The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm (4 page)

They stopped at a foyer deeper into the complex. There were two rows
of elevators but Havard approached one that was situated apart from the rest.
There were no buttons around its doors and he typed something on his tablet to call
the elevator. It was large on the inside, even factoring in the illusion that
its white walls played on Burke’s eyes. It reminded him of an elevator in a
hospital.

“What are you going to do with this core?” Burke asked as the
elevator began its descent.

“We suspect that it’s a unique member of the species. We want to
determine if it either mutated to be able to reproduce in our environments, or
if it was an exceptionally intelligent member of the species. Either way, we
think it might help us perfect a method of detecting them.”

“Will you kill it afterwards?”

“Of course. The second it’s not of any use to us.”

“Good,” Burke said.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened to reveal a section of the
facility that Burke had never seen before. The walls looked to be made of
metal, a reinforced and sturdy gray. No decorations or paint covered the walls
and, after stepping into the room, he saw that the elevator they used was the
only one connected to the room.

Havard walked to the only other door on the wall opposite the
elevator. Once again, there was no method or mechanism that Burke could see to
operate the door, and Havard used his tablet to connect with it. The door
halved itself as it opened, sliding apart horizontally and disappearing into
the walls it was built into like a vault. Another door was behind it, which
required an additional connection from Havard’s tablet. There were three other
doors after that one, each looking stronger and thicker than the one that came
before it.

“Is this a prison?” Cass’s voice sounded like a whisper in his ear.

Burke opened his mouth to answer and stopped himself before
remembering that Havard couldn’t hear her. He shook his head and began to
wonder himself. He thought it was most likely a section of secretive research on
the planet, where they had to keep their new designs and inventions under high
security so they wouldn’t be stolen. Then, when the last door opened and a
cacophony of inhuman screaming blasted through the corridor, he stood there
stunned.

“Oh, it must be feeding time,” Havard said, laughing at the
expression on Burke’s face. “I forgot about that. I should have warned you. The
noise should stop soon.”

“Feeding time for what?”

“There are too many to name, and some that I’m not allowed to admit
that we have,” Havard smiled in a way that didn’t make him look happy at all.

Reluctantly, and wishing he was wearing his armor, Burke followed
Havard through the doors and felt them close abruptly behind him. The walls
didn’t have the same stark, fortified plating that the outside room had, but
neither were they the welcoming, crisp white around the dock. Burke felt like
he was inside a spaceship rather than a structure on a planet.

He saw people farther down ahead of him and Havard, where the
corridor split into two different directions. They were walking quickly, either
carrying something or pushing a cart full of objects that Burke didn’t
recognize. None of them seemed to care or even notice the howling that was
constantly ripping through the air. He expected odd looks when he reached the
fork in the hallway, as he was still holding the alien’s core in his hand. None
of the people looked at him, nodding at Havard instead and saying “sir.”

He turned left and the noise became louder as they walked toward it.
The corridor was wider than the previous one and Burke soon saw why. There were
windows in the walls, each showing a single room spaced roughly twenty meters
apart along the wall. The first ones they passed were empty, but soon he
started seeing occupied ones. Some had strange looking plants and vegetation,
like a patch of an alien garden that had been scooped up and deposited into the
room. Others had animals in addition to the plants. All of them were alien but
Burke recognized most of them. Most were large, plump herbivores that other
intelligent species had used for livestock. They always reminded him of cows.

“We try to keep a minimum number of any alien creature we come into
contact with,” Havard explained as they continued to walk. “I think we might
have some specimens here that have gone extinct on their home worlds.”

“This is a zoo?”

“No,” Havard laughed. “A zoo? They’re for experiments. Mostly the
hostile ones of course, but you’d be surprised by what you can learn about a
species from studying other animals from its planet.”

They reached a door that opened automatically in front of them and
continued down another corridor displaying more docile animals. In the next
hallway were carnivorous aliens and the howling was loud enough to drown out
any possible speech between the two of them. Food was being deposited through
chutes that extended out of the ceiling and the animals waited directly under
it, snapping at the food before it could hit the floor.

Through one of the window he saw over a dozen of the crawlers that
he had fought when he had been stranded. They had come out during the planet’s
night cycle and tried to overwhelm him. He thought of when one of their legs
had nearly stabbed through his eye and shuddered. They were crowded around the
chute in their pen, scrambling to crawl up it when their food was released. A
blast of air came out first, knocking them onto the floor, before it unleashed
a large pile of sludge that they immediately began to feast on.

Burke inhaled sharply and wondered how they kept the stench of all
the animals out of the air.

The last corridor they walked through had another series of doors at
the end like the entrance had. The windows were spaced out much farther in that
hallway and held some of the largest aliens Burke had ever seen. In one there
were two rhymaws that were emitting loud, deep roars as their pen’s food chute
extended but nothing came out. They were a common target for bounty hunters.
Their bodies sported thick, long horns around their shoulders and head that
sold for a high price. They stood on four legs and were capable of running
fifty kilometers an hour during a charge, something that he had learned
firsthand.

Burke was surprised that ACU had two in captivity. Their size and
strength made them notoriously hard to capture, never mind transport. The walls
inside their pen must have been stronger than the others, and he wondered how
many additional layers of protection had been added to the window. Most
surprising of all were the young group of rhymaws that crowded around the
larger one’s legs. The facility had a pair capable of breeding in captivity,
something that Burke had never heard of.

