Death's Head (39 page)

“Sven,” he says.

Haze shouldn’t be calling me
Sven,
but I let it go.

“They’re grown. Kyps combine a viral matrix with a gene-spliced leech. They’re not alive in any sense you’d understand.”

“It sounds like Uplifted technology.”

“Yes,” says Haze. “It is.”

A dozen people are watching our intense, half-whispered conversation, so I wait while Haze takes a deep breath to steady himself. “OctoV,” he says. “You know what he is?”

I give our beloved leader his titles, rolling the words off my tongue as newscasts always give them, a long list of grandiose phrases stripped of meaning by overuse. Haze checks to see if I’m serious.

“OctoV is an Uplifted,” he says.

It comes as less of a surprise than it should.

“We’re soldiers in a war fought by machines,” says Haze. “Well, augmented hive mind composites.” Seeing from my face that he’s lost me, he simplifies. “OctoV is the rebel; the Uplifted are original. They began as machines for the Enlightened, but things changed.”

I should have known this from the fleeting visit OctoV paid my mind in Farlight. So cold, so distant, so obviously not the heroic child emperor of his own homespun legend.

My decision makes itself.

We’re here; we need to be somewhere else. OctoV or the Uplifted, it’s not much of a choice, but it’s the only choice we have, because the great and the good of the U/Free are not about to take us in. And since we’re already on OctoV’s side, we might as well stay there.

“The kyp,” I say. “What do I need to do?”

“Stop trying to kill it.”

“That’s my body,” I tell him.

Haze shakes his head. “It’s your mind.” His smile is sour, and in his gaze I can see the man behind the boy; the power he will become if he lives that long. Haze is no more human than I am…

And as I stumble over that thought, light floods through my skull and Haze locks me down so hard and so fast that I stumble, both hands clutching my head. Shil is moving toward me before I can wave her away, but Haze does it for me.

“Leave him,” Haze says.

My mind is a circular wall collapsing under the waves that suddenly hit it: readouts from my own body, levels of tiredness, stamina, and battle damage. Apparently I’m in a lot better shape than I thought, and half my danger levels haven’t even been approached, ever.

And then, as my thoughts stabilize, the wall fades and there’s another in its place, only this time the wall is mine, and the wall Haze originally erected tightens to enclose only him, and then it’s gone. Although Haze still stands in front of me, his hand under my elbow as I struggle to stand.

“Lock it down,” says Haze.

So I do. It’s odd taking orders from someone who takes orders from me, but he’s right and I need to be invisible to anybody searching for wave echoes in whatever dimension it is I now inhabit.

“What the fuck just happened?” Shil demands.

“He became a god,” Haze tells her. The boy’s only half joking.

I shake my head, realizing something. “Angel, maybe…demon, possibly. But we’re not gods; none of us comes close to that level.”

“You became an angel?” says Rachel.

“Not really,” I say. “I just became a better fighting machine.”

“Speaking of which,” says Haze. “I’ve got a present for you.” Turning his back on the room, he undoes his jacket and shirt, then untapes a package wrapped in strange silver cloth from his chest.

“This is yours,” he says, untying it.

“Too right,” says my gun. “Try not to lose me again.”

CHAPTER 49

S
INCE A
crowd is now gathered around me, I tell them the truth. That the six ships with which we travel will never arrive and nothing we can do will save them.

As if on cue, sound waves shake the bulkhead and I understand instantly that this is not coincidence. I just read the signature of a rocket nearing its target half a mile away.

A second explosion follows, and then a third. The fourth explosion comes as a flat inevitability, and it’s not only the militia who are upset by the time the fifth and sixth vessels explode. Most of us had friends or colleagues on those boats.

“Why?” someone demands.

“Because everyone the Uplifted want is already here,” I say.

“That’s true,” says Haze. “The rest was just window dressing.” Anger shows in his eyes, a bitter hatred toward those who created him.

We’re twenty-five people at the most. A hundred thousand made that drop, back in the days before I created the Aux, when my future was a simple case of
Hit the ground, shoot anything that isn’t us, and keep shooting until I’m dead or there’s only us left.

“Listen.” I tell them. “You think you’re going to be left alive if you behave yourself? You’re wrong. If they don’t kill you, I will…We’re going to fight, all of us. And we’re going to win.”

I’m manipulating them, obviously. But I’m also manipulating myself, and trying to find my old anger. Only it’s gone, replaced by a cold clarity that terrifies me.

“Haze,” I say. “Take the perimeter.”

Whatever he’s about to say is swallowed when he sees me glare.

“Just do it,” I tell him.

To the others, I say, “I’m going to unlock the door.”

Shil’s staring at me as if I’m mad, and Neen can’t work out why I’ve replaced him with Haze, and I don’t have time to explain that I haven’t.

Turning from Haze, I face the entire room.

“Shut up and listen.”

We’re in semi-darkness. The locker room is large, steel-floored, and lit from the ceiling by flat sheets of luminex, which release something close to twilight. Maybe their psy-ops experts think this will make us less likely to resist. If so, we’re about to prove them wrong.

“We fight now, or we all die later anyway.” They’re listening; the threat of death usually does that to people.

“Haze, tell them why.”

“Mostly you know something the Uplifted think is useful,” says Haze. “Get lucky and they’ll rip your minds. Unlucky, they’ll rip your bodies first, because it’s a quicker way to extract information.”

“Either way,” I tell them. “You’re fucked.”

“Believe it,” says my gun.

People are shaking their heads and sucking at their teeth, the things crowds do when hearing truths they’d rather ignore. “Anybody here think that’s a lie?” My gaze sweeps the room.

No one does.

“So,” I say. “This is what’s going to happen…I’m going to get us out of here, and this man is going to protect me while I do it.”

