Death’s Head Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1

  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

  PART 2

  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

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  This is my only vow:

  However it comes, I will look death in the eye.

  —SVEN TVESKOEG

  PROLOGUE

  INDIGO JAXX, general of the Death’s Head, wipes sweat from his forehead and straightens the sleeve of his silver-and-black uniform. He hates himself for doing so and knows that he will make someone suffer for his moment of weakness. He’s a Death’s Head general, after all.

  “You understand?”

  Raising his head, General Jaxx meets the eyes burning into his own.

  “Oh yes,” he says. “I understand.”

  “You find him,” says the voice.

  The general nods.

  “He is nobody. It is important you remember that.” The voice has said this before. It is obviously significant. And a response is obviously required.

  “Nobodies can be difficult to find—”

  “But you will find him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Other functionaries give OctoV a wide range of titles. Great leader, victorious emperor, all-seeing mind… General Jaxx calls him sir. So far, OctoV has not complained. In fact, the general is pretty sure he likes it.

  “And when I find him, sir?”

  “You bring him to me.”

  “Alive or dead?”

  The boy standing in front of General Jaxx smiles and a cold wind blows through the general’s mind, eviscerating the last fragments of his self-control. Every meeting is like this. The general has known officers to kill themselves because they cannot bear to come into his presence.

  “Alive, obviously,” says the voice. “You will test his loyalty, his stamina, his ability to obey orders…”

  “And if he fails the tests, sir?”

  “You will have failed me.”

  “I will not—” begins General Jaxx.

  But it’s too late.

  The general finds himself standing alone. The last flicker of OctoV’s mind offers General Jaxx a sixteen-digit set of coordinates. As the general checks these against a database in his own mind, he discovers the planet in question is a worthless piece of rock at the outer edge of the spiral.

  He didn’t even know it was inhabited.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  THE CAGE opens at the front, a double loop of chain hinging its door at the bottom. At the top a thicker chain and a fist-sized padlock keep the cage safely shut.

  It sits against a dirt-colored wall, a position chosen so the desert sun can broil its occupant. Occasionally a trooper will give the cage a quick glance as he marches across the parade ground, but most men are careful to look away.

  Bad luck is catching.

  “Drag him out then.” The sergeant’s voice is raw, almost triumphant. Nodding to his corporals, he points at the cage. As if there can be any doubt about what Sergeant Fitz means.

  He tosses the larger of the two corporals his key.

  Behind Sergeant Fitz stands a blond boy in a neat uniform. He’s our new lieutenant, fresh off a troop carrier and quite obviously terrified by what is about to happen.

  As the smaller corporal jacks his rifle, the larger one fumbles catching the key. Close up, I can see that he’s sweating, his fingers trembling as he reaches for the lock on my cage.

  Everyone holds their breath.

  Yanking at the door, he jumps to one side as the door hits dirt, raising dust. I could make them wait, but why bother? Instead I erupt from the cage with my good hand already lunging for his throat.

  The man steps back, instinct kicking in.

  He’s too late.

  I have his larynx between my thumb and curled first finger, and it’s the work of a moment to crush his windpipe. For good measure, I slam my forehead into his face, breaking his nose. The corporal’s already dead, he’s just too stupid to realize that fact.

  “Shoot the man…”

  That’s our new lieutenant. As expected, everyone ignores him. Does he really think Sergeant Fitz will allow me that easy an exit from life?

  “Take him down,” says Sergeant Fitz.

  Reversing his rifle, to use as a club, the other corporal advances toward me. I’m naked, I’ve been in the cage for fifteen days, and Fitz severed half the wires on my prosthetic arm before locking me away. I’m so thirsty, I’d probably drink this man’s blood if I could get him close enough…

  He thinks he can take me.

  I grin.

  And that’s enough to make him falter.

  Dropping to a squat, I kick out the corporal’s leg, roll myself up his falling body, and reach his throat as his skull hits the dirt. My elbow does for this one what my thumb and first finger did for the other. He dies gasping, and I’m back on my feet and smiling at Sergeant Fitz before the lieutenant can get his pistol from its holster.

  “No, sir…Let me.” The words are a hairbreadth away from being a direct order.

  The lieutenant takes his hand from his side.

  For a glorious second it looks as if Sergeant Fitz is going to challenge me himself. Unfortunately that’s too much of a dream to be true, and he signals to a couple of recent recruits instead, then a couple more.

  Can I take all four?

  It’s barely worth asking the question. They’re children in uniform, cropped hair doing little to hide the softness of their faces and the fear in their eyes. Is the sergeant that clever? I ask myself as I watch the recruits ready themselves for an attack. One of them has wet his pants, the stain a dark shame on his sand-colored trousers.

