Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

  “I hear you!” she pandered.

  The crowd roared like some bellowing beast from the elder ages, crying victory above the bloody carcass of its foe.

  28

  Rechs fell through a world of utter inky blackness. If there was light, or any shade of color down here beneath the surface of the underground lake, it was a deep, unclean ochre. A brown morass of obsidian gloom. He felt the presence of the psionic user down here in the darkness with him.

  His headache was gone. Meaning the thing had stopped lashing at his mental barriers. Now it was trying to manifest total control of his mind and body.

  It wasn’t a mermaid with the face and torso of his dead lover, Reina. It had merely pulled that from his memories, the strongest ones it could find. Those Rechs thought he’d buried so deep that even he’d forgotten them. The psionic monster had cobbled together a glimmer to entice him. A lure to entrap. A dream to capture. Its animal mind thinking only the basest of thoughts. Woman. Sex. Desire. Fantasy.

  Perhaps that appeal had worked hundreds or even thousands of times before. The broken and cracked bones of many alien species littered the silt-covered depths down here, like some apocalyptic graveyard long turned over in search of buried salvage. Yes, these dead indicated its enticements had done the trick before.

  Rechs could see that now, the ultra-beam from his helmet cutting through the brackish lake.

  When it came, it came as a fish. Almost like a wide-mouthed catfish, its blind white eyes rolling and milky. Its whiskers really tentacles that to Rechs somehow seemed to be the source of its horrible mental powers as they undulated and reached. How it came to be here, Rechs would never know. Maybe it was one of those rare species that had gone deep and hidden in the vast underground seas of almost every habitable world. Or maybe it had been brought, or found its way here, as a pet. Or even a predator looking for a new feeding ground.

  As it came close, its leathery scales brushed up against Rechs and pushed him down into a mass of silt and rotting bones.

  Rechs could feel its mind. It was an ancient mind, or so it told the bounty hunter, revealing to him its unpronounceable name that hurt to even think of. It claimed to have sailed across the Void of a Thousand Years to feed upon his soul.

  Then it swam off into the shadows of the depths, caressing him with promised death.

  Rechs could hear his own breathing within his helmet. It came fast and rapid. He wasn’t in the best fighting environment for a human. Underwater was worse to him than zero-gee. The two millennia he’d spent traveling through space had made him more adept in that sphere than he was underwater. Here it was like swimming through sucking gravy, the weight of his armor forcing him to move his limbs at absurd speeds just to gain locomotion.

  It was coming back. It had made its testing pass. It had tasted his mind. And it would have it, it screamed insanely, bellowing its message like some war cry on a forgotten world that had never known grace, mercy, or love. It was alien. In every sense of the word. It was animal in all the worst ways. Hunt, feed, procreate. But it was something… not more… but other.

  Rechs’s mind tried to slip off its keel, its anchors, or its understanding of what was possible and real, when it reached out for that… other.

  The bounty hunter pushed all that away as the thing in the lake, the dreaming Watcher that had come for his soul, rushed through the murk along the bottom for him. It was easily the size of a bullitar. And as its bass mouth opened wide, he could see the million needle-sharp points glistening from within the darkness beyond. A darkness blacker than the lightless depths down here. A blackness of other voids worse than the known.

  Rechs pushed off hard from the murk and got out of the way of its gaping mouth, trailing his machete as he did. Trailing it along the horrible thing’s scaly side.

  Blind milky eyes seemed to see him. It understood it had missed its prey. And fatally so.

  The razor-sharp carbon-forged edge of the blade drew a gaping slit along the corpulent, liver-spotted belly of the thing. A second later entrails and viscera bloomed into the black waters all around.

  Enraged that it had been offended thus, the beast whip-tailed around, surging through the water and coming right back at Rechs in a fury.

  In his mind, Rechs could hear its pain-filled roar and promise of torments unending. And there was nowhere and no direction for him to go. Not quickly enough, anyway. It had cost him everything just to avoid being bitten the first time.

  The thing came in fast and Rechs slammed both boots into the muddy bottom, looking for purchase and finding none as he pushed the blade into the gaping alien mouth and up into the thing’s skull where surely a brain must be.

  Hot orange light exploded across Rechs’s mind and he suddenly saw a world no human had ever known. A world of hot swamps and a red sun that burned like an eye in the sky. A world beyond the embrace of the galaxy.

  The Dreamer had eaten everything.

  The rivers and swamps were dead.

  Nothing moved. And even the waters were sluggish.

  This was its kingdom. Its home. And it had done this to every world it had visited. Taking control of the minds of explorers who’d trodden the star lanes long before humanity. Making them take it to new worlds to feed. To dream.

  “You’ve ruined me!” it screamed.

  And then…

  “Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  That cry seemed to go on forever. For so long that Rechs still felt he could hear its dying cry late at night when the ship was silent and lying in the shadow of some outer world where no one ever went. As though it had never ended. As though he were listening through a transom into oblivion.

