Death's Head (19 page)

It has to be intentional.

The poor touch his statues for luck, leaving OctoV’s hands and feet worn smooth and bright, while the rest of him remains the strange green that bronze gets when it grows old. Farlight is a city of statues. Senators in robes and generals in uniform, noble-looking gods and naked women, more naked women than you can possibly imagine.

All are made from bronze, all ridiculously beautiful, mostly with full breasts and wide hips…mothers washing their hair, feeding children, sitting contemplating or composing poetry, girls with bows and quivers, with wings, clutching bunches of flowers to their hearts.

The subject doesn’t seem to matter so long as they are naked, which probably tells you more about the inhabitants of Farlight than a dozen slab guides do. I’m in a park beside a statue of a girl washing her feet in a bronze stream. The stream has ripples and the faintest suggestion of a current. The girl has curling hair, soft hips, and neatly crossed legs, so she can reach her ankles.

SERENITY
, announces the label.

Maybe in Farlight. Anywhere else, and she’d need guards to fight off the crowds if she sat around on a riverbank like that.

Mr. deCharge is late.

At least I’m assuming the message is his. It gave a time—five minutes ago—and a place, here beside the
Serenity
statue. As I wait, an old woman comes to nod at the bronze girl and a boy leaves bread crumbs beside her feet, while a child half the age of Aptitude rips bougainvillea from a bush and tosses its blossoms into bronze water, as if she believes the stream is real.

Serenity
has another name, obviously.

One known only to…

The poor,
I think, as instinct kicks me off the bench and the air ripples. A carbon dart passes through the space where my head was, then splinters into fragments against the statue behind.

A twig breaking.

That’s what I heard. Sixteen years of combat training overrides a handful of days in this strange and sloppy city. As I wait, flat on the ground, I try to work out if there are two attackers and if one of them is busy creeping around behind me, puff gun in his hand.

It’s a strange choice of weapon, except that a pulse rifle might melt the bronze girl, and that would undoubtedly cause more trouble than one dead soldier in a public park, so maybe there’s logic to the choice after all.

“You can stand up now.”

The voice is familiar. Amused, positively pleased with itself.

Rolling over, I extract a throwing spike from its sheath and hurl it toward where I think the voice should be. Someone swears.

“Enough,” says the voice.

I’ve got a gun in my hand now, and as the uniformed figure twists my spike from the fir tree behind which he’s been hiding, I reach kneeling position and draw a bead on his head.

“Targeted,” announces my SIG diabolo.

Major Silva blanches.

“Targeted…” The gun’s getting impatient.

“You passed,” says the major. “That was the final test.”

“Wait,” I tell the gun.

The major is the same dapper figure. His diffidence is as much an affectation as it ever was, and he seems to be alone, which impresses me.

“You can put that down,” he says.

I look at the SIG, then shake my head. “Where’s deCharge?”

“Dead.”

“You killed him?”

Major Silva nods. “He supplied your kyp, which was faulty…The man breeds them,” he says, amending it to “bred them.”

“And I can’t get the bloody thing out?”

He shakes his head.

Something interesting has just occurred to me. “So you can’t get another one in?” He realizes the importance of this, or maybe he just sees the relief in my face. I’ve been shot, I’ve had bones broken and suffered beatings from Sergeant Fitz that left me barely able to crawl across a floor, but nothing comes close to my body’s battle with the kyp.

“No,” he says. “We can’t.”

During the course of this brief conversation, my gun gets lowered, although my trigger finger is still hooked through its guard, and the
shell-retained-in-chamber
diode on its handle remains red.

“Where did you get that?”

“Took it off Aptitude Wildeside’s bodyguard.”

“It shouldn’t work for you.”

“Well, it does,” I say. “And I’m keeping it.” I raise the muzzle slightly just in case I need to make the point.

The major sighs. “You can’t go around threatening Death’s Head officers.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I can.”

“You’re covered,” he tells me. “I’ve got a dozen snipers out there.”

“Bullshit.”

“Are you prepared to take that risk?”

“Yes.”

At this, the major grins. “You’ll do,” he says. “Colonel Nuevo said you would…I’m going to break this down, okay?”

After he’s stripped his puff gun into a dozen pieces, he tosses the chassis, barrel, and air cylinder in a trash can and rips open a silver sachet of dark red powder, which he sprinkles over the top. Seconds later there’s a flash and the gun goes up in a sheet of white flame. It takes the can with it, but casual vandalism obviously doesn’t come high on Major Silva’s list of worries.

“Usually,” he tells me, “I’d put you through training. Six months in the academy and then a tour of duty, but at the colonel’s suggestion we’re going to skip the academy.”

It takes me a second to realize what he’s saying.

“You leave in three hours…” Major Silva catches my stare. “Report to the Death’s Head HQ on Casaubon Square. They’ll issue you a uniform. And if anyone asks, tell them you have my permission to carry that.”

He’s referring to the SIG diabolo.

We walk to the edge of the park together, a weird-enough couple to attract glances from those we pass, although the glances are discreet.

At the road, the major hesitates. As I said, it’s an affectation. All that diffidence, the irony and dry humor exist because the uniform he wears allows them to exist. This man is a killer, just as I am, but he’s a killer with manners and a good tailor, or whatever people like him use to make their uniforms.

“By the way,” he says. “Well done.”

I want to go back to Golden Memories, say my good-byes to Aptitude. Not to mention Lisa and Angelique, although it’s a very different type of good-bye I have in mind for us. Instead I find a public video booth and feed it a credit, patching myself through to the public booth at Golden Memories. Someone answers after the thirty-eighth ring.

“What?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Good to hear from you, too.”

“Sven?” It’s Lisa.

“Everything okay?”

