David Gunn - Death's head

“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.

“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.

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.