Death's head dh-1

by David Gunn

  Neen bites. “What’s an ice worm?”

  “Bit like this,” I say, “only natural. Eats its way through ice, obviously enough. People live inside them.”

  “Where?” demands Shil.

  “On Paradise.”

  “You were a guard?” She’s reassessing.

  “A prisoner.”

  “And now you’re a Death’s Head officer?” says Haze, finally turning to look at me.

  “Things change.”

  He glances away, and then looks back when he thinks I’m not watching. So I hold my laser blade higher and light a little more of the tunnel through which we walk. Everyone has secrets, but I’m pretty certain that boy has more than most.

  “How much do you trust Haze?” I ask Neen a few minutes later.

  “With my life.”

  “You understand,” I tell him, “I’ll be holding you to that?”

  Slime slicks under our feet and guano streaks the walls. A quick flick of my blade toward the roof reveals endless bats, hanging silently. Tiny sullen eyes watching us as we pass. The only good thing that can be said about their ammonia stench is that it takes our minds off what is to come next.

  “How do you know which tunnel to take?” Shil asks.

  Increasing the intensity of my blade, I sweep it along a wall. When it dims, Shil is still puzzled so I step behind her and take her shoulders, feeling her freeze beneath my grip.

  Now would be a really good time to let go. But I don’t, because that would mean admitting I’ve noticed. Instead I angle Shil until she’s looking toward the wall, pass her the laser blade, and take her arm at the wrist, bringing the brightness closer to the crumbling concrete.

  “All of you,” I say.

  A scuff in the bat shit stands out, where the ferox stumbled and its fur left traces of feathering. A shift of her wrist lets the brightness highlight a much larger scrape, just above the waterline.

  It’s the heel mark of a ferox.

  Instinct makes me take the last half a mile in silence. This is the way the beast came, and it was held at the Trade Hall. So I already know it is possible to get from the sewer to the hall; the question is, where did the ferox enter the system?

  Water is rolling out of small pipes jutting into the tunnel, and it’s also beginning to rush through sluice gates on either side of us. In the city above our heads it has just begun raining, and gutters are channeling the runoff into this sewer.

  We can cope with the water rising, because if it comes to it, we’ll just swim. But I’m anxious not to lose the tracks of the ferox.

  “Over there, sir,” says Haze.

  I flick my blade toward that wall.

  He’s right: There’s a scuff mark at shoulder height.

  Another scuff a hundred yards later shows the beast kept to that side of the tunnel for a while. The current is harder over there, because the tunnel curves away from us, and a rusting ladder has been bent away from the wall of an access shaft by the weight of something heavy.

  “Take a look,” I tell Neen.

  Shil shakes her head, the action utterly instinctive. So far she’s done everything Neen tells her, younger brother or not, but I refuse to have things unravel between them if the situation gets serious, and it’s going to get serious.

  All five of us need to understand that.

  “Neen goes,” I tell them.

  He climbs swiftly and vanishes from sight. We wait for five minutes and then ten. I’m about to call Shil on her simmering anger when we hear footsteps on the ladder above.

  “Difficult climb,” says Neen.

  “How far?”

  “A hundred rungs or so, but the ladder finishes at a ledge halfway up. After that there’s only wall.” His voice is matter-of-fact, despite grazes to his hands and a nasty gash on one side of his head.

  “Fell,” he says, seeing my glance.

  “Do we need ropes?”

  “No, sir.” Neen shakes his head. “I’ve worked out a route…”

  The streets around the Trade Hall are almost empty. A truck that spits smoke, a couple of electric three-wheelers piled high with furs, business still going on as normal, despite an army camping beyond the gates.

  Few people bother to look as Neen and Franc saunter under a broken arch and find themselves in a narrow alley. Militia uniforms are much the same everywhere: combats and boots, cheap helmets and web belts. Haze hurries out behind them, then makes himself slow down.

