Death’s Head

by David Gunn

  “Send the guy up,” I tell her.

  “I’M CHARLES DECHARGE,” he says.

  He’s small and wiry, an underfed version of Phibs. When he hurries into my room his eyes are already flicking from corner to corner, as if searching for unexpected enemies.

  “You’re meant to have swallowed your kyp by now.”

  “My what?”

  “Aculeus accipio… You were given one.”

  “It’s fitted,” I say, opening my mouth. “Want to take a look?”

  He backs away, his face blanking as he concentrates frantically. The very faintest echo of a thought appears inside my head. It’s a whisper to the roar I heard earlier. I have almost no sense of emotion and certainly nothing resembling nuance, but it’s there.

  “Got you,” says deCharge.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you have a hard time of it?” He takes one look at my room, sees the drying sheets and sodden towels, and realizes the absurdity of his own question.

  “Can you hear me?” he asks.

  And his question is inside my own head, so I nod.

  “Good,” he says. “This is your mission.”

  He’s talking quickly, anxious to get away from a face-to-face meeting, because such meetings are obviously a rarity for him.

  “Five weeks ago Senator Debro Wildeside was disgraced in a plot instigated by her cousin, Senator Thomassi. She’s in exile, as is her ex-husband Anton Urbana, who has taken the place of their daughter Aptitude…

  “With me so far?”

  I nod, trying to keep my face neutral.

  “As tradition allows and Thomassi hoped, Debro Wildeside settled her whole fortune on Aptitude, who is now in Thomassi’s care. The senator plans to marry the girl himself. Should that happen it will create the greatest trading house this empire has ever seen. Your job is to stop that.”

  “Senator Thomassi dies?”

  “Of course,” he tells me. “Begin with Thomassi and end with the girl. Spare no one and burn down the house. Do it tonight.”

  I finally understand why deCharge wants to do this meeting from a distance. He’s been told I might be dangerous. And someone is playing with me, unless they’re playing with Debro and Anton. Either way it stinks. Meet the family, kill their kid…

  CHAPTER 20

  MORNING COMES and the House of Thomassi is still standing, and a very elegant house it is, too. A five-story villa set in its own gardens, with steel gates and trees that look as if they grew from seed. The villa occupies the best position on Boulevard Mazimo, one of Farlight’s more expensive streets, about a fifteen-minute walk west of the central palace complex.

  But all this comes later, much later.

  About twelve hours after I decide I need to clean myself up, buy some weapons, and take Lisa out for that drink…

  MY SHOWER IS cold, which is what you’d expect from a dive on the edge of the Bosworth Landing Field in the shadow of Calinda Gap. I don’t mind, because the city is hot and muggy, the night air thick with hydrocarbons and sharp with ozone from the cutting sheds that line the landing fields below.

  By the time my shower’s done, I’m too clean for my old clothes. So I shrug myself into the trousers, take the credit chip deCharge left on his way out, and go looking for a cheap clothing emporium. What I actually find is a stall about two streets back from Golden Memories, which turns out to be the name of the brothel where I’m staying.

  “That’s all you’ve got?”

  She’s looking at my credit chip.

  I nod.

  “How much is on it?”

  My shrug says it all.

  The old woman pulls a wry smile and tells me her best offer is sixty cents on each credit if I’m expecting her to launder a stolen chip as well as sell me clothes that don’t announce I’ve just flown in from off planet, and probably broken my contract by wandering away from my ship.

  “It’s not stolen,” I tell her.

  Her eyebrows are white, like her hair. She reminds me of a ghost owl with her exaggerated expression of disbelief.

  “I was given it.”

  She laughs. “Sure,” she says. “How hard did you have to hit him first?”

  We settle on seventy-five cents and she takes the whole card and promises to give me cash for what remains, after I buy what I need, provided what remains doesn’t come to more than 25 percent of what is on there in the first place.

  Something tells me she’s done this before.

