David Gunn - Death's head

“Helmets,” I tell everyone.

Neen has to go upstairs.

Pulse rifles at the ready, we hit the street. At which point something becomes obvious. My team are militia and I’m Death’s Head, but many of the soldiers out here are neither.

We’re outnumbered by mercenaries. Not legion-type mercenaries: Sign on, get paid shit, and die to order. These are the other kind, freelance looters, people discharged from militias for being too vicious or damaged to take orders, ex-penal-battalion officers, the sweepings of half a dozen prison planets, people like the person I might have been.

“What?” demands Shil, seeing me stop.

I wait.

“Sir.”

“Mercenaries.”

“Came in on the final drop,” says Haze, and then blushes.

He’s been up all night, patching himself into the data feeds. We have quite an audience, apparently. Propaganda is one of this war’s greatest weapons. It’s why OctoV complains about U/Free observers, Greater Council monitors, and freelance data collectors, but lets them in anyway.

“Take point,” I tell Neen. “We’ll be right behind.”

He leads us between dying bonfires and drunken troopers being kicked back to sobriety. Gunfire comes from a low-lying district ahead, which explains the column of black smoke rising in front of us.

The batwings are back.

“That’s not possible.” Haze is staring up at the sky.

Rolling as languidly as a fish surfacing, a tiny plane twists itself around its own axis and drops like a supercharged stone. It keeps dropping and a second column of smoke joins the first.

“Someone’s controlling them,” I say.

He nods, and Franc points beyond distant walls to where another batwing is dropping from the clouds.

“What does it mean?” asks Franc.

It means we’re fucked.

But I don’t say that, because that’s one of the things you just don’t say. “Insurgents,” I tell her. “Must have a few left over from yesterday. Not sure how they’re controlling them.”

There’s another Uplifted, obviously.

A gap stands like a broken tooth in a row of houses ahead. The buildings on both sides are cheap, fiber-made, and already rotting. Past the gap, the ground dips and we can see even cheaper buildings beyond. In the middle of these stands a metal turret, black with age and ringed by shacks that huddle below what look like flying buttresses. After a second, I realize they’re fins.

“What happened to the house?”

The trooper stops, registers my rank, and salutes. “Control post, sir. Got hit just before dawn. Killed a captain.”

I let the man go, and he scurries away with obvious relief. The next person I see is Major Silva, still looking neat as always and still wearing his tiny spectacles. He greets me with a smile, which tells me all I need to know about how serious this situation is.

“The colonel’s waiting.”

We follow the man through a roadblock, under a bridge that supports a broken railroad, and into the rubble of the ruined building.

“Sven…”

“Sir.”

“They had a belt-fed in the turret and snipers everywhere…” He steps closer. “Lieutenant Uffingham volunteered to clean them out.”

“What happened?”

“You’re the new senior lieutenant.”

Apparently my Obsidian Cross automatically gives me five years’ seniority. I can take a wild guess how the other lieutenants feel about that, not that I care.

“We’ve got rockets,” I say. “Why not just blow the thing to fuck?”

Colonel Nuevo’s eyes flick sideways, and I see a girl wearing the uniform of a recognized U/Free observer.

“Meet Paper Osamu,” he says. “She has plenipotentiary status.”

Plenipo…what? “He’s ex-legion,” my gun tells her. “Up through the ranks. He doesn’t understand stuff like that.”

“There are civilians down there.”

“And up here,” says the gun tartly. “Doesn’t stop the machine heads crashing their planes on us.”

“They’re not machine heads, ” Ms. Osamu says, pronouncing the words with distaste.

“Well, they’re sure as fuck not human.”

At this point I take Colonel Nuevo’s unspoken advice and put my gun back into sleep mode. The next few seconds are wasted as Neen and I go into a huddle. It’s obvious from the shock on the faces of my fellow officers that they think this outrageous. But too many battles have been lost because officers were too grand to take advice from their NCOs.

“Anyone else have an opinion?”

Franc wants to attack from the front; Haze wants to hack into the batwings and corrupt them, preferably from the safety of a cellar several miles away. Neen’s already had his say, and Shil keeps glancing toward the tower.

“Say it.”

She shrugs.

“That’s an order.”

Tight-lipped, she scoops away a handful of dirt, and then carves a line next to it with her dagger. She’s looking at me as she does this.

“Okay,” she says. “That’s the river…and this is their tower.” She stabs her dagger hard into the depression. Taking Neen’s dagger, she cuts a much shorter line from her river to the edge of the dip. “That’s our canal.”

Standing up, she fills her hands with water from a puddle and tips the water slowly into the tiny river, letting it run through the canal into the depression.

“Welcome to my world,” she says. “Where if you’re not trying to find water, you’re trying to get rid of it.”

The others nod.

If we had a combat satellite we could burn the ditch with that. Of course, if we had a high-orbit laser we wouldn’t need to cut a ditch, because we could obliterate the tower without damaging the ghetto around it. This makes me wonder where General Jaxx’s mother ship has gone.

All the same, it’s a neat answer to a difficult question and it should keep the U/Free observer happy.

So I go find Major Silva. “Can you give me troops?”

The major looks slightly shocked. When he comes back it’s with Colonel Nuevo. The U/Free observer is following along behind.

“I hear you want more men.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many?”

“About five hundred.”

Colonel Nuevo’s eyes widen. He doesn’t like being surprised in front of Paper Osamu. “You want to attack the tower with five hundred men?”

“No, sir. I want them to dig a ditch and flood it.”

I can tell he’s disappointed. We’re his suicide squad, afraid of nothing. We exist to irritate his other officers, keep them unsettled. Safe options and engineered solutions are not welcome.

“Haze,” I say. “Explain to the colonel why this makes sense.”

The boy looks stricken. He’s fumbling for a reason when he stumbles over the real one. “There’s an Uplifted inside, sir.”

Haze thinks about it some more and realizes the obvious. “The Uplifted is controlling the batwings. So it’s still fully functioning.”

“If we destroy the tower,” I say, “we risk killing the thing.”

The colonel gets his smile back.

Five hundred men dig for the best part of a day. Being militia, they expect the shitty jobs. I want the mercenaries to do it, but it isn’t my choice and Major Silva insists they’re being saved for later. The grim satisfaction in his voice when he says this is reassuring.

Warnings are broadcast and transport is arranged. And when everything is ready, the women, children, and old men are evacuated under the suspicious gaze of Paper Osamu, licensed witness and plenipotentiary for the U/Free. We begin to flood the tower just before nightfall.

Back at the house, Neen retires to his room, while Haze goes to play with his slabs. Franc excuses herself, and about an hour later the smell of baking fills the house.

“Didn’t know we had a drexler.”