Death's head dh-1 Read online

  The man looks away.

  My beer is cold and so far removed from any other I’ve ever tasted that I find it hard to believe it’s the same drink. This is sweet and smooth, where the others were sour and bitter. It bites at the back of my throat and trickles into my stomach, filling my guts with a slow warmth.

  Someone laughs.

  “Where did you find him?” another asks, his meaning plain. Who is this peasant and why is he in our bar?

  “I didn’t,” says Horse. “The general found him.”

  They leave us alone after that. When my beer was done, Horse offers me another. But I’ve changed my mind again. One beer is what I’m allowing myself.

  “If you’re sure?”

  I nod.

  “The girls are upstairs,” he tells me, nodding toward a spiral staircase that vanishes through a hole in the ceiling. “I’ll wait for you here.”

  “Don’t you want…?”

  He smiles. “This is new for you. I’ve been here for thirteen months.” And then he catches himself, shrugs, and obviously remembers my words about the difference between the Death’s Head and the legion. In that moment I almost like the man. Although I know he will kill me at a single word from one of his superiors.

  “Enjoy yourself,” he says.

  CHAPTER 9

  A dozen girls line up according to height. They wear very little apart from smiles and enough body hair to prove that no one worries too much about being like ferox up here. In age they range from late teens to early thirties, and in looks from the acceptably attractive to so beautiful it makes me want to cry.

  I ignore the most beautiful. We’ll have nothing to say to each other and she looks delicate, the kind of girl to be scared by the scars she’ll find on my back. I ignore the oldest and youngest as a matter of principle. One will be bitter, the other sullen, and I can do without the fuss.

  In the end I choose the one in the middle, quite literally.

  In the middle of the line, middling in looks and size and age. Her name is Caliente; at least that’s the one she gives me.

  “I’m Sven,” I tell her. “Do we need to find a room?”

  She looks embarrassed that I can ask so stupid a question in front of the other girls. “We have rooms,” she says. “Perhaps you’d like to make a choice?”

  As she leads the way, I’m happy to follow, not least because Caliente’s hips are wide and her buttocks curved, and I can see enough light between her thighs as she climbs the steps to let me know what I’m getting.

  Who knew beds came in so many shapes and sizes?

  The room we choose is smaller than the others, less ornate. It is the final one on offer and she seems both surprised and reassured by my choice.

  “You can read a man by the room he chooses?”

  She shrugs away my question, and when I return to it decides to give me an honest answer. “Most of the time.”

  “And this room says what?”

  “That you ask too many questions.”

  I smile and let the matter drop. Every profession has its secrets. Why should hers be any different? I want to ask how Caliente comes to be in this job, whether it’s from choice, how long she’s been aboard the ship. But my ignorance about not needing to buy a room has made me cautious.

  “What do you want?”

  “What can I have?”

  Caliente smiles sadly. “Anything,” she says, as if that should have been obvious. I guess that answers my question about choice.

  “I want a bath,” I tell her. “And time to talk and sleep and do the other stuff in between.”

  And so it happens.

  She doesn’t bite or howl and we don’t fight each other for scraps of food when it’s all over, and for that I’m grateful. Instead Caliente sits astride me, with her breasts overflowing my fingers and her nipples hard beneath my hands, and she talks about nothing very much, until the slow movement of her hips takes away my need for conversation.

  “Take what you want,” she says later.

  It’s dark in the room. A single clap of my hands will summon light and a click of my fingers will dim it again. Caliente has a trick that involves flicking her fingers and tapping her index finger against her thumb that somehow microadjusts the lighting so that each change is almost imperceptible.

  She has many tricks, although only one to do with adjusting the lights. So many tricks, in fact, that I’m rapidly beginning to discover how much I don’t know about sex and what makes women happy.

  “I’m serious.”

  A clap of my hands summons lights and she nurses them down to a gentler level, smiling to show she knows I didn’t intend to make them that bright.

  “What?” I say, seeing something in her eyes.

  Her face goes blank, and remains blank as I sit up on the bed and reach down to stroke her face with my good hand. Despite herself, she looks at me and I recognize pity.

  “When’s your mission?” she asks.

  What mission?

  I fall back on the traditional excuse, and she’s apologizing and I’m trying to wave away her apology before I’ve even finished telling Caliente that it’s confidential and I’m not allowed to talk about it.

  We stroke the lights back to near-darkness and I go down on her. Spreading her thighs to bury my face between her legs and force my tongue deep into her. Caliente tastes of salt and soap and something else, which I realize is me.

  She breathes deeply and her body begins to tense, her thighs tight around my skull. And then her hand reaches down and grips my head as she forces my mouth hard against her. She has her fingers wrapped into my hair and her sex grinding under my tongue. I can taste blood from my lips where they’re bruising against bone.

  “Don’t stop.”

  Her demand is urgent.

  So I do what I’m told, swallowing blood and salt and myself, and remain that way until her fingers twist in my hair, her hips rise one final time, and she pushes herself against me, whimpering.

