Death's Head (14 page)

The landing area is one vast field of docked craft. A high steel fence surrounds it, and from the battered condition of some of the newly arrived ships my guess is the fence exists as much to keep the crews in as to keep the rest of the city out. No one stops me as I slide between two vast pod-shaped vessels and duck under the belly of a third. People come and go, a man laughs out of sight, and a small boy sits on an upturned box watching a five-legged spider bot make a clumsy repair to a runner.

Even out at Fort Libidad we saw runners. They’re those tiny two-man hovers that barely rise above head height, but can handle any terrain. I wonder what use a runner is here and realize, as the boy’s father appears, that the craft is used to navigate the landing area and the boy is a cargo worker’s son.

“What are you doing here?”

“Watching,” I say, which seems fair enough.

The boy’s father scowls.

“Your spider bot’s fucked,” I tell him.

He scowls again, maybe at my language, maybe at my accent, or maybe he just objects to people pointing out the obvious.

“Which is more important,” I ask him. “Getting that weld finished, or having the bot work properly?”

“No one can mend bots,” he says, but I can see him thinking through my question. “Bot,” he decides finally.

Stepping up to the fist-sized metal insect, I grab it while its attention is still on the weld, flip it over, and rip off another two of its legs before tossing the thing to the ground. As the man prepares to shout in outrage I hold up a hand for silence, grab a piece of scrap iron from a half-full skip, and crumble it into small pieces, using the fingers of my new prosthetic.

I drop the crumbs next to the stunned spider bot.

Nothing happens.

Counting down from ten, I hit zero and reach again for the bot when it decides it’s damaged enough already, thank you, and starts eating like its little mechanical life depends on it.

“Three hours,” I say. “Maybe four. Feed it extra for the next few days, until it settles down again.” Already we can see that the bot is beginning to bud three new legs to replace the two I stole and the one that was already missing.

“Fuck,” he says. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“Off world,” I say. “From an engineer. That’s an old combat bot, designed to keep going until it hits fifty percent damage, then instigate emergency repairs. Next time one gives you trouble, mess it up a bit. They usually respond.”

The man looks at me, and then glances around him.

“Ex-army?”

I nod. “And you?”

He doesn’t need to reply, it’s already in his eyes. “Come off one of the ships?”

A glance toward
Trillion Two Zero Three
answers that one for him.

“Looking for a job?”

“Always.”

The man smiles tiredly. “Yeah,” he says. “Been there…Take the east gate and you’ll find a row of flophouses. Ask for a room by the week and refuse to give a deposit, and don’t pay more than two credits.” His glance takes in the coat Carl found for me after agreeing to transport me for the price of my own.

“You do have two credits?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” he says. “When you’ve got that sorted, come back and ask for Per Olson. I’m friends with the foreman. He may have something you can do.”

“Thanks,” I say, knowing I’ll never see him again in my life.

CHAPTER 19

P
ROFESSIONALISM SAYS
I should go back to kill both man and boy. But then, by the same token, I should kill Carl, and maybe those other guys in the first bar, because they might also identify me…

It’s always struck me that leaving a trail of dead is a really bad way to remain inconspicuous. Far better for Per Olson to think I took his advice about flophouses but found myself a better job.

As I head east the cargo vessels grow ever scuzzier. I begin to wonder how such craft can be airworthy and quickly realize they’re not. A host of spider bots are crawling across their broken carcasses. As the creatures go, they chew and strip, removing anything that looks usable, converting this into that. It’s what spider bots do, what the bots have always done so far as anyone knows.

I keep walking until I hit five flophouses in a row, a bar, a cantina of sorts, and a brothel. All are made from fiberbloc, epoxy, and patched metal roofs. They look as if they were thrown up as temporary housing while the landing site was being constructed and never taken down again.

“Five credits,” says the first.

Deciding to save myself the argument, I walk next door.

“Three.”

“Two,” I offer.

The girl behind the counter glances from under her bangs, which probably still works for about 50 percent of her customers, and shakes her head. “Two and a half,” she tells me. “My best offer.” She perks up. “Mind you,” she adds, “that’s everything included.”

“Including you?”

She prepares to be insulted, then takes another look at me and bats her eyelids instead. “Absolutely not. But we can talk about that separately if you want.”

Her name is Lisa. She lets me have the room for two credits.

There follow the worst three days of my life. Control for a soldier is everything. The world might be going to hell in a handcart and the battle lost long before it began, but you still need control over yourself and your fears and emotions.

Sergeant Hito has warned me what will happen. Even told me it will take seventy-two hours and I should keep that in mind when I decide I can’t take any more. And he’s right: It takes exactly that long, almost to the minute.

Nothing he says, however, comes close to describing how it actually feels.

Ripping open a foil packet, I extract a flimsy piece of skin and unroll it as instructed, dropping it into the basin that acts as the sole source of clean water in my new room. I sit down to wait the fifteen minutes I’ve been told to wait.

After five minutes the skin reveals itself as a hollow tube, and a tracery of blood lines begins to spread across its swelling surface. Another five minutes and tiny ripples began to roil across that surface, as it flexes like a caterpillar attempting to crawl.

I’m feeling sick already.

By the time my fifteen minutes are up my stomach is a hard knot and the slug is attempting to climb out of the basin.

This is
Aculeus accipio.

They are illegal to own and breeding them is punishable by death anywhere within the empire. It is said—well, Sergeant Hito says—that on outer systems whole cities use them and see nothing odd about the fact. But his face displayed his own doubt as he said it.

