Death’s Head Read online

  “You noticed the bodies, sir.”

  “Everyone noticed the bodies,” says the colonel. “It would be hard not to, given how many there were. Tell me…what did I notice about the armory?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the major admits finally. “I’m not sure.”

  “There isn’t one,” I say.

  Both officers turn to me, but only the colonel is smiling, and it’s the smile of a cat that’s seen a particularly interesting piece of prey.

  “Isn’t one?” His voice is quiet and sounds eminently reasonable, always a bad sign in a senior officer.

  “They cut it up,” I tell him, already bored with the conversation. Part of me knows I’m living dangerously, but the shock of getting away from the ferox has gone to my head, and my relief at being back among my own kind is giving me unrealistic expectations of how I can expect my own kind to behave.

  “And then,” I say, “they carried it across the desert. Not one bit, but the whole fucking thing. The reason you didn’t see an armory is that there’s no armory left to see. It’s been patched into their tunnels and disguised with mud, rubble, and assorted shit…”

  I’m rambling, but no one seems to mind.

  “How do you know this?” the colonel demands.

  “I was there.”

  The two officers glance at each other.

  “You went with them back to the fort?”

  It’s a bad question. Yes, I’m a traitor. No, I’m a liar…“They took me,” I say. “It wasn’t like they told me why.”

  A hard stare, then the two officers glance again at each other. I’ve gone from being a traitor or a liar to being insane. Of the three options, it’s probably the safest. So why do I have to blow it?

  Some habits are difficult to break, I guess.

  “I learned how to communicate with them.”

  That really gets their attention.

  “It’s true…” Pushing aside a medic, in my anxiety to sit up and make what I say sound true I scramble as far as my knees. A tube is already in my wrist and the medic seems to be trying to force another up my nose, for no reason that seems obvious.

  “Leave us,” demands the colonel, waving the medic away.

  From the look the colonel gives the major, he’s obviously wondering whether to send him away as well. In the end the senior officer shrugs and lets the major stay.

  “You know as well as I do, ferox don’t speak.”

  The major has obviously thought of something else. He’s practically hopping from foot to foot. “This man made their barricades,” he tells the colonel. “Ferox don’t have that level of skill.”

  Helping the enemy is a capital crime. Around here, practically everything is.

  “They cut it with their claws,” I tell him. “A hundred miles from their camp, they shaped ballistic-strength ceramic from memory, with every single sheet proving a perfect fit.”

  Whatever the major is about to say gets chopped short by a single glance from the colonel. “You’re saying they’re intelligent?”

  I think about this. “Maybe not in a sense we understand,” I say. “But they’re organized and they plan ahead.”

  “And you talked to them?”

  “Yes, often.”

  The colonel shakes my hand, which is so unlike a senior officer that I’m immediately suspicious. He wishes me well and says he’ll probably see me again. A few hours later the major comes back to tell me I’ve been tried in my absence, found guilty of desertion, and condemned to death. Since I’m to die at dawn, the major suggests I spend what remains of tonight making peace with whichever God the scum from my planet embrace.

  CHAPTER 7

  WITH MORNING come six soldiers in the combat dress of the Death’s Head elite. They tote pulse rifles across their chests and wear dark glasses beneath their raised visors. An affectation, since we are still barely into half-light.

  “You,” they say. “Come with us.” There must be a boot camp somewhere that teaches these people how to speak.

  Two of the Death’s Head drag me from my cell, which is actually the luggage hold of an air copter. It’s an overhot, sticky, and deeply unpleasant place to spend the last few hours of my life.

  The major waits at his chosen spot, stamping back and forward in irritation, as if my death is just another inconvenience keeping him from breakfast. “Stand him over there,” he orders.

  Death’s Head troopers are far too professional to roll their eyes at the stupidity of a senior officer, but if they did, now would be the time to do it. A natural wall is formed by an outcrop of sandstone, so it’s fairly obvious where I’m meant to stand.

  When a trooper tries to blindfold me, I begin to struggle. God knows why I ever took that stupid vow, but promising to face death with my eyes open seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

  “Leave it,” says the major, sounding bored. “We’ve wasted long enough.”

  I stand where I’m told to stand.

  As an unexpected mark of respect, the sergeant flicks off my cuffs to let me face death freestanding and unbound.

  “Don’t try to run,” he tells me.

  “The legion never run,” I reply. “We stand and we die.”

  The look he gives me is almost sympathetic. And suddenly it seems more important than ever to die well.

  So when they raise their rifles and sight along the barrels, I stare back. My head is high and my body locked so solid that my arms and legs refuse to shake.

  “Load,” says the major.

  The sergeant nods, his response instinctive, and I watch his finger begin to tighten on the trigger. He will shoot first and the rest will fire in the split second that follows his shot. This is how the Death’s Head work, the legion also…

  Unless free fire is declared, firing before your NCO is a capital offense, much like lying under oath, treason, and hitting a senior officer. And if not for an eccentric interpretation of those rules by my old lieutenant, I’d be dead long before this anyway.

  As it is, I was simply broken from sergeant to private for wanting to hit a senior officer. Actually, I had hit him, but the lieutenant decided it was the wanting he found offensive.

