David Gunn: Day of the Damned

General Jaxx approaches a wall and spins on his heel, his timing perfect as his left boot stamps on marble, his step echoing like a rifle shot off the walls of the emperor’s audience chamber.

Twenty paces later, he turns and heads back. He marches with the iron determination of a man who remembers being whipped for marching out of step. In that memory he’s eight, his first year at the Academy.

A fire burns in the great fireplace. OctoV likes to be warm. Or maybe he just likes his generals to be uncomfortable. The emperor wears full dress, and expects his officers to do the same.

The difference is he wears his lightly.

On the wall OctoV takes salute from his victorious troops. One of them is the general’s great-grandfather. He stands behind a major in the Wolf Brigade, whose fur cloak must be vile in that heat.

General Indigo Jaxx is both younger and older than his emperor. OctoV was fourteen when the general was born. He was fourteen the year the general’s father was born. He’s been that age for as long as anyone can remember.

The general runs a hand through his cropped hair.

It comes away wet.

OctoV, the glorious and victorious, the undefeated and ruler of more worlds than any man can count, whose sweat is perfume to his subjects . . .

Some generals vomit before an audience. Others kill themselves. One gave his ADC his own rank badges and told him to pretend. Both died the death that act deserved.

‘Meeting him is like having your brains extracted, liquidized and returned by someone using a mallet and a blunt spoon.’ The officer who wrote that left his own brains across the note on which it was written.

But Indigo Jaxx is not just general of the Death’s Head, the emperor’s elite force. He is Duke of Farlight, the most powerful man in the empire after OctoV. And since OctoV is not strictly a man at all . . .

Aware his marching could be seen as nerves, General Jaxx stamps to a halt, pivots on his heel and stares out of a window. His heartbeat is steadying and his pulse slowing. When he sweeps his fingers through his hair they come away dry.

His body knows what his mind has yet to accept.

It has stood down its defences, untied the knot in his gut, dried the sweat on his ribs and replaced all three with a cold certainty that makes no sense but accepts no refusal.

OctoV is not going to show.

This afternoon’s audience between the emperor and his empire’s most loyal subject, General Indigo Jaxx, has been cancelled.

Taking a look around the audience chamber, the general nods grimly. His staff wait beyond the door, and under no circumstances must they discover the meeting never took place.

‘Sir,’ says Jaxx loudly.

This is what he always calls the emperor. The only one of OctoV’s subjects allowed that latitude.

‘Yes, sir,’ he says. ‘Certainly, sir.’

Having counted to a hundred, he bows himself out.

‘Back to HQ,’ he growls.

As General Jaxx leaves the palace without noticing a Wolf Brigade general’s amusement, he considers what the emperor’s decision to cancel the meeting might mean, and knows it is not good.

The lizard’s mistake is to move. The moment it swaps granite for red dirt and the temptation of food, it’s dead. Because my blade hisses through the air to open its spine from skull to tail.

It’s a small lizard.

All the big ones are eaten.

Picking it up with metal fingers, I hold it over the fire until its flesh crisps and the skin peels. The man I offer to share with doesn’t want to. So I bite off its head, chewing happily.

‘Sven,’ Anton says. ‘That’s disgusting.’

It’s not disgusting at all. It’s hot and salty from the grass and the saline bugs filling its stomach. Believe me, I’ve tasted worse.

‘He only does it to annoy you,’ says a voice.

My side arm has been sulking since we landed yesterday. It wants battle. It wants slaughter. It wants glory and another chip upgrade. The SIG’s got a wolf hunt instead. Pulling the gun from my holster, I toggle it into silence.

‘Can I look?’ Anton asks.

He takes the SIG-37 carefully. The piece has that effect on people. Full AI side arms are rare. Not to mention illegal. ‘Pretty,’ he says, handing it back.

Not sure that’s the word I’d use . . .

‘Yeah, I know,’ Anton says. ‘Never ask a man if he’s Legion. He’ll tell you if he is. If not, there’s no need to embarrass him.’

In my case telling people is compulsory. That’s because I was once busted back from sergeant, and the law wants troublemakers identified early, particularly dangerous ones.

We’re near the edge of the rift, hidden in scrub.

A fire burns behind us. Dry kindling and dry wood so it makes no smoke. A freshly killed rabbit roasts above it. The spit is made from thorn and I trapped the animal two minutes ago. Anton’s hungry and still refusing to eat lizard.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘it’s good to see you.’

I’m waiting for the but.

‘But we thought . . .’

‘OctoV suggested it,’ I say, cutting him short. ‘And a suggestion from our glorious leader . . .’

‘So the general had no option?’

‘None.’

Anton is shocked. As well he might be. I’m here on leave at OctoV’s suggestion. The idea that our glorious leader should bother with the welfare of a junior lieutenant, even a useful one, is so absurd I’m wondering about his real reasons. So is Anton, from the look of things.

‘It’s strange,’ he says,’ how little Debro and I know about you.’

‘What’s to know? I’m a Death’s Head lieutenant.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Before that, a prisoner on Paradise.’

‘And before that,’ he says, ‘the Legion Etrangcre . . . Sven, that’s not really an answer.’

Sounds like one to me.

He tells me most people, if you ask them who they are, tell you about their family or their childhood, where they grew up, what they wanted to be. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘What is your earliest memory? Debro was wondering.’

Killing a dog. I’m five, maybe six. The dog is bigger than me. But old and toothless. The dog has only one canine. I have a brick.

I win.

Before I can drag the dog into hiding, older boys take it.

One of them uses the brick I used on the dog. When I wake, they’re gone and so is my food for the week. The smell of meat leads me to their fire. From their surprise, they weren’t expecting me to get up again. But I mend fast. How much faster than others I don’t know back then.

And I fight dirty.

Kicking embers at one, I knee another between his legs. He’s old enough for it to matter. A third turns to run and I kill him with my brick. They should have taken it with them.

No one argues when I go through the dead boy’s pack and take his blade.

The dog is too hot to carry. So I use my new knife to cut free a half-cooked leg and spend the next two days throwing my guts up.

Anton wishes he hadn’t asked. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘maybe you shouldn’t tell Debro after all . . .’

Three hours to darkness. To be honest, I’d rather be here on my own. But it’s his hunt. I’m only here because Debro, his ex-wife, thinks I’ll keep him safe. Although the sour smile on their daughter’s face when we leave says she believes the opposite.

‘Something wrong?’

‘Why?’

Anton glances at me. He’s been doing that lately. Mostly when he thinks I’m not looking. ‘You’re grinding your teeth.’

‘Thinking about Apt.’

That’s Lady Aptitude Tezuka Wildeside, all of sixteen.

He decides teeth-grinding makes sense.