  It’s a first, both going down and having a woman come for real, but I’m careful not to tell Caliente that. And I was told by my old lieutenant-although I don’t know if it’s true-that in the minutes following release the muscles around a woman’s anus relax. So if a man’s tastes run that way…He told me many things. Not all of them suitable for the twelve-year-old boy I was.

  Caliente says nothing when I roll her over and merely smiles in the near-darkness when I tuck a pillow under her hips to raise them slightly. It’s as if she always knew this is how we’d end up. Sweat slicks her spine and beads between her shoulder blades.

  When I lick it, she shivers.

  “I’m sorry about my arm,” I say.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I can take it off,” I tell her. “But that would probably look worse.”

  “Really,” she says. “It’s fine.”

  So I spit on my hand, having supported myself on my arm, and carry my fingers to her buttocks, sliding one finger inside.

  “In the drawer,” she says. “The pink sachet.”

  It’s lubricant of some sort, so I use that instead, slopping it around her and on me until she tells me it’s enough. And then I ease myself inside her and stay like that, for a count of a thousand, until Caliente asks if I’m okay.

  “Fine,” I say.

  Sometimes need is more complicated than it should be.

  The girl lets me stay until morning, shares her breakfast when she realizes no plans have been made for me, and helps me shower, watching as I struggle back into my too-small uniform with its cutaway badges. If she has any more questions of her own, she keeps them to herself.

  CHAPTER 10

  Paradise is found at the end of the southern spiral. Don’t ask me how astronomers decided which arm of the spiral is north and which south. It was done years before I was born or it occurred to people how many habitable systems there are in a single galaxy. Several hundred years ago, in fact: long before our resident lunatics began arguing about
who owns what.

  Of course, back then the idea of simply shifting an uninhabitable planet into an orbit that made it habitable was still new and no one really had their heads around the physics, which are quite simple.

  Writing to his cousin, a prince called Archimedes once boasted he could move whole worlds given the right tools. He was correct, just a few thousand years too early. Like most of my barroom facts, I have my old lieutenant to thank for that particular gem.

  Below me a planet turns slowly, a ghostly white sphere with a sickly-looking sun in the far distance. I’m watching it through the window of a troop carrier that has been converted to a convict ship. This mostly seems to involve taking out all the walls and removing anything that might create an air of comfort.

  We’re sitting in a long metal hold on metal benches. And the filters on the windows look like they gave up screening light for radioactive particles years ago.

  “Paradise?”

  The woman next to me nods.

  I seem cursed by officers who pride themselves on having a sense of humor. As the convict ship gets closer, I can see a great expanse of cloud stretching from both poles and meeting in the middle. We are too high still for the sight of towns or cities.

  Turning to the woman, I ask the obvious question. “Storms?”

  She shakes her head. “Sheet ice,” she says. “Miles of it.”

  “ Shithead, ” I say.

  A dozen exiles turn to glare at me.

  “Not you,” I tell the woman. “The general.”

  “Which general?” asks a man.

  And the woman shakes her head in warning.

  “Jaxx,” I say. “General Indigo Fucking Jaxx.”

  A hush falls along the row, and I realize that others have been listening in. “Know him personally, do you?” asks a man several seats along. He has one of those ratlike smiles you find on the faces of pimps just before they try to hand you the wrong change.

  I flick him a scowl, and he’s the one who looks away. When I check again, his face is red and he’s chewing his bottom lip. I’ve made an enemy and we haven’t even landed.

  “What’s the wildlife here?” I ask.

  The rat-faced man laughs, nastily. “Wildlife?” he says. “This is Paradise, final destination for everybody on this ship.” He laughs again, then stares down at his feet, and I realize he’s doing his best not to cry.

  “Well,” he adds, moments later. “Final destination for anyone traveling in the cheap seats.”

  “It’s an ice planet,” the woman tells me. “Everything has to be freighted across. In the early days that included oxygen. Now they crack it from the ice. Use the spare hydrogen for fuel…And there are rumors that the dead end up as source material for the protein slabs.”

  A man swears.

  And she shrugs. “Just telling you what I’ve heard.”

  The woman is old enough to be my sister. A good fifteen years older than me, with a tired face and bitter eyes and a flatness to her voice that speaks of someone on the edge of despair. She could even be my sister, with her belief in facts to keep life at bay, but her upscale accent betrays her. She shares it with the pretty-boy lieutenant who died in that attack on the fort.

  “You’re not a common criminal,” I say.

  She looks at me, almost amused despite her surroundings.

  “Are you?” she asks.

  Several of the others smile, and for a moment the atmosphere lightens.

  “We’re exiles,” she adds. “Paradise is an exile planet. No one here is a common criminal.”

  A thought occurs to her. How could I not know this?

  “And you?” she asks. Several people seem to be waiting on my answer.

  “Oh, I’m common enough,” I tell them. “And a criminal.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time…”

  “Which means what?” demands a man across the aisle. He’s been friendly enough until now.

  “I survived a massacre,” I say, my words matter-of-fact. “A tribe of ferox attacked us and slaughtered everybody but me. I don’t really know why…”

  “Except you do.”

