David Gunn - Death's head

She hears the worry in my voice. “Sure,” she says. “All cool. My cousin from the country and Angelique have gone shopping. But I can take a message, if that’s why you’ve called.”

My cousin?

I’m grinning like an idiot into the screen, my reflection overlaying Lisa’s face, like a ghost image. Maybe this is going to work out after all. “Say hi to the kid for me. Tell her I’ll be back soon, and look after yourself, okay?”

“Back soon?”

“Got a job,” I say.

“Off planet?”

“Sounds like it. Oh, and Lisa.” I hesitate, watching her wait for me to find the right words. “Just, thank you, all right? For everything…”

She breaks the connection, but not before she flashes me her smile.

The HQ on Casaubon Square overlooks a dusty fountain and a small rectangle of tired grass. Wrought-iron railings surround the grass on all four sides, as if to protect it from those who might want to trample its beauty, but the beauty is missing and so are the hordes. The square is almost deserted, its only occupants two uniformed Death’s Heads who stand on either side of a black-painted door.

Farlight is OctoV’s largest city, his capital. It’s bigger than any of the Uplifted cities, so we’re told. Although obviously not as big as their orbital habitat, because nothing is as big as that-well, nothing that’s impinged on my life.

Who knows what the U/Free have? Apart from genius, high art, and all the things we don’t…

And yet being in Farlight is like being trapped in the center of a cluster of broken clockwork. It’s strange, maybe more than strange. Looking at the deserted square and the ruined grass and the shabby buildings, it strikes me that this must be intentional.

OctoV is saying something. I just wonder if anyone but OctoV himself understands what it is.

“Halt.”

It seems best to do what I’m told.

“I’m expected.”

The guards on the door look at each other.

“Name?” one of them demands.

“Sven.”

“Sven what?”

In my pocket the SIG gets itself ready. A quick shiver as the chassis unlocks and loads. The combat chip has tied itself to my emotions, which should worry the hell out of me, but actually makes me feel very happy.

“Well?”

A name comes unbidden. It’s the one Debro mentioned, back when we were being inducted into Paradise. “Sven Tveskoeg,” I tell them. “It’s an old Earth name.”

They wonder whether I’m taking the piss.

And then there’s a creak, and a man I recognize is standing in the open doorway. Both guards snap to attention at the sight of Colonel Nuevo’s uniform.

“Sven,” he says. “What are you doing out here?”

“Trying to get in,” I tell him. “Without killing your pet goons.”

His smile is thin. “These are the regiment’s finest.”

I’m obviously expected to reply, but I let silence say it for me, and the colonel sighs. “The major told me to expect you.”

“Really,” I say. “Was that before or after he tried to put a carbon dart through my skull?”

Colonel Nuevo decides it’s time to take our conversation inside.

My real surprise comes when I arrive to get my uniform. This comes last, after a medical, a second medical to check that the results of the first were correct, and a psychometric test, which is canceled halfway through when an intense-looking woman stands up from her desk, wanders over, and turns off my screen.

“It’s better,” she tells me, “we don’t have this on record.”

She says the same to Colonel Nuevo when he turns up at the end of our session.

“Right,” he says. “We’d better get him geared up.”

I expect a quartermaster, a rack of uniforms, a row of helmets, rifles piled in one corner. That’s what you get in the legion. Instead I get an old man who tells me to strip and stand in the middle of the room.

Colonel Nuevo excuses himself for this bit.

Lasers play down my body from all four corners of the room. The lights come up and the old man comes out from behind his screen with a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a jacket hanging over his arm.

He smiles at my surprise. “Fabricators,” he says. “Subvisual spiders.”

As he holds the jacket out to me, I frown. “You’ve made a mistake,” I say, handing back the garment. A silver collar bar on each side gives my rank as second lieutenant, and a silk ribbon tucked into one of the buttonholes proclaims me holder of the Obsidian Cross.

Third class, admittedly. But it’s still the Obsidian Cross.

The old man checks his right wrist, skim-reading an implant. “No,” he says. “No mistake. Second Lieutenant Sven Tveskoeg, Obsidian Cross third class.” He shrugs, watches me climb slowly into the jacket, and invites me to choose a holster style for my gun.

Combat batwings come in hard and fast over stunted trees, their guns blazing as they dip to just above ground level and try to kill everything in their path, which happens to include me.

These machines are fast, hellishly fast, maneuvering at g’s that must take their pilots to the edge of unconsciousness with every twist and turn. A trooper next to me raises his pulse rifle and takes aim.

The batwing stays steady and the man is gone. As burning meat mixes with mud on my uniform, I roll into the nearest ditch and see the batwing bank tightly to come around again.

“Big man, small ditch,” says the gun. “Go figure.”

So I flip myself out and roll behind the wreckage of a fat-wheeled combat bot. We’ve a thousand of the bastards, and they’re about as useless as a nun in a brothel.

As the batwing screams toward me, I raise my gun.

“Locked on,” it says.

“Take it.”

The SIG does what it’s told.

In doing so it trashes 15 percent of its power pack. When this is over I’m going to find the wreckage, because I want to know what the Enlightened have flying those things, and why shooting them makes my gun burn through its battery.

Batwings are small, much too small to take a human pilot. Rumor says they’re flown by the heads of dead Uplift soldiers. But rumor is usually wrong. In the meantime I’m working out what to do next and wondering how the fuck I got here.

As if I could forget.

“Mouthpiece,” a computer says.

A technician offers me a breathing tube. She offers it politely, with no indication that I’m holding up her launch. A glance at the trooper beside me tells me the tube really is what I think, so I stuff it into my mouth, closing my teeth around a ridge put there for the purpose.

“Doors,” says the voice.

We’re being prepped by machine, because it’s more efficient than using humans-or so I’ve been told by the techie, who keeps her eyes lowered and turns away from my questions as soon as politeness allows.

It used to be me that made people nervous; now it’s my wrapping as well. Black combat armor, black-visored helmet, black gloves…And that dinky little silver skull on the front of my helmet, just in case anyone’s too stupid to realize the obvious.

Glass doors close over my head, and everyone around me shuts their eyes. Seconds later our pod fills with shock gel. From drop to landing we’re going to be in free fall, and I mean free fall. We’re also out of communication range, not that this matters. Once dropped, nothing can change a pod’s trajectory.

Like every other pod in the drop we have landing legs to take the worst of the shock, with gel to cushion us from the rest.

I’m counting down in my head.

Three, two, one…

Half a minute is the time I’ve been given from gelling to drop, and it’s accurate to the second. As my body rises, the gel cushions my shock and settles me back in my seat. Twenty men to a pod, five hundred pods to a ship, twenty ships to a fleet. That makes two hundred thousand men free-falling toward Ilseville, capital of Sxio province and second city on the newly re-Uplifted and-Enlightened planet of Maybe Here.