The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning (4 page)

There were metal components that
had been stripped down and then put together, as if by someone who knew what
they were doing but lacked the experience and practice to do it. There were too
many beginner mistakes for the complexity of what Burke had attempted to do: a
transmitter that was half finished, salvaged scraps of solar arrays, dozens of
meters worth of cables that had been pulled out of the destroyed walls. She
thought it looked like he had someone with technical knowledge instructing him
on what to do, but without the capacity to step in and show him how. For a
moment she considered that he hadn’t been alone and then discarded the thought.
The base was certainly empty now.

“Except for me,” she said to
herself and then closed her eyes. “It’s far too soon to be talking to myself
already, isn’t it?”

She started to laugh. It was a
slow, quiet thing at first but it quickly grew into a loud, obnoxious, horrible
noise. She thought if anyone could see or hear how she laughed she would have
imploded with embarrassment, and the realization that there might never be
someone to see her again made her laugh even harder. She cursed her
intelligence during those moments. She knew the planet, Meidum, was massive. It
could support human life but the system it was in had a plethora of other
worlds that could do the same without the hassle of sand, little water, and
elongated day and night cycles. She laughed because she knew the chances of
being rescued were next to nothing. No one would ever come looking for her like
they had come for Burke.

She marched purposefully out of the
base and back to the surface. She walked into the room where Burke had
slaughtered the animals he had hunted. Hysteria still threatened to consume her
entirely and she forced herself along, busying herself so she didn’t have the
chance for idle thoughts to be filled with madness. She walked over the
bloodied floor without a second thought. She made multiple trips, taking every
tool that lay on the floor with her. They were arranged neatly behind the wall
of the building and then she went to the pile of bodies.

Marcus had a massive wound in his
chest, which Jess guessed was from some sort of blade. His shirt was soaked in
his blood but his outer jacket hadn’t been zipped up and had avoided being
soiled. She took the jacket from him, as well as his pants and boots. She left
his under clothes and blood drenched shirt. She dragged the body behind the
building where she had placed the tools.

She stripped the other corpses in a
similar way. Eric and his partner were the cleanest of the four, having been
shot in the head and bled out onto the sand rather than over themselves. She
couldn’t bring herself to remove Eric’s clothes. He had been the only one she
had bonded with on the ship and she refused to tarnish that memory.

The new man was in the worst state,
having had his throat slit open and then left to lay in his blood. She took
only his shoes and searched his pockets, and then dragged him, near fully
clothed, to the rest of the bodies.

In the hours it took her to bury
the dead, she reached some sort of calm. It would have been deep into the night
of her sleep cycle when she was finally finished with the graves, but the
planet’s star still shone as brightly in the sky as when she first arrived. She
made many trips down into the base for water and was only happy to elongate the
task. She barely noticed the sand that slid back into each hole that she dug,
effectively filling up the grave as she made it.

Those first hours alone were a blur
of aching muscles and sweat from the unrelenting heat of the planet. She dug
each of the men a separate grave and placed no marker to distinguish each of
them. When the final grave was filled she stood up and felt the pain in her
back from straining it for hours. She exhaled and felt no nagging doubt or
hysteria pressing against her. She was steady and realized that she had made
the decision to persevere and survive—she had decided, she repeated to herself.
It was important to her to acknowledge that it was a decision.

She would scrape by and live alone
on the planet, but not forever. She knew that she would find a way off the
planet or die in the attempt. She knew that when she filled the final grave,
because that was when she decided that she had to kill Burke Monrow.

On the second day of her year on
Meidum, Jess scrubbed the base and took inventory.

She replaced the clothes and furs
on the makeshift bed frame that Burke had made. She put the dirty clothes in
the water room but used the furs to mop up the blood still streaked along the
floors. She decided against using what little soap she found amongst the
containers and used copious amounts of water and time to clean. She knew most
of the stain would be permanent without the right chemicals but she did what
she could. A stain looked better at a glance than a drying pool of blood.

Each of the containers were moved
into the main room. She recognized the crates as a typical stash collected by
thieves and smugglers. She had no doubt that most of the items were stolen or
scavenged from crashed ships, perhaps even ones that were shot down by the
thieves themselves. She didn’t care; she wasn’t the one who killed those people
and she felt no shame in benefiting from the goods that were left behind.

There were several dozen boxes
despite what Burke had taken with him. She found no stores of drugs or other
contraband and knew that he must have taken the most expensive things with him.
Smart, she begrudgingly admitted, and was pleased that she could benefit from
his decision. He had left many of the functional, cheap things that most people
took for granted. Some were small appliances and plain clothes, but no
blankets. There was one small box with medical supplies: regeneration packs,
bandages, antibiotics, and automated antitoxin kits.

Many of the crates were dried meal
packets and canned food. Burke had had no idea how long he had to wait on the
planet and had hunted as much as he could to stretch out those supplies. She
decided to follow his example and separated the food from the rest of the
items.

Most of the containers were weapons
and electronics. There were hundreds of handguns, rifles, mass produced
tablets, and portable computers. She had seen one of the computers propped up
near Burke’s bed, one that he must have used but she hadn’t checked it yet.
There was a crate without a lid with depleted power cells discarded within it.
She saw that some of them had burst open and were charred around the edges. She
knew instantly that he had tried to recharge the cells and failed, not knowing
how to control the flow of power and overloading the cells instead of
energizing them.

