Death’s Head Page 2

  As its grip loosens and gaze becomes less fierce, the bull turns to another ferox, younger and half its size. I’d think it female but for its skull ridge and a row of tribal markings daubed onto its breastplate.

  The two beasts stare at each other.

  And then the chieftain steps back, waving one hand as if to say, All yours.

  Terrific, I think, slaughtered by the tribal runt.

  But the youngster doesn’t strike. Instead it grips my face and twists my head from side to side, and then up and down, as if checking the articulation. Finally, the beast turns my skull beyond what the bones can stand and I wince. At which the beast steps back, obviously puzzled.

  “My neck doesn’t bend that far,” I say. “You dumb fuck.”

  Grinning, the youngster bares its fangs in obvious amusement.

  What? it says.

  “Human.”

  The amusement vanishes and into my mind comes the picture of a creature bound naked to a post, blood drying like a cloak across his back and buttocks. Splintered bone is already mending, and the gashes on his back have begun to close. He’s shat himself, which I don’t remember, and he looks smaller than I would expect, less than significant among the half a dozen ferox who…

  Two thoughts stop me in my tracks.

  One, that fewer than a dozen beasts can destroy a whole fort and, two, that for the first time ever, I’m thinking of the beasts as…

  “Who,” I say.

  The youngster looks at me.

  Into my mind it replays its picture of the bound soldier.

  “Me,” I say, then remember the ferox have no sense of personal identity. Apparently the beasts think of themselves in the third person, as him. Although how any man can claim to have discovered this or had time to write it down before being ripped to bloody shreds, God knows.

  “Sven,” I say. “I’m Sven.”

  The beast appears to taste the word in its head. After a moment it nods, and the others nod also. As one, they turn and lope away toward a break in the wall I’ve barely noticed before.

  “Come back.

  “Don’t go…”

  When pleading fails I fall back on curses, calling the brutes everything from fuckwits to freaks and gutless cowards. And still they amble away from me and the slaughter they’ve left behind. A silent file of shambling ferox, already beginning to blend perfectly with the sands beyond the breach in the fort wall.

  “Kill me,” I shout.

  The beast at the back turns and for a second my heart stops, but then my heartbeat kicks in again and the smallest of the beasts turns and hurries after the others.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE FEROX COME back before midnight. Well, the smallest one does. He slouches into the fort through that hole in the wall and moves like a shadow across the parade ground, picking his way almost daintily among the piles of dead. Ignoring me, he reaches for the skull on the post above my head and tries to pry it free.

  “I can help.”

  My words startle the youngster and that tells me ferox can hear, unless he’s simply surprised to find me still alive. Twisting my head to the double moon, he stares deep into my eyes.

  After a second he lets his claws drop, obviously disappointed.

  A question has been asked and I’ve failed to answer. More worryingly, I’ve failed even to hear his question.

  Why? I ask myself. Why could you hear last time?

  Because fear provided a key? Possible, but fear is controlled by the limbic system and my body is now too frozen with cold to feel much more than resignation.

  Glaring at the ferox, I see he’s gone back to ignoring me. Without the others to be matched against, he looks huge, his teeth recently formed and razor-sharp, his armor shiny with the bloom of youth. And his claws are cruel but clumsy as he struggles with the trophy still nailed to the pole.

  He can kill you, I remind myself. Gut you and strew your insides across the sand. But they’re just words, insufficient to create the fear their truth demands.

  “Free me,” I say.

  Again that flicker of interest. Only this time it vanishes as quickly as it arrives. I need a way to remake the bridge between us.

  If not fear…then pain?

  As he reaches for the skull, I stretch up with my hands, not to help him but to snag the base of my thumb on his lower claw. Before the beast can react, I drag down my wrist and feel flesh tear and a single word comes into my mind.

  Why?

  “Must talk,” I tell him. “Only way.”

  He looks at me with interest. What? he asks.

  I try not to sigh.

