When I go in to breakfast, Anton’s at a table with Sergeant Toro. Leona is sitting opposite Anton, concentrating on her plate. It doesn’t look that interesting to me. Mary comes out from the kitchens, and puts a plate of cold chicken in front of me before I have time to sit.
‘You want coffee with that?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble . . .’
She scowls, then ruins it by grinning when I slap her arse in passing.
The next person to try it gets hot coffee in his lap. Since he, his boss and his oppos are on the point of moving out, and I’m looking over, he decides there’s not much he can do about it.
‘Sven,’ says Anton. ‘Our friend has a plan.’
I’m on the point of saying I’m not interested in plans. I want to get to Farlight, warn Colonel Vijay about General Luc and get Anton back to Wildeside before anyone discovers he’s missing.
Added to which, the idea of Debro having to defend her compound against stray furies doesn’t make me happy.
‘Toro,’ I say. ‘What do you know about furies?’
He looks up with a start.
‘Theoretically speaking.’ That’s something Aptitude says.
‘Theoretically?’ Sergeant Toro says it like he knows what it means. ‘Ugly bastards . . .’ He stops to consider his words. ‘I’ve met them in battle. Only once, Legba be praised. Don’t want to meet them again.’
‘Where was that?’
He names a planet even Anton doesn’t know.
‘They guard the Uplift temples at night.’ Swallowing most of his coffee, Sergeant Toro wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. As an afterthought, he wipes sweat from his bald scalp with his fingers.
I get the feeling this isn’t a good memory.
‘That’s what we were told. The metalheads wake them up when it gets dark and put them back to sleep come daylight. Use some kind of magic.’
He sees my doubt.
‘Just saying what we were told.’
I tell him about the Uplifted temple at Ilseville. I scalped a metalhead and used its braids as a disguise. He likes the story but doesn’t know the planet. When I figure I’ve made enough conversation, I get back to the questions that matter.
‘Can furies die of hunger?’
The sergeant’s gaze sharpens.
‘Just something that occurred to me. You know, maybe they could . . .’
‘Sven,’ says Anton. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I heard.’
Sergeant Toro glances between us.
And I see his point. This doesn’t sound like a conversation between a high clan member and his hired bodyguard to me either. ‘Maybe this is a bad idea,’ he says, scraping back his chair.
‘Wait,’ Anton says.
It’s only when I nod that the sergeant sits down again.
‘You’re right about the furies,’ he says. ‘Well, almost. They hibernate after three days without food.’
‘What wakes them up again?’
‘The smell of blood.’ He says it like it should be obvious.
‘Sven,’ Anton says. ‘If we could get back to the plan.’
‘In a minute . . .’ I’m trying to work out if giving the SIG to Aptitude was a wasted move or not. Aptitude uses wasted move, it’s to do with chess. If the furies are going to go to sleep then she doesn’t need my gun.
That pisses me off.
On the other hand, the furies might smell blood or attack before three days are up. That means she will need the gun. So then it was a good move. That’s why I need the SIG: it does this kind of thinking for me.
And I know what Sergeant Toro’s going to suggest anyway.
His version of Mary’s plan. Although his reasons worry me more.
Largely because he reminds me of myself. This isn’t someone who needs to travel in a pack. In all probability, this isn’t some-one who even likes travelling in a pack. So why saddle himself with an ex-Legion sergeant, a thinly disguised trade lord, and a militia sergeant, no matter how good?
The sergeant claims to know where Vijay Jaxx lives. This is more than we do. He used to work for the general, seemingly. I guess that means he did things too dirty even for the Death’s Head.
‘What do you reckon?’ Anton says.
He’s making it my decision.
Wise choice.
‘You know we’re on gyros. Single-seaters.’
‘So am I.’ Nodding to the door, he shows me a canvas heap in one corner of the courtyard. A new-model Icefeld lies underneath. A ground-to-ground missile system is bolted either side of the light. A stripped-down gearbox sits in the dirt. The flywheel of a gyro rests beside it. With a rat’s nest of optic.
‘Take me ten minutes. Fifteen at the most.’
A man after my own heart.
‘You’ve got until tonight,’ I tell him. ‘We travel in darkness and you’ll need to mask your headlights. ‘OK?’
He nods.
Sergeant Toro is as good as his word. His bike is back together, parked next to ours when I get downstairs, and its headlight is masked, and so is its instrument panel. Darkness has fallen, I’m buttoning my fly and Mary is waving from an upstairs window.
‘Sven,’ Anton says.
‘What?’
His gaze slides from mine.
Flicking my bike to life, I feel its gyro settle.
Anton rides behind me, Leona slots into place behind that and our newest recruit rides tail. As we move out, I see his gaze skim the windows to see if anyone other than Mary watches us go. He double-checks for snipers on the roof.
This man’s good.
Too good to need our company.
Makes me wonder again what he’s getting out of this.
