Bounty Hunter 1: The Bounty Hunter's Revenge (7 page)

A few moments passed until I woke up
properly and promptly berated myself for being so stupid. Light was what had
woken me up, so the suit could manage to collect at least a little power from
that, if it needed any at all. I peered through the crack in the visor and
discovered, to my surprise, that it wasn’t sunlight. I was still inside the
base, but in a different area than I was when I was last conscious.

“Cass?” I tried to call out to her and
found my throat was hoarse. My mouth was dry; my tongue was an uncomfortable
lump of flesh in my mouth. I tried to coax what little saliva I could into my
mouth and tried again. “Cass?”

The suit came to life around me. I moved
carefully to stretch my muscles while trying not to awaken any pain of my
injuries.

“You’re awake!” She sounded too happy to
be only pleased about that one thing. “I had to move you. I wasn’t able to wake
you up, but I had to risk it or we’d have run out of power. You were right
about coming down here, Burke. I found power cells in a crate down here. I
hooked some of them up to what remains of the network down here and—”

“Slow down. One thing at a time. Let’s
get me up first.”

The faceplate released and I was
temporarily blinded by the flood of light that it had been holding back. It had
only been a few weeks since we had been stranded here, but artificial light
already looked foreign. Cass wouldn’t let me move myself upright and I didn’t
argue. The fall had been the most painful thing I had ever experienced and that
included the times I had been stabbed and shot. I didn’t want to consider the
damage it must have inflicted.

I was able to get a better feel of the
room when I was on my feet, and I confirmed that I was in the same room that
Adam and I had found the stolen cargo for our client. The room was mostly
undamaged, with only two points of collapse that had buried a crate or three.
Most of the crates were intact and still held whatever the thieves had managed
to accumulate over the time they had been here. A smile crept onto my face. The
very thing that Adam refused to haul back in his rush to kill me was now what
would save us.

We spent what must have been an entire
day going through the supplies. Most of them were food and water. I suspected
that they must have had more food stores elsewhere in the base but they were
likely buried in the ruin or suffered a failure in refrigeration when the base
lost power. Cass had only been able to restore the lights in this room by
rigging some of the stored power cells to it.

“We may be able to restore some of the
network in time. They must have been using a similar technology to draw power
from the sunlight that we use. When your arm heals we may be able to fix at
least some of it.”

I nodded at her words and realized that
she was preparing for a very long period of time on this planet. It hit me that
I had been holding out for some sort of quick fix—Adam’s return, or whatever
ship the thieves had used to transport their spoils here. Something like that
happening was unlikely, and it dawned on me that this may be my life for some
time. Perhaps for the rest of my life.

At the end of the day Cass displayed an
organized list of all we had gathered from every crate. One had been medical
supplies, which I felt a twinge of guilt over being ecstatic over finding. They
must have been ransacked from a hospital ship, and I was benefiting from the
misery of others, even if it was inadvertently.

We had pain killers, antibiotics, and
regeneration packs that could heal wounds, but nothing to treat broken bones.
Still, it was reassuring to have something, and I was quickly in the least
amount of pain I had been in for weeks.

The base had been intended for over a
dozen people for extended stays over the course of a few months to a year.
There was ample food and water for only me, a single man, to survive on. Cass
even suspected that I may have been right in my theory about an underground
water source, but even without it I had enough to last for years.

Other containers were filled with
clothes and tools. Some contained luxury goods, such as jewelery or unrefined
materials—things that were mostly useless to me. One crate had been brimming
with holotapes of movies, books, and music. It was almost too good to be true,
that I even had something to occupy my time in addition to food and water.

The remainder of the containers were
weapons and ammunition. I planned to move them all to another part of the base
when I was fully healed. There was nothing we found that could repair the
damage done to the battle aegis, but we hadn’t expected to get that lucky.

I ate and drank as much as I wanted
before I slept at the end of the day. I could pile crates against the door to
keep any crawlers out if necessary during the night cycles. I had enough time
for my body to fully heal, as much as it could heal without a medical facility.
I settled down to sleep that night unaware of the length of time that was about
to pass before I could leave the planet. If I had known, maybe I would not have
slept so soundly.

* * *

My arm and chest made a full recovery
before the end of the first year. My leg should have also, but I was only able
to get limited movement and a slight bend of the knee without feeling like my
muscles were being pulled apart. It no longer caused constant pain, but the
strain of moving it was too uncomfortable to bear.

The movement I did get out of my leg
became natural over the years, and I walked with only a slight limp. Still,
Cass refused to let me remove the armor from that leg out of fear that I
wouldn’t be able to strap it back on.

I wore the suit less and less during the
planet’s day cycle. The hardware had its own capability of keeping its interior
clean but after more than a year there was only so much it could do. The first
time I took the suit off I was greeted to the sores and rashes I had developed
from keeping it on for far too long. I boiled water and washed myself each part
at a time with tiny bits of soap that had been with the medical supplies.

Unable to remove the armor from my right
leg, I had to rinse the inside of it out with water. Cass would then let it
slowly drain away using the same mechanisms that would remove my sweat after a
battle. It wasn’t an ideal way of cleaning the leg, but was better than
nothing.

I took to wearing standard clothes again
as much as possible, but I almost always kept the suit’s helmet on, with the
faceplate open. It was the only way for Cass to communicate with me. She was
the only person I had to talk to.

