Death's Head (13 page)

“We’ll make him one,” she says finally.

“What?”

“Just because no one’s done it for decades…” She shrugs, her mind made up. “We’ve got the fabricators. Got more templates than anyone understands. Give me his false arm.”

When my arm comes free, she actually looks away.

“You should have seen it before.”

“Who did the surgery?”

“My old lieutenant.”

“God,” says Sergeant Hito. “You’d think he’d have had some battlefield modifiers.”

I consider explaining that the battlefield medical supplies were empty when we got them, that few in the legion can read enough to understand written instructions anyway, and most good officers can do things with a heated knife that are beyond mere metal boxes. But I decide not to bother.

“He was drunk,” I say. “But he still saved my life.”

“You saved that yourself,” says Madeleine. “When you picked up your arm and carried it thirty miles back to the fort.”

I nod, because now doesn’t seem a good time to mention I left the arm, knowing it was useless. Having tied off my wound, I decided to take the ferox head instead.

“We’ll fix that first,” she says.

And so she does, with a cold precision that impresses the hell out of me. Wherever she learned her stuff, she knows precisely what she’s doing.

“What finish would you like?”

“For my new arm?”

“The stump.”

In the end, because it takes me so long to understand her question, she gives me something that looks like golden tortoiseshell. It begins as flesh and slowly changes into something close to buffalo horn. With a flourish she produces a tiny laser dagger from her desk drawer and slashes a quick series of marks across its surface.

“You’ve signed it,” says Horse, sounding surprised.

She nods. “First thing I’ve done in years I like…You know what the old man wants him for?”

The sergeant scowls, and she laughs.

“I don’t mean the exact mission. Well, maybe the type.”

He hesitates. My feeling is if I weren’t in that room he’d be more open. “Infiltrate and extract,” he says. “Only you can leave out the extraction bit.”

“Likely to be in disguise?”

The lieutenant looks at her, and then stares pointedly at me. His look asks,
How would you expect me to disguise that?
And for the first time I wonder what it is about me that he keeps finding odd. In the legion you meet all sorts; that’s the whole point. No one minds what language you speak, what color your eyes are, whether your skull shape differs slightly from the man alongside.

I’m tall and reasonably broad, but apart from the scars on my back and the fact that one arm is missing, I’ve never had cause to think of myself as different. A little stronger, maybe; a little more willing to hike the final mile. But that’s only about having extra strength.

After the tortoiseshell decoration to the stump I’m not about to object to anything Madeleine suggests. Although, in the end, she skips the suggestion and just does what she wants anyway. This is fine, because I’ve seen blacksmiths and weapons repairmen at their best and neither comes close to the level of concentration she brings to making my new arm.

The old one is balanced on a stand, which somehow closes, and then the arm is scanned. She looks at a plate on her desk and tuts, walks over to the row of dusty arms and tuts some more, although she’s already said she’s not going to use those.

“Getting ideas,” says the sergeant. “Let her be.”

I nod.

In the end the arm she creates is impressive because it is so unexpected. My old arm, the one the lieutenant bought me, is hard-edged and obvious, all steel plates and pistons, with woven metal hoses leading to clumsy fingers.

The arm Madeleine constructs is exactly like my real one. Only made from black metal. At a distance it could be flesh, although closer up it becomes obvious the skin is not natural. I say
metal
because its surface rings when hit, but the elbow bends like a real arm without any need for overlapping plates and the wrist twists as if it had bones and sinew beneath.

“Like it?”

I nod. “You don’t want to sign it?”

Madeleine smiles. “Made one before,” she says. “Can’t claim it’s original. You want me to do something about your back?”

I shake my head.

“Why not?” asks Sergeant Hito.

“Some lessons are best remembered.”

He glances at the woman. She smiles and sighs. An old woman in a strange job on a ship that is unlike any I’ve ever seen. It’s as if I’ve wandered into another world without knowing I was invited. By now I’m getting nervous. I know this because a low ache like hunger has begun in my gut. The feeling I get just before battle.

“What are you doing about armor?”

“That’s up to the general.”

“But he will be in uniform?”

It’s a game between these two. Somewhere between cards and chess. An alliance built on mocking each other. And I’m discovering more about the sergeant every minute and I’ve begun to wonder why he’s letting me learn so much.

“I’ll make him some,” she says. “If the old man doesn’t like it, we’ll scrap it.”

“Okay,” says Hito. “Give him the basic black.”

“Insignia, rank, company?”

Sergeant Hito shakes his head. “No identifiers,” he says.

CHAPTER 17

I
’M SEARCHED
before being allowed to meet General Jaxx. A group of four officers close in on me and pat me down. Since I’ve already passed through a full-body scan I know this is tradition, part of a ritual to be undergone before being shown into the presence of a Death’s Head general.

“Weapons?”

I shake my head.

“You’ll have to remove that arm.”

Behind me Sergeant Hito begins to object, very politely. All four men outrank him. “The general himself…” They retract the moment the sergeant explains that General Jaxx wants to see Colonel Madeleine’s latest work.

“You stay here,” one says.

