Death's head dh-1

by David Gunn

  Realization halts me midstep.

  Where are the maps?

  As the thought slides into my mind so do floor plans for Villa Thomassi. A blink and I’m looking at the map of an area west of Zabo Square; another blink and Farlight is spread out beneath me, flicking between an aerial photograph and what looks like a transparent overlay. The kyp is feeding me information faster than I can swallow it. Returning the map to close detail, I try to make sense of the house plans.

  “What’s down there?” I demand, pointing to a corridor. On the plans a chute can be seen. It seems to lead to a basement. The big advantage of that is it will take us through the rising flames into the coolness below.

  “An old laundry.”

  “We go that way.”

  Aptitude looks like she’s about to protest, which is good, because it means she’s already thinking of us as a team. Short-term maybe, but Aptitude’s no longer looking to escape from me at the first opportunity. “How old are you?”

  “Why?”

  “Just wondered.”

  For a second it looks as if she’s going to refuse to tell me. Not that it matters really, I’m just interested.

  “Fifteen.”

  I’d killed half a dozen men by then, gotten drunk, gotten laid, caught whore fever, and been whipped for the stupidity. But that was then and this is now and we’re very different people, not just because she’s a girl but also because our worlds are not worlds that are meant to collide.

  “Sven,” I tell her.

  She looks at my outstretched hand, then good manners click in. “I’m Lady Aptitude Tezuka Wildeside,” she says, shaking my bloodstained fingers.

  See what I mean?

  CHAPTER 23

  Dawn finds us limping through the landing fields at Bosworth. A plume of black smoke rises into the sky behind us, newly visible now that the sun has begun to rise. No one seems in a hurry to put out the fire, although two copters hover overhead and fat cargo ships keep straying from their courses to take in the sight.

  Aptitude’s still furious because I threw her down the chute when she refused to jump, and her head still aches from where I put a slug along the side of her skull. It’s been a long walk and her feet hurt, along with everything else. My shoulder’s not good, but the pain is getting better. Sometimes I forget that other people don’t automatically mend.

  I’m looking for a small boy and a newly morphed spider bot. When I find him, he’s sitting near the wing of a rusting drone while his spider chews the wing into something that looks like iron filings. These fall into a plastic bucket that the boy moves occasionally as his bot shifts position.

  “How you doing?”

  “Okay.” He looks up, tries to work out if he knows me, then flicks his eyes to the bot and I know he has it. “Who’s she?”

  “A friend,” I say. “Got hurt in a fall.”

  The kid cocks his head sideways, considering Aptitude’s bloodied skull. “Looks like a bullet to me.”

  I laugh, and Aptitude glances between us.

  “Your dad around?”

  “Out the back,” the boy says. “I’d show you, but I’m not supposed to leave here.”

  Per Olson is standing next to a broken Casmir coil, and every now and then he sucks his teeth and walks around the wreckage of a cargo cruiser’s heart. It’s a mass of precious metals and crystals. All he has to do is extract what’s valuable without consigning himself and a five-hundred-yard circle around him to oblivion.

  “Trouble?” I say.

  He glances up from a hand slab, checks something on its screen, and then does a double take on Aptitude. “Looks like I should be asking you the same.”

  “We need a doctor.”

  “We?”

  “She does.”

  Per nods, and when he sucks his teeth it’s not over the Casmir coil. The directions he gives are precise. I’m to use his name. It would be best if I wrapped her head in something before walking her into the shadow of Calinda Gap. I’ll need to pay gold.

  He hesitates. “Have you got money?”

  “Yeah.” He doesn’t ask me how much or where from, and I realize I like this man. He’s the real thing. All I did was fix his spider bot but he’s ready to sub Aptitude if I don’t have enough for a doctor.

  Reassured, he watches us walk away.

  The doctor is young, nervous, and an addict. He gives his name as Josh3 and looks bemused when Aptitude tries to shake hands. His office is crude, full of medical lash-ups and naked chunks of memory crystal, with one fist-sized piece tied to a slab reader with glass wire. The widows are tar-papered and protected with freshly welded bars.

  I give him a month at most before the gangs or the police force him out. Both will want protection money, and neither will be able to save him from the other. Farlight is beginning to look like Karbonne written extra large. But Josh3 is here now, and the gold coin I’m holding is enough to focus his attention.

  “Bad wound,” he says.

  “Not that bad,” I tell him.

  Josh3 looks like he wants to disagree.

  “Do what you can,” says Aptitude. “But I want to stay conscious.”

  He looks like he wants to disagree with that as well.

  She really is Debro’s daughter. Her face is pale-more so than mine will ever be-her eyes are wide, and her mouth tightens with pain as Josh3 lifts the edges of her wound with a ceramic hook, but she doesn’t flinch and she swallows her pain as he swabs grazed bone and stitches the edges tight.

