Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

This won’t end well was an understatement. So, the general didn’t bother saying it. Everyone in the MTOC was thinking it all the same.

  “Tell Colonel Summers to get an entire battalion over to the Legion barracks and put all of them under guard. And tell him to ask them to wait for me to speak with them before they do exactly what I’d do right about now.”

  The aide dashed off into the MTOC darkness, sure he was on the most urgent mission of his life. Because he was.

  25

  The trail led deeper and deeper into Detron. Baldur had picked up the scent again after losing it near the initial exfil where Shaker and the new kid, Beers, had been taken off in a technical sled. It had been hard to figure out the trails.

  The dog had also told Puncher that one of the legionnaires had died in the firefight in the alley courtyard.

  “How do you know?” he’d asked as they knelt down near dried blood that was still sticky to the touch.

  Smells dead, the dog replied.

  Puncher knew the dog was right. Legionnaires had their vitals read constantly by their armor. Made it easier for medics, corpsmen, and med bots to triage when things went south. And the word was already out that two of them died on the scene. They all knew it.

  Puncher’s gloved hand, which had been touching the blood with one index finger, involuntary made a fist and rested in the blood. He was kneeling, head down, and for a moment all he could see, as the world faded away, was the blood beneath his eyes. He didn’t know whose it was. But someone was dead. Not missing, but dead. No more hope.

  Sorry, thought the dog. Then came in and nudged the legionnaire’s bucket with his muzzle. Come. More scents. Let’s go now.

  Puncher stayed shaking with rage. He promised to kill them all.

  Come. Let’s go. Some alive. More important. All your pack not dead. More to find.

  Later they found the scents of the marine and probably Shaker and Beers. Theirs were the last two vital transponders reading active. But then they found another scent. Off in another direction away from the ambush in the alley.

  They followed it, and halfway down a street in an abandoned warehouse section of the crumbling city the dog just stopped. Turned for a moment on its tail, circling and searching, nose to the ground… and then finally began to whimper. Crooning the same way it had when it knew the legionnaire was dead in the alley courtyard.

  Puncher, hunched over and trying to look homeless for the sake of the few bands of Soshies that passed, knew something was up. Something not good. The SAB was killing his back.

  But he didn’t mind. So it didn’t matter.

  This one died here.

  “Here?” asked Puncher incredulously. He turned and scanned the cracked and dirty sidewalk. “Are you sure, Baldur?” His voice was suddenly desperate because he didn’t want the dog to be sure. He wanted doubt.

  The dog nodded once.

  Sometimes doubt was the only faith you had left. And now there was none.

  Baldur sat respectfully on his haunches. Watching the legionnaire scan the ground and try to find some sign that one of his own, a brother legionnaire, had shoved off right here. But there was nothing. No blood. No body. Nothing to indicate violence had been done. That life had been lost. A story ended here.

  “How?” he asked, his voice raspy and dry. He needed to stop. He needed water. But he had to keep searching because there wasn’t much time left. Every second wasted was a second those who still lived were running out of.

  Don’t know, thought the dog. Just… know.

  Hours later they picked up the trail of Lopez and Beers, after going back and starting from square one in the alley courtyard.

  Baldur worked hard, and it was Puncher who eventually had to stop and make them both drink. He pulled out the dog’s special bowl, a shiny, collapsible one, and poured some water into it. They drank in the shade of an old dead tree in a lifeless and beaten park where the homeless lived like nomads, unbothered by the destruction of the city. That day, yesterday, was hot. They drank, and in time they found the first site. The first place the Soshies had taken the two legionnaires and the marine to.

  There was no one there now. The whole place was abandoned and dark.

  Baldur worked the warren of rooms and corridors until they found the makeshift holding pen.

  “Still alive when they left?” asked Puncher, standing there in the dark, SAB unlimbered and ready to light up any intruders.

  They were, thought the dog. When they were here. But now gone.

  “Gone,” echoed Puncher. “Still find?”

  It occurred to the leej that he was modeling his speech patterns after Baldur’s simple prose.

  Can, thought the dog. Can find.

  And that night he followed the dog from place to place until they were both so tired they just lay down in a dark alley. The legionnaire took out a canister of repellent and put it down in a wide semicircle of spray around them. It would smell like piss and the stench of the long-term homeless. The Soshies wouldn’t want to get involved in that.

  Don’t like, thought Baldur of the protective scent barrier as he lay down next to the legionnaire in the dark of the alley. The old dirty poncho covered them both for warmth as the moons went down and the air got cold.

  “I know,” said Puncher. “Sorry.”

  There was a long silence. Baldur shifted.

  Bad days for your pack. I’m sorry.

  Puncher patted the dog.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. And then lay there listening to the dog fall asleep, thinking of the people waiting out there in the galaxy for a good word that would never come. In time he fell asleep. But only for a little while.

  26

  Rechs knew something was wrong when his head began to split. The monkey screeching, now echoing off all the walls of the immense chamber that encased the underground lake, rose to a high-pitched choral screaming of the damned. Even the moktaar pawed at their monkey skulls as if they felt their own heads splitting.

