Death's Head (34 page)

We’re lit by moonlight.

“Shut it,” says the SIG.

She does.

If there’s a discarded uniform on the floor then she’s dead anyway. But it’s okay: A dress hangs over a chair in one corner. The dress is expensive but filthy, the shoes worn at the heel and trodden down at the back.

“Ilsevillect?”

She nods, begins gabbling at me in Ishvelict, so I put my finger to my lips again, switch to common tongue, and tell her to keep quiet, go back to sleep, and tell no one she was awake when I came through.

“They’ll kill you,” I tell her.

“And if they don’t,” says the gun. “We will.”

The look on her face says she knows that already.

Outside the door I wait, wondering if she’ll scream. When she doesn’t, I take a peep through the door and find her already feigning sleep, her head buried firmly under the covers.

The room opposite contains a major, plus a blonde young enough to be daughter to the woman across the landing. They’re asleep in each other’s arms, blankets pulled up tightly.

“Subsonic ceramic,” suggests the SIG, “quarter charge, hollow point, preset fracture lines.” It’s just showing off.

The man’s a Silver Fist.

At least he was.

My shot passes cleanly through his ear canal, cuts his brain stem, and ricochets off the inside of his skull, splintering into fragments that pulp his cerebellum as surely as if I’d just dropped his brain in a food mixer.

“Now who’s showing off?” asks the gun.

The girl will wake to find a dead man in her bed, but at least she’ll wake, and given he’s three times her age and she’s got a split lip I think she’ll cope.

“Scan warning,” says the gun, and before I can ask
Scanned by what?
the bloody thing kills its laser sights and turns itself off. So I tuck the SIG diabolo into my belt and talk to myself instead.

A floor below this I find two guards standing outside an ornate door.

They die quickly.

Wiping my dagger, I slide it back into its neoprene sheath and pull out my laser knife, tuning its blade to invisible. It’s a wasted effort, because the three-braid is sitting up in bed and his eyes are fixed firmly on the blade in my hand. Should have known the Enlightened could see across a wider spectrum, just as I should have known who was scanning for weapons.

“You won’t get away with this,” he says.

“Want to bet?” says the gun, snapping out of sleep mode. And then to me it says, “More guards heading this way.”

“He call them?”

No one’s clear what power braids have. Certainly not on our side, and probably not theirs. The Enlightened have a lot to gain from keeping everyone ignorant.

The three-braid’s still smiling smugly when he realizes I’m not where I was. That’s because I’m behind him, one hand reaching over his skull to hook my fingers into his nose and yank back his head. He does that flicker thing, but it’s too late. Meat sears as his throat opens, and my blade seals every artery except the last.

“Steps on the stairs.”

Another silverhead, junior enough to have only one braid, but still a silverhead…I kill him fast, and then shoot both his NCOs through the head, hearing brains slop against a wall.

“And again,” says the gun as another two soldiers burst into the room.

It’s chosen subsonic, or maybe I chose that myself. A pull of the trigger and both men go down. I burn out the three-braid’s implant and grind his memories under my heel. That, as much as his death, is what will upset everyone in the morning.

Shutting the door behind me, I hesitate.

A booby trap is what I need.

Gumming a belt mine to the inside of the door, I set it for two movements and use up the first shutting the door behind me.

A LIGHT SHOWS
in a top window.

Darkness stretches out for five floors beneath. It’s a rich house, almost ornate for this city; built by a foreign fur trader, perhaps. People will travel a long way to make themselves rich, even to Ilseville.

The front door is bolted, the windows have locks, and an alarm system winks from above the rear door. There is undoubtedly an alarm system on the front as well, probably made less obvious by a blanket of snow. Three floors up a window is open and a tiny red dot flares and vanishes, flares and vanishes.

A soldier is smoking.

I try to remember what rules the Enlightened have about such things and fail. Most of their rules seem more concerned with what you may or may not eat, wear, or sleep with. All the same, the man obviously doesn’t want to be caught.

“Fléchette or regular?”

The gun practically snorts. “What do you think?”

Setting itself for fléchette, the gun signals ready and I wait for my victim to take another drag. That tiny red dot makes the perfect target. By my reckoning the shot takes him under an eye socket and blows out the top of his skull, missing his brain stem entirely but trashing his frontal lobe.

Spiraling like a dying firefly, his cigarette extinguishes itself at my feet.

The wall is rough, handholds easy to find. All it takes for me to climb in through the window is pushing his body out of my way first.

A flight of stairs gives way to another, and I climb both in silence. The house is cold, my breath visible in a slash of light coming under one door. It seems I’ve arrived at the right place. Killing the person most likely to raise an alarm is pretty basic really, and in a house full of sleeping people, anyone awake has got to be the obvious target.

I’m hoping it’s the Enlightened, but it’s a man very like me. Young, but old enough to have seen something of life. A soldier, who reaches automatically for a gun, because instinct is already running ahead of his thoughts. Our eyes meet and outrage flicks to resignation, without passing through fear.

He dies cleanly, on his feet and facing me.

Silently I say a prayer for a similar death when my time comes, then touch stone to keep that time away.

The other guards die less well.

