I’m searched before being allowed to meet General Jaxx. A group of four officers close in on me and pat me down. Since I’ve already passed through a full-body scan I know this is tradition, part of a ritual to be undergone before being shown into the presence of a Death’s Head general.
“Weapons?”
I shake my head.
“You’ll have to remove that arm.”
Behind me Sergeant Hito begins to object, very politely. All four men outrank him. “The general himself…” They retract the moment the sergeant explains that General Jaxx wants to see Colonel Madeleine’s latest work.
“You stay here,” one says.
The sergeant looks like he wants to object to that, too, but does what he is told and I enter the general’s study alone. It is the same man. As tall as he ever was. Only now he’s wearing a black smoking jacket with narrow trousers, both decorated with a single band of silver piping.
Out of uniform, the only sign he controls a regiment is the silver signet ring on his left hand. A grinning skull, mouth mocking and hollow eyes taunting the world.
“Sven,” he says.
I wait; it’s all I can do.
“We have a job for you. One ideally suited to your talents.”
What talents? I want to ask, but I make myself stay silent.
“What do you know about Farlight?”
“Nothing, sir.”
He nods. “Even better.” Walking across to a sideboard, he pours two drinks from a decanter. He doesn’t tell me what the drink is or ask if I want one, but since he sips from his first and then downs the rest in a single gulp, ending with an obvious sigh of satisfaction, I do the same.
“Single malt,” he says. “An old Earth drink.” He hesitates, smiling slightly. “You know about Earth?”
“Very little,” I say.
“What about its end?”
It’s one of those days for keeping my face blank. Whatever I know, or in this case don’t know, it seems best to keep to myself.
“Slightly over six hundred years ago the singularity swallowed its own children…”
He pauses. “Or maybe it ate its own parents. Experts disagree…You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
I shake my head.
He smiles. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “how happy that makes me.”
The job is simple. I’m to flip to Farlight, hunt out a traitor whose name I will be given on arrival, and kill him, his bodyguards, and his entire family. If his palace catches fire at the same time that will be even better.
“We will, of course, deny having even heard of you if you fail.”
“And if I succeed?”
“You will be inducted into the Death’s Head, undergo formal training, and fight the one campaign all new entrants must undertake. After which, you will work for me and only for me.”
He waits.
Am I meant to thank him?
After a moment, he smiles. “I like you,” he says. “People say you’re an animal. They’re wrong. Animals don’t think. Well, not the way you do. I can see we’re going to work well together.”
I might think, but obviously not fast enough. It takes me a second or two to realize he’s given me my cue to leave.