The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

sand that slid back into each hole that she dug,
effectively filling up the grave as she made it.
    Those first hours alone were a blur
of aching muscles and sweat from the unrelenting heat of the planet. She dug
each of the men a separate grave and placed no marker to distinguish each of
them. When the final grave was filled she stood up and felt the pain in her
back from straining it for hours. She exhaled and felt no nagging doubt or
hysteria pressing against her. She was steady and realized that she had made
the decision to persevere and survive—she had decided, she repeated to herself.
It was important to her to acknowledge that it was a decision.
    She would scrape by and live alone
on the planet, but not forever. She knew that she would find a way off the
planet or die in the attempt. She knew that when she filled the final grave,
because that was when she decided that she had to kill Burke Monrow.
     
     
    On the second day of her year on
Meidum, Jess scrubbed the base and took inventory.
    She replaced the clothes and furs
on the makeshift bed frame that Burke had made. She put the dirty clothes in
the water room but used the furs to mop up the blood still streaked along the
floors. She decided against using what little soap she found amongst the
containers and used copious amounts of water and time to clean. She knew most
of the stain would be permanent without the right chemicals but she did what
she could. A stain looked better at a glance than a drying pool of blood.
    Each of the containers were moved
into the main room. She recognized the crates as a typical stash collected by
thieves and smugglers. She had no doubt that most of the items were stolen or
scavenged from crashed ships, perhaps even ones that were shot down by the
thieves themselves. She didn’t care; she wasn’t the one who killed those people
and she felt no shame in benefiting from the goods that were left behind.
    There were several dozen boxes
despite what Burke had taken with him. She found no stores of drugs or other
contraband and knew that he must have taken the most expensive things with him.
Smart, she begrudgingly admitted, and was pleased that she could benefit from
his decision. He had left many of the functional, cheap things that most people
took for granted. Some were small appliances and plain clothes, but no
blankets. There was one small box with medical supplies: regeneration packs,
bandages, antibiotics, and automated antitoxin kits.
    Many of the crates were dried meal
packets and canned food. Burke had had no idea how long he had to wait on the
planet and had hunted as much as he could to stretch out those supplies. She
decided to follow his example and separated the food from the rest of the
items.
    Most of the containers were weapons
and electronics. There were hundreds of handguns, rifles, mass produced
tablets, and portable computers. She had seen one of the computers propped up
near Burke’s bed, one that he must have used but she hadn’t checked it yet.
There was a crate without a lid with depleted power cells discarded within it.
She saw that some of them had burst open and were charred around the edges. She
knew instantly that he had tried to recharge the cells and failed, not knowing
how to control the flow of power and overloading the cells instead of
energizing them.
    Jess ended the day by organizing
her supplies into orderly sections. Burke had had his own method of keeping
things that she could make no sense of. There had been several of the crates in
the hall at the bottom of the stairs that she could see no reason for. They had
been filled with some of the heaviest things found in the base and even pieces
of concrete from the surface. Two of them had been too heavy for her to move
and she had left them, puzzled why he had placed them there in the first place.
It wasn’t the first time that she found herself resentful of the powered armor
Burke had to help him, while she had been stranded with nothing but her