Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

All because of her.

  So she told them. She traded. But not cheaply. Otherwise she wouldn’t have gotten as much as they’d given. Every second she could keep Lopez alive was a second closer he got to getting rescued.

  And then, Amanda, maybe that makes this mess worth it. Maybe you buy yourself some grace.

  Maybe.

  She lay there on the cold floor of the cell, panting. The torture was over, for now. Yeah, they might come back and try to get another pound of flesh out of her, but for now, just lying on the cold floor of the cell was like heaven. A kind of paradise where someone wasn’t punching, cutting, or hitting your pressure points with a hammer. The opposite of the unending moment of pain. It always seems endless when it arrives. Like it becomes the entire galaxy.

  And then there was the stunner. Or at least, that’s what it looked like. Except it didn’t incapacitate via shock charges. It just lit up the central nervous system like a grease fire and did something to her mind. She really believed it was going to go on forever and ever, never-ending.

  Like hell.

  Hell. The forever kind.

  And if that was what hell was really like… then she was cured of whatever might send her there. She wanted no part of something like that.

  So yeah, she talked.

  You always talked.

  She remembered the E-and-E instructors saying that. That it was just a matter of time. The trick was to give up as little as possible. Buy time, and maybe even trade for something valuable.

  Like painkillers, meds, and life.

  So she traded details on the Reaper program for more painkillers for Lopez. She gave them the command structure in exchange for an IV drip to hydrate the wounded and blaster-burned legionnaire. And she figured that was something they already knew anyway.

  A confession on the number of kills she had was traded for some form of protein, a meal, for Lopez. To keep him alive and with enough calories to get to the marine medevac that had to be at the end of this.

  She dreamed Kirk was out there, flying it, waiting for the dustoff loc.

  “Yeah,” she mumbled to herself through swollen lips. “Kirk will fly it.”

  Her ribs were busted. Her nose broken. Stuff that would eventually heal. But the memory of that living grease fire running across every nerve ending… she’d never forget that for the rest of her life. As long as she lived. It was like your entire body was subjected to the worst toothache imaginable while passing a kidney stone in the same moment. And covered in flaming oil burning and crisping your skin, melting your eyelids and lips. Ears too. Hearing yourself crackle.

  That’s what the little stunner had felt like.

  Not fun.

  “You…” Lopez began, and then paused. “You… all right, Marine?” he said slowly. Trying to articulate his words. He was clear enough to know they’d given him some heavy-duty painkillers. The food and hydration had helped too. When they’d dragged her out of here, he’d been pretty bad off. Now… better. But not by much.

  She, on the other hand, felt wrung out.

  “I said,” belted Lopez suddenly. NCO that he was. “You…” Then he began to cough. It sounded wet, and she knew there was blood in it.

  “I’m good,” she groaned, just to stop him. “I’m good, Sergeant.”

  She felt Lopez’s hand on her back. A weak tap that only managed to rise once and then land like a feather again. She had to fight hard not to cry. Because as bad off as he was, he was trying to comfort her.

  She tried to fight it, and…

  She lost.

  She lay there whimpering because of the pain and everything else. So softly he couldn’t hear her. Or so she hoped.

  “’S’okay, girl. We gonna… make it. Hang in there.”

  38

  Gussavo Rattclopp found himself on the gritty rooftop of one of the smaller buildings beneath the wagon-wheel towers that loomed up into the smoky skies of Detron. He’d passed out while the armored figure had dragged him from the high-end sport utility sled the Soshies were using as the official messenger service for the organizers.

  That’s what the pros called themselves.

  The organizers.

  As in, they made sure the long-brewing grievances of the galaxy turned into demonstrations, then resistance, and finally full-scale riots. The goal was civil war. But no one expected that on any of the planets they’d run their operations on.

  It was still too soon. Someday.

  The people weren’t awake yet.

  Now the organizer was coming around as Rechs began to slap him on the high rooftop. And when he came to his senses, it wasn’t a pretty picture.

