David Gunn - Death's head

Help, he says.

And as I prepare to protest that I’ll be no help at all, I realize he’s reached into the door and is prying away one hinge. Great gasps come from his throat, and I know that whatever we find has to be worth his effort.

Swords, by the hundreds.

What is it with crazed dictators and cavalry? We have no mounts and the dunes are totally unsuitable for heavy horses, but we still have sabers by the thousands. Also, we have enough new-model pulse rifles to turn a whole desert’s worth of sand to glass. These are locked down, without barrels or power packs, and a chain runs through each trigger guard. From the way the youngster’s glance sweeps over them he doesn’t recognize them as weaponry.

Just as well.

Of course, with the barrels in place, the guns would still need charging and unchaining. The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems to me that the new lieutenant was destined to die-deserved it even. He just didn’t need to take a bunch of half-trained boys with him, but since that was what he was himself…

In one corner is an old box covered with dust, fixed to the wall with an explosion of spiderweb containing everything from mummified flies to the desiccated corpse of the spider itself. MEDICAL SUPPLIES says the side of the box. EMPTY, announces a red sticker slapped across its top.

The blade is where I left it five years before.

“We don’t want this falling into anyone’s hands,” the old lieutenant told me, in that way of his that left me uncertain whether he meant what he said or intended the direct opposite. Maybe he was saying, Make sure this gets into unsuitable hands.

He’d be capable of it.

Other officers succumb to wounds taken in battle or self-inflicted. Lieutenant Bonafont suffered terminal ennui. So terminal that one day his heart simply stopped beating.

Maybe a laser blade in the hands of a homesick recruit would have provided entertainment enough to keep him alive. In which case I failed, but then the old bastard failed us all by shuffling off his mortal coil and leaving us in the care of some child doing a six-month tour of duty.

“Got it,” I say.

The whipping post comes apart like fat melting in the sun. I cut from below, slicing away at the wood until a steel spike is revealed. After that, removing the skull is simple: A couple more cuts, a flick of the wrist, and the trophy comes free. I’m armed again, of course. I wonder if the ferox realizes that.

“Here.”

The skull has a nail hole in the top but still looks pretty good for something that’s been scoured by desert winds for the best part of five years. I treat the object with respect. For all I know the ferox indulges in some form of ancestor worship. I really don’t want to blow my survival at this point.

No, he says faintly.

Flicking on my weapon, I touch its blade to the back of my hand and hear his voice grow louder.

You carry it.

Three days and a hundred miles later I meet the first woman I’ve seen in five years. I’d like to think I’d be impressed even if she wasn’t naked, although it’s hard to put an age to her to begin with, because she’s smeared with dirt and her hair is so long it falls around her shoulders and hides her upper body.

And I’m not being disingenuous. When I first see her, it’s dark and I’m tired and she’s running across a cave floor on all fours, her breasts hanging low like the teats on a sand wolf.

Human? The young ferox is intrigued by my interest.

I nod.

We’ve been thrown into each other’s company during the desert crossing. I’ve come to learn the meaning of at least five basic smells, while the youngster now realizes that the way I articulate my head carries the meaning of two of these.

He points at me. Not human.

I’m not inclined to argue, since the youngster’s certainty that I’m something other than her seems to be one of the things keeping me alive.

“Sven,” I agree.

Pointing to the girl, who has frozen under his gaze, the ferox tells me she’s mine, but first I have to meet the elders. This is inevitable, I suppose. Everything about the ferox is tribal, and tradition for them seems to be interchangeable with law. In fact, both concepts come from the youngster as a single thought.

The very idea of elders suggests a solemn gathering, probably around a fire. Well, that’s what it suggests to me. The reality is simpler and much more boring. The youngster drags me through a huge warren of tunnels and caves, stopping only to tell every male he meets, Not human.

Not, they agree.

And then one of the pups, so young that his armor is still soft, brings me the girl. Human, he says, and I begin to understand the problem.

The girl is fifteen, maybe a few years older. From the way old whip scars cross her ribs it looks as if she’s moved on all fours her entire life. She can stand and climb and fit sideways through cracks in the rock that would stop me at the shoulder, but she can’t talk and when I lift dark hair from her face, there is nothing in her eyes but wariness and the sullen anger one expects from any caged animal.

I ask her name.

I ask her age.

I ask how she ended up living with ferox deep in the desert.

After a while, in disappointment and tiredness, I begin to demand answers to the impossible. Why is our beloved leader such a prick? What keeps the stars apart? Is God hardwired into our minds? If so, who did the hardwiring? The stuff that passes for serious thought in legion bars across the empire.

In a sweating tunnel hacked into a cliff face by a long-dead river, a hundred miles farther into the desert than any human is meant to have gone, I lose myself for a week in questions and thoughts of death.

She sits, she watches, after a while she brings me water.

“Thank you,” I say.

Nothing in her face suggests she distinguishes these words from the noises I make as I rage and weep and mourn for a hundred children whose names I’ve never bothered to learn.

In my defense I offer their slaughter, a desert hike that has reduced my feet to bloody pulp, and the fact that the first woman I meet in five years-and quite possibly the last person I will ever see-is little more than a ghost of what I believe humans to be.

Questions about her tribe, her mother and brothers bring no answers. A legionnaire quickly learns patois; how can we not? We take the sweepings of a fifth of the spiral arm and provide immunity from all crimes that have gone before, except treason, in return for certain death, the time and place to be the legion’s choosing.

Common tongue, city tongue, outlying worlds…

I even toss the girl words from traveler speech and machine cult but she recognizes none of them, and I am a man who can order a whore or a drink in fifteen different languages.

I began to agree with the ferox. If she is human then I am not.

Nor were the boys now dead at the fort, though the ferox have no way of knowing this. Nor were the women I knew in Karbonne. Nor my sister, who holds a family together in my memory, relying on sheer determination and guts when the money goes and an entire planet falls into poverty and chaos.

However, the girl is beautiful beneath her dirt. So I give her a name, though I’m uncertain she understands that Anna refers to her. Still, she quickly comes to recognize the tone. Anna shares my food, follows me like a shadow, and no longer flinches when I come within striking distance.

It’s not much, but it’s enough.

Things will improve, I tell myself. She’ll learn to speak. And in the meantime, if I want proper conversation I seek out the youngster and talk to him about the tribe and the desert and what went before. The tribe is old, a thousand chiefs if the youngster is to be believed; old, venerable, and very certain of their right to this land. They have only ever lived in caves, and their laws state-quite clearly-that nothing must change.