Fall in,” orders a corporal, so I do.
I wear a militia uniform at least ten years out of date and a size too small.
Maybe it amuses the general to see me look so shabby beside his men’s black-and-silver uniforms. And I travel in his entourage, although it’s probably more honest to say I travel with the baggage.
We leave Karbonne in a sleek black fighter that takes far more passengers than it should, given its rapierlike profile. An hour later we rendezvous with a mother ship in high orbit above the planet. Why the mother ship bothers with high orbit is anyone’s guess. There were precious few people left on the surface of this world with weapons to do more than bring down a simple kite.
I’m sent for again two days later. My meeting with the general is brief. He simply nods at the sergeant who led my execution party, and then nods at me. “Horse will look after you,” he says.
The sergeant nods. “Yes, sir,” he says. “We’ll have a good time.” He’s quite obviously talking to the general.
“Dismissed,” says General Jaxx.
And away we go.
“He’s taken a liking to you,” says the sergeant. “Just as well. If Colonel Nuevo had his way, you’d be dead.”
“If I had my way,” I growl back, “he’d be slop in the bottom of some bucket.”
The sergeant smiles at me, a death’s-head grin that goes with his silver buttons and the badge on his cap. “You ever been on a mother ship before?”
My snort is answer enough.
I’ve jumped planet in low-level troop carriers, surrounded by the kind of recruits who throw up if forced to cross a puddle, and I’ve dropped from a pod, years ago when we first took this system from the Enlightened, may their metal heads catch fire…Mother ships, battle cruisers, and high fighters are not usual forms of legion transport.
“Let me show you around.”
As it happens, he doesn’t show me very far. An elevator drops us eighteen levels and we exit into the bowels of the recreation area. If anything this clean can be so described. Black glass walls and black glass fountains. A row of tables outside a cafe, pushed tightly together, because the corridor down which we walk isn’t that wide.
A smartly dressed woman with two small children sits at one of the tables. The man sitting opposite her is ridiculously elegant and drinking something cloudy and green from a tiny glass. An Obsidian Cross hangs from his collar, and silver braid waterfalls down one side of his chest. He wears the uniform of a Death’s Head lieutenant as if it’s a particularly amusing form of costume.
He glances idly at the sergeant beside me, and the sergeant comes to attention. A polite nod and we’ve obviously been given our orders to move on.
“Let’s find a bar,” I say.
Horse laughs. “Okay,” he says. “The general wins.”
I frown.
“He said this was about as far as you’d get…” As the sergeant looks around him, I wonder what he sees. To me it’s a new world, one where Death’s Head officers and NCOs slouch down corridors, black-and-silver jackets slung loosely over their shoulders. A world where bar-keepers smile and whores are polite, instead of asking to be paid in advance.
As we move away from the main drag, with its awnings and pavement tables, the air changes slightly and officers become a rarity. There are no troopers here, but a wide variety of NCOs. Now the air smells of beer and sex and sweat, but only a little. Just enough to make the surroundings feel real.
“On the house,” says Horse.
“What is?”
“All of it,” he says, indicating bars on both sides of the passageway. “Anything. The general said charge it to his pad.”
My eyes go wide.
“That’s a joke,” Horse says. “You think anybody in their right mind would…” He runs his words into the dirt, obviously appalled that he needs to explain anything quite so obvious. “What do you want first?”
Get laid, get paralytic.
The obvious answers. Only I want more than that, or maybe it’s that I want less. Whatever, it definitely involves remaining sober enough to remember everything when I wake tomorrow.
“I want a beer,” I say. “A cold beer…And then I want a whore for the night, in a bed, maybe in a place with its own bathroom.”
Horse smiles. “I’ve known men,” he says, “who’d want ten whores and the general’s finest champagne.”
“And I’ve known men,” I tell him, “who’d swap this entire ship for a glass of clean water.”
“It was tough?”
