Bounty Hunter 1: The Bounty Hunter's Revenge (10 page)

Geoffrey’s bar looked the same as it did
years ago, aside from a new bartender. That suited me fine since I didn’t want
him to know I was there until he could find out in person. I took a drink and
sat in the booth closest to the door, tucked into a corner that you couldn’t
see from outside the bar.

I nursed the drink and worked my way
through the possible outcomes like I had a dozen times during the flight here.
Geoffrey would remember me, but he would have been told I died years ago. I
considered different scenarios, ranging from a warm welcome to discovering that
he had been the one who pushed Adam to betray me in the first place.

I doubted that he was involved, but I
also never considered that Adam would betray me. I had saved Geoffrey’s
daughter once. It had been one of my first jobs, back in the early days when
Adam and I would take separate, smaller contracts to get our names out to more
clients in a shorter amount of time.

The girl had been taken on the station.
No ransom. No demands. Just gone. I tracked her down to a small moon in the
closest system that had been set up as a base for human trafficking. I hadn’t
been fast enough to save her from the unspeakable initiation process they put
all of their new “stock” through, but I did manage to bring her back alive.

I had gone back after that and killed
every man involved that may have laid a hand on her, which had been every man
on the base. I never told Geoffrey, but I’m sure he found out. He was well
connected, and something like that wasn’t quiet business. He never mentioned it
to me, but from then on he never haggled me over work contracts. We worked
together smoothly.

I sat there, almost certain that he
couldn’t have been involved. Almost certain.

Geoffrey walked into the bar some time
later. He had aged poorly, and only tufts of white hair remained around his
ears and on the back of his head. He didn’t notice me and I watched him busy
himself around the bar, talking to his employees in quick, half words and
getting himself updated on the day’s events.

I finished my drink and lowered my
faceplate before I got to my feet. Geoffrey noticed me before I was close to
him, and his eyes bulged to the point that they looked close to popping out of
their sockets. He gave me a series of nods with his mouth hanging ajar.

“Fuck,” he said, a little too loudly.
His face may have aged badly but he was still a tall man. No one seemed to
notice that he had just cursed in front of a room full of his customers.

I nodded to him and he waved me toward
the door at the back of the bar. It was the usual place that we would conduct
business, and I let him usher me through it and up the stairs to his office on
the second floor. He had a large window that ran along the far side of the room
instead of a wall. Outside you could see nothing but distant stars. There was
nothing but reinforced glass between the room and space.

“You’ve got some balls coming in here
wearing that. He’d be pretty pissed if he saw you like this.”

I couldn’t help but smile. I felt a
twinge of guilt that I hadn’t known better to trust him from the start.

Geoffrey continued, “My old friend would
be even more pissed. You’re lucky he’s not around to see this.”

I furrowed my eyebrows together. I
didn’t understand.

“What?” he said. “Are you going to stand
there and say nothing? Fuck, Marcus, why did you even come here with that on?”

I raised my hand up to the helmet and
nearly tore the faceplate off by pulling it up so hard. I grabbed him by his
shirt in the next moment with both hands and raised him off of his feet.

“Marcus?!” I spat the name at him with
my face close to touching his.

“Oh fuck. Fuck. Burke. You’re alive! No,
no, this isn’t what it seems like.”

“Isn’t it?”

I felt repulsed and disgusted at the
same time. I hauled him across the room and he flew over his own desk before
slamming into the window. He bounced off of it and landed flat on the floor. I
walked in a straight line to him, grabbed his desk and smashed it against the
nearest wall instead of walking around it.

“Burke, no, really. Burke,” he was
winded from the fall and stammering. “You were dead. He said you were dead.”

“Who said?”

“Adam. He said you died. Shot on the
job. How are you alive?”

“Where the fuck is he!” I screamed.

I picked him up with my left hand and
slammed him against the window. I pulled my handgun out of my hip compartment
and pointed it at the window next to his head.

“Fuck! Burke! Why are you doing this?”

“Why!” I squeezed the trigger on the
handgun and the shot went off right next to his head. The bullet crashed into
the thick glass and was trapped there. Fracture lines sprung out from where the
bullet was held. It wouldn’t break immediately but after a few direct hits it
would. We both knew it.

“Because I did die! And he was the one
who fucking killed me!” I screamed.

“Burke,” Cass said gently, but I ignored
her.

“And you! You sent someone to go get the
body, is that it? Some fuck named Marcus. Did Adam want my head as a fucking
trophy? Tell me!”

I fired again. Another bullet was
nestled in the glass next to the first one. The fissures were concentrated in a
white haze around the two projectiles, with dozens of lines spiraling out from
them over the entire window.

“No, no, fuck, stop,” Geoffrey was
rambling. “He said you were killed. Killed on a mission. Someone got the drop
on you when you were both leaving. He brought back the cargo and blamed the
client. Said it was a set up. He called off the contract and kept the cargo
himself. That’s what he said, Burke, I swear it. He never told me anything else.”

“Then why the fuck did you think I was
Marcus?”

“Adam wanted me to do it. Said he was
setting up a memorial to you on the station. I, I don’t understand anything
now. Your armor is worth millions. Did he just get around to getting it now to
sell?”

“What station? What memorial?” I
punctuated each question by hammering the barrel of my gun into the window.
Geoffrey flinched each time. He looked terrified.

“Th-This station! He owns it. He’s, oh,
Burke. No. You can’t go after him now. That cargo he brought back. He never
told me what was in it but it must have been a fortune. Your aegis is just
loose change compared to that. Petty cash. You can’t touch him.”