  “Sven,” I say.

  The beast jerks his head at the bodies strewn across the parade ground around us. Ugly in the moonlight, they’re already beginning to freeze as the night strips what little heat they have left. Sven?

  I shake my own head, realize how ridiculous that is, and say No, loudly, inside my own skull.

  Not Sven?

  “No,” I say. “Not Sven.”

  He considers this for a moment and says nothing when I reach up again and snag my wrist, harder this time. The thought of words vanishing before this conversation is finished is more than I can bear.

  Captive, he says.

  Am I? Does that mean he’s taking me prisoner?

  Enemies capture Sven. He says this as a statement, one allowing no argument. And as soon as I realize what he means I laugh.

  “Yes,” I agree. “Enemy capture Sven.”

  And God knows, in the twenty-eight years of my short and so far brutal life few enemies have been worse than Sergeant Fitz, who now lies faceup to the stars with a throwing spear through his heart.

  “Let me help,” I suggest.

  The youngster’s eyes flick from the trophy to my hands, and he breaks the ropes as simply as a child might snap cotton. With little to lose, I hold out my wrists and wait while he hooks his claws into my metal cuffs and pulls until they split at the hinge.

  Help, he insists as I begin to walk away.

  “Need something first.”

  He follows me all the way to the armory door. It’s as well he does, because the door is made from some aerated ceramic that weighs little more than foam but is far stronger than it looks.

  “Can you break this?”

  Dark eyes catch mine, amusement replacing anger. Of course I can, says the voice in my head, except it’s not quite a voice, more a wisp of thought that tatters into silence; and the amusement is not really in his eyes, it’s more…

  God, I think. I’ve begun to match feelings to the ugly fuck’s smell. The youngster turns at that, looking quizzical, and I decide to watch my thoughts.

  “Door,” I suggest.

  Putting his hands against the door, he pushes. When nothing happens, he pushes again. Then he draws his lips into a snarl and barges into the door with his shoulder. Something creaks, and I have a nasty feeling it might have been his bones.

  In the end he sinks his claws into the door near the hinges, which is a good guess. The lock is flashy and semi-intelligent, certainly too bright to be bluffed by claiming an emergency. The hinges, however, are priced down to a spec just high enough to avoid the contractor getting killed.

  It’s harder work than he expects. A good five minutes wasted while I stand shivering and barely conscious and he digs his claws slowly through the shiny surface of the door, chipping his way toward the soft material beneath.

  Help, he says.

  And as I prepare to protest that I’ll be no help at all, I realize he’s reached into the door and is prying away one hinge. Great gasps come from his throat, and I know that whatever we find has to be worth his effort.

  Swords, by the hundreds.

  What is it with crazed dictators and cavalry? We have no mounts and the dunes are totally unsuitable for heavy horses, but we still have sabers by the thousands. Also, we have enough new-model pulse rifles to turn a whole desert’s worth of sand to glass. These are locked down, without ba
rrels or power packs, and a chain runs through each trigger guard. From the way the youngster’s glance sweeps over them he doesn’t recognize them as weaponry.

  Just as well.

  Of course, with the barrels in place, the guns would still need charging and unchaining. The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems to me that the new lieutenant was destined to die—deserved it even. He just didn’t need to take a bunch of half-trained boys with him, but since that was what he was himself…

  In one corner is an old box covered with dust, fixed to the wall with an explosion of spiderweb containing everything from mummified flies to the desiccated corpse of the spider itself. MEDICAL SUPPLIES says the side of the box. EMPTY, announces a red sticker slapped across its top.

  The blade is where I left it five years before.

  “We don’t want this falling into anyone’s hands,” the old lieutenant told me, in that way of his that left me uncertain whether he meant what he said or intended the direct opposite. Maybe he was saying, Make sure this gets into unsuitable hands.

  He’d be capable of it.

