The Reforged Trilogy: Book 1 — Crucible of Stars
Chapter 12
Hunter
“The rainbow in the sky pales in comparison to the one in my hand on payday.”
– Escai Kanno, actor (173 PA)
“Prian police! Freeze!”
The rest of the criminals fled into the night, but the man in the black cloak stood his ground. Logan couldn’t make out his face, but the shadowed hood turned toward him. The man’s movements were loose and easy, utterly unconcerned. Even faced with two armed Prian officers, he wasn’t frightened.
This man didn’t fear death. He feared nothing.
Next to Logan, Lieutenant Zachary Reginald gestured with three fingers pointed off to his left. Flank him. Logan nodded to his partner and began circling slowly as Reginald whistled to Maria. The fan-tailed falcon launched herself from Reginald’s gauntlet and circled high through the clear, cold Prian night.
The man in the cloak watched Reginald’s bird. He pushed back his hood, finally revealing his face and Logan was almost disappointed. They knew him only as the Emberguard, but that was a title, not a name. With as terrible a reputation as he had built on Prianus, Logan had been sure they were facing some kind of vengeful fairy or unknown alien… But he was only a human man, like Logan and Reginald. He had the dark stripes across his cheeks and curly green hair of a Mirran. Not from Prianus, then, but why would he come to their remote planet just to kill people…?
There was a steely hiss as the Emberguard drew a long nanosword from under his black cloak, briefly revealing the red robes he wore beneath. Logan wondered if those coal-colored robes were the source of the Emberguard’s name.
“Put away your weapon and stand down!” Reginald shouted.
The Mirran laughed and Logan shuddered at the sound.
“Who do you think you are to deny me?” the Emberguard asked. “I am the hand of nothingness itself! I fear no man, for I have been enlightened. I am the last cinder of destruction before the blaze that will be true oblivion. I fear no man, no pain, no death! But you, too, will find peace when I rip the life from you.”
“Take him,” Reginald said.
Logan brought up his Talon and aimed. The Emberguard raised his sword. Smiling and laughing, he charged into battle.
Coldhand woke in a tangle of sheets, shivering despite the sweat pouring down the back of his neck. He raked cybernetic fingers through his damp blond hair and sat up carefully in the tiny bunk. Coldhand couldn’t remember his dream — but he didn’t have to. It was always the same one. And after five years of reruns, it was growing old. But Logan’s computer-regulated heartbeat remained steady and slow, unchanged by his nightmare.
His bunkroom was small, even more claustrophobically close than the one Xia had locked him in aboard the Blue Phoenix. Fare aboard the Temptation was expensive — paid in full up front to the one-eyed human captain — but that was the cost of discretion, not lavish accommodations.
There was a quiet knock at the door.
“Come in,” Coldhand said, just loud enough to be heard in the corridor outside.
A thin Ixthian man entered, carrying a bulging medical bag, and called up the lights. He gave Coldhand a studied smile, but his antennae twitched uncomfortably and his eyes glittered red. No one aboard the Temptation asked the bounty hunter his name — they all knew it, and knew to shut up unless they wanted to be his next target. The Ixthian unwound the bandages around Coldhand’s right shoulder, inspecting the bullet wound beneath. He probed it gently.
“Does that hurt?” he asked.
“No,” Coldhand answered.
The doctor opened up his bag and pulled out a small sensor. He flicked it on and scanned the wound.
“It looks like I managed to get the entire bullet out,” he said in a slightly unsteady voice. “The fracture is reweaving just fine.”
“How long?”
“Five more days until you can use the arm freely. Faster if you’d let me give you a nanite injection.”
“No machines,” Coldhand said.
The doctor’s colorful eyes were drawn inexorably back down to the cybernetics. The illonium was still twisted and blackened from Tiberius’ bullet. Coldhand followed his gaze.
“No more machines,” he corrected.
“I don’t have the facilities here, but once we arrive on Axis, if I could get a redprint to one of the vats, I could take care of…” the doctor began, gesturing gingerly at Coldhand’s cybernetics, but the hunter frowned. The Ixthians sighed. “Jumo will come by soon to take a look at it.”
