Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

  “What’re you doing?” she shouted, struggling against this unforeseen turn of events.

  Rechs fired using targeting assist and landed the powerful slug right in the guy’s brain pan. Eyes crossed as the back and top of the skull came off and painted the graffiti-laden wall behind him.

  The half-naked girl slithered out of his grasp and streaked for her clothes near a mattress on the floor. Crying.

  “Stay here. Don’t leave the room,” Rechs ordered, then re-entered the narrow hall, shooting. Immediately he took a hammer-blow blaster bolt right in the left pauldron. As the bolt exploded across his chest, the armor ablated much of the impact, but the tremendous kinetic force still knocked that side of Rechs’s body back and down. It felt like he’d been hit by a waterfall of fire.

  Leading with his right side, following the sight of the hand cannon down the dark hallway that led into the interior of Basement Six, Rechs closed. The shooter ducked into a doorway farther down the hall.

  The bounty hunter sent a hail of bullets across the wall and doorframe to keep his enemy back, then shifted the sight picture over to another shooter who’d popped out from another doorway on the opposite side of the hall.

  Firing in bursts now, Rechs sent three slugs toward the man and tore him to shreds in a sudden fury of bullet impacts. The first shot hit the shoulder, destroying it in a spray of bone and matter, and the next two shots tore out the throat and blew off the side of the man’s face starting at the outside orbital socket. The guy ducked back, shrieking in pain, and Rechs aimed for that section of wall and sent another burst of gunfire at it. The bullets ripped through, and Rechs was rewarded with the sound of a morbid, final scream.

  Rechs surged forward and threw himself against the wall facing the door the first shooter had popped out of. He saw the guy fumbling for a charge pack and sent a barely aimed burst of fire into his gut. The killer collapsed backward, and Rechs put a single shot into the pro’s head as he hit the debris-littered floor. Just to make sure the job was done.

  Fire came at Rechs from the way he’d just come. They were pushing at him from behind. One of them lobbed a grenade, which bounced against a baseboard and then spun, wobbling in place. Rechs pushed off from the wall and dove into the room he’d just fired into.

  The grenade went off a second later out in the hall, sending ceiling material down across the room. Dust and smoke bloomed through the doorway, but the HUD auto-switched over to IR once it sensed the light refraction diminishing within his field of view as the air became strangled with dust.

  Moving back into the hallway, using the dust for cover, Rechs laid down burst fire in short staccato eruptions from the hand cannon’s smoking barrel. Anyone caught flatfooted out there would be dead. Anyone not yet attempting to follow shouldn’t be too eager to take up the pursuit.

  They weren’t. Probably didn’t believe in this cause enough to go tramping blind into the kill zone. And that made them smart. If Rechs had to bet, he’d bet they were trying to pin him down here while they got their boss, Rattclopp, to the preplanned escape route.

  As Rechs ran down the hall, he picked up on something out of the ordinary: a security door with some pretty good locking mechanism recently installed. Its high-tech nature didn’t match the surroundings.

  He kicked the lock in with the strength of his armor.

  The room was empty, but by the opposite wall stood a wire-mesh pen. This was where they’d most likely kept the leejes and the marine.

  It meant he was on the right trail.

  Enhanced audio detection picked up the sound of a speedlift off to his right, deeper in the shadowy maze. It sounded heavy-duty. Like something capable of lifting a vehicle up from a subterranean garage and onto the main streets.

  Rechs raced toward the sound, burst through a door, and found an empty garage on the other side. The sound hadn’t been a lift; it had been a blast door opening in the ceiling above. Rechs heard the telltale whine of repulsors and an engine throttling up somewhere beyond the gap.

  Without thinking, he fired his jump jet and rocketed up through the opening, rising up into a small courtyard girded by tall apartment buildings. The area had once been some kind of contrived small reflection park within the cityscape. Now it was overgrown, and the Soshies, or one of the gangs, had installed a blast door and escape route from the old maintenance tunnels they were using as a headquarters within this district.

