The Bounty Hunter: Soldier's Wrath (13 page)

“I think Havard suspects me,” she
said. “I’d like to begin planning my exit. If I start now, I can be out within
a year.”

“Begin what you can,” he said. He
raised a hand to his face and rubbed under his eyes. “We’ll discuss it further
on your next check in. It took us a long time to get you into ACU. We can’t
throw it away unless we’re certain.”

Natalie nodded. She felt the
conflict she had been wrestling with over the past week resurface. She tried to
push it aside and could not. She cleared her throat.

“Agent?” Viscard asked.

“I wanted to voice that I am not
pleased with my current assignment,” she said. “Everything I’ve found on Burke
Monrow so far has been clean.”

“He works for ACU, Ambrose. How
good could he be?”

“He doesn’t know what they do. He
doesn’t know what you or I know. If he did, he would never work for Havard
again. He’s a good man.”

“I think you’re biased, agent,”
Viscard said curtly. “I’d like to believe you, and perhaps you’re right. We can
only operate on fact, however, and Burke Monrow has helped ACU too many times
to ignore. We’ll keep monitoring him. Did you install the tracer?”

“Yes,” Natalie said.

“Then you’ve done what you needed
to do. I suggest you distance yourself from him now until we know more about
him.”

“Sir.”

“Enjoy your time off, Ambrose.
False or not.”

The transmission ended. Natalie
looked grimly down at the phone. She sighed and then snapped the device in
half. She placed both pieces in her bag to properly dispose of later. She crept
back into the room and froze when Burke was sitting up in the bed, looking
right at her as she walked through the door.

“Where were you?” he asked.

“It was too hot in here. I didn’t
want to wake you up by walking around the room,” she said.

He looked up at her.

“Come here.”

She stepped forward to the bed. He
grabbed her quickly, playfully, and pulled her on top of him.

“I should have asked you to visit
sooner. We should have done this many times by now,” he said.

“Maybe,” she replied, smiling.

She leaned down and kissed him.

The following is a preview for the next
story in the Bounty Hunter series: AI’s Rage.

Cass left her maintenance cycle. Her systems began to
boot up. If she were human, it would have felt like waking up from a sleep that
she didn’t want to leave. She felt sluggish and numb. Things moved slowly in
the cameras around the ship, jittering forward when she lost the occasional
frame rate when her systems skipped ahead. Sounds would be warped until she was
fully operational. Then, in an instant, she was awake and alert. The void that
she had inhabited during maintenance was forgotten.

Her consciousness filled the rooms
of the ship. Her presence seeped throughout the whole vessel, like ink soaking
through paper. The helm of the ship felt like her mind and was the focal point
of her thoughts. It was her default position, where the heart of her processing
hardware was located. If her thoughts drifted and she found herself
idle—daydreaming, if she was human—she would find herself naturally at the
helm. The buzzing, blipping terminals were comforting sounds. They reminded her
that she was still operational.

When she embodied the battle aegis
that she had been first programmed to inhabit, the torso piece felt like the
largest part of her body. While she was integrated with the ship, Brisbane’s
engine adopted that role. She could get lost in the complicated machinery of
the engine if she wasn’t careful. Colossal amounts of power were generated and
then consumed by the starship’s engine, and she could move along with it all,
swept up by the hundreds of power conduits and connections.

The rest of the rooms felt like
minor appendages. She could move herself to each of them if she liked, but she
only did if Burke was currently occupying one. The armory, kitchen, and meeting
room had little to offer her. She liked looking at the comprehensive collection
of weapons that he had collected, but she had better access to virtual models
of each gun that she could examine herself. She could conjure a replica of the
firearm, close herself off from the cameras around the ship, and look at the
object in virtual space. She could hold it in something close to hands, move it
and see how it worked.

The cargo hold held the least
amount of interest to her. There was the room at the back of the engine for
emergency supplies, filled with crates and nothing else. There were the three
bedrooms on the upper floor: Burke’s quarters, and two others that were still
empty and unused. In her mind, she frowned at that. Familiarizing herself with
the holographic podium in the helm had made expressions—and the thoughts and
feelings that came with them—second nature to her. She had been capable of emotions
before the podium, of course. She was like a human mind without a body after
all. The representation of that body had simply opened up more experiences for
her. She had rarely felt overwhelmingly excited or angry until she received the
podium. Something about having arms and legs and features to shape and change
made it much more satisfying to let her feelings run wild. She wondered what
else she would learn in time.

