David Gunn - Day of the Damned

Sliding my hand into his jacket I find his ID.

Same face, false name. Unless it was false last time round. Makes me wonder if the whole crew signed on with false papers. This makes me wonder something else . . .

‘SIG,’ I say. ‘Check the black box.’

‘There isn’t one.’

Of course there is. It’s bad enough not logging the journey. But no black box? My gun will tell me Olber’s Paradox isn’t carrying an emergency beacon next.

‘Hey,’ the SIG says. ‘Guess what . . .’

The U Free, who own three quarters of the galaxy, don’t approve of unregistered ships. Being on the United Free’s non-approved list is a bad place to be. Of course, the U Free don’t own anything. As they’ll be the first to tell you. They are a Commonwealth of Free Peoples united in their wish for peace.

The fact we still use money amuses them.

On their planets, houses build themselves, the weather does what it’s told and everything is free. Our habit of killing each other amuses them less. So they provide observers to ensure we slaughter each other according to the rules.

Break the rules and bad things happen.

Planets find themselves in different orbits. Whole sun systems disappear. Galactic maps get redrawn. The U/Free talk quietly. But they carry a very big stick.

OctoV doesn’t approve of unregistered ships either. Of course, his list of capital crimes would fill a book. Probably does. But we’re talking serious here. Death for the captain. Death for his crew. Quite possibly death for the owner.

Our glorious leader and his ministers don’t object to smuggling as such. They just want to make damn sure they get their cut.

‘I mean it,’ the SIG says. ‘No recorder.’

Either this is black ops, or the captain came from so far out-system he didn’t know the rules. We can skip that because Carl would have told him. So that means we’re dealing with black ops.

Not good, given Anton promised OctoV to stay out of trouble.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks me.

‘Forgotten something.’

‘What?’

‘My coat.’

Same flies, same headless cargo loader, same stench on entering the crew quarters. A woman lies on top of my coat, and her guts are rotted to the softness of jam. So I scrape the worst off with my knife, then take the thing outside and scrub it with handfuls of dirt.

‘He had your coat?’ Anton’s looking at me strangely.

‘Yeah. It’s a long story.’

‘We’ve got time.’

‘He hasn’t.’

Anton helps me load Carl into the scout car.

Using back roads, we loop round to approach Wildeside from the opposite direction, arriving as the sun is starting to set. Not sure it’s going to make any difference. If OctoV is lenzing us from high orbit, he’ll have been tracking us the whole trip anyway.

Debro’s not sure if she’s delighted to see me alive, furious we’re so late back, or prepared to wait to find out what happened. Being her, she decides to wait. And her anger fades when she sees Carl. Peeling back his shirt without wincing at the stink, she checks his broken ribs and Aptitude’s handiwork.

She’s impressive, Debro.

Aptitude is going to be like her when she grows up. Aptitude just doesn’t know that yet. ‘Get him inside,’ Debro says. Anton and I carry him between us.

The room she chooses is down three flights, and in the far corner of the palazzo. We’re underground. I’m wondering if there’s any significance in that when Debro’s next question tells me, yes . . .

‘You plan to tell me where you found him?’

I shake my head.

‘Sven . . .’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘But Aptitude and Anton know already.’

‘Then you’d better make sure you’re the one who replies if anyone comes knocking. Hadn’t you?’

She’s smart enough to know that’s an answer in itself.

When I’m twelve a legion lieutenant puts a pistol to my head.

It misfires. Maybe he can’t be bothered to try again. Maybe he decides the goddess luck, that whore whose favour soldiers need, has decreed I should live. Alternatively, he’s so drunk he forgets why he was going to shoot me.

All of these are possible.

A week later he marches me into the desert.

That’s me, him and two dozen volunteers who’ve just completed three weeks’ basic training, max . . . He carries a camelback water carrier, dried meat and his Colt automatic. I carry a camelback, his spare clips, a compass and a sliver of mirror for signalling when the radio doesn’t work.

This is most of the time.

At first, I think he’s taking me out to finish off what he began five days earlier on another planet. But why take two dozen others with him? And why bother to swap one shit hole for another?

We march for a week.

After two days our camelbacks are empty.

The water hole we find on the third day is brackish.

That’s the term he uses. He means it’s almost black and stinks of death and tastes of corruption and salt. Vomiting and the bubbleshits keep us busy for the next two days. Between the vomiting and soiling ourselves we march south, headed for a horizon that always stays just out of reach.

The sun is hot.

But it’s the nights that kill.

The temperature drops so fast it seems impossible the heat in the sand beneath our boots can be squandered so easily. Blue skies turn black. And birds swirl briefly in the scarlet gap between the two and then disappear.

We don’t know where.

On the seventh day, Lieutenant Bonafont makes a joke about resting that no one else understands. He tells us that over the next dune is our fort. The furthest south of any fort the Legion Etrangcre has ever held on this planet. He was here more years ago than he wants to remember.

He’s right, there is a fort.

If you can call a mud-brick ruin, with cracked corner turrets and a broken double-pillared gate a fort. It needs rebuilding, Lieutenant Bonafont tells us. He’s sure we can see that for ourselves. To rebuild it, we’ll need bricks.

Does anyone know how to make bricks in the desert?

‘Piss,’ he says.

So we do. He has me work the sand with a shovel until the mix is wet enough to be slopped into a wooden form and tamped down. Shovel, form and tamp are not words I’ve heard before.

One form makes twelve bricks.

We have five forms but not enough piss.

We’ll make more tomorrow, he tells me. He’s wrong, of course. There is no tomorrow for most of us. As the moon crests a dune far to our east, a wailing cry breaks the silence.

A boom follows.

Our new bricks blow inwards, and damp sand scatters across our tiny parade ground. A grenade comes to rest in the open doorway of the stores. Our sergeant, wall-eyed and bald, grabs the grenade, tosses it inside and slams the door.

The quartermaster screams his fury but dies anyway.

As does Sergeant Nero, who falls back with a spike of door jutting from his belly. It’s the second splinter, the one through his eye, that kills him.

I see him die by the light of a flare our corporal desperately tries to stamp out. His boots spread phosphorus. Until the whole parade ground around him is lit with a sullen glow.

‘Where’s your fucking rifle?’ he screams.

Seems little point saying no one gave me one.

Anyway, a Kemzin lies at my feet, its owner killed when the wall blew in. So I grab it, and work its lever as I watched the corporal do that afternoon.

My first shot kills a tribal.

And has the corporal screaming treason.

Apparently, firing before the order is given is punishable by death. As he heads in my direction, I work the lever again and point the Kemzin at his gut.