She hears the worry in my voice. “Sure,” she says. “All cool. My cousin from the country and Angelique have gone shopping. But I can take a message, if that’s why you’ve called.”

My cousin?

I’m grinning like an idiot into the screen, my reflection overlaying Lisa’s face, like a ghost image. Maybe this is going to work out after all. “Say hi to the kid for me. Tell her I’ll be back soon, and look after yourself, okay?”

“Back soon?”

“Got a job,” I say.

“Off planet?”

“Sounds like it. Oh, and Lisa.” I hesitate, watching her wait for me to find the right words. “Just, thank you, all right? For everything…”

She breaks the connection, but not before she flashes me her smile.

THE HQ ON
Casaubon Square overlooks a dusty fountain and a small rectangle of tired grass. Wrought-iron railings surround the grass on all four sides, as if to protect it from those who might want to trample its beauty, but the beauty is missing and so are the hordes. The square is almost deserted, its only occupants two uniformed Death’s Heads who stand on either side of a black-painted door.

Farlight is OctoV’s largest city, his capital. It’s bigger than any of the Uplifted cities, so we’re told. Although obviously not as big as their orbital habitat, because nothing is as big as that—well, nothing that’s impinged on my life.

Who knows what the U/Free have? Apart from genius, high art, and all the things we don’t…

And yet being in Farlight is like being trapped in the center of a cluster of broken clockwork. It’s strange, maybe more than strange. Looking at the deserted square and the ruined grass and the shabby buildings, it strikes me that this must be intentional.

OctoV is saying something. I just wonder if anyone but OctoV himself understands what it is.

“Halt.”

It seems best to do what I’m told.

“I’m expected.”

The guards on the door look at each other.

“Name?” one of them demands.

“Sven.”

“Sven what?”

In my pocket the SIG gets itself ready. A quick shiver as the chassis unlocks and loads. The combat chip has tied itself to my emotions, which should worry the hell out of me, but actually makes me feel very happy.

“Well?”

A name comes unbidden. It’s the one Debro mentioned, back when we were being inducted into Paradise. “Sven Tveskoeg,” I tell them. “It’s an old Earth name.”

They wonder whether I’m taking the piss.

And then there’s a creak, and a man I recognize is standing in the open doorway. Both guards snap to attention at the sight of Colonel Nuevo’s uniform.

“Sven,” he says. “What are you doing out here?”

“Trying to get in,” I tell him. “Without killing your pet goons.”

His smile is thin. “These are the regiment’s finest.”

I’m obviously expected to reply, but I let silence say it for me, and the colonel sighs. “The major told me to expect you.”

“Really,” I say. “Was that before or after he tried to put a carbon dart through my skull?”

Colonel Nuevo decides it’s time to take our conversation inside.

MY REAL SURPRISE
comes when I arrive to get my uniform. This comes last, after a medical, a second medical to check that the results of the first were correct, and a psychometric test, which is canceled halfway through when an intense-looking woman stands up from her desk, wanders over, and turns off my screen.

“It’s better,” she tells me, “we don’t have this on record.”

She says the same to Colonel Nuevo when he turns up at the end of our session.

“Right,” he says. “We’d better get him geared up.”

I expect a quartermaster, a rack of uniforms, a row of helmets, rifles piled in one corner. That’s what you get in the legion. Instead I get an old man who tells me to strip and stand in the middle of the room.

Colonel Nuevo excuses himself for this bit.

Lasers play down my body from all four corners of the room. The lights come up and the old man comes out from behind his screen with a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a jacket hanging over his arm.

He smiles at my surprise. “Fabricators,” he says. “Subvisual spiders.”

As he holds the jacket out to me, I frown. “You’ve made a mistake,” I say, handing back the garment. A silver collar bar on each side gives my rank as second lieutenant, and a silk ribbon tucked into one of the buttonholes proclaims me holder of the Obsidian Cross.

Third class, admittedly. But it’s still the Obsidian Cross.

The old man checks his right wrist, skim-reading an implant. “No,” he says. “No mistake. Second Lieutenant Sven Tveskoeg, Obsidian Cross third class.” He shrugs, watches me climb slowly into the jacket, and invites me to choose a holster style for my gun.

PART 2

CHAPTER 25

C
OMBAT BATWINGS
come in hard and fast over stunted trees, their guns blazing as they dip to just above ground level and try to kill everything in their path, which happens to include me.

These machines are fast, hellishly fast, maneuvering at g’s that must take their pilots to the edge of unconsciousness with every twist and turn. A trooper next to me raises his pulse rifle and takes aim.

The batwing stays steady and the man is gone. As burning meat mixes with mud on my uniform, I roll into the nearest ditch and see the batwing bank tightly to come around again.

“Big man, small ditch,” says the gun. “Go figure.”

So I flip myself out and roll behind the wreckage of a fat-wheeled combat bot. We’ve a thousand of the bastards, and they’re about as useless as a nun in a brothel.

As the batwing screams toward me, I raise my gun.

“Locked on,” it says.

“Take it.”

The SIG does what it’s told.

In doing so it trashes 15 percent of its power pack. When this is over I’m going to find the wreckage, because I want to know what the Enlightened have flying those things, and why shooting them makes my gun burn through its battery.

Batwings are small, much too small to take a human pilot. Rumor says they’re flown by the heads of dead Uplift soldiers. But rumor is usually wrong. In the meantime I’m working out what to do next and wondering how the fuck I got here.

As if I could forget.

“MOUTHPIECE,”
a computer says.

A technician offers me a breathing tube. She offers it politely, with no indication that I’m holding up her launch. A glance at the trooper beside me tells me the tube really is what I think, so I stuff it into my mouth, closing my teeth around a ridge put there for the purpose.