His work done, the doctor hastily retreated. Coldhand’s body would heal with time, but he needed the Temptation’s mechanic to see to his cybernetic hand. Machines didn’t heal. He tried to close the metal fingers, but only two of them would respond.
Another man might have been angry. Tiberius was doubtlessly furious about their battle, about the injuries to himself, to his ship and to his pride. The repairs were costing Coldhand high color, too, money that would not hold out forever. He should have been angry, but the bounty hunter only noted the rising cost of his hunt and calculated whether he had spent more cenmarks hunting Maeve than he would make from her bounty. Even after a year of chasing her, the expenses were still considerably less than the reward for her live capture.
He would continue the hunt.
Coldhand mentally replayed the fight against Tiberius. Perhaps his tactics had been unwise. The hawk had to be Tiberius’ beloved Orphia, and she was dangerous. Tiberius was prone to rage and impulsive decisions, but Orphia wasn’t. She was more like Coldhand — a creature of sharp hunter’s instinct and no remorse. Coldhand should have shot the bird, not just called her off.
He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Coldhand pulled his shirt back on over his bandaged shoulder. The torn muscles strained with even that simple task, but Coldhand finished dressing without flinching.
Tiberius knew that Coldhand had been a Prian police officer back home. Before, the captain of the Blue Phoenix had been entirely reactive, always favoring running away over fighting. But now the fight was personal. The man would stand and bare his talons when he should turn and fly.
That would make tracking Maeve easier. She couldn’t fly away as easily if her angry captain was spoiling for another fight. Coldhand’s Raptor was a short-range vessel and pushing it all across Alliance space in search of his mark had cost him a lot of color in maintenance. Perhaps Tiberius’ involvement would change that… But it would also complicate the fight. A man in retreat only fired shots enough to cover his escape, but now Tiberius would shoot to kill.
Coldhand weighed his options and chances, then shrugged. He could handle the crew of the Blue Phoenix if their captain’s personal vendetta put them between Coldhand and his prey. Maybe it would even be… exciting.
There was another knock on the bunkroom door, not the quiet rapping of the Ixthian doctor, but a hard banging on the fibersteel.
“Come in,” Coldhand said.
Jumo entered with a few tools in his brown-furred paws. The Lyran was short and wide, like most of his race, with golden eyes and sharp, sensitive ears. The Temptation’s mechanic held a cigar clenched between his long teeth.
“You wanted to see me?” Jumo asked.
“Yes,” Coldhand answered.
He held out his cybernetic hand. The Lyran engineer examined it and gingerly probed the damage.
“What the hells did you do?” Jumo asked. “This is grade five shielding. How’d you blast it open like this?”
Coldhand said nothing. Jumo furrowed his furry brow, but didn’t press the issue. He shined a small light into the twisted rent in the bounty hunter’s forearm, leaning this way and that to peer at the cybernetics’ inner workings. Chomping on his cigar and grumbling, Jumo turned on and calibrated a scanner not so different than the one used by the Ixthian doctor. He tapped a few buttons, the display flashing amber numbers and symbols.
“Everything’s still carrying a signal,” Jumo said. “At least, I think that’s what this damned piece of fairy drop is telling me. But some of the wiring got clipped. It’ll need to be replaced.”
“Can you do it?”
“I have a few spare spools for the micro null-generators on the Temptation’s weapons that should work. It’s not ideal, but no one makes this kind of thing anymore,” the Lyran said, pulling the cigar from his muzzle and gesturing with the smoldering tip at Coldhand’s cybernetics. “I don’t have any illonium shielding that’s thin enough and I don’t keep particle planers onboard. I can do it by hand, but it’ll be a rig job. Ugly, but functional.”
“Fine.”
“And it’s going to be expensive,” Jumo warned.
Coldhand nodded.
“I’ll have the wire tested and ready in a few hours.”
