Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

  What was now considered the Docks on Detron was a subset of that one-time Wonder of the Galaxy. The still-maintained subset. Though not well-maintained. Graft, vice, and smuggling operations had run the place in recent years, although Republic forces had taken over during the recent crisis and would remain until the situation quieted down.

  The ident-concealed Obsidian Crow approached her dock on quarter-maneuver thrust and deployed three massive landing struts. Rechs restrained himself from pivoting the ship for a hot departure—standard operating procedure if you were a bounty hunter, but not if you were a merchant. Instead he allowed the Crow to come to rest on the landing pad with her stubby nose and central pilot’s canopy facing the gargantuan blast doors that accessed the hangar. Just as a merchant would.

  While the ship was powering down, venting gases, the blast doors parted slightly with an ominous gargantuan groan. A bot skinned in ceramic white scuttled through the opening and began to shuffle toward the ship.

  From the cockpit, Tyrus hit the comm button. “Three-Two, their operations and supply bot is heading for the boarding ramp. Intercept and shut him down with our story.”

  G232 shuffled down the boarding ramp and greeted the local supply operations assistant.

  “Good day, my name is OS-99,” lied G232. Rechs had assured the bot that it was completely unnecessary to change its identifier, but G232 had felt that this was best for their “grand deception,” as the bot liked to put it. “I’m the personal administrative officer for Captain Rigel. The biologic crew has come down with Ringo Fever after a small supply run into the Garridan Frontier. You know… parasites. Without putting too fine a point on it, they’re all quite indisposed.”

  G232 leaned in close to the supply operations bot. “Dysentery. Diarrhea, you know. I don’t know how the biologics put up with it. Imagine if that were contagious to us!”

  The other bot jumped back as though the sick were about to erupt from the ship’s boarding ramp and spray the bot’s pristine white ceramic shell.

  “I know… quite disgusting,” agreed G232 heartily. “But harmless to our goods and supply. Charge packs from Ankalor for the marines. No foodstuffs, I assure you. But as you know, Ringo Fever can be quite viral beyond the one-week incubation period. The captain asks that you give his crew three days’ isolation and then we can exchange goods.”

  “Oh my, yes, good galaxy, of course,” said the supply bot, backing up rather quickly. Evidently convinced that it must be away from the vicinity of an outbreak of Ringo Fever immediately. Possibly it was afraid of the local decon procedures. Some of which included a full memory wipe for some arcane and byzantine reason.

  “I shall stay here and do my best to succor them,” said G232 valiantly, as though the admin bot were a character in its favorite movie, M8 of Endabon. The story of the bot who singlehandedly cared for a plague colony until every last one of them died. It was an old movie. G232 liked old movies. Especially old movies about long-suffering bots who saved thankful humans. G232 found them quite inspirational, if a little sappy.

  An hour after sundown, after G232 had inserted an algo worm into the local system to shut down hangar surveillance, Rechs, in civilian gear, slipped from the dock and entered the main access corridors.

  12

  When she came to, they were dragging her down a hall. A bright white hallway that reminded her of a university or some government building. The floors were highly polished—waxed, even. She knew that scent.

  There were four of them. Two out of her sight dragging her by the wrists, and two, in their special black-and-red gear, following her with subcompact blasters. MAT-49s. Black-market weapons.

  She played possum as they dragged her farther along the hall. They stopped and opened a supply closet, then pulled her inside. The place had been cleaned out but still smelled of chemical cleaners. She kept her eyes shut until she heard the door close and lock. She was certain they’d left at least one guard outside.

  Sitting up, she strained her ears. The door to the supply closet had a simple lock, and likely wasn’t rated for fire or active-shooter defense like other doors in a government building. And she could hear the voices of the guards, though she couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  She lowered herself back down into the position they’d left her in. Wanting to look as though she hadn’t moved when they returned. Unfortunately, they’d left her lying twisted in a heap, and her body didn’t exactly want to obey when she told it to get comfortable like that. But she was used to that. Snipers were used to being uncomfortable. So, she lay there trying to figure out what gear they’d left her with.

  Which, after a thorough examination, turned out to be almost nothing. Everything had been taken from her pockets. Even her issue belt was gone.

  Her face was bruised and swollen, and she was pretty sure she’d taken a beating, either before or after passing out. But she couldn’t remember much. She tried to focus on what she could remember. And that made her want to start to cry. Because those were good things. Good people who called her by variations of her name. Manda. Panda. Manda Panda.

  Those good people had no place here.

  Dumb, Amanda. You don’t need that right now.

  There was no way out of this closet that didn’t involve breaking the door down and facing all the attention that would bring. She’d have to wait for her moment. Wait for a lapse and get free. Then… maybe run for it and try to get back to the Docks. Or link up with a marine patrol inside the city.

  And how do you know you’re still inside the city, Manda?

  Manda. Dad had always called her that. And he’d taught her how to think. How to survive. And how to shoot, too. So maybe she needed a little of that good sentimental stuff she called dumb. If just to get her head together.

