The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection (7 page)

“There are too many people here,”
Cass said quietly. “They should limit how many can live here. It would solve a
lot of problems.”

“It would,” he agreed. “But who
gets to decide who gets in and who doesn’t? There’s no denying the vacant
buildings down here. There’s more water than anything else. It’s a problem
spawned from another problem, one that didn’t have a solution.”

“There are new worlds being
colonized every year,” Cass offered.

“With their slavers and hostile
aliens,” Burke shook his head. “No, I’m sorry. You’re right. There should be
more work put into transporting people there.”

“Take a left here, and then go
down.”

The stairways that connected the
levels were the most dangerous places in the lower streets. Most were slick
with rain and grime that didn’t fully wash down the steps. The few that were
dry were inhabited with criminals: petty thugs and gang members that infested
the neglected underside of the city. He saw them in other places too, typically
gathered around the paid elevator access points that connected to the higher
streets. They stood there waiting for anyone unfortunate enough to choose that
exit while carrying down supplies from above.

The criminals he passed mostly left
him alone. When he walked passed them—the thugs were unable to see whether or
not he was glaring at them through his helmet, which he was—they would shout
and jeer when they decided he was leaving them alone out of fear. It took a
great deal of willpower not to turn around and teach each group of them a
lesson. Cass usually soothed him, reminding him that causing too much trouble
might interfere with the fugitives coming out of hiding. Although Burke
despised the gangs, he also felt sympathy for them when he couldn’t think of
any alternative way for the men and women to scrape by.

“You a fucking alien in there?” one
said to him, on the second day of his search.

Burke stopped and made a show of
turning to the man. The armored face plate of his helmet stared silently at
him.

“Fucking aliens,” the man cursed
and spat on the armor. The gang members behind were not as brave. They hung
back while the man put his face as close to Burke’s as he could. The man’s nose
nearly touched the outer armor.

“Must be an alien to be sealed up
like that,” the man continued. “There ain’t enough down here already without
your kind.”

The man raised his hands and put
them on the chest plate of Burke’s armor. Cass sounded exasperated as she urged
Burke not to fight back. The man was wearing thin even on her nerves. She
locked the arms and legs in place when the man pushed against them, effectively
making it so he was trying to shove against a solid wall. Instead of moving the
aegis, he merely pressed himself away from the armor. Immediately, the
annoyance turned to amusement and Burke let out a low laugh. He turned and
walked away.

“You better run!” the man called
out.

Burke shook his head.

Between each day of searching, Cass
would find an abandoned place in the city for them to stop. Burke rested in the
armor, kept warm and sustained by its systems, while Cass continued her search.
Although he preferred his bed on the ship, he was comfortable sleeping in the
aegis, having already done so hundreds of times. It was too much trouble to
call the ship down each night and wasn’t worth leaving it to chance that the
murderers might venture out while they’re resting in orbit.

On the third day, Cass found them.
She finally broke through the security in Spectrum Industries and used their collected
records to better narrow down their search. Burke had just walked down a set of
a stairs much closer to the ground level of the city than when they started. Cass
changed half of the visor’s display as she rambled out directions for him to
follow. He took off into a run down a partially flooded street, risking
reckless steps through the murky water and toward the sound of a man screaming.
The visor’s view reverted back to its original state, displaying what Burke’s
eyes would have seen if the armor didn’t block them.

“Turn left here and then the first
right,” Cass said quickly.

He followed her directions and
turned in time to see the two murderers closing in on a man on one of the
longer bridges in the city. Cass zoomed in one corner of the visor to allow
Burke to see that the man was bleeding. The fugitives were slowly and calmly
walking toward him, as if they were confident that their target couldn’t
escape. The man screamed again and Burke rushed forward.

He felt the compartment on his hip
whirl open and his handgun snapped within his reach. He grabbed it quickly and
came to a stop half way across the bridge. The weapon was brought smoothly up
in front of him and he aimed naturally at his targets—he remained steady and
focused, it was simply another gunshot amongst the tens of thousands he had
already fired in his life. The bullet ripped through the air and passed the
bleeding man’s head. It collided into the woman behind him and was then disintegrated
against whatever armor was under the woman’s skin. The bullet burst open and
fell onto the street in pieces, as though it had been made of ash.

“What the fuck?” Burke said.

“I don’t know,” Cass replied.

The murderers stopped in their
tracks. They both angled their heads to the side in unison—more than just
unison, Burke noticed, but perfect synchronization. He found it deeply unsettling.
The bleeding man let out a third and final scream, like he mirrored Burke’s
thought, and then raced away down the bridge. The fugitives didn’t chase him.
They simply stood in place and looked at Burke. They tilted their heads again,
to the left side this time, and he shuddered.

“I don’t like this, Cass,” he said.

“The pictures were right,” she
replied. “Are you seeing this?”

Burke still held the gun pointed at
the two in front of him. They weren’t moving and he took the chance to look
them over. They were barely clothed: each wore a torn shirt and pants that were
ripped below the knees. They wore no shoes or socks. The man’s chest was
exposed and looked just as covered with modifications as his face. The woman’s
shirt didn’t cover her stomach and her skin looked similarly strange.

He tensed as she walked toward him.
She took each step as if there was no weapon currently pointed at her, walking
as naturally as any other person on a street during a normal day. Burke
suddenly remembered their names from the news report: Lumen and Shaw. The man
stayed in place a few meters behind the woman.

“Hello, my name is L,” Lumen said.

