The FEROX come back before midnight. Well, the smallest one does. He slouches into the fort through that hole in the wall and moves like a shadow across the parade ground, picking his way almost daintily among the piles of dead. Ignoring me, he reaches for the skull on the post above my head and tries to pry it free.
“I can help.”
My words startle the youngster and that tells me ferox can hear, unless he’s simply surprised to find me still alive. Twisting my head to the double moon, he stares deep into my eyes.
After a second he lets his claws drop, obviously disappointed.
A question has been asked and I’ve failed to answer. More worryingly, I’ve failed even to hear his question.
Why? I ask myself. Why could you hear last time?
Because fear provided a key? Possible, but fear is controlled by the limbic system and my body is now too frozen with cold to feel much more than resignation.
Glaring at the ferox, I see he’s gone back to ignoring me. Without the others to be matched against, he looks huge, his teeth recently formed and razor-sharp, his armor shiny with the bloom of youth. And his claws are cruel but clumsy as he struggles with the trophy still nailed to the pole.
He can kill you, I remind myself. Gut you and strew your insides across the sand. But they’re just words, insufficient to create the fear their truth demands.
“Free me,” I say.
Again that flicker of interest. Only this time it vanishes as quickly as it arrives. I need a way to remake the bridge between us.
If not fear…then pain?
As he reaches for the skull, I stretch up with my hands, not to help him but to snag the base of my thumb on his lower claw. Before the beast can react, I drag down my wrist and feel flesh tear and a single word comes into my mind.
Why?
“Must talk,” I tell him. “Only way.”
He looks at me with interest. What? he asks.
I try not to sigh.
“Sven,” I say.
The beast jerks his head at the bodies strewn across the parade ground around us. Ugly in the moonlight, they’re already beginning to freeze as the night strips what little heat they have left. Sven?
I shake my own head, realize how ridiculous that is, and say No, loudly, inside my own skull.
Not Sven?
“No,” I say. “Not Sven.”
He considers this for a moment and says nothing when I reach up again and snag my wrist, harder this time. The thought of words vanishing before this conversation is finished is more than I can bear.
Captive, he says.
Am I? Does that mean he’s taking me prisoner?
Enemies capture Sven. He says this as a statement, one allowing no argument. And as soon as I realize what he means I laugh.
“Yes,” I agree. “Enemy capture Sven.”
And God knows, in the twenty-eight years of my short and so far brutal life few enemies have been worse than Sergeant Fitz, who now lies faceup to the stars with a throwing spear through his heart.
“Let me help,” I suggest.
The youngster’s eyes flick from the trophy to my hands, and he breaks the ropes as simply as a child might snap cotton. With little to lose, I hold out my wrists and wait while he hooks his claws into my metal cuffs and pulls until they split at the hinge.
Help, he insists as I begin to walk away.
“Need something first.”
He follows me all the way to the armory door. It’s as well he does, because the door is made from some aerated ceramic that weighs little more than foam but is far stronger than it looks.
“Can you break this?”
Dark eyes catch mine, amusement replacing anger. Of course I can, says the voice in my head, except it’s not quite a voice, more a wisp of thought that tatters into silence; and the amusement is not really in his eyes, it’s more…
God, I think. I’ve begun to match feelings to the ugly fuck’s smell. The youngster turns at that, looking quizzical, and I decide to watch my thoughts.
“Door,” I suggest.
Putting his hands against the door, he pushes. When nothing happens, he pushes again. Then he draws his lips into a snarl and barges into the door with his shoulder. Something creaks, and I have a nasty feeling it might have been his bones.
In the end he sinks his claws into the door near the hinges, which is a good guess. The lock is flashy and semi-intelligent, certainly too bright to be bluffed by claiming an emergency. The hinges, however, are priced down to a spec just high enough to avoid the contractor getting killed.
It’s harder work than he expects. A good five minutes wasted while I stand shivering and barely conscious and he digs his claws slowly through the shiny surface of the door, chipping his way toward the soft material beneath.
Help, he says.
And as I prepare to protest that I’ll be no help at all, I realize he’s reached into the door and is prying away one hinge. Great gasps come from his throat, and I know that whatever we find has to be worth his effort.
Swords, by the hundreds.
What is it with crazed dictators and cavalry? We have no mounts and the dunes are totally unsuitable for heavy horses, but we still have sabers by the thousands. Also, we have enough new-model pulse rifles to turn a whole desert’s worth of sand to glass. These are locked down, without barrels or power packs, and a chain runs through each trigger guard. From the way the youngster’s glance sweeps over them he doesn’t recognize them as weaponry.
Just as well.
Of course, with the barrels in place, the guns would still need charging and unchaining. The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems to me that the new lieutenant was destined to die-deserved it even. He just didn’t need to take a bunch of half-trained boys with him, but since that was what he was himself…
In one corner is an old box covered with dust, fixed to the wall with an explosion of spiderweb containing everything from mummified flies to the desiccated corpse of the spider itself. MEDICAL SUPPLIES says the side of the box. EMPTY, announces a red sticker slapped across its top.
The blade is where I left it five years before.
“We don’t want this falling into anyone’s hands,” the old lieutenant told me, in that way of his that left me uncertain whether he meant what he said or intended the direct opposite. Maybe he was saying, Make sure this gets into unsuitable hands.
He’d be capable of it.
Other officers succumb to wounds taken in battle or self-inflicted. Lieutenant Bonafont suffered terminal ennui. So terminal that one day his heart simply stopped beating.
Maybe a laser blade in the hands of a homesick recruit would have provided entertainment enough to keep him alive. In which case I failed, but then the old bastard failed us all by shuffling off his mortal coil and leaving us in the care of some child doing a six-month tour of duty.
“Got it,” I say.
The whipping post comes apart like fat melting in the sun. I cut from below, slicing away at the wood until a steel spike is revealed. After that, removing the skull is simple: A couple more cuts, a flick of the wrist, and the trophy comes free. I’m armed again, of course. I wonder if the ferox realizes that.
“Here.”
The skull has a nail hole in the top but still looks pretty good for something that’s been scoured by desert winds for the best part of five years. I treat the object with respect. For all I know the ferox indulges in some form of ancestor worship. I really don’t want to blow my survival at this point.
No, he says faintly.
Flicking on my weapon, I touch its blade to the back of my hand and hear his voice grow louder.
You carry it.