Death's Head (20 page)

“Doors,” says the voice.

We’re being prepped by machine, because it’s more efficient than using humans—or so I’ve been told by the techie, who keeps her eyes lowered and turns away from my questions as soon as politeness allows.

It used to be me that made people nervous; now it’s my wrapping as well. Black combat armor, black-visored helmet, black gloves…And that dinky little silver skull on the front of my helmet, just in case anyone’s too stupid to realize the obvious.

Glass doors close over my head, and everyone around me shuts their eyes. Seconds later our pod fills with shock gel. From drop to landing we’re going to be in free fall, and I mean free fall. We’re also out of communication range, not that this matters. Once dropped, nothing can change a pod’s trajectory.

Like every other pod in the drop we have landing legs to take the worst of the shock, with gel to cushion us from the rest.

I’m counting down in my head.

Three, two, one…

Half a minute is the time I’ve been given from gelling to drop, and it’s accurate to the second. As my body rises, the gel cushions my shock and settles me back in my seat. Twenty men to a pod, five hundred pods to a ship, twenty ships to a fleet. That makes two hundred thousand men free-falling toward Ilseville, capital of Sxio province and second city on the newly re-Uplifted and-Enlightened planet of Maybe Here.

Our job is to re-UnEnlighten it fast.

Ilseville is a trading depot for fur, amber, and a rare and fabulously complex leather taken from cold-water alligators, which are actually something else altogether, but look enough like alligators for the name to stick.

I’ve been briefed on the city we’re about to take.

It’s little more than a small town protected by stonefoam walls. The outer areas are constructed mostly of fiberbloc, which is warm, cheap to manufacture, and utterly useless against artillery. The inner city, which is also walled, is stone-built, with two temples. We’re to spare these, if we can.

“Steady yourselves.”

A thud, hard enough to shake my teeth, a suck of vacuum as a pump sucks away the gel, and then my ears pop as air flows into the pod hard enough to blow open its doors.

“Up and out,” a sergeant shouts, but he’s talking to his squad.

I’ve just piggybacked a lift with them. My men don’t exist; I’m a second lieutenant without a platoon, which strikes me as pretty odd.

Hitting the ground, I go facedown. A swift roll sees me covered from head to foot in mud and I’m happier. So I grab some wild grass and force it under the webbing on my helmet, then flip down my visor.

At least I’m camouflaged.

Fat-wheeled combats roll down a ramp behind me. A junior NCO sits on one, his hands gripping wide handlebars and his thumb already on the firing button.

“Moron,” says my gun.

His vehicle bounces once and slaps wetly on landing. Wheels slip, mud sprays from one side, and his vehicle goes over. Its engine dies a second later. Other pods are having similar luck.

“Incoming.”

A dozen conscripts do the meerkat search.

“Twelve o’clock,” I shout, adding, “get down.”

A batwing, coming in hard and fast. Rolling into a ditch, I see the driver of the dead fat-wheel raise his rifle and watch him become history. Another glorious martyr for the mother system, whatever the hell that might be.

“Locked on,” says the SIG.

“Take it.”

We kill the batwing without thinking about it. Somehow I’ve abandoned my ditch for the burning wreckage of a fat-wheeled combat bot. I’m still alive and so are roughly half the troopers around me, but that’s not going to last.

A hostile cannon spits from a hill to our left, while the enemy have an old-fashioned belt-fed dug in the trees to our right. We need to attack the position in those trees or take the hill, because at the moment we’re all in the cross fire. But the ground between here and both those places is marsh, with hillocks of grass surrounded by filthy water.

“Get the fuck down.”

A couple of troopers hit the ground, but not at my shout. One of them is now minus his head; the other probably wishes he was. A batwing has taken his legs below the hip, clean-sealing the wounds as the pulses pass through.

He’s screaming.