  The armored thug had him hanging over the edge of the roof. By one armored glove.

  Rattclopp shrieked at the six-story drop beneath his suddenly windmilling boots, unable to pull his eyes away from the street below.

  “One chance,” said the man holding him. The voice coming from the helmet was the stuff of bad dreams and action thrillers.

  “Y-y-you a bounty hunter, man?” whined Rattclopp, trying to think of any way to get himself out of this. Words. Words were his weapons. Confusing people with them. Manipulating them. Hiding behind them sometimes. “’Cause I’ll tell you whatever you want to know r-r-right now. We-we got lotsa guys with bounties on-on th-their heads. I-I-I’ll give ’em up. Jes’ don’t dr-drop me, man!”

  He screamed again as though someone down on the streets would hear and come running to help.

  “The captured legionnaire and the marine,” asked the armored thug slowly. “Where are they?”

  The little rat man shrieked, not just because he was afraid of being dropped, but because that was the worst thing the stranger could have wanted to know. That was penalty-of-death stuff with the organizers at this critical juncture in the operation. You didn’t rise in the movement by violating the stuff you weren’t supposed to violate. There were always cut-outs. Sacrificial lambs that could be tossed to the hounds. But some things were just sacred. And location of the “props,” aka the prisoners, was one.

  “C-c-can’t!” he pleaded. “Can’t t-t-tell you that, man!”

  Rechs released Rattclopp and let him fall.

  Seconds later the bicycling little man hit the street. Most likely dead. Rechs didn’t care. He’d given the creep one chance.

  And he had the man’s datapad.

  It would take time to run the encryption hack. Time he wasn’t sure he had. Or rather… if the surviving legionnaire had. So he’d tried to get the man to talk. He hadn’t, and as Rechs didn’t have another interrogation kit, or the time it would take to break the guy down and get a straight answer, he went with another option. Didn’t work. Moving on.

  He left the roof and entered the stairwell access, pulling out a fiber-wire cable from his bucket. He connected it to Rattclopp’s device and ran the hack from his armor. Sitting down just inside the crumbling stairwell, he pulled off his bucket, took out a nutrition bar, took a bite, and chewed. Not angrily. But determinedly. He could feel a little wind blowing across the roof and into the stairwell. It felt nice.

  In his earpiece he got a comm chime from Lyra.

  “Tyrus, I have Gabriella standing by on hypercomm.”

  “Put her through.”

  The channel was filled by that otherworldly moan of hyperspace, so low many never even heard it. But if you spent enough time there, it was impossible to miss.

  “Rechs, it’s me, Gabi.”

  She’d used her familiar name. He couldn’t quite recall if she’d ever done that before. Maybe she was worried about him. But then, she’d called him Rechs instead of Tyrus. So…

  “How are you?” she asked.

  She meant after seeing the beheading stream. She knew him. Had seen enough files on him to know that in a lot of senses he wasn’t really a bounty hunter. He was a fu
gitive hiding under the protection of the Bronze Guild in a complicated game that powers and principalities played in the shadows.

  But in her short time working with Tyrus Rechs she’d stopped thinking of him in any of those terms. Bounty hunter. Fugitive. Traitor to the Republic.

  He was just Tyrus to her.

  Her friend?

  Someone she cared about?

  She got uncomfortable thinking about it.

  So she just accepted it.

  Maybe it’s because he needs a friend, she told herself one rainy afternoon in a tea shop waiting for someone. Maybe that’s your job too, Gabi.

  “I’m fine,” he replied.

  She paused for a second and then continued.

  “Okay. I hope you don’t mind but I’ve been doing some digging and… there’s some pretty shady stuff no one in the media is talking about. Granted, some of the stuff I have access to is not meant for public consumption, but anyone with half a brain should have put some of the more outer-ring connections in place. It’s like they’re willfully blind to—”

  “Digging into what?” interrupted Rechs before taking another bite of his nutrition bar. He was forcing himself to eat slowly. He tended to eat too fast. Right now his body was dying for carbohydrates, something to use as a fuel source. But he still had a lot more to do and he didn’t want to get sick in the middle of doing it.