  I hope so. I really hope so, she thought, and heard how forlorn that sounded inside her head.

  Hours later the narrow door shushed open and two MAT-49s pointed down at her. The weapons’ operators were aiming ultrabeams at her eyes to blind her. She’d been asleep, or she’d been in total darkness. It was getting hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

  They’d locked her in a dark closet and left her there. But how long had it been since the alley? Since they’d been captured? Because everything, every detail, meant something. Could be used to compute. Range and distance. Escape.

  Since Reaper 66 had set her down on the rooftop in the middle of a bad situation making the jump to worse… how long had it been?

  And where were the leejes?

  The ones she’d tried to save. Where were they? They had been the whole point of all this.

  Didn’t you go in there to try and rescue them, Manda? And instead ended up getting caught yourself.

  You ain’t much of a hero, Panda.

  “That’s for sure,” she agreed. Her voice sounded dry and tired.

  One of the armed guards laughed. “She’s delirious.”

  She’d told herself she’d be ready for this moment. She’d take advantage of any opportunity they gave her. And then she’d use it to get free. All she needed was a moment when they weren’t at their best.

  That was all that mattered.

  Wait for that moment, Manda.

  Dad again.

  Get free.

  Get back to the ones who are waiting for you. Get back to the known.

  You can do that, Manda.

  All the names all the good people had ever called her.

  Someone pushed past the pair who pointed the blasters in her face. An old man. He bent down with a hypo. He looked like… not like a doctor. More like a professor. The academic type.

  She didn’t know how she knew that, only that she did.

  “Hold still.” The old man had no compassion in his voice. No empathy for her current situation. Then the hypo went in, and she instantly began to fade.


  They drugged me!

  Her mind screamed indignantly. Her lithe, muscled body fought back and squirmed. But they just stood back and watched. The drugs would do the work now. And there was no way those narcotics were letting go.

  Get back, Manda. That’s all that matters. Wait for your moment.

  They drugged… me.

  They probably know.

  Who, Amanda? Amanda Panda. Who knows what?

  They… they probably know I’ve been captured. The ones I have to get back to. The ones I’ve been away from too long. They… know.

  They’ve already waited too long, she thought as the drug ravaged her mind and smashed her mental faculties into submission.

  She fought to hold on. Telling herself she was tougher than the drug. She gritted her teeth and tried to tell them “Noooooooo.”

  It came out sounding more like a bush deer call than any word from Standard.

  Narkex is a heavyweight in the pharmaceutical world. Knockout. Every time.

  * * *

  She woke up again. In the back of a technical sled surrounded by more of the black-and-red rioters. Soshies. All of them on the seating benches of what was clearly some kind of military transport. All of them armed. MAT-49s. Saiger 6s. For sale in every weapons bazaar along the outer edge and often employed by the Mid-Core Rebellion.

  They were laughing at some joke. But none of it made sense. Nothing did.

  Probably the drugs they’ve pumped me full of, she thought.

  Some kid had his mask off. He was college age. Good teeth and good looks. Kind of kid that played grav polo. He was laughing about hitting a marine with a bottle full of piss.

  “You shoulda seen the guy’s face!” the kid chortled. “It was full of TG’s piss!”

  And everyone above her, sitting on the benches, there to guard her, laughed harder than the kid telling the story. Like they’d just stormed the Savage phalanx at Omicron Ridge back in the worst days of the Savage Wars. Like they were real heroes.

  Through half-shut eyes she tried to study their gear.

  She could see some were operator types with legit gear. LCEs and grenades. Military-grade equipment. Dressed up like Soshies but kitted out like MCR. Which all but confirmed the rebels were involved in this. But only some were like that. Mixed in were a few of the homebrew, make-your-own-kit bunch. Like the grav-polo star telling his piss war story. Yet despite the amateurish nature of the newbs, they’d followed some kind of SOP.

  They all had high-impact sports bottles. “Operator” blades with high-tech skins. Gas masks purchased off the elite holosites for executives who had to go out to the edge and rough it on business deals. Everything you needed to play legionnaire and marine. Everything but the hard work of actually signing up for an enlistment.

  When the riot was over, they’d all go back to their classes, or to their high-paying jobs in tech and entertainment. As they took off the masks and disappeared into society once again, they’d feel a little more virtuous for having hit a marine with a bottle of piss.

  Y’know… really changed the galaxy for the better.

  She wanted to throw up, and she wasn’t nauseated. Not physically, anyway. It was people like this that made her sick. They had no idea how dangerous the galaxy was. No idea that the freedom they so casually tossed aside was purchased every day out there on the edge by marines and legionnaires fighting to keep a thousand would-be tyrants from getting enough mojo to enslave as many people out there as they possibly could. That went on every day out there.

  Some old author had once written a book about his time in the Legion out on the edge. The Galaxy’s Heart Is Darkness. That was the title. Or maybe some line in the book. She couldn’t remember. She’d read it. Agreed with it.

