Authors: David Gunn
Chapter 46
AS THE STARS GET CLEARER AND THE SKY DARKER, THE NIGHT gets colder and colder, until everyone huddles inside their combat jackets or sleeps under the engines of trucks and scout cars that are too cool to make any difference.
The sappers have built slit latrines at the village’s edge. But I’ve told Shil, Rachel and Iona to make their own arrangements and not stray beyond the glow of our fire. No point taking chances after what happened earlier.
General Luc and his staff occupy an inn.
Its main door is bolted against the wind. All of its shutters are closed and locked, but they still bang endlessly, like boys hammering on fences. Noisy, smoky and crowded; I know where I’d rather be.
‘Yeah,’ my gun says. ‘We know. You’d rather be cold.’
I’m sat by myself, watching stars.
The brushwood Neen stole, and the dried dung he had the others collect, has burnt to a white ash that dusts sullen embers like sugar on one of those sticky pastries you can buy in Zabo Square.
‘Behind you,’ the SIG says.
If it was anyone dangerous, it would have warned me before this.
‘What are you thinking?’ asks a voice.
You’d think women would get bored with that question. They never do. At least not the ones I meet. Shil sits herself down uninvited, and puts her back to the wall that’s protecting me from the worst of the wind. Takes me a while to realize she hopes for an answer. I thought she was just making conversation.
‘About the stalls in Zabo Square. The ones that sell pastries.’
She smiles. Not sure why.
‘Can I ask you a question, sir?’
‘You can ask . . .’
Shil hesitates. That’s how I know I’m not going to like it.
‘Were you and Sergeant Leona lovers?’
‘Shil.’
‘Were you, sir?’
She’s waiting for my answer.
First Rachel’s insolence. Now Shil’s question. I’m not sure what’s got into everyone tonight. I could tell her to fuck off, which wouldn’t be the first time. Or I could give her sentry duty for the rest of the night, which would send the same message, but something stops me . . .
‘No,’ I say. ‘We weren’t.’
She closes her eyes. ‘I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse,’ she mutters. I’m not supposed to hear that bit. When I shift to stop her hip pressing against mine, she looks hurt.
‘You cold?’ I ask.
‘Sven—’ Shil catches herself. ‘I mean, sir. What do you think?’
‘Me? I think you probably shouldn’t squat to piss in case your bits stick to the ground.’
Her laugh is rough. ‘Guess you’re never going to change.’
I wasn’t aware I needed to.
‘Shil,’ I say. ‘Listen . . .’
My idea that your first kill is harder than the second, and your second is harder than the third sounds strange when I say it aloud. Particularly when I get to the bit about how it starts getting hard again.
‘What’s that for?’ I ask. She definitely shouldn’t be holding my face in her hands. Her mouth tastes of salt, stew, chocolate pudding and alcohol. When I sit back, she smiles and then sighs.
‘I miss the desert . . .’ Not sure what makes me say it.
The alcohol, probably.
Shil shakes her head. ‘What you miss,’ she says, ‘is the simplicity.’
I stare at her.
‘Sir,’ she adds.
That’s not why I’m staring.
I’m staring because she’s right. And, then again, she’s wrong.
I do miss the silence and the simplicity. Doesn’t mean I want to go back to who I was then or how I was living. I’m just not sure I want to replace it with where I am now. My shock is not that I realize this.
It is understanding I have a choice.
‘Sir,’ Shil says. ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
Her eyes widen. Maybe she expects me to say no.
‘Shil,’ I say, ‘everyone dies. Unless you’re U/Free. And even those bastards must die eventually. That’s why we hope for a better life next time.’
‘You believe that?’
I look at her. ‘You mean some people don’t?’
Her eyes are wet. Usually, where Shil’s concerned, that’s anger. Not this time. ‘Sven,’ she says, ‘I don’t mean in fifteen years, or ten, or five. I don’t even mean next year. I mean, do we die tomorrow? If not tomorrow, next week?’
‘Would it matter?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It would.’
So I wait for her to tell me why.
‘I don’t believe we come back,’ she says. ‘We’re born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse. Then it stops.’ She touches the medallion at her neck. I see her fingers make the shape for Legba Uploaded. Her lips move to the familiar words.
‘I try to believe,’ she tells me. ‘God knows.’
That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard. Taking her face between my hands, I turn her so I can see her eyes in the moonlight. They’re huge, and tracks cut the dirt on her cheek. The air is so cold her tears steam as they fall.
