Death's Head (5 page)

Youngster dies as he lived, in silence; but I hear his death inside my head, even without a knife to summon his thoughts, and his screams are no less terrifying for being silent.

I’m huddled in my pool at the end of a deep tunnel, crouching in the water when a Death’s Head appears. Raising his pulse rifle, the man sights along its barrel and begins to tighten his finger on the trigger.

It’s instinct alone that saves me.

Throwing myself to one side, I scream at the top of my lungs before he has time to take a second shot.
“Human.”

The man hesitates, and that hesitation saves my life. Up goes his visor, his lips already moving as he relates the news to his commander or someone else on the surface. “Human,” I hear him say.

A crackle of static.

“Name?” he demands.

It takes me a second or so to remember.

Whoever is on the other end obviously gets impatient, because the soldier in front of me opens his mouth just as I remember.

“Sven,” I tell him. “Ex-sergeant, Legion Etranger.”

The law of the legion requires me to tell him I was once a sergeant. It’s a way of identifying troublemakers early.

“Where did you serve?”

The name of Fort Libidad comes growling off my tongue. I’m beginning to regret quite how loudly when he raises his rifle for a second time; but it’s unconscious and nothing suggests he feels anything other than shock.

He relates my name and last posting to his unseen superior, who promptly comes back with another question. “How did you get here?”

How indeed?

I walked for days beside a ferox who decided to keep me for a pet…
Somehow, it seems the wrong answer, so I decide on another.

“Captured.”

“And they let you live?” The question obviously comes from him, because there’s not time enough for it to come from the surface.

I nod.

“Just you,” asks the man. “You were the only one captured?”

“The only one from the fort,” I say. “But there was a girl here when I first arrived.”

“She died?”

“The ferox ate her,” I tell him.

I ate her.

And I find myself on my knees, vomiting again.

“Can you walk?” he demands.

I look at him. Something keeps me from saying,
Of course I can walk.

Instead I limit my reaction to a nod. And when he turns, I crawl naked from my pool of water and follow him toward a wire ladder that seems to hang in space. It disappears into speckled darkness above, and I realize it’s still night out there and I can see stars inside the circle of the chimney’s distant top.

A tiny lift motor runs up the edge of the ladder, and he makes a loop from his own belt, hooks it under my shoulders, and fixes the buckle to a hook. I’m being drawn upward before I realize he’s activated the machine.

“What the fuck’s that?” he demands as we crawl past sections of ceramic jammed across tunnel entrances halfway up. He has his helmet light playing across the sides of the chimney. I guess he didn’t see the makeshift barricades on his way down.

“Armored ceramic,” I tell him.

The light when he turns blinds my eyes.

Muttering something, the man tilts his head. And then repeats whatever he originally said.

“Ceramic?” he checks, looking at me.

“Yes,” I say. “Stolen from the fort.”

The man mutters into his throat mike. “Will do,” he says finally. “We’re on our way out now.”

HANDS HELP ME
over the rim and I stare at the starlit sky. A sight I haven’t seen since the hunting trip, when Youngster tricked me away from the caves so the others could kill Anna—from a ferox that is almost compassion.

“Can you stand?”

What is it about officers and idiot questions?

Of course I can stand,
I start to say, then discover I can’t and swallow the rest of my sentence anyway. The boots in front of me belong to a Death’s Head colonel. Small, intense looking, with wire-framed spectacles, he wears one of the empire’s most easily identifiable uniforms.

You know the one. It’s black, with silver piping to the shoulders, narrow silver epaulets, and silver bars on the collar. A skull stares from each button. A tiny dagger hangs on his left hip from a silver chain, as much an affectation as the spectacles, which have smoked-glass lenses.

Other cavalry regiments rely on gold braid, scarlet cloaks, crimson linings, and even cavalry knots in nauseating shades of green. They all look like doormen in overpriced knocking shops.

Not the Death’s Head. No one who has ever seen that uniform could mistake it for anything else. And in the unlikely event you might mistake it, the men wrapped in its understated arrogance are usually happy enough to correct your error.

A sergeant hauls me from the ground and holds me upright in front of the officer. At a nod from the colonel, the sergeant drops me again.

“Ceramic?” says the colonel “Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Army-issue armored ceramic…?”

I nod again, having nodded the first time as well as barked out my reply. “Yes, sir.”

Is this man an idiot,
his gaze says.
If not, then what am I dealing with here?
He does not look the type to take battle fatigue kindly.

“And where do ferox get ceramic?” he asks, his voice quiet.

“From Fort Libidad,” I tell him.

“I see,” he says. “And they carried it here? All the way across the desert?”

I’m bored with nodding. “Have you seen Fort Libidad?” I ask. Around me, half a dozen officers tense.

“What if I have?”

“It occurs to me,” I say slowly, wondering how to finish a sentence I shouldn’t have begun in the first place, “that perhaps you might have noticed the armory?”

“Might I?” says the colonel, turning to a major. The major looks nervous, as well he might. Other officers are discreetly backing away, obviously worried about being included in the question.

“You noticed the bodies, sir.”

“Everyone noticed the bodies,” says the colonel. “It would be hard not to, given how many there were. Tell me…what did I notice about the armory?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the major admits finally. “I’m not sure.”