  “Your ma would be proud of you.”

  I mean it as a compliment. I certainly don’t mean to make her cry.

  Skull stitched and head scarf hiding where her hair’s been cut away, Aptitude walks beside me through Calinda Gap’s early morning. This is a weird city: Expensive yachts trawl lazily overhead, but most of the buildings around us are foamstone or fiberbloc, and a few are wood. Cheap motorbikes fill lanes with a thick fog of hydrocarbon. I’ve even seen a couple of donkeys, laden down with panniers.

  Satellite dishes sprout like fungus from the sides of most of the houses. It’s still early, but already the air stinks of warm dogshit and human sewage. There is a water shortage in this city, at least out here on the edges.

  “God,” says Aptitude.

  “You didn’t know places like this existed?”

  She shakes her head, and then winces at the pain. Her eyes are glazed with analgesics, but Josh3 was good to his word and kept her conscious through the entire operation. My shoulder is also mended, not that it was bad to start with…a cracked bone, busily healing itself by the time Josh3 cut his way inside.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Safety…”

  Aptitude stares at me, so I sit her on a low wall and tell her a few home truths, starting with the fact that a number of important people want her dead and will kill both of us if they ever discover that this is not already the case. The identity of these important people is left unspecified, and it says something for the state of Farlight politics that Aptitude never once doubts that what I tell her is true.

  “And my mother’s alive?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  She slides herself from the wall, ties the scarf tighter around her head, and links her arm through mine. “I suppose,” she says, “we’d better go.”

  Golden memories is nearly empty, for which I’m grateful. Bacon is being fried in the kitchens and the stink of garbage comes from a bin outside. I’m beginning to recognize the signature scents of this city, at least the bits of it I know. And I like the smell of food I can recognize. While I was ruining Aptitude’s wedding supper I could barely tell what was food from what was table decoration.

  Lisa grins as I walk into the kitchen, then sees Aptitude behind me and begins to scowl. There’s a good way to approach this and a bad way, and if I knew which was which I’d do it, but Lisa’s still a stranger, for all that we’ve shared a bed.


  So I settle on the truth.

  “I need your help.”

  Both Aptitude and Lisa are looking at me. To make matters more complicated, Angelique comes out from a stockroom and walks over to join her cousin.

  “Who’s this?” she demands.

  “The daughter of a friend-”

  “A friend?”

  I put my guns on the counter, one after another. It’s not a threat; I just need them to know who I am. At the sight of the last weapon, Lisa’s eyes widen.

  “That’s…”

  “Yeah,” I say, “illegal.”

  Angelique grins.

  They could sell me to the police and probably get a good price. We’re negotiating here. I’ve just told them they’re going to get something that’s worth more. At the moment they probably think it’s one of the guns.

  I take gold coins from my pocket.

  Eyes widen.

  “Ten Octo,” I say, “you keep an eye on her…Another ten, you let her work behind the bar until I get back.” I put a final twenty coins on the counter. We’re talking much more than they make in a month, legally or otherwise.

  “And that?” Lisa asks, looking at the final pile.

  The kid gets my room. It’s not as if Golden Memories has many real guests. And at a hundred credits to a single Octo, I’ve just bought Aptitude a lot of room time. The rules are clear: She works behind the bar, no one tries to make her work on her back, and she gets to eat with Lisa and Angelique.

  “Learn to blend in,” I say once we’re alone in the room that’s about to become hers. “Watch the others and do what they do.”

  She’s a good kid, but I can see the worry in her eyes.

  “This is your life now.”

  “My life?”

  “Maybe forever…”

  Calinda Gap is visible through the window, and the rocky edge of the caldera shows dark against the sun, with a skim of shantytown rising steeper than you’d think it possible to build. There are things I want to say. Things I wish the lieutenant had said to me, in the spaces between those things he did say.

  Finding the right words comes hard.

  And she’s uneasy to be alone in a room with me, which is not surprising given I killed her husband, her bodyguard, and most of the hired muscle at her wedding; but it’s a conversation we need to have. Even if Aptitude’s part is mostly silence and my part is made up of words I find almost impossible to say.

  “Your mother’s not coming back.”

  It’s probably the wrong way to begin.

  “She’s got a camp of her own in Paradise. Anton is with her. She’s become someone.”

  “Someone?”

  “A person who matters.”

  The girl wants to tell me that Debro Wildeside always mattered. Of course Debro did, but that’s not what I’m saying. “People change in prison,” I tell her. “More than they change most other places. They become someone else. Your ma’s the exception. I really believe she’s going to remain herself.”

  “And she’s got Dad.”

  I nod.

  “You really know them?”

  “Yes,” I say. “We landed on the same shuttle. Shared a camp. Fought a couple of battles against other camps. Well, your dad and I did. Setting the boundaries, so others would learn to leave us alone.”

