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the
slew of data collected from the Torrentus Cartel’s hacker agents. He would look
through posted bounties and the hunters that collected them. He followed the
career of Burke and Adam closely, and noticed when Adam abruptly began working
alone. Burke was gone for a year. And then another. And then another. Three
years passed without any sign of the man who had forced him into hiding.
    “We might be leaving soon,” he had
told Sunday. The cat seemed indifferent to the idea.
    He was ready to return to his old
life but then Adam was murdered, and Burke was the prime suspect. Isaac
retreated back into isolation then, bitter and miserable. He killed two slaves
that night. He tied them down onto his bed and, shaking and trembling, beat
them bloody and dead.
    Hope began to build in him as the
next year passed. That hope often morphed and twisted into other emotions: hate
and terror. Another week would pass without any sign of Burke. Isaac began to
think the bounty hunter was falsely accused of murdering Adam, and had never
returned from his three year disappearance. Another week would pass with Isaac
second guessing himself, petrified with fear to risk leaving his base. He
killed slaves during those weeks. He spent more money replacing them. He became
obsessed with looking over any information on bounty hunters and their commonly
used contracts. He’d refresh postings hundreds of times a day, desperately
seeking any sign that Burke Monrow was still alive, all the while hoping that
he was still dead.
    Isaac’s boss had been the catalyst
to begin his plans. The head of the Torrentus Cartel, Gordon Pavel, was losing
patience with Isaac. He was neglecting his agents too often. The operations in
his system were progressing too slowly. Faced with an additional threat from
within, Isaac forced himself to act. He began to plan a way to know for certain
if Burke was alive or dead. Some nights he was a nervous mess as he fussed over
the tiniest of details. Some nights the process of having something productive
to do was invigorating. He felt like he was actively reclaiming his past life.
Some nights he would vomit from the stress of it all.
    “Am I doing the right thing?” he
asked the cat.
    Sunday turned her head up to him
and squeezed her eyes shut. She squinted up at him and then turned away. She
continued to purr. He considered, not for the first time, that he was
legitimately talking to his cat. The ridiculousness of his life appeared in
front of him and, as he usually did when he met that confrontation, he lashed
out and shoved the cat from his lap. The animal landed on the floor in a
scramble of flailing legs and then was gone, racing along the carpet and
vanishing into another room.
    Isaac turned to the computer
terminal at his desk. He had a constant connection to the mercenaries he had
sent to Frey, already stationed around Stheno and monitoring the girl’s
apartment. He had positioned his own ship in the Tali system but at a safe
distance from the planet. He cycled through the video feeds from each
group—five in all—and saw no sign of Burke. The girl had left her apartment and
returned three times since the surveillance was put into place. Isaac tried to
remind himself that it was impossible for Burke to have traveled to the planet
and that is was unlikely that Geoff had even contacted him yet. Even so, he
wrung his hands together, repeatedly interlocking and releasing his fingers, as
he stared at the screen.
    Gordon Pavel would be calling
within an hour and Isaac knew he had to be calm and collected in front of his
boss. He got out of his seat and stepped toward the doors to his ship. He
decided to do another test of its systems, the fourth test that day, to make
sure he was prepared to leave in as little time as possible if his plans failed
and Burke reached him. The small ship was fully integrated into the larger one
and would leave a gaping opening when it left. He needed to make sure the ship
could smoothly