David Gunn - Death's head

This is what money looks like.

A huge portrait of a heroic-looking officer stares down at me. His chest is bedecked with medals, and an Order of Merit hangs from a ribbon around his neck. It takes me a second to recognize the man as Senator Thomassi, and the silver ship behind him as an in-system battle cruiser. At which point irritation kicks in, because the man is no more a soldier than Aptitude is, and at least she doesn’t pretend.

Anger and music carry me across the hall. An altogether different sort of music from that of Zabo Square. This is elegant and made mostly of silences between the notes. It fills my mind and I find my feet taking steps in time to its rhythm, my sudden halts and sideways flicks making me grin, anger forgotten.

A gun sits in my hand.

Fifty people wait for me beyond that door.

Twisting sideways, I slide myself into Senator Thomassi’s dining room and scan the table. Thomassi dies before he has time to realize I’m not one of his men. Both his bodyguards go down, guns undrawn. The first dies with his brains redecorating a wall behind him, the second trying to scream through a hole in his throat.

Aptitude just stands there.

This is the moment that counts, understand that.

Everything I am or want to be comes together in a single shot, as the girl spins around and drops to the tiles.

“Murderer,” screams a woman.

I nod.

Three of Thomassi’s hired muscle die in the space of three bullets, the last one diving behind a wooden chair, only to be killed by a blizzard of splinters. Wherever the old woman found my gun, it packs a punch.

“Party’s over,” I shout.

When no one moves, I empty a clip into the ceiling. Stucco falls like snow and the dining room empties in its turn. A guard with a pistol pops his head around the door and loses half his skull while still looking for the source of the gunfire.

Ceramic over bonded core, with polymer tip and steel expansion ring: Can’t beat it for punch. The slugs achieve 300 percent spread while retaining 97 percent of their weight at fifty paces, which has to be worth every credit of someone else’s money.

A tiny velvet purse sits beside most table settings. A few have been taken by fleeing guests, the rest abandoned. When I check, each purse contains ten gold coins. Thanking whichever god the Thomassis believed in for establishing such sensible traditions, I pocket the lot, deciding it’s worth carrying the extra weight.

This just leaves burning the villa.

Pouring brandy, vodka, and something sweet and sticky onto the table, I knock over an ornate silver candelabrum and watch blue flame run its way along a white linen cloth. For good luck, I splash vodka onto a brain-splattered tapestry, but there isn’t really enough left to make a difference.

Another face, another dead body.

Grabbing Aptitude by the waist, I hoist her over my shoulder and head for the hall with its long flight of marble stairs. Every NCO in existence will tell you don’t climb stairs in a fire, and don’t ever retreat to the top of a house unless someone with a copter is waiting to collect you. But I skimmed the skyline on my way in, and at least three trees touch the villa’s roof, with another five within jumping distance.

What comes next is nasty.

A woman stands at the top of the stairs. She has a gun and it’s held in front of her, pointing squarely at my face. She’s somewhere in her twenties, clear-eyed and determined. She might be biting her lips, but her hands are rock-steady and she looks like she’s handled a weapon before.

Not a member of the family then.

“Stop where you are,” she says.

I shake my head.

My coat’s been discarded, I have guns in both hands, and my metal arm is glinting in the half-light from a chandelier above. Holsters hang under both arms, and my throwing spikes are visible. It’s obvious what I am.

But the woman’s brave. She just stands there, raises her gun a little more, and begins to tighten her finger on the trigger. As she does, I drop Aptitude and the woman loses her concentration as Aptitude’s head hits a marble step.

She fires all the same.

And it’s a good shot, just not good enough.

I might be on my knees, knocked back, and something cracked in my shoulder, but I’m still alive and the guard’s eyes are on Aptitude. She’s transfixed by the wound to the kid’s skull and the black stickiness in Aptitude’s elaborate braid. By the time she gets her attention back to me I’m on my feet, and my gun is locked on her head.

“Drop it,” I tell her.

“No,” she says, raising her own weapon.

“I’ll kill you.”

She shrugs, the most magnificent shrug. One that says, I don’t care, and Fuck off, and Why don’t you die while you’re at it.

She goes down a second ahead of pulling her own trigger. Chunks fall from the roof as her final shot blows apart a stucco ceiling rose and exposes beams above. She has her clip loaded with alternate ballistic and explosive. I’m glad I didn’t know that.

Picking up her gun, I realize it’s a SIG diabolo, shaped for a hand far bigger than her own. It fits me perfectly.

“Lock and load,” the SIG announces.

I look at it.

“Imprinting new information. Genotype human equivalent. Status DH class three, override…”

That’s when I realize it wasn’t my coat the general had chipped with a dinky little transponder, it was me; and I’ve got honorary Death’s Head status, albeit at the lowest level. I’m still trying to work out how this fits with his threat to disown me if the mission goes wrong when splintering wall flicks my attention back to the present.

Two security guards are heading upstairs from the floor below.

“Missed,” I tell them.

A second shot pinpoints the first guard for me, and he drops with a bullet through his head, fragments of bone half blinding the man behind. Wiping his face, the second man is just in time to see the SIG buck in my hand. Where he was standing becomes a fireball. My gun’s just wasted an incendiary and I’m shocked, because you can hire a legion brigade for a week for what it costs to buy a box of those.

“Overkill,” I say.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” The SIG sounds crosser than I am.

For a moment I consider leaving it behind. But intelligent guns have to be valuable, and although I’ve heard of them before I half thought they were a myth. “Two men,” it warns me. “Mounting the stairs.”

I decide to keep the gun.

Having killed more men in the last half an hour than in the first twenty-eight years of my life, I add another couple to the list before hoisting Aptitude back onto my shoulder, and then hesitating. The woman at my feet is about Aptitude’s size, older by a few years and harder-faced even in death, but similar in build.

She’s the answer to a problem I didn’t know I had.

Beneath her clothes lies body armor. It’s slick and formfitting and looks expensive. For a second I’m tempted to take it, but the thought of stripping a corpse turns my stomach and the fastenings look complicated and I’ve talked myself into leaving the armor in place when I realize that doing so will defeat everything I’m trying to achieve.

The body armor unfastens at the back.

It’s thin and seems to be made of spun silk that tenses according to how it’s treated: Scrunch the stuff hard enough and it will probably cut your hands. The default coloring is whatever is underneath. As I strip the corpse her armor goes transparent and then takes on the white and black of the tiles.

I’m in the process of unbuttoning Aptitude’s chemise when she opens her eyes. A split second later she opens her mouth to scream, and tries to bite my hand as it fastens across her face.