David Gunn - Death's head

“Move out,” I tell them.

Shil has packed all the food in the kitchen. When she tells Maria to carry it, Maria adds the bag to her own without complaint. Two rifles are slung across Shil’s back, another three rest against her hip; she’s tucked pistols into her belt, five of them that I can see.

No one needs that many weapons, not even me.

Only Shil is giving them away the moment we leave the house. “Take this,” she says, and such is the determination on her face that the boy does what he’s told. “You’ll need it,” Shil tells him.

He looks puzzled.

A couple of minutes from our door and she’s down to one pulse rifle and a knife tucked into the side of her boot. She keeps these two weapons and her silence for the rest of the journey.

“What’s going on, sir?” asks Neen. He’s carrying the bag his sister gave to Maria.

I shrug, not daring to put it into words.

The battle for Ilseville’s outer ring lasts thirteen days. This is how long it takes the Silver Fist to destroy the river gates, swamp the outer city with their soldiers, and fight street to street and house to house until a circle of flame swallows the entire area. Sixty thousand of OctoV’s troops remain outside the inner walls when those gates get locked.

Mostly they’re militia.

All will die.

We know that, the enemy knows that, it takes those trapped a while to catch up. Group after group falls back toward the inner gates expecting to be let in. Some swear and others just accept their fate. Mainly it’s the mercenaries who go down fighting. Given how the Enlightened feel about those who fight for money rather than belief, it’s not a surprising choice.

Their slaughter is viewed by neutral observers and watched with horrified fascination across the known galaxy. Haze patches us between Uplift and U/Free but there’s small difference between their data feeds. Our troops are killed in running fights and bitter last stands; little is added by way of commentary because little is needed.

And the Enlightened are clever. They wait until the afternoon of the second day, when a group of our militia captures and beheads two Silver Fist officers, before launching their most vicious attack.

Over the course of three and a half hours, a single high flier seeds and reseeds the offending section of ghetto with flamefire until the buildings eat themselves and those inside become fragments and ash.

“Do something,” Franc begs Haze.

We have rockets targeting the high fighter, but most of our batteries are busy protecting the inner city, and anyway nothing we own can eat its way past the fighter’s defenses. As if to prove this, a rocket explodes impotently, and the high fighter casually flies through the explosion, fire dripping from the rear edge of each wing.

“Please,” she begs.

Hunched over his slab, Haze shakes his head. Tears are rolling down his face, which is thinner and older than when the slaughter started. “I can’t,” he says. “I don’t have that level of power.”

“Power?” says Neen.

“Control,” he says, amending his words hastily. I leave them to it.

Have you ever stayed drunk for six weeks? Believe me, it takes real effort. Hot Bar Wild is gone, obviously enough. It’s that black patch of ash down near the river’s edge, between those two patches of ash that used to be warehouses.

I can go down there if I want, in theory at least, because a new truce has just been announced, and it’s going to last just long enough to take us all to the edge of deep winter.

That’s probably called strategy by the U/Free.

As I said, there’s a Hot Bar Wild in every city, and if you get really lucky or the city is really scuzzy, you’ll probably find two, or three, or four…

The SIG and I go hunting for alcohol.

We find it first at a cellar bar behind the cathedral, inhabited by Ilseville’s lowlife. They glower and glare, but once I put my gun on the table and my gold behind the bar they decide it would be simpler to leave me alone. And I’m impressed: No one even gets hurt while we’re reaching this decision.

I’d share the colonel’s supplies, but that offer he made me of a place on Ion’s ship nags at the back of my mind. So much so that I waste some days in the bar just wondering whether or not to kill him.

His offer and the explosion could have been a coincidence. But then as the gun reminds me, I could have been a career sergeant in the legion with a long and impressive record behind me, Franc could have kept her knife use for the kitchen, Haze could have been born virus-free, and Shil could have fallen for my sophisticated charms.

We leave Maria out of it, because she’s normal. In fact, we can’t really work out what she’s doing with us in the first place.

“She opened the door,” says the SIG. “Remember?”

Thinking about it, I do…

On the third day Neen tracks me down.

“Sir?”

If I really concentrate, I can see only one of him. “Sergeant.”

He wants me to return to the house. I tell him it got burned and he tells me he means the new one. I send him away anyhow.

The gun and I move bars. Frederico’s is above a machine shop, backs onto a laundry, and is approached through a particularly unsavory railway arch. It takes Neen five days to find me and he comes back every day for weeks. He even tries staying to drink with me, but I tell him drunks are boring and he’d be better off staying at home to fuck Maria.

We’re now halfway through the new truce. Forty-two days of enforced stalemate while trained negotiators shuttle between Colonel Nuevo and the Enlightened general.

It’s going to fail. Everyone in the bar nods when I tell Neen this. It’s going to fail, because these things always fail. You’d think the U/Free would have learned to stop trying by now. Everyone nods at that, too…

The final bar is built into the city’s inner walls. You have to know someone in the previous bar to discover that this bar exists, which is fine, because by now I know pretty much everyone in the previous bar. They’re survivors, like me.

A pimp called Vice-which may or may not be his real name-introduces me to the madam. An old ex-militia sergeant, given to wearing silk dresses and too much rouge.

Leave your gun at the door, reads a notice. Apparently it was put up as a joke. A lot of strange things go on at Madame Jess’s. There are racks, whips and chains, and a room with a plunge tub so cold it freezes around you if you sit inside it for too long.

This isn’t surprising, since snow now hides the blackened ruins beyond our windows and helps keep the corpses from stinking. Ice has closed the Ilseville River, and the Silver Fist are using the truce to build better camps and reinforce their positions. Enough of the customers at Madame Jess’s think the U/Free favor the Enlightened for me not to bother to disagree.

The madam even has a pair of nude contortionists to entertain her customers. I think they’re the two from Hot Bar Wild, but that could just be the alcohol, or maybe nude contortionists are a type. And it’s weird: You always think you want to meet a woman who can get her knees behind her ears, but when you do, it’s like having sex with a sea anemone.

“Visitors,” announces my gun.

So I help the contortionist untangle herself and struggle back into my trousers. She leaves with a gold coin and a smile that lasts almost as long as it takes her to reach my door. I don’t know what she says, but Franc is grinning sourly as she comes into my chamber.

“Nice,” she says, taking a look at the rack and chains. I’m looking for the irony, but she seems to mean it, and that makes me wonder a bit about home life with the Hazes of this world, or her world, or whichever world is appropriate.