The Bounty Hunter: Soldier's Wrath (5 page)

On his ship, he had access to the
vessel’s multimedia centre and recreation rooms. He had access to movies,
television, video games, and books as they were released. He had spent many of
his days lost in that entertainment, working only when he had to, and
justifying it to himself that it helped take his mind off the pathetic life he
now led. He didn’t like that he was hiding, but he liked living out in the
open, exposed and afraid, even less. After six years in hiding, he took no
pleasure in the entertainment he had set up for himself.

“Sunday is a good cat,” he murmured,
still staring around the room.

He had two separate bedrooms: one
for himself, and one for whichever slaves he currently kept close to him. He
took men and women from his personal stock, usually one at a time but not
always, and would use them himself. He took better care of them when they were
close by and visible, giving them food and clothes and access to whatever
entertainment they liked. When he was bored of them, he’d send them back into
the outer sections of the facility ship where the rest of the slaves were kept.
When they were once again out of sight, he lost interest in how they were
treated. He honestly didn’t know if the conditions for his slaves were poor or
not. He didn’t care.

Only a small handful of guards were
kept on the ship, and even those few were sometimes too much for Isaac’s paranoia.
He allowed only one delivery, once a month, to bring supplies to the ship.
Toward the sixth year in hiding, he requested more slaves to be brought to him,
sometimes even purchasing some for himself. The comforts of his protective room
bored him. Some nights they even had the opposite effect, taunting him into a
rage. The expensive decorations and meticulously crafted life laughed at him, a
reminder that he wasn’t suddenly forced into isolation, but actively planned for
it. The word coward jumped at him from every detail of the prison he had crafted
for himself. The word coward would always remind him of Burke Monrow.

He remembered well the small taste
of freedom he had experienced over a year earlier. He often lost himself in the
slew of data collected from the Torrentus Cartel’s hacker agents. He would look
through posted bounties and the hunters that collected them. He followed the
career of Burke and Adam closely, and noticed when Adam abruptly began working
alone. Burke was gone for a year. And then another. And then another. Three
years passed without any sign of the man who had forced him into hiding.

“We might be leaving soon,” he had
told Sunday. The cat seemed indifferent to the idea.

He was ready to return to his old
life but then Adam was murdered, and Burke was the prime suspect. Isaac
retreated back into isolation then, bitter and miserable. He killed two slaves
that night. He tied them down onto his bed and, shaking and trembling, beat
them bloody and dead.

Hope began to build in him as the
next year passed. That hope often morphed and twisted into other emotions: hate
and terror. Another week would pass without any sign of Burke. Isaac began to
think the bounty hunter was falsely accused of murdering Adam, and had never
returned from his three year disappearance. Another week would pass with Isaac
second guessing himself, petrified with fear to risk leaving his base. He
killed slaves during those weeks. He spent more money replacing them. He became
obsessed with looking over any information on bounty hunters and their commonly
used contracts. He’d refresh postings hundreds of times a day, desperately
seeking any sign that Burke Monrow was still alive, all the while hoping that
he was still dead.

Isaac’s boss had been the catalyst
to begin his plans. The head of the Torrentus Cartel, Gordon Pavel, was losing
patience with Isaac. He was neglecting his agents too often. The operations in
his system were progressing too slowly. Faced with an additional threat from
within, Isaac forced himself to act. He began to plan a way to know for certain
if Burke was alive or dead. Some nights he was a nervous mess as he fussed over
the tiniest of details. Some nights the process of having something productive
to do was invigorating. He felt like he was actively reclaiming his past life.
Some nights he would vomit from the stress of it all.

“Am I doing the right thing?” he
asked the cat.

Sunday turned her head up to him
and squeezed her eyes shut. She squinted up at him and then turned away. She
continued to purr. He considered, not for the first time, that he was
legitimately talking to his cat. The ridiculousness of his life appeared in
front of him and, as he usually did when he met that confrontation, he lashed
out and shoved the cat from his lap. The animal landed on the floor in a
scramble of flailing legs and then was gone, racing along the carpet and
vanishing into another room.

Isaac turned to the computer
terminal at his desk. He had a constant connection to the mercenaries he had
sent to Frey, already stationed around Stheno and monitoring the girl’s
apartment. He had positioned his own ship in the Tali system but at a safe
distance from the planet. He cycled through the video feeds from each
group—five in all—and saw no sign of Burke. The girl had left her apartment and
returned three times since the surveillance was put into place. Isaac tried to
remind himself that it was impossible for Burke to have traveled to the planet
and that is was unlikely that Geoff had even contacted him yet. Even so, he
wrung his hands together, repeatedly interlocking and releasing his fingers, as
he stared at the screen.

Gordon Pavel would be calling
within an hour and Isaac knew he had to be calm and collected in front of his
boss. He got out of his seat and stepped toward the doors to his ship. He
decided to do another test of its systems, the fourth test that day, to make
sure he was prepared to leave in as little time as possible if his plans failed
and Burke reached him. The small ship was fully integrated into the larger one
and would leave a gaping opening when it left. He needed to make sure the ship
could smoothly detach itself from the outer system. He had planned for even
that failure, but it wasn’t all bad. The force of the ship leaving should be
enough to kill anyone left standing in his room. If his next encounter with
Burke ended like the first, Isaac was ready.

* * *

“Cass, I made a mistake. I’m not
ready for this.”

“You are. This panic is temporary.”

“I took on too much, too fast.”

Burke stood in the room at the back
end of the ship. He leaned himself against the corner, as far away from the
door as he possibly could. Lumen still lay in the middle of the room. He tried
not to look at her as he spoke. There was no one else in the room.