  And despite all that, the enraged monkey-men came at him, leaping across the void of the broken span where once a rail system had crossed the vast underground lake. Rechs stumbled away, firing the scatterblaster to keep the closest back.

  Above the din of screaming and the cacophonic blasts of his weapon he heard the mad shaman moktaar laughing insanely. The sound echoed out across the lake and, impossibly, in his mind. Chanting moktaar words of madness down here in the lost world beneath Detron.

  Psionics, Rechs thought.

  He’d encountered them before. Deep in some of the darkest recesses of the galaxy. Mental powers that affected reality. Even influenced space-time. The stuff of bad parlor tricks made frighteningly real. Levitation. Pyrokinesis. Bent spanners. Worse. It was rare, and the main parts of the galaxy thought it only existed in the entertainments. But those who’d studied it knew it lay out there, deep and hidden in the forgotten ruins of the galaxy.

  Hidden why? Hidden because it frightened people. And because it was power, and power had to be protected.

  Hidden deep because whatever form it took, of all the forms Rechs had seen it take, that’s where it was safest. Hidden like some spider that waited for things to fall into its web.

  From his vantage point atop the shattered bridge Rechs saw a large shape moving out there in the water. Something massive just beneath the surface. It had the tail of a fish. And the face and torso of a woman. He saw it just for an instant as it leapt up out of the water, arcing over the surface and then diving back into the depths. Its sudden appearance had seemed unreal.

  Except… maybe that wasn’t totally what had just happened. Rechs’s mind wondered at the thing. Maybe it wanted him to see something it thought he might like to see. His mind had seen a beautiful mermaid with beautiful red hair the color of fall. A porcelain face and blue, otherworldly eyes. Like the eyes of those who in
gested the fabled blue lotus. Life-eaters, they were called out on the fringes of the edge, which was the only place you could find the powerful stuff. On the most off-the-beaten-track worlds where the starliner companies didn’t put in and one was likely to find shipwrecked crews several generations old. All of them “spiced to the gills”—another thing they liked to say out there on the edge.

  And it was true. Eat enough blue lotus and the galaxy got strange. Rechs had once gone out there looking for someone and found only the trail of a ghost that had been gone for years. Maybe. Maybe he’d seen the Dark Wanderer there once in several lifetimes of looking for that strange being. But that was long ago when he and Casper…

  … and Reina.

  They’d gone out there… looking for the Dark Wanderer and finding something equally troubling. But that was a long time ago.

  And Rechs didn’t see why he would consider it now except…

  His mind was under attack. Old memories were being trawled and knotted into a net in which he could become lost. The thing in the water…

  The mermaid… because that’s what it was… had looked like Reina. At least the top of her had. The woman he’d once known and loved. Calling to him.

  That’s impossible, he told himself as he felt his mind get tangled up in his own memories. Lost in dormant emotions. Impossible because Reina had disappeared a long time ago. Well before Casper. Which was why…

  His mind wasn’t working too well. That was for sure. Seemed an obvious statement but one he had to begin with. Like starting a problem you couldn’t solve all over again. Because you had to. His mind wasn’t working and he needed it to. Not to remember. To survive.

  Moktaar, fangs bared and claws reaching, came for him, leaping across the open span, hurling themselves off the edge.

  …hang out on the edge. Wait, Rechs.

  Rechs fired at point blank. At the last second. The blaster disintegrated the howling attacker with no room to spare. He shook his head to clear it.

  Get out of here, his mind roared.

  And all he could see was Reina beneath the waters of the dark underground lake. She’d looked at him, in that moment she’d leapt from the water, hanging between the dark sky of the cavern’s ceiling and the murky black abyss of the cistern. She’d looked at him and… smiled.

  A knowing smile.

  This is psionics, the distant sane part of his mind screamed. These are… His mind struggled to formulate what it knew was real and what was just some… mental illusion. Some slow poison designed to lure him to his death in the lake.

  The sudden splitting headache was the key.

  He’d had those before. Always in the presence of those otherworldly mind powers that were usually only whispered to be. And always in the worst of places.

  It’s a trick, this thing in the water. The Dreamer, the Sleeper, the Watcher. What did they call it? The Watcher in the Water. It’s a trick this thing does to feed. To fight. To survive.

  Even now Rechs wanted to walk to the side of the old mag rail he was stumbling along, trying to get farther away from the enraged moktaar still trying to get to him, and just drop over the side and swim down into the dark where Reina was waiting.

  He saw himself doing it.

  Saw himself fall and slide beneath the water.

  And then he went blind.

  Something slammed into his mind and blotted out his vision. Far away he could hear the shrieks of the maddened moktaar. Enraged and indignant at all the injustices of the galaxy. But he couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t see where he was. Or where they were. Just felt something blasting its way into his mind and there was nothing the armor could do to stop it.

  So why try?

  She swam up out of the darkness in his vision. And the darkness was the dark water of the underground lake he’d been running above. She swam up out of that and it was the same body he’d known long ago. Reina. The woman who’d rescued him and Casper from slavery long ago aboard a Savage lighthugger. The Obsidia. The woman he’d loved.

