Death's Head (12 page)

“How neat you all are.”

“You can learn.”

No reply is merited.

“I mean that, too. You can learn. The general may demand it…And that arm,” he says. “Why?”

I don’t understand the question.

After he repeats it and adds something about the prosthetic being fifty years out of date and mostly broken, I realize what he’s saying.
Why don’t I have a better one?

“They cost,” I tell him, voice cold. “This cost.”

So he asks the price and I give it. And something in my eyes stops him from laughing, although he glances instinctively toward the door through which Caliente vanished.

“Okay,” I say. “So she’s expensive.”

And beautiful, experienced, and intelligent. And there probably isn’t a legionnaire in this part of the spiral who wouldn’t give his real arm, never mind a crappy little prosthetic, to have her. But I’m not about to tell Horse that.

“Do you know what she costs?”

It’s twice what my metal arm cost. I’ve had Caliente at least seven times in the last three days, not including freebies, which means I’ve put the cost of fourteen mechanical arms on the general’s bill. I wonder if he’ll mind and decide I don’t care. How much money do these people have? And why do they get to fuck with the rest of us?

Except I’m not twelve and I had this conversation with my lieutenant. Only back then I was talking about the sergeants and didn’t yet realize the lieutenant got to play God with their lives as well.

“We can fix you another arm,” says Sergeant Hito.

“I don’t want one,” I say crossly.

His face hardens. “Don’t play games,” he says. “It’s a bad move. People who play games around General Jaxx die early.”

And there the conversation is meant to rest, except I can’t let it go. “Don’t you have a favorite weapon?” I ask him.

He looks up, eyes still hard, then realization catches him.

“That’s your weapon?”

“It’s one of them.”

“We’ll find you something better,” he says. “Not just new, better…”

And we go down to the sergeants’ mess, where a dozen hostile faces watch me as I cross the room and keep watching as the door shuts behind us and we head along a corridor toward an elevator.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to say
good day.
”

“
They
don’t,” I say, and beside me I hear Horse take a deep breath.

“You’re the stranger,” he tells me. “It’s their room, their club. No one gets access to the sergeants’ mess except sergeants. Even officers have to be invited.”

“So why am I allowed?”

“Because the general wants it.”

“Why?”

Sergeant Hito is about to say
No one questions what the general wants.
One of those hardwired reflexes we all have instead of thought. But he doesn’t. At my side, he hesitates, thinks about it.

“You lived among the ferox.”

I nod.

“No one has done that before. And you claim to be able to talk to them.”

“I can,” I tell him. “Well, I could. Maybe it was only
those
ferox.”

“And maybe you were insane with hunger and exhaustion, and had lost control of your thoughts and only imagined it. That’s what Colonel Nuevo thinks.”

“Youngster and I spoke,” I say firmly. “Sometimes it was hard to understand him. When I was on the whipping post he had to cut me before he made sense.”

“And then there’s that,” says the sergeant.

“The whipping post?”

“That, too. Medical scans show seventeen lashes in a single whipping. No one survives that level of abuse.”

“I did.”

“Apparently. But that also worries the colonel, I can say this because he’s already said it, and has told me he’s told the general.”

I wait for Sergeant Hito to reach his point and wonder if he knows what this negation of personal responsibility says about him. Maybe it says something about the Death’s Head as a whole.

Negation of personal responsibility.
I’m proud of that. It sounds like something the old lieutenant might say; probably did, come to that.

“You cut yourself to stay sane? While you were a captive of the ferox. Have we got that right?”

“I did it to talk to them.”

Stepping out of the elevator, the sergeant indicates that he is listening. Two men in lesser uniforms step aside. The uniforms are complicated. Sergeants look grander than lieutenants do, and the colonel’s uniform is simpler than that. From what I can remember of General Jaxx, his uniform is almost entirely plain. Apart from the Obsidian Cross hanging from his neck and silver death’s heads on the points of his jacket collar, nothing indicates that he outranks them all.

The men who step aside are probably corporals. One of them slides me a glance and then hurriedly looks away.

“You were saying…?”

“Pain focuses my ability to hear the ferox.”

“You insist that they
can
speak?”

“Only in here,” I say, tapping the side of my head.

“They’re telepaths,” he says, adding…“They speak with thought?” In case the word is too strange.

“Yes, that’s exactly right.”

“And you can hear their thoughts?”

I shrug. “I could hear the speaking of one tribe. What if different tribes speak differently?”

“Thought is thought,” he says.

CHAPTER 16

T
HE ROOM
to which he leads me is small and dusty, which is surprising in itself, since most of the ship is spotlessly clean and seems to be kept that way by an unseen army of cleaners who are either invisible or so small that they work at levels below human sight.

There’s uniformity to the mother ship’s design. The walls are black and shiny, obsidian or glass. The floors are also black, made from what looks like marble. Lights are set into the floors to create pathways when the ship is in darkness, which it is for eight hours out of every twenty-four.

The air is clean, the temperature is pleasant, and everyone seems to know exactly what they are doing. If I were the general I’d never set foot on another planet again. When I say this to Horse, because that’s how I still think of Sergeant Hito, he smiles and nods approvingly as if I’ve just passed some test.

“I’ve brought you a present,” he says. His words are addressed to an old woman who sits behind a counter.

“What have we got here?” she demands.

“An ex-legionnaire.”

“I didn’t ask
who,
” she replies, more snippily than necessary. “I asked
what.
”

“He’s human,” says the sergeant, his voice amused. It looks like they’ve known each other for a long time. “You can run tests.”

