Death's Head (37 page)

“As his ADC,” says the captain, “it’s your job to tell Colonel Nuevo. Particularly since you were the one to negotiate with the silverhead.”

So now it’s a
negotiation.
I smile to show my understanding. “You’ll be coming in with me, of course?”

Captain Mye decides this is acceptable.

The four guards on the door to the old bank are down to three. I consider asking what happened to the other one but let it go.

“Is the colonel busy?”

All three nod. The guards look scared and tired and so far out of their depth that they’re drowning without even knowing it in a cesspit of betrayal and politics.

“You’re relieved,” I tell them.

It takes a moment for my words to sink in.

“Lose your medals and badges of rank, find a pulse rifle, and get yourself up to the walls. Mix with the others; go back to being ordinary soldiers. Steal a militia uniform if you can. That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Their relief is obvious.

Inside Colonel Nuevo’s HQ the pretty blond girl is gone and so are the colonel’s cook, his maid, and all the food in his kitchen. Someone’s let the fire go out in the boilers. So the captain and I go down to the strong room alone.

“Colonel?”

Pretending to hear an answer, I nod to myself and slide my way through a half-open door. “Shouldn’t take long,” I tell Captain Mye.

The stink inside is appalling. Shit stains the colonel’s trousers, and what is left of his brains has liquefied and glued itself to the carpet. His watch cuts into a bloated wrist, and a rat has been chewing at his fingers.

I’d vomit, but I’m used to it.

On the table lies the canister with its lid still open and its red button waiting for my finger. I can return to five-braid Ison and blow her, the ferox, and most of her bloody army into small pieces. Of course, doing so will kill the Aux, what’s left of our army, and every family still left in Ilseville, but that’s war…

Or maybe it’s politics.

As if one isn’t just the flip side of the other.

Shutting the top, I twist a band that locks the lid into place and unscrew the base. A needle-thin hydrogen trigger drops onto the desk. I pocket it and reach deeper into the cylinder, hooking out the core with my bare fingers, and then I sit at the table, pull a piece of folded paper from my jacket, and write my own orders. After that there’s only one more thing I need to do.

The single bullet I put into the ceiling ricochets off the strong room’s underlying steel and damn near kills me.

“That was intelligent,” says my gun.

What I say isn’t for repeating.

“We surrender,” I tell Captain Mye, showing him the paper.

“I heard…”

“A shot, yes. Colonel Nuevo has taken his own life.” I shrug, as callously as possible. “Only to be expected in the circumstances.”

“General Jaxx will require a second witness,” says the captain, reaching around me for the door handle.

“Sir,” I say.

He’s halfway into the vault when he realizes what he sees. Captain Mye tries to turn back, but I’m one step ahead.

It takes death to wipe the shock from his face.

After wrapping the captain’s hand around the grip of Colonel Nuevo’s gun, I thread his finger through the trigger guard.

It looks like suicide to me.

ON HEARING COLONEL
Nuevo’s decision, Five-braid Ison gives us until the following dawn to prepare our surrender. I reckon she needs that long to round up a decent collection of lenz, observers, and U/Free data collectors.

Her demands are simple: We will surrender. All weapons will be given up. Any shot fired in anger will be regarded as having been fired by all. The Death’s Head are to abandon Ilseville as individuals. No marching and no massed ranks. The galaxy will see a shambling defeated mass, stumbling gratefully toward captivity.

In the hours that remain I disband the Aux and give each a handful of coins taken from Colonel Nuevo’s strong room. My final order is simple: They will destroy their alligator-skin patches.

They are local militia, pressed into service by me. Their gratitude at being rescued by the Enlightened knows no bounds.

A hundred scores are settled that night. A group of militia trap three Death’s Head in an alley, kicking two of them to death. If they’d killed all three they might have gotten away with it. But five Death’s Head walk into the militia camp less than an hour later and gun down a dozen soldiers in revenge.

The first night in a month that the enemy aren’t trying to kill us, and we’re busy killing ourselves. Tomorrow we surrender, without honor, without being allowed to retain our weapons, and with helmets held in our hands as we leave the city.

News grabs of Ilseville’s fall will spread everywhere.

The U/Free already know. Their observer general left the inner city this afternoon, given safe passage and an honor guard by the Enlightened. They’re playing it safe, the Uplifted; showing how civilized they can be. All those rumors of mass slaughter and cities burned are lies, obviously.
Look at us,
their actions say.
How can you compare us to the Death’s Head? In what way are we like OctoV?

In the meantime we are destroying ourselves in a frenzy of fear, hatred, and retribution, and you can bet the U/Free know that, too.

When the time comes, I go join the defeated.

I give Franc my dagger. My gun I leave with Haze.

CHAPTER 46

F
IVE-BRAID ISON
flies out half an hour after we surrender. Before she goes, Ison makes a speech for the gathered lenz about inviolable borders, territorial integrity, and what happens to people who underestimate the Uplifted. The speech is addressed to OctoV; at least that’s what she says, although it sounds more like it is addressed to the U/Free to me.

And then, with Ison gone, we’re herded into a column and told we’re to march south, toward the harbor at Mica and waiting transport. This is where we’ve been heading ever since.

Anger keeps me from stumbling. Anger and common sense, self-preservation and pride. Our column’s been on the road for five days now, marching into sleet and a poor pretense for snow, as if chasing the last echoes of winter. The sick and the wounded, the starving and the weak fall daily, shot through the head or trampled under the unthinking boots of those behind.

“
Move,
” I snarl at the woman beside me.

Dragging my boots, I force one foot in front of the other and keep walking through the mud, despite the fact I’m supporting the redheaded sniper, although
almost carrying
probably describes it better.

