The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning (8 page)

“Anything else?” Marie had stopped
smiling.

“Me. I’m a mechanic. A good one.
Probably a damn sight better than the one you have.”

“Probably,” Marie pursed her lips
for a moment. “She’s not that great, but I’m awful fond of her. She’s my wife
after all.”

Jess winced. “Shit.”

“Oh your face,” Marie burst out
laughing. “I’m in a good mood so it’s all right. You can teach her whatever you
know but keep your hands on the engine, right? Now, you walk back on there and
someone will show you a bed and shower. You shower now, first. There any traps
or funny business waiting down with those boxes?”

“No ma’am.”

“Well all right then. It turns out
you’re lying and we’ll leave you here a lot deader than we found you. Go on
now.”

Jess stepped up to the ship and
didn’t exhale until she saw the crew had lowered their weapons. She turned the
filter off on her eye to make her dazed look genuine as she stepped into the
dim light of the ship. Five of the crew walked passed her and joined the
captain on the sand. One man stayed behind and wordlessly showed her to a tiny
room, more a closet than a room, and an even smaller shared shower down the
hall.

The ship was tidy and well kept.
The engine was in a better state than Freedom’s but she could still see where
improvements could be made. She looked it over while the cargo hold was filled
with all of the boxes she had been surrounded with for months. She was grateful
that Marie never asked her to help load the ship. She had no intention of
setting foot back on the planet again.

An awkward first night passed as
she sat with the crew. They were more welcoming than she could have hoped for,
which only set her more on edge. After the best meal she had eaten in a year,
she went back to her tiny room and sat on the bed. She ran her fingers down her
right arm and activated the tracer she had kept on Freedom, one she hadn’t
activated since she last saw the ship leave her behind. The trace was routed
through the ship’s connection to the star system’s network and then slowed to a
crawl as it pinged her old ship. The connection had always been terrible, even
if it was only the tiniest of packets sent and received to confirm the
location.

An hour passed before her arm
blipped back. She had fallen asleep while she waited. She stared down at the
confirmation and felt like she had stones weighing her down in her stomach. She
was off the planet now and could feel the raging necessity for retribution
begin to crumble away. The option to leave it alone, and let Burke be,
presented itself as a possibility, perhaps even the better choice—she knew that
just because she tracked the ship that Burke didn’t necessarily still occupy
it.

She closed her hand around the
arm’s display of Freedom’s location. She closed her eyes and felt her other
hand tense into a fist. She thought of Eric’s head and size of the bullet wound
that she was able to use to scoop out his implant. She knew what she had to do.

* * *

Marie’s wife had been a skilled
mechanic despite what Jess had been told. They worked together in the weeks it took
before they reached a jump gate. She had little to teach the woman and decided
that it was only her augmentations that gave her an edge. The rest of the crew
left Jess alone and she wondered if Marie had found an excuse to help her
without it seeming like a weakness to her people. The seemingly tight,
maintained ship fascinated her because it was the polar opposite of Marcus’s
despite doing the same work. Jess would have liked to stay on with them longer
but she still left the ship when they docked into the jump carrier. She knew
she had more important things to do.

What little money she had saved up
before being stranded on Meidum was still available to her. The identification
chip that she knew had been meshed to the one in her skull was still active and
accurate, and passed through the jump carriers interiors with no trouble. Marie
had given her a change of clothes and a hauling bag as a parting gift. Combined
with the disassembled pieces of Eric’s rifle and Burke’s computer, they were
her sole possessions. She had painstakingly traced her old ship to a space
station in Prime system, named Foras. Its location hadn’t moved in the days she
had been travelling; it wasn’t a good sign that it was still in use but she
headed directly for it regardless.

There were hundreds of ships to
choose from that were heading to Prime. It was the most populated system in
human space. She offered little conversation to the crew and other passengers
on the transport ship. She stayed in her room and constantly checked for any
sign of movement from Freedom.

Jess searched continuously for any
signs of Burke, even delving into bounty postings and active hunter listings.
She was shocked to find him listed as a current target, rather than available
for work. There was a warrant out for his capture and a price on his head, dead
or alive for the murder of Adam Bancroft. There were details of the crime:
Burke had broken into a high security control floor of the Foras station and
killed Adam in his own office, in the station that he owned.

She closed her eyes and inhaled
slowly. Freedom was still docked in that same station. It was possible, even
likely, that Burke had been injured while he killed Adam and died anonymously
somewhere on the station. The alternative might be worse: she was hunting
someone capable of forcing his way into the heart of a secured station, killing
its leader, and getting out alive. She remembered vividly how systematically he
had torn through her old crew and decided that she needed to be careful. She
needed a plan to even the odds against his near invincible battle aegis.

On Foras, she walked purposefully
to the level that Freedom was docked on. She rented out a room on the same
floor but on the opposite end of the station. She left her bag, rifle, and
computer there and then went out and waited. She was confident that Burke
didn’t even know she existed and wouldn’t recognize her, but she needed to be
certain. She stood for hours outside of the hangar doors that housed the ship
and waited. And waited. The hours became days but her resolve never weakened;
standing on a climate controlled station with ample food, water, and noise
around her was nothing compared to the solitary silence of Meidum’s nights.

Jess checked the hangar’s terminal
and knew that Freedom was the only ship in that particular section. There was
no way of telling how often someone entered or exited the facility. On the
first night she saw a man enter with a delivery of food and leave shortly
afterwards. The night next, a different man arrived with a similar delivery.
Someone was inside but she had no way of telling if it was her target. Still,
she waited.

