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  Absolution

  Interstellar Bounty Hunter: Book 1

  Rick Partlow

  Copyright © 2019 by Rick Partlow

  All rights reserved.

  www.rickpartlow.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Formatted by Drew Avera Formatting

  www.drewavera.com/book-formatting

  Contents

  Interstellar Bounty Hunter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  From the Author

  Interstellar Bounty Hunter

  Book 1:

  Absolution

  By Rick Partlow

  Copyright 2019

  By Rick Partlow

  Chapter One

  The dog looked at me with earnest, soulful brown eyes and his left ear cocked upward curiously.

  “You’re not going to fuck this up again like last time, are you?” he asked.

  I favored him with a scowl and nodded toward the airlock hatch.

  “Shut up and get in character,” I told him. He leered at me and whoofed with fake cheerfulness.

  The indicators went green and the outer airlock door of the Charietto opened into the barely-contained chaos of El Mercado. People rushed by, mostly because staying in one place too long meant having to fend off the obnoxiously aggressive street vendors, and the beggars and the pickpockets who worked in conjunction with them. I rested my right palm on my holstered blaster and stepped out into the madness.

  The wave of sound and smell and color crashed over us, overwhelming. Rainbow hair, skin merely a tapestry for holographic tattoos, clothes as colorful and ostentatious as possible to hide the fact they were cheaply-fabricated flash. It was all a cynical attempt at camouflage, trying to hide their poverty and desperation from anyone stupid enough to dock at El Mercado without knowing what it was and who lived here.

  If the Panicle was the heart of the Epsilon Indi system, then El Mercado was the rot at its core. Men and women came to the Panicle to seek their fortunes in the asteroid mines or in selling their wares and services to those who did, and the refuse, the failures, the misfits all seemed to wash out into El Mercado. The only good thing I could say about the place was it had artificial gravity. Docking on one of the stations in the Paragon out at Barnard’s Star usually meant dealing with zero-gee in the docking bays. The older stations still used rotation for centripetal force, built before the development of gravity generators, and I had to put up with incipient motion sickness every time we docked at their non-spinning hubs.

  Dog thought it was hilarious, of course.

  “Mister!” a kid with dreadlocks animated into Medusa-like snakes using miniature actuators rushed up to me, holding a cloth sewn with pockets, each carrying a different plastic syrette. “You want buy Kick? Zero? Sting? I got all the good drugs.”

  He couldn’t have been older than twelve.

  “Where’s your mom and dad, kid?” I asked him, brushing past. “They know you’re out here selling drugs to tourists?”

  “Where you think I get the drugs, man?” he demanded, raising his arms up, a cloth extended from each hand as I walked away. “Hey, maybe your dog want drugs?”

  “It’s a sad statement on the human condition,” Dog said, shaking his head.

  I thought I saw a couple of heads turn, visitors in more expensive clothes, unused to the assault on their senses. Just glances, unsure what they’d thought they’d heard. The locals didn’t even spare Dog a glance, just went about their jobs.

  “I told you to shut up,” I reminded him, pushing a beggar aside with a sweep of my forearm, then grimacing as I realized he’d gotten something slimy on the sleeve of my jacket.

  Real leather, too, damn it.

  I leaned down and wiped it against Dog’s side and he snarled at me.

  “I saw that,” he growled a warning.

  “Good. See more, talk less.”

  I bypassed the train station. Most newcomers used it because the map menus were simple and they definitely didn’t want to get lost in the wrong section of El Mercado. As if there’s a right section. I knew where I was going and I wanted to attract less attention on the way there. We walked.

  There was no customs inspection, no passport control. Anyone could bring pretty much anything into El Mercado except nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. At least, that’s what the official rules said, and I assumed they had remote detectors for that sort of thing. They certainly had no problems with guns, because just about every third or fourth person I saw was carrying one openly, and I had to assume the others had them concealed.

  No issues with robots, either, though I didn’t see as many of those. Dog didn’t get a second look once he stopped talking. Robots were the toys of the rich or the tools of heavy industry, and El Mercado had very few of the first and none of the second. The heavy industry was in the asteroid belt a few million kilometers away. The entertainment and business and housing for the heavy industry was closer, just a few kilometers off to either side in the other districts of the massive Panicle station. El Mercado was everything else, the things people didn’t want to admit they wanted.

  Drugs were ubiquitous, the labs where they were made squatting in solitary ugliness, wrapped in protective fencing and insulation, guarded by men and women with guns. They watched us pass, not caring who we were or what our business was as long as we weren’t a threat. They sold in the streets, in stalls crammed into niches and corners, in fancy storefronts catering to the wealthier visitors. Guns were sold as openly, though their quality varied. Old-fashioned slug-shooters fabricated off patterns centuries old were spread across blankets on the ground on street corners, while blasters like the one I carried were restricted to storefronts, protected behind thick polyglass shields and watched over by an armed sales staff.

