Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

  The zuigar shook it off and tried to pump three shots into Rechs’s gut. In an oft-practiced motion, Rechs batted the pistol aside and grabbed hold of the thug’s wrist, twisting until the blaster released. He grabbed it during the drop and followed up with another jackhammer fist right at the temple. The zuigar collapsed in a heap and went sprawling, unconscious, across the tilted deck.

  There wasn’t any time to think, or even to discover what kind of blaster Rechs had just acquired. Incoming fire from farther down the shadowy deck was already smashing into the gaudy decorations along this section of the maran’s belly.

  Rechs turned and saw two more blasters, aliens in masks and therefore hard to identify, racing at him, firing in tandem. He pulled the trigger on the slender blaster, targeting almost in the same moment. At once two shots came out. The first missed. The second turned one of the incoming aliens’ heads to nothing but a spray of bone and gray matter.

  Some tactical background app that constantly ran in Rechs’s mind groaned inwardly. The joker he’d acquired the blaster from had modified the trigger pull for two shots. An amateur-pretending-to-be-a-pro move if ever there was one. Two untimed shots split the energy charge by adding an after-market diffuser. The weapon fired faster but did little damage beyond the sweet -spot kill of the brain stem. Everything else was likely to leave at most a severe third-degree burn. Painful… but not deadly.

  Rechs didn’t wish for his hand cannon, because he didn’t have it. That was his way. He didn’t spend a lot of his life looking for perfect scenarios. He just made do with what he had. Killed with what was at hand. Charge packs run dry, slug throwers mag out, and swords break. Best not to cry. Best just to find something else to hurt the other guy with as fast as you can.

  Blaster fire smashed into the bulkhead behind him, and Rechs landed the iron sight of the blaster on the incoming masked alien’s head. The thing was closing fast. He pulled the trigger. Again, two shots. Both hit. One in the throat and one in the mask. The shot on the mask deflected, but the other shot sent the alien to his knees, clutching at his burn-ravaged throat, dropping his own blaster on the deck. Rechs ran at him and sent a powerful kick from his boot right into the alien’s jaw.

  It felt like he broke something, but without knowing the species he was dealing with, he couldn’t really say.

  It didn’t matter. The shooter was down. That was good enough for now.

  Another series of powerful blasts by the Nubarian bot controlling the turret on the main deck caused an explosion across the aft deck, showering the rear pavilion with deadly flaming fragments.

  “Lyra…” said Rechs over the comm.

  “Here, Captain,” replied the AI running his ship.

  “Capture underway. Bring the Crow in.”

  The ship confirmed his orders.

  Right now, Tyrus knew his tricked-out old light freighter was surfacing from the waters of another small atoll located two hundred kilometers to the southwest. Rechs had told Lyra to hide out there until the operation went down. Now it would be her job to bring the ship in and stand by to receive the capture.

  Which was Rechs’s next step.

  And that capture wouldn’t be an easy one.

  He found an access stairway up to the main deck of the ship. As he reached the top of the stairs, a thug came at him too fast for Rechs to get a shot off. Rechs instead ducked and rammed into his attacker with his shoulder, flipping the man onto his back. Then Rechs shot him in the skull.

  The guy had been carrying an old Grendel. A nice, solid, heavy blaster that had seen a lot of action in the Jindo Conflict. High rate of fire, good punch. Not ideal for a capture that needed the target alive, but it would suffice to get rid of all the guards Gat was surely surrounding himself with right about now.

  Rechs tossed aside the slender little trick blaster he’d picked up and hefted the heavy blaster. After checking the charge, he proceeded aft toward the security access to the top deck.

  Gat’s guards had chosen to defend a small elevator that was the upper deck’s only access point. Five had moved impromptu barriers of plush reclining couches and anything else they could get their hands on to create a small fortress around the elevator. Someone in charge was clearly aware Rechs was coming after their leader. Rechs could only get so close to the ad hoc fortress surrounding the lift without exposing himself to direct fire at close range. And with the armor having been subjected to the juices stewing inside that tyrannasquid, he wasn’t keen on testing the system’s integrity with live fire.