We’re all used to the cold, which is interesting. Leona and Toro have done time in sub-zero combat zones. So they say when we stop to sit out the next day in the shade of a sandstone butte. In an hour, the road surface goes from ice-flecked and frozen to hot enough to fry an egg.
Even in the shadows it’s so hot it hurts to breathe.
‘Never thought I’d miss the cold,’ says Anton, and ends up telling Sergeant Toro that he’s just back from an ice planet. He leaves out the bit about it being a prison planet. And so I tell them about the siege of Ilseville, which I sat out in a ruined house, with snow banked against our ruined walls.
All that was left of most of the city.
Of course, I was drunk.
But that doesn’t change how cold it was.
Ilseville was where I met Neen, who became my sergeant. His sister Shil. A girl called Franc, who slept with her knives, loved cooking and could make rat taste like chicken. The other was a boy called Haze, who turned out to be a baby metalhead, complete with braids growing straight from his skull.
Always wonder whether I should have let him live.
They formed the core of the Aux. Short for Death’s Head auxiliaries. A name I gave them to keep the Aux alive when some of the regular Death’s Head were showing too great an interest in them.
Even the Death’s Head think twice before killing their own.
There was another, but he died quickly and I can’t remember his name. We picked up Rachel, our redheaded sniper, after Ilseville fell.
Franc died on Hekati.
That was later, half a spiral arm away. We won. OK, Hekati was destroyed, along with almost everyone we met. But it was a victory. Almost as glorious as Ilseville.
And we left that in rubble.
‘Sir,’ Sergeant Leona says, ‘you’re grinding your teeth.’
She takes one look at my face and apologizes. Excusing herself, she heads out of sight to take a piss or something. It takes her longer than it should. So I guess she’s sitting out my anger.
Firing up my laser sabre, I strip a thorn bush to twigs and a twisted trunk, then cut the trunk into equal lengths. The dry twigs catch quickly and within minutes I’m feeding the fire bits of trunk.
‘What’s that for?’ Anton asks.
‘Breakfast.’
Pulling a dagger from my belt, I check its point.
Not sure why I’m bothering. It’s as sharp as it was when I put it away. And I’ve honed the edge so sharp that flesh cuts like paper. I know that from the trickle of blood on my wrist when I draw the blade across my thumb.
‘Keep the fire burning,’ I tell Leona.
She nods, still buckling her belt. ‘Sir . . .?’
I turn back.
‘You want company?’
‘Work best alone.’
She grins. ‘Right you are, sir.’
‘Leona. You know how to cook?’
‘Yes, sir . . . I think so.’
‘How about using a knife? Any good at that?’
When she nods, I throw her my blade which she catches cleanly, and tell her to kill something edible and cook it. Then I go take a piss of my own.
That night sees us descend to the low plains, beginning a run that will take us to the slopes of Farlight. We pass villages and small towns, goats eating rubbish on dumps beside the road, and small children who wave.
The older ones spit.
Sergeant Toro asks if I’ve seen the city before and seems surprised when I say yes. He’d be even more surprised if he knew the story behind my arrival.
Farlight is a sprawl of a city trapped in the bowl of a long-dead volcano. To enter by road you take a track that snakes up the volcano and drops into its crater. Slums cling to the highest slopes of the inside edge. The air there is fresh, but water’s rare and so are jobs. The rich bits of Farlight huddle on the floor. The really expensive bits circle Zabo Square and the cathedral.
A virus hit that area years back.
Imagine blowtorching a toy city until the biggest buildings start to melt, then letting them set again. That’s what the boulevards around Zabo Square look like. Debro has a mansion there. Aptitude’s ex-husband had one also.
Until I burnt it down.
‘Ready?’ I ask.
Everyone nods.
We fire up our bikes.
The blacktop gets better the closer we get to the city. But the road still twists and turns viciously. And we waste hours running parallel to our old path, only heading in the opposite direction and fifty paces higher. With the next stage of our route switched round again and fifty paces above that. Our pegs grinding sparks as we navigate hairpin bends.
Any army that tried to take Farlight using this road would be hacked to pieces before they reached a third of the way up. In all of this, our lights only show the narrowest sliver of blacktop.
As one hairpin leads into another, it occurs to me we’re going to hit a bigger problem and hit it soon.
‘What?’ Anton demands when I pull us over.
‘We’re going off-road.’
He wants to protest that on-road is dangerous enough.
Sergeant Toro is watching. As we wait, his eyes flick to the corner ahead, the strip of road beyond that and the road above. He keeps his opinions to himself and his engine running.
A man after my own heart.
‘Want to tell him why?’
‘Roadblocks,’ the sergeant says.
‘We can talk our way through,’ Anton insists.
‘And if it goes wrong? You happy for me to cut their throats? We might as well send a message saying we’ve arrived.’
Sergeant Leona goes still.
Maybe she’s not used to people openly discussing the slaughter of Farlight’s finest.
‘So,’ I say. ‘Since we can’t kill them . . .’
Anton nods reluctantly.