Death's Head (15 page)

A knock at my door spins me around and the laser knife is in my hand before I’m even aware of the fact. Lisa stands there, eyes wide and appalled. Maybe it’s at my nakedness, at the knife in my hand, or at the fact that one of my arms is made from black metal. Maybe it’s just the stink and the state of my room.

“There’s someone here to see you.”

“Someone?”

“A man,” she says. “He’s been waiting.”

“How long?”

“About three hours.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

This time her eyes definitely flick to the knife in my hand. “I did,” she says. “You threatened to kill the first person who came into this room.”

“Had my mind on other things,” I say.

There’s a fear in her face that looks ugly.

She’s not as young as she’d like, but she’s still a lot younger than I am and this is her life and where she lives, and where she’ll probably always live. I need to learn to handle these things.

“Sorry,” I say. “Battle fever. It’s over now.”

She looks around my room and her nose wrinkles.

“Yeah. It stinks. I’ll get it cleaned up and get myself cleaned up and then I’ll go have a beer. Maybe you could join me?”

“Battle fever?” she asks, neither accepting nor rejecting my invitation.

I nod, looking sheepish.

“You were a soldier. Where?”

Fort Karbonne, a wretched little planet in a wretched little solar system so far from here you won’t even have heard of the nearest star.

I’m right, she hasn’t.

“You’re a long way from home.”

“Yeah, a long way.”

Something in my eyes makes her accept my earlier invitation to have a drink. “But you’ll need to get yourself cleaned up.” Her voice is hesitant, because she’s anxious not to offend me, and I smile, realizing that I really must look dreadful if I’m not fit for some dive on the edge of a Farlight favela.

“Send the guy up,” I tell her.

“I’M CHARLES DECHARGE,”
he says.

He’s small and wiry, an underfed version of Phibs. When he hurries into my room his eyes are already flicking from corner to corner, as if searching for unexpected enemies.

“You’re meant to have swallowed your kyp by now.”

“My what?”

“
Aculeus accipio…
You were given one.”

“It’s fitted,” I say, opening my mouth. “Want to take a look?”

He backs away, his face blanking as he concentrates frantically. The very faintest echo of a thought appears inside my head. It’s a whisper to the roar I heard earlier. I have almost no sense of emotion and certainly nothing resembling nuance, but it’s there.

“Got you,” says deCharge.

“Yeah.”

“Did you have a hard time of it?” He takes one look at my room, sees the drying sheets and sodden towels, and realizes the absurdity of his own question.

“Can you hear me?” he asks.

And his question is inside my own head, so I nod.

“Good,” he says. “This is your mission.”

He’s talking quickly, anxious to get away from a face-to-face meeting, because such meetings are obviously a rarity for him.

“Five weeks ago Senator Debro Wildeside was disgraced in a plot instigated by her cousin, Senator Thomassi. She’s in exile, as is her ex-husband Anton Urbana, who has taken the place of their daughter Aptitude…

“With me so far?”

I nod, trying to keep my face neutral.

“As tradition allows and Thomassi hoped, Debro Wildeside settled her whole fortune on Aptitude, who is now in Thomassi’s care. The senator plans to marry the girl himself. Should that happen it will create the greatest trading house this empire has ever seen. Your job is to stop that.”

“Senator Thomassi dies?”

“Of course,” he tells me. “Begin with Thomassi and end with the girl. Spare no one and burn down the house. Do it tonight.”

I finally understand why deCharge wants to do this meeting from a distance. He’s been told I might be dangerous. And someone is playing with me, unless they’re playing with Debro and Anton. Either way it stinks. Meet the family, kill their kid…

CHAPTER 20

M
ORNING COMES
and the House of Thomassi is still standing, and a very elegant house it is, too. A five-story villa set in its own gardens, with steel gates and trees that look as if they grew from seed. The villa occupies the best position on Boulevard Mazimo, one of Farlight’s more expensive streets, about a fifteen-minute walk west of the central palace complex.

But all this comes later, much later.

About twelve hours after I decide I need to clean myself up, buy some weapons, and take Lisa out for that drink…

MY SHOWER IS
cold, which is what you’d expect from a dive on the edge of the Bosworth Landing Field in the shadow of Calinda Gap. I don’t mind, because the city is hot and muggy, the night air thick with hydrocarbons and sharp with ozone from the cutting sheds that line the landing fields below.

By the time my shower’s done, I’m too clean for my old clothes. So I shrug myself into the trousers, take the credit chip deCharge left on his way out, and go looking for a cheap clothing emporium. What I actually find is a stall about two streets back from Golden Memories, which turns out to be the name of the brothel where I’m staying.

“That’s all you’ve got?”

She’s looking at my credit chip.

I nod.

“How much is on it?”

My shrug says it all.

The old woman pulls a wry smile and tells me her best offer is sixty cents on each credit if I’m expecting her to launder a stolen chip as well as sell me clothes that don’t announce I’ve just flown in from off planet, and probably broken my contract by wandering away from my ship.

“It’s not stolen,” I tell her.

Her eyebrows are white, like her hair. She reminds me of a ghost owl with her exaggerated expression of disbelief.

“I was given it.”

She laughs. “Sure,” she says. “How hard did you have to hit him first?”

We settle on seventy-five cents and she takes the whole card and promises to give me cash for what remains, after I buy what I need, provided what remains doesn’t come to more than 25 percent of what is on there in the first place.

Something tells me she’s done this before.

“What are people wearing?”

The woman looks at me. “What people?”

