Death's Head (7 page)

“If you’re sure?”

I nod.

“The girls are upstairs,” he tells me, nodding toward a spiral staircase that vanishes through a hole in the ceiling. “I’ll wait for you here.”

“Don’t you want…?”

He smiles. “This is new for you. I’ve been here for thirteen months.” And then he catches himself, shrugs, and obviously remembers my words about the difference between the Death’s Head and the legion. In that moment I almost like the man. Although I know he will kill me at a single word from one of his superiors.

“Enjoy yourself,” he says.

CHAPTER 9

A
DOZEN GIRLS
line up according to height. They wear very little apart from smiles and enough body hair to prove that no one worries too much about being like ferox up here. In age they range from late teens to early thirties, and in looks from the acceptably attractive to so beautiful it makes me want to cry.

I ignore the most beautiful. We’ll have nothing to say to each other and she looks delicate, the kind of girl to be scared by the scars she’ll find on my back. I ignore the oldest and youngest as a matter of principle. One will be bitter, the other sullen, and I can do without the fuss.

In the end I choose the one in the middle, quite literally.

In the middle of the line, middling in looks and size and age. Her name is Caliente; at least that’s the one she gives me.

“I’m Sven,” I tell her. “Do we need to find a room?”

She looks embarrassed that I can ask so stupid a question in front of the other girls. “We have rooms,” she says. “Perhaps you’d like to make a choice?”

As she leads the way, I’m happy to follow, not least because Caliente’s hips are wide and her buttocks curved, and I can see enough light between her thighs as she climbs the steps to let me know what I’m getting.

Who knew beds came in so many shapes and sizes?

The room we choose is smaller than the others, less ornate. It is the final one on offer and she seems both surprised and reassured by my choice.

“You can read a man by the room he chooses?”

She shrugs away my question, and when I return to it decides to give me an honest answer. “Most of the time.”

“And this room says what?”

“That you ask too many questions.”

I smile and let the matter drop. Every profession has its secrets. Why should hers be any different? I want to ask how Caliente comes to be in this job, whether it’s from choice, how long she’s been aboard the ship. But my ignorance about not needing to buy a room has made me cautious.

“What do you want?”

“What can I have?”

Caliente smiles sadly. “Anything,” she says, as if that should have been obvious. I guess that answers my question about choice.

“I want a bath,” I tell her. “And time to talk and sleep and do the other stuff in between.”

And so it happens.

She doesn’t bite or howl and we don’t fight each other for scraps of food when it’s all over, and for that I’m grateful. Instead Caliente sits astride me, with her breasts overflowing my fingers and her nipples hard beneath my hands, and she talks about nothing very much, until the slow movement of her hips takes away my need for conversation.

“Take what you want,” she says later.

It’s dark in the room. A single clap of my hands will summon light and a click of my fingers will dim it again. Caliente has a trick that involves flicking her fingers and tapping her index finger against her thumb that somehow microadjusts the lighting so that each change is almost imperceptible.

She has many tricks, although only one to do with adjusting the lights. So many tricks, in fact, that I’m rapidly beginning to discover how much I don’t know about sex and what makes women happy.

“I’m serious.”

A clap of my hands summons lights and she nurses them down to a gentler level, smiling to show she knows I didn’t intend to make them that bright.

“What?” I say, seeing something in her eyes.

Her face goes blank, and remains blank as I sit up on the bed and reach down to stroke her face with my good hand. Despite herself, she looks at me and I recognize pity.

“When’s your mission?” she asks.

What mission?

I fall back on the traditional excuse, and she’s apologizing and I’m trying to wave away her apology before I’ve even finished telling Caliente that it’s confidential and I’m not allowed to talk about it.

We stroke the lights back to near-darkness and I go down on her. Spreading her thighs to bury my face between her legs and force my tongue deep into her. Caliente tastes of salt and soap and something else, which I realize is me.

She breathes deeply and her body begins to tense, her thighs tight around my skull. And then her hand reaches down and grips my head as she forces my mouth hard against her. She has her fingers wrapped into my hair and her sex grinding under my tongue. I can taste blood from my lips where they’re bruising against bone.

“Don’t stop.”

Her demand is urgent.

So I do what I’m told, swallowing blood and salt and myself, and remain that way until her fingers twist in my hair, her hips rise one final time, and she pushes herself against me, whimpering.

It’s a first, both going down and having a woman come for real, but I’m careful not to tell Caliente that. And I was told by my old lieutenant—although I don’t know if it’s true—that in the minutes following release the muscles around a woman’s anus relax. So if a man’s tastes run that way…He told me many things. Not all of them suitable for the twelve-year-old boy I was.

Caliente says nothing when I roll her over and merely smiles in the near-darkness when I tuck a pillow under her hips to raise them slightly. It’s as if she always knew this is how we’d end up. Sweat slicks her spine and beads between her shoulder blades.

When I lick it, she shivers.

“I’m sorry about my arm,” I say.

“It’s okay.”

“I can take it off,” I tell her. “But that would probably look worse.”

“Really,” she says. “It’s fine.”

