As the stars get clearer and the sky darker, the night gets colder and colder, until everyone huddles inside their combat jackets or sleeps under the engines of trucks and scout cars that are too cool to make any difference.
The sappers have built slit latrines at the village’s edge. But I’ve told Shil, Rachel and Iona to make their own arrangements and not stray beyond the glow of our fire. No point taking chances after what happened earlier.
General Luc and his staff occupy an inn.
Its main door is bolted against the wind. All of its shutters are closed and locked, but they still bang endlessly, like boys hammering on fences. Noisy, smoky and crowded; I know where I’d rather be.
‘Yeah,’ my gun says. ‘We know. You’d rather be cold.’
I’m sat by myself, watching stars.
The brushwood Neen stole, and the dried dung he had the others collect, has burnt to a white ash that dusts sullen embers like sugar on one of those sticky pastries you can buy in Zabo Square.
‘Behind you,’ the SIG says.
If it was anyone dangerous, it would have warned me before this.
‘What are you thinking?’ asks a voice.
You’d think women would get bored with that question. They never do. At least not the ones I meet. Shil sits herself down uninvited, and puts her back to the wall that’s protecting me from the worst of the wind. Takes me a while to realize she hopes for an answer. I thought she was just making conversation.
‘About the stalls in Zabo Square. The ones that sell pastries.’
She smiles. Not sure why.
‘Can I ask you a question, sir?’
‘You can ask . . .’
Shil hesitates. That’s how I know I’m not going to like it.
‘Were you and Sergeant Leona lovers?’
‘Shil.’
‘Were you, sir?’
She’s waiting for my answer.
First Rachel’s insolence. Now Shil’s question. I’m not sure what’s got into everyone tonight. I could tell her to fuck off, which wouldn’t be the first time. Or I could give her sentry duty for the rest of the night, which would send the same message, but something stops me . . .
‘No,’ I say. ‘We weren’t.’
She closes her eyes. ‘I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse,’ she mutters. I’m not supposed to hear that bit. When I shift to stop her hip pressing against mine, she looks hurt.
‘You cold?’ I ask.
‘Sven-’ Shil catches herself. ‘I mean, sir. What do you think?’
‘Me? I think you probably shouldn’t squat to piss in case your bits stick to the ground.’
Her laugh is rough. ‘Guess you’re never going to change.’
I wasn’t aware I needed to.
‘Shil,’ I say. ‘Listen . . .’
My idea that your first kill is harder than the second, and your second is harder than the third sounds strange when I say it aloud. Particularly when I get to the bit about how it starts getting hard again.
‘What’s that for?’ I ask. She definitely shouldn’t be holding my face in her hands. Her mouth tastes of salt, stew, chocolate pudding and alcohol. When I sit back, she smiles and then sighs.
‘I miss the desert . . .’ Not sure what makes me say it.
The alcohol, probably.
Shil shakes her head. ‘What you miss,’ she says, ‘is the simplicity.’
I stare at her.
‘Sir,’ she adds.
That’s not why I’m staring.
I’m staring because she’s right. And, then again, she’s wrong.
I do miss the silence and the simplicity. Doesn’t mean I want to go back to who I was then or how I was living. I’m just not sure I want to replace it with where I am now. My shock is not that I realize this.
It is understanding I have a choice.
‘Sir,’ Shil says. ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
Her eyes widen. Maybe she expects me to say no.
‘Shil,’ I say, ‘everyone dies. Unless you’re U/Free. And even those bastards must die eventually. That’s why we hope for a better life next time.’
‘You believe that?’
I look at her. ‘You mean some people don’t?’
Her eyes are wet. Usually, where Shil’s concerned, that’s anger. Not this time. ‘Sven,’ she says, ‘I don’t mean in fifteen years, or ten, or five. I don’t even mean next year. I mean, do we die tomorrow? If not tomorrow, next week?’
‘Would it matter?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It would.’
So I wait for her to tell me why.
‘I don’t believe we come back,’ she says. ‘We’re born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse. Then it stops.’ She touches the medallion at her neck. I see her fingers make the shape for Legba Uploaded. Her lips move to the familiar words.
‘I try to believe,’ she tells me. ‘God knows.’
That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard. Taking her face between my hands, I turn her so I can see her eyes in the moonlight. They’re huge, and tracks cut the dirt on her cheek. The air is so cold her tears steam as they fall.
‘Believe me,’ I say. ‘This isn’t everything.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because . . .’ How do I explain touching the mind of an AI?
‘They’re machines,’ Shil says.
‘Maybe once. But if Hekati thinks there’s more than this . . .’
‘Machine heaven,’ says Shil sourly, but she’s smiling as she turns her face towards me. Her kiss is clumsy, but enthusiastic. So I drop my fingers from her face and cup the breast barely discernible beneath her uniform. When she shifts, I start to say sorry, but she simply pops open a storm flap at her neck and tugs a zip behind. When my hand still won’t fit, she tugs again.
‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘That’s cold.’
Her singlet is warm under my fingers.
Closing her jacket as best she can, she wraps both arms tight round my neck. Our next kiss is deep. As my fingers grip a breast, she winces. So I stroke my fingers across a nipple instead.