  Nothing like throwing up during a firefight to get yourself good and shot.

  “Syl Hamachi-Roi. The politician who—”

  “Why her?”

  “Why her, what?”

  “Why are you looking into her?”

  “Tyrus, she gives a speech about taking the heads of those who oppose the will of the future and within the hour they cut the head off…” She trailed off.

  Rechs sensed something. He knew he was good at what he did. Killing. War. Weapons. But he was the first to admit he’d never been good at reading people. Women he’d known had pointed that out on their way somewhere else more than once. He’d had no choice but to agree with them. They were right. He wasn’t good at reading normal people. Killers. Assassins. Monsters. Yup.

  Most everyone else? Not so much.

  Women?

  Not at all.

  But it sounded like Gabriella was… taking the stream of the leej’s execution personally. A little too involved.

  Like you, Tyrus?

  He shook the thought away.

  It was odd for Gabriella to be poking around this stuff because as far as Rechs knew, she ran contract assignments for an organization that specialized, at least part of the time, in terminations. Assassinations. And she’d seemed pretty matter-of-fact about that in times past.

  Killers. Assassins. And monsters.

  Bounty hunters.

  So what was different about what had happened here? Why was she calling to tell him she was “digging”?

  You know, Tyrus. That’s how she fights. Information is her shield. And her sword. In that, you’re both the same. You just use different weapons.

  But why was this her fight?

  “Why her?” he asked again.

  Gabriella sighed, and it was clear, even to Rechs, that she was a little exasperated with him. But she was still professional. Or maybe she wasn’t. Again, he was not good at this part.

  “I think it was a signal, Rechs.”

  He noticed she didn’t call him Tyrus again.

  She let the sentence hang for a second because to her it was a pretty big stone to throw in the pond. A House of Reason delegate mixed up in the beheading of a legionnaire. That was tinfoil bucket conspiracy cuckoo tower stuff.

  Then she took a deep breath and continued.

  “I don’t think she’s there for all the reasons she’s telling everyone she’s there. To listen. To fact-find for the House of Reason. Yeah, from a political insider position, and I’ve got all the major networks weighing in on the streams, what she’s doing is blatantly politically opportunistic. As in, they think she sees a moment to push her career forward, using the disturbance for her own political gain. That’s what politicians do. But there’s more to this.”

  “How?”

  “Bear with me. I’m trying to get some more hard intel the Guild might have access to. It’s just that something didn’t sound right to me when she was speaking. The speech was too… I don’t know, set up. Too perfect. Ready to go. And she punched that last line too hard. I’m telling you, Tyrus. She was signaling them. She gave someone the go-ahead because the Soshies can’t break through the comms blockade the navy has in place.”

  Rechs chewed but didn’t speak. He waited for Gabriella to fill in her own void.

  “I know this sounds crazy, Tyrus, but what if she was the messenger sent in by the higher-ups who are most likely behind this whole mess to tell them to escalate it to the next level? To do something like… like…” She stumbled. “Like what they did?”

  She paused, and he wondered about her. Who was she really? Why did this affect her compared to all the really dark, jacked-up stuff the Bronze Guild dealt with on a daily basis?

  “She’s trying to light the galaxy on fire, Rechs. You’re not seeing the streams, but everyone is outraged. Everyone. At what the terrorists did, but also at what might be coming next. Everyone is worried the Legion is going to do something that will escalate the situation into a confrontation with the Republic itself… they’re talking about a repeat of the Sayed Massacre.”

  Rechs digested this. He didn’t think the Legion would go out onto the streets and start indiscriminately killing every citizen of Detron until the Republic showed up to stop them. And that wasn’t what had actually happened at Sayed anyway.