  Rechs pushed hard and cut through the thing’s bony spine, making sure the job was done as gore and ichor surrounded him. He couldn’t see his blade, just felt its easy passage through flesh, muscle, and pulpy sacs that must be organs, then the bare resistance of bone for just a second as the sharpness of the blade driven by Savage armor never minded even that obstacle and continued on out the other side of the Dreamer from Beyond the Void.

  That was its name. The meaning of the unpronounceable word.

  Later…

  Later in the dark under the lake, Rechs switched over to sensors and mapping. He was close to the bridge.

  He turned and trudged off through the murky gloom toward a pylon, and began to climb. He wondered what all the moktaar up there would do when he emerged from the water. He was pretty sure they were still there. They’d been held in thrall by the monster that called itself a Dreamer.

  He pulled himself up to the surface of the railway bridge, water and muck streaming off his armor. Machete in hand. Daring them to come for him like some surrounded Savage warlord that wasn’t yet defeated.

  The moktaar were everywhere. All along the rails. Along the bridge. Watching with wide and silent eyes as he stumbled over to his abandoned tactical bag and scatterblaster. He kept the machete ready. But they just stared at him, not in a trance, but just watching. Like statues in the ruins. Like sleepers after the dream, unable to fully return from the grip of whatever deep hypnosis the creature had held them in.

  He shouldered the bag, stowed the machete, and continued across the bridge, scatterblaster ready, leaving them to the dark and silence of the aftermath beneath the lake.

  The transit station up to the surface lay on the other side of the bridge’s vast span. Rechs turned one last time and saw the beady glint of every moktaar’s eyes watching him in the distance, and then stepped into the lift that could take him up-station. It took only a moment to hack Giles’s rudimentary lock he’d set as security.

  The doors closed with him inside, and the lift started up toward the surface. Soft music from some lost easy-listening age played in the interior. Rechs reached into the tactical bag and pushed more charge packs into the scatterblaster.

  He’d co
nquered the threats Giles had forewarned of in the deep dark underneath. Everything left before him would be up top, in the city’s streets and decrepit buildings.

  The real fight was yet to begin.

  29

  The lift opened onto a graffiti-covered station hub where foundry workers had once gathered in tremendous numbers to head down into the works for their long shifts. The hub was essentially an amphitheater that opened up onto several main streets serving the downtown district, but it lacked architectural panache. Brutalist stacked platforms made the place look like an inverted pyramid where little joy ever took place, and bare concrete now served as beds for the few bums who slept here in their garbage palaces. The place reeked of bad urine, ripe feces, and unwashed bodies.

  After the collapse of the shipyards, Detron had tried to bill itself as a “People’s Paradise for the Galaxy,” if Rechs remembered the slogan correctly. They tried to show they could continue to thrive without industry and commerce and that by enhancing their own lives with every free thing they could vote for, they’d somehow rise to the top of the galaxy.

  It didn’t work.

  From above, on the streets above the transportation well, came the sounds of amplified speeches and the roar and swell of a distant and approving crowd. The words were lost as they bounced between buildings, arcades, and dark alleys. Drums and occasional horns blared out and rolled on without seeming accompaniment or meaning.

  Like some damned carnival, thought Rechs.

  Not a full-scale breakdown of societal order. More like a planetary Colonization Day festival from the way it all sounded. Celebrating its founding the same way every other world did. The one day of the year when everyone went nuts and lost their minds until the next workday. The reminder that they’d all, in some way, come from somewhere else to make it in someplace new. Or at least, distant relatives had.

  Rechs crossed the cracked and broken duracrete of the transportation hub, scatterblaster in a cradle carry across his chest plate, and climbed up the broken platform steps to street level.

  It was early morning and hot. Sweltering already. The powerful sun rose above impressive towers, each comprising at least a hundred wagon wheels, or orbital rings, stacked one on top of the other, launching themselves up into the smoke-laden skies. Some of these wheels even still turned, spinning about their axis as they’d been meant to long ago. Most were frozen by dirt and long neglect. Between them, high above, the city’s once-fabled system of monorails snaked through the towers like the dirty arteries of some cardiovascular system that hadn’t pumped blood in years. And down below, the streets were littered with burnt-out sleds, couches, and other things that had been dragged down from the buildings and set afire. Papers were scattered everywhere. Across the intersection from where Rechs stood, a body lay on the sidewalk. The poor soul’s blood had congealed and dried in a nearby gutter.

  Rechs bent over and picked up one of the papers lying loose on the street. It was a flyer. Many on the street had the same purple printing.

  The Galaxy Must Fundamentally Change for Us to Achieve the Dignity We Deserve, it announced.

  The message continued in the main body below. And that change begins here on Detron. Change the Government. Change the Galaxy. Be at the Noon Rally in Liberation Square (formerly Expedition One Heritage Park) to listen to Syl Hamachi-Roi speak her truths. Then be prepared to do whatever it takes.

  None of those on the streets, many of whom were wearing the red and black get-ups, paid any attention to Rechs in his full bounty hunter armor. In gaggles and clusters, heading in every direction, they laughed, talked, sang, or chanted, “Resist the status quo for the galaxy to grow.”