‘Believe me,’ I say. ‘This isn’t everything.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because . . .’ How do I explain touching the mind of an AI?
‘They’re machines,’ Shil says.
‘Maybe once. But if Hekati thinks there’s more than this . . .’
‘Machine heaven,’ says Shil sourly, but she’s smiling as she turns her face towards me. Her kiss is clumsy, but enthusiastic. So I drop my fingers from her face and cup the breast barely discernible beneath her uniform. When she shifts, I start to say sorry, but she simply pops open a storm flap at her neck and tugs a zip behind. When my hand still won’t fit, she tugs again.
‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘That’s cold.’
Her singlet is warm under my fingers.
Closing her jacket as best she can, she wraps both arms tight round my neck. Our next kiss is deep. As my fingers grip a breast, she winces. So I stroke my fingers across a nipple instead.
‘Thought you were going to die,’ she says. ‘That night in Ilseville.’
‘So did I.’
The cracked bones mended within a week, and the pain went within a month. All that remains now is scarring to remind me that my heart was once visible through a hole in my chest.
Knife wounds you stitch.
But bullet wounds are different, because stitching those can kill. Some need air and others maggots. So medics pack broken flesh with sterile bandages, if they have any, and hope unpacking them doesn’t finish what the enemy started.
But that wound in Ilseville . . .
Shil tied me to a chair to hold me still while she cut away ruined flesh. Washed the wound with water and vinegar and kept me sedated with brandy. She smiles sourly when I remind her of this.
In the cold of the high plains, with a freezing wind at our backs, and only a broken wall to protect us, our fire burnt down to embers, and the stars clear above us, with the Aux talking in the darkness or sleeping, and five hundred Wolf Brigade camped around us, we unfasten zips, undo buckles and free Velcro straps.
Fuck knows, it’s taken us long enough.
Her body is whipcord thin, her breasts as slight as I remember from seeing her strip once. Give me two twigs and I could beat out a march on her ribs. We’re not naked, because the cold would kill us before we could dress again. Colonel Vijay might consider being found frozen in his lover’s arms romantic, but I’m not the colonel, and Shil is not my lover; although she opens her thighs readily enough as I slide my hand into her combats.
‘You don’t mind?’ she asks.
Body hair crinkles beneath my fingers. ‘About what?’
‘Oh,’ Shil says. ‘Franc didn’t—’
My other hand stills her lips.
Yes, I know, Franc shaved her whole body with the edge of a knife, every day, and wore her scars like badges of honour. When the U/Free removed her scars, they took away her reason to live. So she died for us. Because dying was the only thing she could do to make sense of being alive.
Shil listens in silence as I say this. Then she reaches up and hooks her fingers around the back of my neck.
We kiss again, because that’s polite.
Kiss first, take the weight on your elbows, make conversation afterwards, and leave the money discreetly on the table before you go. That last bit of my old lieutenant’s rules doesn’t apply, obviously.
At least I hope not.
Rolling Shil to face the wall, I curl myself behind her and reach round to cup my fingers over her breast.
‘Ready?’
She gasps when I enter.
So I pull back. A part of me wants to grip her hips and bury myself. A bigger part knows I should behave.
‘Fuck,’ Shil says at last. ‘I thought she was joking.’
It hadn’t occurred to me Franc talked about us. Not that there was much us where Franc was concerned. The only person she loved was Haze, my intelligence officer. And that was sexless.
We lie still for a few seconds as Shil’s body adjusts, and we feed on each other’s warmth. And then she reaches for my fingers and takes my hand from her breast and pushes it between her legs, locking her thighs tightly.
‘Slowly,’ she whispers.
Sliding myself out, I roll Shil over and kiss her forehead. Reaching up, she grips my neck and kisses my mouth. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was saying goodbye.
‘Whatever happens,’ she says.
‘Whatever happens?’
‘I’ve had you . . .’ She grins. Has to be my expression, because I can’t think what else would make her grin like that. ‘You realize,’ she says, ‘you’re a bastard?’
She asks if I’m in love with Aptitude.
This is an improvement. The last time she asked about Aptitude she wanted to know if I’d fucked the kid. It’s the same answer this time.
No, I’m not . . . No, I haven’t . . . I don’t intend to now or ever.
Around dawn, when it’s light enough to see each other’s eyes clearly, we fuck one final time. It’s brief and awkward, as if she needs the darkness to be comfortable. ‘Sven,’ she says, when we’re done.