  “Why were you let out?”

  “To kill you…” I take a deep breath. “Only I’d already promised your ma that I’d look after you if I could, and I made that promise before I was given the assignment.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble?”

  Her question makes me smile. “Behave yourself,” I tell her, “and no one will ever know. The senator is dead. His villa is in ruins. And you…well, you’re already dead on the stairs, aren’t you?”

  Aptitude nods, doubtfully.

  CHAPTER 24

  Octo V is thirteen, his hair falls in waves over thin shoulders, and his eyes are clear and fixed on the future. He’s been thirteen for my entire life and will probably still be thirteen when rust finally eats the cheap metal cross over my grave. Quite why he likes that age is hard to say.

  No one has dared ask.

  Maybe he believes a child emperor is intrinsically more heroic, or maybe he really does have no sense of human time. It’s probably unwise to speculate.

  Either way, this city is full of statues of a smartly uniformed child. He wears cavalry dress, frock coats, pilot’s goggles, and sometimes carries a cane or a swagger stick. In the most famous statue of all he wears the shapeless uniform of an astronaut, from the days before Octovians rediscovered style.

  It has to be intentional.

  The poor touch his statues for luck, leaving OctoV’s hands and feet worn smooth and bright, while the rest of him remains the strange green that bronze gets when it grows old. Farlight is a city of statues. Senators in robes and generals in uniform, noble-looking gods and naked women, more naked women than you can possibly imagine.

  All are made from bronze, all ridiculously beautiful, mostly with full breasts and wide hips…mothers washing their hair, feeding children, sitting contemplating or composing poetry, girls with bows and quivers, with wings, clutching bunches of flowers to their hearts.

  The subject doesn’t seem to matter so long as they are naked, which probably tells you more about the inhabitants of Farlight than a dozen slab guides do. I’m in a park beside a statue of a girl washing her feet in a bronze stream. The stream has ripples and the faintest suggestion of a current. The girl has curling hair, soft hips, and neatly crossed legs, so she can reach her ankles.

  Serenity, announces the label.

  Maybe in Farlight. Anywhere else, and she’d need guards to fight off the crowds if she sat around on a riverbank like that.

  Mr. deCharge is late.

  At least I’m assuming the message is his. It gave a time-five minutes ago-and a place, here beside the Serenity statue. As I wait, an old woman comes to nod at the bronze girl and a boy leaves bread crumbs beside her feet, while a child half the age of Aptitude rips bougainvillea from a bush and tosses its blossoms into bronze water, as if she believes the stream is real.

  Serenity has another name, obviously.

  One known only to…

  The poor, I think, as instinct kicks me off the bench and the air ripples. A carbon dart passes through the space where my head was, then splinters into fragments against the statue behind.

  A twig breaking.

  That’s what I heard. Sixteen years of combat training overrides a handful of days in this strange and sloppy city. As I wait, flat on the ground, I try to work out if there are two attackers and if one of them is busy creeping around behind me, puff gun in his hand.

  It’s a strange choice of weapon, except that a pulse rifle might melt the bronze girl, and that would undoubtedly cause more trouble than one dead soldier in a public park, so maybe there’s logic to the choice after all.

  “You can stand up now.”

  The voice is familiar. Amused, positively pleased with itself.

  Rolling over, I extract a throwing spike from its sheath and hurl it toward where I think the voice should be. Someone swears.

  “Enough,” says the voice.

  I’ve got a gun in my hand now, and as the uniformed figure twists my spike from the fir tree behind which he’s been hiding, I reach kneeling position and draw a bead on his head.

  “Targeted,” announces my SIG diabolo.

  Major Silva blanches.

  “Targeted…” The gun’s getting impatient.

  “You passed,” says the major. “That was the final test.”

  “Wait,” I tell the gun.

  The major is the same dapper figure. His diffidence is as much an affectation as it ever was, and he seems to be alone, which impresses me.

  “You can put that down,” he says.

  I look at the SIG, then shake my head. “Where’s deCharge?”

  “Dead.”

  “You killed him?”


  Major Silva nods. “He supplied your kyp, which was faulty…The man breeds them,” he says, amending it to “bred them.”

  “And I can’t get the bloody thing out?”

  He shakes his head.

  Something interesting has just occurred to me. “So you can’t get another one in?” He realizes the importance of this, or maybe he just sees the relief in my face. I’ve been shot, I’ve had bones broken and suffered beatings from Sergeant Fitz that left me barely able to crawl across a floor, but nothing comes close to my body’s battle with the kyp.

  “No,” he says. “We can’t.”

  During the course of this brief conversation, my gun gets lowered, although my trigger finger is still hooked through its guard, and the shell-retained-in-chamber diode on its handle remains red.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “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.”