Can you get me a drink?” The naked girl glances up from her screen, on which an impossibly beautiful tribal woman is saying good-bye to a legionnaire who has the kind of rugged good looks and smoldering smile that would see him a target for everyone’s spite in the real world.
I wonder which role Caliente is playing and why she doesn’t just jack the feed straight into her mind like everybody else on this ship.
“Sure,” I tell her. “Vodka okay?”
She smiles.
“What are you playing?”
“It’s new,” she says. “Really neat.”
The vodka comes already chilled over ice. I love the drink machine in her room. Waiting while Caliente shifts on her chair to make room for me, I take another glance at her game; it all looks pretty ordinary to me. “What’s good about it?”
“Thing’s got rules.”
I look at Caliente and remember why I chose her last time. Full breasts, but not too heavy, and hips that can be gripped. The chair is too small for both of us. So I pick her up and put her on my lap.
“All games have rules,” I say.
She looks slightly disbelieving. As if she wants to contradict but isn’t sure she dares. Instead she wriggles prettily. Which, if it doesn’t get my uniform stained from inside, is going to get it stained from outside anyway.
“Wait.”
I lift her again, just enough to unfasten my trousers.
“Now you can wriggle,” I tell her.
It’s day three of life aboard the general’s mother ship and I’ve had my shower, a uniform has been found for me, and I’ve been camping in Caliente’s room for the last fifty-six hours.
She wriggles. Mechanically at first, then with more interest as she realizes I’m getting aroused. “Those games,” I prompt, because the lieutenant once told me you should always make conversation with girls in a brothel.
“Most don’t have rules,” she tells me.
“Really?”
“Well, not the ones I play.”
“What happens?”
“You play until you get bored. Or things fuck up.”
“And then?” I ask, steadying her speed slightly so her buttocks and inner thighs brush against me more slowly as she swivels her hips. If I’m not mistaken, she’s begun to get wet.
Caliente hesitates.
“Don’t stop,” I tell her. “I just want to know what happens if you fuck up.”
“You turn the game off and start again.”
“Ah, right…” The games supplied to the legion are simpler. You go into battle, you die, along the way you collect brothel tokens and medals. You can even go for promotion, in the games world obviously, but I’ve never seen the point.
We shuffle in silence for a while, if heavy breathing counts as silence. Then I lift Caliente one final time and lower her onto me. She’s tight, more involved than last time, unless the position just makes entry deeper.
“Is that augmented?” she asks.
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Everything’s just in proportion.”
She does it once for one of the tokens Sergeant Hito gave me, and once again for nothing, and is about to do it a third time when hammering on the door tells us both that the sergeant has lost patience for “babysitting a berserker,” as he calls it.
He’s wrong. I’ve seen berserkers. We have nothing in common at all. For a start, I’m not a fucking marsupial.
“You’re wanted.”
I’m wanted in here, I almost answer. Instead I lift Caliente off me, thwack her once on the buttocks, and smile when she yelps. The slap she aims back barely catches my face.
“Enough,” says the sergeant. He sounds as if he means it. “She can go,” he adds, his voice loud despite the door between us.
“She’s already gone,” Caliente says, flipping him an invisible finger before kissing me lightly on the lips and disappearing into her shower room in a wiggle of red ass, cheeky grin, and white towel.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” says the sergeant.
“What?”
“You might at least put yourself away.”
It takes me a moment to work out what he means. When I’ve fastened my zip, I look around for my coat. “Does this mean the general is ready to see me?”
It’s been three days of doing nothing much but fuck Caliente and take showers. I’ve been expecting to be bustled in to meet the general for so long that I’ve begun to wonder if he even knows I’m on the ship. Except obviously he does, because it’s dangerous for everybody if I’m on the ship and he doesn’t know. Everyone is open about the general’s ruthless nature and vicious anger. But then, everyone seems to regard this as a good thing.
I’m not so sure. My opinions are that anger has no place in battle, except on the part of the men. Officers are meant to be ice-cool. As I said, my old lieutenant was an idealist.
Obviously enough, I don’t mention his theory. I just camp for three days in a room above the sergeants’ mess. Most of the sergeants openly resent my presence anyway, and only accept it because Hito outranks them and the general is known to take an interest.
“What?” says Sergeant Hito. “See you? Looking like that?”
That’s the other thing about the legion: We don’t worry too much about dress regulations and personal standards. The Death’s Head, on the other hand, all look like they come out of the same vat. Unless, of course, not caring about dress regulations only applies to the bits of the legion in which I’ve served. Frontier forts. Suicide missions. The bits that die.
“What are you thinking?”