  He’d been at Sayed. But no one living knew the real story. Just the fiction the House of Reason had contrived to further their careers. And the lie the Legion had allowed to protect the galaxy from something it wasn’t ready for.

  “What’re you finding?” he asked quietly as he finished up the nutrition bar.

  “Dark stuff. On the surface she’s squeaky clean if you buy the advertising. Fresh out of the schools. Worked her way through. Champion of the downtrodden. Saying all the old things in a fresh exciting new way.”

  Sarcasm.

  “And?” he prompted.

  “When you start to look closer, you see she’s been financed heavily from the get-go. Finances that don’t come from anywhere obvious. Loans mysteriously paid off. Very expensive high-profile team suddenly in place at just the right moment. Media opportunities not presented to local planetary politicians. She was swept from obscurity right into a junior delegate position. That doesn’t happen, Tyrus. They try to say it does by going way back in history, but it doesn’t. Not anymore. So now she’s a junior delegate with a sudden, massive presence within the streams. She’s everywhere and her social is dominating. It’s too convenient. And then it gets weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “One of our bounty hunters, Loth Kador, normally very businesslike, ran into a guy Hamachi-Roi used to know from the schools. Rumor was the schoolmate was going to spill some very embarrassing dirt on her. So both Loth and the guy are on New Vega Cintron and the guy gets himself shot in a bar by Loth. The official story is they exchanged words and the guy pulled. Loth promptly shot him dead right there on the spot.”

  “So why isn’t this believable?” asked Rechs.

  “The schoolmate was an ardent anti-blaster supporter. Big on turn-in programs in the mid-core worlds. Advocate for a total ban. Only the local enforcement and military should carry. That type. As you can imagine, he’s not fond of personal sidearms. So why would this guy, whose degree by the way was in Non-Lethal Military Conflict Solutions, ever in the galaxy pull a blaster on an obvious killer like Loth? In a bar, no less?”

  Rechs’s mind was still trying to grasp the fact that ther
e was an actual field of study that had convinced itself that militaries could fight conflicts with non-lethal weapons. Sometimes the galaxy was so stupid he wondered why he was even bothering.

  “Could just be a hypocrite. What does Loth say?”

  “That’s where it got weird for us. Gone rogue. Can’t find him. Dropped his contracts. And believe me, Archangel wants him found. Suth and Noggs got assigned, and those two don’t mess around. They haven’t called in in thirty days.”

  Rechs had heard of Archangel’s personal hunting dogs. Suth and Noggs were not to be messed with.

  Gabriella made several compelling points. But none of this answered why she was taking this so personally. What was going on right now was Legion business. Not Guild. He wondered if it was maybe because she cared for him. But he suspected it was something else. Something far more personal.

  The bucket chimed, indicating the encryption hack had been accomplished.

  “Gotta go now, Gabriella. Time’s running out.”

  And then he was gone.

  39

  “We’ll do the last one in a few hours. Just after dark. Then we drop the tower.”

  The captured marine knew the speaker as Mean Eyes.

  The Guild knew him as Loth Kador, bounty hunter. Professional. And currently listed on the Guild’s status board as “GR”: Gone Rogue. Next to that status was the modifier, “FKC”: Find, Kill, or Capture. In that order of priority.

  Because the perks of being a Bronze Guild member came with certain obligations. And when you failed to meet those obligations, you invited trouble on yourself.

  Loth Kador had other names. But what’s a name? Multiple identities are the way of bounty hunters and other scum, as far as the galaxy is concerned.

  The team he’d assembled to run the HVT capture for the Soshies had just received their final brief. In the next few hours, they’d execute the last legionnaire, release the stream, and destroy the rundown, once top-of-the-mark luxury residence tower in the best neighborhood of the Heights on Detron.

  According to his contacts with those who served Mr. Zauro, the man behind all these riot and resistance shenanigans, the media would soon be fed stories that the Legion had executed payback and killed an entire building full of detained Soshies. As soon as Loth had blown up those pitiful wannabes who had been traveling with his team.