I nod. “Yeah,” I agree. “Even before the ferox attacked. We’re legion. If the meat is cheap, we’ll eat it. If the beer is watered, we’ll drink it. And if the weapons are outdated and the power packs are faulty, we’ll fight with them anyway…”
A couple of corporals have stopped to listen, but a glance from Horse sends them on their way. I’m out of place on this ship. My prosthetic arm is rusty and I’ve had to tear the cuff to make my shirt fit. My boots are so worn that one heel slopes. It’s hard not to believe that my being here is some kind of joke.
“We’re cannon fodder,” I say, bitterly. “We make no pretense to be anything else.”
“And you think we do?”
“No,” I say. “That’s not what I mean. You’re elite, we’re grunts. No one in their right mind would expect high command to treat us the same…” Shrugging, I look around me and nod at the nearest bar. I’ve changed my mind about getting drunk.
“That will do.”
“I know a better one.”
We walk for another ten minutes along a corridor, then turn right and drop a level, walking for the same length of time again. As we walk, I count my footsteps and try to work out the width of the ship from the distance traveled.
It’s big; anything that lets you walk a thousand paces in the same direction is big. And when we walk a thousand paces again, more or less in the same direction, I realize this is not a ship as I know it.
I did this in the caves; that’s how I learned the ranking of the ferox. All bull ferox claim territory, and the more senior the male, the larger the stamping ground he claims. And the weirdest thing I discovered was that the youngster was second in command, which confirmed their intelligence for me. No one looking at their chief could doubt he was the strongest and deadliest, but the youngster? He’d have lost a fight to any of the others, and yet the space he claimed was larger than theirs was.
“What are you thinking?”
“About the ferox.”
Horse hesitates, glances around, and hesitates again. It’s not the behavior you expect from a Death’s Head sergeant, particularly not one who’s been awarded the Obsidian Cross. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he’s wearing the tiny silk ribbon folded into the buttonhole of his jacket.
“Say it,” I tell him.
“What really happened?”
“The ferox came,” I say. “They slaughtered everybody except me.”
There’s doubt in his face. As if he knows I’m not telling him the entire truth.
“Maybe it’s their idea of a joke,” I add. “Maybe they were just having a good day. I asked once, but I couldn’t understand the answer.”
“You asked…?”
“The ferox talk…I know the general doesn’t believe me, but it’s true.”
“Who knows what the general believes,” says Horse, and that’s the end of our conversation.
At a small door set into a shiny black wall, he stops. Almost inevitably the door knocker, the handle, the hinges, and the mask embossed into the center of the obsidian door are all death’s heads.
The woman who answers his knock takes one look at me and opens her mouth to object.
“General’s orders,” says Horse.
So she shuts her mouth and moves aside. A narrow corridor leads to a bar. The counter is cut from a single block of black marble, black leather lines the wall, and black tiles cover the floor. Looking around, I wonder if this is irony and realize, as a dozen serious faces turn to greet us, that it is anything but.
“Welcome to the NCO club,” says Horse.
“Is he a noncom?” The question comes from a man with half his face replaced by metal, and eyes that are all ice. Horse slides him a glance before I have time to answer.
The man looks away.
My beer is cold and so far removed from any other I’ve ever tasted that I find it hard to believe it’s the same drink. This is sweet and smooth, where the others were sour and bitter. It bites at the back of my throat and trickles into my stomach, filling my guts with a slow warmth.
Someone laughs.
“Where did you find him?” another asks, his meaning plain. Who is this peasant and why is he in our bar?
“I didn’t,” says Horse. “The general found him.”
They leave us alone after that. When my beer was done, Horse offers me another. But I’ve changed my mind again. One beer is what I’m allowing myself.
“If you’re sure?”
I nod.
“The girls are upstairs,” he tells me, nodding toward a spiral staircase that vanishes through a hole in the ceiling. “I’ll wait for you here.”
“Don’t you want…?”
He smiles. “This is new for you. I’ve been here for thirteen months.” And then he catches himself, shrugs, and obviously remembers my words about the difference between the Death’s Head and the legion. In that moment I almost like the man. Although I know he will kill me at a single word from one of his superiors.
“Enjoy yourself,” he says.