Burke was about to answer when he
heard a sound like something cracking open and then crunching into place. He
looked down in time to see Lumen’s arm part-way through its transformation. Her
hand split between her middle fingers and then curled open like there was a set
of hinges in her wrists. He saw that her arms were fully prosthetic, just like
his leg, and peeled away to reveal the inner mechanics beneath the artificial
skin. In a second he saw the blade eject out from her forearm to replace where
her hand had been. In another second, the blade was thrust up at his neck and
scraped its way along the armor plating of his aegis. A hot shower of sparks
frothed up from the connecting metal and it was then that Burke shoved her
away.

A warning of damage flashed on the
visor in front of him. Whatever the blade had been made from, it was enough to
take a thin shaving from the outer armor. He looked up to see Lumen once again
angling her head at him.

“Minor damage,” Cass reported.
“She’d need hours to stab her way through us.”

Burke watched Shaw raise an arm at
him from behind Lumen. He saw that the murderer’s arm was now equally changed,
but sporting multiple barrels of a firearm instead of a blade. The bullets
spewed toward Burke before he could get out of the way and he fired back
instead of wasting time trying to dodge the bullets. Cass channeled energy into
as many kinetic barriers as she could, afraid the man’s weapon might be enough
to deal damage to them like Lumen’s blade. The projectiles bounced harmlessly
from the aegis, however, and she soon reverted to conserving the suit’s power.

Unfortunately, Burke’s shots also
ricocheted from his opponent’s armor without any effect. Shaw lowered his
weapon and Burke reloaded his handgun in the same moment. They stared at each
other then, for one absurd moment when neither side knew what to do to the
other.

“What did Spectrum Industries do to
them?” Burke said. “How can their skin be as bullet-proof as our armor?”

“It isn’t. It can’t be,” Cass
answered.

She was still talking when Lumen
broke the momentary truce by lunging forward. She wrapped her left arm around
Burke’s neck and clung onto him. He was too heavy for her to pull onto the
floor but she kept her grip on him as she started to stab relentlessly into his
chest with her bladed arm. Each strike sent a fresh wave of sparks onto the
bridge and a new warning that they were sustaining damage.

Burke twisted his arm so that his
gun was aimed at her despite how close she was. He fired off two shots and they
were lost in the mess of strikes she was pummeling into his chest. His visor
abruptly changed to the video feed from the handgun. He could see two blackened
circles where his two shots had hit into Lumen’s stomach.

“Fire at her again!” Cass directed,
circling one of the black marks with a red reticule. “The same place. The whole
magazine!”

“But—”

“Just do it!”

He followed her orders. Each strike
from Lumen’s blade set his aim off for a moment. He timed two shots after each
of her attacks, firing ten more bullets in total into the same place on her
stomach. The eighth one caused Lumen to suddenly freeze in place, still clung
to the armor. The final two shots sent snaking fissure lines of damage around
the point of impact, cracking their way through the armor plates at her
stomach. She let out a guttural howl and let go of him. She fell onto her back
and writhed on the floor of the bridge.

Shaw let out the exact same howl in
the exact moment, a perfect replica of her cry. He then moved independently of
Lumen, leaping forward as Burke rushed to reload. The man’s augmented legs
moved him quickly over the bridge. Burke was expecting him to strike the gun from
his hands, and was taken off guard when he instead jumped at the last moment
and led with both feet into Burke’s chest. He felt the prosthetic legs make
contact with his armor, press down, and then release with the same jumping
mechanism that he himself had used many times before. Shaw’s legs launched him
from Burke with enough force to knock the heavy aegis over and send it sliding
along the floor of the bridge.

By the time Burke was back on his
feet, the two killers were gone. He stepped forward and leaned down to where
his gun had been flung during his fall. He finished reloading it, just in case
they were hiding, and then moved along the bridge to see any trace of them.

“I’m tracking them,” Cass said.
“They’re moving lower through the city. I won’t lose them.”

“Call Rylan,” he said lowly. “Tell
him to find a place to land after picking us up. We won’t be on the ship for
long.”

He kneeled down where Lumen had
attacked him. There were small mounds of crumbled bullets and shavings of metal
from his armor. There were a few droplets of blood, a much darker red than any
normal human blood he had seen. He shook his head.

* * *

In Brisbane’s armory, Burke looked
over the chest plate of his aegis that he had just removed. He ran his fingers
through the thin scrapes left in the metal, feeling the ragged edges of the
indentations biting into his fingertips. At a distance, the marks wouldn’t be
discernible in the black color of the armor. Still, the armor was something he
took pride in owning and he hated when it sustained any damage. Repairing it
was expensive but he never hesitated in paying that cost.

He didn’t bother with a shower or a
rest. He knew that Cass may lose her tracking on the murderers. Instead, he
looked through the armory and picked out a rifle. The weapon was too large to
fit into the compartment in his aegis but was small enough to carry in the open
without risking too much trouble. As low in the city as they climbed, there
were hardly any people to frighten by carrying the gun.

Below the rows of weapons, secured
into the racks while they were on display, were large drawers full of
ammunition. The bullets were kept tightly packed in boxes, each of them built
into the drawers as a solid unit to prevent spilling their contents if the ship
ever lost gravity. He searched quickly through the drawers until he found the
correct caliber for the gun he had chosen. Then he picked out rounds
specifically designed to pierce armor—barriers, doors, and personal infantry
protection. The bullets he had previously used were tailored for soft targets,
breaking apart in flesh to cause massive damage. The bullets he chose now, he
hoped, would be capable of punching through whatever protection Spectrum had
installed on Lumen and Shaw.

Burke loaded the rifle gun and set
extra magazines to insert into the armor. He then put his aegis back on with
the intention of leaving the ship immediately; however, when he stepped out
into the main corridor of the ship, Cass asked him to come to the helm.