Over the second year I was able to
repair part of the solar array on the top of the base. I had cleared away
almost all of the rubble of the collapsed ruin. I had buried what had been left
of the thieves after months of the animals feeding on them. It wasn’t much, but
I felt compelled to do it. I moved the rubble over onto the same area, as if to
mark them in a protective layer over where they were put to rest. As consumed
with anger as I was toward Adam, I still tried to maintain some part of my
prior dignity.

The repaired array didn’t generate
enough power for the entire base, but I only used one room. It was enough to
keep the lights on when I needed them, and enough to power the water filtration
system when I finally cleared my way into it. At first I was terrified that the
drilled hole would be another entrance for the crawlers to get into. None ever
came, and after months of being paranoid and keeping the room sealed when I
wasn’t collecting water, I finally resigned myself to the idea that nothing was
coming to get me. I left the room open.

I began to hunt during the nights. I
learned that the rat creatures usually emerged several hours before the
crawlers and, combined with the new water source, I was able to feed myself
indefinitely off the planet. The crawler’s shrieks never ceased to unsettle me,
and I always sealed off the basement area with rows of stacked crates after
each rat kill. I never took any chances about letting them down the stairs.

At the end of the third year I had
stopped shaving. At first it was a matter of maintaining some visible
connection to my former self. My body had been battered and, even though it
recovered, I still felt the scars of being stranded. I used the smaller shards
of the broken blade from the suit’s arm as a razor, and kept my hair short.
Into my fourth year I had to admit to myself that I no longer saw the point in
doing it and, as if that resignation was what the universe was waiting for, the
ship arrived the very next week.

* * *

The roar of the ship woke me up
immediately. We had made some tentative plans for this event over the years,
but in those first moments I relied on my
instincts. I sprang from the makeshift bed I had constructed out of broken down
cargo containers and spare clothes. Cass’s helmet, which I only took off for
sleeping, was promptly put on. She starting spewing ideas at me while I slid on
the rest of the armor, piece by piece.

“A small ship, from what I can gather
from the vibrations caused by the engine. No way to tell how many people are on
it. I wish we had managed to get some sort of surveillance working. Do you
remember what we agreed on?”

“Yes,” I answered. “No kills unless
there’s an opportunity to do so without being noticed. Listen first. They might
be friendly.”

“And?” she prompted.

“And no gunshots until I’ve made sure
the ship can’t take off and leave us all fighting. Winning a battle won’t mean
anything if the pilot just leaves.”

I had the suit’s legs, torso, and left
arm when I heard the noise from down the hall of the base. I couldn’t risk
spending any more time with the final arm of the suit and started moving. Cass
locked and sealed the pieces I had managed to equip but I still felt exposed
with right arm, my dominant arm, having no armor.

There was a gun in the hip compartment
of the suit but I needed something that wouldn’t make a lot of noise. I grabbed
the blade that I had fashioned out of the broken armor pieces, with the same
hilt of layered wrapped cloth that I had made so many years ago, and held it
with my right hand as I walked to the entrance of the room. I used the tip of
the blade to knock the power cell from the wall and the lights of my room went
out.

The door was open and I leaned against
the wall next to it, with my right leg straight and my left slightly bent. I
listened.

“—telling you Marc, someone has been
living here. The kind of bombs that were used here wouldn’t have done all
this.”

“Doesn’t matter,” another voice, a
little deeper than the first, answered. “Look at this place. It’s been falling
apart for years. We’re here for some dead guy in a battle aegis. Or just the
hardware. Just shut up and look for it. And you call me Boss when we’re
off-ship.”

From the way the sound of their voices
traveled to my ears I estimated that they were only just walking down the
stairs and onto my level. I had cleared the path as much as I could but enough
remained that I still heard the crunching of shattered concrete and rubble
below their feet. It would be harder to pinpoint where they were when they got
onto the clear floors of the hallway but they would be closer then.

“Did you catch all of that, Cass?” I
whispered.

“They’re here for us. Someone has been
talking about us.”

“After all this time?”

“Maybe Adam didn’t want to say what
happened until now. Or maybe you’re a story. You were very close to being
famous, and I am a very expensive piece of machinery. At least I was. I better
still be.”

The smile on my face from what she had
said soon faded. They were moving closer. It was difficult to tell their
footsteps apart as they echoed down the hallway but it seemed like one was
moving toward me and the other was searching the other way, toward the water
room. I secured my grip on the blade and waited.

“Some sort of set up in this room,
boss,” yelled the man that was closest to me, walking to my room. “Everything
is dark, though. You were probably right about it being abandoned.”

“Of course I was,” the other voice
sounded distant. I could barely hear it. “Didn’t I say to shut up and search?”

“Asshole,” I heard the closest one
mutter.

He was in the doorway, nearly right next
to me, and he had spoken so quietly that only I had heard him. I held my
breath. He was so close that all he had to do was turn his head to the left and
he could have seen me. My heart was pounding from the intensity of the moment,
being so close to a kill or being seen and caught. It had been years but it was
still a rush. I had missed this life.

Just as quickly that rush turned to
anger. At Adam, for stealing this away from me. Four years of work, of danger,
and the payoffs that it brought. The muscles around my mouth curled up into
something close to a snarl. This man in front of me wasn’t Adam. He hadn’t
wronged me yet, but he was here for what was mine, and the rifle that I saw in
his arms showed me that he was ready to fight for it.