So I spit on my hand, having supported myself on my arm, and carry my fingers to her buttocks, sliding one finger inside.

“In the drawer,” she says. “The pink sachet.”

It’s lubricant of some sort, so I use that instead, slopping it around her and on me until she tells me it’s enough. And then I ease myself inside her and stay like that, for a count of a thousand, until Caliente asks if I’m okay.

“Fine,” I say.

Sometimes need is more complicated than it should be.

The girl lets me stay until morning, shares her breakfast when she realizes no plans have been made for me, and helps me shower, watching as I struggle back into my too-small uniform with its cutaway badges. If she has any more questions of her own, she keeps them to herself.

CHAPTER 10

P
ARADISE IS FOUND
at the end of the southern spiral. Don’t ask me how astronomers decided which arm of the spiral is north and which south. It was done years before I was born or it occurred to people how many habitable systems there are in a single galaxy. Several hundred years ago, in fact: long before our resident lunatics began arguing about who owns what.

Of course, back then the idea of simply shifting an uninhabitable planet into an orbit that made it habitable was still new and no one really had their heads around the physics, which are quite simple.

Writing to his cousin, a prince called Archimedes once boasted he could move whole worlds given the right tools. He was correct, just a few thousand years too early. Like most of my barroom facts, I have my old lieutenant to thank for that particular gem.

Below me a planet turns slowly, a ghostly white sphere with a sickly-looking sun in the far distance. I’m watching it through the window of a troop carrier that has been converted to a convict ship. This mostly seems to involve taking out all the walls and removing anything that might create an air of comfort.

We’re sitting in a long metal hold on metal benches. And the filters on the windows look like they gave up screening light for radioactive particles years ago.

“Paradise?”

The woman next to me nods.

I seem cursed by officers who pride themselves on having a sense of humor. As the convict ship gets closer, I can see a great expanse of cloud stretching from both poles and meeting in the middle. We are too high still for the sight of towns or cities.

Turning to the woman, I ask the obvious question. “Storms?”

She shakes her head. “Sheet ice,” she says. “Miles of it.”

“
Shithead,
” I say.

A dozen exiles turn to glare at me.

“Not you,” I tell the woman. “The general.”

“Which general?” asks a man.

And the woman shakes her head in warning.

“Jaxx,” I say. “General Indigo Fucking Jaxx.”

A hush falls along the row, and I realize that others have been listening in. “Know him personally, do you?” asks a man several seats along. He has one of those ratlike smiles you find on the faces of pimps just before they try to hand you the wrong change.

I flick him a scowl, and he’s the one who looks away. When I check again, his face is red and he’s chewing his bottom lip. I’ve made an enemy and we haven’t even landed.

“What’s the wildlife here?” I ask.

The rat-faced man laughs, nastily. “Wildlife?” he says. “This is Paradise, final destination for everybody on this ship.” He laughs again, then stares down at his feet, and I realize he’s doing his best not to cry.

“Well,” he adds, moments later. “Final destination for anyone traveling in the cheap seats.”

“It’s an ice planet,” the woman tells me. “Everything has to be freighted across. In the early days that included oxygen. Now they crack it from the ice. Use the spare hydrogen for fuel…And there are rumors that the dead end up as source material for the protein slabs.”

A man swears.

And she shrugs. “Just telling you what I’ve heard.”

The woman is old enough to be my sister. A good fifteen years older than me, with a tired face and bitter eyes and a flatness to her voice that speaks of someone on the edge of despair. She could even be my sister, with her belief in facts to keep life at bay, but her upscale accent betrays her. She shares it with the pretty-boy lieutenant who died in that attack on the fort.

“You’re not a common criminal,” I say.

She looks at me, almost amused despite her surroundings.

“Are you?” she asks.

Several of the others smile, and for a moment the atmosphere lightens.

“We’re exiles,” she adds. “Paradise is an exile planet. No one here is a common criminal.”

A thought occurs to her.
How could I not know this?

“And you?” she asks. Several people seem to be waiting on my answer.

“Oh, I’m common enough,” I tell them. “And a criminal.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“Wrong place, wrong time…”

“Which means what?” demands a man across the aisle. He’s been friendly enough until now.

“I survived a massacre,” I say, my words matter-of-fact. “A tribe of ferox attacked us and slaughtered everybody but me. I don’t really know why…”

“Except you do.”

It’s uncanny. The woman even nags like my sister.

“I was lashed to a whipping post,” I tell her. “Naked, with most of my back laid open. I guess the ferox figured the legion were my enemies, too.”

“You are in the legion?”

I nod. “Yes,” I say. “Fifteen years.”

She turns away. “The legion killed her parents,” says the blond man who sits beside her.

“Mine, too,” I tell him.

The woman turns back. So I answer her question before she has time to ask it. “I’m twelve, homeless, without a family. A lieutenant offers me food, clothes, and somewhere to sleep. All I have to do in return is—”

“Kill people,” says the woman.

We make the rest of our descent in silence.

As I glance around, I can tell that the others are wondering what kind of monster they have in their midst. This creature, with his metal arm and ragged clothes, a scar on his face, and a wrist so thick that the shackle bites into flesh.