Death's head dh-1

by David Gunn

  “Me?”

  “I have my reasons,” he says. A wave of his hands dismisses the two men, who scrape their chairs against the floor in their haste to escape. “Wait outside,” he tells them, to their obvious disappointment.

  “Engineers?”

  “No.” The colonel shakes his head. “Experts on the Uplifted, completely fucking useless, both of them. I’m going to shoot one of them. I just haven’t decided which. It died, you know.”

  “The thing?”

  “Simply shut itself down. But we’ve got bigger problems.” He flicks up a screen, touches his finger to a slab, and the city spreads out below me, seen from a great height.

  “View from the mother ship?”

  “I wish…high-orbit satellite. Still, at least the general left us that.”

  So General Indigo Jaxx is gone. Do I dare ask where? Somehow in my thoughts his mother ship is still riding shotgun up there in high orbit, our final defense and weapon of attack.

  “Concentrate,” orders the colonel.

  Ilseville is smaller than it seems from the ground. Our river is a tributary of a larger river that splits on the plain and loses itself in vast marshes beyond; the waterlogged terrain across which we attacked is simply a small corner of this. Clouds scuttle below us, obscuring the view. I’m not sure what I’m meant to be watching, because the city looks peaceful and the marshes are empty.

  “Here,” he says, losing patience.

  Black insects skim the surface of a tiny stream. Only the stream is the larger of the rivers and the insects are boats and we’re about a day away from the insects reaching the coin-sized circle that is Ilseville.

  “Hex-Sevens,” he says.

  I count fifty, and then give up. No sooner do I count than more fill the edge of the screen. It’s like kicking an ants’ nest and then trying to make sense of the reaction. “How many soldiers to a boat?”

  “A hundred,” he says. “Maybe more.”

  “You want me to go out there and see if I can stop them, sir?”

  He stares at me, then smiles. “You’re insane,” he says. “That’s probably why I like you.” He dips his hand into a desk drawer and retrieves a handful of silver braid. “Fix this on,” he tells me. “And consider yourself promoted to staff officer.”

  The colonel laughs, and I realize my face probably says it all.

  “What do you know about politics?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Good,” he says. “And bad.”

  It seems OctoV likes to cover his bets, so he spread-bets against himself and then covers the long odds with small sums that occasionally pay out and cost little if they’re lost. We’re one of those small sums. This is not the way Colonel Nuevo puts it, but it’s what he means.

  This battle, which I thought key to OctoV’s planning, is a diversion for a diversion. And there are other layers that make our situation even more complicated. The late Lieutenant Uffingham was nephew to EmpireMinister Othman, who is currently in disgrace. Major Silva owed his position to General Jaxx, who has the ear of OctoV, making him dangerous as a patron and doubly dangerous as an enemy.

  Colonel Nuevo asks if I follow so far.

  It seems best to say yes, although I consider asking what an empireminister might be but decide I can work that out for myself. It’s someone important enough to be mentioned in the same breath as General Jaxx.

  “We’re a sideshow,” the colonel says.

  Looking from the screen to the river beyond his window, I consider asking if the sideshow is about to close early and decide I know the answer to that as well.

  “Where’s the real battle, sir?”

  The star system he names registers vaguely. All that can be said is that it is a very, very long way away. About halfway across the outer spiral if my memory is right.

  “Attrition,” says Colonel Nuevo. “That’s what this comes down to. How many brigades can we tie up? How many of us can they kill…? Who can do it fastest?”

  Pouring himself another drink, the colonel raises his glass.

  “Make your choice,” he tells me. “Death or glory.”

  I can’t work out if he’s joking.

  Although his next comment answers that for me. “We’re ringed with ball busters. You know why they’re there?” The obvious answer is to destroy Enlightened ships. Only if the answer is that obvious, why ask the question?

  “Mercenaries,” I say, “are sometimes known to abandon battles.”

  The colonel laughs mirthlessly.

