Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

  None of the tables were in use. But that wasn’t for a lack of patrons.

  Rechs found himself facing at least sixteen down-station dead-end loser types. Some sat at tables with their hands, claws, or tentacles near but not on their weapons. Others clustered along the walls or leaned against a rickety old wooden bar, trying to play laconic and uninterested to the hilt because that’s what actors playing hard boys did in the entertainments.

  Despite the tension and the nonchalance act, everyone was nervous. Rechs could practically smell that. They’d heard the shot, and they’d seen that the dog man, whatever his name was, wasn’t here.

  If they were getting paid by Giles, then this was how they earned their keep. When the shooting started it was their job to finish things by shooting back until it stopped. But here was someone who wouldn’t go down easily, didn’t mind shooting first, and looked to be ready to shoot a lot.

  And then there was Giles, sitting there in the middle of it all. Or so Rechs imagined the human to be.

  Giles Longfree was an older man. Older than the rest and slightly older than Rechs appeared. He had quick, furtive, mischievous eyes and gray hair slicked back and needing a cut. He wore an expensive if not trendy suit and a string tie like some of the colony types preferred. He had a pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter on the table and he was casually leaned back, one leg crossed and staring straight at Rechs like he’d been waiting for him all along to arrive with all his weapons and simmering menace.

  He looked to Rechs like a made man in one of the cartels who knew he carried some weight and demanded some respect. Not just some thug.

  Giles Longfree was an earner.

  And likely he didn’t care if Rechs was a bounty hunter here to take him in, because he had all his men armed to the teeth right here behind him. And if Rechs was just some chungo looking for passage into the city? Either way…

  “Wait a minute,” Giles said, suddenly leaning forward and letting go of the too-cool-to-care-because-you’re-in-my-world-now act. “Hold the comm… I know you!”

  Rechs remained standing still. Scattergun cradled. Watching the shooters across the bar. Tagging who needed to die first.

  “You’re that bounty hunter!” erupted Giles Longfree.

  The boss slapped his hands together and the sound caused some of his hired blasters, the twitchier ones of course, the scared ones, to jump a little. Others waited. Immobile. Coiled like hydra-vipers ready to strike out from some dark recess under a rock that never should have been turned over in the first place.

  “Yeah…” said Giles, rubbing several days’ worth of beard growth. He looked around at his hired guns. “Boys, we are indeed honored. This is the one and only Tyrus Rechs.”

  At that point Giles stood up and raced around the table like he was some kind of servant waiting to be of use, suddenly springing into action for just such an occasion.

  “This is indeed an…” He didn’t finish his sentence as he dusted off a chair and placed it right in front of his table. He shouted, “Arac! Get me the good bottle of Faldaren! The stuff we got off that liner out of Antares.”

  Then he resumed, satisfied the chair was clean and places just right.

  “This is indeed an honor, sir. Tyrus Rechs.” He threw his arms wide. “Can you believe it?”

  It was hard for Rechs to tell if the guy was serious. Or if he was mocking him. Or just odd. The bounty hunter really wasn’t good at reading people.

  But there was still a chance they didn’t all have to die. So, he waited to see how everything would play out.

  Rechs got the sense Giles’s men weren’t too sure, either.

  “Please have a seat and…” said the crime boss as he moved back to his own chair, hand splayed out showing off the new arrangement he’d made for his guest, “let me know how I can be of use to the one… and the only… Tyrus Rechs.”

  He said each part of Rechs’s name like it was its own sentence.

  Rechs stepped close to the table but didn’t sit down. “Need to get into the city.”

  Giles rubbed one manicured finger across his chin and nodded as though seriously considering this. His eyes watched something unseen. Staring into it.

  “Well then you’ve come to the right place, Tyrus. May I call you that? Well… I am the guy that does just that, and I can do it for you, Tyrus, but…” He made a tailor’s face. Indicating that what was going to be asked for was going to take some time because of the work and the craftsmanship involved. It was all very honest. All very earnest. At least according to Giles’s furrowed brow and concerned grimace.