Being close to the dead bolts has nothing to do with what’s about to happen, but all the same I walk across to the door and put my hands on either side of the lock plate.

“Ready?” I ask Haze.

A wall of silence enfolds my mind almost before he nods.

I can see the inside of the door, examine how it fits together: The sheet ceramic is bonded to a honeycomb of high-tensile carbon fullerenes. The lock operates electronically, with a manual override set into the wall on the far side of the door.

Schematics lay themselves over everything that falls under my gaze, and I’m giving myself a headache until I blink a map away and realize the overlays can be summoned and dismissed at will.

Seven bolts click, snapping themselves back into the frame around the door.

“Impressive,” says Haze. “You check the corridor outside?”

When I shake my head his face blanks momentarily.

“Clear,” he says.

The steps on this ship are steep, like someone forced stairs and ladders to breed, then welded their bastard offspring to the walls. There’s a sailor at the top of the first set of steps, but he’s facing away from us.

He’s alone,
says Haze.

Hooking my hands around the man’s ankles, I jump backward, landing cleanly fifteen feet below. His own landing is much messier. Somewhere in the drop, his head clips the edge of a step and renders the knife in my hand redundant.

Neen carries the man back to the locker room. In his pockets are a knife, a pistol, a cosh, and a half-finished bar of chocolate. Around his neck is a medal of Legba Uploaded. Finding it upsets Neen, who wears one very similar.

“
Many names,
” Haze says.
“Many faces.”

Neen repeats the mantra, and somehow that makes it all right. Although letting Maria have the chocolate probably helps.

“You want to go fishing again?” asks Haze.

“No.” I shake my head. “That’s enough for now. Find me the armory.”

By now I’m getting used to seeing his face blank. It’s not something I want to start doing myself. That level of disengagement could get you killed in battle. Also, my party trick with the door has left me feeling as if I’ve just run five miles straight up the side of a mountain, carrying a rucksack full of rocks.

“One level down,” says Haze.

“Let’s go.”

I take point, Shil goes second. We’re armed; I have two knives and my gun stuck in my belt. Its combat chip is shut down for the moment, so Haze and I don’t have to waste energy shielding it.

The SIG’s not amused.

But then it doesn’t see why we need additional weapons anyway, given we already possess the smartest gun ever made…

“Modest, too,” says Shil.

Haze and Maria follow behind Neen, with Franc bringing up the rear and Rachel walking just ahead of her.

The rest remain exactly where they are. There are two things interesting about this. One, the Aux still operate as a tightly knit group. And two, the others do what we tell them, outranked by us or not.

We’re Death’s Head. Worse than that, we’re running some juju shit routine obviously stolen straight from the Enlightened.

“Cover me,” I tell Haze.

He locks down the ceiling cameras so they replay the same endless loop of safe nothing as we head down a level. And as I touch my fingers to the armory door, Haze spins a wall around my mind that’s cold and white and hard-edged, like ice or frosted glass. The door is semi-sentient. I’m still considering this when I realize that I can simply kill the door at a local level while leaving fail-safes and complicity algorithms in place.

Complicity what?

Except I’m inside the armory and no longer care. Wall-to-wall pulse rifles, maritime issue; a couple of belt-feds, although they’re too heavy for anyone but me to hoist, and anyway a belt-fed without a tray is an invitation to trip over your own feet and shoot the ceiling.

And then I see something really interesting.

“What?” demands the gun.

“Over there.”

It scans the armory, its humor worsening as it sees what I do.

A permanent-fire pulse gun, aka
the cinder maker.

The cinder maker is slate gray, with a small red dot for a sight and laser optics and aimer slung in an elegant tube under the barrel. The power pack is a fat disk hung just in front of the trigger. The barrel is midlength, the muzzle narrow. The handle can rotate three clips in case permanent pulse is inappropriate. It has to be the most beautiful weapon I’ve ever seen.

“Cheap shit,” says my SIG. “Vulgar design. Probably jam on you first time out. Can’t imagine why anyone would want one.”

“But with a real fuck-off power pack.”

“Worthless.”

“So you don’t want to transfer?” says Haze.

“Can’t be done,” my gun says. “Utterly incompatible.”

“But if it could?”

Haze knits code to make the cinder maker accept the SIG’s character base while I lash up a physical fix. Given my newfound knowledge and some of the shit I had to mend back in the legion, making a Colt SW 37-12 accept the diabolo’s combat chip is practically child’s play. I add a fold-down wire stock almost without thinking, checking that it flips down easily and folds up again without a problem.

We’ve just created the SW SIG-37 diabolo, the galaxy’s first fully intelligent machine pistol, with added stock and cinder gun capability. Although that’s nothing like as impressive as the other thing we’ve done, which is reduce my gun to silence.

“You’re grinning,” Shil says.

We leave the armory with enough weapons slung around our necks to start a small war—which is the plan. Haze does his trick with the cameras and we’re back at the locker room within minutes.

“Here,” says Neen. “Take a weapon.”

Everyone wants a pulse rifle, even those who’ve never been near one. I make them all take knives as well, for hand-to-hand. And then the Aux stick half a dozen knives in our belts and lanyard a couple of pistols around our necks. We don’t need them, but we’re already living up to our own myth.

“I’ll go first…”

Neen’s words are half boast and half plea. He requires telling about Haze, because so far Neen thinks we just got lucky in the corridor. And though he knows Haze is different, he has no idea how different. Also, I don’t have time for this.

“Stand back while I talk to my sergeant.”

People do as they’re told.

“If I go down,” I tell Neen. “You’re fucked.”

My own sergeant glares at me.

“But if that does happen,” I say, “you lead the Aux. Because you’re the best combat grunt in this room. Not that you have much competition. Apart from Franc, and she’s a basket case.”