Death’s Head Read online

  He wants the armory itself. At least, he wants its door and walls. It takes us three days to cut the building into cartable pieces. When I suggest that smaller pieces are easier to carry, the youngster just smiles. A quick baring of his fangs makes him look as if he might slip into laughter or outright savagery, had the first not been impossible for a ferox, and the second their default position on almost everything.

  Work, he says.

  I work.

  And when the cutting is done we carry the pieces away among us. Well, I carry a door, which is lightest of the pieces into which the armory has been hacked. We carry our booty a hundred miles and it takes seven days, using up what little reserves of energy we all have left.

  I sweat, drag my feet, and fail to follow in the leader’s footsteps. The ferox slow down, letting me grab ragged breath from the hot desert air. When I’ve finished vomiting a thin sour stream, which is all that fills my stomach, the youngster hauls me to my feet and the march begins again.

  “Tell me why,” I say to one after another.

  Their answers are strange, oblique.

  I cut myself harder, and burn myself more sharply, but their words still hover on the edge of meaning.

  Flamefire, says Youngster, but it means nothing to me.

  Those pieces, which looked ragged when we ripped them from the walls of the armory, fit perfectly into the entrance of the main warren, across a turn of tunnel behind this, and into a gap where the walls narrow a hundred paces after that.

  Not fit close enough to jam into place: They fit perfectly, every bulge in the wall matched by a curve in a slab of ceramic. No mortar is needed, because every tunnel narrows at exactly the point chosen. The ferox simply haul the ceramic slabs upright and use brute force and that natural narrowing to fix each slab into place.

  Only seeing it prevents me from believing it impossible. And even then, while describing what is happening to Anna, I find myself wondering if what I’m saying is really true.

  Done, says the youngster.

  He seems happier than I’ve seen him in weeks.

  Eat, sleep, get strong. Now we wait.

  The youngster trundles away, and when I next see him he’s curled up on the edge of a rock pool, letting a thin trickle of water wash across his fur. He’s snoring, loudly.

  CHAPTER 5

  A HOT WIND seeps into the cave system at dusk, finding its way through faults in the rock and up the slanting chimneys that climb toward the cliff tops above. For all its heat, the wind is a blessing. Our caves are beginning to stink of closeted ferox, dung, and too many beasts scrabbling a living in too small a space.

  As the temperatures rise the males claim their own areas, only returning to the females for sex.

  I find a small cave of my own. Since none of the adults disputes this, and most have become friendly since I first arrived at their camp dragging the skull of a long-dead chief, my landgrab is obviously acceptable. After all, I live in the warren and I eat what they eat, which some weeks is precious little…

  There was a boy, they tell me, a man, and an older woman. All found wandering in the desert. Ferocious, almost as fierce as the ferox, Anna is what’s left. The others are gone, but no one seems willing to tell me where.

  Anna=Human, they say. Human=Anna.

  I think it’s a statement. After a while I realize it’s a question.

  Looking into the girl’s eyes shows me nothing. I believe she is feral, a human like me, but run wild or maybe just wilder. Now I’m beginning to wonder if we’re even the same species. Strange things happened in the very early days of colonization, when people were still being changed to match planets, rather than planets being changed to match people.

  Still, I feed scraps to the wild girl, who grows friendlier and begins to curl herself around me whenever I appear.

  What happens next is inevitable.

  One morning Anna arrives early, a dead lizard in her hand. She’s obviously really pleased with herself, understandably enough. She smiles when I say her name. It might be my tone of voice, although I pretend to myself that it isn’t. She looks up, and she smiles.

  My own smile ignites a grin on her face.

  We eat the lizard together, sucking it down to bones and mangled shreds of silver skin, and then I say, “Let’s clean you up.”

  She keeps smiling and I keep talking, my voice low and soothing as I cut her hair with my laser blade, leaving her standing in a tangle of filthy curls. Her underarm hair goes the same way. A sweep of blade above her skin and an acrid smell of burning keratin and it’s done.

  We are not ferox.

  Only, some days, it seems we are.

  In the deepest recesses of the cave system I show Anna a stream that slides down a gray wall and fills a pool that looks almost as old as this planet. I’ve been coming here for weeks, cooling myself against the wind and washing away the worst of the cave system’s stink.

  “Come on,” I say.

  She screams at the shock of the water, but not seriously, and anyway I’m in there first and it isn’t really that cold. After washing away my own filth, I attack what looks like a lifetime’s dirt on the girl in front of me. Her skin is pink, unquestionably paler than mine is.

  When I splash the girl to rinse her, she splashes back. We laugh, fight in a lazy fashion, and then I scrub grit from her scalp. Most of the dirt in her hair is too ingrained to come free, but by then Anna’s probably cleaner than she’s ever been, and finishing the job is the last thing on my mind.

  From the speed with which Anna grapples me, one of her knees still dragging in the water of the pool, she must have been wondering what took me so long.

  Most people who talk about animal sex haven’t tried it; or if they have, they’re probably locked up where they belong. This is different. Anna looks human but behaves like an animal, and right up to the point where she sinks her teeth into my neck and rides herself to real screams, I’m uncertain which she really is.

