The Bounty Hunter: Soldier's Wrath (2 page)

“Do you know who I am?” Burke
asked.

“No. Should I?”

“My name is Burke Monrow. And I
will kill you some day. Remember my name.”

“So dramatic,” the man sighed and,
for the briefest moment, his lower lip trembled. “Oh well. I’ll indulge myself.
My name is Isaac Paxton. You won’t have to remember my name because you won’t
have time to. I’m setting the base to self-destruct as I leave it. Which will
be right now. Goodbye, whatever your name was.”

The man smiled but looked shaken.
Burke unloaded the rifle’s magazine into the screen before he cut away. There
was no warning of the base’s imminent destruction—no red lights or sirens
sounded throughout the room. He felt the rumbling of a ship beginning to take
off near the room and he turned around and started to run.

The room with the cages seemed full
of obstacles now that he ran through it. The floor was more slick with blood
and his leg threatened to buckle out with each hard step he took. In the
corridor, three guards ignored him and raced away instead, running in the
direction of his ship. Burke chased after him, shooting at them between running
around the dead bodies and the growing fires. He heard more gunfire as he
neared the corridor that connected to his ship and saw the guards he had missed
drop to the floor as they turned the corner.

Burke called out before he turned
into the hallway. Adam still fired one shot that tore through the air next to
his head. Burke walked quickly down the hall as Adam held up the rifle as an
apology for firing at him. He had an odd expression on his face as they stepped
into the ship together.

“I thought you were leaving?”

“I should have,” Adam muttered.
“Maybe next time I will.”

“The base is set to explode. We
need to go. Now.”

Adam nodded and walked to the front
of the ship. Kristen was still on the floor in the cargo hold, in the same
position as he had last seen her. He loosened the straps of his armor and let
them drop to the floor as he stepped toward her. When he was close enough, he
crouched down—feeling his leg split open anew as he did so. He winced back the
pain and set a hand down near her head. He felt the ship’s engines come to life
through the vibrations through the floor.

“I killed them,” he said. “You
don’t have to worry about them ever hurting you again.”

The ship lurched as it left the
moon. A bright flash of light came through the windows of the doors behind
them. The moon base erupted in a spray of fire moments after they left the
surface. Burke kept his eyes on Kristen.

“All of them?” she asked, her voice
firm despite how injured she looked.

“All of them,” Burke lied, and felt
no guilt as the girl closed her eyes.

* * *

Natalie Ambrose lay naked in the
bed. She let the sheets hang loosely around her, not caring which parts of her
body were covered and which were exposed. Burke was similarly naked next to
her, laying on his back with one arm under her head. She ran her fingers over
his chest, sometimes trailing with her fingertips, sometimes gently running the
length of her fingers over his skin. He liked the sensation.

“What about this one?” she asked
softly.

He looked down to see her index
finger resting on a round scar on his chest.

“Gunshot wound, like most of them,”
he said. “After the war.”

“You only have one on your face,”
she said, her voice still low. She ran a fingertip under his eye.

“I got that on Meidum. A crawler
leg got through a hole in my armor.”

“And these?”

Her hand rested on the three long
scars streaked over his stomach.

“Dross. That one might have hurt
the most.”

Her hand moved down his stomach and
was lost under the sheet. He grinned at her and she laughed but continued
moving her hand lower, passed his thigh until she rubbed the scar on his leg.

“I saw this one while I was down
there earlier,” she said, mirroring his grin. “How did you get it?”

“Another gunshot. Many years ago.”

“During a contract?”

“Something like that. Geoff’s
daughter was taken. I got shot twice bringing her back,” he said, looking off
for a moment before he added: “but I brought her back.”

“Good. Well done,” she said.
“You’ve mentioned Geoff before. What kind of work do you usually do for him?”

“This and that,” he answered. He
shifted his arm out from under her and turned onto his side to face her. “Why
so curious?”

“Just making conversation,” she
said, raising her head in such a defiant way that it made him want to kiss her.
He leaned his head closer to hers and she met him half way, kissing him deeply.
She pulled her head back. “You should have asked me to your ship sooner.”

“I should have,” he said frankly.

“You have a whole month to make it
up to me,” she said, stretching as she spoke. Her back arched up away from the
bed and he eagerly watched how her chest and stomach curved and tensed. It
wasn’t the first time they had slept together but it was the first in a long
time.

“What about you?” Burke asked.

“What about me?”

He moved quickly on top of her, a
leg on either side of her hips. She eyed him suspiciously as he cupped his
hands over her breasts. He leaned down and kissed them, one at a time, and then
kissed the scar below her collar bone.

“How did you get your scars?”

“Accidents. Mostly,” she said. Her
eyes looked away from his for a moment. She squirmed beneath him and then
looked back up at him.

“This one looks like a bullet,” he
said, spiraling his fingers over the scar tissue on her stomach. “You were
shot?”

“An explosion in ACU’s lab,” she
said, shaking her head. “I work with a lot of weaponry and armor. You know
that. Accidents happen. It was a piece of shrapnel.”

He found another scar above her
left hip, looking similarly like a bullet wound. Before he could ask her about
it, she shifted firmly beneath him and drew his eyes to hers. He was too busy
admiring her body to realize her expression matched his own; she missed being
intimate with him as much as he had with her. He leaned down to kiss her again.

The shower in the en suite bathroom
of Burke’s quarters wasn’t large enough for the two of them. Natalie went first
as he lay in bed alone, half dozing as he listened to the water running only a
few meters away from him. He went in after she came out to dry herself. She was
already dressed when he came out with a towel. She was looking over the display
that covered the entire far wall of his room.