  “So if I was the general, I might circle this planet with sats designed to kill unexpected traffic. Say for the next six weeks.”

  “Try six months,” he says. “And it’s all traffic, unexpected or not.”

  “Do the mercenaries know that, sir?”

  “No,” he says. “But you’re going to tell them.”

  CHAPTER 35

  There’s a Hot Bar Wild in every city on every planet at this end of the spiral. It might be illegal; it might advertise openly; it might be called something else…but it’s there. All you have to do is find it.

  In Ilseville it’s down on the river dock, squatting in a patch of wasteland between two crumbling warehouses. IMPERIAL TRADING, reads one board, IMPORT / EXPORT.

  The board is rotten, and the warehouse it advertises is empty.

  Maybe such bars find scuzzy areas or maybe they blight the areas in which they’re set. Someone knows, but it’s not me.

  Pushing my way through the door, I make for an empty table, beating a huge man with luminous tattoos, who swings his dreads from side to side and scowls. He’s meant to look like an Enlightened but it’s not even a good likeness.

  “Mine,” he says.

  I put my gun to his head.

  The man leaves, still scowling and muttering threats.

  “Bring it on,” says the SIG. “We’ll be waiting.”

  I have to admit that I’m quietly impressed by Hot Bar Wild…Shil, on the other hand, is anything but. Two rather young gymnasts are performing on a low wooden stage, and they’re wearing nothing, not even body hair.

  One of them is bent so far backward that her head protrudes from between her legs. As we watch, she uncoils faster than a spring, does the splits, and picks up a gold coin with her vulva.

  Not to be outdone, her companion drops to the floor, rolls her legs over her head, and tucks them behind her arms. The next coin lands exactly where its owner intends it to land; a second later it vanishes.

  A group of men by the bar begin to cheer. “Remind me why we’re here,” Shil says.

  “You’re covering my back.” Turning to Haze, I raise my eyebrows.

  “Nothing even comes close,” he tells me, checking his slab. And my gun preens itself in a run of flashing diodes. These guys have money, and when mercenaries aren’t spending their cash on alcohol, implants, or drugs, they’re buying weapons, the flashier and smarter the better. So it’s as well to know what we’re facing.

  “Here,” I say, tossing Neen a money roll.

  Neen catches it easily, breaks out twenty gold coins, and heads for the bar. I’m aiming to come out of here ahead of the money Colonel Nuevo staked us, but we need to spend some cash to get things rolling.

  He pays with gold, because that’s what mercenaries use, and some customs are too ingrained for even OctoV to change. Neen must look convincing in his new uniform, because its lack of insignia is exciting interest.

  I’m wearing something very similar: All my usual braid is gone from my chest and the lieutenant’s bars are missing from my collar. Pretty soon one of these guys is going to ask Neen or me which unit we’re with.

  We’ve planned how this is going to go.

  Someone is about to be taken down hard. It’s unfair, but it’s necessary, and fair isn’t a word that has much of a place in a bar like this.

  Neen tells the bar girl to keep the change. And then, picking up the bottle he’s just bought and five shot glasses, he begins to return to our
table. When it comes, his stumble is convincing. No alcohol is spilled, no one’s uniform gets wet, but someone’s chair gets joggled and respect needs reestablishing. At least, that’s what the squat man with the scarred face decides.

  He taps Neen on the shoulder.

  And goes down as Neen smashes the bottle into the side of his head. A kick to the gut lifts the man half off the floor and Neen follows up by stamping hard on the man’s wrist.

  The whole bar hears bones break.

  A friend of the injured man launches himself at Neen just as I put a shot through the ceiling, dropping plaster onto the crowd below. A woman screams from a cubicle above, but it’s fear, not injury. And the two contortionists freeze midmaneuver, giving their punters a prime-time view of all those sinuous moves previously denied them.

  “Enough,” I say.

  “Or what?” It’s the squat man’s friend.

  His ear vanishes with just enough chopped meat decorating the table behind to make one of the contortionists projectile-vomit. She makes a nasty mess of herself.

