David Gunn - Death's head

Our job is to re-UnEnlighten it fast.

Ilseville is a trading depot for fur, amber, and a rare and fabulously complex leather taken from cold-water alligators, which are actually something else altogether, but look enough like alligators for the name to stick.

I’ve been briefed on the city we’re about to take.

It’s little more than a small town protected by stonefoam walls. The outer areas are constructed mostly of fiberbloc, which is warm, cheap to manufacture, and utterly useless against artillery. The inner city, which is also walled, is stone-built, with two temples. We’re to spare these, if we can.

“Steady yourselves.”

A thud, hard enough to shake my teeth, a suck of vacuum as a pump sucks away the gel, and then my ears pop as air flows into the pod hard enough to blow open its doors.

“Up and out,” a sergeant shouts, but he’s talking to his squad.

I’ve just piggybacked a lift with them. My men don’t exist; I’m a second lieutenant without a platoon, which strikes me as pretty odd.

Hitting the ground, I go facedown. A swift roll sees me covered from head to foot in mud and I’m happier. So I grab some wild grass and force it under the webbing on my helmet, then flip down my visor.

At least I’m camouflaged.

Fat-wheeled combats roll down a ramp behind me. A junior NCO sits on one, his hands gripping wide handlebars and his thumb already on the firing button.

“Moron,” says my gun.

His vehicle bounces once and slaps wetly on landing. Wheels slip, mud sprays from one side, and his vehicle goes over. Its engine dies a second later. Other pods are having similar luck.

“Incoming.”

A dozen conscripts do the meerkat search.

“Twelve o’clock,” I shout, adding, “get down.”

A batwing, coming in hard and fast. Rolling into a ditch, I see the driver of the dead fat-wheel raise his rifle and watch him become history. Another glorious martyr for the mother system, whatever the hell that might be.

“Locked on,” says the SIG.

“Take it.”

We kill the batwing without thinking about it. Somehow I’ve abandoned my ditch for the burning wreckage of a fat-wheeled combat bot. I’m still alive and so are roughly half the troopers around me, but that’s not going to last.

A hostile cannon spits from a hill to our left, while the enemy have an old-fashioned belt-fed dug in the trees to our right. We need to attack the position in those trees or take the hill, because at the moment we’re all in the cross fire. But the ground between here and both those places is marsh, with hillocks of grass surrounded by filthy water.

“Get the fuck down.”

A couple of troopers hit the ground, but not at my shout. One of them is now minus his head; the other probably wishes he was. A batwing has taken his legs below the hip, clean-sealing the wounds as the pulses pass through.

He’s screaming.

A helmetless grunt stands beside him, covering his own ears. Militia, by the look of his uniform. Out of two hundred thousand troops, a thousand of us are Death’s Head, maybe another ten thousand are from the legions, and the rest are conscripts and recruits.

I put a knife through the injured man’s heart.

He stops screaming.

“Get down,” I tell the grunt. “Right down,” I add, when he falls as far as his knees. “Where’s your sergeant?”

The man looks at me blankly.

“Sergeant?” I say.

Another trooper points. What’s left of their sergeant is staring blankly at a cold gray sky, and no one’s even had sense enough to steal his plasma pistol.

“You’re the new sergeant,” I tell the trooper who pointed, giving him the pistol. As an afterthought, I get him to unbuckle his own helmet and cram the sergeant’s helmet on his head in its place. Demands are flooding through the earpiece.

“Down,” I hear the trooper say. “The new sergeant,” he adds. And then he tosses his old helmet to the grunt who seems to be without.

He’ll do.

“Cover me,” I tell him.

Pulse cannon or belt-fed? Which to hit first…Spotting a group of troopers who’ve abandoned their fat-wheels and are dragging a mortar toward the hill, I decide to take the trees and the belt-fed for myself.

Behind me the new sergeant fires a burst from his pulse pistol, and I hug dirt as return fire skims over my head. A second burst, then another burst and another; he’s got the rest of his troop firing now. If he lives long enough he’s going to make a good NCO.

Grinning to myself, I roll into a sodden ditch and shake my head. Good and NCO- now, there are two words I never expected to hear in the same sentence. The channel is deep enough to let me crawl on my belly through marsh grass and cold water toward the sound of the belt-fed weapon.

The grunts are keeping pace with me and I’m officially impressed. To the man with the machine gun it must look like they’re advancing on his gun camp. I just hope he doesn’t get too many of them before I can reach the trees.

“Fucking chaos,” says the gun when I wake it up again.

“Remind me to reset you.”

There has to be a character button somewhere, because I can’t believe this is its default personality. SIG GmbH would never make a profit.

“Distance,” I demand.

“About fifty yards.”

“I don’t want about. ”

“Forty-eight yards, eleven and a quarter inches, approximately. I can give you a more accurate measurement if you want.”

“Can you get him from here?”

The SIG’s sulking.

“Well?”

“Of course. It would help if you told me what rounds you want.”

“Whatever does the least damage.”

“Why?”

“Because I want that belt-fed in one piece. Not for me,” I add quickly, in case it’s the jealous type. “For the men behind me.” I’m crawling through cold water as this goes on, the gun carefully giving me new distances every few seconds until I tell it to stop.

We’re still thirty yards from the trees, and the soldier with the belt-fed is a couple of yards back from that. I’d try to go around him, but that would mean leaving my ditch, and the ditch is the sole reason I’m still alive.

“What are my options?” We’re talking about rounds, obviously.

“Ceramic, flechette, incendiary, explosive, overblast…”

“Overblast.”

The gun unlocks and loads.

And I wait for a particularly heavy burst of fire from behind me. Something that’s going to make the man in the trees want to keep his head down. When the burst comes, I wait it out and pop my head up in the split-second silence that follows, adding one shot of my own. It helps that overblasts don’t need to be accurate; anything within about ten feet works fine.

I’m up and running the second my round explodes, splashing my way through a dozen yards of sour marsh and boggy ground. The gunman’s on his side, hands tight to his ruptured ears. One of his eyes is pulped and blood oozes from his nose, but he’s still conscious enough to try to crawl away from me.

He dies in silence.

Swiveling the belt-fed, I turn it toward the hill where the enemy pulse cannon is busy cutting down the troopers advancing toward it. A handful of our militia are trapped halfway up a slope; they’re what remains of the brigade I saw earlier.

A blast of belt-fed ceramic concentrates the minds of the Ilsevillect troops opposite. One of them swivels the blast cannon toward me, igniting a tree several paces to my right, which is pretty good for a sighting shot. Unfortunately for him, it frees our militia trapped on the slope below. I keep firing, just to make life more interesting, and by the time he realizes it’s time to swivel his cannon back to where it was, it’s already too late.