  Other officers succumb to wounds taken in battle or self-inflicted. Lieutenant Bonafont suffered terminal ennui. So terminal that one day his heart simply stopped beating.

  Maybe a laser blade in the hands of a homesick recruit would have provided entertainment enough to keep him alive. In which case I failed, but then the old bastard failed us all by shuffling off his mortal coil and leaving us in the care of some child doing a six-month tour of duty.

  “Got it,” I say.

  The whipping post comes apart like fat melting in the sun. I cut from below, slicing away at the wood until a steel spike is revealed. After that, removing the skull is simple: A couple more cuts, a flick of the wrist, and the trophy comes free. I’m armed again, of course. I wonder if the ferox realizes that.

  “Here.”

  The skull has a nail hole in the top but still looks pretty good for something that’s been scoured by desert winds for the best part of five years. I treat the object with respect. For all I know the ferox indulges in some form of ancestor worship. I really don’t want to blow my survival at this point.

  No, he says faintly.

  Flicking on my weapon, I touch its blade to the back of my hand and hear his voice grow louder.

  You carry it.

  CHAPTER 4

  THREE DAYS and a hundred miles later I meet the first woman I’ve seen in five years. I’d like to think I’d be impressed even if she wasn’t naked, although it’s hard to put an age to her to begin with, because she’s smeared with dirt and her hair is so long it falls around her shoulders and hides her upper body.

  And I’m not being disingenuous. When I first see her, it’s dark and I’m tired and she’s running across a cave floor on all fours, her breasts hanging low like the teats on a sand wolf.

  Human? The young ferox is intrigued by my interest.

  I nod.

  We’ve been thrown into each other’s company during the desert crossing. I’ve come to learn the meaning of at least five basic smells, while the youngster now realizes that the way I articulate my head carries the meaning of two of these.

  He points at me. Not human.

  I’m not inclined to argue, since the youngster’s certainty that I’m something other than her seems to be one of the things keeping me alive.

  “Sven,” I agree.

  Pointing to the girl, who has frozen under his gaze, the ferox tells me she’s mine, but first I have to meet the elders. This is inevitable, I suppose. Everything about the ferox is tribal, and tradition for them seems to be interchangeable with law. In fact, both concepts come from the youngster as a single thought.

  The very idea of elders suggests a solemn gathering, probably around a fire. Well, that’s what it suggests to me. The reality is simpler and much more boring. The youngster drags me through a huge warren of tunnels and caves, stopping only to tell every male he meets, Not human.

  Not, they agree.

  And then one of the pups, so young that his armor is still soft, brings me the girl. Human, he says, and I begin to understand the problem.

  The girl is fifteen, maybe a few years older. From the way old whip scars cross her ribs it looks as if she’s moved on all fours her entire life. She can stand and climb and fit sideways through cracks in the rock that would stop me at the shoulder, but she can’t talk and when I lift dark hair from her face, there is nothing in her eyes but wariness and the sullen anger one expects from any caged animal.

  I ask her name.

  I ask her age.

  I ask how she ended up living with ferox deep in the desert.

  After a while, in disappointment and tiredness, I begin to demand answers to the impossible. Why is our beloved leader such a prick? What keeps the stars apart? Is God hardwired into our minds? If so, who did the hardwiring? The stuff that passes for serious thought in legion bars across the empire.

  In a sweating tunnel hacked into a cliff face by a long-dead river, a hundred miles farther into the desert than any human is meant to have gone, I lose myself for a week in questions and thoughts of death.

  She sits, she watches, after a while she brings me water.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Nothing in her face suggests she distinguishes these words from the noises I make as I rage and weep and mourn for a hundred children whose names I’ve never bothered to learn.

  In my defense I offer their slaughter, a desert hike that has reduced my feet to bloody pulp, and the fact that the first woman I meet in five years—and quite possibly the last person I will ever see—is little more than a ghost of what I believe humans to be.