Jess ended the day by organizing
her supplies into orderly sections. Burke had had his own method of keeping
things that she could make no sense of. There had been several of the crates in
the hall at the bottom of the stairs that she could see no reason for. They had
been filled with some of the heaviest things found in the base and even pieces
of concrete from the surface. Two of them had been too heavy for her to move
and she had left them, puzzled why he had placed them there in the first place.
It wasn’t the first time that she found herself resentful of the powered armor
Burke had to help him, while she had been stranded with nothing but her single
augmented arm.

On the third day, she reviewed all
the information she could find about the planet. Her arm could serve as well as
any tablet computer, and she viewed what data she had on there. The arm’s
display emitted from her right hand and she manipulated the interface with the
fingertips on her left. She ignored the constant error messages she got as she
cycled through the information: connection lost, network not found, wireless
signal missing. Many times she followed a link to view that message, working
only with what data she had saved locally to the arm’s drives that assumed she
still had a consistent galactic internet connection.

Most of the information she already
knew or was useless to her: Meidum was officially uninhabited, there was
unusually high amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere for a desert world, it was
suspected that the planet had large subterranean caves that was home to most of
the planet’s indigenous lifeforms. She looked for weather patterns and exact
timings on the length of the planet’s day and night cycles. Each day and night
lasted a week and she estimated she had landed in the middle of the day cycle
by the star’s position and direction of movement in the sky. 

She read about frequent sandstorms
when the planet switched between day and night, when the changing temperatures
would draw together fierce winds. Suddenly, she thought she understood the
stacked crates—to protect the underground from being flooded with sand. She
made a note to replace the heavy crates and keep a pile of the worst worn
clothes to stuff through the cracks between them.

On the fourth day, the system’s
star began to set. Jess inspected the repairs Burke had made to the solar array
and found that he had done a terrible job. Her years of experience as a
mechanic made her able to see improvements immediately, but the heat that had
built up on the surface near the end of the day cycle was too much for her to make
the changes. She retreated back down into the basement level and prepared for
the week-long night that lay ahead of her.

Burke had burned through many of
the power cells in his stay as he was unable to restore them. She was confident
that she could recharge them where he had failed, but not in a week’s time. She
had no idea what would remain functional when the star’s light set and the
solar array was no longer able to accumulate power.

She collected as many plastic
containers from the boxes that she could find and filled them with water,
unsure if the filtration system would still function during the night. She
emptied another crate and filled that with soiled clothes and water and then
sealed it away. All of the weapons were collected and placed in the opposite
corner of her bed. Burke had left Eric’s rifle and she decided that was the
weapon she would use when she went out to hunt during the night, as she had
heard Burke suggest before he put a bullet in Eric’s head.

She thought of his final words as she
cleared the last things of his old room. Had he intended to shoot Eric all
along, or was it a decision he made on impulse as Eric walked away? Jess looked
over the wall nearest the bed and saw lines etched into it that she hadn’t
noticed before. They were a tally, and she counted the first hundred before
deciding they had to total up to the days Burke had spent on the surface.

“He must have killed Eric to spare
him from what had been done to himself,” Jess whispered as she ran her fingers
through the tally marks. “Why though, when he had just proved that he lived
through it? A fuck load of good it did in the end, someone’s stuck here after
all.”

The base felt suffocating to her
after that, and she suffered the lessening heat to watch the hours of sunset before
the darkness of night fully fell around her. She had no idea how long it would
be until the animals came out of their refuge from the day’s heat. She sat on
top of the base with her rifle, alternating between looking through its scope
and sizing up the components needed to fully repair the solar array.

The winds came before the animals
did. She sealed away the base with the stacked boxes and clothes and spent the
first storm miserably staring at her barricade, unsure of whether it would hold
and unwilling to leave it and risk being buried.

When the sandstorm cleared, she moved
the boxes and dug away the sand to find that things had crawled out after the
storm. She found what initially looked like dogs snuffling around where she had
buried the men. She shot one and found with disgust that it resembled a rat
more than a dog, with a squashed snout and coarse hair.

While stumbling her way through her
first time skinning an animal, she thought that she had completed her first
steps and acquainted herself with the basics of survival on the planet. She had
found water and hunted her first meal, even after botching the preparation of
the carcass. She had survived most of a day and night and protected herself
from a sandstorm. As the night approached its week-long end and cooled to its lowest
point, she thought she had seen all that the planet would throw at her. She was
wrong.

* * *

There were less than thirty hours
left of night, and it was starting to get very cold.

Jess sat on the roof with Eric’s
rifle and Marcus’s jacket wrapped around her. When she exhaled, she could see
her breath froth in the air in front of her eyes. She longed to huddle in the
basement level and waste a power cell on heating her room but resisted the
temptation. She had killed four of the dog-sized rats and had ruined most of
the meat as she learned how to properly gut her kills. She wanted at least one
more attempt before the sandstorms and returned heat drove both her and the
animals underground.

She used her bionic eye to scan the
horizon instead of the rifle’s scope. With the low light filter, she could see
clearly all around her. The eye was also capable of zooming in but she didn’t
utilize that function yet; she was familiar with firearms but not as good as
Eric had been with the rifle. Even if she saw one of the creatures from a few
kilometers away, she would have to wait for it to get closer.