  The Dark Wanderer.

  Hang out on the edge. Wait.

  The water pulled and swirled her hair to become all that was known. Except Reina’s hair had always been black… and now it was red. Red the color of blood. Arterial-bleeding red. Dark and bloody.

  She smiled and he saw her vampire’s canines opening to…

  He felt himself stumbling toward her embrace in the waters below. Stumbling toward the edge of the track. Helpless to do anything other than let it happen.

  Tyrus Rechs knew that was wrong. Knew that would be the end of him if he did. Knew that once he took that last step he’d sink to the bottom of the old lake and find a sea of necrotic white corpses along its bottom in the bare shifting light down there. It would be like hell.

  Somehow this thing—whatever it was—had found the old lake and made its lair there in the long years after the foundry’s collapse. Or maybe it had always been there. Who could ever be sure about the unknowable?

  It was a feeding ground now. Part of the way things worked in the down below. Covenanted with the moktaar who knew to drive prey to it, and the smuggler Giles who needed to cross over it. Like some deal with a devil in the water.

  Helplessly Rechs felt himself bashing into the rail of the track, the thin barrier that maintenance crews would use to travel along. That passengers would walk when techs said the train they were taking home or to work wasn’t going to budge, and they’d have to get on a new train at the next station.

  I’m going in. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Which was a terrifying thought.

  He dropped the scattergun. Heard it from far away as it clattered against the duracrete of the old span.

  Fine, he thought.

  He shucked the tactical bag, and it slid easily off his shoulder and onto the surface of the bridge. Rechs felt it hit his boots as he started to climb over the rail.

  And then he was falling, pulling out his carbon-forged machete from off his back as he splashed into the dark waters below.

  Fine, he thought. If the thing wanted to play tricks with memory and mind to get him under the water where it would have the advantage, then…

  Here I am. Let’s play.

  27

  Syl Hamachi-Roi’s chartered star yacht, Star Mist, officially designated as a sanctioned courier for a member of the House of Reason, set down on the ceremonial landing platform of Detron’s old Government Council Building. It was the height of high-end luxury travel, and the landing pad it kissed was built during the grand days of the Republic to receive official dignitaries for commissioning ceremonies for the latest battleship, the landing pad was as visible within the government cluster as the playing field of a sports stadium.

  Repub Navy traffic control, mainly the admiral overseeing operations aboard the destroyer Castle, had been reluctant to let Star Mist enter Detron’s airspace, but both the pilot and the House of Reason member herself had dared the admiral to shoot “her ship” down if he didn’t like it. Seconds of inaction on the part of the navy had allowed Star Mist to drop below the atmosphere and assume an approach profile for Detron’s government sector and the ceremonial landing pad. Despite the military no-fly zone currently in effect.

  This was her big moment. Syl Hamachi-Roi and her handlers would not be denied.

  The recently-elected junior delegate had been a nobody mere months ago. She’d quickly risen to prominence in the entertainment and media streams by taking on the policies of the current leadership. She showed a gross ignorance of galactic history, but she’d tapped into a universal frustration many were having with respect to the government. And she’d artfully managed to suggest—without, of course, ever really saying it—that maybe the Mid-Core Rebellion had some legitimate grievances.

  Detron was her big moment to take the stage.

  Word from
the media was that Syl had a very good chance of becoming the next Orrin Kaar, a man considered a first among equals, capable of getting his will done in the House and Senate.

  But first… she needed a moment to shine.

  She needed to put it all on the line to show the masses of the galaxy that she could be the savior they so desperately needed, wanted, according to the media’s indefinable and ongoing crisis they never tired of talking about.

  The galaxy was never without trouble.

  Syl, and many others, were vying to be the answer to the galaxy’s problems.

  As the Star Mist set down, elegant and slender gears deployed from her mirror-polish underbelly and gases vented from twin deluxe nacelles that erupted aft of the central passenger deck. The crowd held its breath in anticipation. Within minutes nondescript but obvious security types masquerading as crew were securing the landing pad as more and more protestors gathered around the steps of the various government buildings to witness the spectacle.

  Elsewhere were the riots and ruin. Here was worship.

  This, for every protestor who’d thrown in with what was happening here on Detron, was a crowning achievement. To many, who felt their grievances were legitimate, this was victory. The House of Reason had failed. Or rather its leadership had failed. And now one of their own, a simple working girl from their side, one of the House’s most bright and shining new members, had come to their rescue.

  Syl Hamachi-Roi, surrounded by a cross-section of Republic citizenry who looked just like her, emerged from the ship and was led toward a sea of microphones and floating holocams. Some of the feeds went full-screen on the delegate; others kept her in a smaller window while continuing to show the body of the dead legionnaire being dragged through the streets and kicked at by a sea of masked “freedom fighters” who were apparently too preoccupied or just plain mean to be bothered with the historic event happening at the landing pad.

  “People of the galaxy!” began Syl, shouting to be heard over the swell and roar of the crowd. Her face shining. Her eyes beatific. She was even smiling at them. Willing them to hope in this darkest of times. Like some angelic messenger who would one day be a god among them.