  Questions about her tribe, her mother and brothers bring no answers. A legionnaire quickly learns patois; how can we not? We take the sweepings of a fifth of the spiral arm and provide immunity from all crimes that have gone before, except treason, in return for certain death, the time and place to be the legion’s choosing.

  Common tongue, city tongue, outlying worlds…

  I even toss the girl words from traveler speech and machine cult but she recognizes none of them, and I am a man who can order a whore or a drink in fifteen different languages.

  I began to agree with the ferox. If she is human then I am not.

  Nor were the boys now dead at the fort, though the ferox have no way of knowing this. Nor were the women I knew in Karbonne. Nor my sister, who holds a family together in my memory, relying on sheer determination and guts when the money goes and an entire planet falls into poverty and chaos.

  However, the girl is beautiful beneath her dirt. So I give her a name, though I’m uncertain she understands that Anna refers to her. Still, she quickly comes to recognize the tone. Anna shares my food, follows me like a shadow, and no longer flinches when I come within striking distance.

  It’s not much, but it’s enough.

  Things will improve, I tell myself. She’ll learn to speak. And in the meantime, if I want proper conversation I seek out the youngster and talk to him about the tribe and the desert and what went before. The tribe is old, a thousand chiefs if the youngster is to be believed; old, venerable, and very certain of their right to this land. They have only ever lived in caves, and their laws state—quite clearly—that nothing must change.

  But Sven is change.

  He asks me about my tribe, then retreats and sulks for days at my answers. We fly, I tell him, among the stars and between the moons. A whole people are out there, their history written in those flickering lights that cross the sky each night.

  Many Sven, he says.

  I sigh.

  He understands sighing now, along with tears and nods and shakes of the head. In turn I can identify seven separate smells and a handful of his gestures. The laser knife has stopped being a weapon and become the means by which I communicate. A strange Sven ritual, which involves touching light to the back of my hand until my words become clear enough for a ferox to hear.


  We return to Fort Libidad before the onset of high summer. The youngster doesn’t bother to tell me why, but I know my presence is required. It is nearing the middle of the year and the winds have begun to rise; food is already scarce. Animals die when the heat comes, and the ferox refuse to eat carrion.

  Next dawn, he says.

  So next dawn sees us ready.

  Even the chieftain makes the journey, his face wrapped against the wind and a hundred miles of sifting sand. We walk in single file, following in his steps. Mostly the wind blows our footprints away, but crossing the dried edge of an oasis I look back and see that we leave only one set of prints, albeit deep ones and made strange by the fact that I cannot always match the chieftain’s stride.

  The fort is abandoned.

  And the stench inside is vicious. Flesh has fallen from bones and rotted to matted spoor beneath half-visible skeletons. In time the heat will rot what remains completely, or desiccate it, but that time is not yet.

  Door, says the youngster.

  So I nod.

  Walls, he adds. We speak almost effortlessly.

  “What about the walls?”

  Like doors? he asks.

  “Are walls like doors?” The heat, the winds, and being near enough to the only one of my kind are beginning to get to me.

  Door, he repeats, more intently. A dozen ferox stand around us in a circle, watching closely. That’s twice the number of beasts needed for the original attack, so this has to be important. Also, the chief is growing impatient, his head swinging slowly from side to side.

  “Which door?” I ask.

  It is the right question.

  The youngster can only remember the armory door. Since nothing was able to stand in his way, nothing else counts. So we walk to the armory, followed by a silent procession of the others.

  The pulse rifles are in place, broken down to lock, stock, and barrel and still chained through their trigger guards. Enough weapons to launch a revolution. A wall of cavalry sabers looks as gratuitous as it ever did.

  We take, he says.

  “What?”

  Everything.

  For a moment I feel panic. Unarmed, these beasts are deadly enough. The thought of a tribe of ferox armed with pulse weapons is beyond horrific. On the very edge of doing something stupid, I realize my mistake. To Youngster the broken-down rifles are simply clutter.