David Gunn - Death's head

“The colonel will never accept it.”

“Let’s ask him,” I suggest.

At the captain’s side one of his lieutenants nods.

Taking a demand for surrender to a ranking officer can be regarded as a bad career move for anyone hoping for a long-term military career. Such a point obviously occurs to Captain Mye, because he stops just before we reach the colonel’s HQ and turns to me, his face serious.

“As his ADC,” says the captain, “it’s your job to tell Colonel Nuevo. Particularly since you were the one to negotiate with the silverhead.”

So now it’s a negotiation. I smile to show my understanding. “You’ll be coming in with me, of course?”

Captain Mye decides this is acceptable.

The four guards on the door to the old bank are down to three. I consider asking what happened to the other one but let it go.

“Is the colonel busy?”

All three nod. The guards look scared and tired and so far out of their depth that they’re drowning without even knowing it in a cesspit of betrayal and politics.

“You’re relieved,” I tell them.

It takes a moment for my words to sink in.

“Lose your medals and badges of rank, find a pulse rifle, and get yourself up to the walls. Mix with the others; go back to being ordinary soldiers. Steal a militia uniform if you can. That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Their relief is obvious.

Inside Colonel Nuevo’s HQ the pretty blond girl is gone and so are the colonel’s cook, his maid, and all the food in his kitchen. Someone’s let the fire go out in the boilers. So the captain and I go down to the strong room alone.

“Colonel?”

Pretending to hear an answer, I nod to myself and slide my way through a half-open door. “Shouldn’t take long,” I tell Captain Mye.

The stink inside is appalling. Shit stains the colonel’s trousers, and what is left of his brains has liquefied and glued itself to the carpet. His watch cuts into a bloated wrist, and a rat has been chewing at his fingers.

I’d vomit, but I’m used to it.

On the table lies the canister with its lid still open and its red button waiting for my finger. I can return to five-braid Ison and blow her, the ferox, and most of her bloody army into small pieces. Of course, doing so will kill the Aux, what’s left of our army, and every family still left in Ilseville, but that’s war…

Or maybe it’s politics.

As if one isn’t just the flip side of the other.

Shutting the top, I twist a band that locks the lid into place and unscrew the base. A needle-thin hydrogen trigger drops onto the desk. I pocket it and reach deeper into the cylinder, hooking out the core with my bare fingers, and then I sit at the table, pull a piece of folded paper from my jacket, and write my own orders. After that there’s only one more thing I need to do.

The single bullet I put into the ceiling ricochets off the strong room’s underlying steel and damn near kills me.

“That was intelligent,” says my gun.

What I say isn’t for repeating.

“We surrender,” I tell Captain Mye, showing him the paper.

“I heard…”

“A shot, yes. Colonel Nuevo has taken his own life.” I shrug, as callously as possible. “Only to be expected in the circumstances.”

“General Jaxx will require a second witness,” says the captain, reaching around me for the door handle.

“Sir,” I say.

He’s halfway into the vault when he realizes what he sees. Captain Mye tries to turn back, but I’m one step ahead.

It takes death to wipe the shock from his face.

After wrapping the captain’s hand around the grip of Colonel Nuevo’s gun, I thread his finger through the trigger guard.

It looks like suicide to me.

On hearing colonel Nuevo’s decision, Five-braid Ison gives us until the following dawn to prepare our surrender. I reckon she needs that long to round up a decent collection of lenz, observers, and U/Free data collectors.

Her demands are simple: We will surrender. All weapons will be given up. Any shot fired in anger will be regarded as having been fired by all. The Death’s Head are to abandon Ilseville as individuals. No marching and no massed ranks. The galaxy will see a shambling defeated mass, stumbling gratefully toward captivity.

In the hours that remain I disband the Aux and give each a handful of coins taken from Colonel Nuevo’s strong room. My final order is simple: They will destroy their alligator-skin patches.

They are local militia, pressed into service by me. Their gratitude at being rescued by the Enlightened knows no bounds.

A hundred scores are settled that night. A group of militia trap three Death’s Head in an alley, kicking two of them to death. If they’d killed all three they might have gotten away with it. But five Death’s Head walk into the militia camp less than an hour later and gun down a dozen soldiers in revenge.

The first night in a month that the enemy aren’t trying to kill us, and we’re busy killing ourselves. Tomorrow we surrender, without honor, without being allowed to retain our weapons, and with helmets held in our hands as we leave the city.

News grabs of Ilseville’s fall will spread everywhere.

The U/Free already know. Their observer general left the inner city this afternoon, given safe passage and an honor guard by the Enlightened. They’re playing it safe, the Uplifted; showing how civilized they can be. All those rumors of mass slaughter and cities burned are lies, obviously. Look at us, their actions say. How can you compare us to the Death’s Head? In what way are we like OctoV?

In the meantime we are destroying ourselves in a frenzy of fear, hatred, and retribution, and you can bet the U/Free know that, too.

When the time comes, I go join the defeated.

I give Franc my dagger. My gun I leave with Haze.

Five-braidison flies out half an hour after we surrender. Before she goes, Ison makes a speech for the gathered lenz about inviolable borders, territorial integrity, and what happens to people who underestimate the Uplifted. The speech is addressed to OctoV; at least that’s what she says, although it sounds more like it is addressed to the U/Free to me.

And then, with Ison gone, we’re herded into a column and told we’re to march south, toward the harbor at Mica and waiting transport. This is where we’ve been heading ever since.

Anger keeps me from stumbling. Anger and common sense, self-preservation and pride. Our column’s been on the road for five days now, marching into sleet and a poor pretense for snow, as if chasing the last echoes of winter. The sick and the wounded, the starving and the weak fall daily, shot through the head or trampled under the unthinking boots of those behind.

“ Move, ” I snarl at the woman beside me.

Dragging my boots, I force one foot in front of the other and keep walking through the mud, despite the fact I’m supporting the redheaded sniper, although almost carrying probably describes it better.

Who knows what her name is? She fell fifteen minutes ago. So a Silver Fist officer upended her, raised her buttocks into the air, and took her at the roadside, putting his pistol to the back of her skull before he’d even withdrawn.

And then he caught me watching.

“You going to carry her?”

Stupidity made me say, “Yes.”

So now I’m carrying a sobbing woman who wants to know why I didn’t just let the bastard kill her.

We sleep beside a ditch, tentless and without food, while our Silver Fist friend inflates a bubble tent and eats self-heating ration packs. Uplift rations are probably as vile as our own, but hunger gnaws at my guts like a fox and I’d eat pretty much anything.