David Gunn - Death's head

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.”