by David Gunn
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.
Chapter 47
The scout car ahead changes gear as the road starts to rise towards its distant pass through the mountains. Slopes stretch both sides as far as we can see. Well, as far as Rachel can see and that’s further than most. Even using field-glasses, I can’t make out where the heat haze ends and the sky begins.
Buzzards circle us.
They’ve been following for three days. They can’t believe a convoy this big doesn’t leave them a trail of dead. Rachel says they’ll come through the pass. Ajac says not, he’s seen birds like this before. They’ll turn back. Ajac and Rachel ride side by side, their visors flipped up and their words whipped away by the hot wind.
Neen and Iona’s communication is strictly non-verbal.
They clutch hands occasionally, making their combat trikes wobble until tiny gyros kick in to stabilize them. You shouldn’t need gyros on a fat-wheel, my gun tells me crossly.
It’s in a foul mood.
Not the only one. Neen and Shil aren’t talking. And Iona spends most of the morning giving Neen sympathetic glances. Occasionally she stops to glare at Shil, when she thinks we’re not looking.
Colonel Vijay is oblivious to it all.
I’d be so lucky.
As the scout cars pull ahead, and the incline increases, and the transporters fall back behind us, we’re left on our own in a little huddle. Six Aux and the colonel, on combat trikes, each of us in a uniform so dusty it needs no camouflage.
Even our outriders have scattered.
Sergeant Toro is hunting goat for General Luc’s supper. His corporal is thirty minutes back helping a trooper who shredded his tyre. Not sure where the final one is. Out of our sight somewhere.
We’ll never get another chance this good.
Neen sees me loosen the flap on my holster. We haven’t discussed this, because you don’t discuss mutiny. You act and live or die with the consequences. Tapping the SIG-37 awake, I tell it to keep quiet.
‘Fucking great,’ it says. ‘You’re about to do something stupid.’
‘I’m saving Colonel Vijay’s life.’
‘What I said.’
For once I wish the SIG was less lethal. ‘Neen,’ I say, ‘what rounds are you carrying?’
A Kemzin is strapped to his back. At the hip, he has a simple Colt automatic. Almost no brains and zero attitude. ‘Seven six two, sir. Full metal.’
‘Cut a cross in the top?’
That’s illegal but everyone does it.
‘No, sir,’ he says. ‘Uncircumcised.’
Seeing my surprise, Neen says he took the side arm from a militia officer in Farlight. An amateur, obviously.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘We’ll swap.’
Neen looks at the SIG, and nearly runs himself off the road. Only instinct and gyros save him. ‘Sir?’ he says.
‘He’ll want me back,’ the SIG says.
‘Don’t count on it.’
Taking my weapon, Neen slides it into his jacket for safety, while he flips up his own holster flap and hands me his automatic. Only then does he put the SIG-37 in his own holster. He checks three times it’s fastened safely.
‘Scan for comms traffic,’ I tell the SIG.
It takes so long to answer I think it didn’t hear, but it’s sulking. ‘No traffic,’ it says, which surprises me.
‘Check again.’
The SIG does. It was right first time.
‘Cover me,’ I tell Neen.
He wants to ask, from what?
Seeing us, the colonel nods, then forces a polite smile.
Shil appears on his other side. A fact that darkens Neen’s face, as swiftly as it wipes the smile from Colonel Vijay’s own. She positions herself well. A little back from the colonel, but close enough to stop him making a run for it.
‘Sir,’ I say, ‘I’m taking over.’
‘Mutiny is a capital offence, Sven.’
‘Not mutiny, sir. A temporary redesignation of command.’
His mouth twists, and he looks almost impressed. ‘And you’re going to shoot me if I refuse to accept this redesignation?’
‘Yes, sir.’ I have Neen’s gun aimed at his heart.
‘No, you’re not,’ he says. ‘I’ve read your file. You’re clinically incapable of killing your CO.’
Dropping my hand, I re-sight on his upper leg.
A leg wound can kill, but only if you’re unlucky. As I switch my aim, the colonel realizes I’m holding an ordinary weapon. It’s this, more than anything else, which convinces him I mean it.