If I’m going to do this, I have to do it quickly. Picking up the slug before it can escape, I open my jaw and swallow, feeling tiny hooks scrape my gullet before it is even halfway down.

I gag. The reflex is instinctive.

It fights the reflex, its hooks sinking deep into the sides of my throat. By now I’m on my knees, retching. Habit makes me crawl toward the toilet until my mouth is over the side. Clutching my gut, I heave the muscles under my hand, and my stomach finally loosens and lets go its contents.

The vomit rises up in my throat and passes through the slug on its way out of my mouth. The
Aculeus
kicks and strains, but that’s excitement. This is what it’s been waiting for. It’s alive and has found itself a host.

Spitting, I feel the slug tense and the reflex throws me into a vomiting fit that empties my stomach, and then empties it again, until I no longer know or care where the liquid and already digested food is coming from. Within three bouts of vomiting, my stomach is empty, and within seven I’ve emptied my upper intestines and am spitting bile, which etches its way through the dirt lining the toilet bowl.

The diarrhea begins shortly afterward.

Waking to find I’ve soiled the sheets, I roll out of bed, dragging the sheets with me, and wash them in the basin until the shit is gone. The mattress is also stained, so I wipe it down, spreading the mess rather than actually cleaning it. This engages what is left of my brain and I scrape the cotton cover with my combat knife, not caring if the blade takes away cloth so long as it rids the mattress of the dirt.

Once I’m done scraping, I scrub the stain with a sodden pillowcase until the material looks no worse for wear than any other bit. Flipping the mattress over, I hang my sodden sheet up to dry from a light fitting and spread a huge and filthy towel across the mattress for my bedding. And then I fall unconscious for the next five hours.

The towel is dirty but the mattress is still clean.

So I wash the towel and feel too sick to do more than toss it back onto the bed and fall asleep again. A vomiting fit wakes me and I see blood in the toilet bowl. Music can be heard in my head; it’s that weird stuff women play sometimes, waves and wind and natural noises. After a while I realize my body is playing itself back to me, but there’s something extra.

A real music, odd and dissonant and weirdly seductive, with an unexpected echo. I can hear my own thoughts, but they’re time-lagged by a split second. A waterfall of fears and memories that I have…
no way of turning off

My throat hurts, and as I cough the slug seethes slightly and then settles.

I vomit again, a sour stream little thicker than beer, but it’s almost from habit now, and I know that next time I’ll be able to swallow the reflex and the taste in my throat. Either the slug is thinner, it’s dug itself deeper into my gullet, or I’m already getting…
used to this

The towel is clean for the first time in days.

My eyes are hollow and my cheeks stubbled, my gut sinks in toward my ribs where fever has stripped what fat I had from my frame. My muscles look like bundled wires beneath my sallow skin. I’m pretty sure my eyes have changed color but that has to be…
impossible

As my thoughts synchronize with themselves, I feel the music in my head fade and the sounds of my own body recede into the background. In their place is a great emptiness. I can see myself for what I am, some hick soldier out of his depth in a strange city on a mission still to be revealed.

It’s a very scary thought.

Except it isn’t.

Already I’ve noted my arm, the strength in my body, the mind that’s barely been stretched to thought in the first twenty-eight years of its life. The potential is there, I can use that.

I will use it.

Staggering to the window, I look out on the edges of Farlight. Ahead of me I see the Bosworth Landing Field and beyond that the Emsworth Favelas, climbing the lower slopes of the caldera. Above is Calinda Gap, a gash cut by time and strange tides in the bowl’s rocky edge.

How do I know these things?

I don’t know, but accept that I do. And as I turn to look at a different section of this outer city, facts slip into place and history backs up behind physical objects. These are my thoughts and I can just about control them, but the information is being drawn from somewhere else.

This is definitely not how it is meant to work. The slug is meant to allow access to a low-level neural link to let me pass and receive messages, sliding them under even the most sophisticated surveillance devices. An agent of the general’s should be making contact, mental contact, but I don’t think he is this vast hollowness and intelligence that is filling my head.

You are mine now.

Are you listening?

Pushing away the emptiness, I stagger back to the mirror. How I look has never much interested me. I get the usual girls a legionnaire gets, which is mostly the ones other men don’t want. It’s a cruel fact but then it’s a cruel world and I’ve forgotten how many times my sister told me that when I was a child; and everything I’ve heard and seen since suggests it’s true.

Doesn’t have to be.

“Who are you?” I demand finally.

The voice laughs. “Who do you think?” it says. “I’m OctoV, your
emperor.
” Something in the way the voice says this makes me swallow, and sourness immediately fills my throat.

“I don’t understand.”

“Few of you do.”

“Of us?”

The voice nods, absurd as that sounds. I can hear the voice, but only in my head, and what I’m hearing is more thought than actual speech. I get the inflections, the nuances that a speaker might put into the words were they actually verbal, but it is more an intimation of how they should sound.

Inflections, nuances, intimations—where do these terms come from?

Don’t underestimate yourself,
says the voice.
Anyway, you heard them from your guardian as a child.

“What am I meant to do?”

Your job.

“Are you going to tell me what that is?”

Someone else will. You must do the job the general sends you to do. Because if you don’t he will have you killed, and that would be inconvenient. So do what you do and be who you are. We’ll talk later.

“When?” I ask as the voice begins fading.

A day or so, a week, a month, a few years. It’s hard to be exact. Necessity is so fluid at this level.

And then the voice is gone and I’m alone again. The urge to vomit is also gone, and in its place is a hunger to see this city and do my job. I examine those thoughts carefully, worried they might belong to someone else, but they genuinely seem to be mine.