The wolfin engineer gathered up his tools and headed out the door. Three hours later, just as promised, Jumo called to tell the bounty hunter that everything was prepared. Coldhand made his way through the ship to the Lyran’s workshop, set up in one corner of the engine room. The Temptation was a cargo vessel, though it was much larger than Tiberius Myles’ little bird. But like the Blue Phoenix, the corridors were patched and closed in by extensive modifications.
After overwriting Tiberius’ old book with his own message and fighting his way past the other Prian, Coldhand had searched the Gharib landing crescent for a ship to return him to Axis. With its large gun turrets, the Temptation had caught his eye. Contrary to the shows, most ships — including the Blue Phoenix — didn’t carry heavy weaponry. Except, of course, for pirate vessels and the warships of the CWA Armed Forces. Crews engaged in legal cargo transportation rarely mounted guns on their craft. It made them look dangerously like the former and drew too much attention from the latter.
Warships saw a lot more action than the average freight hauler, injuries and damage as a result that required skilled doctors and mechanics to mend. It was those assets the hunter was willing to pay for, more than spacious quarters or fine meals. CWAAF ships weren’t for hire, so Coldhand had bought passage on a pirate ship heading back to Axis.
The pirates that Coldhand passed in the corridors were largely made up of hulking, muscular specimens of their assorted races. Each of them radiated a sense of violence and confidence, but they all watched the bounty hunter pass in tense silence. Was Coldhand just a passenger? Or was he on the hunt?
Jumo’s cramped workshop was hazy with smoke. Every counter, table and stool was covered in a jumble of tools and ashtrays, all full with cigar stubs. He must have disabled smoke detectors, which was a bad idea in an engine room. The Lyran swept the mess from a short cha-gri and pulled the chair over next to a low workbench.
“Have a seat,” he said.
Coldhand sat and rested his broken cybernetic hand on the table. Jumo snuffed out his cigar and lit a new one before getting to work. It took the Lyran half an hour to find the seams of the illonium casing on the cybernetics and then pry them loose, exposing the packed bundles of circuitry, sensors and servos inside. Jumo carefully disconnected the damaged wiring and removed it. He inspected the twisted, blackened ends.
“Damn. These wires are basically your nerves,” Jumo said “Did it hurt when the casing got blown open like this?”
“No.”
Jumo shuddered and returned to the task at hand. He measured and cut new wires, then pinned and tabbed the ends. After pulling a magnifier over Coldhand’s exposed circuitry, the mechanic fitted each of the replacements into their tiny ports. Jumo jerked back his paw with a pained yelp as a bad connection shocked his fingers.
“This thing was prefabricated,” the Lyran complained. “It was never meant to have parts replaced, so nothing’s marked. I’ll do my best, though.”
“Do that.”
The smell of singed fur was almost as thick as cigar smoke by the time Jumo finished refitting the forty-three wires that Tiberius’ bullet had damaged. He replaced the illonium casing as best he could, holding the heavy alloy in place with a few temporary welds, and reminded the human that he could only properly replace the shielding on Axis or some other industrialized world.
Coldhand flexed and curled his fingers experimentally. Each of them responded to his nervous system, clicking flatly against each other. He left the workshop without thanking Jumo.
The Temptation was equipped with better SL engines than those on the Blue Phoenix and made the journey from Stray to Axis in only five days. The pirate ship was a fast one, Coldhand noted with satisfaction. Little but pure data transmissions traveled faster.
Coldhand spent most of the time in his quarters. He had no desire to mingle with the pirates and no need for company. The Ixthian doctor returned three times to inspect his patient’s progress, pronouncing Coldhand healed after four days.
Beside contact with the medic, Coldhand made only one effort to interact with anyone onboard the Temptation. He followed the yellow stripe painted on the wall of the hallways, marked mess hall in stenciled Aver.
It was early in the day and the mess was nearly empty. A pair of burly humans arm-wrestled in one corner, stopping to watch Coldhand as he entered. The bounty hunter dismissed the two sweaty men with a glance. They wouldn’t have what he wanted. He raked the room with icy blue eyes. A group of assorted races clustered around another table, watching a svelte Mirran woman with a pale mask of golden stripes on her face performing some sleight of hand for the amusement of her fellows. They laughed and applauded her efforts. Coldhand moved on.