  The rest was harder to spot. Illegal and black-market virtual reality software, pirated fabricator patterns, even Bartoli crystals, although those were the most jealously guarded of all, kept in safes and carried out to ships or businesses by escorts. Nothing was marked, nothing was advertised. If you were there, you knew what you meant to shop for and where to find it.

  I was looking for sex. Sex was everywhere, and like everything else here, for sale. Live companionship was available, but expensive. Once, there’d been actual human trafficking in places like this, but the Marshals hadn’t tolerated it for long. Prostitution was legal, pimping was not, and any attempt by a house to take more than a fifty percent cut of companion’s income was met by law enforcement raids, and no one here wanted that, particularly when the clientele for real, human companions tended to be wealthy.

  Most lonely people tended not to be wealthy, which was why pleasure doll rental was a thing, though here they tried to get fancy and call themselves Lifestyle Companionship Providers. You could call it whatever you wanted, but the bottom line was, you were having sex with a robot, and a not too bright one at that.

  Security was pretty stiff, no pun intended, at the live, human brothels. Not so much at the robot version. Their main concern was that none of the drunken spacers who stopped by tried to steal one of the dolls and take it with them on their ship for entertainment. At least not with
out paying for it.

  The place I was looking for had a sign in bright, neon orange that advertised “Live Robot Sex,” as if they didn’t see the oxymoron inherent in the term, right beneath the imaginative name of the place: “Congress with the Beast.” Most of their clientele was probably too drunk to care. Dog and I walked past an unconscious asteroid miner with a plastic jug of whiskey in one hand and his pants around his ankles and through the front door. A woman sat at the front desk, her expression a statement on boredom painted by one of the old masters. She didn’t bother with the holographic tattoos or the dyed skin or robotic hair weaves, just let her utter lack of interest be her camouflage.

  “Hi, I’m Nikki, welcome to Congress with the Beast.” The words were as rote as if they’d been read from a script, her eyes as dead as any of the pleasure dolls’. Then she saw Dog and one of her eyebrows shot up and I finally noticed actual interest. “We don’t usually allow pets,” she said, although I sensed a “but” coming involving extra payment for an exception.

  “He’s a robot,” I told her, pulling a wad of paper trade notes from my jacket and slipping a few extra in with the advertised amount. “I find he enhances the experience for me, if you know what I mean.”

  “Whatever floats your boat, cowboy,” she said with a shrug, stuffing the cash into the back pocket of her ratty jeans. “No weapons in the back though.” She gestured toward my blaster. “You’ll have to leave that in the lockers along with anything else you might be carrying. No use trying to sneak it through, we got a scanner.”

  The scanner was rudimentary, a plastic halo over the doorway into the hall, and I wondered if it even worked. There were three dozen lockers in the reception area, rusted and battered metal, painted a puke green a million years ago and faded nearly to white now. Each had a thumbprint reader to secure it, and I chose one in the middle at eye level and stashed the gun inside it, peeled off a glove and let it read my print. I entrusted the number on the front to memory, then paused and looked at Dog.

  “Record,” I told him. “Remember 12B. End record.”

  Which was a show for Nikki, since Dog had probably already taken it upon himself to remember the locker number, if for no other reason than to rub it in my face if I forgot it.

  “You know, cowboy,” Nikki said, her voice low and conspiratorial, as if there were anyone else in the room or anyone at all who cared, “if you want, I could probably get you a first-class AI for your dog there. I could fix him up good, get him to where he could fly your ship and have real conversations and even work as your bodyguard.”

  “It’s pretty damn illegal to install that kind of AI in a robot without a license,” I told her. She rolled her eyes and made a rude gesture with her hand. “Anyway,” I went on, eyeing Dog significantly, “who the hell would want a dog that talks all the time?”

  Dog’s right ear tilted at me and he frowned.

  “Whatever, buddy,” Nikki said. “Your loss. What kind of companionship you looking for today? We got male and female models in all sizes, colors and shapes. If you want anything too wild, it’ll take an hour or so and cost more.”

  I suppressed a disinterested shrug. I couldn’t care less, but I didn’t want her to realize that.

  “Female, skinny, long dark hair.”

  She nodded and punched those parameters into a menu.

  “Right. Room twenty-three.” Her voice went back to its original drone, the rote recital she had to give a hundred times a day. “There’s a bathroom in there. Once you leave the room, the door’s locked and you have to pay again to re-enter. The robot can’t leave the room and if you try to take her out, an alarm will sound and she’ll deactivate, and you’ll get blacklisted from ever coming here again. We clear?”

  “Crystal,” I assured her over my shoulder, walking past the desk.

  Dog followed at my left heel, tail wagging as if he was looking forward to this.

  The hallway was dimly lit, on purpose I was sure. No one wanted to see the faces of the other customers, or have theirs seen. A couple of them passed by us along the way, a wild-haired older man with crazy eyes shining in the dark, his shoulder rubbing against the other wall to keep his balance. Alcohol wafted off of him, the smell strong enough to make me want to heave. The other was a woman, broad-shouldered and rough looking in work coveralls. She didn’t meet my eyes, her stance slightly embarrassed.