  But these kids, they had no idea what the situation really was. They were the useful idiots that the dark side of the galaxy, the howling animal looking to make it all one big bonfire, always needed. They thought not being able to pick their college of choice was a real threat to existence. Never mind that it was free. The right one wasn’t selecting them. Time to riot for a better future.

  They should try a place like Boarrago V instead. Try that little slice of darkness where the natives are like living zombies in the sway of a grand cleric who’s decreed that every female on the planet is his.

  Try fighting a jungle war there against that kind of red lotus-chewing madness. Especially when the other side is paying wobanki mercenaries to get involved.

  Talk about darkness. Nothing darker in the night than the cats.

  Try finding a marine patrol that got killed and disemboweled without firing once from their blasters.

  Try going through that and then decide whether an already-too-coddling government is really the sort of thing that should send you to the streets.

  Or Ituria, which was just a few years before Psydon. A Republic protectorate world whose seventeen different factions, all nuclear-armed, had turned that planet into a Stone Age nightmare.

  Try being on a marine task force sent to supply aid to just one faction with the added threat that the people you are not supplying might just decide to take it into their heads to nuke you because you’re helping the enemy they nuked five years ago. That’s what you get when the elites spend two centuries building nuke-proof bunkers below the planet. Not enough room for the three billion above who’ll have to pay the price, but enough room to keep lobbing nukes at each other for upwards of twenty years.

  And then try being the Legion force sent in to clean out a faction’s bunker to get all sides to stop shooting for a while.

  “It was a madhouse down there,” some old leej once told her. “An absolute madhouse like one of them Savage hulks I hit as a private when I didn’t know better.”

  The cargo sled comes to a stop and everyone’s putting their masks on. She’s trying to remember as many faces as she can because a part of her promises to come back some day and collect on a little payback.

  You don’t mean by trial, right, Manda?

  Dad’s voice.

  She doesn’t answer.

  And then she has her first opportunity. A real dumb stump of a kid—all muscle and no doubt thinking that this plus the gear made him a man—pulls her off the back of the cargo sled. She slips his knife out of his Johnny Action Ranger pistol belt. Black nylon. Purchased from True Warrior Supplies. Veteran-owned, you know.

  It’s a nice blade, too. She can tell as she palms it and lets it fall up her sleeve and down to her armpit where she clenches it to the side of her rib cage.

  She gets a brief glimpse of the sky.

  It’s morning on Detron. But which morning?

  The city rises all around her in those stupid wagon-wheel buildings that were all the rage fifty years ago. Massive towers stacked on towers made of wagon-wheel-like levels.

  What the past thought the future would look like one day.

  Now those towers look tired and anachronistic. Old and beaten. And how much of what’s being built today and fawned over by contemporaries will be viewed the same way in another couple of generations?

  The Soshies, MCR pros, and local useful idiots hustle her off the street and into a building. Through a lobby that must have once looked well-appointed and was now covered in graffiti and black mold. Past a blue couch with starburst thread that’s been shot by a blaster several times. The place smells of old greasy food.

  She doesn’t know the building, just that she’s in downtown, based on what she remembers of her time over the city. The area once called the Glitter District because the best and the brightest lived there. The captains of industry and the famous architects who built the ships that defeated the Savages.

  Her grandfather was a gunner’s mate on the Ohio. Fought at Telos. He was nineteen and he survived that and went on to fight the last Savage fleet at the Hebrides. Then he came home and star
ted a family with the girl who’d been waiting all that time for him to come back.

  Grandma.

  Think about the knife.

  Get out of here and get home. That’s all that matters, Manda Panda.

  She’s brought inside a supply elevator. It feels like they’re going down. But it could just as easily be up. It’s not a long trip and they haul her into what is clearly an under-basement. So down it was.

  The place is set up like some kind of headquarters. The guards are fresh-faced. Children really. But these are murderous children carrying weapons.

  They pass a wide section leading from the hall where some whiny-voiced guy is hectoring a bunch of true believers about what needs to happen if they’re going to “win this war!”

  He calls it war, she notes.

  You have no idea what war is, little boy. The knife is still in her armpit. I flick this open and you’re going to get a taste, though, she promises him silently.

  And suddenly, she feels good. This won’t be that hard. The knife will get her a blaster. A blaster will get her back to the street. Wait a couple of hours until they dial down and smoke a little lotus to come off the high of being “real operators,” and she can at least get to the marine patrols. Those are happening every sixteen blocks. Or they were as of the last day she can remember. If she can make it sixteen blocks, she can get the hell out of here and get back.

  Hell, she thinks. Hell.

  Because she’s kinda pissed.

  Acquire the right weapon system and she can resume her day job from one of these towers. A little payback via the rooftop and a good sight picture. She’ll just shoot everyone in red and black and then they will know you do not mess with the marines.

  Demons on deck; Hell to repel!

  She shouts the hullbuster motto inside her skull and imagines a good sight picture and just the right trigger pressure. Love is a stationary target.