I stare at Sergeant Hito. It’s such an inappropriate question from a sergeant. A woman maybe…if she’s making conversation.
“I mean it.”
“How neat you all are.”
“You can learn.”
No reply is merited.
“I mean that, too. You can learn. The general may demand it…And that arm,” he says. “Why?”
I don’t understand the question.
After he repeats it and adds something about the prosthetic being fifty years out of date and mostly broken, I realize what he’s saying. Why don’t I have a better one?
“They cost,” I tell him, voice cold. “This cost.”
So he asks the price and I give it. And something in my eyes stops him from laughing, although he glances instinctively toward the door through which Caliente vanished.
“Okay,” I say. “So she’s expensive.”
And beautiful, experienced, and intelligent. And there probably isn’t a legionnaire in this part of the spiral who wouldn’t give his real arm, never mind a crappy little prosthetic, to have her. But I’m not about to tell Horse that.
“Do you know what she costs?”
It’s twice what my metal arm cost. I’ve had Caliente at least seven times in the last three days, not including freebies, which means I’ve put the cost of fourteen mechanical arms on the general’s bill. I wonder if he’ll mind and decide I don’t care. How much money do these people have? And why do they get to fuck with the rest of us?
Except I’m not twelve and I had this conversation with my lieutenant. Only back then I was talking about the sergeants and didn’t yet realize the lieutenant got to play God with their lives as well.
“We can fix you another arm,” says Sergeant Hito.
“I don’t want one,” I say crossly.
His face hardens. “Don’t play games,” he says. “It’s a bad move. People who play games around General Jaxx die early.”
And there the conversation is meant to rest, except I can’t let it go. “Don’t you have a favorite weapon?” I ask him.
He looks up, eyes still hard, then realization catches him.
“That’s your weapon?”
“It’s one of them.”
“We’ll find you something better,” he says. “Not just new, better…”
And we go down to the sergeants’ mess, where a dozen hostile faces watch me as I cross the room and keep watching as the door shuts behind us and we head along a corridor toward an elevator.
“It wouldn’t hurt you to say good day. ”
“ They don’t,” I say, and beside me I hear Horse take a deep breath.
“You’re the stranger,” he tells me. “It’s their room, their club. No one gets access to the sergeants’ mess except sergeants. Even officers have to be invited.”
“So why am I allowed?”
“Because the general wants it.”
“Why?”
Sergeant Hito is about to say No one questions what the general wants. One of those hardwired reflexes we all have instead of thought. But he doesn’t. At my side, he hesitates, thinks about it.
“You lived among the ferox.”
I nod.
“No one has done that before. And you claim to be able to talk to them.”
“I can,” I tell him. “Well, I could. Maybe it was only those ferox.”
“And maybe you were insane with hunger and exhaustion, and had lost control of your thoughts and only imagined it. That’s what Colonel Nuevo thinks.”
“Youngster and I spoke,” I say firmly. “Sometimes it was hard to understand him. When I was on the whipping post he had to cut me before he made sense.”
“And then there’s that,” says the sergeant.
“The whipping post?”
“That, too. Medical scans show seventeen lashes in a single whipping. No one survives that level of abuse.”
“I did.”
“Apparently. But that also worries the colonel, I can say this because he’s already said it, and has told me he’s told the general.”
I wait for Sergeant Hito to reach his point and wonder if he knows what this negation of personal responsibility says about him. Maybe it says something about the Death’s Head as a whole.
Negation of personal responsibility. I’m proud of that. It sounds like something the old lieutenant might say; probably did, come to that.
“You cut yourself to stay sane? While you were a captive of the ferox. Have we got that right?”
“I did it to talk to them.”
Stepping out of the elevator, the sergeant indicates that he is listening. Two men in lesser uniforms step aside. The uniforms are complicated. Sergeants look grander than lieutenants do, and the colonel’s uniform is simpler than that. From what I can remember of General Jaxx, his uniform is almost entirely plain. Apart from the Obsidian Cross hanging from his neck and silver death’s heads on the points of his jacket collar, nothing indicates that he outranks them all.
The men who step aside are probably corporals. One of them slides me a glance and then hurriedly looks away.
“You were saying…?”
“Pain focuses my ability to hear the ferox.”
“You insist that they can speak?”
“Only in here,” I say, tapping the side of my head.
“They’re telepaths,” he says, adding…“They speak with thought?” In case the word is too strange.
“Yes, that’s exactly right.”
“And you can hear their thoughts?”
I shrug. “I could hear the speaking of one tribe. What if different tribes speak differently?”
“Thought is thought,” he says.