by David Gunn
‘I suppose Lady Aptitude goes too?’
‘And Senator Wildeside. Me, my team, you. Everyone . . . We all go,’ I add. ‘There’s no point otherwise.’
The Wolf sighs. ‘Why you?’ he asks.
That’s the question really bothering him.
Why did our glorious leader choose me? ‘Because I’m stupid enough to obey orders, sir.’
*
The feeds are full of events on Farlight. A glorious revolution is taking place. The corrupt regime of OctoV is crumbling as the poor and dispossessed rise against his brutal rule. The latest news is that OctoV has killed himself in his palace.
We see a vista of Farlight city.
A single shot is heard. They’ve given it too much echo. A real shot would be flatter, much more matter of fact. But the U/Free are keeping the news simple. We’re barbarians, after all. Subtle isn’t what they’re selling.
‘You’ve changed,’ Debro says, when I say this.
‘We all have.’
And we’re going to change more, she must know that.
According to the feed, Prince Thomassi has asked the Enlightened for help in quelling the last few outposts of resistance. That would be us. As is their way, the U/Free will send observers to ensure the rules of civilized warfare are obeyed.
A map on screen shows our planet.
We’re a tiny red dot. The rest of the planet is a peaceful blue. High over the Wolf’s Lair are comm sats and news drones. We’re being watched, and the viewing figures along the bottom say our audience is increasing.
Up on the walls General Luc has ten men. Some on belt-feds. Others fire rockets or mortars as fast as their launch mechanisms can handle. Needless to say, that’s one sergeant, one corporal, a lance jack and seven troopers.
They’re loaded for bear.
Pulse rifles across their backs, double holsters at their hips, knives in both boots, and grenades around their waists. Every semi AI and self-loading armament is up there. Doesn’t matter what they hit at this stage. So long as they make a noise and keep the enemy occupied.
‘Sven.’
‘Sir?’
Vijay sighs. ‘You don’t need to salute every time.’
‘You’re the emperor.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’ve been meaning to mention that.’ His face screws into a look of deep worry. ‘Is it true?’ he asks. ‘OctoV really said I was to replace him?’
‘Yes, sir. That was the plan.’
We stand in General Luc’s hall. Battle honours hang from the walls. Oil paintings of past campaigns mix with portraits of OctoV. In most, the emperor wears a green cavalry tunic.
In one, a Wolf Brigade jacket, with a pelt tossed over the shoulder.
I think I can see the faintest shadow of breasts. And then I decide I can’t. Although it’s hard to miss the softness of those hips.
Most of the Wolf Brigade have gone ahead to prepare for Vijay’s arrival. Marching in pairs to the gate, they vanish as they step through. Only Aptitude, Debro and the Aux remain with the new emperor.
Plus those troopers on the walls.
They’ll die, because that is their job. Make a noise, look like twenty times their number, make every rocket, grenade and round count and leave this world like men when the moment comes.
Turning to Neen, I ask, ‘You understand your duties?’
‘Sir, yes, sir.’
He recites the list back to me.
These are the new rules. ‘Protect the emperor first, Aptitude second, her mother third. Die if necessary.’
I slap him on the shoulder. Neen looks surprised, then steps back and grins.
For a second he’s the floppy-haired farm boy I met outside Ilseville. ‘Never thought we’d get this far, sir.’
‘Nor me. Thought I’d be replacing you months back.’
His grin widens.
Hugging his sister, he checks that Ajac’s clip is full, Iona carries medical supplies and food, and Rachel has her rifle ready. Then he salutes Vijay.
‘Sven goes first, sir. You go next. We follow . . .’
None of us knows what we’ll find on the other side. The hex has ten thousand settings, according to General Luc. Who knows which one Leona chose?
Chapter 56
‘YOU KNOW WHAT A SINGULARITY IS?’
Do I look like someone who knows what a singularity is? More to the point, do I look like someone that gives a fuck?
Pulling the pin from a grenade, I lob it high and hit the dirt, before rolling into a crater filled with stinking gas. Weak gravity hangs my grenade at the top of its arc, before dropping it over a broken wall. Regolith rains down in slow motion. Not sure there was anyone to kill. But the bang makes me feel better.
