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 fugitive 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