  “What are people wearing?”

  The woman looks at me. “What people?”

  “People like me…”

  I get a leather coat, too heavy for the hot night air. It’s a cheap copy of the one Carl took as price for my passage aboard his ship. The two shirts she offers are black, their dye is poor quality, and both look ready to fall apart after a couple of washes. When I pull a face the old woman tells me to take a closer look.

  They’re ex-military, ballistic polymer mixed with spiderweb. The color is crap because polymer and web take dye badly, but the cloth is thick enough to slow blades and wind itself around incoming bullets, making them easier to extract.

  She has me pegged as a mercenary, someone mugging rich kids to make ends meet between jobs. It’s not a bad cover story for a man of my temperament. It also makes it easier to ask my final question, although I ask another one first.

  “How much left on the chip?”

  She debates lying. Decides against. “Three thousand and eight credits.”

  Seeing the shock in my eyes, the woman scowls. She could have lied anyway, because I obviously had no idea just how much was there.

  “Must have been a good friend,” she says bitterly.

  I stare at her.

  “To give you this.”

  We lock eyes and she glances away. “I can’t give you anything like that much in cash,” she tells me. “I said that up front.”

  “I need a gun,” I say. “Something good. You can take another two five…I want the last five hundred in cash. Small notes.” I wonder what I’ve said to make her laugh.

  “This is Farlight,” says the woman. “No one takes paper.”

  It seems inflation makes banknotes worthless, and OctoV keeps printing scrip to pay his troops, so now even credit chips have to be underwritten with gold from private banks, at least they do in Farlight. It’s my ignorance of this that convinces the woman I’m from way off system.

  And then she weighs the chances of someone that distant getting this far into the center without serious backing, and begins to wonder if she should be dealing with me at all. I’ve gone from being an out-of-work mercenary to something more dangerous.

  “A gun,” I tell her, making my voice hard.

  She nods. Greed, and the thought of the credits she can take, overcoming her fear. “You wait here,” she says. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  It’s more like an hour.

  “I THOUGHT YOU’D forgotten…” Lisa is slouched behind the counter at Golden Memories, her hair carefully brushed and then messed up again where she’s flicked it back in irritation at the heat and the length of time I’ve made her wait.

  “Had to get this,” I say, pulling back my coat.

  Her eyes widen at the shoulder holster and the length of gun it carries. Something smaller would have been nice, but this is nearly new and came with enough clips to need a second holster on the other side, just to carry the ammo.

  “You’re not planning to go out wearing that?”

  “Why? You think it’s a bad idea?”

  She does, but I wear it anyway. For a start, I want to know if the rig looks obvious under my coat—and then there’s the excitement factor. For her, not me. I’ve been wearing concealed weapons most of my life.

  We drink at a cantina two buildings along. A place that caters to men from the breaking yards and landing fields. For this part of the city it’s practically a class joint. All the men look over and most of them know Lisa by name, if the litany of he
y s and hi s and hello s that hits her is anything to go by.

  Eyes skim over me, note my clothes and the way I carry myself. If anyone registers the concealed weapon it doesn’t show in his face. I’d say his or her face, but Lisa’s the only woman in this cantina, apart from a girl who could be her twin, and she’s serving beer behind the counter.

  Carl’s in a far corner with two men from Trillion Two Zero Three. His gaze skims across me a little faster than the rest.

  “Who’s your friend?” It’s the girl who looks like Lisa.

  “He’s from off planet.”

  “Lisa,” the girl says, smiling. “Everyone’s from off planet.”

  “No.” Lisa shakes her head. “He’s, like, off off planet.”

  The girl behind the bar examines me with new interest. “You here looking for a job…?”

  “I’ve got one,” I tell her.

  Lisa looks at me with interest.

  “You going to tell me what it is?” That’s the bar girl again.

  I give her my best smile. “Believe me,” I say. “You really don’t want to know.”

