Death’s Head

by David Gunn

  “Took it off Aptitude Wildeside’s bodyguard.”

  “It shouldn’t work for you.”

  “Well, it does,” I say. “And I’m keeping it.” I raise the muzzle slightly just in case I need to make the point.

  The major sighs. “You can’t go around threatening Death’s Head officers.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I can.”

  “You’re covered,” he tells me. “I’ve got a dozen snipers out there.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Are you prepared to take that risk?”

  “Yes.”

  At this, the major grins. “You’ll do,” he says. “Colonel Nuevo said you would…I’m going to break this down, okay?”

  After he’s stripped his puff gun into a dozen pieces, he tosses the chassis, barrel, and air cylinder in a trash can and rips open a silver sachet of dark red powder, which he sprinkles over the top. Seconds later there’s a flash and the gun goes up in a sheet of white flame. It takes the can with it, but casual vandalism obviously doesn’t come high on Major Silva’s list of worries.

  “Usually,” he tells me, “I’d put you through training. Six months in the academy and then a tour of duty, but at the colonel’s suggestion we’re going to skip the academy.”

  It takes me a second to realize what he’s saying.

  “You leave in three hours…” Major Silva catches my stare. “Report to the Death’s Head HQ on Casaubon Square. They’ll issue you a uniform. And if anyone asks, tell them you have my permission to carry that.”

  He’s referring to the SIG diabolo.

  We walk to the edge of the park together, a weird-enough couple to attract glances from those we pass, although the glances are discreet.

  At the road, the major hesitates. As I said, it’s an affectation. All that diffidence, the irony and dry humor exist because the uniform he wears allows them to exist. This man is a killer, just as I am, but he’s a killer with manners and a good tailor, or whatever people like him use to make their uniforms.

  “By the way,” he says. “Well done.”

  I want to go back to Golden Memories, say my good-byes to Aptitude. Not to mention Lisa and Angelique, although it’s a very different type of good-bye I have in mind for us. Instead I find a public video booth and feed it a credit, patching myself through to the public booth at Golden Memories. Someone answers after the thirty-eighth ring.

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Good to hear from you, too.”

  “Sven?” It’s Lisa.

  “Everything okay?”

  She hears the worry in my voice. “Sure,” she says. “All cool. My cousin from the country and Angelique have gone shopping. But I can take a message, if that’s why you’ve called.”

  My cousin?

  I’m grinning like an idiot into the screen, my reflection overlaying Lisa’s face, like a ghost image. Maybe this is going to work out after all. “Say hi to the kid for me. Tell her I’ll be back soon, and look after yourself, okay?”

  “Back soon?”

  “Got a job,” I say.

  “Off planet?”

  “Sounds like it. Oh, and Lisa.” I hesitate, watching her wait for me to find the right words. “Just, thank you, all right? For everything…”

  She breaks the connection, but not before she flashes me her smile.

  THE HQ ON Casaubon Square overlooks a dusty fountain and a small rectangle of tired grass. Wrought-iron railings surround the grass on all four sides, as if to protect it from those who might want to trample its beauty, but the beauty is missing and so are the hordes. The square is almost deserted, its only occupants two uniformed Death’s Heads who stand on either side of a black-painted door.

  Farlight is OctoV’s largest city, his capital. It’s bigger than any of the Uplifted cities, so we’re told. Although obviously not as big as their orbital habitat, because nothing is as big as that—well, nothing that’s impinged on my life.

  Who knows what the U/Free have? Apart from genius, high art, and all the things we don’t…

  And yet being in Farlight is like being trapped in the center of a cluster of broken clockwork. It’s strange, maybe more than strange. Looking at the deserted square and the ruined grass and the shabby buildings, it strikes me that this must be intentional.

  OctoV is saying something. I just wonder if anyone but OctoV himself understands what it is.

  “Halt.”

  It seems best to do what I’m told.

  “I’m expected.”

  The guards on the door look at each other.

  “Name?” one of them demands.

  “Sven.”

  “Sven what?”