‘What?’
‘If we live, I want out of the Aux.’
‘That’s what this was about?’ My question is rough enough to make her scramble away from me, holding her jacket closed, while she fumbles at the zip of her combats with her other hand.
‘Of course that’s not—’
‘Not going to happen,’ I say, adding, ‘What about Neen? He want out too?’
‘Neen makes his own decisions.’ This is the Shil I recognize, although it turns out her anger isn’t with me. At least, not entirely.
‘I thought Iona was your problem?’
‘She doesn’t help,’ Shil replies, still waiting for my answer.
‘Shil. Conscripts don’t resign.’
Her mouth sets in misery.
‘You could fix it.’
‘But I’m not going to. Only you and Neen remain of the originals.’
‘And Rachel,’ she says.
‘No,’ I shake my head. ‘Rachel joined after Ilseville fell.’
Shil thinks about that. Eighteen out of twenty-five died within minutes of hitting the ground. Six out of seven made it through the first skirmish. Haze is off-planet, the others died later. Only two of her troop remain.
I know exactly how she feels.
Me, I’m one out of five hundred. Because that’s how many we were before the ferox attacked Fort Libidad. Everyone has a story and most of them are grim. That’s why we get drunk to remember, and drunker still to forget.
I grip Shil’s shoulders and she’s not expecting that. She fights briefly and then folds herself into me. I don’t have to look to know she’s crying.
‘You’re still a bastard,’ says a voice at my side.
Chapter 47
THE SCOUT CAR AHEAD CHANGES GEAR AS THE ROAD STARTS to rise towards its distant pass through the mountains. Slopes stretch both sides as far as we can see. Well, as far as Rachel can see and that’s further than most. Even using field-glasses, I can’t make out where the heat haze ends and the sky begins.
Buzzards circle us.
They’ve been following for three days. They can’t believe a convoy this big doesn’t leave them a trail of dead. Rachel says they’ll come through the pass. Ajac says not, he’s seen birds like this before. They’ll turn back. Ajac and Rachel ride side by side, their visors flipped up and their words whipped away by the hot wind.
Neen and Iona’s communication is strictly non-verbal.
They clutch hands occasionally, making their combat trikes wobble until tiny gyros kick in to stabilize them. You shouldn’t need gyros on a fat-wheel, my gun tells me crossly.
It’s in a foul mood.
Not the only one. Neen and Shil aren’t talking. And Iona spends most of the morning giving Neen sympathetic glances. Occasionally she stops to glare at Shil, when she thinks we’re not looking.
Colonel Vijay is oblivious to it all.
I’d be so lucky.
As the scout cars pull ahead, and the incline increases, and the transporters fall back behind us, we’re left on our own in a little huddle. Six Aux and the colonel, on combat trikes, each of us in a uniform so dusty it needs no camouflage.
Even our outriders have scattered.
Sergeant Toro is hunting goat for General Luc’s supper. His corporal is thirty minutes back helping a trooper who shredded his tyre. Not sure where the final one is. Out of our sight somewhere.
We’ll never get another chance this good.
Neen sees me loosen the flap on my holster. We haven’t discussed this, because you don’t discuss mutiny. You act and live or die with the consequences. Tapping the SIG-37 awake, I tell it to keep quiet.
‘Fucking great,’ it says. ‘You’re about to do something stupid.’
‘I’m saving Colonel Vijay’s life.’
‘What I said.’
For once I wish the SIG was less lethal. ‘Neen,’ I say, ‘what rounds are you carrying?’
A Kemzin is strapped to his back. At the hip, he has a simple Colt automatic. Almost no brains and zero attitude. ‘Seven six two, sir. Full metal.’
‘Cut a cross in the top?’
That’s illegal but everyone does it.
‘No, sir,’ he says. ‘Uncircumcised.’
Seeing my surprise, Neen says he took the side arm from a militia officer in Farlight. An amateur, obviously.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘We’ll swap.’
Neen looks at the SIG, and nearly runs himself off the road. Only instinct and gyros save him. ‘Sir?’ he says.
‘He’ll want me back,’ the SIG says.
‘Don’t count on it.’
Taking my weapon, Neen slides it into his jacket for safety, while he flips up his own holster flap and hands me his automatic. Only then does he put the SIG-37 in his own holster. He checks three times it’s fastened safely.
‘Scan for comms traffic,’ I tell the SIG.
It takes so long to answer I think it didn’t hear, but it’s sulking. ‘No traffic,’ it says, which surprises me.