  Shil goes next. She still looks like a boy at first glance, and probably second glance as well. Had it been just the four of them everything would be fine. But I’m there as well, and it’s hard to mistake me for anything but what I am.

  A professional killer.

  A woman turns, nudges another. A man on a gyro bike stops to see what they’re looking at and finds himself looking straight into my eyes.

  Idiot, I want to say.

  He opens his mouth to shout and I cross the street in a blur, wrap one arm around his thick neck, and twist savagely. The crack echoes off a nearby wall. Neen kills one of the old women and Franc kills the other. She does it cleanly and savagely, a single stab to the heart, then a swipe across the throat.

  I’m speechless. Also impressed.

  Grinning, Franc wipes her knife on her trousers and thrusts it back into its sheath. Her eyes catch Haze’s glance, and he nods. When I look at Franc again she’s humming to herself.

  My sergeant, meanwhile, is looking at his sister, who is anything but happy. After a second, he goes back to lowering his victim to the ground. Quite how a man that thin manages to support a woman that fat beats me.

  “Right,” I say. “Drag them into the tunnel.”

  Franc reaches for her victim, and Haze moves forward to help.

  “Shil,” I say. “A word…”

  The others pretend not to hear.

  “Franc and Neen just saved your life,” I tell her. “They saved my life, and they saved Haze’s life, too. If that happens again, I expect you to act faster.”

  “They were women,” she says.

  “So are you and Franc.”

  “Old women,” says Shil, close to crying. Although I suspect it’s more with frustration than anything else.

  “Was that going to stop them raising an alarm?”

  I wait for her answer and, after a few seconds, she shakes her head.

  “No,” I say. “It was not.”

  On my orders Shil and Franc take the dead women’s scarves and wrap them around their own heads. After a moment’s thought, I take a shawl from one of the women and make Haze wear this as a scarf. All that puppy fat makes him look like a girl anyway. When they’re done, I discard my own jacket and struggle into the trench coat of the man I’ve just killed.

  Now we’re two men and three women, all militia.

  “Walk on,” I tell them. “Eyes down, talking quietly. Step aside, be polite, and salute anything that looks like it needs saluting.”

  “And you, sir?” asks Haze.

  “I’ll be a hundred paces behind you. If you hear a disturbance keep walking.”

  The silverhead who begins to follow Neen made the change decades before the trooper was born. He’s tall, swathed with a mess of tubes that loop from his ribs to his legs. The virus has strung steel plaits from his skull, which ripple as he walks. He’s a five-braid, and he’s an arrogant bastard, far too sure of himself to worry about covering his back.

  “Hey,” says my gun. “Take a look at ugly.”

  A full battery pack and settings that only require it to forecast a handful of seconds into the future have made the SIG hyperactive, happy, and talkative. I preferred the thing in fuck-off mode.

  “You know,” the gun says, “that silverheads used to be human? Some of them quite recently…”

  Just as I think the SIG’s about to riff off silverhead history, it stops and half a dozen diodes beginning to flick through a rapid sequence.

  “Phasing,” it announces.

  “What
the fuck does-”

  And then I find out, because the silverhead walks confidently toward a wall and disappears in a shimmer of light.

  “Move,” says the SIG.

  I move.

  We find the silverhead two streets later, entering a road Neen is already on, although the silverhead enters it from a doorway on the opposite side. A clever trick, one I’d always believed a myth until then.

  “Oh shit,” says the gun.

  The silverhead has stopped, almost as if listening intently. And my gun’s gone very quiet indeed, to the point of stopping its lights exactly where they are.

  If one myth is true, how about another? Ripping a throwing spike from its sheath on my wrist, I waste a fraction of a second finding its sweet point and flick it free from my fingers.

  “ Got you, ” says the silverhead, turning.

  He becomes aware of my throw as the spike hits his shoulder. Injury locks the Enlightened into now.

  “Can I suggest subsonic?”

  My gun sounds happy to be back in the game.

  Two shots take the silverhead to his shattered knees. And then, extracting my dagger, I simply walk up to the whimpering creature and drag my blade hard across his throat.