  Serious.

  Except… thought Rechs. Maybe this is all just an act.

  “City’s real hot right now, Tyrus. Hard to get in there, even for me. And once you’re there… why, what do you get up to? No one’s going to shows. Restaurants and shopping have all been looted. All those kids… why, all they want to do is protest, smoke a little lotus, and make love. You know how it is.” He winked at Rechs. Like they’re really doing something. Making a difference.

  “Yeah… you know,” Giles continued, as if talking to himself. “The more I think about it… well, I think I can get you in there. Sometime tomorrow. We can leave at oh dark hundred, military talk. Was a marine myself back in the day. We can leave then and it’s a ways, but I can get you right up into the Heights if that’s what you really want. But… I won’t lie to you… that’s going to be very expensive, Tyrus. Credits up front.”

  Giles’s eyes went wide as though he’d just had an idea. “Say, what are you up to,” he looked skyward, “up there?”

  The bounty hunter ignored this. “Need to go now. It’s urgent.”

  Giles tsk-tsked. He sat back and folded his arms after checking his very expensive cuffs. Then he stared off over Rechs’s shoulder.

  “That just won’t be possible. There are arrangements that need to be made. People to be paid off. We’d be going through the entire abandoned foundry so… that comes with its own host of problems. I mean come on, Tyrus… you don’t just go waltzing in and not have a contingency plan for the Watcher.”

  “Now,” said Rechs bluntly. “I’ll pay extra.”

  Again, the older-looking man shook his head.

  “I’m afraid that’s a no-can-do, Tyrus. I’m not bargaining for more credits. You’ll pay as it is. I’m telling you how it works.”

  One of the guards, a slender fellow who looked highly capable with the two blasters he had cross-rigged over his chest, shifted his stance from leaning to ready on two feet. Blaster grips sticking out from a black leather vest. Rechs identified him as the company shooter. It was expected for this guy to take the lead in this type of situation. He stepped forward to do just that.

  “Boss says—”

  And then faster than anyone could’ve expected, Rechs was pointing the barrel of the scattergun, one-handed, at the thug.

  But no trigger pull.

  The guard recognized he was had and put his hands up, ceasing his menacing tough guy act.

  “Hold on there, Johnny. Just hold on a minute,” said Giles soothingly. His voice was sober. He stood up from his chair. “First off, Johnny…” He approached his hired man. “That’s just not done here at my place. Maybe in whatever rat hole your mama hatched you in. But this is my”—he spread his arms wide—“kingdom. And the great and venerable Tyrus Rechs, who’s a thing of legend, has come here to do a deal with me, Giles Longfree, humble servant of House Tritan… who doesn’t let his guest be insulted.”

  The bounty hunter watched this little playlet unfold. Knowing something was up. Still, he was the only one with a blaster covering the room. So, he had a little advantage.

  “Never,” Giles came close to the hired blaster he was beginning to chastise, “ever… threaten Tyrus Rechs unless I want him dead. And I don’t. Do you understand that, Johnny?”

&n
bsp; Johnny lowered his head. Taking the chastisement.

  “Now turn around and go get yourself a beer from the bar and just settle down, son.”

  Obediently, Johnny did.

  And Giles shot him in the back of the head. Just like that. Quick as a snake. Even Rechs, who was considered fast, was impressed. The crime boss had produced a small needle blaster from his sleeve and pulled the trigger in one swift motion.

  Johnny collapsed to the floor even as the whine of the sudden blaster shot was still fading across the old honky-tonk.

  “Sorry, Tyrus,” said Giles, turning and opening his hands expansively. The blaster still in one. “So… you really wanna go now?”

  Rechs nodded.

  “Okay boys,” Giles said, “we’re goin’ on a safari. Get the gear ready.”