  As the sergeant’s finger reaches trigger pressure he locks his eyes on mine, which takes guts, because you need courage to look someone in the eyes as you take his life. That’s why killing is a young man’s job and it’s old men who send them out there.

  I nod, to signify I’m ready.

  And he smiles.

  It’s a clean shot, a hit to the chest. I barely have time to register this fact before five other pulse rifles fire in unison and darkness takes me.

  YOU DON’T WAKE… This is my first thought. You don’t wake after someone shoots you with a pulse rifle. Largely because there isn’t enough of you left to wake up again.

  My second thought is, God, that hurt.

  Even the memory of having my arm ripped off by a dying ferox has paled before an ache that locks tight my chest and forces my lungs to fight for each breath. Every nerve in my body feels on fire.

  “Lowest setting,” someone says.

  When my eyes finally allow themselves to focus, I realize the voice belongs to the colonel, who is sitting on the end of my bed, cleaning a handgun that seems to be constructed mainly of glass.

  Since I was shot in the middle of the desert, and beds out there are few and far between, I decide I must be somewhere else.

  Lowest setting?

  “Bullshit,” I say.

  Beyond the edge of my vision, someone laughs.

  “We adjusted the power packs,” says the colonel. “A small modification, but my own.”

  “Why?” I demand.

  Again that laughter. “You were right,” says the voice. If I didn’t know better I’d say the colonel is relieved.

  “You can go,” the voice adds, and the colonel almost scurries from the room. I wait and the voice waits and after a while it sighs.

  “A legionnaire?”
/>   I nod, and then, in case that was not enough, add, “Sir.”

  My reasoning is that anyone who can send a Death’s Head colonel from a room deserves all the respect he can get. I have no idea quite how right I am until the voice became a man at the edge of my vision, in simple black and silver. And the man turns out to be General Indigo Jaxx.

  I know who he is. Everyone knows who he is. The general has single-handedly prevented an assassination attack on our dear leader, throwing himself in front of a crazed woman whose son was killed in the eastern spiral.

  “You were a sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why were you broken?”

  “I hit an officer.”

  He looks at me, considering. “I didn’t hear that,” he says. “Let’s try again. Why were you broken?”

  “Insubordination.”

  “What kind?”

  I blink…Most officers aren’t even aware there is more than one kind. “I refused an order,” I tell him. “Then punched out my lieutenant before he could issue his order to anyone else.”

  General Jaxx sighs. “And what was this order?”

  “Shoot the lieutenant, shoot everybody else, and then shoot myself.”

  “That never happened,” says the general.

  “No, sir.”

  “Why,” asks General Jaxx, “would he have issued such an order? Had he, which he did not.”

  “He was drunk, sir. And bored.”

  “This was at Fort Libidad?”

  “Yes, sir. The boredom killed him eventually.”

  “And then the ferox killed everybody else.”

  I nod.

  “Except you,” he says, holding my gaze.

  We’ve come to the crux of the problem. We both understand that, and I’m the one who is surprised, because it has never occurred to me that I’m important enough to be a problem, at least not to anybody over the rank of lieutenant.

  “Colonel Nuevo wants to kill you,” says the general. “This would be the commonsense answer. Luckily for you, Major Silva sometimes has his own opinion on things.”

  Walking to the window, General Jaxx looks out at a landscape denied to me. I have no way of knowing if I am in Karbonne or even on the same planet. The temperature in this room is controlled, and walls of black glass keep me from whatever is outside. Also, I’m lashed to the bed with a woven band across my chest and another above my knees, but low enough to keep my legs from moving. I am, however, definitely still alive, and this is more than I have any right to expect.

  “We can’t send you back to the legion,” he says. “You know how it is. One man left after an entire fort is slaughtered. No brigade would take you…” He hesitates, amends his words. “Well,” he says, “no brigade would take you and let you live. So we have to think of something else. Do you have any thoughts on the matter?”

  It doesn’t occur to me to wonder why a general is taking the trouble to discuss matters with an ex-legion ex-sergeant.

  “I don’t care where I go,” I say. “So long as it’s not back to the desert.”

  “Had enough of the sun, have we?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Right,” he says. “Leave it with me. I’ll see what we can do.”

  CHAPTER 8

  FALL IN,” orders a corporal, so I do.

  I wear a militia uniform at least ten years out of date and a size too small.

  Maybe it amuses the general to see me look so shabby beside his men’s black-and-silver uniforms. And I travel in his entourage, although it’s probably more honest to say I travel with the baggage.

  We leave Karbonne in a sleek black fighter that takes far more passengers than it should, given its rapierlike profile. An hour later we rendezvous with a mother ship in high orbit above the planet. Why the mother ship bothers with high orbit is anyone’s guess. There were precious few people left on the surface of this world with weapons to do more than bring down a simple kite.

  I’m sent for again two days later. My meeting with the general is brief. He simply nods at the sergeant who led my execution party, and then nods at me. “Horse will look after you,” he says.

  The sergeant nods. “Yes, sir,” he says. “We’ll have a good time.” He’s quite obviously talking to the general.

