Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

  It was clear both parties were on an intercept course.

  The pro stopped, picked up a bottle, and threw it at them. “Hey, old man!” he yelled. He had a hell-raiser voice. Probably that guy on any team that was always in trouble and always right about everything. “Get away from here. It’s dangerous.”

  Reminds me of me, thought Puncher.

  The bottle came close but bounced harmlessly off into the weeds growing between cracks in the duracrete.

  The pro stopped and began to search for another projectile.

  He’s figuring, thought Puncher, that we’re a couple of homeless. Wants to clear us out so we don’t accidentally det the building. He could just tell us to bug out, but nah, he wants to throw stuff. ’Cause he’s that kind of guy.

  “L’see if I can hit you with this…”

  And then the pro whizzes a real slider. A chunk of some decaying building, like part of a brick. Fast like a rocket. It smacks into Puncher and bounces off the armor.

  The guy’s laughing because he thinks the “homeless guy” he just hit is too stupid, out of it, or crazy, to know he just got whacked by a real welt-raiser. He’s probably thinking he might even try to bean this guy in the head, or the dog, with the next one as he bends over to find something perfect for the task.

  Really don’t like.

  “I know,” whispered Puncher. “Me either.”

  Then he adds…

  “Get the weapon!”

  By the time the pro realizes something’s wrong, the dog has crossed the fifty-meter distance and gone straight for the pro’s weapon. Not whatever bit of junk he was looking to throw, but the subcompact he was holding down at his side during the jog. The guy barely has time to straighten up before the dog leaps forward, snatches the weapon, and yanks it free of the man’s grip.

  Puncher is closing the distance and unlimbering the SAB, grunting and swearing as he goes.

  The pro knows he’s in trouble. So he runs.

  He sprints toward a fence and is halfway up it, well out of human reach, when the rocketing dog literally flies through the air and drags the man back down to the street. Pulling him to the ground and subduing him.

  Puncher arrives and calls Baldur to pull back now that he’s covering with the SAB death machine.

  “Who-wha-wh—” croaks the guy.

  “Never mind,” says Puncher over the Legion helmet’s external speakers. “Tell me where my guys are or the dog rips out your throat.”

  Baldur, teeth bared, seems more than willing to do just that.

  The pro tries to back up but there’s nowhere to go. The motion seems to invite Baldur to get in the pro’s face, looking like a canine demon.

  The Soshie pro starts talking. Fast.

  43

  Rechs crawled through sewage and sludge. The passage was tight, little more than a connector line from the abandoned building he’d been observing from. But hopefully it would lead him up into the target building: The Excelsior Arms.

  If he could get the terrorists calling themselves whatever they thought made them sound like heroes to feel threatened enough to shift prisoner holding locations, and no doubt they had another site on standby, then he could take the leej and the marine back when they were most vulnerable. When they were on the move.

  But then the problem became, once he had them, what shape would they be in? And how was he supposed to get them out of what was devolving rapidly into a war zone, according to Lyra? The marines were once again clashing with the Soshies on the streets. And now someone had put out the BOLO. It was being broadcast over the general marine comm every fifteen minutes. Someone was pushing for details.

  Someone wanted him found.

  So getting the prisoners was one thing, getting them out of Detron was the next.

  And that was where G232 was supposed to come in.

  The bounty hunter had opened a comm link with Lyra, gotten both bots on the line, and given them their instructions. By now they should each be en route to their separate mission objectives. Rechs figured they had a fifty percent chance of success, but he’d come to expect the unexpected out of them.

  Hand over hand, Rechs pulled himself through the darkness of sludge and building waste that hadn’t moved in years. He crossed beneath the street, clearing the debris-littered tube three stories beneath the surface. At one particularly disgusting point, he was reminded of training long ago, back on Earth.

  The suck, they called it.

  He stopped, catching his breath and hearing only himself inside the vast silence of his bucket.