  And then everyone was scrambling and Rechs was pretty sure he was walking into a trap. But this was the only way in without storming the city directly. And until he could pin down the location on the captured legionnaires… this was the way it had to be.

  20

  The “expedition,” as Giles Longfree kept calling it, was ready within the hour. Outside the bar everyone was loaded and ready for what looked like a fight. Giles called out the order of march.

  “Sake, you and Koko are on point.” He turned to Rechs, who stood beside him, and whispered, “They’re good men. Expendable.”

  Giles raised his voice once more. “Crosstree and Viper, you follow thirty behind and let me know when we get to the stairs down to the main foundry. The rest of you follow behind me and Tyrus Rechs. We get into a fight, hold position until I give the orders to flank those screaming monkey bastards. Roger?”

  He turned to Rechs again. “Wild tribe of feral moktaar down there. Been breeding like rats since the shipyards closed down and they turned off the foundry. They went completely savage. Them and a couple of other things. If we reach the other side without any encounters, then I’d say we’re in the clear until we get to the Watcher.”

  Rechs had no idea what any of this meant, but soon the company of fourteen—two were staying behind—set out for the back of the darkened shopping arcade. Many of the men were carrying actual torches, flames guttering and held aloft. Rechs threw a filter up inside his HUD that accounted for their haphazard lighting and gave him a good visual picture of his surroundings.

  They arrived at an old blast door whose seals and safety locks had long since been disabled. New mechanisms had been jury-rigged and installed. And it looked like Giles was the one controlling access. One of his lieutenants, a squirrelly lizard race Rechs failed to identify, darted forward and bent to the data seals that controlled the locks.

  While the lizard worked, constantly shifting the over-large blaster to his back as it kept slipping down in front of his workspace, Giles began to question Rechs.

  “Sooooo… that bounty still out on you… or did you clean that up? Last time I heard it was ten million untaxed? And listen… I’m just getting this out in the open, so you don’t think I know about it and am setting you up for the old double cross. Understand, Tyrus? I’ve found it’s best to just go ahead and get the obvious out in the open. Prevents misunderstandings down the line. Know what I mean?”

  Rechs was pretty sure he was going to get double-crossed. But that was part and parcel of being a bounty hunter. Sometimes you had to work with the locals, and the less desirable ones at that, to get to your target. They knew the planet you’d just shown up on better than you did. And fifty percent of the time they thought they could just shoot you in the back and somehow collect on both ends while selling your gear off and stripping your ship for bonus profits. That they visualized this plan without ever taking into account that hired killers are well aware of this kind of thing never failed to surprise Tyrus Rechs. Who did they think they were trying to rip off?

  “Just wanted to let you know that, Tyrus,” continued Giles. “Just so we can trust each other going forward. Because we are going to get into some really hairy stuff down here, man. I mean like, really hairy.”

  The blast doors hissed open on a rusty note of long disuse.

  Giles Longfree laughed and pulled out a small oxygen purifier with a bottle attached. He held up his hand that everyone should wait. With the other hand he dialed a small knob on the purifier and opened the contents of the bottle into the mask. He inhaled deeply and then shut it off as he began to cough.

  “Purified jade lotus mist,” he sputtered at Tyrus. “My medicine,” he croaked after another fit had subsided.

  He stowed the mask and bid the forward scouts to enter the passage beyond the old blast door. Paces were counted off and the next group started through into the darkness beyond. After a moment, Giles stepped through as well, looking around at the dust and cobwebs to make sure none of it got on what he apparently considered to be a finely cut suit.

  Rechs followed, and so did eight other hired blasters strapping all the heavy weaponry they could.

  They proceeded down a long maintenance access shaft for some time before arriving at a massive cavern. Rechs’s armor imaged the vast space. They were ten stories above a main floor and down there, like some vast model city, lay the foundry works that had once manufactured the hull plating for the battleships Detron produced for the galaxy. But to get down there they had to descend ten stories of badly maintained stairs clinging tenuously to a support pylon that jutted out from the side of the cavern.

