The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection Read online

  The Bounty Hunter – Resurrection

  By Joseph Anderson

  The Bounty Hunter – Resurrection

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Anderson

  Also by Joseph Anderson:

  The Wizard and the Dragon

  Bounty Hunter Series

  The Bounty Hunter Series One, Complete

  Revenge

  Redemption

  Vampire

  Into The Swarm

  Reckoning

  Author’s Note:

  The Bounty Hunter stories are a series of novellas. Each story is intended to be self-contained, like an episode of a television series. Although some names and references are made to prior events, each story can be enjoyed on its own.

  If, however, you prefer to read things in order, the series begins with The Bounty Hunter’s Revenge.

  Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy the story.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Other books by the author

  Author’s Note

  The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection

  Excerpt from Soldier’s Wrath.

  Resurrection

  Lumen couldn’t remember her last name. On good days, she could remember her first name. On bad days, she only remembered that it started with an ‘L’. She’d introduce herself like that.

  “Hello,” she’d say. “My name is L.” And then she would stab the stranger in the throat.

  Her partner and husband, Shaw, had more than a similar problem with his memory. It was the exact same problem, since their minds had been linked. They shared the good days and the bad, from Lumen to L and Shaw to S. They usually forgot the faces of those they killed within a few hours. They didn’t like killing them, of course, it was simply much easier to remove the augmented arms and legs from the rest of a person if that person remained perfectly still. Draining the fluid—blood—from the neck was merely the easiest way to achieve that.

  They hadn’t always killed people for spare parts. Nor had their minds always been linked. They had always gotten along with each other, however, and that was precisely why they had been chosen for an exciting experiment. They lived together, ate together, and worked together. They both volunteered for the experiment together. Together they were linked. And together they went insane.

  The company they worked for, Spectrum Industries, was the leading developer of prosthetic limbs and robotics. Lumen and Shaw were offered an exciting amount of money for participating in the exciting experiment. The researchers never meant for things to go so horribly wrong, but there had been dozens of legal waivers for a reason. There is no research without risk.

  The memory of that first day was corrupted for the two of them. When they thought of it, they were both already one person merged as they sat in the small, sealed room. Lumen had thought it was too cold. Shaw had thought the room was too clean and too white. They now both remembered the room as cold, bright, and suspiciously immaculate. The lead researcher, Florence, entered the room. Lumen thought she was attractive—sleek augmented legs and all. Weeks later, Shaw remembered thinking the same thing. They listened to the woman’s questions.

  “How are you today?” she asked.

  “Good,” they both answered.

  “This is the final stage of the preparation before you will be restricted to this facility,” Florence explained. “This is the last chance to speak up if you’ve changed your mind about participating in the study.”

  Shaw had been worried and had been tempted to leave. Lumen had not. Weeks later, Shaw’s memory overpowered Lumen’s and they both remembered being uncertain and insecure. It helped and provided more fuel to blame Spectrum for what they had done.

  “I want to stay,” they answered, after a moment of hesitation.

  “Excellent,” Florence replied, with a large genuine smile. “Now, you’ve been chosen for multiple reasons. Chief among them are your extensive augmentations already present. Your arms were lost in an accident and you chose to work for the company after receiving the prosthetics we created. Is that correct?”

  The question had been directed at Lumen. She had nodded on the day. She had felt gratitude. She had lost her arms in an accident. It had been a painful experience. The replacements had been a wonderful thing for her life. Shaw had lost his legs. It was how they met: they had been in the same accident and recovered in the same hospital. It was Lumen’s memory that overpowered Shaw’s and he was confused. He hadn’t lost his arms. The memory became unsynchronized between the two of them and felt like pain. The memory stuttered in place. Florence repeated the same words:

  “Is that correct? Is that correct? Is that correct? Is that correct? Is that correct? Is that correct? Correct? Correct? Correct? Ect, ect, ect, ect, ect, ect, ect.”

  The memory skipped ahead. They had not yet been linked but they were closer together. They were sharing a room in the facility. It was still too cold and too clean. The white walls made the room feel too large. Shaw hadn’t liked it. Lumen hadn’t minded. They both remembered hating it. It was more fuel.

  Spectrum Industries had removed Lumen’s legs. Spectrum Industries had removed Shaw’s arms. They were given the same augmentations. They were closer together. They hadn’t been bothered much by the change. After over a decade of living with mechanical limbs, the new ones didn’t feel so different. Florence came to visit them a week after the surgery.

  “How are you today?”

  “Good,” they both answered.

  “I’ve come to speak to you today about a new development. The two of you present a unique opportunity for the company. If you are both willing, in addition to the advanced dermal replacement procedure, we’d like to create a temporary neural link between the two of you.”

  “What does that mean?” they both asked.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Florence said with a smile. “Let me get that part out of the way first. We’ve done it before, but never with two people that are so close.”

  On that day, Lumen and Shaw had exchanged a loving look. Remembering the conversation as a merged person, the memory threatened to derail and froze for a moment. It started again and skipped over the look like it never happened.

