Chapter 12: Hunter | page 2

Coldhand woke in a tangle of sheets. Despite the sweat pouring down the back of his neck, he was shivering. He raked his cybernetic fingers through his damp blond hair and sat up carefully in the tiny bunk. Coldhand couldn’t remember the dream, but didn’t have to. He always dreamed about the same things. After five years of reruns, it was getting old. The bounty hunter could feel his computer-regulated heartbeat, steady and slow, unchanged by his nightmare.

The room was small, even more claustrophobically closed than the one Tiberius had kept him in. Fare aboard the Temptation was expensive, paid to the pale-eyed human woman who captained the ship, but certainly not for lavish accommodations. There was a quiet knock at the door.

“Come in,” Coldhand said, just loud enough to be heard in the corridor outside.

A thin Ixthian man entered, carrying a bulging medical bag, and called up the lights. He gave Coldhand a studied smile, but his short antennae twitched uncomfortably and his jeweled eyes glittered red. No one aboard the Temptation asked the hunter his name. They all knew it and knew to keep their silence. The doctor unwound the bandages around Coldhand’s right shoulder, looking at the bullet wound beneath. He probed the injury gently.

“Does that hurt?” he asked the human.

“No.”

Clearing his throat uneasily, the silver-skinned doctor opened up his bag and pulled out a small sensor. He flicked it on and scanned the wound. “It looks like I managed to get the entire bullet out,” he said. “The fracture is reweaving just fine.”

“How long?”

“Five more days until you can use the arm freely,” the Ixthian told him. “It’d be faster if you would let me give you a nanite injection.”

“No machines,” Coldhand said. The doctor’s eyes were drawn inexorably back to the cybernetics. The illonium was still twisted and blackened from Tiberius’ bullet. Coldhand followed his eyes. “No more machines.”

“I don’t have the facilities on the Temptation, but once we arrive back on Axis, if I could get a redprint to one of the vats, I could…” he began, gesturing gingerly at the metal hand, but Coldhand leveled an icy look at him and the doctor fell silent. He sighed. “Jumo will be by to take a look at it as soon as he’s done with the engines.”

His body would heal with time, the bounty hunter thought as the doctor hastily left, but he needed the Temptation’s mechanic to see to his cybernetic hand. Coldhand tried to close the metal hand, but only two of the fingers would respond.