  Meanwhile, off the port side, two sleds full of guards opened fire into the shadowy recesses of the open-air deck the bounty hunter proceeded along. Rechs dove for cover behind the main bar and fired back. Expensive crystal decanters of the finest liquors the galaxy had to offer exploded in a pell-mell riot all around him as blaster bolts tried to find their mark.

  Rechs duck-walked behind the bar, keeping his bucket down out of their line of sight. When he caught a brief break in the onboard fire coming at him from the fortress defenders, he quickly unloaded the rest of the heavy blaster’s charge pack on one of the two sleds. Specifically, he targeted the sled’s pilot—a guska. That particular species required a breather-mask that steadily pumped methane into their lungs. Oxygen-rich planets like this one were toxic to the guska.

  The mask was blown off, causing the alien to cover its cavernous, toothless mouth and drop frantically to the sled’s deck. But that wasn’t good enough for Rechs. He continued to pour hot fire into the driver’s dash, smashing controls and sending up small electrical explosions. Finally, he struck something important. Smoking black bloomed from a fire at the driver controls, and the sled spiraled into the waters near the tyrannasquid.

  The beast had been in the process of reaching up to clutch the hovering pleasure-maran with its flailing tentacles. Attempting to claim for its own the craft that had served it so many meals, but until now seemed unattainable itself. Thankfully the maran maintained enough altitude to stay just beyond the monster’s reach, though the occasional tentacle managed to caress the underside, causing the repulsors to jump and sway against the thick fibrous arms, sending the ship into lurches that felt to Rechs likes the swelling waves of a storm.

  Hopefully the downed guard sled would distract the monster temporarily. The thing could have its prize… but only after the bounty hunter took his own.

  Rechs checked his weapon. The charge pack was empty.

  There were dead guards all along the deck, all of them either with weapons lying close by or charge pack bandoliers ready to access. But to get to these, Rechs would need to expose himself to the shooters at the lift. And these shooters weren’t amateurs. These were the best Gat could acquire. The cream of the crime prince’s crop of killers and assassins. Plus, there was still one sled full of guards hovering close by, seeking to get a better shot at the bounty hunter hiding behind the bar.

  Rechs gave his HUD a quick scan. He had a little bit of jump juice left. Really just fumes. Not enough to even make a conservative guess as to whether what he was about to do was possible.

  “Might work…” he grunted to himself, rising from the duck-walk. It would be the last thing they’d expect right now, anyway.

  In one swift motion, still holding the heavy blaster, Rechs raised it to port arms and ran for the rail facing the hovering sled. Untargeted fire tried to acquire him, but he was moving fast and straight at them…

  He leapt out across the void between the two hovering vessels, over the raging mouth of the monster in the watery depths once more. His jets burst, surging him forward, and then sputtered out. A second later he landed on the sled, swinging the empty blaster like a massive club into the chest of a Gomarii slaver, not bothering to watch as the scumbag went over the side and into the death-laden waters below.

  A guard tried to strike Rechs with the butt of his weapon, but missed as the bounty hunter moved li
ke a liquid hypersnake and threw himself out of the way. Still holding the empty heavy blaster, he smashed another alien’s blaster-holding claws. The would-be killer watched helplessly as his weapon clattered to the deck. Rechs once more swung the empty blaster, this time right into the beaky face of his latest attacker.

  A massive blaster bolt from the maran’s main gun slammed into a lithe sniper standing at the bow of the sled and aiming at Rechs. It was one of the Guri assassins, famed for their ability to shoot down their targets under the direst of circumstances. This one was instantly vaporized by the immense power of the massive bolt that just barely sizzled across the sled’s bow.

  Rechs only put it all together after it happened. He’d just been bailed out. Big-time.

  Over the comm the Nubarian bot triumphed in alphanumerica that “Boss Captain Rechs” owed it one.