A helmetless grunt stands beside him, covering his own ears. Militia, by the look of his uniform. Out of two hundred thousand troops, a thousand of us are Death’s Head, maybe another ten thousand are from the legions, and the rest are conscripts and recruits.

I put a knife through the injured man’s heart.

He stops screaming.

“Get down,” I tell the grunt. “Right down,” I add, when he falls as far as his knees. “Where’s your sergeant?”

The man looks at me blankly.

“Sergeant?” I say.

Another trooper points. What’s left of their sergeant is staring blankly at a cold gray sky, and no one’s even had sense enough to steal his plasma pistol.

“You’re the new sergeant,” I tell the trooper who pointed, giving him the pistol. As an afterthought, I get him to unbuckle his own helmet and cram the sergeant’s helmet on his head in its place. Demands are flooding through the earpiece.

“Down,” I hear the trooper say. “The new sergeant,” he adds. And then he tosses his old helmet to the grunt who seems to be without.

He’ll do.

“Cover me,” I tell him.

Pulse cannon or belt-fed? Which to hit first…Spotting a group of troopers who’ve abandoned their fat-wheels and are dragging a mortar toward the hill, I decide to take the trees and the belt-fed for myself.

Behind me the new sergeant fires a burst from his pulse pistol, and I hug dirt as return fire skims over my head. A second burst, then another burst and another; he’s got the rest of his troop firing now. If he lives long enough he’s going to make a good NCO.

Grinning to myself, I roll into a sodden ditch and shake my head.
Good
and
NCO—
now, there are two words I never expected to hear in the same sentence. The channel is deep enough to let me crawl on my belly through marsh grass and cold water toward the sound of the belt-fed weapon.

The grunts are keeping pace with me and I’m officially impressed. To the man with the machine gun it must look like they’re advancing on his gun camp. I just hope he doesn’t get too many of them before I can reach the trees.

“Fucking chaos,” says the gun when I wake it up again.

“Remind me to reset you.”

There has to be a character button somewhere, because I can’t believe this is its default personality. SIG GmbH would never make a profit.

“Distance,” I demand.

“About fifty yards.”

“I don’t want
about.
”

“Forty-eight yards, eleven and a quarter inches, approximately. I can give you a more accurate measurement if you want.”

“Can you get him from here?”

The SIG’s sulking.

“Well?”

“Of course. It would help if you told me what rounds you want.”

“Whatever does the least damage.”

“Why?”

“Because I want that belt-fed in one piece. Not for me,” I add quickly, in case it’s the jealous type. “For the men behind me.” I’m crawling through cold water as this goes on, the gun carefully giving me new distances every few seconds until I tell it to stop.

We’re still thirty yards from the trees, and the soldier with the belt-fed is a couple of yards back from that. I’d try to go around him, but that would mean leaving my ditch, and the ditch is the sole reason I’m still alive.

“What are my options?” We’re talking about rounds, obviously.

“Ceramic, fléchette, incendiary, explosive, overblast…”

“Overblast.”

The gun unlocks and loads.

And I wait for a particularly heavy burst of fire from behind me. Something that’s going to make the man in the trees want to keep his head down. When the burst comes, I wait it out and pop my head up in the split-second silence that follows, adding one shot of my own. It helps that overblasts don’t need to be accurate; anything within about ten feet works fine.

I’m up and running the second my round explodes, splashing my way through a dozen yards of sour marsh and boggy ground. The gunman’s on his side, hands tight to his ruptured ears. One of his eyes is pulped and blood oozes from his nose, but he’s still conscious enough to try to crawl away from me.

He dies in silence.

Swiveling the belt-fed, I turn it toward the hill where the enemy pulse cannon is busy cutting down the troopers advancing toward it. A handful of our militia are trapped halfway up a slope; they’re what remains of the brigade I saw earlier.

