The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning (7 page)

As she subconsciously began to
doubt that she would ever get off the planet, even as she unknowingly
approached the day she would leave, she began to pay more attention to Burke’s
ramblings. She looped multiple recordings back and saved new ones for the end
of the night cycle, when she closed herself off from the surface and had
nothing to do. She watched as Burke’s face grew darker from more time spent out
during the day. He often had small cuts from shaving with a rough blade and
eventually no cuts at all as he let his beard grow out.

“This was meant to be our big
break,” he often said, repeating over and over how Adam had wronged him.
“Enough money for us to be set for life, or live richly for a little while. I
wanted to use the money to be able to take smaller contracts, help people
instead of just doing it for money. He always disagreed. I should have seen it
then. Stupid. Stupid to be sentimental. If I had treated it like a partnership
instead of a friendship, instead of thinking like we were still two people on
the same side of the war. I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have let this happen.

“I don’t think I was wrong to trust
him. Even though he did this to me, I don’t think I was wrong to trust him.
He’s the one who’s fucked up for doing this to me, not me for blindly trusting
him. Right? Cass understands more each time I ask her. We’ve been here for two
years and she’s as human as any other person I’ve known but it’s still strange
to think that. And I can’t tell her that it feels odd. Maybe it won’t feel
strange soon. Maybe I just have to let go.

“I wish I knew why Adam did this.
More than anything else.”

Sometimes Jess would feel sympathy
for the man and would feel as if her sanity could start to unravel around her
as she did so. It had been a pact she had made with herself to keep herself
moving on: a goal, a target, something to live and work for. She would kill
Burke Monrow. She would kill Burke Monrow. Burke Monrow who did this to her
only because it was done to him, and she would still kill him. Because if she
didn’t have that to live for, then what was the point of even struggling alone
on the planet. There was an injustice out there, far away from her lonely hovel
on Meidum, and she stared at its face each night on the computer screen. She
burned with reckoning, to right that wrong he had inflicted on her because it
wouldn’t be fair any other way.

“I wish I had known Cass in the
war,” Burke’s recording began. It was nearly the end of Jess’s ninth month on
the planet. She had just sealed up the stairs several hours in advance to the
crawler’s emergence. She liked to give ample time before they usually came out,
just to be safe.

“I wish I could hear Cass instead
of you,” she said acidly at the screen.

“Instead of Adam, I mean,” he
continued. “I trust her, even now. I think we work better together than me and
Adam.”

“Adam and I,” she spat again.

“We fought on Earth. I think this
is the first time I’ve spoken about this.”

Jess sat upright suddenly on the
bed. Her left hand instinctively went to her right arm and clutched around the
metal surface. She squeezed it tightly at the mention of Earth.

“I was seventeen when the dross
were first discovered,” he closed his eyes. “My parents were killed. My family.
I used all the money I was left with on a forged ID. Same name but a year
older. I only had to wait a few months before I turned eighteen but I couldn’t
wait. I needed to fight them.”

“I was fifteen,” Jess whispered
back. “Too young. I was evacuated and then couldn’t bear going back.” She
squeezed her arm tighter.

“I can’t even remember the amount
of times I nearly died and I hate that. That should be a happy statement,
maybe. I don’t know. I’m lucky to have lived and here I am complaining about
it. If I had Cass and her armor during the war I could have done so much more.
I’ve felt invincible inside the aegis. People have shot me in the head and it
feels like a raindrop against my helmet. It’s what made me—let me—survive the
fall onto this planet. And that was a good thing. It was a good thing. I can’t
let myself question that again. I survived to kill Adam.

“There were so many augmented
soldiers that I saw during the war. Replaced arms and legs, some could fight
better with them but others could fight worse. I never understood that sense of
power until I got the armor. I understand now, the sacrifice those people made
to protect something they thought was worthy. I would do it too to have another
chance to kill those fucking aliens. A chip in my head and a metal limb or two.
I barely noticed it toward the end of the war, the same people with the
different arms and legs. They were other soldiers. I saw them instead of the
augments.

“Would others have looked at me the
same way?”

Jess felt cold. A chill ran down
from her neck, spreading across her shoulders, arms, and back. Her left hand
loosened and fell limply away from her right arm. She was on the precipice of
remembering something, something important. It was like trying to recall the
name of something and it danced just out of reach, just out the mind’s grasp
around it to fully see the letters that made out the word. She stopped the
recording and jumped back a few seconds.

“—barely noticed it toward the end
of the war, the same people with the different arms and legs. They were other
soldiers. I saw them instead of the augments.”

Her mind grasped it and she closed
her eyes and let the realization rush through her. She felt as if it the back
of her head had been struck. She was caught between rage and rapture, simultaneously
furious at herself and ecstatic.

She dived away from the bed and
pulled aside the crates from the stairs. She pushed aside the cover at the top
of the stairs and burst out onto the surface. She had a few hours until the
crawlers came out but she risked it anyway, knowing how tormented and restless
she would be if she didn’t act right away.

The night air was cold but she
threw off her jacket when she made it around the back of the ruined building.
She dug rapidly into the sand with her bare hands, raking her fingers through
the sand and throwing it away from her. She couldn’t remember what order she
had buried them and she didn’t stop to try to remember. She dug furiously and
rapidly until her fingers made contact with a corpse. The face had decomposed
to the point that it was barely recognizable. She thought it might have been
Marcus but she pulled the body out anyway to check. The flesh of his arms and
legs had shrivelled and dried but the evidence that they had all been flesh was
unmistakable. She set the body aside and kept digging.