  Rechs didn’t take the time to acknowledge. He discarded the empty heavy blaster for the beaked alien’s weapon. It was an old scattergun. Rechs didn’t have the time to figure out how old or what make, just to rack a charge pack and send a spray of energy bolts into the last guard on the sled. The short-range blast did brutal damage to the hired blaster, leaving the corpse draped over the rail. Rechs racked another charge pack and finished off the pilot, whose mouth merely worked in protest at his sudden and unforeseen change of fortune, hands still on the steering column.

  Such are the ways of the galaxy. In a heartbeat you can go from winning to dead. And not just dead… scatter-blast dead.

  Moving quickly, Rechs made his way to the sled’s controls.

  He scanned the skies surrounding the battle over the lagoon. Close by, three sleds were attempting to pull crew and survivors off the maran. Fires had broken out across the pleasure ship, and it was now smoking in a dozen places. But Rechs’s eyes were drawn to the distance, where one other vessel was incoming. A very familiar old light freighter: the Obsidian Crow. She sped across the waters, thundering in with her telltale howl of engines.

  “Stand by to get off the ship!” Rechs shouted over the comm to the Nubarian, which was digitally whooping as it blasted one of the transport sleds from the sky in a flurry of concussive pom-pom fire. The sled ruptured along its hull and exploded, raining bodies and debris down along the sides of the burning maran and into the lagoon.

  And then a truly amazing thing happened. It was as if the tyrannasquid, an ancient monster with a mind completely alien even to a galaxy filled with aliens, had learned something from Rechs’s impromptu flying counterattack against one of the sleds. Without warning the monster breached the foam-churned and debris-littered waters of the lagoon, flung itself up at the massive floating pleasure palace, and wrapped its tentacles around the hull of the burning ship. Hanging from the pleasure-maran’s underside, the hideous tyrannasquid, like some inscrutable creature from the outer dark, snaked its tentacles into the guts of the ship and pulled out living victims to feast on as it howled and roared in triumph and pain.

  08

  Rechs tagged the progress of the little rolling Nubarian bot. It had left the forward blaster tower and was on the move to the aft pick-up deck they’d targeted for exfil. Now it was time to take the target into custody. Gat Hathor needed to be ready for a fast departure.

  Rechs, at the controls of the captured guard sled, drove the craft toward the upper deck of the monster-embraced luxury ship. Even as he approached, some of the former revelers were now throwing themselves overboard and into the body- and debris-littered sea below. A few even escaped in this manner—for the time being anyway—as even the tyrannasquid could snatch only so many out of the air at once, its tentacles cracking out like a whip and seizing hapless snacks in its clutches.

  Flying the sled with one hand, Rechs shot down the defenders atop the third deck of the maran as he closed for approach to the main flight deck. Gat’s guard would have called in an evac as soon as it became clear the maran was going down. But evac wasn’t something they had ever expected to need—a flaw in their security, and part of the reason Rechs had chosen this setting to make his move—and it would take time for even their fastest rescue ship to get here.

  Still, time was a finite luxury, and Rechs had burned much of it up just getting this far. His window of free operation was closing fast.

  He rocketed the sled at the third deck in what no doubt looked to the remaining guards like a suicide run. Killers and assassins scrambled to get out of the way, suddenly giving up their allegiance to the dread crime prince crocosaur Gat Hathor. Nearby, the Obsidian Crow swam across the sky, circling to come in close to the burning pleasure-maran. The tyrannasquid seemed too busy pulling out more victims to mind the intrusion.

  “Master… uh… Captain Rechs,” began G232 over the comm link. “We have arrived as per your orders! It does not currently seem as though things are… uh… going according to plan.”

  The trepidations of the old admin and diplomatic bot that had become a member of Rechs’s crew were evident in the transmission.

  “Everything’s on track, Three-Two. Lower the aft cargo door and stand by with the magnetic grappling array.”

  “Truly I shall, sir. But it seems there’s a… well, I’ll be blunt about it. It seems there’s a tyrannasquid currently attacking that ship. This is most unforeseen, Captain Rechs. Tyrannasquid are to be avoided at all times and handled with no small amount of caution, according to the Galactic Travel Standards and Safety Guidelines for the last year I was given an opportunity to download and review them all. While I know rule changes certainly go into effect over time, one can’t possibly envision a time when the rules covering tyrannasquid might ever be… dialed back, as it were, master. I mean… Captain Rechs. Certainly—”

  “Just stand by on the cargo deck, Three-Two!”

