Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

  The junkie had been someone years ago. Everyone was someone once. But he’d ended up here. In… this. And then dead. His body lying here ever since. Forgotten. Unfound. Maybe no one cared.

  Yet another thing that fell into the category of not-Rechs’s-business. Much of the galaxy was like that. And if you spent too much time looking at all the things that weren’t your concern, well, then you were liable to forget what you were after in the first place.

  Rechs moved quietly through the dark labyrinth of the basement. He passed through a gym and entered the lowest level of what had been a parking garage. Consulting his downloaded map on the HUD, he assessed possible routes into the main building areas. Unfortunately, though he knew all about the security on the outside of the building, he had no idea what the disposition of forces was on the inside. But it was time to find out. Before the Nubarian bot arrived with whatever it could find to get the Soshies moving.

  Rechs quietly cleared one level at a time as he moved upward through the garage, which twisted back on itself to reach the top. The level just below the building’s main entrance.

  He heard them before he saw them. A small team of pros around what was clearly an escape vehicle. Another high-end sport utility sled. There were three of them in and around it.

  Probably their job was to be ready to boogie at any minute, just waiting for whoever was in charge to give the word. One at the wheel. One stretched out asleep inside the rear cargo section with the back hatch open. And the last one walking back and forth near the speedlift, smoking and talking to someone over comm.

  The elevator was the fastest route up and into the building. And the pro walking near it was in constant contact with someone—probably a team leader elsewhere in the building. So neutralizing the sentry would alert the rest of the building. Then the prisoners would be iced and everyone would flee.

  No go, thought Rechs.

  One lone light, an emergency floodlight, was still active near the elevator. None of the pros had low-light imaging gear that Rechs could see. He spent a long moment in the darkness beyond their pool of light studying the situation, and then he began to move.

  As he advanced through the shadows, using the parking garage’s pillars for cover, the armor’s HUD detected the building’s wireless spectrum signal. It provided no access to their internal comms, but it did provide access to the building’s old systems. Stuff that once was the latest in smart-interface living to make sure the residents felt like masters of the universe. Working the command interface on his sleeve, Rechs hacked into the garage’s atmospheric and door controls with little problem.

  First he shut down the floodlight near the elevator—after taking a moment to deploy his stealth cloak to cut down on any ambient light reflection that might still be active in the area. If they used ultrabeams, they’d see him for sure.

  “Ah, c’mon!” shouted the sentry in the darkness that had suddenly enveloped the extraction team. Then he was on his comm device shouting at someone. “We got lights out down here again. Get Juju over to maintenance to flip the breaker. We’re not sitting down here in the dark!”

  A reply came back, but Rechs was already on the move. He slipped between the sled and the sentry and headed toward the elevator in the thick darkness. To the men he would be little more than a passing shadow.

  At the last second, he keyed his interface and sent a command to open the doors to the lift. Their quiet whoosh made the nearby sentry jump. But there was no lift inside the shaft. Just an empty well leading up into the building.

  “Who’s there?” shouted the sentry, apparently thinking someone had just arrived in the basement via the elevator, but unable to see anything beyond the bare light of his handheld comm device. “Hello?” He tapped his comm again. “Yeah, tell Juju the speedlift is acting funky, too.”

  Rechs stepped into the well of the elevator shaft, stared up into the darkness to make sure the elevator wasn’t coming down on his head, and then closed the door with a couple of taps on his wrist. Cut off, but inside the shaft, he magnetized his gauntlets and began to climb upward between the repulsor tracks.

  46

  “We’re ready in ten to start recording the stream,” said one of Loth’s lieutenants over the comm.

  Loth acknowledged the transmission and crossed to the big window to watch the streets below. There were fires in the distance. The sky was red—late-afternoon red—and filled with the buzzing gnats that were marine SLICs trying to intimidate the Soshies into getting off the streets and returning to their homes and dormitories. The marines seemed oblivious to the fact that they were only reinforcing a narrative already in play. A narrative that was about to go into overdrive.

  That the marines were looking for a fight.

  Time to send a quick encrypted transmission to Mr. Zauro. There would be no reply. Zauro had been clear about his intention for this mission, and so far everything had played out just as planned.

  A reply would mean problems.

  Loth felt a sense of pride over his success to this point. He knew it wasn’t due to any genius on his own part. He’d merely done as he was told. But he’d executed flawlessly what felt like some grand operation mounted by the best psyops specialists money could buy. And money could buy a lot, with what Loth was being paid.

  Zauro could afford it. He had a lot of credits. Loth had named a high price for his services and betrayal of the Guild, and the old man had accepted it so fast that Loth wondered whether he’d left too many credits on the table. Because there was no going back after this one.

  But he wouldn’t need to. As it was, he’d already have more than enough to disappear out to the rumored pleasure worlds along the edge, where a lot of dark money got buried, and live quite comfortably on the interest. Or… well, there would no doubt be more big paydays from Mr. Zauro if this continued to go well. And why settle on a planet if you can just buy one instead?