  It’s uncanny. The woman even nags like my sister.

  “I was lashed to a whipping post,” I tell her. “Naked, with most of my back laid open. I guess the ferox figured the legion were my enemies, too.”

  “You are in the legion?”

  I nod. “Yes,” I say. “Fifteen years.”

  She turns away. “The legion killed her parents,” says the blond man who sits beside her.

  “Mine, too,” I tell him.

  The woman turns back. So I answer her question before she has time to ask it. “I’m twelve, homeless, without a family. A lieutenant offers me food, clothes, and somewhere to sleep. All I have to do in return is-”

  “Kill people,” says the woman.

  We make the rest of our descent in silence.

  As I glance around, I can tell that the others are wondering what kind of monster they have in their midst. This creature, with his metal arm and ragged clothes, a scar on his face, and a wrist so thick that the shackle bites into flesh.

  In my turn I wonder how long it will take each of them to turn into somebody else. The convicts down there might have begun as exiles, polite and well spoken. But circumstances change everybody, circumstances and hunger and poverty and necessity…

  You can put a dozen fancy words to that most basic of needs.

  “Welcome to Paradise,” announces the rat-faced man when our ship finally reaches the surface and guards begin to walk up the line, undoing shackles as they go. “That includes you.” He smiles sourly in my direction.

  I don’t answer or look away or do anything that might draw attention to myself. I just watch, as one of the guards punches the man in the mouth, half drags him from his seat, and slams him back again so hard that when his skull hits the wall behind him, everyone in the hold hears the sound of bone on metal.

  Opening her mouth to scream, the woman next to me halts when I put my hand across her mouth and hold it there, receiving a nod of grudging respect from one of the guards.

  Speak only when you are spoken to. None of this lot has the faintest clue.

  “Keep quiet,” I say.

  Very slowly, she lifts my hand from her mouth, and though she wipes her lips with the back of her own hand and looks like she’s about to be sick, she does what I suggest and stays silent.

  “And you,” I tell her friend.

  They stay close to me after that. My monstrousness, my knowledge of how this world works has become an asset. Typical liberals, I tell myself. Even Rat Face trails along behind us, blood trickling from his broken mouth. Whatever he’s carrying wrapped in a cloth is kept close to his chest.

  “If you can eat that,” I say, “eat it. And if not, and it’s small enough, then swallow it while you still have time.”

  Narrow eyes watch me.

  “Stuffing it up your arse isn’t enough,” I tell him. “They’re going to search us. And if we get lucky it’ll be limited to a cavity search.”

  “And if you get unlucky?” asks the woman, her voice acid.

  “A fuck-off body scan. Maybe random surgery, to make the point. Anything you’ve got hidden under chest muscles or sewn into your guts will get found.”

  It’s obvious from her expression that she didn’t know you could hide objects beneath layers of muscle or inside the upper gut. They’re amateurs. My personal opinion is that no one should attempt to start a revolution unless they’ve got some chance of success. This lot, forget it.

  “Line up.”

  We do, and I notice most of the others doing whatever the woman does. And since she follows my example, I find myself leading a row of puppets whose ham-fisted movements reflect my own.

  Having made us strip, the guards stand us by our clothes while we wait to be cavity-searched. It’s done in the open, with sexes mixed to ensure the maximum humiliation
and make sure the prisoners realize their place.

  There are sixteen of us in our group. Twelve men and four women. The men are younger than the women, mostly my age or a little less. One of the women is our age, the rest a good fifteen years older. This has to say something about revolutionaries.

  “It says women die more willingly,” a voice beside me announces.

  I turn to find the woman from the ship.

  “Given how they’re treated after capture,” she says, “it’s a sensible choice…” She smiles at my shock. “I read people’s faces. It’s one of the things I do.”

  “And you?” I ask, wondering how to phrase my question.

  “Was I raped? Did OctoV let a group of his little fuckwit teenagers practice their torture routines on me?” She shakes her head. “I was bailed almost before I was arrested. My family refused to let me go anywhere without guards. They hired the best lawyers money could buy…”

  “And the judges still found you guilty.”

  “Oh no.” She smiles, sourly. “I was found innocent. But I got jailed just the same.”

  She’s the first to be cavity-searched, in front of one friend and fourteen strangers. And she takes it because she has no option. Something is already hardening behind her eyes. I’m second, her friend third. It looks like a hierarchy is being established.

  A thin man is standing naked in the middle of jeering guards. At an order from their corporal he squats until his buttocks almost touch the cold tiles, and then thrusts his arse into the air and kisses the ground as ordered. Fingers force their way inside him and he screams. When they let him climb to his feet he’s crying.

  “It’s barbaric,” says the woman.

  “Intentionally.”

  She stares at me, crossly. As if to say, I realize that.

  “I’m Sven.”

  “The mercenary.”

  “The ex-legion-sergeant…”

  For a moment she’s about to argue. And then she shrugs. “You’re right,” she tells me. “This isn’t the place for semantics.”

  The question must show in my eyes.