  So loud are her shouts as they echo off the cave walls that I expect Youngster to appear, anxious to discover the cause of the fuss. Only he probably already knows, because the ferox are open about sex, which is entirely hierarchical for them and mostly to do with power and prestige.

  I’m talking about the males, obviously. I doubt if anyone asks the tribe’s females for their preferences. Anna and I rut endlessly over the next few weeks and keep rutting as the cave system grows hotter and food becomes ever rarer.

  The ferox grow sluggish and bad-tempered. A young bull is killed. Youngster says it was a challenge fight to an elder, but everybody knows the battle was about food. I gut any prey the hunt finds, using my laser blade to hack fresh kills into crude joints. No one worries about cuts of meat; they just want food quickly.

  As the heat rises, the food situation gets worse. The chief takes most, the females eat scraps, and the pups grub in the dirt for insects. I should have seen what was coming, we both should…

  Come now.

  “Me?” I ask, surprised.

  Youngster nods.

  When he tells me I’m needed on a hunting trip, I’m more than puzzled. For a start, I’m slower than he is and less able to move silently, and I’m already weak with the bubble shits; but five groups are going out that evening, and if Youngster wants me to hunt with him, then hunt with him I will.

  We eat well that night. And it’s only later, with my hands full of scraps for Anna, that I realize she’s gone. The others are restless around me, unwilling to help me find her, so I track down Youngster.

  “Where is Anna?” I demand, already fearing his answer.

  Gone, he says.

  “Where?”

  It is a fairly stupid conversation.

  We ate, he says. You ate. Now she is gone. If the hunting does not improve, we begin to eat the pups.

  I land only one punch before his backhand throws me against a cave wall. When I roll to my feet with the laser blade in my hand, two other ferox are standing beside him.
/>   Challenge? asks one.

  “No challenge,” I reply.

  The ferox avoid me after that. They watch from the corner of their eyes, tensing as I turn corners in a tunnel to meet them. I’ve gone from being a member of the tribe to being a problem. I can smell hesitation on their fur, a restrained fury that sees them turn away from me.

  My anger is more open, less wise.

  The pool where we first bathed is almost gone, but I use what water is left to wash out my mouth, then take grit and scrub the fingers that picked crudely roasted chunks of flesh from that evening’s cooking fire. And I sleep curled around a dark void that is my anger, until someone shakes me awake in the early hours of the morning. It is the youngster, the mixture of scents rolling off him too complicated for me to translate.

  He picks me up. Human? he asks.

  Behind him, ferox shuffle in a passageway.

  “Not human,” I reply.

  The youngster allows himself to look doubtful and my guts churn, not from what I have eaten but from what may come next. His paw is holding my face, and a yellow sickle of claw is visible at the edge of my sight, ragged with use.

  We talk later, he says.

  I nod.

  A hundred miles beyond the frontier, trapped in an underground cave system with ferox, in the middle of a summer so hot that the water in the deepest cave pool will eventually be reduced to dampness and nothing…I am in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and that has to be the history of my twenty-eight years to date.

  I sleep alone, I eat alone.

  In so doing I reduce my food intake to scraps and sacrifice the company others might bring me. It is the only way to keep my anger in check.

  The laser blade stays in my pocket.

  Pups who once regarded me as an object of interest start to bristle if I come near, as if what is thought by their elders filters down. Still-soft armor strains to flex, heads are raised, and half-grown fangs are bared, so I nod and smile and begin to count the days until high summer comes to an end, because this heat can’t last much longer.

  After all, how long can it take some scuzzy little planet to negotiate the shallow bend of its solar orbit?

  CHAPTER 6

  FLAMEFIRE IS RIGHT…

  When the attack comes it’s not against me, and comes not from the tribe but from outside. I still wonder how Youngster knew it would happen. Can ferox read the future? Or is the answer simpler, with rumor running through his world as swiftly as our own?

  “Death’s Head.”

  The cry is amplified.

  A human voice stretched by electronics into a weapon itself. Its source might be a hundred or more paces away, but my head still hurts from the sudden blast of noise.

  “Surrender Now.”

  The words are said for form only. No quarter is asked or given.

  Above and below, from the sides, through fissures in the rock, tunnels, and natural chimneys, the attack appears to come from every direction at once.

  The Death’s Head clear the cave system with flamethrowers, using the lower vents to flood the main camp with gas, which they then ignite. And flamefire pours in from above, sticky and stinking, igniting everything it touches and flowing relentlessly downhill toward the caverns where the females and the cubs hide.

  What had been hot became an inferno.

  Fire curls against rock, and the darkness of the caves becomes an unholy half-light, with ferox in flames like moving candles. They die fighting, because that’s the way it goes.

  Instinct tumbles me into the last of my pool of water, and common sense holds me there, my face barely above the surface as oxygen burns out of the air and my lungs begin to choke. Anybody who tells you they don’t feel fear in battle is a liar. Fear keeps you alive, by focusing the mind so you know that what you’re about to do is not some childish game.

  This is my own side; these are my own people. Maybe that’s why I’m so terrified.