Choking on the gas, I crawl free and Leona’s voice follows. Of course it does, it comes from the SIG-37. OctoV’s avatar is making her final speech.
At least, I hope it’s final. It’s muddling as fuck to have your side arm switch personalities. Worse still, when everyone around you is being massacred.
‘Do something useful,’ I suggest.
‘Like what?’
‘Tell me where the fuck we are. Better still, tell me how to get to somewhere else . . .’
The bitch laughs.
‘Sven,’ she says. ‘Take a look around you. What do you see?’
What does it think I see? A violet sky and the ruined, ruptured surface of a planetoid mined half bare for the water frozen under its dirt.
‘Fuck all.’
Not a star in sight. A couple of ghostly smudges, but that’s it. The air is cold enough to hurt when we breathe, and so thin the deepest breath scrapes barely enough oxygen.
General Luc is dead and Colonel Nswor, so is Major Whipple, and the captain whose jaw I broke, and the boy who showed me to the H-pad to meet Aptitude. I don’t know his name, but then I don’t know most of the frozen corpses around me.
It would be easier – and a fuck of a lot quicker – to count the living.
The Wolf Brigade never retreats. The Death’s Head would rather die than surrender a single step. The Legion dies where it stands. The boasts infest my head like song lyrics as I find myself putting them to the test.
Vijay suggests we scavenge ammo.
If we do, he says, we’ll have enough to prevent our attackers from uncoupling their mining ship from this planetoid.
Our new emperor’s lie doesn’t even convince himself.
At our back is a low run of stonefoam buildings with broken roofs. An explosion blew out the windows, bent girders and ripped the walls like paper. Judging from the ice dust in drifts against the walls it happened a long time ago.
Inside the biggest hangar is a machine that cracks water into oxygen. That hangar was where we came out.
‘Who opened fire first?’
‘Does it matter?’
Aptitude shakes her head. ‘Just wondering.’
‘Neen,’ I bark.
‘Sir?’ he snaps me a ragged salute.
‘Get her out of here now. Fifty paces back . . .’
My sergeant disappears with a protesting Aptitude in tow.
Slamming a fresh power pack into his pulse rifle, Ajac levers the pre-charge, waits two seconds for a diode to turn green and sticks his head over a wall, aiming for a rusting buggy that carries cutting equipment for the ship’s anchor wires.
Oxygen tanks explode with a satisfying bang.
‘Good shot,’ Rachel says.
She is half immersed in purple gas, her Z93z wrapped in a strip of grey cloth to camouflage it as she hugs the ground near a break in Ajac’s wall. An arse, broad shoulders, red hair, a rifle. She’s killing our new enemy with grim determination.
You wouldn’t think a mining ship was that dangerous. But this one is the size of a small city and armed with the kind of laser intended for cutting asteroids in half and freeing mile-square blocks of ice from planetoids like this.
It’s been making short work of us.
‘Singularity,’ repeats the
SIG. ‘You know what that is?’
‘Of course I fucking don’t.’
‘Know why it matters?’
‘No, I don’t.’ Still, I’m pretty certain Leona’s ghost intends to tell me.
Realizing her power pack is empty, Shil reaches for another and discovers she hasn’t got one. So she grabs a Kemzin from the dirt, drops out its empty clip, and rifles its owner’s body for more rounds.
Cartridges splash into a puddle of gas around her knees, making swirls in its purple surface as they fall. Her clip blips out in seconds.
Oxygen starvation makes her breathless; the cold wind purples her skin, unless that’s the thin air again. Somewhere in the last half hour she has lost her helmet, her flak jacket, her pack and her scowl.
Her grin is altogether more terrifying.
The ghost of OctoV, once guardian of the true faith, is preaching heresy. This is no stranger than most of the things to happen today. So I say nothing and keep listening, although I steal ammunition from a corpse as I do, and swap my cracked helmet for an unbroken one.
‘A few of you decided to become us. A few of us decided to be you. One of me decided not to be me. So it became someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘This me,’ she says. ‘As opposed to that me.’ She means Gareisis, the hundred-braid, because once OctoV and he were parts of the same. Leona’s ghost sounds sad.
‘Vijay is the answer,’ she says.