‘Sven,’ he says. ‘Wait.’
‘Colonel, I’m taking control.’
‘On what grounds?’ His voice is calm.
‘Grief makes you unable to command, sir.’
‘Temporarily unfit,’ Shil says, supplying the term I want. Neen glares at his sister and then glances at me. He decides we’ve discussed this already, without him knowing. He’s wrong. She just learns fast.
‘Grief at what?’ Colonel Vijay demands.
‘The death of your father, sir. The massacre of doubters. The arson that destroyed your family home. The Thomassi’s coup. The call on officers of the Third Death’s Head to surrender. Our capture by General Luc . . .’
It is quite a list.
‘I see,’ he says. ‘And this grief manifests how?’
Takes me a moment to work out what he’s asking. Ahead of us the scout cars increase their lead, while a drone overhead drifts to one side. I can barely see the transporters that should bring up our rear.
‘Refusal to escape, sir.’
He nods, as if expecting no less.
‘Every officer’s duty,’ I remind him. ‘Kill your captors and escape. In certain circumstances, to be judged by a later court martial, simply escaping may be enough to wipe out the disgrace of being captured
in the first place.’
‘Sven, General Luc is not the enemy.’
‘Well, he’s not a friend, sir. We should be fighting the Thomassi. The rules state-’
‘I know the rules.’
‘Yes, sir. I don’t doubt it.’
‘My father wrote most of them.’
Looking from me to Neen and across at Shil, Colonel Vijay checks how far back the rest of us are in his mirrors. Then he nods to the gun in my hand. ‘You’re going through with this,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you’ll give me back my command. Knowing I’ll have you court martialled and shot for mutiny?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Colonel Vijay buries his face in one hand.
We ride in silence, the colonel’s trike bracketed by mine on one side and Shil’s on the other. Neen rides to the left of me, keeping a slight distance. The others keep their positions, still wondering what’s going on.
‘Your NCOs didn’t know about this, did they?’
‘No, sir. They didn’t.’
‘Of course not. Otherwise they’d be liable for mutiny.’ Colonel Vijay’s lips twist. ‘Sven,’ he says, ‘take a look around you.’
In that moment, he sounds exactly like his father.
‘I have, sir.’
‘Take another.’
Scout cars up ahead, transporters and trucks way behind. An-incline of rock, grit and gravel on both sides, rising to that mountain pass ahead. We’re in the middle of goddam nowhere. Even the buzzards are beginning to turn back in disgust.
‘What do you see?’ the colonel demands.
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘You see nothing.’
Neen and Shil scan the slopes, wondering what they’re missing.
‘It’s a trap, Sven,’ Colonel Vijay says. ‘The moment we make a break, those outriders will reappear. The Wolf ‘s probably got snipers on that mound.’
He jerks his chin to a low hill ahead of us.
‘And those scout cars? They’ll birth extra trikes the moment they’re needed.’ Colonel Vijay sounds apologetic for stating the obvious. ‘Sven,’ he says, ‘they want us to run.’
‘Sir,’ says Neen, ‘It’s not-’
He doesn’t get to finish, although Colonel Vijay’s glance is almost kind. ‘Sergeant,’ he says, ‘I’m not going to get myself shot while escaping. Certainly not so General Luc can keep a clear conscience.’
He raises his eyebrows.
‘Assuming it is clear, of course.’
Personally, I doubt the Wolf has a conscience at all, clear or otherwise.
‘Since he’s going to kill me,’ Colonel Vijay adds, ‘I might as well make him go through the pretence of due process.’
Nodding politely, he edges his bike forwards and, after a second, I fall back to return Neen’s side arm.
‘You know,’ the SIG says, ‘I’m not sure chess is your thing.’
That night, after we’ve made camp on the far side of the pass, Colonel Vijay excuses himself from the Wolf’s company and joins us round our fire.
He smokes a cheap cigar with Neen, takes a swig from Shil’s brandy and tries not to choke on either. He even shares our rations. And if he pays a little too much attention to Iona’s breasts and gets slightly drunker on three swigs from a bottle than is decent, that’s fine. We’ve all been there at his age.