  “Get on with it,” the sergeant growls.

  The boys glance at one another.

  As they advance, I let the anger drain from my body. It’s one thing to kill NCOs, and I know enough about those two corporals to see them hanged. It’s quite another thing to kill children and I don’t intend to start now.

  A BULLHIDE WHIP tears skin on its first blow, rips muscle within five, and opens a victim’s back to the bone before reaching double figures. Men begin to die when the number rises above fifteen, and no man has lived beyond fifty.

  This is a fact.

  In the legion fifty lashes is a sentence of death, and any dec
ent officer will give permission for the victim to kill himself before whipping begins. But Sergeant Fitz is not a decent officer. Mind you, he’s not an officer at all. He is an NCO and they’re the worst. I should know, I used to be one.

  “Three-minute break.”

  Being broiled in the cage is a bad way to die. I’m fifteen lashes into a far worse one, tied naked to a whipping post, with the flesh on my back peeling away like torn paper, and the man who put me here has just given his whip master a water break.

  “Want some?” asks Fitz, holding the flask in front of my face.

  Of course I do. Not that I’m going to tell him that.

  “Too bad.”

  I’m a big man, built with physical exertion and kept lean by the demands of frontier life. Like all the soldiers in the forts south of Karbonne, I’ve burned away my body hair with quick swipes of a firebrand. We are not ferox. We will not share even secondary characteristics with them.

  Above me, on top of the whipping post, is a trophy; it’s probably going to be the last thing I ever see. It has fangs and narrow eye sockets, because ferox need to shield their eyes from the harsh light of the desert, and few stretches of desert come harsher or brighter than the dunes around Fort Libidad.

  The skull is taken from an adult male.

  If the heavy jaw does not tell you this, the bony ridge running like a helmet crest from its forehead to the back of its neck undoubtedly will.

  A dozen stories revolve around this skull. Apparently I killed its owner in hand-to-hand combat and dragged his head back to Fort Libidad as proof. This is bullshit; what’s more, it is dangerous bullshit. No one goes hand-to-hand with a ferox and lives. I found the skull eighteen miles away. This was how far I tracked a deserter on the old lieutenant’s orders.

  “Track him for a day,” he told me. “After that, return.”

  We both knew what went unspoken. If a man is not found inside a day, then he is dead anyway, killed by the temperature drop that hits this planet in the hours before dawn…

  Out of my sight, the whip master picks up his whip. I know this from the crack it makes as dried blood is flicked from the lash. “And again,” says Sergeant Fitz, and I tense myself against the next fifteen blows.

  Sixteen.

  Seventeen.

  Eighteen.

  I’m not sure how much more of this I can take. And then the skull grins. Bone twists like flesh, rotten teeth bare, and the slitted eyes narrow further, in obvious amusement.

  I’m going to die…

  My thought comes as a shock.

  Aren’t I?

  The ferox grins some more. Jaws curve upward in a way that defies physics and all logic. Not yet, it says. And not here.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FIRST I know of a raid is when an explosion shocks the air. Our gate guard goes down with a spear in his throat. A short spear, thrown using a sinew wrapped around its notched shaft. There’s a good chance that sinew came from a human leg; most of them do.

  “To arms,” shouts the lieutenant.

  Sergeant Fitz is more pragmatic. “Free fire,” he yells, my execution already forgotten.

  The skull above me says nothing. It merely grins.

  Able to move at speed and deadly with bow, blade, or throwing spears, the ferox fight silently and to a preagreed plan. Speed and silence are a deadly mix in the desert, where sounds can carry for miles and a guard with good hearing is more valuable than one with good eyes.

  The ferox pour through our gate in a wave.

  And we get slaughtered, that’s the only way to describe it. Most of the legion are new and barely know one end of a pulse rifle from another.

  I watch a boy, little older than me when I first joined, drop to his knees and raise his gun to take careful aim. He even takes a breath and lets it out slowly, holding his fire until his heartbeat is steady. His first shot should blow a bull ferox apart and kill the beast behind, but he’s forgotten to flick his precharge lever to load the coil.

  The kid pulls his trigger repeatedly, shaking his head. Safety catches were abolished because new recruits kept forgetting to toggle them, but there’s no future for a recruit so raw he forgets to precharge his weapon.

  He dies with irritation on his face. Still unsure why his rifle won’t fire. I’d tell him, but the gag in my mouth prevents it.

  “Fall back,” cries a voice.

  It’s our lieutenant, aged all of seventeen and still so new that few of us have bothered to learn his name. There’s no need now. As a ferox drops from a roof behind him, the boy turns and the ferox flicks out one claw, opening a second mouth in the lieutenant’s throat.

  He dies in silence.

  “Riddle’s down!” someone screams.