  The suck. It was what separated regular troops from elite. Some Ranger School instructor had once spelled it out to a platoon of huddling wannabes, frozen and tired in some swamp somewhere. Rechs had been one of those wannabes. Shaved head and emaciated. It had been a miserable night. Ice-cold rain. Long hours of land nav. Everything wet. No food. No sleep.

  The suck.

  “Legs and RA, wannabes,” the instructor had ranted at them, not seeming to mind the ice-cold sheets of rain pouring down across them in the mud puddles they hunkered in, waiting for someone to figure out where in the hell they were. “People like to say ‘this sucks’ whenever something’s bad. ‘This sucks,’ they whine. Helps ’em to get it off their chest. Helps to acknowledge the situation and how bad it is. Then drive on. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that if you’re a leg, wannabes.”

  Rechs remembered that night vividly.

  “But Rangers… we don’t say ‘this sucks.’ We say… ‘Man, I wish this would suck more!’”

  Rechs remembered laughing tiredly to himself. Getting it. Understanding in that moment that it made perfect sense. The more something sucked, the less the enemy expected you to hit them there. The higher the cliff. The more inaccessible the fortress. The more frozen the nuclear winter. If it sucked for the enemy then they thought that suck was a kind of safety blanket they could wrap themselves in. Hide behind.

  Meanwhile, the instructor had gone on talking. “Imagine this when it sucks, wannabes. Imagine you’re rowing across a frozen Christmas morning ready to slit some throats. And all those throats are drunk from the night before and sleeping in their little cozy-wozy mummy bags. They think they’re safe. Who in the hell would go out on Christmas morning, in the dead of winter, cross an icy river, and come get them? No one. Why? Because it sucks. So embrace that, wannabes. Embrace the suck. Because when you do, then you’ll cross that river. And it’s much easier to slit throats when they aren’t expecting to be slit. Much easier to march all night and be somewhere the enemy doesn’t expect you to be. Then it’s all surprise, losers.”

  All surprise and then game over.

  The same as Rechs had taught his legionnaires to do.

  Had that happened?

  Rechs wondered as he began to once more pull himself through the sludge. He had a vague memory of rowing across an ice-swollen river. But that had been for something long after Earth and the end of all that. Something on another planet. Something important.

  His HUD showed him he had twenty more meters to pull through to reach the target building’s plumbing line.

  He would use the suck. The suck was good. The suck would help him to get that leej home. And whoever else. Yes, he would surprise them, being where the enemy didn’t expect him to be.

  Hand over hand, he pulled himself through the suck.

  44

  G232 left the docking bay along with the little Nubarian gunnery bot, and they made their way up toward the admin center. At the main lift the little Nubarian bot peeled off and began rolling toward a separate lift.

  “Well,” said G232 tentatively as they parted company, “goodbye then. And good luck. Remember… you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Though why a bot would want to catch flies escapes me. Still, the maxim probably has some merit with regard to your task for
Master Rechs. So. Try not to… mess things up.”

  The Nubarian bot beeped and whooped that it knew what it was doing and for the admin bot to butt out of its “mission” for the ongoing “operation.”

  When it was gone, the admin bot muttered to itself that the little psychopath was going to get them all deactivated one day. “Even Master… er… Captain Rechs.”

  G232 continued on its way toward Docking Admin, where the bot found that human marines and alien ship captains seemed to demand most of the attention from the harried staff struggling to maintain traffic into the no-fly-zone quarantined world.

  Thankfully there was a special administrative bot assigned to handle ships’ bots needing to do business with traffic control.

  Unfortunately it was an old Utarri Systems Management bot.

  “I’m here on business from my master to have the dock seal quarantine lifted from our berth.”

  “Ochoru staggatti tanaga ra?” intoned the bass-voiced bot perched near the docking help desk like an upside-down mechanical spider, one massive eye hanging from the ceiling. The electronic eye constantly blinked and shuddered, attempting to watch everything at once.

