David Gunn - Death's head

“Come on,” I say.

She screams at the shock of the water, but not seriously, and anyway I’m in there first and it isn’t really that cold. After washing away my own filth, I attack what looks like a lifetime’s dirt on the girl in front of me. Her skin is pink, unquestionably paler than mine is.

When I splash the girl to rinse her, she splashes back. We laugh, fight in a lazy fashion, and then I scrub grit from her scalp. Most of the dirt in her hair is too ingrained to come free, but by then Anna’s probably cleaner than she’s ever been, and finishing the job is the last thing on my mind.

From the speed with which Anna grapples me, one of her knees still dragging in the water of the pool, she must have been wondering what took me so long.

Most people who talk about animal sex haven’t tried it; or if they have, they’re probably locked up where they belong. This is different. Anna looks human but behaves like an animal, and right up to the point where she sinks her teeth into my neck and rides herself to real screams, I’m uncertain which she really is.

So loud are her shouts as they echo off the cave walls that I expect Youngster to appear, anxious to discover the cause of the fuss. Only he probably already knows, because the ferox are open about sex, which is entirely hierarchical for them and mostly to do with power and prestige.

I’m talking about the males, obviously. I doubt if anyone asks the tribe’s females for their preferences. Anna and I rut endlessly over the next few weeks and keep rutting as the cave system grows hotter and food becomes ever rarer.

The ferox grow sluggish and bad-tempered. A young bull is killed. Youngster says it was a challenge fight to an elder, but everybody knows the battle was about food. I gut any prey the hunt finds, using my laser blade to hack fresh kills into crude joints. No one worries about cuts of meat; they just want food quickly.

As the heat rises, the food situation gets worse. The chief takes most, the females eat scraps, and the pups grub in the dirt for insects. I should have seen what was coming, we both should…

Come now.

“Me?” I ask, surprised.

Youngster nods.

When he tells me I’m needed on a hunting trip, I’m more than puzzled. For a start, I’m slower than he is and less able to move silently, and I’m already weak with the bubble shits; but five groups are going out that evening, and if Youngster wants me to hunt with him, then hunt with him I will.

We eat well that night. And it’s only later, with my hands full of scraps for Anna, that I realize she’s gone. The others are restless around me, unwilling to help me find her, so I track down Youngster.

“Where is Anna?” I demand, already fearing his answer.

Gone, he says.

“Where?”

It is a fairly stupid conversation.

We ate, he says. You ate. Now she is gone. If the hunting does not improve, we begin to eat the pups.

I land only one punch before his backhand throws me against a cave wall. When I roll to my feet with the laser blade in my hand, two other ferox are standing beside him.

Challenge? asks one.

“No challenge,” I reply.

The ferox avoid me after that. They watch from the corner of their eyes, tensing as I turn corners in a tunnel to meet them. I’ve gone from being a member of the tribe to being a problem. I can smell hesitation on their fur, a restrained fury that sees them turn away from me.

My anger is more open, less wise.

The pool where we first bathed is almost gone, but I use what water is left to wash out my mouth, then take grit and scrub the fingers that picked crudely roasted chunks of flesh from that evening’s cooking fire. And I sleep curled around a dark void that is my anger, until someone shakes me awake in the early hours of the morning. It is the youngster, the mixture of scents rolling off him too complicated for me to translate.

He picks me up. Human? he asks.

Behind him, ferox shuffle in a passageway.

“Not human,” I reply.

The youngster allows himself to look doubtful and my guts churn, not from what I have eaten but from what may come next. His paw is holding my face, and a yellow sickle of claw is visible at the edge of my sight, ragged with use.

We talk later, he says.

I nod.

A hundred miles beyond the frontier, trapped in an underground cave system with ferox, in the middle of a summer so hot that the water in the deepest cave pool will eventually be reduced to dampness and nothing…I am in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and that has to be the history of my twenty-eight years to date.

I sleep alone, I eat alone.

In so doing I reduce my food intake to scraps and sacrifice the company others might bring me. It is the only way to keep my anger in check.

The laser blade stays in my pocket.

Pups who once regarded me as an object of interest start to bristle if I come near, as if what is thought by their elders filters down. Still-soft armor strains to flex, heads are raised, and half-grown fangs are bared, so I nod and smile and begin to count the days until high summer comes to an end, because this heat can’t last much longer.

After all, how long can it take some scuzzy little planet to negotiate the shallow bend of its solar orbit?

Flamefire is right…

When the attack comes it’s not against me, and comes not from the tribe but from outside. I still wonder how Youngster knew it would happen. Can ferox read the future? Or is the answer simpler, with rumor running through his world as swiftly as our own?

“Death’s Head.”

The cry is amplified.

A human voice stretched by electronics into a weapon itself. Its source might be a hundred or more paces away, but my head still hurts from the sudden blast of noise.

“Surrender Now.”

The words are said for form only. No quarter is asked or given.

Above and below, from the sides, through fissures in the rock, tunnels, and natural chimneys, the attack appears to come from every direction at once.

The Death’s Head clear the cave system with flamethrowers, using the lower vents to flood the main camp with gas, which they then ignite. And flamefire pours in from above, sticky and stinking, igniting everything it touches and flowing relentlessly downhill toward the caverns where the females and the cubs hide.

What had been hot became an inferno.

Fire curls against rock, and the darkness of the caves becomes an unholy half-light, with ferox in flames like moving candles. They die fighting, because that’s the way it goes.

Instinct tumbles me into the last of my pool of water, and common sense holds me there, my face barely above the surface as oxygen burns out of the air and my lungs begin to choke. Anybody who tells you they don’t feel fear in battle is a liar. Fear keeps you alive, by focusing the mind so you know that what you’re about to do is not some childish game.

This is my own side; these are my own people. Maybe that’s why I’m so terrified.

Youngster dies as he lived, in silence; but I hear his death inside my head, even without a knife to summon his thoughts, and his screams are no less terrifying for being silent.

I’m huddled in my pool at the end of a deep tunnel, crouching in the water when a Death’s Head appears. Raising his pulse rifle, the man sights along its barrel and begins to tighten his finger on the trigger.

It’s instinct alone that saves me.

Throwing myself to one side, I scream at the top of my lungs before he has time to take a second shot. “Human.”

The man hesitates, and that hesitation saves my life. Up goes his visor, his lips already moving as he relates the news to his commander or someone else on the surface. “Human,” I hear him say.