  Rechs leapt from the sled the moment it hit the third deck of the pleasure-maran. As Rechs rolled, the sled continued its slide across the larger ship’s width, careening into three hired blasters, crushing one and carrying the other two off over the side and out of the fight.

  Rechs came up with the blaster he’d acquired from the sled’s pilot and began to shoot down Gat’s hired killers. Powerful shots from the medium blaster sent two tangos onto their backs. Return fire was wild, but one bolt found Rechs in the shoulder pauldron and glanced off, ricocheting into Suracaõ’s burning late afternoon. It wasn’t a bell-ringer, but it’d leave a bruise. Rechs had had lots of those. He’d suffered plenty of scars, wounds, broken bones, and a whole host of other combat injuries. Stuff healed. Pain was a constant at his age despite the voodoo that had been done to him long ago.

  He shot the guy who shot him. In fact, he shot him a whole bunch, putting at least five rounds center mass on the rag-dolling alien. It was another Gomarii, and after taking all five hits it seemed he decided to just sit on a nearby deck chair, his head slumped onto his chest. A final posture of refusal to fall to the deck of the doomed and burning ship. A last act of defiance against the murder machine that was Tyrus Rechs.

  Some part of Rechs’s mind noted all that as the last of Gat’s guards hustled the crime boss for the aft quarterdeck. Apparently, the crime lord was thinking—incorrectly—that the arriving Obsidian Crow was his rescue ship.

  Rechs tagged one guard, causing the rest to move even faster.

  Finally, something is going according to plan, thought Rechs.

  He checked the blaster and found he was down to half a charge pack. It was enough to finish this. Or at least it needed to be.

  As he crossed through the debris-littered deck, the tyrannasquid gave an epic bellow and tore off hull plating from the port side to reach more food. One of the repulsors gave up the ghost, whined on overload, and exploded beneath the ship. The rest of the lift array fought valiantly to maintain loft and altitude, but it was a losing battle, and Gat Hathor’s pleasure-maran began to sink ever so surely toward the floating battlefield that was the surface of the lagoo
n.

  Gat Hathor ran for the aft quarterdeck’s landing pad. It was accessible via a ramp that led down off the third deck. For a moment Rechs lost sight of the team extracting their boss. A heavily armored Tennarian male stopped to toss a few shots at Rechs to slow his pursuit, then ducked and fled as Rechs returned fire with two quick blaster bolts.

  The bounty hunter didn’t slow. He reached the top of the ramp and found he had a good picture of the five-man team leading the hulking crocosaur. The prince of the Hegemmy Cartel, draped in gold chain mail and hauling his massive energy mace, was moving onto the quarterdeck, heading for the landing Crow.

  None of the guards waited in ambush. They were all moving, determined to be rescued themselves as much as to rescue their employer.

  Rechs took the opportunity to shoot two of them in the back. Two others dove and sent a furious storm of blaster fire straight back at him.

  The fifth of Gat’s escorts, and probably his best guard, was an old war bot. It swiveled one-eighty on its hip actuators and fired at Rechs from both hand blasters.

  There wasn’t time for cover. The timing of the Crow’s landing meant the capture needed to happen now.

  Incoming fire smashed into the ramp around Rechs as he advanced, firing back at the deadly blaster-slinging war bot, aware he had little charge left and that these war bots almost never went dry.

  Priority target now, Rechs heard his mind tell his shooter’s muscles and instincts as he landed three solid shots on the war machine’s armored battle-damaged upper torso. A second later its rust-colored shoulder actuator exploded. That had been lucky; it was most likely due to the advanced age of the machine. But it was still in the game. Like some living dead monstrosity, the giant killing machine eschewed suppressive blaster fire and strode toward Rechs with its one remaining blaster, apparently intent on powering up all its reserve energy for a single pulsed shot.

  That might well be enough to put a great big smoking hole in Rechs’s armor. And Rechs.