Free Beacon 23: Part 3: Bounty (Kindle Single) by Hugh Howey Page B

strict quarantine, so please stay aboard. I’ll come to you.”
    There’s a pause on the other side.
    “Quarantine?” the pilot asks.
    “No longer communicable,” I assure him—and I feel like I can hear him exhale in relief.
    If he checks the colreg logs, he’ll see that I’m not exactly lying. I am under quarantine. What the logs won’t say is that it was a computer virus, and that the victim was my beacon. Strange the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep people away from me, considering how lonely I feel most of the time. I guess that’s the strange torment I suffer: dying for company, for someone to talk to, but it’s never the right someone who shows. And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.
    •••
    I head down three sets of ladders to the lock hub, the sling over my arm making the trip take longer than usual. Any weight on the ball of my left foot makes my ankle cry out, so I try to get my heel deep on the rungs, which just means repeatedly banging my shin. I considered going without gravity for a while, but one look at all the crap strewn everywhere and I imagine it floating and bouncing around. No thanks.
    In fact, the wreck of my beacon comes into stark relief with the prospect of someone docking up. In addition to the stuff everywhere, I’ve got open access panels leading down into mechanical spaces and wires strung all over from my makeshift repairs. My walk suit is crumpled up in the middle of the docking module, and the door to the lifeboat is wide open. For a while there, I was wearing the suit all the time and sleeping in the lifeboat, but I stopped doing both those things after the shipwreck debris bombarding my beacon died down. Besides, I’m back to not sleeping much anyway.
    I wait by the airlock for the pilot to secure his ship. Sniffing the air, I have this bad feeling that, despite the herculean effort from the air scrubbers and NASA’s PineFresh scenting system, the entire facility reeks of a college dorm room, midsummer, after an egg fight, with two dead skunks under a pile of soiled laundry. I breathe into my palm and sniff. Whatever olfactory sense I had died months ago. That’s good for me, bad for visitors.
    A loud thump against the hull lets me know that the ship has arrived and that the pilot is a three on a scale of ten when it comes to jockeying a flight stick. If he’s making a living collecting bounties, that probably means he’s more of a terrestrial threat. More of a sleuth-and-taser kinda guy. This guess is vindicated once I’ve keyed my side of the airlock and he’s keyed his. The bounty hunter on the other side is straight out of one of those true-life holos where people repo your shit or haul you back to jail from some remote moon hideout.
    His hair is in dreadlocks. His beard is long, and it’s knotted with bits of string so that it juts out in little clumps. There’s an unlit cigar between his teeth and mirrored shades wrapping his face. He’s got a bandana around his neck, another on his bicep, and one tied around each knee. His flightsuit is studded with bulging pockets, and even standing perfectly still, he jangles. I imagine he must keep the grav on his ship at a 0.7 to be able to stand all that nonsense. He has guns strapped everywhere, and an honest-to-goodness bandolier of large brass shells and grenades is draped across his chest like some warlord beauty contestant sash. What sounds vaguely like a dog yips somewhere from within the depths of his ship.
    “Mitch,” the bounty hunter says, reaching out his hand with a jangle and clatter. “Mitch O’Shea.” We do that awkward arm-in-sling handshake where I extend my left hand, turn it sideways, and we go pinkie-to-thumb. He looks me up and down. “What happened to you?”
    I realize I’m standing there in my boxers, barefoot, covered in bruises and duct tape. I dimly care.
    “Gravity genset went on the fritz,” I say. “Started oscillating. Uncontrollably.”
    The bounty