Death's Head (8 page)

In my turn I wonder how long it will take each of them to turn into somebody else. The convicts down there might have begun as exiles, polite and well spoken. But circumstances change everybody, circumstances and hunger and poverty and necessity…

You can put a dozen fancy words to that most basic of needs.

“Welcome to Paradise,” announces the rat-faced man when our ship finally reaches the surface and guards begin to walk up the line, undoing shackles as they go. “That includes you.” He smiles sourly in my direction.

I don’t answer or look away or do anything that might draw attention to myself. I just watch, as one of the guards punches the man in the mouth, half drags him from his seat, and slams him back again so hard that when his skull hits the wall behind him, everyone in the hold hears the sound of bone on metal.

Opening her mouth to scream, the woman next to me halts when I put my hand across her mouth and hold it there, receiving a nod of grudging respect from one of the guards.

Speak only when you are spoken to.
None of this lot has the faintest clue.

“Keep quiet,” I say.

Very slowly, she lifts my hand from her mouth, and though she wipes her lips with the back of her own hand and looks like she’s about to be sick, she does what I suggest and stays silent.

“And you,” I tell her friend.

They stay close to me after that. My monstrousness, my knowledge of how this world works has become an asset.
Typical liberals,
I tell myself. Even Rat Face trails along behind us, blood trickling from his broken mouth. Whatever he’s carrying wrapped in a cloth is kept close to his chest.

“If you can eat that,” I say, “eat it. And if not, and it’s small enough, then swallow it while you still have time.”

Narrow eyes watch me.

“Stuffing it up your arse isn’t enough,” I tell him. “They’re going to search us. And if we get lucky it’ll be limited to a cavity search.”

“And if you get unlucky?” asks the woman, her voice acid.

“A fuck-off body scan. Maybe random surgery, to make the point. Anything you’ve got hidden under chest muscles or sewn into your guts will get found.”

It’s obvious from her expression that she didn’t know you could hide objects beneath layers of muscle or inside the upper gut. They’re amateurs. My personal opinion is that no one should attempt to start a revolution unless they’ve got some chance of success. This lot, forget it.

“Line up.”

We do, and I notice most of the others doing whatever the woman does. And since she follows my example, I find myself leading a row of puppets whose ham-fisted movements reflect my own.

Having made us strip, the guards stand us by our clothes while we wait to be cavity-searched. It’s done in the open, with sexes mixed to ensure the maximum humiliation and make sure the prisoners realize their place.

There are sixteen of us in our group. Twelve men and four women. The men are younger than the women, mostly my age or a little less. One of the women is our age, the rest a good fifteen years older. This has to say something about revolutionaries.

“It says women die more willingly,” a voice beside me announces.

I turn to find the woman from the ship.

“Given how they’re treated after capture,” she says, “it’s a sensible choice…” She smiles at my shock. “I read people’s faces. It’s one of the things I do.”

“And you?” I ask, wondering how to phrase my question.

“Was I raped? Did OctoV let a group of his little fuckwit teenagers practice their torture routines on me?” She shakes her head. “I was bailed almost before I was arrested. My family refused to let me go anywhere without guards. They hired the best lawyers money could buy…”

“And the judges still found you guilty.”

“Oh no.” She smiles, sourly. “I was found innocent. But I got jailed just the same.”

She’s the first to be cavity-searched, in front of one friend and fourteen strangers. And she takes it because she has no option. Something is already hardening behind her eyes. I’m second, her friend third. It looks like a hierarchy is being established.

A thin man is standing naked in the middle of jeering guards. At an order from their corporal he squats until his buttocks almost touch the cold tiles, and then thrusts his arse into the air and kisses the ground as ordered. Fingers force their way inside him and he screams. When they let him climb to his feet he’s crying.

“It’s barbaric,” says the woman.

“Intentionally.”

She stares at me, crossly. As if to say,
I realize that.

“I’m Sven.”

“The mercenary.”

“The ex-legion-sergeant…”

For a moment she’s about to argue. And then she shrugs. “You’re right,” she tells me. “This isn’t the place for semantics.”

The question must show in my eyes.

“What words really mean.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Debro Wildeside.”

“Sven,” I repeat.

“What’s your second name?”

I stare at her. It’s a good question. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have one.

“Do you know the story of Sven Tveskoeg?”

We weren’t keen on stories in my family. So I shake my head, wondering what this has to do with me. This woman is odd. Mind you, looking around the holding pen, where a good half of us are scrabbling back into our clothes and the rest stand naked awaiting their turn, I realize that we’re all a little odd.

Ungainly, occasionally ugly. We’re almost normal in how odd we are.

“He was a king,” Debro says when she sees she’s got my attention back. “In the old days.”

“Which planet?”

Most of the known galaxy is ruled by the United Free. Our dear leader holds much of the rest, or so we’re told. The Enlightened and the Uplifted reckon they hold more, but repeating that is treason. The only worlds that still have kings are the worthless ones. Princes of rubble and rock, my sister used to call them. She had firm opinions on those people, which didn’t stop one of them hiring a legion for six months and reducing three planets in our system to cinder.

“Which planet?” says Debro. “The original…”

“Farlight?”

She sighs. “Earth,” she says, fastening her top.

I don’t mean to laugh. “Earth’s a myth,” I tell her. “Fairy tales.” I know nothing, and even I know that.

She shakes her head. “It was real. A lot more real than most of the crap that passes for history these days…”

“Debro.”
The word is a warning.

“You know it’s true.”