  He flickers from view, but the damage is too serious. For a second he’s almost transparent, and then he reappears, just in time to let my knife finish taking the head from his body.

  Self-proclaimed god or not, he drops like a wall collapsing.

  “Good riddance,” says the gun.

  A sweep of my dagger and most of the silverhead’s scalp comes free. There’s flesh beneath the shell, so I scrape it clean and cram the mass of steel braids onto my own head. It’s a tight fit.

  What am I going to do about those tubes?

  Discarding the jacket I stole earlier, I slash open my shoulder and stab my hip…It hurts like fuck, but I do it anyway, and then I force the fattest of the tubes into the open wounds and watch flesh begin to seal itself around them. Black’s not really an Enlightenment color, but my prosthetic arm is definitely not normal and that’s good. And my gun, that’s definitely not normal, either.

  “Flash faster,” I tell it.

  “What?”

  “Make like winter-tree lights.”

  The SIG does so, with very bad grace.

  “Neen?”

  The boy turns, catches sight of me, and swears. I’d grin, but silverheads take themselves far too seriously for humor.

  “Fall in,” I say. “All of you. We’re going to visit the Uplifted.”

  No one stops us as we cross a square; no one even glances our way. A child almost does and is slapped into silence by her father, who bows nervously without ever meeting my face. If this is the response the Enlightened elicit, I’m not sure I like them much, either.

  Neen stalks ahead, his rifle ported across his chest. The three girls, who are actually two girls and an increasingly sulky Haze, walk behind like a shadow, stopping when I stop and keeping their eyes on the ground.

  Up ahead is a steel gate cut into a foamstone wall. A guard stands on either side. These are real soldiers, not militia. We’re being watched, scanned by some kind of lenz above the door, and one of the guards is already unporting his gun.

  He’d kill Neen as soon as look at him, but my braids and the gun, which is now chanting Uplift prayers, give the man pause.

  “Open,” demands my gun, taking a break from its chanting.

  The guard falls back before us.

  He wants to stop me but can’t bring himself to touch someone he believes Enlightened. The mistake costs him his life, as Franc jabs a blade under his jaw and up into his brain.

  Neen kills the other guard, a savage swipe of hardened steel across his jugular. It leaves Neen soaked in blood, but I understand this well enough. The trooper’s washing away the memory of his earlier kill, giving himself something legitimate. From the grin on Franc’s face, it doesn’t look like she’s too bothered about stuff like that.

  “Stand back.”

  Neen blows the gate out of its arch with a belt mine and we’re inside, guns held combat-style and our eyes scanning an inner courtyard. It’s not what I expect. Someone’s roofed the entire area in spun glass, which shifts through a thousand patterns so swiftly that it makes my eyes ache.

  “Don’t look,” Haze tells Franc.

  She drags her gaze away from the ceiling.

  The floor beneath our boots is a thin skim of water over huge squares of marble. Colors drift in the water like opalescent clouds, not mixing but passing through each other in fingers of pure purples and blues.

  A door ahead begins to open and Franc raises her pulse rifle.

  “May I?” she asks.

  I nod, and a soldier goes down with most of his skull missing. It’s a clean shot and Franc’s grin is wider than ever. She lived under Uplift occupation, I remind myself; she’s bound to have issues.

  We hit the corridor beyond and kill everything we see. A NewlyMade, skull still soft and first braid still growing. A full-blown two-braid, too shocked at being attacked to phase out in time. A handful of guards, who die before they realize what’s happening.

  A girl sees us and begins to scream. It’s Franc who takes her aside and quiets her down, talking intently. She’s the daughter of the two-braid, hunting for her father. We all know what she doesn’t, that her father is already dead.

  As the slaughter ends, a couple of women appear, utterly human and crippled with fear. Neen pointedly indicates the door behind us and tells them to get the fuck out of here.

  I nod. Shil smiles. The earlier incident is forgiven.

