The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm (2 page)

The dross slammed into the marines and the line of them erupted in
fire. The earth below them cracked from the force of it. Jack was nearly
knocked over from the shock wave that hit the wall. For a few minutes, there
was nothing but the sound of hissing fire as the aliens were consumed by it.
More pods dropped from the ships that were closer now, low enough to target the
reinforcements precisely at the evacuation sites. Two landed outside the walls
of Jack’s position and they were let in just as the dross pushed through the
wall of fire and rushed toward them.

The ship’s bombardment had thinned their numbers but they swarmed
tighter together as they pressed through the fire. The gates were closed
immediately after the last of the marines made it through, but more drop pods
continued to come down. They landed in the midst of the attackers, ripped apart
as the doors were opened no matter how many of Jack’s soldiers fired from the
wall. The torn body parts were lost as the number of dross increased. He
couldn’t see the ground as the first of them slammed into the wall.

He leaned over the wall and started firing. Usually he would have
shot at those further in the back, making an obstacle for the waves of dross;
however, the walls of the site were weaker than those of the other bases he had
fought at and needed to be protected. The giant claws of the dross would have
trouble breaking through the walls but there were hundreds of them and more
ready to replace those who died. As the corpses piled up at the base of the
wall, he knew it was a race against what would happen first: the wall
collapsing, or the piles of body stacking high enough that they could climb over
it.

The sights of his rifle moved from head to head of the aliens. He
fired in quick bursts, squeezing three to five shots into the skull of each
dross and killing it instantly. Others jumped up at them, futilely clamping
their jaws a few meters short of the marines but getting closer with each jump.
Jack focused on those when he saw them, as if he was punishing each of the
jumping aliens for being so bold. Their bodies fell dead on top of the living
ones at the bottom, quickly shrugged off and lost as new living ones clambered
over it.

The ships still fired into the masses of aliens. Their numbers
stretched out further than Jack could see in every direction. There may have
been an end to them somewhere, but the smoke from the bombardment masked it
from his view. Despite the force of constant impacts into the earth, some of
the dross risked tunnelling under the wall. The structure had been built down
through the earth but it didn’t extend far. Jack knew that it would hold as the
aliens had to burrow farther down than usual and then claw their way back up on
the other side. He hoped it would be long enough.

He roared orders to the rest of the marines every few minutes: a
coordinated blast at the base of the wall with a grenade from each of them to
clear away the bodies. They ducked at the top of the wall after dropping the
explosives and, even as close as they were, the sound of them popping open made
them seem like children’s toys in comparison to the artillery that rained
overhead. They resumed their positions quickly afterwards, splattering new
layers of blood over the blackened, singed corpses of the dross around the
wall.

Jack heard the warning through his helmet. The evacuation ship would
be landing shortly and couldn’t stay for long. Everyone would need to be ready
to immediately board it. He looked back and saw the huddled families around the
landing pad. Parents were covering their children’s ears as they cried, the
fuel that had fed their nightmares since the infestation began abruptly coming
to life around them. The marine he had assigned to keep them close to the pad
had done their job well. They would be ready when the ship arrived.

He heard the dross howl from the wall and he whipped back around to
face them. More of them were tunnelling down now, too many to be searching for
a way under the wall, and Jack knew that one of them was about to break
through. He screamed for the marines to abandon the wall and jumped down onto
the ground of the site just as the earth began to rupture and the aliens poured
through.

The thought that he had failed shuddered through him and he resisted
it, determined to salvage what he could. He saw the evacuation ship coming in
over the wall and he fired as the aliens climbed up. He sent two, dead, falling
back down their hole and hoped the other soldiers around him were doing the
same. If they could keep the dross suppressed for a little longer, it would be
enough for the ship to land.

People began to scream but he kept his eyes down the sights of his
rifle. Each time a dross clawed its way up he sent a bullet to punch it back
down again. The screaming grew louder, laced with gurgling cries as throats were
torn and lungs filled up with blood. He glanced once around the site and saw
that too many tunnels were open and not being suppressed. Too many marines had
been cut down. The civilians around the landing pad were being slaughtered.

Jack felt something slash through his back and he fell to his knees.
One of the final rattles of gunfire washed behind him and killed whichever one
had sliced through his back. He raised his head and saw the evacuation ship
turning away and, as one of the final things he did, he agreed with the
decision. He dropped his rifle and put a hand to his helmet.

“Squadron 816, transmitting coordinates. Fire on my position,” he
said and then pulled the helmet from his head.

The dross were surrounding him, ready to pounce after finishing the
marines that were still fighting around him. Jack looked up at the ship that
turned its turrets toward him. It was his final act of defiance, stealing away
the alien’s pleasure of finally killing him. The flash of the cannon blazed his
eyes—a brief moment of burning pain. He was obliterated before he could hear the
impact.

* * *

Burke woke up to a shooting pain from his augmented leg. Even a year
after receiving the prosthetic, it still caused him pain on a daily basis. The
point at his thigh, where the metal and the flesh connected, was always tender
and inflamed after the leg pain. It felt like the limb was being roasted in an
unseen fire, assaulted by a flash of heat that was strong enough to wake him.
He didn’t waste any time as he sat up on the edge of his bed. He knew that it
would be hours before he could fall back to sleep again.

The ship was quiet and he didn’t like it. Cass, the ship’s AI, was
in hibernation while she performed her nightly maintenance. The ship felt dead
and empty without her presence turning on the lights as he moved from room to
room. He knew better than to interrupt her when she was running diagnostics on
herself: if stopped, she would have to start the process all over again. Still,
when his leg hurt he preferred to have her to talk to and take his mind off the
pain.
Sometimes he would run on the treadmill in
his room but his leg felt particularly raw that night, too sensitive to
exercise out the problem.