“There’s a lot of information
here,” she said. “Did you leave anything out?”

“Some of it is in layers behind the
files that are displayed, but no,” he explained. “That’s my entire history there
if you want to see.”

“You trust me with that?” she
looked back at him over her shoulder.

“I do.”

The smile crept slowly over her
face. She turned away from him before he could see it fully form.

“Jack Porter,” she read from the screen.
“It says he was a soldier that went missing and likely died on Earth, during
the war against the dross. I didn’t know that. Is that why you picked him?”

“Geoff picked it, not me. Maybe he
chose it for that reason.”

“And your pilot doesn’t know your
real name?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay,
Jack
,” she said,
turning to face him. She was grinning again. “I’ll keep your secret.”

* * *

Geoff’s bar was quiet. He didn’t
mind. Each planet, space station, and ship, operated on its own frame of time.
A ship might arrive with its crew in the middle of their awake cycle, while the
space station, Foras, might be deep into its night. Despite how busy the
station could be, most of the bar’s patrons were local people. He expected the
bar to be nearly empty when he visited at night.

There were three humans and an
alien—a vruan—all at different tables of the bar. Lucy, the bartender that
usually worked the night shift, welcomed Geoff as he entered. He was pleased to
see a vruan already taking advantage of the new additions he had made to the
bar to accommodate the specific needs of the alien race. Although humans and
vruans could inhabit the same atmosphere, their nutritional needs were
different. There were scant few foods that both races could eat together,
although rare exceptions did exist.

“How are you tonight?” Lucy asked Geoff
as he stepped behind the bar.

“Tired. I need a drink.”

“Want me to make you one?”

“Don’t trouble yourself. I have
some in my office.”

“Call me if you need some more,”
she said as he stepped through the door at the back of the bar.

The stairs to Geoff’s office seemed
to give him more trouble each time he climbed them. He knew he was getting old.
He was nearly a hundred and had finally lost all of his hair. He knew if he had
taken better care of himself he may have squeezed another hundred years out of
his body. Now he would consider himself lucky to get another fifty.

In his office, he closed and locked
the door behind him and stepped to the liquor cabinet next to his desk. He took
out a bottle of brandy and poured himself a glass. He studied himself in the
mirror as he held the drink up into the light. For years he had clung to the
final tufts of gray hair around his head. Now that he had finally resorted to
shaving it all off, he was pleasantly surprised to find that he looked younger each
time he looked at himself in a mirror. He wondered if any man or woman would
ever look twice at him again, and then shook his head. He drained the glass
quickly, considered the bottle for a moment, and then decided to take it with
him to his desk.

He regretted sitting down
instantly. He had forgotten to open the hidden safe in the floor next to the
cabinet. The terminal at his desk was used solely for running the bar and its
business on the station. His other work—his real job—was kept primarily in the
hidden safe in the floor. He forced himself to get back up and then kneeled
down to open the hatch. He retrieved a stack of computer tablets and a small
stash of paper. Although the tablets had all network functionality stripped out
of them, for complete prevention of being accessed remotely, he had many
secrets he didn’t trust to any electronic device.

The papers contained a
chronological record of every job he had ever done. In his youth, he had been a
smuggler. Not every job had been something he was proud of now that he was
older, but he was able to find peace in the things he hadn’t lowered himself to
do. He had never transported people or catered to any of the more dangerous
criminal cartels. He had hauled drugs between systems and made a substantial
profit. Those memories gave him the most pause and always ended in some sort of
justification that he wasn’t so bad, since he hadn’t distributed the drugs
himself. Brandy always helped to soothe that guilt.

He read the papers quickly. His
body might be in the first stages of failing him, but his mind and senses were
as sharp as ever. There was little that he had forgotten as he read his old
list of contacts and the network he had built and established over the major
star systems in human space. The pages contained less information as he flipped
through them, showing how he withdrew from many dealings as time went on. By the
time he opened his bar on Foras, he was operating covertly enough that he had
never once been visited by the station’s authorities. Most of the work he had
done in the past decade might be considered almost legal, if he had bothered to
apply for the right permits and paid importation taxes.

Geoff set the papers back in the
safe. He carried the tablets back to his desk and poured himself another glass
of brandy. He looked at the screen on top of the desk and saw the bar below
him. Another customer had walked in, another vruan who seemed to be flirting
with Lucy. Not for the first time, he acknowledged that the bar was profitable
enough that he didn’t need his other work anymore. For a moment, he looked at
the tablets spread out in front of him and wondered why he kept at it. Then,
the moment passed, and he picked up the first one and was back to work.

He pulled another tablet from his
coat pocket. It was a cheap device, one that he used to pull data from public
internet access points on the station. He set wide download parameters, in
addition to the dozens of drop boxes he had established for his contacts in the
galaxy. He physically interfaced the tablet with one on the desk and, when the
data transfer was complete, set the cheap tablet aside for shredding. He went
through a few every month—a cost he was willing to spend for the sake of being
untraceable.

The data was sent through the
features of the more robust tablets he kept in his safe. While the computer’s
programs sorted through the data, automatically discarding junk information,
Geoff looked over the schedules of the multiple smuggling ships he had moving
between systems. Most ships used jump carriers and their jump gates to travel
between systems in days rather than the months it would take otherwise. The
jump carriers had extensive hardware for scanning the cargo and occupants of
any ship that used them. Smuggling ships traveled the long way, brimming with
as much cargo as possible, and going dark for months as they were out of range
of any system’s network. He monitored the estimated progress of each ship on
the tablet in his hands.