  “Dismissed,” says General Jaxx.

  And away we go.

  “He’s taken a liking to you,” says the sergeant. “Just as well. If Colonel Nuevo had his way, you’d be dead.”

  “If I had my way,” I growl back, “he’d be slop in the bottom of some bucket.”

  The sergeant smiles at me, a death’s-head grin that goes with his silver buttons and the badge on his cap. “You ever been on a mother ship before?”

  My snort is answer enough.

  I’ve jumped planet in low-level troop carriers, surrounded by the kind of recruits who throw up if forced to cross a puddle, and I’ve dropped from a pod, years ago when we first took this system from the Enlightened, may their metal heads catch fire…Mother ships, battle cruisers, and high fighters are not usual forms of legion transport.

  “Let me show you around.”

  As it happens, he doesn’t show me very far. An elevator drops us eighteen levels and we exit into the bowels of the recreation area. If anything this clean can be so described. Black glass walls and black glass fountains. A row of tables outside a café, pushed tightly together, because the corridor down which we walk isn’t that wide.

  A smartly dressed woman with two small children sits at one of the tables. The man sitting opposite her is ridiculously elegant and drinking something cloudy and green from a tiny glass. An Obsidian Cross hangs from his collar, and silver braid waterfalls down one side of his chest. He wears the uniform of a Death’s Head lieutenant as if it’s a particularly amusing form of costume.

  He glances idly at the sergeant beside me, and the sergeant comes to attention. A polite nod and we’ve obviously been given our orders to move on.

  “Let’s find a bar,” I say.

  Horse laughs. “Okay,” he says. “The general wins.”

  I frown.

  “He said this was about as far as you’d get…” As the sergeant looks around him, I wonder what he sees. To me it’s a new world, one where Death’s Head officers and NCOs slouch down corridors, black-and-silver jackets slung loosely over their shoulders. A world where bar-keepers smile and whores are polite, instead of asking to be paid in advance.

  As we move away from the main drag, with its awnings and pavement tables, the air changes slightly and officers become a rarity. There are no troopers here, but a wide variety of NCOs. Now the air smells of beer and sex and sweat, but only a little. Just enough to make the surroundings feel real.

  “On the house,” says Horse.

  “What is?”

  “All of it,” he says, indicating bars on both sides of the passageway. “Anything. The general said charge it to his pad.”

  My eyes go wide.

  “That’s a joke,” Horse says. “You think anybody in their right mind would…” He runs his words into the dirt, obviously appalled that he needs to explain anything quite so obvious. “What do you want first?”

  Get laid, get paralytic.

  The obvious answers. Only I want more than that, or maybe it’s that I want less. Whatever, it definitely involves remaining sober enough to remember everything when I wake tomorrow.

  “I want a beer,” I say. “A cold beer…And then I want a whore for the night, in a bed, maybe in a place with its own bathroom.”

  Horse smiles. “I’ve known men,” he says, “who’d want ten whores and the general’s finest champagne.”

  “And I’ve known men,” I tell him, “who’d swap this entire ship for a glass of clean water.”

  “It was tough?”

  I nod. “Yeah,” I agree. “Even before the ferox attacked. We’re legion. If the meat is cheap, we’ll eat it. If the beer is watered, we’ll drink it. And if the weapons are outdated and th
e power packs are faulty, we’ll fight with them anyway…”

  A couple of corporals have stopped to listen, but a glance from Horse sends them on their way. I’m out of place on this ship. My prosthetic arm is rusty and I’ve had to tear the cuff to make my shirt fit. My boots are so worn that one heel slopes. It’s hard not to believe that my being here is some kind of joke.

  “We’re cannon fodder,” I say, bitterly. “We make no pretense to be anything else.”

  “And you think we do?”

  “No,” I say. “That’s not what I mean. You’re elite, we’re grunts. No one in their right mind would expect high command to treat us the same…” Shrugging, I look around me and nod at the nearest bar. I’ve changed my mind about getting drunk.

  “That will do.”

  “I know a better one.”

  We walk for another ten minutes along a corridor, then turn right and drop a level, walking for the same length of time again. As we walk, I count my footsteps and try to work out the width of the ship from the distance traveled.

  It’s big; anything that lets you walk a thousand paces in the same direction is big. And when we walk a thousand paces again, more or less in the same direction, I realize this is not a ship as I know it.

  I did this in the caves; that’s how I learned the ranking of the ferox. All bull ferox claim territory, and the more senior the male, the larger the stamping ground he claims. And the weirdest thing I discovered was that the youngster was second in command, which confirmed their intelligence for me. No one looking at their chief could doubt he was the strongest and deadliest, but the youngster? He’d have lost a fight to any of the others, and yet the space he claimed was larger than theirs was.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “About the ferox.”

  Horse hesitates, glances around, and hesitates again. It’s not the behavior you expect from a Death’s Head sergeant, particularly not one who’s been awarded the Obsidian Cross. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he’s wearing the tiny silk ribbon folded into the buttonhole of his jacket.

  “Say it,” I tell him.

  “What really happened?”