‘Check again.’
The SIG does. It was right first time.
‘Cover me,’ I tell Neen.
He wants to ask, from what?
Seeing us, the colonel nods, then forces a polite smile.
Shil appears on his other side. A fact that darkens Neen’s face, as swiftly as it wipes the smile from Colonel Vijay’s own. She positions herself well. A little back from the colonel, but close enough to stop him making a run for it.
‘Sir,’ I say, ‘I’m taking over.’
‘Mutiny is a capital offence, Sven.’
‘Not mutiny, sir. A temporary redesignation of command.’
His mouth twists, and he looks almost impressed. ‘And you’re going to shoot me if I refuse to accept this redesignation?’
‘Yes, sir.’ I have Neen’s gun aimed at his heart.
‘No, you’re not,’ he says. ‘I’ve read your file. You’re clinically incapable of killing your CO.’
Dropping my hand, I re-sight on his upper l
eg.
A leg wound can kill, but only if you’re unlucky. As I switch my aim, the colonel realizes I’m holding an ordinary weapon. It’s this, more than anything else, which convinces him I mean it.
‘Sven,’ he says. ‘Wait.’
‘Colonel, I’m taking control.’
‘On what grounds?’ His voice is calm.
‘Grief makes you unable to command, sir.’
‘Temporarily unfit,’ Shil says, supplying the term I want. Neen glares at his sister and then glances at me. He decides we’ve discussed this already, without him knowing. He’s wrong. She just learns fast.
‘Grief at what?’ Colonel Vijay demands.
‘The death of your father, sir. The massacre of doubters. The arson that destroyed your family home. The Thomassi’s coup. The call on officers of the Third Death’s Head to surrender. Our capture by General Luc . . .’
It is quite a list.
‘I see,’ he says. ‘And this grief manifests how?’
Takes me a moment to work out what he’s asking. Ahead of us the scout cars increase their lead, while a drone overhead drifts to one side. I can barely see the transporters that should bring up our rear.
‘Refusal to escape, sir.’
He nods, as if expecting no less.
‘Every officer’s duty,’ I remind him. ‘Kill your captors and escape. In certain circumstances, to be judged by a later court martial, simply escaping may be enough to wipe out the disgrace of being captured in the first place.’
‘Sven, General Luc is not the enemy.’
‘Well, he’s not a friend, sir. We should be fighting the Thomassi. The rules state—’
‘I know the rules.’
‘Yes, sir. I don’t doubt it.’
‘My father wrote most of them.’
Looking from me to Neen and across at Shil, Colonel Vijay checks how far back the rest of us are in his mirrors. Then he nods to the gun in my hand. ‘You’re going through with this,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you’ll give me back my command. Knowing I’ll have you court martialled and shot for mutiny?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Colonel Vijay buries his face in one hand.
We ride in silence, the colonel’s trike bracketed by mine on one side and Shil’s on the other. Neen rides to the left of me, keeping a slight distance. The others keep their positions, still wondering what’s going on.
‘Your NCOs didn’t know about this, did they?’
‘No, sir. They didn’t.’
‘Of course not. Otherwise they’d be liable for mutiny.’ Colonel Vijay’s lips twist. ‘Sven,’ he says, ‘take a look around you.’
In that moment, he sounds exactly like his father.
‘I have, sir.’
‘Take another.’
Scout cars up ahead, transporters and trucks way behind. An-incline of rock, grit and gravel on both sides, rising to that mountain pass ahead. We’re in the middle of goddam nowhere. Even the buzzards are beginning to turn back in disgust.
‘What do you see?’ the colonel demands.
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘You see nothing.’
Neen and Shil scan the slopes, wondering what they’re missing.
‘It’s a trap, Sven,’ Colonel Vijay says. ‘The moment we make a break, those outriders will reappear. The Wolf ‘s probably got snipers on that mound.’
He jerks his chin to a low hill ahead of us.
‘And those scout cars? They’ll birth extra trikes the moment they’re needed.’ Colonel Vijay sounds apologetic for stating the obvious. ‘Sven,’ he says, ‘they want us to run.’
‘Sir,’ says Neen, ‘It’s not—’
He doesn’t get to finish, although Colonel Vijay’s glance is almost kind. ‘Sergeant,’ he says, ‘I’m not going to get myself shot while escaping. Certainly not so General Luc can keep a clear conscience.’
He raises his eyebrows.