  A tricked-out sled car, something that had been high-end luxury back on Utopion ten years ago and now looked like something a pimp might drive, roared off over the overgrown grass. Rechs shot at it, but it was sufficiently armored that even his rounds did no damage.

  He gave chase, running after it as fast as he could.

  36

  Rechs quickly fell behind the driver who, once he’d cleared the courtyard, slammed his foot on the accelerator and carried the sled off down a narrow street. At the same time, other vehicles converged on the escape route’s entrance, seeking to cut Rechs out of the chase. An impromptu firefight broke out as Rechs filled the driver’s cab of the first vehicle to arrive, a slick sport utility sled, with bullets. Both of the pros up front were killed.

  Two other sleds entered the courtyard from opposite streets, part of a three-team response to what Rechs imagined the pro Soshie network was calling “the situation at Basement Six.”

  Rechs sent powerful fifty-caliber rounds into one of the sleds, spider-webbing the safety glass and blowing giant volcano holes inward on both driver and wingman. Still on his feet, the bounty hunter circled the sled, using it for cover as more vehicles came in hot, braking hard on repulsors and sending up a skirl of debris and hot wind.

  A brief exchange of blaster bolts and return gunfire echoed out across the empty street. This area was too far away from the riots to have many passersby, and the locals had been keeping their heads down ever since the trouble started.

  Rechs opened a comm link to the Obsidian Crow as he crouched behind the blaster-riddled sled. The day was reaching the zenith of its heat, and despite the armor’s best efforts to keep Rechs cool, he was sweating buckets and breathing hard. The thing’s climate controls were at times as temperamental as its shields.

  There had been a lot of action already in the short space of a few minutes. Shooting and getting shot at. And now he was losing his target.

  “Here,” said Lyra. “Are you okay, Tyrus?”

  “Launch the observation bot out the hangar bay door. Send it to my loc and tell it to sweep the streets for this vehicle.”

  He sent his bucket’s feed capture of the escape sled over to Lyra.

  “On it, Tyrus. Are you—”

  Rechs cut the feed. He popped up and shot a target of opportunity in the torso. He was facing at least four of them, and the first one to get it had made the mistake of using a sled door for cover. Fifty-caliber rounds—moving fast and heavy from the depleted uranium—didn’t mind civilian doors in the least. The shot man twisted, screaming wordlessly, and fell to the hot pavement as his blaster skittered under the sled.

  More sleds were inbound. They were trying to tie him up here. To waste his time so the lead sled could escape.

  Rechs abandoned the firefight and ran for the nearest alley, firing on full auto to keep their heads down as he departed. When he reached the cool shadows of the alley he kept running, arms and legs pumping, even using the weight of the pistol to pull him ahead just a little bit farther with each stride.

  He doglegged into a side alley and threw himself against a crumbling duracrete wall. Several two-headed rats, local to the planet, chittered at Rechs and backed off into the darkness. They’d been feeding on the body of a dead drunk, or homeless person, who’d built their camp here.

  Rechs hydrated and listened to the helmet’s enhanced sound detection. He could hear more sleds coming in fast back at the courtyard, but no one was in a hurry to head do
wn the alley and catch him.

  “Rechs!” It was Lyra breaking through his comm. “Drone overhead your area in thirty seconds. Also, G232 has something to tell you.”

  Rechs told the armor to dose him with some staminex and adrenapro. A dangerous combo that could peg out his heart. But he was out of juice. After two firefights that included almost getting blown to bits by a grenade, and then a foot chase… he was fading.

  He didn’t like it, but that was the way it was.

  At least the beatdown in the common room had gone easily. He’d barely broken a sweat with the Soshie kids.

  “Ah… yes… master—oh no, right,” began G232. “You don’t want me to call you that. Captain Rechs… it seems someone has contacted the local authorities and put out a… ‘BOLO’ associated with your name. Tyrus Rechs. That’s what pricked up my auditory sensors while listening in on the local authority comm traffic. I take it you know what that means, master—I mean, Captain?”

