David Gunn - Death's head

“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.

The 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.”