David Gunn - Death's head

The man does what he’s told. No one suggests we might want to pay.

At the table we toast one another, our unit, and the stupid fucking war. And then Haze produces a pack of cards and we begin to play. About ten minutes later a man in a leather coat with a pistol stuffed in his waistband saunters over. He’s thin, gray-haired, and wearing one of those really obvious cerebral implants. His T-shirt reads HAPPINESS IS A WARM BELT-FED WEAPON.

Removing a glove that is weighted across the knuckles and armored around the wrist, he thrusts out his hand. “Ion,” he says.

We shake.

He nods at a spare stool.

“It’s an open game,” says Haze.

So the man pulls up the chair and Haze deals him in, taking five gold coins from him in the first three rounds. Understandably enough, Ion’s not happy. Round four sees him win two coins back, round five sees him win another two, and the round after that gives him two more, meaning he’s one ahead.

The man folds his hand, excusing himself from the game.

“Have a drink,” I say.

Ion fetches himself a glass from the bar. We’ve made him happier than if he won ten coins straight. It’s weird, but then what makes people happy often is.

“You think this is a bad gig?” asks Ion. It’s the opening we’ve been waiting for.

“Yeah,” I say. “Real bad.”

Ion empties his glass, pours himself another one, and toasts the fresh-washed gymnast who’s just come back on, to a mix of catcalls and rapturous applause.

“You know,” says Neen, “I’d be surprised if even a quarter of us get out alive.”

Listening in, a woman asks, “Why?”

Haze drains his glass; his hand is steady, but his elbow misses the table. You wouldn’t know it’s the first alcohol any of us have had all day.

“General’s fucked off,” says Haze, and a couple of mercenaries at the next table exchange glances with each other.

“Gone,” says Neen. “Pissed off to Farlight.”

“Yeah.” Franc’s voice is hard. “Apparently he’s gone home to a warm bed.”

Ion looks interested, although that’s probably because he’s just realized Franc is a girl; with her shaven head and baggy uniform it can get hard to tell.

“And then,” says Haze, “there’s that flotilla of Uplift landing craft crawling up the river. Thousands of the fuckers.”

“Landing craft?”

“X-Seven-i’s,” says the SIG, refusing to be left out. The designation means nothing to me, but the colonel was pretty sure it would mean something to them.

“Hex-Sevens?” says Ion.

“Yeah,” says Haze. “And then just to really screw things…Jaxx’s seeded the entire fucking upper atmosphere. No one gets in or out for six months.”

“You sure?” It’s a man from a table two down.

When Haze dips under the table, half a dozen men reach for their guns. But all he’s after is his slab, which wakes as he flicks his finger across its surface.

Everyone waits.

“Here,” says Haze, pushing his toy across the table to Ion, who glances at the screen and then takes a long hard look. A weapons set is clearly visible. Behind it sits another, with another behind that and another in the distance. If you look carefully and check their alignment you’ll see they form part of a pattern.

“How the fuck did you do that?” demands Ion.

And Haze flinches.

We’ve lost him. He’s out of the loop and back to being the pudgy kid in the corner no one wants in their game. Franc touches his arm, almost diffidently, and I watch Haze tense and then relax.

“Ball busters,” says Ion, he’s talking to a mercenary at the next table. “Fucking thousands of them.”

The man pulls up a stool without being invited.

We’d make a deal of it, but this routine is running itself, and we have the attention of half the bar. The music’s dead and the contortionists have gone back to sulking, probably because they can’t find anyone to buy them a drink.

“How do you know about this?” the uninvited man asks.

Neen glares at him, a real thousand-klick stare. That flat-eyed-snake routine Colonel Nuevo runs without even thinking about it. Neen’s hardened in the brief time he’s been on this planet.

“We’re Death’s Head auxiliaries.”

A lot of people go very quiet.

“What, the fuck,” Ion says finally, “is a Death’s Head auxiliary?”

“Like mercenaries,” says Shil. “Only we get paid less, we do nastier jobs, and we get to work for men like him.” Shil is looking at me as she says this, and I’m not entirely sure she’s joking.

I smile anyway. “Sven,” I say, introducing myself. “Lieutenant Sven Tveskoeg, Obsidian Cross second class.”

“Bullshit,” says a woman. You can say one thing for mercenaries, they speak their mind.

“You don’t look like an officer,” adds Ion, staring at my arm.

“Lost it killing a ferox.”

“Yeah, right…”

Anything else the uninvited man is likely to say gets lost as Neen palms a gun and puts it to the man’s head. “Now’s a good time to say, Fuck, that’s really impressive. ”

The man does as he’s told.

Ion’s looking at me. He’s grinning. “You’re the maniac who gutted a lagarto, then cooked it and started handing bits of alligator around?” He looks really pleased to see me. “Always wanted to hunt one. What was it like?”

“Big,” I say. “Ugly.”

“What did you use to kill it?”

I tap my pocket. “Laser blade, seriously useful. Used it on Paradise to cut tunnels in the ice. That blade can do pretty much anything.”

“Paradise?”

“Yeah. I got sent there by accident.”

A man I don’t recognize suddenly grabs a spare stool from another table and places it very close to mine. He looks like he’s working out whether he can take me. We both reach the same conclusion: He can’t.

It’s one of those you-and-whose-army moments. Given my army is sitting at my back and most of the drunks in this place don’t look as if they’re about to volunteer to be any part of his, the man’s not very happy.

He is, however, seriously angry. “You were a guard on Paradise?”

“Not a guard,” I say. “A prisoner.”

The man blinks. That’s impossible, he wants to say. No one gets out.

Ion is laughing. “Don’t tell me,” he says. “They made you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Swap all that for all this.” I gesture around Hot Bar Wild, with its vomit-stained floor, sulking strippers, and metal-grilled windows. As I said, we could be in any strip club, in a thousand different cities, on a hundred different planets, we just happen to be here.

“And now,” I tell Ion, “I’m going to make you a similar offer. You and a hundred close friends can swap all this for anywhere within ten star systems of here. Onetime-only offer. You get to leave three days from now, in the only ship with a key code for getting through the ball busters.”

I’ve got his total attention. “What’s the catch?”

“You have to live that long.”

Someone swears, and Ion holds up one hand, silencing them. “Lay it out for us,” he says.

In the early hours of the morning, with most of the city still ignorant of the horrors about to happen, I hear clattering downstairs and find Haze crouched over a bucket in the kitchen, vomiting.

“Alcohol,” he says.

He doesn’t want me to think it’s fear.

A towel is wrapped around his head, and when Haze comes down to breakfast he’s wearing his Death’s Head cap. He eats almost nothing, yet still looks bulkier than he did a week before. Also, he’s sweating.

“Hangover,” says Franc when she sees me watching.