  “Yeah,” gasped Rechs as the drugs hit and he gulped more hydration. “It means they know I’m here.”

  “You appear to be in trouble, Captain. I’m sorry if that’s an understatement. My human interface functions don’t always detect well over communication devices.”

  “Drone’s on station and searching, Tyrus,” interrupted Lyra.

  Rechs waited. The expensive drone system was military and designed to detect terrorist threats within a population of up to one million. Its scanning and identification software had cost Rechs a small fortune and so he didn’t care to deploy it unless he absolutely had to. With almost zero stealth capabilities, it was incredibly susceptible to ground fire and detection—a design flaw the House of Reason hadn’t bothered to address when they’d ordered several hundred.

  “Tracking the sled three blocks west of your position, Tyrus. It’s stopped. Blocked by a crowd. Feeding you telemetry now.” Lyra’s computer voice sounded urgent, and he could tell she was more than a little worried about him. She always was. But he didn’t correct her. Or get angry with her like many did with their ship’s AIs. Some said it was the best way for them to learn. Negative feedback. But metaphorically, she was still a child. And Rechs didn’t get mad at children. Not that he’d met many. And Lyra was based on someone who’d once cared for him. And whom he’d…

  …yeah.

  “They’re turning around, Tyrus. Predictive algorithms indicate that detour back to their original route will require them to pass less than a block from your current position. You can intercept here.”

  A digital pinpoint appeared on the map in Rechs’s HUD.

  The drugs he’d injected were taking effect. The bounty hunter wasn’t ready for a marathon, but he could move, and the ache in his legs and body had all but disappeared. He shoved himself away from the wall and began to run. The tac bag was secured but still banged into his back and side as he ran, acting like a drag as he tried to make the rendezvous with a bare minimum of seconds to spare. And trying to come up with a plan once he did.

  He ran for the opening onto the main street when audio detection picked up the approaching escape sled that he was certain Rattclopp was aboard. It was howling, its engine screaming at full as it raced away from the mob that had blocked its escape route. It turned onto his street a mere ten meters away.

  With no thought to the precious remaining jump juice, Rechs kicked the thrusters in while holstering his sidearm. He rocketed toward the vehicle, barely grabbing the rear passenger compartment as it roared along the street.

  The wheelman felt the added weight, checked his side mirrors, and saw the bounty hunter death-gripping his vehicle. He swerved toward an upcoming abutment along the street and tried to scrape Rechs off.

  Rechs pulled himself atop the speeding vehicle just before it slammed against the abutment, its scraping side sending sparks behind them. The impact at speed sent him over the other side of the vehicle just as a spray of automatic blaster fire, wild and unaimed, erupted through the roof of the sled.

  Instantly the sled was swerving across the road, intending to drag him against the building on the opposite side. Rechs had no choice but to hang on, forced to see if his luck would hold.

  Blaster fire in high-cycle mode smashed through the window just above his head and flung itself out into the hot air amid a spray of melted plastic and shattered glass. Rechs’s strength-augmented hands made grooves in the vehicle as he slid down to the passenger stepboard, like he’d dragged his fingers through moist sand.

  Rechs couldn’t see what was about to happen but he had a pretty good idea it wouldn’t be good if he stuck around in his current position much longer. He activated the magnetic grapples on his boots and gloves and climbed underneath the sled. A second later the vehicle slammed into a building farther along the street.

  The repulsors whooshed and roared around him, and Rechs made himself as small as possible, knowing that if he got between the powerful repulsors and the street they managed to keep a five-ton sled floating above, there was every chance he’d be flattened.

  The driver mashed the accelerator and gunned it forward. Weight, load, and drag told him he still had someone attached. Both side mirrors told him where the hitchhiker was not.

  And if Rechs wasn’t walking around on the rooftop through which someone inside the vehicle was shooting with frenetic abandon, then he was clearly hanging from the bottom.