  Youngster dies as he lived, in silence; but I hear his death inside my head, even without a knife to summon his thoughts, and his screams are no less terrifying for being silent.

  I’m huddled in my pool at the end of a deep tunnel, crouching in the water when a Death’s Head appears. Raising his pulse rifle, the man sights along its barrel and begins to tighten his finger on the trigger.

  It’s instinct alone that saves me.

  Throwing myself to one side, I scream at the top of my lungs before he has time to take a second shot. “Human.”

  The man hesitates, and that hesitation saves my life. Up goes his visor, his lips already moving as he relates the news to his commander or someone else on the surface. “Human,” I hear him say.

  A crackle of static.

  “Name?” he demands.

  It takes me a second or so to remember.

  Whoever is on the other end obviously gets impatient, because the soldier in front of me opens his mouth just as I remember.

  “Sven,” I tell him. “Ex-sergeant, Legion Etranger.”

  The law of the legion requires me to tell him I was once a sergeant. It’s a way of identifying troublemakers early.

  “Where did you serve?”

  The name of Fort Libidad comes growling off my tongue. I’m beginning to regret quite how loudly when he raises his rifle for a second time; but it’s unconscious and nothing suggests he feels anything other than shock.

  He relates my name and last posting to his unseen superior, who promptly comes back with another question. “How did you get here?”

  How indeed?

  I walked for days beside a ferox who decided to keep me for a pet… Somehow, it seems the wrong answer, so I decide on another.

  “Captured.”

  “And they let you live?” The question obviously comes from him, because there’s not time enough for it to come from the surface.

  I nod.

  “Just you,” asks the man. “You were the only one captured?”

  “The only one from the fort,” I say. “But there was a girl here when I first arrived.”

  “She died?”

  “The ferox ate her,” I tell him.

  I ate her.

  And I find myself on my knees, vomiting again.

  “Can you walk?” he demands.

  I look at him. Something keeps me from saying, Of course I can walk.

  Instead I limit my reaction to a nod. And when he turns, I crawl naked from my pool of water and follow him toward a wire ladder that seems to hang in space. It disappears into speckled darkness above, and I realize it’s still night out there and I can see stars inside the circle of the chimney’s distant top.

  A tiny lift motor runs up the edge of the ladder, and he makes a loop from his own belt, hooks it under my shoulders, and fixes the buckle to a hook. I’m being drawn upward before I realize he’s activated the machine.

  “What the fuck’s that?” he demands as we crawl past sections of ceramic jammed across tunnel entrances halfway up. He has his helmet light playing across the sides of the chimney. I guess he didn’t see the makeshift barricades on his way down.

  “Armored ceramic,” I tell him.

  The light when he turns blinds my eyes.

  Muttering something, the man tilts his head. And then repeats whatever he originally said.

  “Ceramic?” he checks, looking at me.

  “Yes,” I say. “Stolen from the fort.”

  The man mutters into his throat mike. “Will do,” he says finally. “We’re on our way out now.”

  HANDS HELP ME over the rim and I stare at the starlit sky. A sight I haven’t seen since the hunting trip, when Youngster tricked me away from the caves so the others could kill Anna—from a ferox that is almost compassion.

  “Can you stand?”

  What is it about officers and idiot questions?

  Of course I can stand, I start to say, then discover I can’t and swallow the rest of my sentence anyway. The boots in front of me belong to a Death’s Head colonel. Small, in
tense looking, with wire-framed spectacles, he wears one of the empire’s most easily identifiable uniforms.

  You know the one. It’s black, with silver piping to the shoulders, narrow silver epaulets, and silver bars on the collar. A skull stares from each button. A tiny dagger hangs on his left hip from a silver chain, as much an affectation as the spectacles, which have smoked-glass lenses.

  Other cavalry regiments rely on gold braid, scarlet cloaks, crimson linings, and even cavalry knots in nauseating shades of green. They all look like doormen in overpriced knocking shops.

  Not the Death’s Head. No one who has ever seen that uniform could mistake it for anything else. And in the unlikely event you might mistake it, the men wrapped in its understated arrogance are usually happy enough to correct your error.

  A sergeant hauls me from the ground and holds me upright in front of the officer. At a nod from the colonel, the sergeant drops me again.

  “Ceramic?” says the colonel “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Army-issue armored ceramic…?”

  I nod again, having nodded the first time as well as barked out my reply. “Yes, sir.”

  Is this man an idiot, his gaze says. If not, then what am I dealing with here? He does not look the type to take battle fatigue kindly.

  “And where do ferox get ceramic?” he asks, his voice quiet.

  “From Fort Libidad,” I tell him.

  “I see,” he says. “And they carried it here? All the way across the desert?”

  I’m bored with nodding. “Have you seen Fort Libidad?” I ask. Around me, half a dozen officers tense.

  “What if I have?”

  “It occurs to me,” I say slowly, wondering how to finish a sentence I shouldn’t have begun in the first place, “that perhaps you might have noticed the armory?”

  “Might I?” says the colonel, turning to a major. The major looks nervous, as well he might. Other officers are discreetly backing away, obviously worried about being included in the question.