A gaunt human man sat alone in the back of the mess, a small computer open on the table in front of him. The sleeves of his faded black jumpsuit were pulled down low over his arms, but the dark tracery of the man’s veins was still visible along his neck. His curly brown hair had been shaved off not long ago, but not maintained and now rose from his scalp in unkempt tangles.
Coldhand took the chair across the table and the man sat bolt upright, staring.
“Whoa, hey! I didn’t do nothing,” he protested.
The other pirates heard the panic in their crewmate’s voice and turned to watch, but none of them made a move to stop Coldhand.
“God, don’t kill me,” the pirate said. “Don’t rip my heart out!”
Coldhand raised one eyebrow, then darted his cybernetic hand out to grab the other man’s bony wrist. He pushed up the sleeve to the elbow. The pirate’s thin arms were lined with dark needle runs and clumsy punctures in his waxy skin. His eyes were wide, dilated unnaturally.
“What kind of chems are you on?” Coldhand asked.
“What?” the skinny human squealed. “I ain’t taken nothing…!”
“What kind?” Coldhand asked again.
The pirate jerked and shook in Coldhand’s grip, not daring to attempt an escape but unable to keep his body still. The air of the Temptation’s mess hall was taut, every eye on Coldhand and the man he interrogated.
“Cedrophin,” the pirate answered at last.
“How much do you have?” Coldhand asked.
“I uh…”
The man reached into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit with his free hand and fumbled out a pair of vials. They clattered off the open computer and rolled in a tight crescent on the tabletop. Each was tiny, no longer than Coldhand’s smallest finger. The glass had deep grooves on each side — guide tracks for insertion into a syringe or pneumatic injector.
“I’ll take both.”
“Yeah, yeah,” the pirate said, nodding far too emphatically. “Of course. They’re all yours.”
Coldhand picked up the cedrophin in his right hand and released the other man. He fished two orange cenmark chips from his pocket and they slid for a mechanical heartbeat in his illonium fingers before Coldhand dropped them to the tabletop. The pirate stared at the money as though it might bite him.
“I’m a bounty hunter, not a thief,” Coldhand said.
He pocketed the two vials and left the Temptation’s mess hall. Everyone in the room watched him go, but no one stopped him.
Once back inside his rented quarters, Coldhand fitted the first ampoule of cedrophin into a folding injector. He cinched a black strap around his arm above the seam where flesh met metal, and waited. Coldhand didn’t bother clenching his fist or otherwise working the muscle to make the veins more visible, as Maeve had on the streets of Axis. It would have been pointless, anyway. Coldhand’s organic muscles ended at the elbow. There was nothing but metal and wires to react to his balled fist.
So Coldhand waited. When the tourniquet finally revealed the blue lines of his veins, Coldhand checked the seal on the vial. It was intact. He didn’t tap the syringe and nudge the plunger. That kind of thing was for the shows. A century ago, it might have been useful to remove air from the needle and avoid an embolism, but now even the cheapest chems came in vacuum-sealed packaging that made such practices obsolete.
Coldhand put the needle against his arm and pushed, watching the point tear a tiny hole into his skin. The pain was hollow and distant. Coldhand emptied the stimulant into his vein and waited. Nothing. He loaded up the second vial of cedrophin and injected it.
Still nothing.
Coldhand lay down on his narrow bunk and stared up at the blank fibersteel ceiling. The double dose of cedrophin would have most species — even the resilient Hadrians and Lyrans — crawling up the walls. Coldhand touched his right hand to his chest.
He felt his mechanical heart beating rhythmically inside. It would never race with excitement, even chemically induced. Only exertion would speed Coldhand’s pulse, and only as much as was strictly physiologically necessary.
The cybernetic organ was already filtering the toxins from his blood, encapsulating them in lipids for safe excretion. Within an hour, Coldhand would just piss out a hundred cenmarks worth of drugs. He would never get sick, never get drunk, never get high off chems.