The sergeant looks like he wants to object to that, too, but does what he is told and I enter the general’s study alone. It is the same man. As tall as he ever was. Only now he’s wearing a black smoking jacket with narrow trousers, both decorated with a single band of silver piping.

Out of uniform, the only sign he controls a regiment is the silver signet ring on his left hand. A grinning skull, mouth mocking and hollow eyes taunting the world.

“Sven,” he says.

I wait; it’s all I can do.

“We have a job for you. One ideally suited to your talents.”

What talents?
I want to ask, but I make myself stay silent.

“What do you know about Farlight?”

“Nothing, sir.”

He nods. “Even better.” Walking across to a sideboard, he pours two drinks from a decanter. He doesn’t tell me what the drink is or ask if I want one, but since he sips from his first and then downs the rest in a single gulp, ending with an obvious sigh of satisfaction, I do the same.

“Single malt,” he says. “An old Earth drink.” He hesitates, smiling slightly. “You know about Earth?”

“Very little,” I say.

“What about its end?”

It’s one of those days for keeping my face blank. Whatever I know, or in this case don’t know, it seems best to keep to myself.

“Slightly over six hundred years ago the singularity swallowed its own children…”

He pauses. “Or maybe it ate its own parents. Experts disagree…You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

I shake my head.

He smiles. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “how happy that makes me.”

The job is simple. I’m to flip to Farlight, hunt out a traitor whose name I will be given on arrival, and kill him, his bodyguards, and his entire family. If his palace catches fire at the same time that will be even better.

“We will, of course, deny having even heard of you if you fail.”

“And if I succeed?”

“You will be inducted into the Death’s Head, undergo formal training, and fight the one campaign all new entrants must undertake. After which, you will work for me and only for me.”

He waits.

Am I meant to thank him?

After a moment, he smiles. “I like you,” he says. “People say you’re an animal. They’re wrong. Animals don’t think. Well, not the way you do. I can see we’re going to work well together.”

I might think, but obviously not fast enough. It takes me a second or two to realize he’s given me my cue to leave.

CHAPTER 18

F
ARLIGHT IS VAST.
A sprawl of a city trapped in the bowl of a long-dead volcano. It’s layered with history, like some exotic omelet. For a start, single streets have half a dozen different names, while boulevards end abruptly and grand squares have lost out to viral attacks that leave half their buildings looking like molten wax.

Palaces fill the center and slums crawl up the slopes of the volcano’s caldera until the sides become too steep for normal building, and huts on stilts and hardfoam shacks become all that cling to the rock. After a few hundred paces even these peter out and the crater’s sides can be recognized for what they are.

All this I see in the time it takes an old cargo freighter to overfly the city at a height I’m surprised the emperor allows. When I mention this a crew member grins.

“Upset someone, probably.”

“Who did?”

“We’re being paid to drop low over Boulevard Mazimo. So presumably we’re ruining someone’s posh lunch.” He laughs. “I guess they left someone off their guest list.”

Carl grins, slaps me on the shoulder, and offers me half of what remains of his sausage, which seems to be made from rancid meat mixed with enough garlic to bury the stink of one thing under the stink of another.

As good a description of Farlight politics as I’m likely to find.

I thank him, say I’ve just eaten.

He’s the ship’s cargo skipper. We originally met in a bar in high orbit. A joint I’ve never visited before, obviously enough, but recognize immediately. A row of stalls at the back speak of hasty blow jobs and up-against-the-wall fumbles. I get the same glance from a dozen different men, checking for the law, ex-wives, and debt chasers. And a barkeep comes out from behind his counter the moment I trip some scanner built into the door.

“No weapons,” he says.

“I’m not carrying.”

“You’ve been scanned.”

“All right. I’m not intending to use.”

He opens his mouth again.

“I could, however, change my mind.”

The madam laughs. “Give him a drink,” she says, and I’m in.

Carl wanders over to ask where I got my coat. I examine his question for double meanings and wonder if some other query is coded beneath its surface, but the man is serious. He prides himself on dressing well and wants one like it.

“Belonged to a Death’s Head sergeant.”

He looks startled.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “He won’t want it back.” This is true enough. Sergeant Hito took it from stores, the previous owner having no need of it. “You can have it,” I say, “if you can get me to Farlight.”

“There’s a drop shuttle,” he tells me. “Leaves every hour.”

It’s my turn to look at him.

“Ballistic silk lining,” I say. “Half-chameleon outer layer, runs on sunlight and sodium glare. Infinitely more effective than full chameleon, which is much too obvious.” I’m only repeating what Sergeant Hito told me, but it sounds convincing and I want to get rid of the coat. Call me suspicious, I can’t help suspecting General Jaxx has a neat little transponder bug fixed in there somewhere.

Carl’s sold, and I have my ride…

“You sure you aren’t hungry?”

“Quite,” I say, waving away his offer of rancid salami. So Carl wanders away to do whatever he does on
Trillion Two Zero Three,
which seems to be very little. A while after we land he looks around quickly, checks that the ramp exiting the cargo bay is clear, and nods meaningfully.

A quick shake of my hand and I’m out of his life, my coat still on his back and a half-chewed mouthful of salami still churning away in his mouth.