“We’ll all human, darling,” she says. “Or didn’t our beloved leader tell you?”

“Madie…”

“I know. All beings in the empire are human, even the ones that aren’t. It’s the new rules.”

“It’s been a hundred years.”

“Exactly,” she says. “The next emperor will probably change it. And then there’ll be no end of trouble…”

“
Strip,
” says the sergeant, and it takes me a second to realize he means me.

“God,” she says. “Couldn’t you have showered him first?”

“He’s been in the sergeants’ brothel.”

“You don’t say…Use that,” she orders, pointing to a cubicle door. It’s an oval tube made from glass, with a touch pad set into a shiny black console. There’s nothing to say what any of the buttons do. Choosing one at random, I tap it once; when that doesn’t produce an effect I tap it again.

A few seconds later I’m sitting on the floor clutching my hands to my eyes, blinded by a light brighter than any I’ve ever seen in the deserts south of Karbonne, and the sergeant is standing over me, swearing.

“What happened?”

“I’m fucking blind,” I tell him, trying to struggle upright and tripping over my own feet. Two sets of hands help me.

“Don’t tell me,” says the woman. “You looked at the light?”

“I didn’t know there was going to be one. No one told me.”

She sounds more serious when she speaks again.

“How long did you look?”

“A second.”

“You sure?”

“If that,” I say. I’ve been in enough deserts and enough battles to know that light blinds. Already I can see her silhouette peering hard into my face. My reflexes probably kicked in before any real damage could be done.

“I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not,” says the sergeant. “We need to get you down to the medical bay immediately.”

“I’m fine,” I repeat. “Look, I can already see both of you.”

Fingers grab my face and wrench it around. It’s the woman, and she has a grip like steel. Her face gets closer to me and I can smell sour breath as she stares deep into my eyes, peering so hard it feels like she’s trying to see through to the back.

“Fuck,” she says. “He’s a self-healer.”

They disappear into a huddle and return looking determined. “We’d like to do some tests,” says the woman.

“To tell you what you already know?”

Sergeant Hito grins.

I can see it already. She wants to be able to tell General Jaxx what she’s discovered without having to reveal how she discovered it: by potentially blinding his new pet.

“Okay,” I say, figuring I probably owe the sergeant. And the shower has killed the stink of living with the ferox, something even a spell in Paradise was unable to do.

As the woman sits me in front of a computer, Sergeant Hito begins to walk the length of a row of prosthetic arms, shaking his head every few paces. At the end of the row, he turns around and starts again.

“Nothing big enough.”

“Grow him one,” the woman says. “With this level of healing you’ll have no trouble at all.”

“He wants a metal one.” The sergeant looks at me. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Tell him he can’t.”

“The problem,” says the sergeant, “is that he probably can.”

“Ah,” she says. “Close personal interest, eh?”

For a second the sergeant looks as if he wishes this conversation hadn’t started, but I’m not really listening, because I’m sitting in front of a computer that seems to be doing nothing but sticking needles in me and slicing blades lightly across my skin. And whatever the computer’s finding out, it’s making a lot of noise and flashing dozens of lights and whirring.

Unless it’s just designed to behave like that.

“You’re right,” she says finally. “He’s human.”

“Plus?”

“One point eight percent something else.”

The very blandness in her voice makes the sergeant look up.

“What?”

She shrugs, releasing my good arm from a row of unnecessary straps. A wipe of something that smells like alcohol and already my skin is beginning to heal. “It must be a useful adaptation,” she says at last.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Something in my tone makes them both turn.

“There’s no cutoff,” I tell her. “The body just keeps going. No pain is too much. Few wounds too extreme. The day I lost my arm to a ferox I walked thirty miles back to the fort.”

“A ferox did that?”

“A child,” I said. “Probably a baby.”

“You were doing what?”

“Hacking the head off its father.”

The woman glances at Sergeant Hito. It says,
What are you doing bringing this lunatic in here?
So I start to explain that the adult was already dead. Well, almost dead, and old age not weapons had taken him down. But it’s too late. I can see in her eyes what I saw in the eyes of new recruits until I stopped bothering to speak to them. Something between fear and awe.

“Okay,” she says. “I can see why the general might want him. Why do you like the arm you’ve got?”

“It’s strong.”

The woman sighs, and I get so bored with thinking of her as
the woman
that I ask her name and ask it politely.

“Madeleine,” she says.

“That’s a nice name,” I say, at which the sergeant raises his eyebrows, but I mean it. I’m not making conversation with a whore. It’s a nice name.

“Very old,” she says. “From the Earth days.”

I look at her. “You know,” I say, “you’re the second person to mention Earth recently.”

“Who was the other?”

“A prisoner on Paradise.”

“I don’t want to know,” she says to Sergeant Hito. “Do I?”

The sergeant shakes his head.

“Did Earth exist?”

“Why do you think it didn’t?”

I shrug, trying to remember. “Something my sister said,” I say at last. “About Earth being invented to explain why things in the galaxy were once simpler…She was always saying stuff like that and I didn’t really pay much attention, but I always assumed it was true.”

“That’s heresy,” Madeleine says quietly. “You might want to forget your theories about Earth while you’re around the general.”

I nod, smile to show that I’ve understood and am already taking her advice. She doesn’t smile back.

“Bad times,” she says. “A lot of people died.”

“I know,” I tell her. “Guess I was meant to be one of them.”

The sergeant smiles and nudges Madeleine’s attention back to the dusty row of prosthetic arms. But the life has gone out of her, so I guess she has some history of her own.