  “What now, sir?” Neen asks.

  “We find the Uplifted.”

  Everything I’ve heard says Uplifted are vast pyramids of diamond and silicon, able to protect themselves from anything. When I told Colonel Nuevo my Aux could take one, I was boasting; he must have known that.

  “It’s up those stairs,” says Franc. “The girl told me.”

  “Why?”

  “I told her we were here to protect it.”

  “It’s here, sir,” says Haze. It’s the first thing he’s said to me since I made him wear a woman’s shawl half an hour before. “I think it’s sick.”

  He’s right.

  A small metal pyramid hangs from an intricate web that spreads across most of the ceiling. A fist-sized diamond hangs from filaments at the pyramid’s center. Lights run the length of every strand in the web and within the pyramid itself. They run unevenly, in a stuttering motion that lacks the fluidity this object deserves.

  A dim light pulses at the diamond’s center. Only Haze could equate an Uplifted to a machine. And yet…

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  Dropping to his knees in front of a tangle of filaments, Haze takes a closer look. “Burnout,” he says. “You want me to fix it?”

  “Can you?”

  “I can try.”

  That’s good enough for me. The Uplifted comes apart in a burst of flame and static. As I drop my pistol back into its holster, Haze is staring. “Fuckwit was flying the batwings,” my gun tells him. “You want to face those again?”

  CHAPTER 31

  There are some simple rules to occupying a city. Rule one says grab yourself a good base. That doesn’t mean somewhere secure, because if you lock a city down properly even the ghettos are secure. It means find somewhere warm, dry, and comfortable, preferably with its own stock of food and a cellar full of alcohol.

  Hotels are good, as are clubs, glitzy bars, and posh houses. But we’re in Ilseville, where the first three of those are rarer than hen’s teeth.

  I order the Aux to head uphill, because hills usually equal expensive-unless they’re absurdly steep, like in Farlight. Of course, finding a hill in Ilseville isn’t easy. The city’s mostly flat, being built on a floodplain. The few hills that do exist are artificial, made from silt dredged from the Ilseville River back when the wharves and landing stages were built.

&nb
sp; All this I discover in the time it takes the Aux to walk from the Trade Hall to a residential district overlooking the river. I’ve ditched my dreads and removed the silver body hose, losing both once Colonel Nuevo’s troops begin pouring through the recently opened gates.

  “How about that one, sir?” asks Franc, indicating a huge house on the shady side of a square.

  “Or that?” Shil says, pointing to something even grander.

  “Too flash,” I tell Shil. “We’d lose it to the colonel. We’ll take the first.”

  It’s still large, faced with sheets of solidified foam cut to look like sandstone. The high windows that stare at us are barred and reinforced with toughened glass, which suggests Ilseville isn’t quite the haven of tranquillity the Enlightened have been suggesting. As I suspect, the front door is cored with mesh and its lock is semi-smart.

  “Hello,” says my gun.

  And then it explains, using very simple language, exactly what is going to happen to the lock if it doesn’t cooperate. Three seconds later, five bolts click back and the door begins to open as we watch. A maid in full uniform is waiting on the other side.

  “Welcome,” she says.

  If she’s shocked to be greeted with a faceful of drawn weapons she does a good job of keeping it hidden. The maid is young, in her early twenties probably, and bright enough to know she stands a better chance of getting through this alive if she makes herself visible and useful rather than hiding behind a locked door to be hunted down.

  “Whose house?”

  “Lord Filipacchi, of Filipacchi Trading.”

  The name means nothing to me.

  “It’s mine now,” I say. “Mine, and theirs…Understand?”

  She does.

  Her name is Maria, and she walks me around the house as if I really am the new owner. There are five floors, not including an attic, which makes this the tallest house I’ve ever seen. A turret on the top floor overlooks the city, and I claim this for my own. The room is filthy and full of old furniture.

  “Are there any other servants?”

  Maria shakes her head.

  “Hire some,” I tell her. “Have them prepare this room.”