The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm Read Online Free PDF Page A

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