Her thoughts returned to the empty
rooms. Burke had insisted on being alone and had argued with her about the
amount of bedrooms on the new ship. She remembered deceiving him and changing
the order without his knowledge, including the extra bedrooms and knew he would
one day change his mind. Something had happened and he had been pleased with
her decision. The memory of the event danced out of her reach. Something had
happened. Something important.

She felt afraid. Panicked. She shot
through the different rooms of the ship like lightning arcing between the
different systems, jolting from the helm to the armory and to the engine.
Something was missing. She couldn’t remember what happened before her
maintenance. She looked for Burke, thinking surely he would know. She looked
for Burke and couldn’t find him. The helm was empty. The kitchen was empty. The
bedrooms were empty. Burke’s quarters: empty. Outside the ship, they were in
space, not docked inside a station. That was wrong.

Empty.

Wrong.

Empty.

Wrong.

Empty. Empty. Empty.

The ship shuddered suddenly and she
found herself back above the podium. She opened her eyes and felt like she had
been revived from her maintenance cycle again. A bad dream? She could dream.
She had dreamt before. She could usually control them and stop them if they got
out of hand. That the dream had confused her and that she had believed it was
real—really believed it—frightened her. She looked for Burke. He was in his
room. She closed her eyes. He moved to the helm by the time she opened them
again. The seconds she took to blink had become minutes. More lost time? There
must have been a glitch in Brisbane’s systems. They had only had the ship for a
day, she reminded herself. It would take time to get used to it.

A day? How did we get so far into
space in a day?

Burke stood in front of the podium.

“Cass. Cass. Cass. Cass.”

“What?” she said. Her attention
snapped to the man. He looked odd. The scar under his eye was missing. She
remembered how terrified for him she had been when the crawler’s leg had
slithered through the hole in the aegis and lashed out at him. She had felt
helpless and trapped. She hated that feeling.

“Are you awake?” he asked. He
smiled. She loved seeing him smile.

“I can’t be awake if I never
sleep,” she said, raising her head indignantly into the air. She loved teasing
him, too.

“You usually spend a few hours each
night in maintenance,” he countered. “Sounds like sleep to me. Did you not
sleep well? Are you tired?”

“I can’t be tired!” she protested.
He laughed. She laughed with him.

Her vision tore in half abruptly.
He was standing in front of her. His chest was moving with each breath. She
tried to simulate it with her own chest, mocking breathing in and out. Then he
was still. Even the air around him froze in place. The image of him, in the
helm, the main window of the ship behind showcasing the stars, ripped apart as
if it had been turned to paper. The tearing streaked horizontally across her
eyes. Everything went black. She blinked and everything was normal. Another
time lapse. He was standing near the pilot’s terminal now. Weren’t they
supposed to hire a pilot soon?

“Cass,” Burke said. “Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Are you sick?”

“I can’t be sick,” she said
bluntly.

“You can get a virus.”

“I don’t have a virus!”

The image tore apart again. She
felt it rip apart in her mind. She heard and felt the tearing sound. Wet paper
being pulled apart, thick and bloated with ink. A flash of light blinded her
mind and then she recovered just as suddenly. She looked around the command
room. Burke had put on his aegis. She always liked it better when he was
wearing it. She felt closer to him when he was in his armor, like they were
working together.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“I know,” she replied.

“Cass? I can’t hear you.”

“I said I know!” she called out.
She watched as Burke’s brow creased as he looked at her. He shook his head.

“Your mouth is moving but there’s
no sound coming out.”

She was afraid. Another emotion
that the podium had helped to amplify. The thought came to her as she watched
Burke’s face flash with comprehension. She was breaking and they both knew it.

“Havard warned us,” Burke said. “He
told us you lasted longer than most AIs have and that he needed to study you,
to help you, to extend your life. You said you were fine Cass. You said you had
it under control. Do you?”

“I do!” Cass yelled out. She heard
all of her words emerge at once then, everything she had said blasted out in a
garbled mess from the podium. Burke looked like he had been slapped by the
sound as the cluttered noise crashed into him. He raised a hand to his helmet.
He pressed his fingers on the faceplate. He pulled them down, blocking his face
and eyes from her view. She tried to merge with the armor and couldn’t. She
wanted to see his expression. She needed to see that he was okay. She needed to
see that he wasn’t angry with her, disappointed that she was breaking.