A blast of belt-fed ceramic concentrates the minds of the Ilsevillect troops opposite. One of them swivels the blast cannon toward me, igniting a tree several paces to my right, which is pretty good for a sighting shot. Unfortunately for him, it frees our militia trapped on the slope below. I keep firing, just to make life more interesting, and by the time he realizes it’s time to swivel his cannon back to where it was, it’s already too late.

The hill is overrun.

CHAPTER 26

S
IR…”

It’s the man I made sergeant. He’s out of breath, as are the four troopers who struggle out of the marsh behind him. Five men out of ten—not a bad rate of attrition for a battle this fierce.

“Sergeant?”

“What now, sir?”

“We attack.”

He checks to see if I’m joking.

“
Fucking Death’s Head,
” one of them mutters, but the voice is impressed despite itself.

“What’s your name?”

“Neen, sir.”

“And the others?”

“Troopers Will, Shil, Franc, and Haze.”

Crop-haired and filthy, they salute, looking nervous. In name order they’re runtish, scowling, white-faced, and overweight. Only Neen looks vaguely like a soldier, and that’s probably just the way he carries his gun. At least he looks more likely to shoot someone else than shoot himself.

“Stick with me,” I tell them. “Anyone asks, you’re already obeying orders. Got it?”

They nod like the neat little row of cannon fodder they are. It’s all I can do not to turn my back on the lot of them and walk away, leaving the group to fulfill their manifest destiny, which is get slaughtered for the greater good of OctoV. But being a lieutenant without men to command, that sucks.

So I order my new sergeant to choose himself a corporal.

“Franc,” he says without hesitation. His choice looks young and nervous, but it’s the sergeant’s decision.

“Okay. Now hit some batwings.”

Neen smiles, nods. Catching his mood, the others do the same.

“You’re going to fire this,” I tell Neen. “And I’m going to show you how.”

The belt-fed is a new model. More complicated that any machine gun I’ve handled before, but the thing about belt-feds is that they all follow a basic pattern, and it’s a pattern that is centuries old. A belt goes in, spent ceramic is ejected, somewhere down the line the block and barrel overheat and the firing mechanism jams. An experienced gunner can read the signs, letting his weapon cool between bursts for just long enough to keep it firing the rest of the time.

“Okay?”

He looks doubtful, so I run him again through the routine, doing my best to keep my temper, which is never good at the best of times. We touch on range and the fact that the gun has no brain at all, and why that can be an advantage when the Enlightened start letting off logic bombs.

We’re all aware there’s a battle going on around us.

“Got it this time?”

He takes one look at my face and nods.

“Good.”

Batwings continue to cut swaths through our troops before they can muster. Half the time new drops don’t even get clear of the pods. And our pods are still dropping, providing the batwings with a limitless supply of fresh meat.

We have twenty thousand dead already according to a readout on my visor. From habit, I double that for a true figure, and then double it again for what we’ll have lost by nightfall. Eighty thousand out of two hundred thousand, pretty much what the high command must be expecting.

The fleet can be seen in low orbit; General Jaxx’s mother ship is a black fleck in the sky above that. An early drop managed to set up an anti-aircraft gun. Most of their time is spent trying to take out high fighters before they can chase our pods to the ground. About one shot in ten hits its target. I’ve been in battles most of my life, but combat like this is outside my experience.

Dragging the belt-fed to the edge of the trees, we place it facing the city, because that’s where the batwings are obviously based.

“Kill them all,” I tell Neen.

Remembering his training, he snaps me a salute.

I smile.

Our belt-fed attracts attention, as we knew it would. As soon as the enemy realize we’ve moved it, a batwing peels off from the pod run and doubles back toward our small circle of trees. Bullets rip apart branches and then the batwing’s behind us, banking tightly for another run.

“Anyone injured?”

“Me,” says a voice.

Behind me lies a trooper. A sliver of branch protruding from his stomach. Out here that’s a death wound, three days of blood poisoning and flesh rot. It takes me a moment to remember his name. It’s Will, the smallest of the five.