‘Assuming it is clear, of course.’
Personally, I doubt the Wolf has a conscience at all, clear or otherwise.
‘Since he’s going to kill me,’ Colonel Vijay adds, ‘I might as well make him go through the pretence of due process.’
Nodding politely, he edges his bike forwards and, after a second, I fall back to return Neen’s side arm.
‘You know,’ the SIG says, ‘I’m not sure chess is your thing.’
That night, after we’ve made camp on the far side of the pass, Colonel Vijay excuses himself from the Wolf’s company and joins us round our fire.
He smokes a cheap cigar with Neen, takes a swig from Shil’s brandy and tries not to choke on either. He even shares our rations. And if he pays a little too much attention to Iona’s breasts and gets slightly drunker on three swigs from a bottle than is decent, that’s fine. We’ve all been there at his age.
Although Ajac still is.
And Neen’s only a year or two more.
You’d think, given the death of his father and the fate awaiting him, that Vijay Jaxx would look older. Not a bit of it. He still looks what he is: a well-brought-up late teen, with floppy hair and a tiny beard so blond it’s almost invisible.
After supper, he excuses himself politely.
He sounds apologetic when he says he needs to return to General Luc. As if he regrets being forced to leave our cheap cigars and cheaper brandy and outdated rations for real food and a requisitioned hunting lodge.
Maybe he does.
Even the best meals taste sour when you’re prisoner.
‘Who takes first watch, sir?’
Neen looks surprised when I say no one. No watches and no pickets, Colonel Vijay’s orders. We’re under the protection of the Wolf Brigade. I hope he finds the words as hard to say as I do to hear.
‘I’m not tired, sir,’ Neen says.
‘You want to walk our perimeter, that’s fine. Wake me if you get bored.’
He salutes, collects his Kemzin and takes himself out to the edge of our fire, while I settle myself in the shelter of a rock that rises like broken bone from the slope we’re descending, with the others round me in a sprawl. Our fire burns to ashes faster than we’d like and, come morning, our uniforms are frozen so hard they creak when we move.
I sleep in my boots. We all do.
Our rations might taste vile, but they’re still better than any I ate in the Legion. These merely taste bad, those were sometimes poisonous. I’ve known fifteen-year-old pressed meat slaughter more than a full-on tribal attack.
Telling the Aux to quit whining, I flick my trike to life and wait for my team to saddle up. We edge through a sprawl of Wolf Brigade troopers folding their camp and pulling faces at their own rations.
We’re the first to the road. So we wait, as we did yesterday.
It’s worth being early to see General Luc’s scowl when he finds us drawn up in order, waiting for his men to sort themselves out. Unless he knows how close we came to falling into his trap and scowls because we pulled back before it snapped shut.
We are half a day from his lair. A small castle perched on the top of a basalt mountain a hundred miles from the rift. The walls are cut from the mountain’s rock, making them almost invisible.
Or so I’ve been told. Few visit it willingly.
‘Mount up,’ Sergeant Toro tells his outriders.
From the tightness of his voice, the Wolf’s had words about being late on parade. The glare Sergeant Toro shoots me is blasphemous. So I grin back and that upsets him even worse.
His men ride us tight for the rest of the morning. So maybe he’s also upset we didn’t fall into yesterday’s trap. We respond by pretending they don’t exist. And the sergeant doesn’t like that much either.
We stop once, an hour before noon.
There are usually two stops a day. One before the sun reaches its highest. Another an hour before sunset begins. That means we ride through the heat of the day. General Luc probably has his reasons. Not sure what they are, mind you.
‘Sorry,’ the sergeant says. ‘Not enough to go round.’
We’re not allowed to join the others filling their camelbacks and bottles from the water truck. So I tell Sergeant Toro he’s a dumb fuck, and I can’t believe General Luc is stupid enough to think we’d fall for a trap. Just how fucking dumb do they think we are?
He doesn’t know. How fucking dumb are we?
Not as dumb as a bunch of bastards who’ve never fought a real battle in their lives and run at the first sign of danger. Thought that would hit a nerve. Sergeant Toro doesn’t know why we’re retreating either.
If I wasn’t an officer, he tells me.
So I say not to let that worry him, because I never have. ‘Behind that,’ I suggest, nodding at the truck. ‘Who’s going to know?’
He looks tempted. ‘And the injuries?’
‘You can tell them you fell over.’
His laugh is harsh. ‘And what will you say?’
‘I saw you trip.’