Death's head dh-1

by David Gunn

“Bad for you,” I say.

  He looks at the knife in my hand and smiles. “You’ve lost me a month’s wages,” he says, sounding less than upset.

  “Really, sir?”

  “The general said you’d do it in three weeks. I told him five. Get your things,” he says. “We’re out of here.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I’ve been on Paradise for less than a month. And yet, leaving is harder than I ever imagined. Phibs will come out on top, or be trusted adviser to someone who does. He will collect his little pile of gold, or whatever it is Phibs is so busy collecting.

  He will grow rich, establish power bases. People will come to him for medicines and knives and food, because there’s always one man who has these available, for a price.

  Anton and Debro are different.

  They have only their ideals, and these crack, tarnish, and break. Some people are unable to live with the damage this does to them. I know. Lieutenant Bonafont lives in my memory as a brilliant tactician, natural teacher, and able handler of men. Which is probably why he ended up running a two-bit fort hundreds of miles south of a city that was a city only in name.

  He began as somebody like Anton. I understand that now. His voice in my head is educated, polite, well brought up…all the things I will never be.

  This sets me wondering. Why did the man waste his time on me? Because no officer in the legion, not even one reduced to commanding a fort in the middle of nowhere, need ever bother himself with a twelve-year-old refugee, an accident left over from an afternoon’s casual slaughter.

  Yet Lieutenant Bonafont did.

  He taught me how to hold a knife and fire a pulse rifle. He taught me how to track and how to understand the weather. I learned to read skies and be able to tell from the grit beneath my feet whether someone had walked that route before me. And he taught me other things, which seemed pointless to me.

  Not to eat with my fingers. How to hold my temper. Why I should always drink a glass of clean water before going to bed drunk.

  Maybe it’s the debt I owe Lieutenant Bonafont that makes me keep returning to the debt I owe Debro and Anton, because I’m worrying about them. Mostly I’m worrying that Debro will stop Anton from being sufficiently ruthless to keep the things we’ve gained. And as I walk back along the corridor, with a knife still hanging loose at my side, my thoughts should be on the shower I’ve been promised, the new clothes, and my meeting with the general…

  I regret having failed to persuade Colonel Nuevo that the others should come with me, an essential part of my team.

  He will not hear of it.

  Although he is prepared to consider Phibs, which is a surprise in itself. He is prepared to consider Phibs, but not Debro or Anton. And so I condemn a man who doesn’t even know he has a second chance to no chance at all, because I want Phibs to back up Anton, at least in the short run.

  I’m coming to understand politics better than I expect.

  “Well?” asks Debro.

  She’s sat in one corner of our newest camp, stroking the hair of the child we gained along the way and talking and talking to the small girl endlessly. I have no idea what she says, but Debro speaks incessantly and quietly and sweetly, in a way I’ve never seen her speak to an adult, not even Rebecca.

  “What did they say?” asks Anton.

  I glance around the camp, see Phibs watching from one corner, and nod to him. A second later I nod to Debro and Anton and wander outside. Phibs arrives first, Anton second, and finally Debro. Behind her I can hear the rising whine of a child.

  “How old?” I ask.

  “No idea,” says Debro. “In this place it’s almost impossible to say.”

  “Are you planning to keep her?”

  “Of course I’m keeping her,” she says crossly. Shaking her head as if there are subtleties I will never understand.

  “What happened?” asks Phibs. “We got problems?”

  I shake my head. “The camp’s already deserted,” I tell them. “Someone’s even left you an armchair, a bottle of vodka, and two glasses.”

  Anton’s eyes go wide.

  “What is going on?” Debro says, her face suddenly serious. Out of all of them, she’s always the one who can read the signs. One of life’s natural trackers.

  I take a deep breath, look around at the ceramic walls and the crudely cut door into what has briefly been my world. “I’m leaving,” I say.

  Phibs opens his mouth, but no words come out.

  “No one leaves,” says Anton.

  “What do they want from you?” asks Debro.

  Looking at the woman I’ve briefly borrowed as a sister, I have to admit that I don’t know.

  “Who came?” she asks.

  “A colonel,” I say. “From the Death’s Head.”

  “And you know this man?” Debro’s voice is matter-of-fact. As if the answer to this question is already obvious. Which, in a way, it is. People do not get dragged out of Paradise on a whim. Although it seems I’ve been sent here on exactly such a whim.

  “This colonel,” says Anton. “Would he work for General Jaxx?”

  I nod.

  “And where are you going now?”

  Thoughts flicker across his face. A certain calculation can be seen. He’s not cruel or conniving, just very intense and very very serious. As I consider how to answer, I realize that both he and Debro are waiting on my words.

  Phibs, too, but in a different way.

  He’s just interested.