  And so I learn the boy’s name after all.

  “Fall back, fall back.”

  Stand, I want to shout. Hold steady and die well.

  The ferox are cruel to soldiers who run, as unforgiving as our own dear leader, and troopers are dying around me in the dozens as they try to fall back toward an inner wall, which simply provides a backdrop for their slaughter. The air is hot with shit and guts, the stink of angry ferox and human blood on boiling sand. Flies settle quickly on the broken bodies.

  Eggs will be laid, larvae hatched, and the desert will take back what should never have been here in the first place. The XVth Brigade, Legion Etranger. A ferox goes down, a youngster, half its armor burned away.

  The only beast to be wounded so far.

  It feels like hours before the last boy dies. In reality it’s probably a handful of minutes and the ferox are kind, in a way rumor says is not in their nature. They kill quickly and cleanly, forcing each cadet to his knees, dragging back his head, and cutting his throat before moving on.

  Anyone who says these beasts are mindless knows nothing.

  Seven years ago when we first built Fort Libidad the beasts would no more have cut a man’s throat than open his belly; ferox have plating across their throats and over their guts and believed we must have the same.

  They’ve obviously discovered this is untrue, because I’m looking at the proof. A hundred dead teenagers with their throats and bellies ripped open.

  Their chieftain is huge.

  A bull standing nine feet tall, four feet across the shoulders, his mottled armor is chipped and cracked, and age has grayed his fur and dimmed his eyes, but when he moves toward me the others fall back to give him space.

  Claws grip my jaw and turn me to face him.

  This is it, I think, but his claws never close.

  Instead dark eyes glare into mine and my head is twisted farther, to allow him a better view. Releasing my jaw, he taps my metal arm, considering the sound it makes. The prosthetic is crude, all pistons and rewelds and braided steel hoses that are past their safety date, but it looks better than the broken stump beneath.

  “You did that,” I mumble.

  Dark eyes watch me.

  “Well, not you exactly.” I nod to the trophy above me. “Him.”

  The ferox follows my glance. Then his other hand moves to the broken flesh of my back as he dips his fingers into my blood and carries it to his mouth.

  Seconds later, he spits and keeps spitting.

  I could have told him.

  Bad blood, my father always said.

  As the others watch, the old bull considers his options. I have no doubt my death is at the top of that list. Every other human in Fort Libidad is dead, their blood staining the sand of the parade ground, the stink of their voided bowels so strong it fights with the scent of my executioner.

  I wait, keeping my eyes on his.

  This is my only vow.

  Everyone makes and breaks promises and we all carry our share of those. Vows are different. Well, they are where I come from, which is a backwater so distant our dear leader barely bothers to include it in his list of glorious conquests.

  My vow is simple.

  However it comes, I will look death in the eyes. I will forgi
ve myself every broken promise and debt still to be repaid, but if I break this vow, God will never forgive me.

  So we lock eyes, a tribal chief standing over nine feet tall, and me, an ex-Etranger-sergeant, aged twenty-eight, standing as upright as pain allows.

  What? it asks.

  I blink, despite myself.

  My world suddenly reduced to a pair of dark eyes and a voice in my head. Maybe it’s the pain, I tell myself.

  As I said, fifteen lashes can kill.

  If not for my unnatural ability to heal, my corpse could have been waiting to greet the ferox when they arrived. The pain is extreme, so extreme I have trouble concentrating on the beast’s question.

  What? Its demand is louder this time.

  The gag used for a whipping post is crude. It’s the victim’s own belt, fastened tight enough to make speech impossible, but not so tight that groans are stifled, because that defeats the object of the exercise.

  Free me, I think.

  After a moment’s consideration the beast cuts my gag with a single flick of one claw. It is an object lesson in precision and reinforces why a hundred boys barely old enough to leave home lie dead in the dirt behind me.

  “Soldier,” I say, wanting to answer its question while the beast is still interested.

  The beast looks blank.

  “Human.”

  It thinks about this, head turned slightly to one side. When it grins, the beast reminds me of the trophy nailed above me. And once again I see the bull ferox flick its gaze upward. I have no idea how much of my thoughts it can read, but it obviously catches enough.

  Not human, it says.

  I shrug, which is stupid.

  Catching my wince, it grins some more.

  “Ugly bastard,” I say.

  Claws tighten around my jaw, closing slowly. Too much of that and something will break; in a man less thick-boned it would probably have broken already.

  What? it demands.

  Lashed to a post, surrounded by bodies, and in the grip of a beast that wants to ask existential questions is not a great place to be. As the claws keep closing, I feel the bones in my jaw stress to cracking point, and think What have I got to lose…?

  “I don’t understand your question.” When in doubt, fall back on stupidity, because it works every time.