Five days passed before Burke finally
emerged. Jess maintained outwardly calm even as her heart rate spiked and searing
vitriol boiled inside her chest. She recognized him easily from all of his
video logs she had watched. She swapped a filter on her eye to look closer at
him and check for weapons: he was wearing no armor, only simple clothes, had a
handgun on his belt, and a military grade augmented leg. He had paid some price
for his revenge on Adam then, she reasoned, and knew that it wasn’t enough.

The leg became an easy mark to
follow as she trailed behind him. He moved directly toward a bar half way
around the level and she recognized the name from all the deliveries he had received.
She didn’t follow him in and stood outside instead, glancing casually back
inside every few minutes. He was standing at the bar at first, then was sat
alone at a booth, and was then joined by another man. They began to talk and
Jess started to move.

She went back to her room, marched
toward her bag and heaved it up over her shoulder. She walked back around the
station, passing the same bar on her way to the hangar and turning her head,
only for a brief moment, to confirm that Burke was still at the table. She
marched onward, faster when she was passed the windows to the bar, until she
arrived at the hangar. The terminal was easy to bypass. The ship’s alarms were
meant to serve as the real deterrent to thieves, and its locks and pass codes
as the barrier to unauthorized access.

She walked quickly into the hangar
and passed the ship’s main doors. She longed to look over the ship’s hull and
check for changes or new damages, but she had no idea how long Burke would be
gone. If he left the bar shortly after she passed it, he would be only a few
minutes behind her. She found the opening on the ship’s side and saw that the
grating had never been replaced. She slipped easily inside of it and then
pulled her bag in behind her. The compartment was as filthy and greasy as ever
but the smell of it was oddly welcoming to her.

At the end of the compartment, she
put her hands on the hidden door and took a breath. The next part was the only
section of her plan that relied on luck. She was leaving it to chance that
there was no longer anything blocking the door on the other side. If there was
anyone else inside the ship, or if Burke’s AI was monitoring the interior, then
she was ready to deal with that. If the door didn’t budge, however, then she
needed to leave and formulate an entirely new plan.

She exhaled and pressed against the
door and felt it give to her strength. She pushed herself up with her arms,
sticking her head up into the ship as the doorway parted and pulling herself up.
The bag came next and then she stayed crouched, hands on the floor, and peering
around in the dim light of the ship. She could hear the faint hum of the engine
and the air rushing through the ship’s ventilation. Immediately she could tell
that alterations had been made and old rattling, damaged parts had been
replaced for the ship’s innards to sound so smooth. She pushed the thought
aside and strained her ears for any other sounds: footsteps, voices, breathing.
She heard nothing and slowly stood upright.

The ship was vacant. Everywhere she
looked she saw evidence of change. The walls were clean. The floors were swept.
The cargo hold had been halved and another room was between it and the engine.
The battle aegis and an extensive collection of firearms were inside but she
moved past them and into the engine room. Surprisingly, she felt cheated when
she looked over the repairs that had been denied to her so many times. Still,
there were at least three that she saw had been missed and were still in the
rigged state she had put them in. She hunkered down next to the engine and
assembled the rifle. When it was locked and loaded she made a final check over
the engine and then lay flat on her stomach. She waited.

When the ship’s doors lowered,
there was the sound of one person’s footsteps but two voices. Their words were
muffled through the ships walls and their words were difficult to make out. One
man’s voice and a woman’s. Jess strained her ears and could still only hear one
person moving around the ship. The doors closed. She heard the voices in the
control room above her.

“How long,” Jess heard Burke begin
to say, and then the rest was muffled.

“Three days,” the woman replied,
louder and clearer than him. “That’s one less day than when you asked me
yesterday.”

He responded. Jess couldn’t make it
out.

“Only a little.”

She stood slowly, carefully. She
reached her hand into the engine and wrapped her metal fingers around the part
she had placed in there over a year earlier. She tensed her arm and was ready
to pull when another voice, a third voice, spoke above her. She froze.

“Actually, no. Something else.”

A man’s voice. It was loud, louder
than the woman’s. The AI, she knew, but not the new man. A transmission, she
guessed, at the volume of the sound and its vibrations through the ship. She
kept her hand in the engine but waited. If it was the man Burke had just met
then he might come looking if the communication was abruptly severed. She
gritted her teeth together and, again, waited.

“Last time we spoke,” she heard. “I
offered to purchase back the AI we sold you.”

“The answer is still no.”

Jess closed her eyes. That was the
loudest thing said yet. She had never heard an AI convey any emotions before,
never mind such blatant anger. She reminded herself that it had helped Burke
murder her crew.

The conversation above her ended.
There was a moment of silence. Burke spoke again and she couldn’t discern the
words.

“Then I pity him,” the AI’s voice.

Jess gripped the part tighter and
pulled it as hard as she could. The part grinded free of the engine and its
turbines immediately began to slow. The lights stayed on around her and she
reached in for the second component, yanking it out and severing the ship’s
draw on the emergency power. The engine’s thrumming went dead. The ventilation
stopped. She moved quickly into the armory and flicked her augmented eye to see
perfectly in the darkness. She took a single handgun from one of the many racks
and then moved onto the door, knowing that above all else she had to keep Burke
from getting to his armor.

She stepped quickly into the cargo
hold and heard two shots slap into the wall behind her and a third in front of
her. She stopped and crouched down. It was almost unfair, she thought, to watch
him stumble around in the dark while she could see perfectly. Almost as unfair
as how he had been invulnerable while he killed Eric, Alan, Marcus, and the
others.