  When the girl opens her mouth, Lisa glares. So the girl shuts her mouth again.

  “Meet my cousin,” Lisa says. “Angelique.”

  Angelique shakes my hand, although she seems to find the gesture hilarious. “Where are you from?” And then before I can answer, she mock-scowls at Lisa. “I’m allowed to ask that, right?”

  Somehow we all end up in bed roughly an hour after the bar closes. It’s Angelique’s bed, so maybe Lisa is nervous about taking me back to her room at Golden Memories, not that I care whose bed we use. Lisa and Angelique are young, they’re blond, and both have obviously long since discarded their inhibitions, assuming they had any to begin with.

  We fuck, we sleep, they drink cachaca and I nurse a beer until the cousins are sprawled in a tangle of naked limbs on a filthy mattress and I’m standing at the window watching the sun come up over the capital of my world.

  Somewhere out there is a girl not that much younger than these two. She should be dead, because I should have killed her. The fact that this hasn’t happened is obviously worrying deCharge, because I can feel his voice tugging at the edge of my mind.

  What? I ask.

  Voices break through, far too many voices, and I find myself on my knees. When I look around the girls are still sleeping, but the sun is a little higher in the sky. Mr. deCharge is in the mix inside my head, his voice more urgent than the others.

  Where are you, he says.

  Sick, I tell him.

  His voice comes from a distance, bleached of its worry and anger. Only the length of time it’s been demanding my attention lets me know he’s upset.

  What do you mean sick?

  I feed him a memory of my vomiting, so real and vivid I can almost feel him lurch back to escape its full horror.

  Shit, he says.

  Yeah, I agree. And then I ask a question that’s been troubling me. How do I get rid of the kyp?

  You don’t, he tells me, but in asking I’ve reassured him. Mr. deCharge thinks I’m worrying about the fact that my kyp is not working properly and is making me vomit…well, as far as he knows.

  Where are you now?

  Something stops me from telling him the truth. Out for a walk. Where are you?

  Waiting for you.

  I nod, slipping three fat silver coins from my pocket. One goes on Lisa’s side of the bed, another goes on Angelique’s side, and the last goes into Lisa’s shoe. She’ll know to keep quiet about that one.

  “Buy a dress,” I scrawl on a scrap of paper.

  And then I’m out of there, eyes scanning the street to check if anyone’s been waiting for me. Dogs and a hen, a cat on a high roof, and a broken-tailed skink chewing a fly halfway up a filthy wall. It’s still early and I need to be somewhere else.

  Can you hear me?

  Just about, I say. It’s erratic. I can’t believe it’s meant to be like this.

  It isn’t.

  And I can’t get it out?

  No, he tells me, sounding reassured by my repeated questions. You’re just going to have to work with that one. He listens to me swear and agrees that a faulty kyp is not ideal.

  I’m on my way back, I tell him.

  He hesitates.

  Unless you want me to go straight there?

  Where?

  The Thomassis’ villa.

  I can almost hear him wrestle with the questions, and behind his anxiety lie other voices, a mix of direct questions and fragments of thought. It’s like listening to a badly tuned military radio with everyone talking at the same time. Somehow that doesn’t seem right to me.

  The voices, I say to him before he’s had time to answer my previous question. Should I be able to hear them?

  And it’s his turn to swear. You can hear other voices?

  Hundreds, I say. It’s like a permanent headache. It’s one of the things that’s making me sick… This is a lie obviously, but it’s a good lie.

  You can turn them off…

  A wind almost sweeps me from my feet. When it’s gone, I’m sagged against a wall being watched by a puzzled boy who’s clutching a broken stick of bread. Seeing me stare back, the child makes off before I can steal his family’s breakfast.

  You there? deCharge asks. I lost you for a moment.

  Yeah, I tell him. Still here.

  I can turn it off?