  No. There would be no reply from Mr. Zauro. Or the strange Tennarian lawyer he used for contracts and assignment briefings. Showtime was scheduled. And a horror show was what the galaxy would get in the next hour.

  He commed the freighter captain at the docks. She too was getting well paid for what was going to be a tricky takeoff and a sketchy jump just to get them off the roof at the last second. Supposedly Zauro’s lawyer had put the fear in her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t just quit town. Things were getting hairy, and once that freighter got picked up on the feeds, they’d have to dump it in a sun somewhere to make sure it never got found.

  And of course Loth’s orders from the lawyer had been to make sure the crew was still aboard when that happened. Loose ends would all be tied up after this one.

  Yeah, another dead leej was a bummer. Loth didn’t have anything against them, and the Legion would be pissed for sure. But neither did he fear their retribution. Once all the kids got killed in what was going to look like payback from the marines, according to rumors waiting to be transmitted to Dark Ops teams on the ground, there would be galactic hell to pay. And Loth’s team, the freighter, and the plan would get lost in the chaos. Media contacts would ensure that much.

  “Send her in,” Loth bellowed to his lieutenant.

  The Soshie that waited on him in the suite—his manservant, as Loth thought of him—stepped out and left Loth alone in what had once been the most grand and opulent room in the building. Now the paint was peeling and the carpet smelled of old smoke. The heyday of this place had ended long ago. When they’d commandeered it, they’d had to kick out some old crone who claimed to have once been the galaxy’s biggest entertainments star. Now she looked like a shriveled old witch in clothes that admittedly must have cost a pretty penny all those years ago. Her old bot—that was her last possession—loaded her into her hover chair and pushed her away. The last Loth had seen of them, they’d been walking down the street as dark came on. He’d watched them go from her very own pen
thouse.

  Serves her right, he’d thought, though he didn’t bother to articulate why. In his mind it was just some kind of galactic justice for being stupid and weak.

  He didn’t buy Zauro and the Soshies’ racket about wealth needing to end up in the right hands. He doubted even Zauro did. But Loth liked the justice part of things. Or rather, the act of what it took to make that happen. He liked that part.

  They were bringing in one of the whiny brats who wanted to play head-chopper for the next legionnaire beheading stream. Apparently she’d done something to convince his lieutenants she would do better than the last girl had. Loth had been clear that she’d better.

  “We need a nice clean cut,” he’d hectored his men. “Not a hack job! Made us look like a bunch of amateurs.”

  They’d already killed that last girl. Her body would get found in the building with all the others. Another kid dead at the hands of the out-of-control military. Never mind that she’d cut the head off a legionnaire.

  The floor of the building shook once. Like some distant tremor or low-grade earthquake.

  Then again. Briefly.

  Like it did when you had the misfortune to be in the presence of a wandering taurex looking for something to eat. You know, right before it charged, and your life ended.

  Loth had been on a taurex hunt once. Security for some rich banker that wanted to bag one. Half the team had to shoot it just so the guy could say he killed one. Then they waited an hour just to make sure it was dead and sent men in to make sure it was safe before the banker would even get near it to get her picture taken with its massive corpse. Plus, she’d had to make sure her makeup and hair were done just right. She even changed hunting outfits twice.

  But both the creature’s horns had been blown off, and that apparently ruined it for her. Or at least that had been the stated reason why no bonus was paid.

  Crazy, thought Loth as he waited for the new head-chopper. Crazy what money does to people.

  He wondered if he’d get crazy on the other side of this. When he was good and rich. No-limit accounts full of Zauro’s payments.

  The floor shook again.

  This time the glass in the windows of the suite shook with it, and that bothered Loth a bit.

  It felt like artillery crossing the land, falling slowly to bracket its target. And for some reason he felt that cold ice-water thrill up his spine. The kind you feel when you suspect you might just be that target.

  Another thunder strike. Coming quicker now.

  Loth stumbled toward the window just as the new Soshie head-chopper was shown in. He ignored her. His eyes searched the streets. He knew what he was looking for even before he found it.

  But already over the comm he was getting traffic from his LP-Ops in the streets telling him what the situation was. That what he was seeing wasn’t a figment of his imagination.

  The marines were sending in an HK-PP.

  And it looked to be headed straight for the tower.

  47

  Normally the bot assigned to operations control of the mighty assault and infantry support vehicle designated Hunter-Killer Planet-Pounder, or HK-PP, did little beyond run power plant management, handle automated damage control, and make sure a number of smaller systems were interfacing to assist during the ground assault phase of operations. But in this instance, Rechs had made sure the little Nubarian bot had been outfitted with enough utility command override programs to take full control of everything, including the main mounted turrets along the back of the mech and the devastating mauler blaster system atop used for the destruction of heavy fortifications.

  The Nubarian felt it had ended runtime and gone to the fabled eternal factory floor. It squealed with electronic delight as it ordered power to all weapons systems. It had already crushed three combat sleds and a small prefab tower the marines had evacuated upon seeing which direction the HK-PP was traveling.