  “Good shot,” says my gun.

  No one’s quite sure which event it means.

  “Give my sergeant another bottle,” I tell the barkeeper.

  The man does what he’s told. No one suggests we might want to pay.

  At the table we toast one another, our unit, and the stupid fucking war. And then Haze produces a pack of cards and we begin to play. About ten minutes later a man in a leather coat with a pistol stuffed in his waistband saunters over. He’s thin, gray-haired, and wearing one of those really obvious cerebral implants. His T-shirt reads HAPPINESS IS A WARM BELT-FED WEAPON.

  Removing a glove that is weighted across the knuckles and armored around the wrist, he thrusts out his hand. “Ion,” he says.

  We shake.

  He nods at a spare stool.

  “It’s an open game,” says Haze.

  So the man pulls up the chair and Haze deals him in, taking five gold coins from him in the first three rounds. Understandably enough, Ion’s not happy. Round four sees him win two coins back, round five sees him win another two, and the round after that gives him two more, meaning he’s one ahead.

  The man folds his hand, excusing himself from the game.

  “Have a drink,” I say.

  Ion fetches himself a glass from the bar. We’ve made him happier than if he won ten coins straight. It’s weird, but then what makes people happy often is.

  “You think this is a bad gig?” asks Ion. It’s the opening we’ve been waiting for.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Real bad.”

  Ion empties his glass, pours himself another one, and toasts the fresh-washed gymnast who’s just come back on, to a mix of catcalls and rapturous applause.

  “You know,” says Neen, “I’d be surprised if even a quarter of us get out alive.”

  Listening in, a woman asks, “Why?”

  Haze drains his glass; his hand is steady, but his elbow misses the table. You wouldn’t know it’s the first alcohol any of us have had all day.

  “General’s fucked off,” says Haze, and a couple of mercenaries at the next table exchange glances with each other.

  “Gone,” says Neen. “Pissed off to Farlight.”

  “Yeah.” Franc’s voice is hard. “Apparently he’s gone home to a warm bed.”

  Ion looks interested, although that’s probably because he’s just realized Franc is a girl; with her shaven head and baggy uniform it can get hard to tell.

  “And then,” says Haze, “there’s that flotilla of Uplift landing craft crawling up the river. Thousands of the fuckers.”

  “Landing craft?”

  “X-Seven-i’s,” says the SIG, refusing to be left out. The designation means nothing to me, but the colonel was pretty sure it would mean something to them.

  “Hex-Sevens?” says Ion.

  “Yeah,” says Haze. “And then just to really screw things…Jaxx’s seeded the entire fucking upper atmosphere. No one gets in or out for six months.”

  “You sure?” It’s a man from a table two down.

  When Haze dips under the table, half a dozen men reach for their guns. But all he’s after is his slab, which wakes as he flicks his finger across its surface.

  Everyone waits.

  “Here,” says Haze, pushing his toy across the table to Ion, who glances at the screen and then takes a long hard look. A weapons set is clearly visible. Behind it sits another, with another behind that and another in the distance. If you look carefully and check their alignment you’ll see they form part of a pattern.

  “How the fuck did you do that?” demands Ion.

  And Haze flinches.

  We’ve lost him. He’s out of the loop and back to being the pudgy kid in the corner no one wants in their game. Franc touches his arm, almost diffidently, and I watch Haze tense and then relax.

  “Ball busters,” says Ion, he’s talking to a mercenary at the next table. “Fucking thousands of them.”

  The man pulls up a stool without being invited.

  We’d make a deal of it, but this routine is running itself, and we have the attention of half the bar. The music’s dead and the contortionists have gone back to sulking, probably because they can’t find anyone to buy them a drink.

  “How do you know about this?” the uninvited man asks.

  Neen glares at him, a real thousand-klick stare. That flat-eyed-snake routine Colonel Nuevo runs without even thinking about it. Neen’s hardened in the brief time he’s been on this planet.

  “We’re Death’s Head auxiliaries.”

