David Gunn - Death's head

“You were a guard?” She’s reassessing.

“A prisoner.”

“And now you’re a Death’s Head officer?” says Haze, finally turning to look at me.

“Things change.”

He glances away, and then looks back when he thinks I’m not watching. So I hold my laser blade higher and light a little more of the tunnel through which we walk. Everyone has secrets, but I’m pretty certain that boy has more than most.

“How much do you trust Haze?” I ask Neen a few minutes later.

“With my life.”

“You understand,” I tell him, “I’ll be holding you to that?”

Slime slicks under our feet and guano streaks the walls. A quick flick of my blade toward the roof reveals endless bats, hanging silently. Tiny sullen eyes watching us as we pass. The only good thing that can be said about their ammonia stench is that it takes our minds off what is to come next.

“How do you know which tunnel to take?” Shil asks.

Increasing the intensity of my blade, I sweep it along a wall. When it dims, Shil is still puzzled so I step behind her and take her shoulders, feeling her freeze beneath my grip.

Now would be a really good time to let go. But I don’t, because that would mean admitting I’ve noticed. Instead I angle Shil until she’s looking toward the wall, pass her the laser blade, and take her arm at the wrist, bringing the brightness closer to the crumbling concrete.

“All of you,” I say.

A scuff in the bat shit stands out, where the ferox stumbled and its fur left traces of feathering. A shift of her wrist lets the brightness highlight a much larger scrape, just above the waterline.

It’s the heel mark of a ferox.

Instinct makes me take the last half a mile in silence. This is the way the beast came, and it was held at the Trade Hall. So I already know it is possible to get from the sewer to the hall; the question is, where did the ferox enter the system?

Water is rolling out of small pipes jutting into the tunnel, and it’s also beginning to rush through sluice gates on either side of us. In the city above our heads it has just begun raining, and gutters are channeling the runoff into this sewer.

We can cope with the water rising, because if it comes to it, we’ll just swim. But I’m anxious not to lose the tracks of the ferox.

“Over there, sir,” says Haze.

I flick my blade toward that wall.

He’s right: There’s a scuff mark at shoulder height.

Another scuff a hundred yards later shows the beast kept to that side of the tunnel for a while. The current is harder over there, because the tunnel curves away from us, and a rusting ladder has been bent away from the wall of an access shaft by the weight of something heavy.

“Take a look,” I tell Neen.

Shil shakes her head, the action utterly instinctive. So far she’s done everything Neen tells her, younger brother or not, but I refuse to have things unravel between them if the situation gets serious, and it’s going to get serious.

All five of us need to understand that.

“Neen goes,” I tell them.

He climbs swiftly and vanishes from sight. We wait for five minutes and then ten. I’m about to call Shil on her simmering anger when we hear footsteps on the ladder above.

“Difficult climb,” says Neen.

“How far?”

“A hundred rungs or so, but the ladder finishes at a ledge halfway up. After that there’s only wall.” His voice is matter-of-fact, despite grazes to his hands and a nasty gash on one side of his head.

“Fell,” he says, seeing my glance.

“Do we need ropes?”

“No, sir.” Neen shakes his head. “I’ve worked out a route…”

The streets around the Trade Hall are almost empty. A truck that spits smoke, a couple of electric three-wheelers piled high with furs, business still going on as normal, despite an army camping beyond the gates.

Few people bother to look as Neen and Franc saunter under a broken arch and find themselves in a narrow alley. Militia uniforms are much the same everywhere: combats and boots, cheap helmets and web belts. Haze hurries out behind them, then makes himself slow down.

Shil goes next. She still looks like a boy at first glance, and probably second glance as well. Had it been just the four of them everything would be fine. But I’m there as well, and it’s hard to mistake me for anything but what I am.

A professional killer.

A woman turns, nudges another. A man on a gyro bike stops to see what they’re looking at and finds himself looking straight into my eyes.

Idiot, I want to say.

He opens his mouth to shout and I cross the street in a blur, wrap one arm around his thick neck, and twist savagely. The crack echoes off a nearby wall. Neen kills one of the old women and Franc kills the other. She does it cleanly and savagely, a single stab to the heart, then a swipe across the throat.

I’m speechless. Also impressed.

Grinning, Franc wipes her knife on her trousers and thrusts it back into its sheath. Her eyes catch Haze’s glance, and he nods. When I look at Franc again she’s humming to herself.

My sergeant, meanwhile, is looking at his sister, who is anything but happy. After a second, he goes back to lowering his victim to the ground. Quite how a man that thin manages to support a woman that fat beats me.

“Right,” I say. “Drag them into the tunnel.”

Franc reaches for her victim, and Haze moves forward to help.

“Shil,” I say. “A word…”

The others pretend not to hear.

“Franc and Neen just saved your life,” I tell her. “They saved my life, and they saved Haze’s life, too. If that happens again, I expect you to act faster.”

“They were women,” she says.

“So are you and Franc.”

“Old women,” says Shil, close to crying. Although I suspect it’s more with frustration than anything else.

“Was that going to stop them raising an alarm?”

I wait for her answer and, after a few seconds, she shakes her head.

“No,” I say. “It was not.”

On my orders Shil and Franc take the dead women’s scarves and wrap them around their own heads. After a moment’s thought, I take a shawl from one of the women and make Haze wear this as a scarf. All that puppy fat makes him look like a girl anyway. When they’re done, I discard my own jacket and struggle into the trench coat of the man I’ve just killed.

Now we’re two men and three women, all militia.

“Walk on,” I tell them. “Eyes down, talking quietly. Step aside, be polite, and salute anything that looks like it needs saluting.”

“And you, sir?” asks Haze.

“I’ll be a hundred paces behind you. If you hear a disturbance keep walking.”

The silverhead who begins to follow Neen made the change decades before the trooper was born. He’s tall, swathed with a mess of tubes that loop from his ribs to his legs. The virus has strung steel plaits from his skull, which ripple as he walks. He’s a five-braid, and he’s an arrogant bastard, far too sure of himself to worry about covering his back.

“Hey,” says my gun. “Take a look at ugly.”

A full battery pack and settings that only require it to forecast a handful of seconds into the future have made the SIG hyperactive, happy, and talkative. I preferred the thing in fuck-off mode.

“You know,” the gun says, “that silverheads used to be human? Some of them quite recently…”

Just as I think the SIG’s about to riff off silverhead history, it stops and half a dozen diodes beginning to flick through a rapid sequence.

“Phasing,” it announces.

“What the fuck does-”

And then I find out, because the silverhead walks confidently toward a wall and disappears in a shimmer of light.

“Move,” says the SIG.