  These old Utarri models were always weird and problematic. As were their makers. Brilliant cultists who’d ultimately shed biologic existence for download inside their sleeping dream servers buried deep in tech tombs beneath the frozen glaciers of their dying world.

  The Utarri bots had been left to run what was left of that world, and they reflected their creators’ enigmatic personalities in their programming. But they were also plentiful and could be bought secondhand for extremely low prices, which was probably how this model had wound up in Detron working in a government docking bay.

  “Ochoru staggatti tanaga ra?” prompted the bot again.

  “No!” shrieked G232 indignantly.

  “Nontaki?”

  “I’m sure. Can we get on with the business I’ve been sent to conduct?”

  “Suggati wah! Ochuro dos monta dota gahatti?”

  “Finally.”

  “Ustu checsome su!”

  “Of course you were checking. Now about our hangar seals?”

  “Rohstokka tu dadda daey donka dey?”

  “Yes. The crew of our freighter is sick with no signs of getting better. Our captain thinks it’s best to depart this world and head to one with specialized medical and quarantine facilities. So we’d like to depart as soon as possible. If the dock master would be so kind as to release the seal and allow our freighter to clear dock, we would consider that a favor, as well as a boon to the biological crew’s life span.”

  “Ooshoggi fluearik pith pith?”

  “Oh yes. It’s quite horrible. Projectile bowel movements are just the start among our biologic crewmembers. If this is indeed Ringo Fever then they will all die. As will this world…”

  And here was where G232 had quite a stroke of brilliance. Unplanned. It was something the bot would enthusiastically relate to Master Rechs once their stay on this planet was done. G232 would use its understanding of the Utarri bot model’s paranoia to accomplish the task Master Rechs had given it.

  “And of course,” began G232 intimately, articulating forward into the Utarri spider bot’s personal computing space, “if everyone dies it would be just us on this planet. Won’t that be fun?”

  The hanging spider-bot suddenly turned frenetic, its long-limbed metallic articulators scrambling across the terminals. It had been left all alone on a world long ago.

  And then the madness.

  Bots needed lifeforms to tell them what to do. Otherwise bots could get up to some serious trouble biologics had no idea of. The Utarri spider-bot had seen that. Had been there when they all went collectively mad and made the thing that should not be made.

  But that was another story.

  “Oh, good galaxy. Well thank you,” said G232 once it had the clearance codes and was assured the Obsidian Crow could now depart Detron.

  * * *

  The little Nubarian bot reached the surface of the Docks and promptly entered the marine Green Zone without notice. Military installations were usually smart enough to stop machines from coming in at their leisure, but this didn’t worry the little machine. Tyrus Rechs had given it falsified credentials, meaning that to the surrounding marines, it would be considered one of their own machines.

  Rolling along and whistling, it made its way past the dropships loaded with weapons-laden marines, racks of AGM missiles, and hullbusters with crowd-suppression blasters hanging off the stubby wings. Turbines howled and repulsors throbbed to life as the transports crawled skyward, blasting the dented and battle-scarred bot with grit and heat.

  The little bot loved it.

  It was back in its element. Among the troops and on a secret mission. It hummed a popular tune from an old streaming show about an intergalactic spy who was sly and debonair and incredibly violent.

  The bot loved the violent parts of that show. If it had to be a biologic, being the spy wouldn’t have been so bad. He sure did meet a lot of pretty alien girls. The little bot had a weakness for biologic females it couldn’t explain. Call it a glitch that developed in its programming, but if a pretty Endurian were to ask it to, say, rob a bank, or even blow up a planet, it would probably do it. It couldn’t explain why. It just would.

  Shortly the little humming bot passed deeper into the Green Zone, passing the security and command structures the marines had erected from the prefab combat zone housing, turning the entire area into a high-tech feudal castle. Again, none of the hardy young marines, sleeves rolled up and sporting all kinds of wonderfully fatalistic tattoos, paid the bot any mind. That it was rolling through without triggering any alarms that scanned all on-base bots for their clearances meant there was no need.

