Madame Guillotine

surgery.
He filed that under the least of his current problems.
Two kids came at him swinging metal batons. Against marines in riot gear, that might’ve been enough. Perhaps it already had been, and a past success had led them to the false conclusion that they could handle legionnaires in the same manner. Shaker quickly disabused them of this notion. While maintaining a sight picture with his N-4 on a growing mob at the entrance to the alley, he delivered a series of offhand blows, the last of which was a solid throat punch that made the kid no doubt wonder if he was ever going to breathe again as he fell to his knees in the dirty alley, begging for air.
The kid’s buddy left him there, disappearing back into the crowd.
Both Lightspeed and Beers had dealt with their own rioters. Idealistic youths resisting the powers that be by attacking legionnaires on a rescue mission. Make sense of that. Now those youths were either unconscious or crawling back to their brethren while puking their guts out along the pavement.
“Let’s roll, Switchblade,” ordered Shaker to the rest of the QRF. “Form up… wedge. I’ll take point. Need to move at the double to catch up.”
He switched over comm to the Reaper team on overwatch somewhere above, hidden behind a nearby building. The comm went live a moment before he transmitted, and he could hear their engines and repulsors. The shuttle that had dropped his team was long gone and wouldn’t be back until they needed extraction.
“Switchblade to Reaper… which way did they go?”

03
The first intimation that things were going from seriously south of bad to completely messed up was when Lightspeed’s vitals grayed out in Shaker’s HUD.
“Lightspeed… comm check?”
Maybe it was just a malfunction.
That’s what Shaker was desperately wishing at that moment. Because it would be some good news in what was turning out to be all bad news in the making. And as team leader, he couldn’t help but feel it was his fault. That was leadership. Real leadership.
They’d gone down the alley, tracking on the last known location of the team that had snatched the weapons officer out of the downed bird. The Reaper team above had the best intel coverage, but they’d lost the tangos in the warren of routes the alley had turned into, only picking up small glimpses of what they thought was the team from an altitude of at least eight hundred feet as the SLIC pilot tried not to hit any of the buildings. Or take ground fire.
The last thing any of them needed right now was another downed bird.
Blaster fights were definitely breaking out around the crash site. Either because the shotcaller had gotten his way and sent the marines back in to take the scene, or because the agitators had decided to start shooting to create more chaos among the rioters.
Or maybe it was just a convenient time for accounts to be settled up among the various street gangs.
Shaker didn’t have to deal with any of that at the moment. As they made their way deeper into the shadowy alley and started taking tangents to pursue their quarry, Shaker had two immediate, gnawing problems. First, the flight officer. He needed to get her back in friendly hands before a bad day turned into a major stellar incident. Second, the crowd of rioters who’d followed them into the warren. They were keeping back, but it was clear they were waiting for the right moment to try something. They’d already lobbed a few gas bombs, obviously unaware that Legion armor and filtration systems handled such weapons effortlessly. Still, it indicated intent. And the intent to harm was clearly evident.
Normal Legion protocols indicated KTF in effect. But this was not a normal Legion assignment. This was babysitting.
They had been pulled from normal unit rotation to do some time in what was called the “crisis management teams” that were the precursor to Legion Dark Ops. It was in these teams that one learned to work with other military and governmental organizations—something that was part and parcel of life as a Dark operator. Though as Shaker saw it, there wasn’t much to learn beyond patience and the ability to suffer incompetence while still trying to get the mission done.
Anything but a five rating during this assignment meant no go for Dark Ops. But that was all career stuff. And Sergeant Sean Lopez, Shaker as he was tagged, couldn’t’ve cared less about it at that moment. Diving into the alley to get the marine officer had been his only concern. That was the one mission objective that needed to happen for today not to be a complete mess.
And as the QRF got deeper and deeper, followed through the warren of alleys by the black-and-red-clad mob of wannabe ninjas, it was clear the group of pros they were chasing could easily go to ground inside any of these buildings and quickly disappear into the extensive underground transportation system built back in Detron’s halcyon days.
Which meant the QRF was just a desperate second from losing their quarry.
But they received intermittent updates from the shooter in the Reaper bird, and these indicated that, so far at least, the legionnaires on the ground were roughly on the right trail.
“Don’t like this one bit,” said the usually stoic Cave.
Cave was a staff sergeant who’d just finished up a rotation as a line platoon sergeant. He and Shaker had been in roughly the same time and knew a lot of the same people. Both had the same goal—Dark Ops—and both knew exactly what it took.
“Pull back?” asked Shaker, breathing heavily. Not from the exertion of the double-time they ran with weapons ready, but because of the anxiety creep he was starting to get as things progressed. He felt the same as Cave. Didn’t even need to explain the reasons.
They both knew they were on the verge of getting in too far over their heads. Allied units were busy with the clown show of the crash,