Twenty percent. Only twenty percent.
The Temptation set down on Axis late the next day. Unwilling to attract unwanted attention, the captain landed her ship in a private Level Two bay. She nodded to Coldhand as he disembarked and offered him no parting comment or well wishes.
An hour’s brisk walk brought Coldhand out of the private bays and into the busy Axis streets. He found a public computer terminal with a short line. Looking back over their shoulders at him, three humans and a chubby Dailon decided that their business could wait and left.
Coldhand fed a silver chip of change into the computer and the monitor flickered to life. It displayed the blue and white Starwind logo just long enough to make a subliminal impression and then brought up an Axis mainstream search screen. Coldhand keyed up the records for his Raptor, grounded on Level One, and frowned. His unexpected trip to Stray and back had left his fighter moored longer than expected. The unconcerned monitor informed Coldhand that he owed almost three hundred cenmarks in fees and the Raptor was impounded pending payment.
He brought up his financial accounts. They were all overdrawn. Coldhand had spent most of his money paying for his fare on the Temptation. The color in his pockets was all he had left, and even that was barely enough to cover a few meals and a place to stay. He drummed his cybernetic fingers on the edge of the terminal’s keyboard, thinking. The computer flashed up a red-lettered warning, telling the bounty hunter that his credit was about to run out. He gave the machine another silver cenmark.
Coldhand needed work. Almost a year of exclusively chasing Maeve had paid nothing so far and he had spent his entire savings. Coldhand had to find a bounty, a short-term job that would pay the bills until he brought down his Arcadian mark. But with his Raptor grounded, he couldn’t take any off-world bounties.
He needed something local, a job somewhere here on Axis that didn’t require access to a starship. Coldhand pulled up a third screen — this one branded across the top with the blue, white and green of the Central World Alliance — and scanned quickly through the CWA bounty listing.
It was short, as usual. The Alliance had enough trained soldiers and firepower to bring in its own criminals. Coldhand keyed up another listing, bounties subject to CWA approval, but posted by individual planets or private parties.
A handful of notices caught his attention: Zoen Temple, wanted on Giadeen for illegal chemical shipping; Titania, an Arcadian who failed to appear in court on Kahl for questioning related to a pair of particularly gruesome murders; Toku Mikigawa, a human member of the Sisterhood wanted for five counts of rape on Mir. Interesting, but nothing close enough for Coldhand to chase down without his ship.
Instinctively, Coldhand began swiping past the Stray listing. The ratty fringe world made good money harboring the kind of people that often had bounties on their heads. It didn’t pay to hire hunters to kill or arrest their own patrons. Sometimes a personal bounty would crop up on Stray, but usually for some petty crime or vendetta that simply didn’t interest Coldhand. This time, however, one listing made him hit a key to freeze the screen and read the details.
The bounty was for a Dailon man by the name of Vyron Fethru. It was posted from Stray, but the mark was here on Axis.
The client gave no name, only a disposable com frequency to contact once Vyron was brought to Stray.
Vyron was wanted for gang-related crimes on Axis, listed as the frontman for the group. He and his gang were under suspicion for several killings, kidnappings and high-color chem running. Vyron was to be taken alive only, unharmed, and brought intact to Stray. His bounty, however, was to be paid out of an Axis account. The amount was an adequate four hundred cenmarks to be delivered upon capture, confirmed by genetic scan. The bounty promised another four hundred on Vyron’s delivery to Gharib.
Eight hundred cenmarks. Coldhand pondered the posting. The initial payment would be enough to get his bird off the ground and back into the sky, where it belonged. The hundred left over would cover the cost of repairing his cybernetic casing. Four hundred color would pay for hunting Maeve Cavainna for another month.
Coldhand checked the date on the listing. It was two days old. That was ample time for any number of other hunters to see the posting and begin tracking down Vyron Fethru. Bounty hunting wasn’t a popular occupation, but Axis was the most densely populated planet in the core. At least a dozen hunters had surely started on the job by now. He would have to move quickly to reach Vyron first.