  Voices get louder in my head as I think about them and then fade, leaving silence and the voice of the little man who came to see me the night before. I turn him off completely, and then turn him back on again. A hundred voices, one voice, no voices. It’s all possible. I can hear deCharge properly now, complete with nuances.

  What happened? he asks.

  Don’t know. Although I do. OctoV’s just taken time out of conquering some part of the known galaxy to show me how to turn down the volume on knobs and sliders I didn’t even know existed.

  Got you, says the man.

  Yeah…

  How does it feel?

  Clear, I tell him. Like we’re in the same room.

  His relief is obvious. And the voices?

  Gone. All I can hear now is you.

  Fuck, he says, then repeats it, and for the first time I understand how worried he’s been, how scared for himself as well as for me. First time that’s ever happened, he tells me. Didn’t even know kyp could glitch. He thinks we’re bound together by adversity, so I throw him another crumb, something to feed back up the line.

  My biology’s fucked, I tell him. Self-repairing. I guess it’s been fighting the kyp, that’s probably why it glitched, but everything’s cool now.

  That stuff about my biology is checkable, and I know for a fact someone will check; they’d better, because I’m not going to forgive the general my experience with the slug for some time, if ever…

  You wait, he tells me, while I check where we go from here.

  I shake my head, watched only by the black cat, which is busy necking what’s left of that broken-tailed skink. As the skink’s head disappears into the cat’s gullet, I remember that deCharge can’t see me, and realize he’s probably still waiting for my answer.

  No, I say, I’m going in.

  Wait, he tells me, but I’ve already broken the connection.

  History is like a sandstorm. I can’t remember who told me that. But you need to choose carefully where you sit it out, because the silent center is often more dangerous than out on the noisy edge.

  CHAPTER 21

  I’M IN a bar on the far edge of Zabo Square when word comes in that a day’s work is available, a bar favored by ex-soldiers.

  A dozen men stand up as one.

  The work is available because I’ve called ahead to warn Senator Thomassi that a rival faction intends to upset his wedding. He probably still has people trying to track my call.

  We’re to gather outside Villa Thomassi. The money will be good but only professionals need apply.


  “Where have you worked?” asks a hard-faced man when I finally get to the front of the line. He’s head of security for the Thomassis, an ex-legionnaire judging by the way he holds himself.

  “That’s confidential.”

  The head of security glares at me. “You’ll need to do better than that.”

  The Death’s Head dagger is in my hand before he has time to blink. In my other hand is the laser blade, although he doesn’t realize what it is until I cut a chunk out of a sandstone gatepost beside him.

  “Does it really matter?”

  His eyes flick from blade to blade, widening. “Is that real?”

  “Which one?”

  “The dagger.”

  I nod, flip it over in my hand, and offer it to him hilt-first. He takes it gingerly, as if the handle might be poisoned.

  “This really yours?” he asks, and then tells me the rate of pay before I’ve had time to answer.

  Give terror a black uniform and a grinning logo, and let superstition do the rest. It’s a neat trick if you can pull it off. Just suggesting I’m ex–Death’s Head is enough to get me this gig.

  So now I’m outside an ornate cathedral, trying not to melt in the heat as sweat trickles down my ribs inside my leather coat and a crowd of ragged children gather to watch the show. They’re drawn by the decorated hover and the music from inside, and by the weapons in the hands of the hard-eyed men lined up around me.

  I could do it here, as Thomassi and Aptitude come out of the cathedral, but I’d be cut down in seconds and the door is too narrow to let me get a clear shot at everyone else.

  And then there’s my other problem.

  Sweet little Aptitude.

  Thinking about her in clichés makes it no better. By the end of today I will have failed someone, and such is the training the legion enforces that I know whichever way it goes, I can’t afford to fail myself. It’s the worst failure, the failure that makes you fail others.

  The old saying sits in the back of my head, all buffed up and shining, but it’s no use because I still don’t know where my real duty lies.

  Aptitude Wildeside looks just like her mother.