“I’m Anton,” says her friend. He’s been dressing with his back to her. Unless she was the one who had her back to him.

We shake.

“My ex-husband,” she says, almost fondly.

In his rags he looks like a stick insect wrapped in cheap plastic. Since he doesn’t seem the type to dress like that, someone has obviously stolen his real clothes farther up the line.

“You were condemned as well?”

The glance he gives Debro is strange. It’s as if he is asking her permission for something. “We have a daughter,” he says. “Under the age of majority. You know the law.”

Obviously enough, I don’t.

“She’s legally still bound to her mother. Since her mother is here Aptitude should also be here…” He hesitates. “My family made overtures to OctoV. The emperor agreed to let me take her place. For old times’ sake.”

Anton talks of OctoV as if he’s just another man.

“You’ve met him?”

“My father and his grandfather were friends.”

It explains why Debro is still alive. Although, I realize, it could equally well explain why she was dead had that been the case. “Who is looking after your girl?”

Again that glance.

“My cousin,” says Debro finally. “Thomassi was the only one who offered.”

A story is obviously hidden in the looks they give each other and under the silence Debro lets hang at the end of her words.

“You’ve quarreled with the others?”

“Hardly,” Anton says. “My mother would have offered. As would my brother. They were too afraid to upset the senator…”

Who has to be the cousin, I guess. Anything else Anton might say is lost as the last of the new prisoners climbs up from her squat, head held high despite the tears in her eyes. She’s the youngest of the women, and the guards have saved her until last. As she passes the corporal, she mutters something.

It’s a bad mistake.

A baton to her gut, an upsweep between her legs, and she’s on the floor again, rolling from side to side in her own piss.

“You,” the corporal says. “Pick up her clothes.”

Anton does as he’s ordered.

“And you,” I’m told. “Take her with you.”

I come to attention. “Yes, sir.”

His response is a sour smile. “Strip,” he orders.

It seems best to do it without question.

“Turn around.”

Waiting for the blow, I wait some more, but the man is reexamining the scars on my back.

“A sjambok?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m surprised you lived.”

“Yes, sir. Me, too.”

“Dress,” he tells me. Walking over to the girl, he hooks his boot under her rib cage and rolls her over, scowling at the mess. “And take your garbage with you.”

CHAPTER 11

T
HE ICE
is five miles thick, it is ten…it is so thick, no one will ever be able to drill that deep. In fact, ice is all there is, and anyone who imagines real rock somewhere beneath all this frozen water understands nothing about space. Because Paradise is a vast comet trapped by the gravity well of an inconveniently placed star.

There are as many different opinions as there are prisoners in our group. The guards undoubtedly have their own theories, but they’re hardly about to share them with us.

Apart from the landing field, which undomes to allow entry to visiting craft, the whole of the complex is underground. This makes it easier to conserve what little warmth there is. Exiles are held on the lowest level, guards on the level above, and the governor above that. The theory is the heat generated by the exiles will rise to heat the guards, who will heat the governor and his family.

At some point everything probably worked. But the fact that the prison is now run by its inmates means new tunnels are dug and resources diverted, so now the lowest level is like a giant starfish expanding forever.

Guards and governor still have their quarters above the starfish’s body. Unfortunately its legs are now so far under the sheet ice, the center cannot hold; private kingdoms are created, passing from generation to generation. At the same time, little principalities are built, often hacked directly out of the ice. These tend not to appear on any of the existing maps.

Debro’s done her research. I wonder if knowing what she does makes things worse or better.

“Okay, boys…We’ll take it from here.” The words are arrogant, an open challenge to the guards, who scowl but bite their tongues.

The man facing them laughs.

Tall and missing one eye, he wears his beard braided and twisted about with copper wire. “I’m Ladro,” he announces. “I run this section. You’ll need to remember that…What happened to her?”

He’s looking at me.

“Spoke out of turn.”

“And him?”

“The same,” says the rat-faced man, who wears dried blood like a beard of his own.

“You’ll learn.”

“I have,” he says.

Ladro smiles. It’s not a kind smile, and I wonder if the new prisoner realizes he’s just spoken out of turn again. But the rat-faced man’s correct: He does learn. Because whatever he’s been clutching so tightly to his chest is gone and both of his hands are now empty and hanging loosely at his sides.

“Your ring,” I say to Debro. “Swallow it.”

She looks shocked.

“Now,” I hiss. “We’re about to be taxed. You’ll lose it if you don’t.”

Reluctantly she pulls the signet from her little finger.

“Do it.”

While she’s still hesitating, I grab the ring from her hand and swallow it as discreetly as I can. When I glance across, Anton is grinning.

“Turn out your pockets,” orders the man. “Put your open hands in front of you. I won’t bother strip-searching, because the guards will have done that already.”

We do what we’re told.

“Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re going to give me anything you’ve got left. If you refuse, I’ll break the arms of the people standing on either side of you.”

“You can’t—” one man tries to say; he doesn’t get to finish his sentence.

“Pick him up.”

Someone does.

“All right,” says Ladro. “Turn out your pockets and offer up your hands.”

Walking down the line, he stops occasionally to thrust his hands into a woman’s jacket or check that the out-turned pockets of a man really are turned out far enough.

Roughly every third person has something. Wedding rings are plentiful, and one man has a neat little watch that looks like it does an awful lot more than simply tell the time. Ladro stops when he gets to me and gapes at what rests in the palm of my broad hand.

I think I’ve overdone it, but his amazement stops him from thinking too hard about why I haven’t tried to keep it hidden for longer.