  Rechs let the gaudy flyer with poorly mixed fonts slip from his glove and flutter back down to the dirty street. None of this was Rechs’s business. They could burn down their own planet. He didn’t care.

  His only problem was finding the network that had snatched the two leejes and the marine. And the next step to accomplishing that was finding an operative for the other side. Probably a low-level player who was working the crowd on the ground. One who did what they were told and followed the lead of the mastermind who put it all together.

  Because there was always a mastermind. Few things were organic even if made to seem so. There was always someone looking to profit from the misery and outrage of others. Follow the money, his mother had liked to say. And she’d been right. And once he tagged an operative, he’d wait for them to connect with their network at the next level. So many connections would take him to wherever they were keeping their prisoners. He’d just have to work his way through it as fast as possible.

  Rechs headed toward the sound of the distant crowd, betting he could probably put eyes on someone who was connected enough to lead to someone else who led to someone else. And so on and so on. Eventually he’d flip the stone the legionnaires were being hidden under. But there was a problem. No doubt the public gatherings would be under drone surveillance by Repub authorities and military intel types watching the spectacle unfold and trying to tag the players. And while he was pretty sure he could evade the holocams constantly feeding images to the BOLO software that might identify him, there was always the chance he’d stand out. And that would make things more difficult.

  So he’d brought something for that.

  He got closer to the place where thronging masses of rioters, or resisters, or whatever they wanted to call themselves, had gathered, then ducked into a burnt-out bank that had already been plundered. Inside he found ruined stone counters, pulverized and laying in dusty sections in the lobby, charred furniture, and a vault door that had been pried open with what looked some heavy-duty construction equipment that was no longer on scene. The wealth had been redistributed by force. Or maybe it wasn’t the rioters. Perhaps one of the criminal cartels or gangs had taken advantage of the civil disobedience to go ahead and get some major-league thievery done.

  Again, not the bounty hunter’s concern. Rechs deployed his stealth cloak and set it to configure to the color of black that matched the resisters’ gear. He donned a red hood, pulling it over his bucket, then produced a can of nano-camo, set it to charcoal, and covered the front of his armor.

  The cloak would scramble electronic surveillance within the feed’s frame of the cloak.

  And… just in case there were actual human eyes also out there and watching… Rechs hoped red and black would let him pass by unnoticed among the swarms of disgruntled youths who seemed intent on playing dress-up to the hilt regardless of the contrived uniformity.

  Rechs left the burnt-out bank and moved a few streets closer to the rally. The crowds grew thicker. Thousands of kids chanted and shouted while some drank and smoked highly illegal lotus without care. Others raced tricked-out grav cycles through the streets, heedlessly forcing their fellow Soshies to keep clear as they roared up and down the city blocks, a hologame racetrack come to life. No store window remained intact. Every shop door was broken and bent. Looted goods had been used, perused, destroyed, and tossed into the street.

  Law enforcement services were nonexistent.

  Above all this the crowd shouted “We demand change now” as each speaker poured their platitudes into the rioters’ ears about “taking back what the galaxy owed” or “settin’ things up for the win!” The lingo was doled out in buffet-sized portions, and the crowd reacted with delight.

  Rechs entered what must have once been a posh downtown apartment tower. The entrance looked to have been the site of a fantastic blaster fight, probably to get inside past the private security. Power was out in the building, so the bounty hunter climbed up through the stairwells to the fourth level and found a ransacked apartment from which to watch the events on the main stage.

  From this vantage point he saw that the crowd was even bigger than he’d realized.

  The Soshies were packed in, a mass of revolutionary flesh pressing toward the
main stage where the speakers had been speaking their slogans. Now some musical act that couldn’t get through a sentence without breathlessly screaming profanities about the Legion and the House of Reason stomped and jumped around the stage, throwing smoke bombs out into the mass of seething, surging kids. The rock stars used denigrating slurs and vulgar invectives to refer to the wild rioters, who applauded them wildly, eating up every word as though it were some eternal-youth-giving honey.

  None of that interested Rechs. He watched the crowd like some high and silent unmoving gargoyle in cloaked rags and skin of armor, waiting for his target to appear.

  He spotted the operative within an hour. A mover. Or what the mobs and cartels, which were often the same kind of people behind these types of political movements, called “earners.”

  Rechs tagged the kid in his HUD.

  The hunt was on.

  30

  Hours of darkness had suddenly turned into a supernova. A searing hot burning bright white light stabbed Amanda right in the eyeballs. Men and women in masks shouting orders at one another stormed the room in a businesslike assault.

  No, these were definitely not the kids in black and red. The Soshies.

  These were the pros she had spotted and warned Marine Intel about. The ones mixing in with the rioting crowds. Seeking to make the most of a bad situation by turning it into something far worse.

  And here she was… in their clutches.

  Nice going, Manda.

  They dragged her to her feet and pulled her out of the room she and the legionnaires had been held in for the last few hours. She looked over her shoulder, fighting hard to as someone with a big hand worked to force her head forward. Even so, she still got a glimpse of Lopez. The other one, Beers, wasn’t there. He’d been moved to another location.

  Or maybe something worse.