  A lot of people go very quiet.

  “What, the fuck,” Ion says finally, “is a Death’s Head auxiliary?”

  “Like mercenaries,” says Shil. “Only we get paid less, we do nastier jobs, and we get to work for men like him.” Shil is looking at me as she says this, and I’m not entirely sure she’s joking.

  I smile anyway. “Sven,” I say, introducing myself. “Lieutenant Sven Tveskoeg, Obsidian Cross second class.”

  “Bullshit,” says a woman. You can say one thing for mercenaries, they speak their mind.

  “You don’t look like an officer,” adds Ion, staring at my arm.

  “Lost it killing a ferox.”

  “Yeah, right…”

  Anything else the uninvited man is likely to say gets lost as Neen palms a gun and puts it to the man’s head. “Now’s a good time to say, Fuck, that’s really impressive. ”

  The man does as he’s told.

  Ion’s looking at me. He’s grinning. “You’re the maniac who gutted a lagarto, then cooked it and started handing bits of alligator around?” He looks really pleased to see me. “Always wanted to hunt one. What was it like?”

  “Big,” I say. “Ugly.”

  “What did you use to kill it?”

  I tap my pocket. “Laser blade, seriously useful. Used it on Paradise to cut tunnels in the ice. That blade can do pretty much anything.”

  “Paradise?”

  “Yeah. I got sent there by accident.”

  A man I don’t recognize suddenly grabs a spare stool from another table and places it very close to mine. He looks like he’s working out whether he can take me. We both reach the same conclusion: He can’t.

  It’s one of those you-and-whose-army moments. Given my army is sitting at my back and most of the drunks in this place don’t look as if they’re about to volunteer to be any part of his, the man’s not very happy.

  He is, however, seriously angry. “You were a guard on Paradise?”

  “Not a guard,” I say. “A prisoner.”

  The man blinks. That’s impossible, he wants to say. No one gets out.

  Ion is laughing. “Don’t tell me,” he says. “They made you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Swap all that for all this.” I gesture around Hot Bar Wild, with its vomit-stained floor, sulking strippers, and metal-grilled windows. As I said, we could be in any strip club, in a thousand di
fferent cities, on a hundred different planets, we just happen to be here.

  “And now,” I tell Ion, “I’m going to make you a similar offer. You and a hundred close friends can swap all this for anywhere within ten star systems of here. Onetime-only offer. You get to leave three days from now, in the only ship with a key code for getting through the ball busters.”

  I’ve got his total attention. “What’s the catch?”

  “You have to live that long.”

  Someone swears, and Ion holds up one hand, silencing them. “Lay it out for us,” he says.

  CHAPTER 36

  In the early hours of the morning, with most of the city still ignorant of the horrors about to happen, I hear clattering downstairs and find Haze crouched over a bucket in the kitchen, vomiting.

  “Alcohol,” he says.

  He doesn’t want me to think it’s fear.

  A towel is wrapped around his head, and when Haze comes down to breakfast he’s wearing his Death’s Head cap. He eats almost nothing, yet still looks bulkier than he did a week before. Also, he’s sweating.

  “Hangover,” says Franc when she sees me watching.

  Bread, cheese, and a cold chunk of goat are set out on the table. A coffeepot is bubbling over a fire built on what was meant to be an ornamental hearth. The engineers never did get the city’s power back.

  “Eat,” says Maria. “And take food with you.” Her eyes are red; her fingers when she leaves the table brush Neen’s shoulder. When she returns with another jug of coffee, his hand covers hers as she pours him a second cup.

  She follows us to the door to say good-bye.

  “Lock it once we’re gone,” says Shil. She hugs the other girl, which comes as a surprise to all of us.

  Dawn is a slash of pink on the far horizon when we meet Ion at the river gates. The militia are already gathered and shock is their dominant expression, because they’ve been ordered to hold the gates until sunset. Against the enemy, obviously, but also against us, should we try to retreat to the safety of the city.