A shot to the chest, a shot to the throat. A kick to the balls, a twist of someone’s head, and a snap loud enough to wake a silverhead in the room beyond. He gets his shot in first and I find myself hitting a wall, my face flattened by an expensive wall hanging as the blow spins me around. That’s my blood, splatter-patterning antique cloth.

It’s bad, almost as bad as when the ferox took my arm. Reeling that thought in, I check my status…My prosthetic arm is in place, my legs are unbroken, and my head turns, though it hurts like fuck, which is good, because not hurting at all would be far worse. All that’s wrong is a hole in my chest. He’s missed my heart, but that’s probably not difficult. Half a dozen women will tell you I don’t have one.

He stands over me.

He’s as tall as I am, probably taller. Seven braids stream back from his skull. He’s the most senior silverhead I’ve yet seen.

“That’s illegal technology,” he says, kicking my gun across the floor.

“And you can fuck off, too,” says the gun, then goes dark as all its diodes switch off at once.

The silverhead smiles. “This is where you die.”

And in the back of my mind, a skull grins.

“Not here,” I say. “And not yet.”

His reply is a steel-capped boot to my guts. Another kick like that and something will rupture. So I curl myself tight, trying to make it look like instinct while fighting the very instinct that makes me want to curl up into a ball in the first place. It’s a tough trick.

The next kick catches me in the ribs, breaking a couple. The seven-braid smiles at the crack and draws back his boot for a final go. It’s the moment for which I’ve been waiting. Another rib breaks, and my gut muscles barely survive the blow, but I reach right around his ankle and grip the toe of his boot, then pull…

A single twist locks him into the present.

His foot dislocates before his knee, but it’s a close call, and his knee only gives to stop his hip from dislocating entirely. The seven-braid falls, because there’s nothing else he can do, and I slam my elbow hard into his throat. I’m not sure what all those silver torso tubes do but I rip them out of his body anyway.

And then I remove his head without bothering to check if he’s dead first. It hangs from my fingers by all seven braids and leaves a trail of blood as I make my way downstairs and out into the street.

“Wow,” says the gun when we’re clear of the house. “Five broken ribs, a smashed shoulder, and a ruptured spleen. Cheap at half the price.”

I get the feeling it’s just being kind.

My feet are heavy as lead, it’s cold, and the temptation to lie down in the snow for a few minutes is overwhelming. So overwhelming that the gun curses me from one side of a deserted square to the other.

And I’m back at the pumping station before an explosion two blocks away tells me someone has just opened a bedroom door they should have left closed.

“Kaboom,” says the gun.

I have to agree.

CHAPTER 42

I
’M GRINNING,
also bleeding and trying to climb a rusty metal ladder while holding the head of a self-elected god, not necessarily a good mix. It takes me longer than I’d like, but I manage it anyway, and then make my way home.

The head goes in a bucket, because I’m fed up with the mess. The food, taken from the kitchen of the first house, goes into the larder, leaving me with what I’ve been putting off.

Seeing how bad my wound really is.

My uniform is half glued to my side with dried blood, and my jacket peels back reluctantly, although water helps the cloth to pull free. I can see splintered ribs and torn muscle, a pulsing artery, and sinew that looks like it should go somewhere. Straightening the ribs makes me wince.

“Leave it.” Shil’s voice is fierce. “Just fucking leave it.” She steps up beside me and turns me toward her flashlight. “What happened?”

“Someone shot me.”

She sighs. “Obviously. Who?”

“A silverhead…”

My answer stops her in her tracks. “Where was he?”

“Into the outer city. I killed three Enlightened, plus several humans. One of them could have been me.”

“Believe me, sir,” says Shil. “No one could be you.”

“I’m fine.”

“No,” she says. “You’re not.” Without being asked, she banks a fire, finds me a chair, and pours me a glass of brandy. A moment later she has a second glass of brandy mixed with two glasses of water, and she’s heating the whole lot in a saucepan over the fire.

“I can do that myself.”

She stops midstride, then squats in front of me. Her face is hard, and something unforgiving has fixed itself behind her eyes. “You don’t want me in this group, do you?”

I shrug. It hurts.

“What did I do?” she demands. “To make you hate me?”

Twist away from my caress, offer yourself as the price for demoting your brother, hate me yourself…
There are a dozen things I could say and all of them would be half true, and none of them would be honest.

I know the real answer.

It goes back to those locked gates, the high fighter seeding the ghetto with fire, and how Shil and Franc feel about our militia’s slaughter by the Silver Fist. Franc’s better at keeping her disgust hidden, but then she’s been a possession most of her life and that has to be good training.

“Listen,” I say. “There was nothing I could do.”

“Yes there was, sir. You could have stayed here. Not gone into the outer city.” She thinks I’m ignoring her question.

“I mean the gates…”

“Sir, now’s not the time.”

“Yes,” I say, “it fucking is. So I’ll say it, and you’ll listen.”

She waits.

“The code to lock the gate was broadcast by a hiSat. A hiSat dumped up there by General Jaxx’s mother ship. I could no more break its coding than could Haze. Even the colonel was powerless to stop what happened next.”

“Why, sir?” says Shil.

She’s asking why the general had the gates locked in the first place. Shil already understands why none of us could break it open, even if we’d dared try to disobey General Jaxx’s orders.

“To save food, maybe to save ammunition. Because he knew the mercs would fight to the end once they knew they were trapped. God knows I’m not the general…”