He limped into the helm of the ship and took his seat at the command
console. The screens flickered to life and showed that Cass still had an hour
left of hibernation. They were currently docked inside a larger ship: a jump
carrier, housing thousands of people and their ships while it carried them over
the vast distances between star systems, cutting a journey of months to only a
few days. The screen next to Cass’s systems showed that eighteen hours remained
until the jump was complete.

They had been travelling for weeks. They had been given a job to
capture a dangerous alien and then deliver it to their contact Havard, a man
who operated the human government’s branch that specialized in hostile alien
species, ACU. The alien had been a shapeshifter, plainly named Species 1260 by
Havard, and had been hiding on a space station. Burke had tracked it, found
that it had been breeding, and killed its offspring that were masquerading as
humans.

The job had bothered him. He had hunted the species of alien before
but had never found any that were reproducing. They had murdered many humans
and taken their place on the station, mimicking their jobs and lives, fooling their
friends before murdering them too and replacing them with more of their own.
Worst of all, Havard had requested one of the breeding aliens be brought back
alive—another thing that had never been asked of Burke before. That stipulation
had never stopped bothering him. It gnawed at his sense of justice that the
alien was allowed to live, and made him suspicious of Havard’s intentions.

What remained of the alien sat next to the ship’s command console.
The true form of the alien was a small core, not much bigger than an apple, and
the flesh that it constructed around it acted as a protective shell. The core
was pale and looked like it was made of ivory. Once a day, since taking it on
his ship, Burke had burned the outside of it to strip away the initial layers
of carbon it drew from the air around it. It sat inert at the helm and, so far,
he had resisted the daily urge to smash it to pieces.

His leg flared up again and he left the room out of fear that he
might strike the core out of anger. He wouldn’t be paid if the alien was
destroyed and, as much as he hated to admit, he and Cass needed the money. He
slowly descended the stairs to the lower level of the ship, leading down with
his left leg of flesh and bone and easing his augmented one down afterwards. The
cargo hold was small and stacked full of crates: food, water, medical supplies,
and emergency stores of fuel. He walked passed them and into the armory at the
rear of the ship.

His battle aegis stood in the middle of the room. It was the most
useful tool he owned but also, along with his prosthetic leg, a constant
reminder of the betrayal he had suffered the year before. He had purchased the
aegis shortly before his old partner, Adam, had tried to kill him. Adam had
left him for dead on a remote planet and Burke had barely survived, scraping
out an existence for three long years before he got his chance to leave.

The ship he now stood in had been that chance. A prize he had taken
from a group of mercenaries that had been sent to retrieve his body and armor
as a final insult. He had killed them, taken the ship, and acted out his
revenge on Adam. Burke lost his leg in the process and, after spending three
years relying on the aegis to survive, not a day went by when the sight of it
didn’t bring back memories of being stranded on the uninhabited planet.

Cass had been the only thing that had kept him sane over those years
and he was grateful. She had been only a tool before that, a feature of the
aegis that provided information to him as he fought. Without her, he would have
died. A year later he considered her his partner in bounty hunting, and that
they both went out on missions together when he put on the armor. He looked
over the helmet piece and saw the deep claw marks from his last job. The armor
was strong enough to withstand most bullets and explosions, but Species 1260
had been strong enough to scrape layers from the suit after a few attacks.

He ran his fingers over the helmet and felt angry once again. He
should have killed the alien, but Adam’s betrayal made Burke stop and
reconsider. He didn’t trust Havard anymore but he wasn’t sure if he had
legitimate reasons not to, or if it was because of what Adam had done to him.
Burke was always surprised that he trusted Cass so genuinely. She had saved his
life but then so had Adam when they fought together in the war.

He sat back and rubbed uselessly at the metallic thigh of his leg,
somehow deriving a small amount of comfort from it. He thought of fighting with
Adam on Earth, against the dross and how many times they had nearly died. He
had had no aegis then, only small scraps of body armor and a rifle that never
had enough ammunition. He tried to remember all the times that he had shot at a
dross that was close to piercing through Adam’s back and how many times Adam
had returned the favor. There were too many fights to count, too many near
deaths to remember amongst the blur of a hundred battles. Burke had been born
and raised on Earth and the thought of the dross now inhabiting it made his
insides boil.

He remembered the final battle on the planet and how anticlimactic
it had been for him and Adam. They were assigned to guard an evacuation in the
middle of a city, so far away from the alien’s advance that they didn’t even
fire a bullet. They had been lucky. He bitterly reflected on how fortunate he
had been to leave that war unscathed, only to be betrayed by the man who helped
him the most to survive it.

The cycle repeated, Burke wondering if it wasn’t Havard’s fault that
he no longer trusted him.

“You’re awake?” Cass’s voice filled the room. They had installed
each room with speakers, cameras, and microphones after claiming the ship. She
could shift her presence from each room and emit her voice like it was coming
from a person standing in front of Burke.

“Yeah. My leg woke me up,” he said, surprised that he had spent an
hour mulling over the past.

“Again?” she sounded concerned. Her voice was as fluid as any
human’s. He rarely thought of her as an artificial intelligence anymore. She
had come with restraining programs to limit her thoughts and processes. He had
removed them.

“It’s because we’ve been stuck on the ship for so long. It’ll be
better once we deliver the alien and can find some more work.”