“Rylan knows who I am,” he said.
“Geoff made a mistake and I can’t even be angry with him. Natalie came here
thinking that I was already fixed and look at me. I can’t do this.”

“Rylan hasn’t done anything yet,”
Cass said softly. “I don’t think he’ll betray us, but if he does we can handle
it. We can get another ID change. We have enough credits saved up to overhaul
the ship and fit it with new credentials. It’d be expensive but we could
manage.”

“I don’t like uncertainty,” Burke
said, his eyes closed. “I’m trying.”

“Natalie knows who you are. You
trust her. She cares about you Burke,” Cass said. “So do I.”

“And Kristen? She’s in danger. I
can’t afford to be worried about myself.”

“You can, actually. It will be four
days before we reach Frey. That’s four days that you can’t do anything to help
her. Relax as best as you can. Talk to Rylan. It will be okay.”

“I lied to her,” Burke said lowly.

“To Natalie?”

“To Kristen. When she was taken, I
lied to her. I told her I killed everyone that was involved with her abduction.
Everyone. Now she’s in danger again.”

“A lie isn’t always a bad thing,”
Cass said frankly. “Deception isn’t always malicious. We’ll stop them. They
won’t take her again.”

Burke stood still for another
moment. He felt only a little better. He nodded once and forced himself to walk
across the room. He closed the door behind him without a second look back at
Lumen. He walked passed the engine and climbed the stairs to the upper deck. He
could see Rylan in the distance, through the open doors to the helm, still sat
at the pilot’s console. He suddenly wanted to ask Cass if she was monitoring
all outgoing messages but stopped himself, knowing that she likely already
started the moment Geoff said his real name. The thought uplifted him a little
more, knowing that he could be certain that Cass, at the very least, would
always support him.

He didn’t want to face the pilot
right away. He turned at the door to his room and saw Natalie was waiting for
him. She was looking through the files on the wall display. She jumped in place
as the doors opened, startled by his sudden appearance. She laughed at herself
and looked at him.

“You caught me spying,” she said,
smiling.

“I said you could look,” he said,
his voice level. He walked across the room and sat down on the bed.

“How are you doing?” she stepped
toward him. She stood over him instead of sitting next to him on the bed. She held
her hands out to him and, when he didn’t take them, she crossed them over her
stomach.

“I don’t know.”

“I want to tell you something. Will
you listen?”

He nodded. It was a tiny movement.

“I won’t lie and say I understand
what you’re going through. I can’t. I know that in a way, you’re only now
dealing with what Adam did to you. After what the two of you did on Earth, I
can’t imagine how that must feel.

“Among the soldiers who survived
the war on Earth, more have killed themselves than those who haven’t. The
effect of fighting for your home planet, and then losing it, is something that
will be studied for centuries. You went through that with Adam, together, and
even managed to stick with each other and work after that. You stuck with that
person despite him being a constant reminder of the war you both lost. To have
that person turn on you, the person that understood the most horrible thing
that ever happened to you more than anyone,” Natalie’s voice trailed off.

Burke was very still on the bed.

“I can’t understand it,” she
repeated. “But I can accept it. You’re not wrong to feel the way you do, and to
be worried. But not everyone who cares about you will turn on you, no matter
how it might seem sometimes. I promise you that.”

He nodded once. She held out her
hands again. He reached up and squeezed them softly. She sat down next to him
and rested against him, her head on his shoulder.

“I am going to ask you a strange
question,” she said. “I want you to be honest.”

“Okay,” he said slowly.

“Do you ever miss him?”

“Who?”

“Adam.”

He was taken aback. For a brief
instant, he looked at her like it was the stupidest question he had ever heard.
Then, he found his mind wondering at the answer and was surprised by what he
felt.

“There were only three of us that
survived from the beginning,” he began. “In our squad. Most of them died. We
got replacements. Most of them died too. Our squad captain, Moira, nearly died.
A dross crushed half of her head but she lived through it. She wasn’t well
enough to fight again until the war was over. I took over her position. Maybe I
shouldn’t have. Adam was always better with people than I was. He could make
them think what he wanted them to.”

Burke smiled. Natalie thought he
looked sad, only for a moment, before he gave a short laugh.

“I didn’t know him before the war,”
he continued. “He was born on Earth, like me, but we never met until the
fighting started. I don’t know if it was the war that changed him into who he
became, and that it only took a few more years for that change to be complete.
Or maybe losing the war was what started the change. I don’t know. It changed
me, I’m certain of that. I can’t remember much of my life before it.

“My family died. My friends. It was
only Adam and the other soldiers that joined us near the end—the few that
survived—they were the only people in the entire galaxy I knew, right after
losing the planet. I can see why many people couldn’t cope. Maybe I wouldn’t
have without working with Adam. Maybe Adam couldn’t either, and it was only a
matter of time.

“I don’t know, Natalie. I don’t
miss who he became. I miss who he was. I miss who I was before he tried to kill
me, but maybe that’s not even his fault. Maybe that was just the moment that
the war caught up with me. Maybe I was already broken and it took until then
for me to realize it.”

Natalie put an arm around him and
pulled him against her. She pressed the side of her head against his.

“That makes perfect sense,” she
said.

“I wish it didn’t. You didn’t come
here for this.”

“I said that I accepted you, as you
are,” she said firmly, but pleasantly. “I meant it.”

She raised a hand to his face and
turned his head to hers. She kissed him once on the lips and then on the
forehead. He didn’t take his eyes from hers. They eased back slowly onto the
bed and turned to face each other. He moved his arms around her back and she
did the same to him.