  It was here Giles began to tell the tale of this place between long sucks of the jade lotus mist that filled his mask. His voice was animated and his cadence that of a bad Shakespearean performer.

  “See, Tyrus… this was a whole city down here. And before everything went belly-up, this was the heart of Detron, the jewel of the shipyards. This was the heart of darkness of the whole place… where the war machines were made that all those legionnaires rode out there on the tip of the spear thrust into the Savage foe. Fightin’ Savages like some latter-day Achilles.”

  Inhale and then coughing.

  “The other side of this place is a big old underground cistern and someone…”—inhale—“a long time ago when everything began to die on Detron… they left something in the water and it just got all big and weird. I think. That’s my guess what the Watcher is. The Watcher in the Water. Or maybe…”

  Another inhale. They were halfway down the rickety stairs of the ten-story support pylon.

  “Maybe it was always there, Tyrus. Deep in the vast underground oceans on every world we never get into. You ever think about that, Tyrus? We know so little about these planets and we just camp out on top of them for a season. But way down there… there’s creatures in the water. Been there for a long time and no one knows how long. I think about that.”

  He inhaled from his mask again and began to cough violently. This had happened before, and each time he’d waved Tyrus forward while he stopped to catch his breath, occasionally lighting a cigarette and saying something like, “Oh man… that’s real nice.” His whiny bandsaw voice was the only sound that could be heard out over the vast abyss of the abandoned foundry works once you’d factored out everyone’s cautious bootsteps down the perilous stairs that twisted their way around the support pylon.

  Rechs went down another flight and stepped onto a landing. A loud pop echoed through the darkness. Then a trap door that comprised the entirety of the landing gave way, and Rechs fell fast down to the next level.

  Which, as it rapidly loomed up to meet him, was clearly a cage.

  Big, metallic tanks instantly began to jet bright orange gas from all four sides.

  It was a bad trap. But it still would have meant death or capture for anyone who didn’t happen to have jump-jet-capable armor.

  Rechs flared his jump jets at the last second, giving him a soft landing. He wasn’t concerned about the surging poisonous vapor filling the space around him like jet engines spoo
ling up sudden contrails on a cold day at high altitude. The sealed armor easily handled toxic gases.

  “Dammit!” he heard Giles Longfree exclaim from above. “I forgot about the jump jets. All rrrright, boys…” he said matter-of-factly. “Blast him!”

  And then the mobster darted back up the stairs.

  The four shooters who had led the way and stepped past the trap were now back at the mouth of the trap door. One of them tried a quick shot with a blaster. Its green bolt lanced out and struck ancient iron, exploding in a shower of fire and sparks.

  Rechs fired his jets and rocketed up out of the trap door. He heard the eight shooters above hustling down the stairs to get a shot on him, convinced they had the advantage in numbers and firepower.

  What happened next was a bloodbath.

  Rechs landed just beside the trap door and swung his pump-action scatterblaster at the four hired blasters still looking for him down in the cage, so fast had his ascent been. The powerful blast tore through the one closest and blew half a face off the two men standing behind. Rechs gave a forceful kick to the fourth man, sending him tumbling down into the darkness.

  Wasting no time, he turned to engage the thugs coming down from above. Racking another charge pack, he hugged the wall of the curving pylon just below the next landing. The two that came down first were following medium blasters and immediately locked front sights on their dead friends bleeding on the landing. One of them, the little lizard, led the other, a human in dirty combat leathers.

  Rechs shot the human in the belly and didn’t wait for the guy to realize he was dead. An instant later he jackhammered his combat boot into the lizard’s pot belly and sent him sprawling for the rail and the fall below. The lizard discharged his weapon as he stumbled and another green blaster bolt raced off, creating a dying comet as it streaked away into the darkness of the cavern. But the little lizard man didn’t go over the rail, instead bouncing off it, its prehensile tail trying to grab on to a support.