‘Thought you were going to die,’ she says. ‘That night in Ilseville.’
‘So did I.’
The cracked bones mended within a week, and the pain went within a month. All that remains now is scarring to remind me that my heart was once visible through a hole in my chest.
Knife wounds you stitch.
But bullet wounds are different, because stitching those can kill. Some need air and others maggots. So medics pack broken flesh with sterile bandages, if they have any, and hope unpacking them doesn’t finish what the enemy started.
But that wound in Ilseville . . .
Shil tied me to a chair to hold me still while she cut away ruined flesh. Washed the wound with water and vinegar and kept me sedated with brandy. She smiles sourly when I remind her of this.
In the cold of the high plains, with a freezing wind at our backs, and only a broken wall to protect us, our fire burnt down to embers, and the stars clear above us, with the Aux talking in the darkness or sleeping, and five hundred Wolf Brigade camped around us, we unfasten zips, undo buckles and free Velcro straps.
Fuck knows, it’s taken us long enough.
Her body is whipcord thin, her breasts as slight as I remember from seeing her strip once. Give me two twigs and I could beat out a march on her ribs. We’re not naked, because the cold would kill us before we could dress again. Colonel Vijay might consider being found frozen in his lover’s arms romantic, but I’m not the colonel, and Shil is not my lover; although she opens her thighs readily enough as I slide my hand into her combats.
‘You don’t mind?’ she asks.
Body hair crinkles beneath my fingers. ‘About what?’
‘Oh,’ Shil says. ‘Franc didn’t-’
My other hand stills her lips.
Yes, I know, Franc shaved her whole body with the edge of a knife, every day, and wore her scars like badges of honour. When the U/Free removed her scars, they took away her reason to live. So she died for us. Because dying was the only thing she could do to make sense of being alive.
Shil listens in silence as I say this. Then she reaches up and hooks her fingers around the back of my neck.
We kiss again, because that’s polite.
Kiss first, take the weight on your elbows, make conversation afterwards, and leave the money discreetly on the table before you go. That last bit of my old lieutenant’s rules doesn’t apply, obviously.
At least I hope not.
Rolling Shil to face the wall, I curl myself behind her and reach round to cup my fingers over her breast.
‘Ready?’
She gasps when I enter.
So I pull back. A part of me wants to grip her hips and bury myself. A bigger part knows I should behave.
‘Fuck,’ Shil says at last. ‘I thought she was joking.’
It hadn’t occurred to me Franc talked about us. Not that there was much us where Franc was concerned. The only person she loved was Haze, my intelligence officer. And that was sexless.
We lie still for a few seconds as Shil’s body adjusts, and we feed on each other’s warmth. And then she reaches for my fingers and takes my hand from her breast and pushes it between her legs, locking her thighs tightly.
‘Slowly,’ she whispers.
Sliding myself out, I roll Shil over and kiss her forehead. Reaching up, she grips my neck and kisses my mouth. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was saying goodbye.
‘Whatever happens,’ she says.
‘Whatever happens?’
‘I’ve had you . . .’ She grins. Has to be my expression, because I can’t think what else would make her grin like that. ‘You realize,’ she says, ‘you’re a bastard?’
She asks if I’m in love with Aptitude.
This is an improvement. The last time she asked about Aptitude she wanted to know if I’d fucked the kid. It’s the same answer this time.
No, I’m not . . . No, I haven’t . . . I don’t intend to now or ever.
Around dawn, when it’s light enough to see each other’s eyes clearly, we fuck one final time. It’s brief and awkward, as if she needs the darkness to be comfortable. ‘Sven,’ she says, when we’re done.
‘What?’
‘If we live, I want out of the Aux.’
‘That’s what this was about?’ My question is rough enough to make her scramble away from me, holding her jacket closed, while she fumbles at the zip of her combats with her other hand.
‘Of course that’s not-’
‘Not going to happen,’ I say, adding, ‘What about Neen? He want out too?’
‘Neen makes his own decisions.’ This is the Shil I recognize, although it turns out her anger isn’t with me. At least, not entirely.
‘I thought Iona was your problem?’
‘She doesn’t help,’ Shil replies, still waiting for my answer.
‘Shil. Conscripts don’t resign.’
Her mouth sets in misery.
‘You could fix it.’
‘But I’m not going to. Only you and Neen remain of the originals.’
‘And Rachel,’ she says.
‘No,’ I shake my head. ‘Rachel joined after Ilseville fell.’
Shil thinks about that. Eighteen out of twenty-five died within minutes of hitting the ground. Six out of seven made it through the first skirmish. Haze is off-planet, the others died later. Only two of her troop remain.
I know exactly how she feels.
Me, I’m one out of five hundred. Because that’s how many we were before the ferox attacked Fort Libidad. Everyone has a story and most of them are grim. That’s why we get drunk to remember, and drunker still to forget.
I grip Shil’s shoulders and she’s not expecting that. She fights briefly and then folds herself into me. I don’t have to look to know she’s crying.
‘You’re still a bastard,’ says a voice at my side.