  Now they were engaging with ground fire from their assault blasters. But the heavy armor on the mech laughed at this. And so did the bot as it fired both forward turrets at an unoccupied dropship pad and blew it to shreds.

  The Nubarian bot had orders not to hurt civilians or military. And it would, grudgingly, follow those orders. But other than that… it had been instructed to cause as much chaos and damage as possible along the way to the target.

  A glorious mission indeed.

  The bot whirled scanners around to make sure the main battle tanks weren’t online and moving to engage, because those would be a problem. But they were still offline. The bot sent a complement of missiles rocketing toward the undefended MBTs, sending them up in blossoming towers of flame.

  If it all weren’t so exhilarating, the bot might have felt sorrow for destroying those three beautiful machines. But it needed to be done.

  A moment later the massive HK-PP crossed through the wire, trampling the flimsy defenses, and entered the streets of the city. Civilians dressed in their red-and-black costumes, which the Nubarian bot thought were pretty, fled from the mech’s presence with panicked abandon.

  This was what it was like to be a conqueror, the bot calculated. It saw itself as one N0MAAD6, the legendary scout recon bot that had singlehandedly defeated a Savage battalion on Dataan in the long ago. The secret hero of every bot that ever trundled the warships of the galaxy. Or slogged alongside the marines and even the Legion in some war or another.

  When you’ve been designed for massive destruction, war is the fulfillment of your grand purpose.

  Initially, as calculated, the Nubarian bot would have the advantage. And it spent much of this advantage firing into unoccupied buildings, devastating multiple floors with each hit. He could get off one shot every minute from the mauler; it took that long for the cannon to power up again from the onboard reactor.

  A marine SLIC came in, and the door gunner opened up on the walker’s pilot cupola. The little Nubarian bot paid little attention to this and instead swiveled both forward turrets at the hovering aircraft. Slowly, so they’d get the point. The pilot wisely broke off the attack and dove away down a canyon of towers to break target lock.

  More SLICs were coming in to make passes on the mech’s armor. If they were more advanced ships, like assault shuttles or buzz ships, the bot would be in trouble. But the marines sent to handle Detron were doing it with left-over equipment from Psydon. Which was something hullbusters took pride in: having the worst gear and still getting the job done.

  The bot was busy angling the dorsal deflector to keep these attacks off its back when the mech reached the main avenue it needed to take. It chirped in a businesslike fashion and busied itself with its new heading as damage alerts came in from the articulating legs.

  A marine anti-armor team using combat sleds had followed up the street despite the Soshie mob and fired off three missiles at the walking behemoth. The HK-PP’s innate ECM generators handled two of the attacks, but the third missile had rocketed into one of the legs and done substantial damage.

  Smoke and bells erupted across the command cupola as the bot ordered damage-control fire extinguishers activated.

  “Master Rechs indicates that you should hurry along to your destination and quit fooling around with destroying everything, you little maniac.”

  It was G232.

  The bot ordered the head of the walker to come about and look rearward, presenting the forward turrets with some field of the rear firing arc. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough. The bot laid down a blistering barrage of fire from both turrets, ordering the blasters into extreme high-cycle suppressive.

  Bright blue fire spat out from the walker and tore up the street the sleds were speeding down. They cut hard and braked to avoid being enveloped in the barrage of incoming fire as a fourth missile snaked off into the late-afternoon smoke, untargeted.

  The bot told G232 to mind its own business.

 
“I am doing just that,” lectured the admin bot. “Captain Rechs has tasked me with making sure you stay on target. He suspected you would go wild and start… rampaging. And here you are. Rampaging.”

  G232 made the word “rampaging” sound like it was some dreadful societal faux pas instead of the pell-mell swath of destruction that now lay across the city in the HK-PP’s wake.

  The giant mech smashed into a ceremonial arch that stretched over the avenue. A commemorative architectural structure from days gone by. It crumbled like an old cookie and the HK-PP continued on. Ahead lay the tower. Its target.

  The little bot checked the charge on the main gun and scanned for a new target. Something big. Something that would really go KA-BOOOOOM!

  “Make an impression,” Captain Rechs had ordered.

  48

  Within General Sheehan’s command center, the primary focus was now the rogue war machine rampaging into the operational zone. Command and staff officers were looking bewildered and flummoxed as they tried to explain who had taken a premier fighting vehicle from the pool and decided to take matters into their own hands.

  No one had an answer, but the consensus was that some enlisted punk who’d had enough of the Soshies had gone joyriding. Or maybe it was a leej who had waited long enough and wasn’t about to let another of his buddies get decapitated.

  All comm with the war machine was being blocked by spam-jam algos, and attempts by the nerds in electronic warfare to hack their way into the vehicle’s systems and take control had failed.

  Captain Hess, who’d been out roaming the line and trying to figure out some way to go hunting for Tyrus Rechs, surfaced through the mass confusion enveloping the TOC.

  “This is what I warned your chief of staff about, General!” Hess screamed. “Most likely it’s Rechs that’s commandeered that planet-pounder. If not him, then someone working for him. And while you all are chasing it down, he’s freed up to do some real damage to Republic assets!”