David Gunn - Death's head

“Trouble?” I say.

He glances up from a hand slab, checks something on its screen, and then does a double take on Aptitude. “Looks like I should be asking you the same.”

“We need a doctor.”

“We?”

“She does.”

Per nods, and when he sucks his teeth it’s not over the Casmir coil. The directions he gives are precise. I’m to use his name. It would be best if I wrapped her head in something before walking her into the shadow of Calinda Gap. I’ll need to pay gold.

He hesitates. “Have you got money?”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t ask me how much or where from, and I realize I like this man. He’s the real thing. All I did was fix his spider bot but he’s ready to sub Aptitude if I don’t have enough for a doctor.

Reassured, he watches us walk away.

The doctor is young, nervous, and an addict. He gives his name as Josh3 and looks bemused when Aptitude tries to shake hands. His office is crude, full of medical lash-ups and naked chunks of memory crystal, with one fist-sized piece tied to a slab reader with glass wire. The widows are tar-papered and protected with freshly welded bars.

I give him a month at most before the gangs or the police force him out. Both will want protection money, and neither will be able to save him from the other. Farlight is beginning to look like Karbonne written extra large. But Josh3 is here now, and the gold coin I’m holding is enough to focus his attention.

“Bad wound,” he says.

“Not that bad,” I tell him.

Josh3 looks like he wants to disagree.

“Do what you can,” says Aptitude. “But I want to stay conscious.”

He looks like he wants to disagree with that as well.

She really is Debro’s daughter. Her face is pale-more so than mine will ever be-her eyes are wide, and her mouth tightens with pain as Josh3 lifts the edges of her wound with a ceramic hook, but she doesn’t flinch and she swallows her pain as he swabs grazed bone and stitches the edges tight.

“Your ma would be proud of you.”

I mean it as a compliment. I certainly don’t mean to make her cry.

Skull stitched and head scarf hiding where her hair’s been cut away, Aptitude walks beside me through Calinda Gap’s early morning. This is a weird city: Expensive yachts trawl lazily overhead, but most of the buildings around us are foamstone or fiberbloc, and a few are wood. Cheap motorbikes fill lanes with a thick fog of hydrocarbon. I’ve even seen a couple of donkeys, laden down with panniers.

Satellite dishes sprout like fungus from the sides of most of the houses. It’s still early, but already the air stinks of warm dogshit and human sewage. There is a water shortage in this city, at least out here on the edges.

“God,” says Aptitude.

“You didn’t know places like this existed?”

She shakes her head, and then winces at the pain. Her eyes are glazed with analgesics, but Josh3 was good to his word and kept her conscious through the entire operation. My shoulder is also mended, not that it was bad to start with…a cracked bone, busily healing itself by the time Josh3 cut his way inside.

“Where are we going?”

“Safety…”

Aptitude stares at me, so I sit her on a low wall and tell her a few home truths, starting with the fact that a number of important people want her dead and will kill both of us if they ever discover that this is not already the case. The identity of these important people is left unspecified, and it says something for the state of Farlight politics that Aptitude never once doubts that what I tell her is true.

“And my mother’s alive?”

“Yes,” I say.

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

She slides herself from the wall, ties the scarf tighter around her head, and links her arm through mine. “I suppose,” she says, “we’d better go.”

Golden memories is nearly empty, for which I’m grateful. Bacon is being fried in the kitchens and the stink of garbage comes from a bin outside. I’m beginning to recognize the signature scents of this city, at least the bits of it I know. And I like the smell of food I can recognize. While I was ruining Aptitude’s wedding supper I could barely tell what was food from what was table decoration.

Lisa grins as I walk into the kitchen, then sees Aptitude behind me and begins to scowl. There’s a good way to approach this and a bad way, and if I knew which was which I’d do it, but Lisa’s still a stranger, for all that we’ve shared a bed.

So I settle on the truth.

“I need your help.”

Both Aptitude and Lisa are looking at me. To make matters more complicated, Angelique comes out from a stockroom and walks over to join her cousin.

“Who’s this?” she demands.

“The daughter of a friend-”

“A friend?”

I put my guns on the counter, one after another. It’s not a threat; I just need them to know who I am. At the sight of the last weapon, Lisa’s eyes widen.

“That’s…”

“Yeah,” I say, “illegal.”

Angelique grins.

They could sell me to the police and probably get a good price. We’re negotiating here. I’ve just told them they’re going to get something that’s worth more. At the moment they probably think it’s one of the guns.

I take gold coins from my pocket.

Eyes widen.

“Ten Octo,” I say, “you keep an eye on her…Another ten, you let her work behind the bar until I get back.” I put a final twenty coins on the counter. We’re talking much more than they make in a month, legally or otherwise.

“And that?” Lisa asks, looking at the final pile.

The kid gets my room. It’s not as if Golden Memories has many real guests. And at a hundred credits to a single Octo, I’ve just bought Aptitude a lot of room time. The rules are clear: She works behind the bar, no one tries to make her work on her back, and she gets to eat with Lisa and Angelique.

“Learn to blend in,” I say once we’re alone in the room that’s about to become hers. “Watch the others and do what they do.”

She’s a good kid, but I can see the worry in her eyes.

“This is your life now.”

“My life?”

“Maybe forever…”

Calinda Gap is visible through the window, and the rocky edge of the caldera shows dark against the sun, with a skim of shantytown rising steeper than you’d think it possible to build. There are things I want to say. Things I wish the lieutenant had said to me, in the spaces between those things he did say.

Finding the right words comes hard.

And she’s uneasy to be alone in a room with me, which is not surprising given I killed her husband, her bodyguard, and most of the hired muscle at her wedding; but it’s a conversation we need to have. Even if Aptitude’s part is mostly silence and my part is made up of words I find almost impossible to say.

“Your mother’s not coming back.”

It’s probably the wrong way to begin.

“She’s got a camp of her own in Paradise. Anton is with her. She’s become someone.”

“Someone?”

“A person who matters.”

The girl wants to tell me that Debro Wildeside always mattered. Of course Debro did, but that’s not what I’m saying. “People change in prison,” I tell her. “More than they change most other places. They become someone else. Your ma’s the exception. I really believe she’s going to remain herself.”

“And she’s got Dad.”

I nod.

“You really know them?”

“Yes,” I say. “We landed on the same shuttle. Shared a camp. Fought a couple of battles against other camps. Well, your dad and I did. Setting the boundaries, so others would learn to leave us alone.”

“Why were you let out?”

“To kill you…” I take a deep breath. “Only I’d already promised your ma that I’d look after you if I could, and I made that promise before I was given the assignment.”