  In my pocket the SIG gets itself ready. A quick shiver as the chassis unlocks and loads. The combat chip has tied itself to my emotions, which should worry the hell out of me, but actually makes me feel very happy.

  “Well?”

  A name comes unbidden. It’s the one Debro mentioned, back when we were being inducted into Paradise. “Sven Tveskoeg,” I tell them. “It’s an old Earth name.”

  They wonder whether I’m taking the piss.

  And then there’s a creak, and a man I recognize is standing in the open doorway. Both guards snap to attention at the sight of Colonel Nuevo’s uniform.

  “Sven,” he says. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Trying to get in,” I tell him. “Without killing your pet goons.”

  His smile is thin. “These are the regiment’s finest.”

  I’m obviously expected to reply, but I let silence say it for me, and the colonel sighs. “The major told me to expect you.”

  “Really,” I say. “Was that before or after he tried to put a carbon dart through my skull?”

  Colonel Nuevo decides it’s time to take our conversation inside.

  MY REAL SURPRISE comes when I arrive to get my uniform. This comes last, after a medical, a second medical to check that the results of the first were correct, and a psychometric test, which is canceled halfway through when an intense-looking woman stands up from her desk, wanders over, and turns off my screen.

  “It’s better,” she tells me, “we don’t have this on record.”

  She says the same to Colonel Nuevo when he turns up at the end of our session.

  “Right,” he says. “We’d better get him geared up.”

  I expect a quartermaster, a rack of uniforms, a row of helmets, rifles piled in one corner. That’s what you get in the legion. Instead I get an old man who tells me to strip and stand in the middle of the room.

  Colonel Nuevo excuses himself for this bit.

  Lasers play down my body from all four corners of the room. The lights come up and the old man comes out from behind his screen with a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a jacket hanging over his arm.

  He smiles at my surprise. “Fabricators,” he says. “Subvisual spiders.”

  As he holds the jacket out to me, I frown. “You’ve made a mistake,” I say, handing back the garment. A silver collar bar on each side gives my rank as second lieutenant, and a silk ribbon tucked into one of the buttonholes proclaims me holder of the Obsidian Cross.

  Third class, admittedly. But it’s still the Obsidian Cross.

  The old man checks his right wrist, skim-reading an implant. “No,” he says. “No mistake. Second Lieutenant Sven Tveskoeg, Obsidian Cross third class.” He shrugs, watches me climb slowly into the jacket, and invites me to choose a holster style for my gun.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 25

  COMBAT BATWINGS come in hard and fast over stunted trees, their guns blazing as they dip to just above ground level and try to kill everything in their path, which happens to include me.

  These machines are fast, hellishly fast, maneuvering at g’s that must take their pilots to the edge of unconsciousness with every twist and turn. A trooper next to me raises his pulse rifle and takes aim.

  The batwing stays steady and the man is gone. As burning meat mixes with mud on
my uniform, I roll into the nearest ditch and see the batwing bank tightly to come around again.

  “Big man, small ditch,” says the gun. “Go figure.”

  So I flip myself out and roll behind the wreckage of a fat-wheeled combat bot. We’ve a thousand of the bastards, and they’re about as useless as a nun in a brothel.

  As the batwing screams toward me, I raise my gun.

  “Locked on,” it says.

  “Take it.”

  The SIG does what it’s told.

  In doing so it trashes 15 percent of its power pack. When this is over I’m going to find the wreckage, because I want to know what the Enlightened have flying those things, and why shooting them makes my gun burn through its battery.

  Batwings are small, much too small to take a human pilot. Rumor says they’re flown by the heads of dead Uplift soldiers. But rumor is usually wrong. In the meantime I’m working out what to do next and wondering how the fuck I got here.

  As if I could forget.

  “MOUTHPIECE,” a computer says.

  A technician offers me a breathing tube. She offers it politely, with no indication that I’m holding up her launch. A glance at the trooper beside me tells me the tube really is what I think, so I stuff it into my mouth, closing my teeth around a ridge put there for the purpose.

  “Doors,” says the voice.