  “We planned to install several cranial implants already,” Florence continued. “We will only be adding one more. There will be increased compensation, of course.”

  Shaw had been tempted by the money. Lumen had been interested in helping the company that gave her arms back to her. Together, they remembered the conversation as coercion, and that they had been guilted into accepting the procedure that drove them insane. Neither of them remembered signing the additional consent forms.

  More parts of their bodies were removed. Several sections of bone were replaced to support the reinforced structures that were inserted under the skin around the base of each of their augmented limbs. The procedure was the original experiment, to monitor the long term effects of additional support around standard implants. The main function of the new implants were to allow the prosthetic limbs to be replaceable without the help of a mechanical surgeon. A new product line of prosthetics were planned for both function and fashion. A different set of arms and legs for whatever each day required. Seamless improvement, they planned to call it.

  Lumen and Shaw’s skulls were opened and implanted with sufficient devices to accommodate the new hardware. The researchers considered the neural link an added bonus—something harmless but ultimately important for future products. They expected the two of them to wake up and have a few amused days as they could wirelessly send each other thoughts and feelings. They expected to record smiles as they took turns seeing through e
ach other’s eyes. They didn’t expect for both of them to go into a coma after the surgery was complete.

  The past experiments with neural links had been performed first on animals and then on strangers. The minds of the test subjects barely merged and they could send whispered thoughts and the ghosts of sensation to each other. Lumen and Shaw had already shared so much of their lives that their merge was more thorough than those that came before them. As their thoughts and experiences fully mingled and integrated, their bodies shut down. They were scanned and every test result came back abnormal. The researchers considered them a lost cause and all of their advanced hardware with them. They did what every responsible researcher in Spectrum Industries would have done: they took advantage of the waivers the test subjects signed to further butcher their bodies.

  Human testing was so rare and the researchers relished the opportunity. To be fair, they considered the two of them to be mostly brain dead. Mostly. More bones were removed and replaced. More experimental hardware was installed. Subdermal plates replaced what was left of their skin: flesh colored shards of metal that could withstand far more punishment than skin. As Shaw was operated on, Lumen would lay in her bed and feel every slice of the scalpel that cut into him. When Lumen’s skin was replaced, Shaw felt the burn as each piece of metal was seared into together.

  Shaw, in particular, was tested on. He was stripped naked and fastened against a wall. Only his eyes were protected by heavy goggles—they had not yet found the time to replace those parts. They used him as a shooting target and congratulated themselves on a job spectacularly done when the bullets crushed into themselves and bounced harmlessly off his skin. They burned him alive with flamethrowers and watched as what was left of his skin was roasted away. The dermal implants smoked as they cooled down and then returned to their flesh color, giving him the appearance as if he had never been burned at all. All the while, Lumen lay in the room next to him and felt every impact of every bullet and every lick of the flames.

  Their eyes opened then. Shaw’s shielded by the dark goggles and the researchers couldn’t see that he had woken up. Lumen began to move: she got out of bed and started walking toward him. Shaw shifted against the confines he had been strapped into against the wall. The researchers noticed that and wondered if the implants were shifting to repair some unseen damage that they had endured. They were making notes as Lumen walked through the doors and began to kill them. There were eight in all, Florence included, and Lumen managed to kill three of them before they started to shoot at her. It was Shaw’s turn to feel each bullet that bounced painfully off Lumen’s flesh. She walked through the barrage of gunfire and struck each of them down.

  Florence was the last one to die. They remembered thinking how attractive she was as Lumen cut through her throat. After freeing Shaw, they removed Florence’s legs. They remembered thinking they were the best part. They took more parts then. They left the guns and rifles and took the weaponized arms and legs, those specifically designed to be attached to the replaceable slots they had been received in the experiment. They helped each other try them on. They were a great help in slaughtering the guards that were called to the room. They carried as many of the limbs as they could as they calmly blasted their way out of the facility. They made sure to carry Florence’s legs with them.

  Weeks later, they looked for more arms and legs. Most days they felt broken and thought more parts could help. On the bad days, when they felt the most broken, they would look for people in the city streets that had prosthetic arms and legs. Lumen would walk up to them and introduce herself.

  “Hello. My name is L,” she’d say and stab them in the throat.

  * * *

  Burke Monrow knelt on the roof of the building and knew that his target was standing below him. The city stretched around him: the towering structures blocked his view of the horizon in every direction. When he looked down, he saw dozens of connecting bridged streets that linked the network of sprawling buildings. He was too high up to see the ground, only the darkness. When he looked up, the perpetual rain that soaked the city fell on the visor of his full suit of armor. The image of the buildings above him, stretching tall enough that he could only see the tops of a few of them, came through as distorted blurs through the blobs of rain on the visor.

  There was a window in the roof near his feet. He lowered his head and looked through it and watched the rain drops boil away. Cass, the AI that embodied his battle aegis when he left his ship, activated the wave of heat that washed over the visor. She made sure that nothing disturbed his view.