Eric’s body was in a similar state.
She only recognized it by the metal leg and she grinned at the sight of it.
Later, she felt guilt at profiting from their deaths but not defiling their
graves; they were dead and gone and she knew she wasn’t disturbing a peaceful
sleep. She dragged the corpse into the building where she gutted the animals
she hunted. She braced her right hand over the skull and immediately drew it
away. Even with her prosthetic hand, she couldn’t bring herself to plunge her
fist down into what had been Eric’s head. She went back down into the base for
tools instead.

The augmented leg extended farther
up into his torso than she would have guessed, even after knowing how deeply
her arm extended into her own chest. The insides of the corpse had decomposed more
thoroughly than the outside, especially where bacteria had eaten their way out
of his intestines. She worked the root of the leg out from where it had been
grafted into his pelvis and spine. She inserted a tool into the exit wound that
Burke’s shot had left in his skull, scooping out the implant that bridged the
connection between the synthetic limb and the biological brain. It was no
bigger than her thumb and she marvelled at how something so small could help
her so much. A mess of thin, spidery threads came out with the implant and she
severed them to complete the extraction.

She stared down at the pieces she
had harvested and felt an overwhelming urge of nausea at what she had just done
in a flurry of excitement. She knew she had the pieces to perfect her distress
signal, even as she stumbled onto the sand and vomited.

The bodies were buried once again
in the sand before she got to work. The crates were stacked against the stairs.
The crawlers emerged and left the base alone, hunting the other animals on the
surface. The sandstorms came as the planet began its day cycle. Jess worked
tirelessly to be ready the moment the weather cleared.

The leg was opened and stripped for
pieces carefully. Eric had used his augmentations for combat, she remembered.
He had often coordinated attacks with information—projectile trajectories,
weather patterns, and wind speeds for long shots—that had seamlessly been downloaded
into his head and delivered to an interface over his eyes. He hadn’t worn that
piece of hardware when he had been killed but the capability was still intact
within the implant. Often that information was delivered over vast distances,
usually through networks around the planets he fought on. She knew it wouldn’t
be enough to boost the signal to reach the system’s network, but it would be
enough to reach several times farther out and had a better chance at reaching a
ship. The capability was better than if she had used her own civilian implant.

When the sandstorms abated, she had
constructed a much larger transmitter. Any resemblance of the leg was gone; she
had used almost all of the pieces, in conjunction with many long barrels from
the rifles she had found, to create the device. She had to carry it to the
surface in pieces and then assemble it on the roof. She ran a series of wires
down into the base and connected them to the computer at her bed. The lights
dimmed when she turned it on and watched as the display initialized the signal.
She watched the feedback on the display eagerly and smiled when the strength of
the signal covered her side of the planet and reached out into space.

Each night she climbed up and
carefully took down the beacon. She packed it carefully next to her bed and
reassembled it when she woke up. She guarded it in the middle of the night
cycle, after the sandstorms but before the crawlers emerged, making sure that
none of the dog-rats chewed through any of the pieces. They had never attacked
the solar array but she took no chances. She shot at any that came near,
zooming in with her eye after months of practice with Eric’s rifle. Each night
she continued to add another red coat of blood to Burke’s tallies on the wall.

Almost three months passed before
the signal got a response. Ninety more tallies were painted red. Several times
the computer displayed a blip that the signal had been received by something
but they never answered; she recalled all the times Marcus had refused to
answer a distress message, stating plainly that it could be a trap.

When the ship finally answered and
began its descent toward her, she stared up with a mix of trepidation and
excitement. She wasn’t sure if it was good that people like Marcus would pass
her signal by: the ship must have either more generous people than him or far,
far worse.

The ship landed almost exactly
where her’s had been a year earlier. It was a larger ship, but not by much. She
immediately saw that they had no outer weapon systems: they were either a
transport ship or smugglers like Marcus had been. Jess stood with Eric’s rifle
in her right hand, barrel casually pointed to the sand at her feet, and Burke’s
computer in her left hand. The ship’s doors parted and an additional
compartment opened up to make a ramp to exit and board the vehicle.

The interior of the ship was dark.
The lights were off and a lone woman stepped out and walked down toward her.
Jess peered into the darkness clearly with her bionic eye and saw at least six
more people: three men and three women. Half of them had rifles of their own
pointed out at her. The others had handguns at their hips. She judged the woman
walking toward her as the captain and guessed that she thought the brightness
of the planet made it so Jess couldn’t see the armed crew far behind her.

Jess kept the rifle pointed at the
sand and took her finger away from the trigger. The captain made a point of
showing the gun on her belt but didn’t make a move to hold it. She stopped a
few paces from Jess and looked straight at her.

“Name?”

“Jess.”

“Marie. Scanner says you’re Jess
Martin. That right?” She spoke with a drawl that Jess didn’t recognize.

“Jess Richmond. Your scanner is
broken or you’re testing if I’ll tell the truth.”

“Clever, good,” Marie smiled, her
teeth were too white and caught the light. “What happened here now?”

“A year ago we came to find a
corpse. Turns out the corpse wasn’t dead and killed most of us and took our
ship,” Jess spoke slowly while feeling her heart race in her chest. She wasn’t scared
of being shot. She was scared that they would take off without her.

“That right? Well Jess, it took
some time to fly over here and land. I hope it’s not just pretty old you here
or we’ll be mighty disappointed.”

“No. Yes,” Jess closed her eyes.
“I’m the only survivor. There are more than thirty boxes in the base behind me.
You can have everything. I don’t want any of it.”