“There isn’t one,” I say.

Both officers turn to me, but only the colonel is smiling, and it’s the smile of a cat that’s seen a particularly interesting piece of prey.

“Isn’t one?” His voice is quiet and sounds eminently reasonable, always a bad sign in a senior officer.

“They cut it up,” I tell him, already bored with the conversation. Part of me knows I’m living dangerously, but the shock of getting away from the ferox has gone to my head, and my relief at being back among my own kind is giving me unrealistic expectations of how I can expect my own kind to behave.

“And then,” I say, “they carried it across the desert. Not one bit, but the whole fucking thing. The reason you didn’t see an armory is that there’s no armory left to see. It’s been patched into their tunnels and disguised with mud, rubble, and assorted shit…”

I’m rambling, but no one seems to mind.

“How do you know this?” the colonel demands.

“I was there.”

The two officers glance at each other.

“You went with them back to the fort?”

It’s a bad question. Yes, I’m a traitor. No, I’m a liar…“They took me,” I say. “It wasn’t like they told me why.”

A hard stare, then the two officers glance again at each other. I’ve gone from being a traitor or a liar to being insane. Of the three options, it’s probably the safest. So why do I have to blow it?

Some habits are difficult to break, I guess.

“I learned how to communicate with them.”

That really gets their attention.

“It’s true…” Pushing aside a medic, in my anxiety to sit up and make what I say sound true I scramble as far as my knees. A tube is already in my wrist and the medic seems to be trying to force another up my nose, for no reason that seems obvious.

“Leave us,” demands the colonel, waving the medic away.

From the look the colonel gives the major, he’s obviously wondering whether to send him away as well. In the end the senior officer shrugs and lets the major stay.

“You know as well as I do, ferox don’t speak.”

The major has obviously thought of something else. He’s practically hopping from foot to foot. “This man made their barricades,” he tells the colonel. “Ferox don’t have that level of skill.”

Helping the enemy is a capital crime. Around here, practically everything is.

“They cut it with their claws,” I tell him. “A hundred miles from their camp, they shaped ballistic-strength ceramic from memory, with every single sheet proving a perfect fit.”

Whatever the major is about to say gets chopped short by a single glance from the colonel. “You’re saying they’re intelligent?”

I think about this. “Maybe not in a sense we understand,” I say. “But they’re organized and they plan ahead.”

“And you talked to them?”

“Yes, often.”

The colonel shakes my hand, which is so unlike a senior officer that I’m immediately suspicious. He wishes me well and says he’ll probably see me again. A few hours later the major comes back to tell me I’ve been tried in my absence, found guilty of desertion, and condemned to death. Since I’m to die at dawn, the major suggests I spend what remains of tonight making peace with whichever God the scum from my planet embrace.

CHAPTER 7

W
ITH MORNING
come six soldiers in the combat dress of the Death’s Head elite. They tote pulse rifles across their chests and wear dark glasses beneath their raised visors. An affectation, since we are still barely into half-light.

“You,” they say. “Come with us.” There must be a boot camp somewhere that teaches these people how to speak.

Two of the Death’s Head drag me from my cell, which is actually the luggage hold of an air copter. It’s an overhot, sticky, and deeply unpleasant place to spend the last few hours of my life.

The major waits at his chosen spot, stamping back and forward in irritation, as if my death is just another inconvenience keeping him from breakfast. “Stand him over there,” he orders.

Death’s Head troopers are far too professional to roll their eyes at the stupidity of a senior officer, but if they did, now would be the time to do it. A natural wall is formed by an outcrop of sandstone, so it’s fairly obvious where I’m meant to stand.

When a trooper tries to blindfold me, I begin to struggle. God knows why I ever took that stupid vow, but promising to face death with my eyes open seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

“Leave it,” says the major, sounding bored. “We’ve wasted long enough.”

I stand where I’m told to stand.

As an unexpected mark of respect, the sergeant flicks off my cuffs to let me face death freestanding and unbound.

“Don’t try to run,” he tells me.

“The legion never run,” I reply. “We stand and we die.”

The look he gives me is almost sympathetic. And suddenly it seems more important than ever to die well.

So when they raise their rifles and sight along the barrels, I stare back. My head is high and my body locked so solid that my arms and legs refuse to shake.

“Load,” says the major.

The sergeant nods, his response instinctive, and I watch his finger begin to tighten on the trigger. He will shoot first and the rest will fire in the split second that follows his shot. This is how the Death’s Head work, the legion also…

Unless free fire is declared, firing before your NCO is a capital offense, much like lying under oath, treason, and hitting a senior officer. And if not for an eccentric interpretation of those rules by my old lieutenant, I’d be dead long before this anyway.

As it is, I was simply broken from sergeant to private for
wanting to hit a senior officer.
Actually, I had hit him, but the lieutenant decided it was the
wanting
he found offensive.

As the sergeant’s finger reaches trigger pressure he locks his eyes on mine, which takes guts, because you need courage to look someone in the eyes as you take his life. That’s why killing is a young man’s job and it’s old men who send them out there.

I nod, to signify I’m ready.

And he smiles.

It’s a clean shot, a hit to the chest. I barely have time to register this fact before five other pulse rifles fire in unison and darkness takes me.