The Bounty Hunter: Resurrection Read Free

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.
    Burke looked back at the broken
window in the ceiling. He judged the distance to be too great to reach, even
with the launching mechanisms in his leg and armor. Cass displayed the exact
distance over his vision and confirmed that they would fall short of reaching
it. He looked across the room and to the single door on the other side.
    “There are stairs in there,” Cass
explained, cycling through the building’s cameras as she did so. “A quick climb
to the roof. I’ll call the ship.”
    “The new pilot better respond,”
Burke said curtly.
    “He will. Trust him,” she replied.
    He moved quickly across the room.
He felt empty bullet cases and broken glass crunch beneath his feet with each
step. The guards that he hadn’t fired upon were shifting awkwardly on their
feet, unsure if they were allowed to leave or were being apprehended like their
boss.
    “Useless! All of you!” Taggus
screamed while he was carried across the room.
    “Quiet,” Burke growled.
    There was another stolen crate near
the door. He was a few steps away from it when one of the guards wheeled around
from behind it. Burke saw the shotgun in his hands and then felt the blast of
it being fired at point-blank range into his face. The visor’s display was a
frazzled mess of static and played tricks on his eyes before his vision fully cleared.
The guard looked horrified that his weapon had done nothing even after being
fired so close. Burke twisted his right arm to trigger the front blade out of
the aegis’s forearm. He held it up in a mocking strike over the terrified
guard’s throat and then lowered his hand. He twisted his arm again to retract
the blade and then shoved the man out of the way instead.
    “No killing, only wounding. Good,
Burke,” Cass commended.
    “Useless,” Taggus muttered again.
    Burke shouldered open the door and
stepped inside. The stairwell was a generous size, enough to accommodate a few
people at a time. It was poorly lit, however, and Cass adjusted the visor to
help him see. He could