  “Farlight City,” I say, and catch it then. In that second I understand what they want and what I can do for them. I know it before Debro even opens her mouth to ask. Makes few friends, said my first and only psychological test on joining the legion. Utterly faithful to those he does…

  I will protect their daughter. Whatever it is Debro and Anton want from me I will do…I tell them this and give them my word. It’s a legion oath, binding until death, and for all Debro’s professed hatred of the military she kisses me on both cheeks and tells me her prayers will hold me to it.

  CHAPTER 15

  Can you get me a drink?” The naked girl glances up from her screen, on which an impossibly beautiful tribal woman is saying good-bye to a legionnaire who has the kind of rugged good looks and smoldering smile that would see him a target for everyone’s spite in the real world.

  I wonder which role Caliente is playing and why she doesn’t just jack the feed straight into her mind like everybody else on this ship.

  “Sure,” I tell her. “Vodka okay?”

  She smiles.

  “What are you playing?”

  “It’s new,” she says. “Really neat.”

  The vodka comes already chilled over ice. I love the drink machine in her room. Waiting while Caliente shifts on her chair to make room for me, I take another glance at her game; it all looks pretty ordinary to me. “What’s good about it?”

  “Thing’s got rules.”

  I look at Caliente and remember why I chose her last time. Full breasts, but not too heavy, and hips that can be gripped. The chair is too small for both of us. So I pick her up and put her on my lap.

  “All games have rules,” I say.

  She looks slightly disbelieving. As if she wants to contradict but isn’t sure she dares. Instead she wriggles prettily. Which, if it doesn’t get my uniform stained from inside, is going to get it stained from outside anyway.

  “Wait.”

  I lift her again, just enough to unfasten my trousers.

  “Now you can wriggle,” I tell her.

  It’s day three of life aboard the general’s mother ship and I’ve had my shower, a uniform has been found for me, and I’ve been camping in Caliente’s room for the last fifty-six hours.

  She wriggles. Mechanically at first, then with more interest as she realizes I’m getting aroused. “Those games,” I prompt, because the lieutenant once told me you should always make conversation with girls in a brothel.

  “Most don’t have rules,” she tells me.


  “Really?”

  “Well, not the ones I play.”

  “What happens?”

  “You play until you get bored. Or things fuck up.”

  “And then?” I ask, steadying her speed slightly so her buttocks and inner thighs brush against me more slowly as she swivels her hips. If I’m not mistaken, she’s begun to get wet.

  Caliente hesitates.

  “Don’t stop,” I tell her. “I just want to know what happens if you fuck up.”

  “You turn the game off and start again.”

  “Ah, right…” The games supplied to the legion are simpler. You go into battle, you die, along the way you collect brothel tokens and medals. You can even go for promotion, in the games world obviously, but I’ve never seen the point.

  We shuffle in silence for a while, if heavy breathing counts as silence. Then I lift Caliente one final time and lower her onto me. She’s tight, more involved than last time, unless the position just makes entry deeper.

  “Is that augmented?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Everything’s just in proportion.”

  She does it once for one of the tokens Sergeant Hito gave me, and once again for nothing, and is about to do it a third time when hammering on the door tells us both that the sergeant has lost patience for “babysitting a berserker,” as he calls it.

  He’s wrong. I’ve seen berserkers. We have nothing in common at all. For a start, I’m not a fucking marsupial.

  “You’re wanted.”

  I’m wanted in here, I almost answer. Instead I lift Caliente off me, thwack her once on the buttocks, and smile when she yelps. The slap she aims back barely catches my face.

  “Enough,” says the sergeant. He sounds as if he means it. “She can go,” he adds, his voice loud despite the door between us.

  “She’s already gone,” Caliente says, flipping him an invisible finger before kissing me lightly on the lips and disappearing into her shower room in a wiggle of red ass, cheeky grin, and white towel.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” says the sergeant.

  “What?”

  “You might at least put yourself away.”

  It takes me a moment to work out what he means. When I’ve fastened my zip, I look around for my coat. “Does this mean the general is ready to see me?”

  It’s been three days of doing nothing much but fuck Caliente and take showers. I’ve been expecting to be bustled in to meet the general for so long that I’ve begun to wonder if he even knows I’m on the ship. Except obviously he does, because it’s dangerous for everybody if I’m on the ship and he doesn’t know. Everyone is open about the general’s ruthless nature and vicious anger. But then, everyone seems to regard this as a good thing.

  I’m not so sure. My opinions are that anger has no place in battle, except on the part of the men. Officers are meant to be ice-cool. As I said, my old lieutenant was an idealist.

  Obviously enough, I don’t mention his theory. I just camp for three days in a room above the sergeants’ mess. Most of the sergeants openly resent my presence anyway, and only accept it because Hito outranks them and the general is known to take an interest.