  We’re being prepped by machine, because it’s more efficient than using humans—or so I’ve been told by the techie, who keeps her eyes lowered and turns away from my questions as soon as politeness allows.

  It used to be me that made people nervous; now it’s my wrapping as well. Black combat armor, black-visored helmet, black gloves…And that dinky little silver skull on the front of my helmet, just in case anyone’s too stupid to realize the obvious.

  Glass doors close over my head, and everyone around me shuts their eyes. Seconds later our pod fills with shock gel. From drop to landing we’re going to be in free fall, and I mean free fall. We’re also out of communication range, not that this matters. Once dropped, nothing can change a pod’s trajectory.

  Like every other pod in the drop we have landing legs to take the worst of the shock, with gel to cushion us from the rest.

  I’m counting down in my head.

  Three, two, one…

  Half a minute is the time I’ve been given from gelling to drop, and it’s accurate to the second. As my body rises, the gel cushions my shock and settles me back in my seat. Twenty men to a pod, five hundred pods to a ship, twenty ships to a fleet. That makes two hundred thousand men free-falling toward Ilseville, capital of Sxio province and second city on the newly re-Uplifted and-Enlightened planet of Maybe Here.

  Our job is to re-UnEnlighten it fast.

  Ilseville is a trading depot for fur, amber, and a rare and fabulously complex leather taken from cold-water alligators, which are actually something else altogether, but look enough like alligators for the name to stick.

  I’ve been briefed on the city we’re about to take.

  It’s little more than a small town protected by stonefoam walls. The outer areas are constructed mostly of fiberbloc, which is warm, cheap to manufacture, and utterly useless against artillery. The inner city, which is also walled, is stone-built, with two temples. We’re to spare these, if we can.

  “Steady yourselves.”

  A thud, hard enough to shake my teeth, a suck of vacuum as a pump sucks away the gel, and then my ears pop as air flows into the pod hard enough to blow open its doors.

  “Up and out,” a sergeant shouts, but he’s talking to his squad.

  I’ve just piggybacked a lift with them. My men don’t exist; I’m a second lieutenant without a platoon, which strikes me as pretty odd.

  Hitting the ground, I go facedown. A swift roll sees me covered from head to foot in mud and I’m happier. So I grab some wild grass and force it under the webbing on my helmet, then flip down my visor.

  At least I’m camouflaged.

  Fat-wheeled combats roll down a ramp behind me. A junior NCO sits on one, his hands gripping wide handlebars and his thumb already on the firing button.

  “Moron,” says my gun.

  His vehicle bounces once and slaps wetly on landing. Wheels slip, mud sprays from one side, and his vehicle goes over. Its engine dies a second later. Other pods are having similar luck.

  “Incoming.”

  A dozen conscripts do the meerkat search.

  “Twelve o’clock,” I shout, adding, “get down.”

  A batwing, coming in hard and fast. Rolling into a ditch, I see the driver of the dead fat-wheel raise his rifle and watch him become history. Another glorious martyr for the mother system, whatever the hell that might be.

  “Locked on,” says the SIG.

  “Take it.”

  We kill the batwing without thinking about it. Somehow I’ve abandoned my ditch for the burning wreckage of a fat-wheeled combat bot. I’m still alive and so are roughly half the troopers around me, but that’s not going to last.

  A hostile cannon spits from a hill to our left, while the enemy have an old-fashioned belt-fed dug in the trees to our right. We need to attack the position in those trees or take the hill, because at the moment we’re all in the cross fire. But the ground between here and both those places is marsh, with hillocks of grass surrounded by filthy water.

  “Get the fuck down.”

  A couple of troopers hit the ground, but not at my shout. One of them is now minus his head; the other probably wishes he was. A batwing has taken his legs below the hip, clean-sealing the wounds as the pulses pass through.

  He’s screaming.

  A helmetless grunt stands beside him, covering his own ears. Militia, by the look of his uniform. Out of two hundred thousand troops, a thousand of us are Death’s Head, maybe another ten thousand are from the legions, and the rest are conscripts and recruits.