Havard had to use his tablet once more on the doors at the end of
the hall. Burke looked through the nearest window as he waited. The pen was
dark inside but he could still hear noises from it. As he looked closer he saw
flashes of illuminated shapes in the darkness, parts of some animal that
shimmered when it caught the light in a certain way. He leaned forward to the
glass and three pairs of eyes snapped open and gleamed like neon jewels,
seemingly floating in the pen as their bodies stayed cloaked in the darkness.

The doors opened and he followed Havard through. When they closed
behind him, and the wailing of the hungry animals faded away, he wondered if
they had moved to another section of the facility. The room they stood in was
massive, both tall and wide. It was a circular room, with stairs and narrow
walkways built onto the inside of the walls. Burke saw that there were more
windows that displayed pens similar to the hallways, but he was too far away to
see what was contained inside them. He was confused by that and wondered if
they were vacant; there were still no noises like there had been in the
hallways.

There was a pillar in the middle of the room that ran from the floor
to the ceiling. There was a ring of desks and computer terminals around it,
each with a person behind it. There were other people around the room. Some
were climbing the stairs to check on the pens higher up, while some were moving
through doors dotted around the main level. Burke’s ears were ringing now that
he could no longer hear the captive animals. The sudden change, combined with
the calm atmosphere of the room, set him on edge.

Havard walked to the central desks and Burke followed behind.

“I need someone down here to retrieve a 1260 nucleus,” Havard
instructed to the man behind the desk. “Make sure there’s a nutrient bath ready.
I don’t want this one going dormant and hibernating for months.”

“Nutrient bath?” Burke repeated quietly to himself. Even after being
reassured of Havard’s intention to eventually kill the alien, it still didn’t
seem right that it was about to be brought back to life in a flourish. When a
woman approached him a few minutes later, wearing a large glove on each of her
hands, he relinquished the core while trying to convince himself he was making
the right decision. He expected that the weight of transporting it would have
eased immediately when it was out of his hand. Instead, he felt worse.

“Now,” Havard began. “We have a few more things to discuss. Like I
said, I have some more work for you. But first I have an offer. I want to
purchase the AI we sold you with your aegis suit. We’ll provide a replacement
free of charge. What did you call her? Cass?”

“Wow,” Cass said in Burke’s ear. “Last time I spoke with him, he
mentioned he was interested but I didn’t think he’d have the nerve to try.”

“How much?” Burke asked, and tried not to laugh when Cass growled in
his ear. He was confident that she would know he was joking.

“Six hundred million.”

Burke was floored. His usual rate for completing a job for ACU was
just under a million credits. The ship at the top of their list was less than
ten million. For the money being offered, he could have bought a small space
station.

“I told you I was a bargain,” Cass said, so happily he could hear
her virtual smile.

“Fuck,” Burke answered. “No, sorry. She’s not mine to sell anymore,
so it would be her decision. You’ll have to ask her. I only asked because I was
curious and now I have to ask again: why? When I bought the suit and she came
with it, it only cost a fraction of that. What changed?”

“You removed her restriction programs and she’s still functioning.
They aren’t in place to limit an AI’s capabilities, despite what most people
think. They’re safety precautions, intended to increase the longevity of an
AI’s life span. How long has she been functioning?”

“Four years and eighty-nine days,” Cass said.

“Four years,” Burke said.

“Do you know how long we’ve managed to keep an unrestricted AI
functioning here?”

“No,” Burke answered. “Three years?” he guessed.

“Three
months
, with its processing capability severely
hindered for the last month.”

He was worried now. Cass was quiet.

“Why is she different?” Burke asked. “Is there any danger that
she’ll stop functioning?”

“That’s why I want to buy her back. She isn’t showing any signs of
degradation. Consider letting us borrow her at least, to run some tests and
thorough scans. We might be able to prolong her further.”

“No,” she said firmly.

“You’ll have to ask her yourself,” Burke replied.

“Very well,” Havard sighed and shook his head. “Follow me, then. I
have some things to show you.”

They walked to the right side of the room. Burke saw that the
windows on the main floor were tinted black, unlike the clear ones on the
levels above them. They had been too high up to see into. He wondered what was
in them that Havard wanted to show him.

Havard looked down at his tablet when they stood in front of the
window. It was dark enough that he couldn’t see anything inside of it. Burke
could see it as he stood next to him. The screen displayed:

Containment Room A16.

Occupants: One.

Isolation measures currently active:

Audio and visual insulation.

Burke watched as Havard typed through commands on the tablet. The
sound insulation was deactivated first, and the sound of a human crying
immediately blared from behind the dark window. Burke immediately went on guard
and felt his body tense. The black tint on the window faded away to reveal a
young girl, no older than six or seven, curled up at the bottom of the glass.
Her cheeks were soaked in tears and her face and eyes were puffy. She sobbed
and looked up at him.

“Please help me,” she whimpered. “They hurt me.”

“What the fuck is this?” he growled.

“Oh please,” Havard waved a hand dismissively at him. “Don’t be so
dense.”

The room the girl was in was empty. There was a door on the far side
of it and, as Havard continued to interface with his tablet, a slot opened
above it where a chute had protruded in the other pens. Something that looked
like a weapon extended out of the wall, with three sharp prongs on the end like
a trident. A surge of electricity ran down along the prongs and then arced
between the tips of them.