Cloaked in invisibility, Burt flew steadily over the gorge. Below him the chasm descended into pure blackness. There was no telling how deep it went. His body had been upgraded with scanning systems that were strong enough to detect a fart from 20 miles away, but even they were unable to discern the depth this cavern dug into the planet’s mantle.
Evenly cruising the distance across, he switched his view to tracking mode. His eyes were one of the only human parts of his ravaged body that had survived, but they were still connected to the cybernetic mainframe that allowed him to continue to live. This had some advantages, like the HUD he could overlay onto his vision.
He saw the radioactive ghost that was Jasper walking along a corridor. Last he’d seen the woman had been arm in arm with Gondo. He followed them through the wall until he saw them enter one of the outward facing chambers. Now he could see them easily through the large window that faced the chasm.
They walked across the room and Gondo sat at a table near the window. Jasper moved to a bar area and poured some drinks, then joined him at the table, bringing a large bottle that she set between them. The two sat sipping their beverages and chatting.
Burt despised these Casters. Wizards sent off to a special school like they lived in some story book.
While he was growing up in the Marshes Burt had made a best friend, Elias. Elias and he were inseparable. They did everything together. Stomping around the soggy alleys of their world, imaginations running wild. Watching pre-singularity Westerns and acting out the roles of their favorite cowboys. Their favorite was The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. They would beg or steal enough credits to watch it in one of the Marshes movie houses, sometimes enough leftover for popcorn. Trading lines and goofing around. It had been the best time of his life.
Until Elias was designated psychic capable.
He’d left the next day, without a goodbye.
Years later Burt had run into Elias, but the Caster didn’t even seem to notice. Elias been walking along one of the main streets of the upper city, conversing with his new friends from the Academy. When Burt had tried to get his attention they had all laughed at him and his filthy clothes. They were wearing fancy radiation cloaks, whereas Burt was wearing a mask and hood he had salvaged from a dead gang member.
The divide between their worlds was so vast. Burt took all his frustration, anger and jealousy, and directed it into his work as a bounty hunter. Once he rose through the underworld and was offered the job of chasing down a renegade Caster, he’d entered the ranks of the Reelers with a grim determination.
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Standing over the crippled form of his first Caster mark, he imagined Elias’ face as he pulled the trigger of his plasma gun. It didn’t make the pain go away, instead it awoke a hunger inside him. So he’d done it again, and again. He’d become a relatively rich man.
He’d spent a happy time then as a successful bounty hunter. Nice clothes, nice restaurants and nicer women. He was welcomed into the fancy bars and coffee houses that would have booted him off a skyway years ago.
Word spread of his prowess in the field. His reputation grew as an elite hunter, giving him higher and higher paying jobs. He was finally looked at with respect.
Of course it was only a matter of time until one of the filthy wizards robbed him of all that.
Gondo.
Gondo had become his sole focus since their last encounter. Chucking him down that ventilator shaft like he was flushing a toilet. Laughing at him just like Elias and his friends did that day. He hated Casters. But he reviled the talented, entitled ones.
After the doctor had pieced him together there was nothing left but his brain and the front part of his face, a portion of his upper torso, and his left arm. Everything else had been chunked up and ravaged by the fan blades and subsequent impact.
The doc had connected him to a computer that allowed them to communicate. Under Burt’s instruction, the surgeon liquefied all the bounty hunter’s assets, and used the funds to send his body to a reforge clinic.
After a series of excruciating surgeries, Burt had emerged in his current form. A steel case for his cranium. A large upper body with body with 4 arms, only one of them his own. 4 legs that made him into a kind of cybernetic centaur. He tended to fold 2 of the legs into his body so he could walk around like a normal person, albeit a tall and misshapen one. He would shroud his bulky form in whatever tattered raiment he came across.
His 4 new legs had come in handy on his trek to locate Jasper. Loping across the barren landscape of the Wastes, he’d seen things that would haunt him to the end of his days. Mutated faces with extra eyes on extra heads peering out of the muck, long jaws slack and drooling. Bizarre audiences of grey-black beings that scuttled off into the overhanging darkness of demolished buildings as he approached.
Then his descent into the cave system leading to the Ourobouros base. Without all his updated tracking gear he would have been lost forever in that maze, futuristic powercells extending his life through the dark destitute ages. Luckily it had only taken him the better part of a week to wind his way downward, finally breaking into the very chasm he now hovered in.
Now, his prey was just meters away from him. A simple blast deployed from any of the multitude of deadly weaponry strapped to his carapace would end the man. But Burt wanted to feel bones break. He wanted to see his twisted reflection in blood.
So he waited for the right moment to strike. After the bottle was half empty he decided it was time. He set his covert jets behind him, then burst through the window, guns blazing.
