failed to do and
dragged them up onto the roof. She saw that he had unknowingly used part of the
communication array to restore power, but it wasn’t a powerful enough component
to reach out as far as she needed. Still, she removed it and replaced it with
pieces she had fused together herself and doubled the absorption rate of the
base.

Next, she completed a method of
recharging spent power cells. That was something she had done before and was an
easy task once she had all the parts from the computers and their batteries
laid out in front of her. That, combined with the solar array, let her have
ample heating in the colder parts of the night. During the hottest parts of the
day she wished she had found a pair of evaporator and condenser coils amongst
the scrap pieces, both for cooling and to extend the lifespan of the fresh meat.
There were small fans in each of the cheaper computers and she used those to
increase airflow around the main room. It made the unbearable heat merely
uncomfortable.

Over the months she made additional
changes. She made a small boiler out of spare cooking plates and a small metal
drum. She could have a heated shower with no soap but it was many times better
than nothing. She stripped several of the container’s lids down to size and
then slit them part-way in half. She interlocked them inside each other and
then placed them over the top of the stairs during sandstorms, with the lid
handles facing down so she could weigh them down against the wind. It wasn’t
perfect, and she still barricaded the stairs at the bottom, but it dramatically
reduced the amount of sand she had to clear each week.

She constructed her distress
signal. It was a simple thing that could only send out blips on focused
frequencies. It took her many weeks to finish the device and make sure it could
withstand the heat and sand on the surface. She kept it on the roof, hooked up
to the solar array and consuming as much power as it possibly could to boost
the signal. She knew it would only reach other parts of the planet and low
orbit but she spent an anxious few days after first putting it up, hopeful that
there was another base within a few hundred kilometers of where she was. When
no answer came she took the device down to protect it from the storms, only
putting it back up when it was safe from the strong winds. She reflected
bitterly on the hardware in her skull that could have perfected the beacon and
how its presence inside her head taunted her.

Blood was collected when she
drained the dog-rats that she hunted. She learned the wisdom in Burke’s choice
to gut them in the shattered building on the surface and she devoted the room
to the same use. She brought all the tools back underground when she was
finished and kept them in a more diligent state of cleanliness than Burke had
left them. She used the blood to color the tally marks he had left on the
inside wall of the base. Each of the etches were filled in to account for the days
she had been on the planet. Burke’s totalled up to over three years. When she
was finished catching up with the days she had missed, she had colored seven
months worth of the wall carvings. It became a weekly ritual for her to fill in
the previous days when she made her first kill of the planet’s night.

She resumed watching Burke’s
recordings. Many of them lasted several hours when he had taken to leaving the
computer recording throughout long stretches of night. She tried to always have
one of them playing during her own nights on the planet, even if she didn’t
always listen to what he was saying; even when he wasn’t even saying anything
at all. The sound of someone’s voice or the low drone of static was enough to
make the silence of night bearable when she wasn’t out hunting or asleep.