“People like me…”

I get a leather coat, too heavy for the hot night air. It’s a cheap copy of the one Carl took as price for my passage aboard his ship. The two shirts she offers are black, their dye is poor quality, and both look ready to fall apart after a couple of washes. When I pull a face the old woman tells me to take a closer look.

They’re ex-military, ballistic polymer mixed with spiderweb. The color is crap because polymer and web take dye badly, but the cloth is thick enough to slow blades and wind itself around incoming bullets, making them easier to extract.

She has me pegged as a mercenary, someone mugging rich kids to make ends meet between jobs. It’s not a bad cover story for a man of my temperament. It also makes it easier to ask my final question, although I ask another one first.

“How much left on the chip?”

She debates lying. Decides against. “Three thousand and eight credits.”

Seeing the shock in my eyes, the woman scowls. She could have lied anyway, because I obviously had no idea just how much was there.

“Must have been a good friend,” she says bitterly.

I stare at her.

“To give you this.”

We lock eyes and she glances away. “I can’t give you anything like that much in cash,” she tells me. “I said that up front.”

“I need a gun,” I say. “Something good. You can take another two five…I want the last five hundred in cash. Small notes.” I wonder what I’ve said to make her laugh.

“This is Farlight,” says the woman. “No one takes paper.”

It seems inflation makes banknotes worthless, and OctoV keeps printing scrip to pay his troops, so now even credit chips have to be underwritten with gold from private banks, at least they do in Farlight. It’s my ignorance of this that convinces the woman I’m from way off system.

And then she weighs the chances of someone that distant getting this far into the center without serious backing, and begins to wonder if she should be dealing with me at all. I’ve gone from being an out-of-work mercenary to something more dangerous.

“A gun,” I tell her, making my voice hard.

She nods. Greed, and the thought of the credits she can take, overcoming her fear. “You wait here,” she says. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

It’s more like an hour.

“I THOUGHT YOU’D
forgotten…” Lisa is slouched behind the counter at Golden Memories, her hair carefully brushed and then messed up again where she’s flicked it back in irritation at the heat and the length of time I’ve made her wait.

“Had to get this,” I say, pulling back my coat.

Her eyes widen at the shoulder holster and the length of gun it carries. Something smaller would have been nice, but this is nearly new and came with enough clips to need a second holster on the other side, just to carry the ammo.

“You’re not planning to go out wearing that?”

“Why? You think it’s a bad idea?”

She does, but I wear it anyway. For a start, I want to know if the rig looks obvious under my coat—and then there’s the excitement factor. For her, not me. I’ve been wearing concealed weapons most of my life.

We drink at a cantina two buildings along. A place that caters to men from the breaking yards and landing fields. For this part of the city it’s practically a class joint. All the men look over and most of them know Lisa by name, if the litany of
hey
s and
hi
s and
hello
s that hits her is anything to go by.

Eyes skim over me, note my clothes and the way I carry myself. If anyone registers the concealed weapon it doesn’t show in his face. I’d say
his or her face,
but Lisa’s the only woman in this cantina, apart from a girl who could be her twin, and she’s serving beer behind the counter.

Carl’s in a far corner with two men from
Trillion Two Zero Three.
His gaze skims across me a little faster than the rest.

“Who’s your friend?” It’s the girl who looks like Lisa.

“He’s from off planet.”

“Lisa,” the girl says, smiling. “Everyone’s from off planet.”

“No.” Lisa shakes her head. “He’s, like, off off planet.”

The girl behind the bar examines me with new interest. “You here looking for a job…?”

“I’ve got one,” I tell her.

Lisa looks at me with interest.

“You going to tell me what it is?” That’s the bar girl again.

I give her my best smile. “Believe me,” I say. “You really don’t want to know.”

When the girl opens her mouth, Lisa glares. So the girl shuts her mouth again.

“Meet my cousin,” Lisa says. “Angelique.”

Angelique shakes my hand, although she seems to find the gesture hilarious. “Where are you from?” And then before I can answer, she mock-scowls at Lisa. “I’m allowed to ask that, right?”

Somehow we all end up in bed roughly an hour after the bar closes. It’s Angelique’s bed, so maybe Lisa is nervous about taking me back to her room at Golden Memories, not that I care whose bed we use. Lisa and Angelique are young, they’re blond, and both have obviously long since discarded their inhibitions, assuming they had any to begin with.

We fuck, we sleep, they drink cachaca and I nurse a beer until the cousins are sprawled in a tangle of naked limbs on a filthy mattress and I’m standing at the window watching the sun come up over the capital of my world.

Somewhere out there is a girl not that much younger than these two. She should be dead, because I should have killed her. The fact that this hasn’t happened is obviously worrying deCharge, because I can feel his voice tugging at the edge of my mind.

What?
I ask.

Voices break through, far too many voices, and I find myself on my knees. When I look around the girls are still sleeping, but the sun is a little higher in the sky. Mr. deCharge is in the mix inside my head, his voice more urgent than the others.

Where are you,
he says.

Sick,
I tell him.

His voice comes from a distance, bleached of its worry and anger. Only the length of time it’s been demanding my attention lets me know he’s upset.

What do you mean sick?

I feed him a memory of my vomiting, so real and vivid I can almost feel him lurch back to escape its full horror.

Shit,
he says.

Yeah,
I agree. And then I ask a question that’s been troubling me.
How do I get rid of the kyp?

You don’t,
he tells me, but in asking I’ve reassured him. Mr. deCharge thinks I’m worrying about the fact that my kyp is not working properly and is making me vomit…well, as far as he knows.

Where are you now?

Something stops me from telling him the truth.
Out for a walk. Where are you?

Waiting for you.