Death’s Head

by David Gunn

  “They’re telepaths,” he says, adding…“They speak with thought?” In case the word is too strange.

  “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

  “And you can hear their thoughts?”

  I shrug. “I could hear the speaking of one tribe. What if different tribes speak differently?”

  “Thought is thought,” he says.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE ROOM to which he leads me is small and dusty, which is surprising in itself, since most of the ship is spotlessly clean and seems to be kept that way by an unseen army of cleaners who are either invisible or so small that they work at levels below human sight.

  There’s uniformity to the mother ship’s design. The walls are black and shiny, obsidian or glass. The floors are also black, made from what looks like marble. Lights are set into the floors to create pathways when the ship is in darkness, which it is for eight hours out of every twenty-four.

  The air is clean, the temperature is pleasant, and everyone seems to know exactly what they are doing. If I were the general I’d never set foot on another planet again. When I say this to Horse, because that’s how I still think of Sergeant Hito, he smiles and nods approvingly as if I’ve just passed some test.

  “I’ve brought you a present,” he says. His words are addressed to an old woman who sits behind a counter.

  “What have we got here?” she demands.

  “An ex-legionnaire.”

  “I didn’t ask who,” she replies, more snippily than necessary. “I asked what.”

  “He’s human,” says the sergeant, his voice amused. It looks like they’ve known each other for a long time. “You can run tests.”

  “We’ll all human, darling,” she says. “Or didn’t our beloved leader tell you?”

  “Madie…”

  “I know. All beings in the empire are human, even the ones that aren’t. It’s the new rules.”

  “It’s been a hundred years.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “The next emperor will probably change it. And then there’ll be no end of trouble…”

  “Strip,” says the sergeant, and it takes me a second to realize he means me.

  “God,” she says. “Couldn’t you have showered him first?”

  “He’s been in the sergeants’ brothel.”

  “You don’t say…Use that,” she orders, pointing to a cubicle door. It’s an oval tube made from glass, with a touch pad set into a shiny black console. There’s nothing to say what any of the buttons do. Choosing one at random, I tap it once; when that doesn’t produce an effect I tap it again.

  A few seconds later I’m sitting on the floor clutching my hands to my eyes, blinded by a light brighter than any I’ve ever seen in the deserts south of Karbonne, and the sergeant is standing over me, swearing.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m fucking blind,” I tell him, trying to struggle upright and tripping over my own feet. Two sets of hands help me.

  “Don’t tell me,” says the woman. “You looked at the light?”

  “I didn’t know there was going to be one. No one told me.”

  She sounds more serious when she speaks again.

  “How long did you look?”

  “A second.”

  “You sure?”

  “If that,” I say. I’ve been in enough deserts and enough battles to know that light blinds. Already I can see her silhouette peering hard into my face. My reflexes probably kicked in before any real damage could be done.

  “I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not,” says the sergeant. “We need to get you down to the medical bay immediately.”

  “I’m fine,” I repeat. “Look, I can already see both of you.”

  Fingers grab my face and wrench it around. It’s the woman, and she has a grip like steel. Her face gets closer to me and I can smell sour breath as she stares deep into my eyes, peering so hard it feels like she’s trying to see through to the back.

  “Fuck,” she says. “He’s a self-healer.”

  They disappear into a huddle and return looking determined. “We’d like to do some tests,” says the woman.

  “To tell you what you already know?”

  Sergeant Hito grins.

  I can see it already. She wants to be able to tell General Jaxx what she’s discovered without having to reveal how she discovered it: by potentially blinding his new pet.

  “Okay,” I say, figuring I probably owe the sergeant. And the shower has killed the stink of living with the ferox, something even a spell in Paradise was unable to do.

  As the woman sits me in front of a computer, Sergeant Hito begins to walk the length of a row of prosthetic arms, shaking his head every few paces. At the end of the row, he turns around and starts again.

  “Nothing big enough.”

  “Grow him one,” the woman says. “With this level of healing you’ll have no trouble at all.”

  “He wants a metal one.” The sergeant looks at me. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Tell him he can’t.”

  “The problem,” says the sergeant, “is that he probably can.”

  “Ah,” she says. “Close personal interest, eh?”

  For a second the sergeant looks as if he wishes this conversation hadn’t started, but I’m not really listening, because I’m sitting in front of a computer that seems to be doing nothing but sticking needles in me and slicing blades lightly across my skin. And whatever the computer’s finding out, it’s making a lot of noise and flashing dozens of lights and whirring.

  Unless it’s just designed to behave like that.

  “You’re right,” she says finally. “He’s human.”

  “Plus?”

  “One point eight percent something else.”

  The very blandness in her voice makes the sergeant look up.

  “What?”

  She shrugs, releasing my good arm from a row of unnecessary straps. A wipe of something that smells like alcohol and already my skin is beginning to heal. “It must be a useful adaptation,” she says at last.

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Something in my tone makes them both turn.

