Nobody cares, old man, Rechs told himself.
He closed in on the kid. It was important to be close now. To execute the next step. The takedown. Then move to a temporary secure location for a quick chemical interrogation.
That was all there was time for. Because time was running out for the legionnaires. There was no doubt about it. This crowd wanted blood, and the only blood currently available to them was their own. Plenty of fights between competing groups under the same Soshie banner were already taking place. Purging. Seeking a greater purity. Like the Savages had before they finally united and let loose true terror on the galaxy.
But more blood would be needed in order to keep the energy and momentum up. In order to prop up the belief that change was really happening. That old every-time lie of the constant demagogue. And those who’d taken the legionnaires and the marine… they were in the best position to deliver that blood. Rechs had no doubt they would do so at a time most opportune to whatever their agenda was.
Another high-profile music act was coming on stage as a speaker walked off to thunderous applause. Head down in humility like he’d just read out the Andaara Address after the bloody battle that drove the Savages of Id off Britannia and freed the last of the old core worlds. Back in the early days.
Back when…
Rechs saw his moment. Forming the takedown on the fly. Everything was too chaotic, too fluid. He had to improvise as he moved. Not the bounty hunter’s best play, but the one he had to make if he was going to get hands on the missing legionnaires and pull them out of this mess.
“Tyrus.”
It was Lyra over the comm. Now that he was above ground, he had comms with the ship again.
“I’m tracking you. Our docking berth is still secure. The quarantine ruse is working. Also I have a comm request from the Guild. Ready to connect.”
“Not now,” grunted Rechs as he sprinted for the kid, who was only ten meters ahead but moving away from him. Most likely leaving the festival atmosphere to connect with someone or pick up more supplies.
The mark was on the outskirts of the mass of disgruntled “freedom fighters” when Rechs rammed his armored shoulder into the kid’s side, sending him flying through an already shattered glass window of a looted liquor store.
The kid stumbled into the darkness, smashed into something, and went sprawling. Rechs had hit him with everything he had, and for a moment he was concerned he might have paralyzed the kid and made him unable to talk.
The bounty hunter checked the street to see if anyone was feeling heroic enough to come to a fellow rioter’s aid. But no one did. No one even seemed to notice, which was a good break to catch.
Rechs stepped through the shattered glass store front and found the kid lying tangled in a rack that had once held snacks. He was bleeding from a dozen little cuts. Probably from the shattered glass on the floor.
Rechs moved quickly, assessing and then hauling the dazed kid to his feet in one jerk and dragging him through the smashed and shattered debris into the darkness at the back of the store. And then even farther back into a shadowy storeroom the looters hadn’t yet fully stripped.
The kid was dazed and confused. Unsure if Rechs was helping. He quickly realized the man dragging him like a rag doll wasn’t looking out for his best interests and began to squeal in protest.
“Hey, man… wh-what’re you doing?” cried the indignant little turd who’d just smashed a bottle of piss over an unsuspecting citizen’s head so the guy could get curb-stomped by a pack of gutless jackals who thought they were really something.
Some part of Rechs’s mind told him he was taking this personally. No matter whatever else he might tell himself. And that wasn’t good. Professional was always better than personal. Mistakes were made when it was personal. And since other lives besides his were on the line, he needed to keep it professional.
Rechs threw the kid into a pile of stacked liquor boxes. The bottles shattered as they tumbled out of their packaging, and the place smelled like bad Calpurian synth gin. The kind of stuff that rotted your gut on just one pull. Ghetto bums drank it because it was the only thing they could afford.
He stowed his scatterblaster on his back, letting the magnetic smart clamps grab it with a dull clack. Then he got down to business, popping one of the armor’s pneumatic cargo slots and pulling out an interrogation kit the size of a miniature datapad. Rechs flipped the lid, removed the parallax hypo, and hit the kid with a full dose.
The kid fought for a few seconds, throwing a sudden fury of kicks and blows against Rechs’s armor, hurting himself more than anything else. But once the small yet powerful hypo went to work, he was finished with all that.
Parallax immobilized everything except sensory and cognitive functions. The House of Reason had declared possession of it to be a criminal offense worthy of twenty years in the mines on Herbeer or a penal equivalent. Dark Ops used it until the law was passed. After that, it was only used by the House’s pets in Nether Ops, especially on the secret rendition worlds. That was okay because, after all, it was being used on the House’s behalf, and well out of the public eye. It was a crime when someone else did it; it was state security when they needed it done.
Still… Rechs had his sources.
The parallax would take two minutes to fully complete its work, but after the first twenty seconds the kid wasn’t moving at all. Rechs stepped over