Anything else makes no sense. I just don’t know what the question is. Since Leona’s ghost claims not to know either, I’m going to have to work it out for myself.
‘Sven . . .’
Vijay is calling me.
Turning round, I see what he’s pointing at.
A spear of stars juts at forty-five degrees into the sky behind us and climbs and climbs, until it becomes a fat slash of stars and planets and local clusters that keeps climbing as our planetoid turns.
‘Worth it, to see that,’ he says.
Stir milk into coffee and you get a dip surrounded by milky legs that blend into rings. That’s our galaxy we’re looking at. We’re on the outer edge of the outermost ring, looking in. ‘Not over yet, sir.’
‘Why? You got an idea?’
‘A few . . .’ Well, one actually.
‘Need help?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Carry on then.’
Permission given, he retreats to where Aptitude waits, ten paces behind us, her face raw with cold and oxygen starvation. Neen’s glance says he knows it’s supposed to be fifty paces, but what can he do?
The oxygen is too thin, the wind savage and there’s nothing to eat come morning but corpses. That might do for what’s left of the Wolf Brigade, might do for me if it came to it. But Debro would rather starve, and so would Aptitude. And so, I suspect, would our new emperor.
‘Clear me a comms channel to the captain.’
Diodes do a fancy dance as Leona’s ghost leaves off preaching heresy and begins to flirt her way through the mining ship’s security routines. Pretty please, I hear her say. Promises, promises. And then, Got you.
‘Talk to the AI instead,’ she suggests.
‘Why?’
‘Might as well start at the top.’
Taking the planet buster from around my neck, I flip the lid and turn the enamel band to prime its core. Then I hold it up, so the SIG can lenz it through to the ship. When that’s done, I broadcast my message.
If the ship leaves, we will die. Since we will die, I have no hesitation in taking the AI with me. Even if the ship frees its anchors, it cannot outrun the explosion. The AI, the ship and its crew will be ripped to small pieces.
If anything remains of them at all.
All we ask is passage to the nearest planet. Since we have gold, we can offer to pay our way. Alternatively, we can all die. But that seems wasteful.
‘Sven,’ Leona’s ghost says when I’m done, ‘that was almost thoughtful.’
It takes five minutes for the firing to stop. And then a long hatch in the ship’s belly drops, and a buggy bounces down the ramp. For a second it hesitates in the shadow of the ramp. But when no shots are fired, it comes towards us.
Ginal Ord is first officer on the Heart of Darkness, an independent but licensed mining ship, registered out of Finmu, capital of this arc of the halo. She is authorized by her captain to negotiate.
Her voice in our helmets asks who represents us.
By now Vijay stands beside me, as do most of the others. Shil still won’t meet my eyes, which is to be expected. Debro waits, purple-skinned but refusing to show how cold she is. Neen and Iona stand shoulder to shoulder. While Aptitude watches Vijay, whose gaze flicks from the approaching buggy to where the Wolf Brigade lieutenant who talked to me about parole has troopers stripping valuables from the dead.
‘Do we really have gold, Sven?’
I nod towards the lieutenant. ‘He does, sir.’
Vijay smiles a tired smile. ‘You realize,’ he says, ‘it’s usual for senior officers to have captains or above as their ADCs?’
‘Yes, sir . . .’
‘Better get Neen to find you some new pips.’
Takes me a moment to work out what he means.
And then Neen grins as he hacks the rank badges from a dead captain and Iona fumbles with frozen fingers for her needle and thread, while the buggy draws to a halt and opens its glass pod to release a woman in a cheap exoskeleton.
‘Sir,’ I say, ‘what do you think of their ship?’
‘Well,’ Vijay replies, ‘it’s large.’
That’s one way of describing it. Imagine that a mad sculptor soldered together every rusting rocket and ruined hangar from the Emsworth landing fields to make a steel slum, then bolted on gun turrets armed with industrial lasers, sprayed the whole thing red and welded his handiwork to massive boosters.
‘Do you want it?’
‘Sven . . .’
‘Just a thought, sir.’
Also by David Gunn
DEATH’S HEAD: BOOK ONE OF THE AUX
DEATH’S HEAD: MAXIMUM OFFENCE
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
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