David Gunn - Death's head

I move.

We find the silverhead two streets later, entering a road Neen is already on, although the silverhead enters it from a doorway on the opposite side. A clever trick, one I’d always believed a myth until then.

“Oh shit,” says the gun.

The silverhead has stopped, almost as if listening intently. And my gun’s gone very quiet indeed, to the point of stopping its lights exactly where they are.

If one myth is true, how about another? Ripping a throwing spike from its sheath on my wrist, I waste a fraction of a second finding its sweet point and flick it free from my fingers.

“ Got you, ” says the silverhead, turning.

He becomes aware of my throw as the spike hits his shoulder. Injury locks the Enlightened into now.

“Can I suggest subsonic?”

My gun sounds happy to be back in the game.

Two shots take the silverhead to his shattered knees. And then, extracting my dagger, I simply walk up to the whimpering creature and drag my blade hard across his throat.

He flickers from view, but the damage is too serious. For a second he’s almost transparent, and then he reappears, just in time to let my knife finish taking the head from his body.

Self-proclaimed god or not, he drops like a wall collapsing.

“Good riddance,” says the gun.

A sweep of my dagger and most of the silverhead’s scalp comes free. There’s flesh beneath the shell, so I scrape it clean and cram the mass of steel braids onto my own head. It’s a tight fit.

What am I going to do about those tubes?

Discarding the jacket I stole earlier, I slash open my shoulder and stab my hip…It hurts like fuck, but I do it anyway, and then I force the fattest of the tubes into the open wounds and watch flesh begin to seal itself around them. Black’s not really an Enlightenment color, but my prosthetic arm is definitely not normal and that’s good. And my gun, that’s definitely not normal, either.

“Flash faster,” I tell it.

“What?”

“Make like winter-tree lights.”

The SIG does so, with very bad grace.

“Neen?”

The boy turns, catches sight of me, and swears. I’d grin, but silverheads take themselves far too seriously for humor.

“Fall in,” I say. “All of you. We’re going to visit the Uplifted.”

No one stops us as we cross a square; no one even glances our way. A child almost does and is slapped into silence by her father, who bows nervously without ever meeting my face. If this is the response the Enlightened elicit, I’m not sure I like them much, either.

Neen stalks ahead, his rifle ported across his chest. The three girls, who are actually two girls and an increasingly sulky Haze, walk behind like a shadow, stopping when I stop and keeping their eyes on the ground.

Up ahead is a steel gate cut into a foamstone wall. A guard stands on either side. These are real soldiers, not militia. We’re being watched, scanned by some kind of lenz above the door, and one of the guards is already unporting his gun.

He’d kill Neen as soon as look at him, but my braids and the gun, which is now chanting Uplift prayers, give the man pause.

“Open,” demands my gun, taking a break from its chanting.

The guard falls back before us.

He wants to stop me but can’t bring himself to touch someone he believes Enlightened. The mistake costs him his life, as Franc jabs a blade under his jaw and up into his brain.

Neen kills the other guard, a savage swipe of hardened steel across his jugular. It leaves Neen soaked in blood, but I understand this well enough. The trooper’s washing away the memory of his earlier kill, giving himself something legitimate. From the grin on Franc’s face, it doesn’t look like she’s too bothered about stuff like that.

“Stand back.”

Neen blows the gate out of its arch with a belt mine and we’re inside, guns held combat-style and our eyes scanning an inner courtyard. It’s not what I expect. Someone’s roofed the entire area in spun glass, which shifts through a thousand patterns so swiftly that it makes my eyes ache.

“Don’t look,” Haze tells Franc.

She drags her gaze away from the ceiling.

The floor beneath our boots is a thin skim of water over huge squares of marble. Colors drift in the water like opalescent clouds, not mixing but passing through each other in fingers of pure purples and blues.

A door ahead begins to open and Franc raises her pulse rifle.

“May I?” she asks.

I nod, and a soldier goes down with most of his skull missing. It’s a clean shot and Franc’s grin is wider than ever. She lived under Uplift occupation, I remind myself; she’s bound to have issues.

We hit the corridor beyond and kill everything we see. A NewlyMade, skull still soft and first braid still growing. A full-blown two-braid, too shocked at being attacked to phase out in time. A handful of guards, who die before they realize what’s happening.

A girl sees us and begins to scream. It’s Franc who takes her aside and quiets her down, talking intently. She’s the daughter of the two-braid, hunting for her father. We all know what she doesn’t, that her father is already dead.

As the slaughter ends, a couple of women appear, utterly human and crippled with fear. Neen pointedly indicates the door behind us and tells them to get the fuck out of here.

I nod. Shil smiles. The earlier incident is forgiven.

“What now, sir?” Neen asks.

“We find the Uplifted.”

Everything I’ve heard says Uplifted are vast pyramids of diamond and silicon, able to protect themselves from anything. When I told Colonel Nuevo my Aux could take one, I was boasting; he must have known that.

“It’s up those stairs,” says Franc. “The girl told me.”

“Why?”

“I told her we were here to protect it.”

“It’s here, sir,” says Haze. It’s the first thing he’s said to me since I made him wear a woman’s shawl half an hour before. “I think it’s sick.”

He’s right.

A small metal pyramid hangs from an intricate web that spreads across most of the ceiling. A fist-sized diamond hangs from filaments at the pyramid’s center. Lights run the length of every strand in the web and within the pyramid itself. They run unevenly, in a stuttering motion that lacks the fluidity this object deserves.

A dim light pulses at the diamond’s center. Only Haze could equate an Uplifted to a machine. And yet…

“What’s wrong with it?”

Dropping to his knees in front of a tangle of filaments, Haze takes a closer look. “Burnout,” he says. “You want me to fix it?”

“Can you?”

“I can try.”

That’s good enough for me. The Uplifted comes apart in a burst of flame and static. As I drop my pistol back into its holster, Haze is staring. “Fuckwit was flying the batwings,” my gun tells him. “You want to face those again?”

There are some simple rules to occupying a city. Rule one says grab yourself a good base. That doesn’t mean somewhere secure, because if you lock a city down properly even the ghettos are secure. It means find somewhere warm, dry, and comfortable, preferably with its own stock of food and a cellar full of alcohol.

Hotels are good, as are clubs, glitzy bars, and posh houses. But we’re in Ilseville, where the first three of those are rarer than hen’s teeth.

I order the Aux to head uphill, because hills usually equal expensive-unless they’re absurdly steep, like in Farlight. Of course, finding a hill in Ilseville isn’t easy. The city’s mostly flat, being built on a floodplain. The few hills that do exist are artificial, made from silt dredged from the Ilseville River back when the wharves and landing stages were built.