  I put a knife through the injured man’s heart.

  He stops screaming.

  “Get down,” I tell the grunt. “Right down,” I add, when he falls as far as his knees. “Where’s your sergeant?”

  The man looks at me blankly.

  “Sergeant?” I say.

  Another trooper points. What’s left of their sergeant is staring blankly at a cold gray sky, and no one’s even had sense enough to steal his plasma pistol.

  “You’re the new sergeant,” I tell the trooper who pointed, giving him the pistol. As an afterthought, I get him to unbuckle his own helmet and cram the sergeant’s helmet on his head in its place. Demands are flooding through the earpiece.

  “Down,” I hear the trooper say. “The new sergeant,” he adds. And then he tosses his old helmet to the grunt who seems to be without.

  He’ll do.

  “Cover me,” I tell him.

  Pulse cannon or belt-fed? Which to hit first…Spotting a group of troopers who’ve abandoned their fat-wheels and are dragging a mortar toward the hill, I decide to take the trees and the belt-fed for myself.

  Behind me the new sergeant fires a burst from his pulse pistol, and I hug dirt as return fire skims over my head. A second burst, then another burst and another; he’s got the rest of his troop firing now. If he lives long enough he’s going to make a good NCO.

  Grinning to myself, I roll into a sodden ditch and shake my head. Good and NCO— now, there are two words I never expected to hear in the same sentence. The channel is deep enough to let me crawl on my belly through marsh grass and cold water toward the sound of the belt-fed weapon.

  The grunts are keeping pace with me and I’m officially impressed. To the man with the machine gun it must look like they’re advancing on his gun camp. I just hope he doesn’t get too many of them before I can reach the trees.

  “Fucking chaos,” says the gun when I wake it up again.

  “Remind me to reset you.”

  There has to be a character button somewhere, because I can’t believe this is its default personality. SIG GmbH would never make a profit
.

  “Distance,” I demand.

  “About fifty yards.”

  “I don’t want about.”

  “Forty-eight yards, eleven and a quarter inches, approximately. I can give you a more accurate measurement if you want.”

  “Can you get him from here?”

  The SIG’s sulking.

  “Well?”

  “Of course. It would help if you told me what rounds you want.”

  “Whatever does the least damage.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want that belt-fed in one piece. Not for me,” I add quickly, in case it’s the jealous type. “For the men behind me.” I’m crawling through cold water as this goes on, the gun carefully giving me new distances every few seconds until I tell it to stop.

  We’re still thirty yards from the trees, and the soldier with the belt-fed is a couple of yards back from that. I’d try to go around him, but that would mean leaving my ditch, and the ditch is the sole reason I’m still alive.

  “What are my options?” We’re talking about rounds, obviously.

  “Ceramic, fléchette, incendiary, explosive, overblast…”

  “Overblast.”

  The gun unlocks and loads.

  And I wait for a particularly heavy burst of fire from behind me. Something that’s going to make the man in the trees want to keep his head down. When the burst comes, I wait it out and pop my head up in the split-second silence that follows, adding one shot of my own. It helps that overblasts don’t need to be accurate; anything within about ten feet works fine.

  I’m up and running the second my round explodes, splashing my way through a dozen yards of sour marsh and boggy ground. The gunman’s on his side, hands tight to his ruptured ears. One of his eyes is pulped and blood oozes from his nose, but he’s still conscious enough to try to crawl away from me.

  He dies in silence.

  Swiveling the belt-fed, I turn it toward the hill where the enemy pulse cannon is busy cutting down the troopers advancing toward it. A handful of our militia are trapped halfway up a slope; they’re what remains of the brigade I saw earlier.

  A blast of belt-fed ceramic concentrates the minds of the Ilsevillect troops opposite. One of them swivels the blast cannon toward me, igniting a tree several paces to my right, which is pretty good for a sighting shot. Unfortunately for him, it frees our militia trapped on the slope below. I keep firing, just to make life more interesting, and by the time he realizes it’s time to swivel his cannon back to where it was, it’s already too late.