  “There’s no cutoff,” I tell her. “The body just keeps going. No pain is too much. Few wounds too extreme. The day I lost my arm to a ferox I walked thirty miles back to the fort.”

  “A ferox did that?”

  “A child,” I said. “Probably a baby.”

  “You were doing what?”

  “Hacking the head off its father.”

  The woman glances at Sergeant Hito. It says, What are you doing bringing this lunatic in here? So I start to explain that the adult was already dead. Well, almost dead, and old age not weapons had taken him down. But it’s too late. I can see in her eyes what I saw in the eyes of new recruits until I stopped bothering to speak to them. Something between fear and awe.

  “Okay,” she says. “I can see why the general might want him. Why do you like the arm you’ve got?”

  “It’s strong.”

  The woman sighs, and I get so bored with thinking of her as the woman that I ask her name and ask it politely.

  “Madeleine,” she says.

  “That’s a nice name,” I say, at which the sergeant raises his eyebrows, but I mean it. I’m not making conversation with a whore. It’s a nice name.

  “Very old,” she says. “From the Earth days.”

  I look at her. “You know,” I say, “you’re the second person to mention Earth recently.”

  “Who was the other?”

  “A prisoner on Paradise.”

  “I don’t want to know,” she says to Sergeant Hito. “Do I?”

  The sergeant shakes his head.

  “Did Earth exist?”

  “Why do you think it didn’t?”

  I shrug, trying to remember. “Something my sister said,” I say at last. “About Earth being invented to explain why things in the galaxy were once simpler…She was always saying stuf
f like that and I didn’t really pay much attention, but I always assumed it was true.”

  “That’s heresy,” Madeleine says quietly. “You might want to forget your theories about Earth while you’re around the general.”

  I nod, smile to show that I’ve understood and am already taking her advice. She doesn’t smile back.

  “Bad times,” she says. “A lot of people died.”

  “I know,” I tell her. “Guess I was meant to be one of them.”

  The sergeant smiles and nudges Madeleine’s attention back to the dusty row of prosthetic arms. But the life has gone out of her, so I guess she has some history of her own.

  “We’ll make him one,” she says finally.

  “What?”

  “Just because no one’s done it for decades…” She shrugs, her mind made up. “We’ve got the fabricators. Got more templates than anyone understands. Give me his false arm.”

  When my arm comes free, she actually looks away.

  “You should have seen it before.”

  “Who did the surgery?”

  “My old lieutenant.”

  “God,” says Sergeant Hito. “You’d think he’d have had some battlefield modifiers.”

  I consider explaining that the battlefield medical supplies were empty when we got them, that few in the legion can read enough to understand written instructions anyway, and most good officers can do things with a heated knife that are beyond mere metal boxes. But I decide not to bother.

  “He was drunk,” I say. “But he still saved my life.”

  “You saved that yourself,” says Madeleine. “When you picked up your arm and carried it thirty miles back to the fort.”

  I nod, because now doesn’t seem a good time to mention I left the arm, knowing it was useless. Having tied off my wound, I decided to take the ferox head instead.

  “We’ll fix that first,” she says.

  And so she does, with a cold precision that impresses the hell out of me. Wherever she learned her stuff, she knows precisely what she’s doing.

  “What finish would you like?”

  “For my new arm?”

  “The stump.”

  In the end, because it takes me so long to understand her question, she gives me something that looks like golden tortoiseshell. It begins as flesh and slowly changes into something close to buffalo horn. With a flourish she produces a tiny laser dagger from her desk drawer and slashes a quick series of marks across its surface.

  “You’ve signed it,” says Horse, sounding surprised.

  She nods. “First thing I’ve done in years I like…You know what the old man wants him for?”

  The sergeant scowls, and she laughs.

  “I don’t mean the exact mission. Well, maybe the type.”

  He hesitates. My feeling is if I weren’t in that room he’d be more open. “Infiltrate and extract,” he says. “Only you can leave out the extraction bit.”

  “Likely to be in disguise?”

  The lieutenant looks at her, and then stares pointedly at me. His look asks, How would you expect me to disguise that? And for the first time I wonder what it is about me that he keeps finding odd. In the legion you meet all sorts; that’s the whole point. No one minds what language you speak, what color your eyes are, whether your skull shape differs slightly from the man alongside.

  I’m tall and reasonably broad, but apart from the scars on my back and the fact that one arm is missing, I’ve never had cause to think of myself as different. A little stronger, maybe; a little more willing to hike the final mile. But that’s only about having extra strength.

  After the tortoiseshell decoration to the stump I’m not about to object to anything Madeleine suggests. Although, in the end, she skips the suggestion and just does what she wants anyway. This is fine, because I’ve seen blacksmiths and weapons repairmen at their best and neither comes close to the level of concentration she brings to making my new arm.

  The old one is balanced on a stand, which somehow closes, and then the arm is scanned. She looks at a plate on her desk and tuts, walks over to the row of dusty arms and tuts some more, although she’s already said she’s not going to use those.

  “Getting ideas,” says the sergeant. “Let her be.”