Who knows what her name is? She fell fifteen minutes ago. So a Silver Fist officer upended her, raised her buttocks into the air, and took her at the roadside, putting his pistol to the back of her skull before he’d even withdrawn.

And then he caught me watching.

“You going to carry her?”

Stupidity made me say, “Yes.”

So now I’m carrying a sobbing woman who wants to know why I didn’t just let the bastard kill her.

We sleep beside a ditch, tentless and without food, while our Silver Fist friend inflates a bubble tent and eats self-heating ration packs. Uplift rations are probably as vile as our own, but hunger gnaws at my guts like a fox and I’d eat pretty much anything.

“Fuck off,” says the sniper.

So I do, all of ten paces.

This takes me to the very edge of the laser fencing. There’s no real reason for the corral the Silver Fist construct, because we’re too shattered to think about escaping, and there’s nowhere for us to go anyway.

The silence is what gets me.

Guns and rockets, mortar rounds and snatches of small-arms fire have become so much a soundtrack to my life that their absence shocks me more than any noise. Only when some guard shoots a straggler does my day feel vaguely normal. When I mention this to the sniper she stares at me strangely. This may be why she won’t look at me anymore.

We stink, all of us.

Shit, sweat, death, and defeat, who knew they smelled so similar?

I miss my gun and its arrogance. We do what we do, we do it well, and no one else comes close. Maybe its arrogance merely matches my own.

The next day the sniper walks for an hour almost unaided, and then tries to sit. Hooking my arm under hers, I drag her to her feet and make her keep walking. Her punches are so weak they don’t even bruise me. Around this time I remember to ask her name. Rachel.

“Well, fucking walk,” I tell Rachel.

Anger’s good. It gets her through to the evening.

Mornings turn to afternoons and get swallowed by the night. But the successive nights do little to dampen Rachel’s misery. One time, a couple of guards come by with flashlights in their hands and rape on their minds. A single look at the state of her is enough to make them go elsewhere.

Come dawn, there’s another woman crying and a man dead, his head smashed and blood crusting his mouth. A boy offers to help bury him, but we move off before the job is done.

Anyone else would have dropped Rachel by now, and I know the Silver Fist are placing bets on how long I can keep going. Most of them have already lost, which probably explains the viciousness of their passing kicks.

Night comes around again, the eighth…at least I think it’s the eighth. Tents go up and the enemy eat, leaving only a handful of guards to erect the laser fencing that keeps us secure. Our hunger makes their job easier by the day.

“Get up,” I tell Rachel when dawn arrives.

“Piss off.”

I slap her so hard I have to carry her for the rest of that day, although she regains consciousness around noon. The Silver Fist who are still in on the bet think it’s hilarious.

Personally, I hope to see them all dead.

The next morning is much the same. I want Rachel to get up; she wants me to fuck off and die…Sheer obstinacy stops me from leaving her. Rachel’s alive and she’s bloody well going to stay that way.

“Stand,” I say, twisting my fingers into her hair.

Shadows shift behind me, and I turn expecting to see a guard. Only it’s someone else entirely.

“Hi,” says Shil. “Still relying on your charm?”

Having sworn loudly enough to make a Silver Fist look around, I stamp my anger into silence and take a deep breath, then another.

“All right,” says Shil. “You’ve made your point. You’re really fucking pleased to see me.”

“I told you to stay behind.”

“No. You said I wasn’t Aux, remember?”

“Yeah.”

“So,” she says. “Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do anyway?” She glares past me to where Rachel sits. “Do you want help with her or not?”

Around us the defeated are picking up their packs, struggling into sodden boots and forcing themselves to their feet. A few are glaring in undisguised hatred at the Silver Fist, but most are too hollow-eyed to care.

“As long as it doesn’t void their bet,” I say.

Shil looks at me strangely. “You’ve been close to dropping her,” she says, “for a couple of days now.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

Hoisting Rachel between us, we set off in silence along a track that barely qualifies as a road, and as the sun reaches the high point of its journey—roughly as high as a tree on the horizon, had any trees been able to grow in this wilderness—right around then Neen and Franc appear behind us, position themselves on either side of Rachel, and release us from her burden.

“Fantastic,” I say. “Don’t tell me…”

“Yeah,” says Neen. “Good to see you, too.”

He’s taller than I remember, even thinner. His shaggy mop has been cropped to the skull and he’s back in uniform, complete with Death’s Head patch made from alligator skin. So are the others, I realize, even Maria. Only Haze wears militia uniform, with a fat cap pulled down tight over his ears.

“How are you handling the…”

He glares at me, almost tripping over his feet as he turns his attention from the road. “By not thinking about it.”

Our column is now a third of the length it was when it set out from Ilseville. No lenz line this road to record us. Our surrender was news; our march to the coast at Mica is a given. At most a few families turn out from their farms to watch us pass. They look like everyone else on this planet: badly dressed, damp, and cold.

A woman gives Franc soup and is sworn at by a guard.

She swears back and three men from her village suddenly appear behind her, which is interesting. The Uplifted might hold this planet, but it seems they still have hearts and minds to gather in.

Sipping from the cup, Franc smiles her thanks. When I look again, she’s given the cup to Haze.

That night we make a fire from scraps of wood and huddle around it while Rachel tells her story. It’s depressingly familiar. A daughter when she should have been a son, she fills a quota for conscripts that her brother is still too young to fill for himself. Her biggest mistake is having proved useful with a gun.

“Only,” says Rachel, “I’m not going to swap sides again.” It takes me a moment to realize what she means.