  And there was an easy way to get rid of anyone down there.

  The driver gunned the engines and steered toward an obstacle ahead that would do the trick of knocking Rechs off.

  Hanging on with both feet and one gauntlet, Rechs pulled an EMP grenade off his belt, slammed it into the undercarriage with some effort, and thumbed the activation flip. Then he dropped from the bottom of the sled and rolled along the hot surface of the quiet street as the sled sped away.

  As he’d fallen, the sled’s powerful repulsors had passed over Rechs, causing a warning to flash inside his HUD that his armor integrity was in danger of being compromised. But the vehicle had passed over quickly, and other than a battered numbness in his legs, Rechs felt all right. No broken bones or dislocations from the repulsor buffeting he’d just taken.

  Four seconds later the EMP grenade went off and shorted out everything in the vehicle. Engines, instruments, and repulsors. The sled crashed down onto the street and went sliding, turning over halfway down the block and coming to rest on its side.

  Rechs got to his boots and shook his head. He was starting to feel dizzy. Either from the drugs or from the roll across the street. Or maybe he’d knocked his head against his bucket a few too many times.

  “Tyrus!” It was Lyra again. Her voice distant and tinny across the comm. The bounty hunter stumbled toward the wrecked sled lying down the street. “Tyrus, are you okay? I’ve been listening over your comm. It sounds like—”

  “I’m fine,” Rechs cut in, moving toward the sled as the driver climbed out and stood on the overturned vehicle before stupidly pulling a blaster. Rechs fired once and blew the guy off the top of the sled.

  Orders must’ve been to protect the guy inside at all costs, thought Rechs. Likelihood of Rattclopp being in there… pretty high.

  “Okay…” said Lyra hesitantly, like she didn’t believe him when he said he was fine.

  The AI began to tell Rechs something, but his ears were ringing so badly at that point that he couldn’t make it out. Couldn’t focus.

  No… it wasn’t his ears.

  His armor hadn’t had the time to protect itself completely against the effects of the EMP. It was still booting. He was dragging it forward under his own power. He’d barely noticed and was now glad for those hard training sessions where he worked in it unpowered.

  Times like this happened sometimes.

  He reached the sled.

  “Tyrus, the marines took out your drone. Didn’t recognize the signature a
nd since it’s a no-fly zone…”

  The armor finished booting and came back online.

  Rechs pushed the sled over to its upright position. Someone inside whined at being hurt. Started screaming that whoever was responsible didn’t know who they were messing with.

  Enhanced audio detection picked up the depression of a blaster trigger clicking on an empty charge pack.

  “You come in here and I’ll shoot,” whined the man inside.

  “No you won’t,” said Rechs tiredly. He ripped off the sled door, reached inside, and dragged Rattclopp out. Or if he wasn’t Rattclopp, he certainly should’ve been named so based on his features.

  He was human.

  But he looked like a sweaty, fat, rat.

  And there was real fear in his eyes.

  37

  They dragged her back through the door to the holding cell and left her in a heap. For a long while she just lay there, shuddering. Panting. Gasping when she moved in the slightest.

  Yeah, they’d gone to work on her. And they didn’t ease up until she started talking. Telling them everything she wasn’t supposed to.

  “You a-a-alll r-right?” stuttered Lopez.

  He was doped to the gills. She’d traded everything she knew about the command structure on Detron just for that. Painkillers for the leej and a little more medicine to treat his burns and open wounds. They wouldn’t give her more skinpacks, though. And that’s what she really needed.

  But in answer to Lopez’s question, she wasn’t all right. They’d been terrible to her. But she’d held out, not giving them the satisfaction of an answer. Not at first. Not even when her interrogator pulled one of her teeth with a pair of pliers after straddling her as she was strapped to the chair.

  But then they threatened to make sure Lopez didn’t get his next round of pain meds. They told her how bad that would be, because he would be in a lot more pain than he already was.