David Gunn - Death's head

Helping the enemy is a capital crime. Around here, practically everything is.

“They cut it with their claws,” I tell him. “A hundred miles from their camp, they shaped ballistic-strength ceramic from memory, with every single sheet proving a perfect fit.”

Whatever the major is about to say gets chopped short by a single glance from the colonel. “You’re saying they’re intelligent?”

I think about this. “Maybe not in a sense we understand,” I say. “But they’re organized and they plan ahead.”

“And you talked to them?”

“Yes, often.”

The colonel shakes my hand, which is so unlike a senior officer that I’m immediately suspicious. He wishes me well and says he’ll probably see me again. A few hours later the major comes back to tell me I’ve been tried in my absence, found guilty of desertion, and condemned to death. Since I’m to die at dawn, the major suggests I spend what remains of tonight making peace with whichever God the scum from my planet embrace.

With morning come six soldiers in the combat dress of the Death’s Head elite. They tote pulse rifles across their chests and wear dark glasses beneath their raised visors. An affectation, since we are still barely into half-light.

“You,” they say. “Come with us.” There must be a boot camp somewhere that teaches these people how to speak.

Two of the Death’s Head drag me from my cell, which is actually the luggage hold of an air copter. It’s an overhot, sticky, and deeply unpleasant place to spend the last few hours of my life.

The major waits at his chosen spot, stamping back and forward in irritation, as if my death is just another inconvenience keeping him from breakfast. “Stand him over there,” he orders.

Death’s Head troopers are far too professional to roll their eyes at the stupidity of a senior officer, but if they did, now would be the time to do it. A natural wall is formed by an outcrop of sandstone, so it’s fairly obvious where I’m meant to stand.

When a trooper tries to blindfold me, I begin to struggle. God knows why I ever took that stupid vow, but promising to face death with my eyes open seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

“Leave it,” says the major, sounding bored. “We’ve wasted long enough.”

I stand where I’m told to stand.

As an unexpected mark of respect, the sergeant flicks off my cuffs to let me face death freestanding and unbound.

“Don’t try to run,” he tells me.

“The legion never run,” I reply. “We stand and we die.”

The look he gives me is almost sympathetic. And suddenly it seems more important than ever to die well.

So when they raise their rifles and sight along the barrels, I stare back. My head is high and my body locked so solid that my arms and legs refuse to shake.

“Load,” says the major.

The sergeant nods, his response instinctive, and I watch his finger begin to tighten on the trigger. He will shoot first and the rest will fire in the split second that follows his shot. This is how the Death’s Head work, the legion also…

Unless free fire is declared, firing before your NCO is a capital offense, much like lying under oath, treason, and hitting a senior officer. And if not for an eccentric interpretation of those rules by my old lieutenant, I’d be dead long before this anyway.

As it is, I was simply broken from sergeant to private for wanting to hit a senior officer. Actually, I had hit him, but the lieutenant decided it was the wanting he found offensive.

As the sergeant’s finger reaches trigger pressure he locks his eyes on mine, which takes guts, because you need courage to look someone in the eyes as you take his life. That’s why killing is a young man’s job and it’s old men who send them out there.

I nod, to signify I’m ready.

And he smiles.

It’s a clean shot, a hit to the chest. I barely have time to register this fact before five other pulse rifles fire in unison and darkness takes me.

You don’t wake… This is my first thought. You don’t wake after someone shoots you with a pulse rifle. Largely because there isn’t enough of you left to wake up again.

My second thought is, God, that hurt.

Even the memory of having my arm ripped off by a dying ferox has paled before an ache that locks tight my chest and forces my lungs to fight for each breath. Every nerve in my body feels on fire.

“Lowest setting,” someone says.

When my eyes finally allow themselves to focus, I realize the voice belongs to the colonel, who is sitting on the end of my bed, cleaning a handgun that seems to be constructed mainly of glass.

Since I was shot in the middle of the desert, and beds out there are few and far between, I decide I must be somewhere else.

Lowest setting?

“Bullshit,” I say.

Beyond the edge of my vision, someone laughs.

“We adjusted the power packs,” says the colonel. “A small modification, but my own.”

“Why?” I demand.

Again that laughter. “You were right,” says the voice. If I didn’t know better I’d say the colonel is relieved.

“You can go,” the voice adds, and the colonel almost scurries from the room. I wait and the voice waits and after a while it sighs.

“A legionnaire?”

I nod, and then, in case that was not enough, add, “Sir.”

My reasoning is that anyone who can send a Death’s Head colonel from a room deserves all the respect he can get. I have no idea quite how right I am until the voice became a man at the edge of my vision, in simple black and silver. And the man turns out to be General Indigo Jaxx.

I know who he is. Everyone knows who he is. The general has single-handedly prevented an assassination attack on our dear leader, throwing himself in front of a crazed woman whose son was killed in the eastern spiral.

“You were a sergeant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why were you broken?”

“I hit an officer.”

He looks at me, considering. “I didn’t hear that,” he says. “Let’s try again. Why were you broken?”

“Insubordination.”

“What kind?”

I blink…Most officers aren’t even aware there is more than one kind. “I refused an order,” I tell him. “Then punched out my lieutenant before he could issue his order to anyone else.”

General Jaxx sighs. “And what was this order?”

“Shoot the lieutenant, shoot everybody else, and then shoot myself.”

“That never happened,” says the general.

“No, sir.”

“Why,” asks General Jaxx, “would he have issued such an order? Had he, which he did not.”

“He was drunk, sir. And bored.”

“This was at Fort Libidad?”

“Yes, sir. The boredom killed him eventually.”

“And then the ferox killed everybody else.”

I nod.

“Except you,” he says, holding my gaze.

We’ve come to the crux of the problem. We both understand that, and I’m the one who is surprised, because it has never occurred to me that I’m important enough to be a problem, at least not to anybody over the rank of lieutenant.

“Colonel Nuevo wants to kill you,” says the general. “This would be the commonsense answer. Luckily for you, Major Silva sometimes has his own opinion on things.”

Walking to the window, General Jaxx looks out at a landscape denied to me. I have no way of knowing if I am in Karbonne or even on the same planet. The temperature in this room is controlled, and walls of black glass keep me from whatever is outside. Also, I’m lashed to the bed with a woven band across my chest and another above my knees, but low enough to keep my legs from moving. I am, however, definitely still alive, and this is more than I have any right to expect.