  “Is that Taggus?” Burke asked inside the helmet. His body was fully sealed and protected under the heavy layers of power armor he wore.

  “Yes,” Cass replied. Her voice came through the internal speaker inside the suit’s helmet. She sounded as human as Burke did; a stranger hearing her for the first time would have sworn they heard another person speak and not an AI. To Burke, there was no need to make that distinction.

  The visor’s display split vertically in half. On the left side of the display, Burke could still see through the window below him. He could see his target below a drop of fifty meters and the plethora of guards around him. In the right half of the display, Cass cycled through the cameras of the building’s security network. She had hacked effortlessly into their systems and showed Burke the other angles of the room: the positions of the guards he couldn’t see through the window. As the display shifted, she marked each of their positions relative to his vantage point. When the visor returned to its normal view, he could see red target reticules through the roof of the building.

  “Taggus is the only Vruan in the room,” Cass explained smoothly. “The others around him are human. They’re armed but it’s nothing that my armor can’t withstand.”

  “Your armor?” Burke asked with a grin.

  “Someone has to keep you safe.”

  He was still grinning as he tightened his grip on the assault rifle in his hands. He gave one final look through the glass before he stood upright. He knew the window had been made to bear the weight of far more than a single person, but his armor was heavy. Heavy enough that hundreds of mechanisms shifted to assist his movement. Cass helped coordinate that. He had to admit, sometimes the armor felt more hers than his.

  He jumped forward onto the glass and it crumbled beneath his feet. The cries of the guards below rushed up to meet him as he fell. The rain came down with him, mixing in with the spraying shards of glass. The room was brightly lit and the light was caught as it pierced through the falling glass and water. It shimmered around him for the first few seconds of his fall and then was lost as the guards began to fire. The bullets replaced the sparkling glass as they crashed into him and were obliterated in a hot burst of sparks when they failed to even scratch his armor.

  Burke landed in a crouch. The floor cracked beneath his feet. He stood slowly as the guards continued to fire at him. He held the rifle casually at chest level but made no movement to fire back. Cass split the visor once again to display both sides of the room and he could see all of the guards as they fired at him. He waited only a few more seconds before the clicking sounds of empty weapons trying to be fired replaced the deep percussions of propelled bullets. Burke cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders.

  “Stop showing off,” Cass said.

  “I’m not. Watch,” he replied, unable to hide his smile.

  Two thirds of the guards threw their weapons to the floor. They were the most intelligent among the group, those who had landed more shots than they missed and had witnessed how it had done nothing to their opponent. The stubborn ones began reloading to try again. Taggus was bellowing out orders to them.

  “They’re thieves, not killers,” Burke said. “We’ll wound. Not kill.”

  He shifted the rifle in his hands then. He moved faster than heavy armor should have allowed, turning with the rifle and in time with Cass’s help. Five of the guards still held their weapons: two in front and three behind.
He lined up the first two shots without stopping, bobbing the rifle up and then down. He sent a bullet in the shoulder of the first guard and into the thigh of the second. They both staggered back and fell to the floor.

  The three behind Burke opened fire. He turned into the barrage of bullets and aimed each shot unperturbed as the gunfire slammed into him. He downed two more guards with shots to the legs. The final one, a man, had shielded his lower body behind one of the crates they had stolen. Burke lined his last shot carefully and punched a bullet into the man’s arm. He recoiled when the bullet hit, falling back and vanishing behind the crate.

  Taggus held a vruan-made pistol, specifically designed for the alien’s three fingered hands. The vruans stood on two legs and were one of the rare humanoid races in the galaxy. They were typically a few centimeters shorter than most humans but Taggus was tall for his race. His skin was a chaotic mess of differing colors and textures: it was common for vruans to be heavily augmented. Burke looked closely at the alien’s face and saw the hexagonal pattern shift like scales instead of skin. More orders were screamed into the room. None of the guards responded.

  “What am I paying you for!” Taggus roared, in the shared language that most alien races agreed upon. Both Burke and Cass were perfectly fluent in it.

  “Hold out your hands,” Burke roared back. His voice boomed through the outer speaker from his aegis. “Or I’ll have to break them.”

  The alien’s face contorted, the hexagonal scales changing color as the look of rage spread over his face. He punched forward with his handgun and fired what remained of its magazine. Burke marched forward and felt each bullet deflect off his armor as if they were small pebbles.

  Cass magnetized the chest plate of the aegis and displayed a prompt for Burke on the visor. He let go of his rifle and it fastened itself onto the front of his armor. He unhooked the grapple line he kept in his belt and unraveled it. Taggus took two steps backwards before Burke rushed out and grabbed one of his arms. True to his word, he twisted it hard enough to give the alien a warning of a broken arm and then loosened his grip when he stopped resisting. He tied the vruan’s arms and legs up quickly and then heaved him up over his left shoulder. Cass locked his left arm in place then, using the strength of the armor to bear the load of the alien’s weight.