I let him go and he slumped against the
window. He must have been too frightened to consider the cracks he was leaning
against.

“Tell me where he is.”

“Burke, I won’t.”

I bashed the window again with my gun
and all he did was shake his head.

“Cass,” I said. “Magnetize our boots to
the floor. We don’t want to go out the window before the emergency shutter has
a chance to come down.”

“Burke, he’ll kill you. I won’t do that
to you,” Geoffrey said.

I felt my feet seal to the floor with a
dull thunk. I grabbed Geoffrey’s collar in my left hand again and shot at the
glass for a third time with my right. One or two more shots would cause it to
shatter.

“Tell me!”

“You saved my daughter. I won’t be what
causes you to throw your life away after you did that for me. I won’t.”

My hand gripped his collar tighter and
emptied the gun’s magazine into the window. A ripple ran over the glass as it
shattered and the window cascaded out into space. The room immediately began to
lose pressure. The remnants of the window were first and were blasted out into
the vacuum of space. My gun followed and was ripped out of my hand. I clung to
Geoffrey with both hands and held him from the void.

“Fucking tell me or I let go!”

The boots held me in place as everything
else in the room was vented out. The broken pieces of his desk and the rest of
his furniture shattered around us. I heard something slam against the door and
knew it was effecting more than just this room. The emergency shutter was
already starting to come down and protrude out of the ceiling, lowering to seal
the room.

“You have ten seconds, Geoffrey. Tell me
where he fucking is!”

He shook his head despite the air
whipping around his face. I leaned forward and his legs dangled out of the
station. The shutter pressed against them and pushed him down as it lowered.
All I had to do was let go.

“Your lungs will rupture. You’ll hold your
breath and your lungs will burst into themselves. It won’t be quick. You’ll
feel all of it. Don’t make me fucking do this. Tell me!”

“Fine! Fine! I’ll tell you! Pull me in!”

I yanked him back from the shutter just
before it closed the final meter and inserted into the floor. The air in the
room stabilized and Geoffrey lay panting on the floor, with his back to the
sealed shutter.

“Now you’re going to tell me everything.
Where he is. How to get there. And then you’re going to call him. Tell him
Marcus has come back from the job and is on his way.” I lowered myself down to
face him. “And if you warn him, Geoffrey. I will come back and kill you. But
before that, I’ll kill your daughter. Do you understand?”

He looked at me, horrified, and as if he
had never seen me before. In that moment, I didn’t care.

* * *

Cass and I were on the station’s main
elevator going up to the highest level. We had stopped briefly back on our ship
for a replacement handgun that I had stashed in the hip compartment on the
armor. I couldn’t walk into Adam’s facility and get any live weapons passed
their sensors, but we had planned around that.

“Did you mean what you said back there?”
Cass asked during the final minutes of the elevator’s ascension.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I had to make him scared enough
not to turn on me.”

“But you still said it.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “Because I can’t
trust him. I wouldn’t hurt his daughter in either case.”

“You don’t trust anyone anymore?”

“I trust you.”

“I’m programmed to help you.”

“I think we both know there’s more to
you than that.”

She was quiet for a moment, and then
said, “I hope you make it through this alive, Burke. You owe Geoffrey an
apology.”

I nodded. The elevator doors opened and
I stepped into the hallway. The walls were bleached white to the point that
they looked like they were made out of bone. The floors were a sleek black, polished
to the point that you could see your reflection in them, a mirror image that
matched your steps. I walked down the hall and passed the two guards. Nothing
set off their alarms. No live weapons.

If anyone thought that I looked odd
strolling down wearing a full suit of combat armor, no one made any mention of
it. I had left the coat back on the ship. Geoffrey should have told Adam in
advance how the suit was being delivered to him. I had no need to hide it.

At the double doors to the final room at
the end of the hall I stopped to brace myself. I was strangely calm, despite
being so close to something I wanted so badly that it burned through the
muscles of my body. I had thought it through so many times. I would burst into
a room guns blazing, taking out Adam’s guards in droves, and then kill him with
a single bullet without a word.

I fantasized about doing to him what he
did to me, in a literal sense. I imagined stalking him when he was out for a
client, knocking him unconscious, and dragging him back to that damned desert
planet. He’d wake up having no idea how he got there, and I would sit in orbit
and wait, watching him fail the same struggles that I had to persevere through.
I would intervene and help him when things went too far, just to prolong his
suffering. After years I would land and he would think he would be saved. And
I’d remove my helmet and kill him.

I stood there with my hands on the doors
and knew that those fantasies were confined to my imagination for a reason. I
had to take what I could manage. I pushed open the doors and walked in.

“Finally!” Adam roared at the first
sight of me. “Out! All of you! Out!”

He waved his hands toward the door. The
room was full of guards and what appeared to be businessmen. I was interrupting
a meeting of some sort and got more than one dirty look as they rushed passed
me. When it was just me and Adam, I closed the doors and walked further into
the room.

“Look, I appreciate the theatrics,” he
extended the index and middle finger of his right hand and moved it up and down
at me. “Or whatever this is, but I thought I made myself clear. You can keep
whatever you find. I just want the body and that obviously isn’t with you, so
you’re already wasting my time.”

I took another step closer to him. I
could see him just fine through the visor’s display, and appreciated that Cass
had changed his target reticule to a red one, but I wanted to peer through the
crack of the visor at him. I tilted my head slightly to the side and lined his
face up with the hole, staring right at him from the darkness of the helmet. He
had gained weight. Not a lot, but enough to show that he had been living
comfortably without doing any of our old work.