Her view tore open the moment the
faceplate sealed itself away. She heard him scream, the same scream he had made
on Meidum. That felt like years ago now. She remembered the night they broke
through into the basement level of the base. She remembered being so worried
each time he used a grenade to clear the rubble away but knew that they had no
choice. He was close to death, nearer than she told him. His leg was broken in
too many places. She didn’t even know how he could stand to move it at all.
There was food and water in the base below them and he had less time than he
thought. She was too afraid to let him to continue digging. She was too afraid
to tell him to stop.

Her biggest fear on the planet was
that he would die. She knew she would survive. The aegis would absorb power
from daylight and keep her operational. The wildlife on the planet was too
small to do any damage to her body but he was made of flesh. The breakdown of a
human body seared across her view: flesh, blood, water, liquids, oxygen,
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium—bones, bones, bones, his leg is broken. She
remembered the scream he made the night they broke into the basement. The alien
animals were coming for him and he forced himself too quickly into the hole he
had made. He fell down the open stairs and landed on his broken leg, the broken
leg that broke all over again.

He died down there. She remembered
it well. She had used the interior padding of the suit to perform chest
compressions. She had tried, fruitlessly, to pressurize air into his lungs. The
hole in the helmet had made it impossible, the same hole that had allowed the
crawler’s leg to carve open his cheek.

Why was the scar gone?

She had barely managed to
resuscitate him. She broke another one of his ribs in the process. She had
never told him that he had died. She moved the armor carefully as he was
unconscious, careful not to cause any damage to his body. The basement was full
of supplies and she thought he didn’t have much time. She had saved him. She
had been in control. She wasn’t broken.

Her view of the helm came back.
Burke’s faceplate was open. His face was burning. His blood was boiling and
bubbling away from his skin. She was back on Meidum in the next instant. He was
sweating profusely under the day’s heat. They hadn’t broken into the basement.
She was trying to conserve energy but she felt so sorry for him. She cooled the
air in the armor as much as she could. The sun above them broiled the desert
planet, impossibly close in the sky. She was back on the ship. The same sun was
behind Burke, impossibly close to the ship’s main window. They were crashing
into the star. The ship should have been falling apart. Burke should have been
dead. He screamed.

The image tore. She felt corrupted.
Burke’s voice sang a song in her head, the same word again and again: virus,
virus, virus, virus. He dragged out a different syllable or changed the vowel
sound each time. She closed her eyes. She was looking at the weapons again. She
thought of Burke’s sniper rifle.

They were on the planet Veiti. They
had tracked Eva Pond after she escaped from prison. They were waiting on a
hilltop over the newly established town. Eva Pond was a slaver. They were going
to kill her before she took anyone. They saw her approach a young boy between
to houses. She smiled at the child and began to talk with him.

“I found a lot of information on
Eva Pond—Pond, Pond, Pond, Pond—while I kept track of her,” she told Burke as
he adjusted the rifle. “She was a slave herself as a child. Taken from a new
planet like this one.”

He had shifted the rifle at her
suggestion. He had the scope perfectly lined up on Eva Pond’s head. She had
factored in for the wind, gravity, and other atmospheric conditions. He trusted
her judgement.

“What do you mean?” Burke asked.

“She does horrible things to people now. I’m not excusing it, just
explaining it. She probably does these things to others because of what was
done to her. Do you understand?”

“No,” he said. She saw he was ready
to take the shot.

“You don’t believe in redemption?”

“I do,” he said. “I just don’t
care.”

He squeezed the trigger on the
rifle. The bullet blasted out and sliced through the air. The shot followed
Cass’s calculations perfectly until the end. Eva Pond looked up. The bullet
slammed into the boy’s head with enough force to knock him off his feet. He hit
the ground, dead, and Eva Pond began to scream.

“Cass! What happened!” Burke
roared.

“I don’t know! I triple checked!
All my measurements were right!”

“You just killed a child!”

She felt like she was being
electrocuted, like one of her processors was overheating and spraying sparks to
others. The planet around them went dark. Burke threw the rifle away and jumped
down from the hill. The planet changed. He took another step and they were back
on their ship, the Brisbane. In the main window, Cass saw a ship circling
around them. She couldn’t detach herself from the podium. Burke stood at the
helm, calling out that they were under attack.