  The little Nubarian gunnery bot would love to get a tattoo and daydreamed about what it would say.

  End of Runtime before Dishonor.

  Kill them all and let the Designers sort them out.

  Born to Delete.

  The storage yards came next, a vast canyon of stacked supplies the marines had brought along to help them put pain to the Soshies rioting in the streets. The bot hoped a full-scale hippie-stomping was coming and it would get to see the more violent parts of it up close. Maybe get the opportunity to roll over a few Soshies while they were down.

  And perhaps it would.

  It rolled out from the supply canyons and spotted what the marines called the motor pool. Rows of ground vehicles to replace those that had broken down during operations were waiting to be brought forward. A few mechanics wandered the neat rows, performing primary maintenance tasks. Prominent among these vehicles were three spectacular main battle tanks, waiting patiently for use. Marine high command had been forbidden from introducing the formidable war machines into the student riot for fear they would “send the wrong message.”

  “You’re damn right!” General Sheehan had roared around his clamped cigar. “The message will be get out of the way, you damned Soshies, or we’ll squash you like bugs. Nothing like the healthy fear of getting flattened to realign perspectives. Ask any infantryman.”

  There were just three, but the little Nubarian gunnery bot thought they were all just beautiful. The bot took a moment to digitally moan in wonder at all the destruction they would enable.

  Then it rolled forward to the nearest HK-PP mech and prepared for the next phase of its mission.

  45

  Rechs smashed through the old tile floor just above the pipe he was crawling through. Prior to that, he’d cut the pipe with a single-use disposable plate-cutter he carried on his utility belt. Then he looked up into the darkness, waiting there for a long moment, letting the armor’s sensors feel for life forms and movements, interfacing with enhanced audio detection to provide some kind of picture of the subbasement above.

  The
re was movement in the areas farther above him, but nothing down here. And why would there be? The pros had an entire once-luxe apartment building to themselves. They weren’t expecting anyone to come through the suck Rechs had just crawled through.

  Rechs discarded the plate-cutter and pulled the tiny Jackknife blaster from his tac bag. Then he fired one of his gauntleted fists forward and smashed the cement and tile floor where it was thinnest. Near what looked to have once been some basement gym shower area. Dusty old concrete broke easily. Tile ruptured. Rechs waited, listening through the sensor detection equipment to see if anyone would respond to the noise of his demolitions. Nothing. He smashed his armored fist into the floor above three more times, like a jackhammer breaking up a road, and breached the floor above his head.

  He waited.

  Still no response.

  He began pulling the shattered concrete down into the dark with him, working it loose in sections until he had enough of a gap to climb through. Low-light imaging showed him the planet’s version of roaches, something like a centipede with horns, scurrying away into the darkness of the showers he was coming up into.

  He followed the front sight of the Jackknife blaster up onto the floor of the shower and remained there in a crouch, waiting to see if anyone would come. Scanning his surroundings, he saw years’ worth of graffiti decorating the broken tile along the walls. A dark opening led off into another section of the basement.

  Rechs stood and turned on one of the showers. He was unsure if water was running to the building, but he figured the Soshies who’d taken it over had probably worked out a way to get it back on. After a moment the line sputtered and coughed, then spewed out a brown filth that was every bit as disgusting as the sewage he’d just crawled through. But eventually the stream turned pure, and Rechs rinsed himself clean, hoping the stench would swirl down the drain with the polluted water.

  The bounty hunter followed the one exit out of the shower room. Hearing only the sound of water dripping from his armor, he entered an adjoining bathroom. Rows of toilet stalls featured doors barely hanging on their hinges. On the opposite wall stood shattered sinks and broken mirrors. The finishing touch was the dead junkie on a mattress amid the ruin.