  I nod.

  In the end the arm she creates is impressive because it is so unexpected. My old arm, the one the lieutenant bought me, is hard-edged and obvious, all steel plates and pistons, with woven metal hoses leading to clumsy fingers.

  The arm Madeleine constructs is exactly like my real one. Only made from black metal. At a distance it could be flesh, although closer up it becomes obvious the skin is not natural. I say metal because its surface rings when hit, but the elbow bends like a real arm without any need for overlapping plates and the wrist twists as if it had bones and sinew beneath.

  “Like it?”

  I nod. “You don’t want to sign it?”

  Madeleine smiles. “Made one before,” she says. “Can’t claim it’s original. You want me to do something about your back?”

  I shake my head.

  “Why not?” asks Sergeant Hito.

  “Some lessons are best remembered.”

  He glances at the woman. She smiles and sighs. An old woman in a strange job on a ship that is unlike any I’ve ever seen. It’s as if I’ve wandered into another world without knowing I was invited. By now I’m getting nervous. I know this because a low ache like hunger has begun in my gut. The feeling I get just before battle.

  “What are you doing about armor?”

  “That’s up to the general.”

  “But he will be in uniform?”

  It’s a game between these two. Somewhere between cards and chess. An alliance built on mocking each other. And I’m discovering more about the sergeant every minute and I’ve begun to wonder why he’s letting me learn so much.

  “I’ll make him some,” she says. “If the old man doesn’t like it, we’ll scrap it.”

  “Okay,” says Hito. “Give him the basic black.”

  “Insignia, rank, company?”

  Sergeant Hito shakes his head. “No identifiers,” he says.

  CHAPTER 17

  I’M SEARCHED before being allowed to meet General Jaxx. A group of four officers close in on me and pat me down. Since I’ve already passed through a full-body scan I know this is tradition, part of a ritual to be undergone before being shown into the presence of a Death’s Head general.

  “Weapons?”

  I shake my head.

  “You’ll have to remove that arm.”

  Behind me Sergeant Hito begins to object, very politely. All four men outrank him. “The general himself…” They retract the moment the sergeant explains that General Jaxx wants to see Colonel Madeleine’s latest work.

  “You stay here,” one says.

  The sergeant looks like he wants to object to that, too, but does what he is told and I enter the general’s study alone. It is the same man. As tall as he ever was. Only now he’s wearing a black smoking jacket with narrow trousers, both decorated with a single band of silver piping.

  Out of uniform, the only sign he controls a regiment is the silver signet ring on his left hand. A grinning skull, mouth mocking and hollow eyes taunting the world.

  “Sven,” he says.

  I wait; it’s all I can do.

  “We have a job for you. One ideally suited to your talents.”

  What talents? I want to ask, but I make myself stay silent.

  “What do you know about Farlight?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  He nods. “Even better.” Walking across to a sideboard, he pours two drinks from a decanter. He doesn’t tell me what the drink is or ask if I want one, but since he sips from his first and then downs the rest in a single gulp, ending with an obvious sigh of satisfaction, I do the same.

  “Single malt,” he says. “An old Earth drink.” He hesitates, smiling slightly. “You know about Earth?”

  “Very little,”
I say.

  “What about its end?”

  It’s one of those days for keeping my face blank. Whatever I know, or in this case don’t know, it seems best to keep to myself.

  “Slightly over six hundred years ago the singularity swallowed its own children…”

  He pauses. “Or maybe it ate its own parents. Experts disagree…You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  I shake my head.

  He smiles. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “how happy that makes me.”

  The job is simple. I’m to flip to Farlight, hunt out a traitor whose name I will be given on arrival, and kill him, his bodyguards, and his entire family. If his palace catches fire at the same time that will be even better.

  “We will, of course, deny having even heard of you if you fail.”

  “And if I succeed?”

  “You will be inducted into the Death’s Head, undergo formal training, and fight the one campaign all new entrants must undertake. After which, you will work for me and only for me.”

  He waits.

  Am I meant to thank him?

  After a moment, he smiles. “I like you,” he says. “People say you’re an animal. They’re wrong. Animals don’t think. Well, not the way you do. I can see we’re going to work well together.”

  I might think, but obviously not fast enough. It takes me a second or two to realize he’s given me my cue to leave.

  CHAPTER 18

  FARLIGHT IS VAST. A sprawl of a city trapped in the bowl of a long-dead volcano. It’s layered with history, like some exotic omelet. For a start, single streets have half a dozen different names, while boulevards end abruptly and grand squares have lost out to viral attacks that leave half their buildings looking like molten wax.

  Palaces fill the center and slums crawl up the slopes of the volcano’s caldera until the sides become too steep for normal building, and huts on stilts and hardfoam shacks become all that cling to the rock. After a few hundred paces even these peter out and the crater’s sides can be recognized for what they are.

  All this I see in the time it takes an old cargo freighter to overfly the city at a height I’m surprised the emperor allows. When I mention this a crew member grins.