  “What?” says Sergeant Hito. “See you? Looking like that?”

  That’s the other thing about the legion: We don’t worry too much about dress regulations and personal standards. The Death’s Head, on the other hand, all look like they come out of the same vat. Unless, of course, not caring about dress regulations only applies to the bits of the legion in which I’ve served. Frontier forts. Suicide missions. The bits that die.

  “What are you thinking?”

  I stare at Sergeant Hito. It’s such an inappropriate question from a sergeant. A woman maybe…if she’s making conversation.

  “I mean it.”

  “How neat you all are.”

  “You can learn.”

  No reply is merited.

  “I mean that, too. You can learn. The general may demand it…And that arm,” he says. “Why?”

  I don’t understand the question.

  After he repeats it and adds something about the prosthetic being fifty years out of date and mostly broken, I realize what he’s saying. Why don’t I have a better one?

  “They cost,” I tell him, voice cold. “This cost.”

  So he asks the price and I give it. And something in my eyes stops him from laughing, although he glances instinctively toward the door through which Caliente vanished.

  “Okay,” I say. “So she’s expensive.”

  And beautiful, experienced, and intelligent. And there probably isn’t a legionnaire in this part of the spiral who wouldn’t give his real arm, never mind a crappy little prosthetic, to have her. But I’m not about to tell Horse that.

  “Do you know what she costs?”

  It’s twice what my metal arm cost. I’ve had Caliente at least seven times in the last three days, not including freebies, which means I’ve put the cost of fourteen mechanical arms on the general’s bill. I wonder if he’ll mind and decide I don’t care. How much money do these people have? And why do they get to fuck with the rest of us?

  Except I’m not twelve and I had this conversation with my lieutenant. Only back then I was talking about the sergeants and didn’t yet realize the lieutenant got to play God with their lives as well.

  “We can fix you another arm,” says Sergeant Hito.

  “I don’t want one,” I say crossly.

  His face hardens. “Don’t play games,” he says. “It’s a bad move. People who play games around General Jaxx die early.”

  And there the conversation is meant to rest, except I can’t let it go. “Don’t you have a favorite weapon?” I ask him.

  He looks up, eyes still hard, then realization catches him.

  “That’s your weapon?”

  “It’s one of them.”

  “We’ll find you something better,” he says. “Not just new, better…”

  And we go down to the sergeants’ mess, where a dozen hostile faces watch me as I cross the room and keep watching as the door shuts behind us and we head along a corridor toward an elevator.

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to say good day. ”

  “ They don’t,” I say, and beside me I hear Horse take a deep breath.

  “You’re the stranger,” he tells me. “It’s their room, their club. No one gets access to the sergeants’ mess except sergeants. Even officers have to be invited.”

  “So why am I allowed?”

  “Because the general wants it.”

  “Why?”

  Sergeant Hito is about to say No one questions what the general wants. One of those hardwired reflexes we all have instead of thought. But he doesn’t. At my side, he hesitates, thinks about it.

  “You lived among the ferox.”

  I nod.

  “No one has done that before. And you claim to be able to talk to them.”

  “I can,” I tell him. “Well, I could. Maybe it was only those ferox.”

  “And maybe you were insane with hunger and exhaustion, and had lost control of your thoughts and only imagined it. That’s what Colonel Nuevo thinks.”

  “Youngster and I spoke,” I say firmly. “Sometimes it was hard to understand him. When I was on the whipping post he had to cut me before he made sense.”

  “And then there’s that,” says the sergeant.

  “The whipping post?”

  “That, too. Medical scans show seventeen lashes in a single whipping. No one survives that level of abuse.”

  “I did.”

  “Apparently. But that also worries the colonel, I can say this because he’s already said it, and has told me he’s told the general.”

  I wait for Sergeant Hito to reach his point and wonder if he knows what this negation of personal responsibility says about him. Maybe it says something about the Death’s Head as a whole.

  Negation of personal responsibility. I’m proud of that. It sounds like something the old
lieutenant might say; probably did, come to that.

  “You cut yourself to stay sane? While you were a captive of the ferox. Have we got that right?”

  “I did it to talk to them.”

  Stepping out of the elevator, the sergeant indicates that he is listening. Two men in lesser uniforms step aside. The uniforms are complicated. Sergeants look grander than lieutenants do, and the colonel’s uniform is simpler than that. From what I can remember of General Jaxx, his uniform is almost entirely plain. Apart from the Obsidian Cross hanging from his neck and silver death’s heads on the points of his jacket collar, nothing indicates that he outranks them all.

  The men who step aside are probably corporals. One of them slides me a glance and then hurriedly looks away.

  “You were saying…?”

  “Pain focuses my ability to hear the ferox.”

  “You insist that they can speak?”

  “Only in here,” I say, tapping the side of my head.

  “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.