David Gunn - Death's head

Molten metal splashes my face like tears.

On the other side is a long ladder rising into darkness. It leads where I need it to lead.

The streets that the Silver Fist own are as quiet as ours are, equally deserted. I’m tempted just to knock at the first door I reach…Knock at the door, kill whoever answers, and riff this thing from there, but I have no idea how many guards the average three-braid keeps on call.

So I do it the difficult way.

A pipe runs up the front of the house. My Death’s Head uniform is black, it’s nighttime, and few lights show in the outer city. Even the campfires across the river are fewer than last week, but the silver moon insists on slipping from behind its clouds, and I find myself frozen beside a second-floor window as a five-man patrol passes underneath.

No one looks up.

Sliding my dagger between the window and frame, I catch the lock and hear it break with a slight crack. The room is dark, and I’m almost inside when I see a middle-aged woman alone in bed. She sits up and opens her mouth, but closes it again when I put a finger to my lips. It’s probably my gun that concentrates her mind so quickly.

We’re lit by moonlight.

“Shut it,” says the SIG.

She does.

If there’s a discarded uniform on the floor then she’s dead anyway. But it’s okay: A dress hangs over a chair in one corner. The dress is expensive but filthy, the shoes worn at the heel and trodden down at the back.

“Ilsevillect?”

She nods, begins gabbling at me in Ishvelict, so I put my finger to my lips again, switch to common tongue, and tell her to keep quiet, go back to sleep, and tell no one she was awake when I came through.

“They’ll kill you,” I tell her.

“And if they don’t,” says the gun. “We will.”

The look on her face says she knows that already.

Outside the door I wait, wondering if she’ll scream. When she doesn’t, I take a peep through the door and find her already feigning sleep, her head buried firmly under the covers.

The room opposite contains a major, plus a blonde young enough to be daughter to the woman across the landing. They’re asleep in each other’s arms, blankets pulled up tightly.

“Subsonic ceramic,” suggests the SIG, “quarter charge, hollow point, preset fracture lines.” It’s just showing off.

The man’s a Silver Fist.

At least he was.

My shot passes cleanly through his ear canal, cuts his brain stem, and ricochets off the inside of his skull, splintering into fragments that pulp his cerebellum as surely as if I’d just dropped his brain in a food mixer.

“Now who’s showing off?” asks the gun.

The girl will wake to find a dead man in her bed, but at least she’ll wake, and given he’s three times her age and she’s got a split lip I think she’ll cope.

“Scan warning,” says the gun, and before I can ask Scanned by what? the bloody thing kills its laser sights and turns itself off. So I tuck the SIG diabolo into my belt and talk to myself instead.

A floor below this I find two guards standing outside an ornate door.

They die quickly.

Wiping my dagger, I slide it back into its neoprene sheath and pull out my laser knife, tuning its blade to invisible. It’s a wasted effort, because the three-braid is sitting up in bed and his eyes are fixed firmly on the blade in my hand. Should have known the Enlightened could see across a wider spectrum, just as I should have known who was scanning for weapons.

“You won’t get away with this,” he says.

“Want to bet?” says the gun, snapping out of sleep mode. And then to me it says, “More guards heading this way.”

“He call them?”

No one’s clear what power braids have. Certainly not on our side, and probably not theirs. The Enlightened have a lot to gain from keeping everyone ignorant.

The three-braid’s still smiling smugly when he realizes I’m not where I was. That’s because I’m behind him, one hand reaching over his skull to hook my fingers into his nose and yank back his head. He does that flicker thing, but it’s too late. Meat sears as his throat opens, and my blade seals every artery except the last.

“Steps on the stairs.”

Another silverhead, junior enough to have only one braid, but still a silverhead…I kill him fast, and then shoot both his NCOs through the head, hearing brains slop against a wall.

“And again,” says the gun as another two soldiers burst into the room.

It’s chosen subsonic, or maybe I chose that myself. A pull of the trigger and both men go down. I burn out the three-braid’s implant and grind his memories under my heel. That, as much as his death, is what will upset everyone in the morning.

Shutting the door behind me, I hesitate.

A booby trap is what I need.

Gumming a belt mine to the inside of the door, I set it for two movements and use up the first shutting the door behind me.

A light shows in a top window.

Darkness stretches out for five floors beneath. It’s a rich house, almost ornate for this city; built by a foreign fur trader, perhaps. People will travel a long way to make themselves rich, even to Ilseville.

The front door is bolted, the windows have locks, and an alarm system winks from above the rear door. There is undoubtedly an alarm system on the front as well, probably made less obvious by a blanket of snow. Three floors up a window is open and a tiny red dot flares and vanishes, flares and vanishes.

A soldier is smoking.

I try to remember what rules the Enlightened have about such things and fail. Most of their rules seem more concerned with what you may or may not eat, wear, or sleep with. All the same, the man obviously doesn’t want to be caught.

“Flechette or regular?”

The gun practically snorts. “What do you think?”

Setting itself for flechette, the gun signals ready and I wait for my victim to take another drag. That tiny red dot makes the perfect target. By my reckoning the shot takes him under an eye socket and blows out the top of his skull, missing his brain stem entirely but trashing his frontal lobe.

Spiraling like a dying firefly, his cigarette extinguishes itself at my feet.

The wall is rough, handholds easy to find. All it takes for me to climb in through the window is pushing his body out of my way first.

A flight of stairs gives way to another, and I climb both in silence. The house is cold, my breath visible in a slash of light coming under one door. It seems I’ve arrived at the right place. Killing the person most likely to raise an alarm is pretty basic really, and in a house full of sleeping people, anyone awake has got to be the obvious target.

I’m hoping it’s the Enlightened, but it’s a man very like me. Young, but old enough to have seen something of life. A soldier, who reaches automatically for a gun, because instinct is already running ahead of his thoughts. Our eyes meet and outrage flicks to resignation, without passing through fear.

He dies cleanly, on his feet and facing me.

Silently I say a prayer for a similar death when my time comes, then touch stone to keep that time away.

The other guards die less well.

A shot to the chest, a shot to the throat. A kick to the balls, a twist of someone’s head, and a snap loud enough to wake a silverhead in the room beyond. He gets his shot in first and I find myself hitting a wall, my face flattened by an expensive wall hanging as the blow spins me around. That’s my blood, splatter-patterning antique cloth.

It’s bad, almost as bad as when the ferox took my arm. Reeling that thought in, I check my status…My prosthetic arm is in place, my legs are unbroken, and my head turns, though it hurts like fuck, which is good, because not hurting at all would be far worse. All that’s wrong is a hole in my chest. He’s missed my heart, but that’s probably not difficult. Half a dozen women will tell you I don’t have one.