  I don’t know why a female would be any more embarrassed for being there than a man, but humans are funny that way. I didn’t say a word, listening to the sounds of my boot soles tapping against the tile, the click-click of Dog’s claws in quiet echo. I looked for the numbers on the doors and began seeing odd on the left, even on the right. And right where I expected it, I saw a larger, more reinforced door, metal where the others were plastic, with an ID plate affixed above the knob. The sign at eye-level gave no indication of the room’s purpose, just warned customers to stay out.

  I made a mental note of its location and kept moving. Twenty-one was another ten meters down and to the left. I tried it and found it open. The knob was grimy, sticky with some substance I wasn’t anxious to know the provenance of, and I was glad I’d worn gloves. The door was light and cheap, plastic with soundproofing insulation glued to the back, more of it on the walls. The bed was basic and uncomfortable looking, but then I guess it wasn’t meant to be slept in.

  The girl on the bed looked very comfortable. I had to do a double-take when I saw her face, lean and sharp and pale, the dark hair spilling down over one eye. She looked just like Janie, and I wondered if I’d asked for those specifications with her in mind. Probably. I don’t have much of an imagination. What she was wearing did not remind me of my ex-wife, and I was fairly sure Janie had never even owned something with that much lace and so little in the way of actual covering.

  “Come on in, cowboy,” the pleasure doll invited, smiling in a way determined by armies of clinical psychologists to guarantee excitement. “Close the door and let’s have some fun.”

  I pushed the door shut.

  “Are there cameras in here?” I asked, standing a meter from the bed, arms crossed.

  “Do you want there to be cameras?” the doll asked me, her responses cobbled together from a limited range of possibilities. “Do you want someone to watch?”

  “Of course there are,” Dog answered, knowing he was the one I’d been speaking to. “I’ve already taken care of them. They really don’t even have anything you might call a firewall on these systems. It’s almost criminal negligence.” He laughed, and if you don’t think a human laugh is an odd and unsettling thing coming from something that looks like a cross between an English mastiff and a Labrador retriever, well then, you’ve never been around Dog.

  “Your dog is funny,” the doll said, imitating his laugh, which made it somewhere around ten times as weird.

  “Shut her up, will you?” I said plaintively, nodding towards the bed.

  Dog hopped up on the bed and rested a paw against the pleasure doll’s forehead. She froze in place, mouth half-open as she’d prepared to say something else, her limited AI system determined to be seductive no matter what.

  “How the heck do people live with themselves?” I wondered aloud, shaking my head.

  “Thank God I don’t have to find out,” Dog said, then presented his hind end to me. “You want this thing or what? It’s taking up too much space in my ass.”

  “You don’t have an ass,” I reminded him. I slapped him on the rump. “Hand it over.”

  The compartment opened up above his right rear leg and I reached in and pulled out my backup piece, a more compact, slightly less powerful version of the blaster I’d entrusted to the house weapons lockers. I hoped I’d get that one back. Quality weapons weren’t cheap and I had a certain sentimental attachment to it.

  The hidden compartment disappeared into Dog’s fur as if it had never opened and I tucked the blaster into my jacket pocket. I kept my hand inside the pocket as I pulled the door back open and ch
ecked outside. Nothing except a muted grunting from a nearby room with inadequate soundproofing.

  “Come on.”

  It was a short but tense walk back to the door we’d seen. I wasn’t worried about their security cameras, not with Dog taking care of it, but a place like this would have bouncers. Human bouncers, I mean. I doubted anyone even in El Mercado would take the risk of programming robots to potentially harm humans. The storm that would bring down on them would be Biblical in its proportions and wouldn’t just involve the Marshals. They’d have the damn Navy in here, and not to arrest anyone either.

  The ID plate on the door taunted me, daring me to try it. I looked down at Dog, gesturing to the lock.

  “Good Lord, what use are you, anyway, Masterson?” he said, raising his head up to the plate, leaning his front paws against the door. He stared at the lock and I saw a laser from his right eye scanning across the plate.

  Something clicked and I pushed the handle downward. It opened. I slipped inside and closed it quickly, just giving Dog enough time to squeeze through behind me. The door had opened into a narrow, dark entrance hall that opened up a couple meters down, light dimly filtering from some source in the main room. Rack after rack of spare parts were mounted to the walls, heads, hands, feet, knees, all stripped bare of artificial flesh, the white plastic gleaming bonelike in the muted light.

  Work tables were lined up in the center of the room, each occupied by a pleasure doll under repair, some with their flesh in place, others inhuman skeletons laid open, actuator motors and fluid-filled artificial muscles in full view. Maybe there was some deep, philosophical analogy to be made there to our society, beautiful and perfect on the outside but with a profane ugliness just under the surface. I don’t know, I’m not that smart.