Although Ajac still is.
And Neen’s only a year or two more.
You’d think, given the death of his father and the fate awaiting him, that Vijay Jaxx would look older. Not a bit of it. He still looks what he is: a well-brought-up late teen, with floppy hair and a tiny beard so blond it’s almost invisible.
After supper, he excuses himself politely.
He sounds apologetic when he says he needs to return to General Luc. As if he regrets being forced to leave our cheap cigars and cheaper brandy and outdated rations for real food and a requisitioned hunting lodge.
Maybe he does.
Even the best meals taste sour when you’re prisoner.
‘Who takes first watch, sir?’
Neen looks surprised when I say no one. No watches and no pickets, Colonel Vijay’s orders. We’re under the protection of the Wolf Brigade. I hope he finds the words as hard to say as I do to hear.
‘I’m not tired, sir,’ Neen says.
‘You want to walk our perimeter, that’s fine. Wake me if you get bored.’
He salutes, collects his Kemzin and takes himself out to the edge of our fire, while I settle myself in the shelter of a rock that rises like broken bone from the slope we’re descending, with the others round me in a sprawl. Our fire burns to ashes faster than we’d like and, come morning, our uniforms are frozen so hard they creak when we move.
I sleep in my boots. We all do.
Our rations might taste vile, but they’re still better than any I ate in the Legion. These merely taste bad, those were sometimes poisonous. I’ve known fifteen-year-old pressed meat slaughter more than a full-on tribal attack.
Telling the Aux to quit whining, I flick my trike to life and wait for my team to saddle up. We edge through a sprawl of Wolf Brigade troopers folding their camp and pulling faces at their own rations.
We’re the first to the road. So we wait, as we did yesterday.
It’s worth being early to see General Luc’s scowl when he finds us drawn up in order, waiting for his men to sort themselves out. Unless he knows how close we came to falling into his trap and scowls because we pulled back before it snapped shut.
We are half a day from his lair. A small castle perched on the top of a basalt mountain a hundred miles from the rift. The walls are cut from the mountain’s rock, making them almost invisible.
Or so I’ve been told. Few visit it willingly.
‘Mount up,’ Sergeant Toro tells his outriders.
From the tightness of his voice, the Wolf’s had words about being late on parade. The glare Sergeant Toro shoots me is blasphemous. So I grin back and that upsets him even worse.
His men ride us tight for the rest of the morning. So maybe he’s also upset we didn’t fall into yesterday’s trap. We respond by pretending they don’t exist. And the sergeant doesn’t like that much either.
We stop once, an hour before noon.
There are usually two stops a day. One before the sun reaches its highest. Another an hour before sunset begins. That means we ride through the heat of the day. General Luc probably has his reasons. Not sure what they are, mind you.
‘Sorry,’ the sergeant says. ‘Not enough to go round.’
We’re not allowed to join the others filling their camelbacks and bottles from the water truck. So I tell Sergeant Toro he’s a dumb fuck, and I can’t believe General Luc is stupid enough to think we’d fall for a trap. Just how fucking dumb do they think we are?
He doesn’t know. How fucking dumb are we?
Not as dumb as a bunch of bastards who’ve never fought a real battle in their lives and run at the first sign of danger. Thought that would hit a nerve. Sergeant Toro doesn’t know why we’re retreating either.
If I wasn’t an officer, he tells me.
So I say not to let that worry him, because I never have. ‘Behind that,’ I suggest, nodding at the truck. ‘Who’s going to know?’
He looks tempted. ‘And the injuries?’
‘You can tell them you fell over.’
His laugh is harsh. ‘And what will you say?’
‘I saw you trip.’
Chapter 48
‘Keep your wits about you,’ I tell the Aux. ‘Only attack if I give the order.’
‘That was a joke, all right?’ Colonel Vijay’s voice sounds tired. ‘For anyone listening over the comms system: that was a joke.’
He brings his trike alongside for a quiet word.
The Wolf’s Lair hugs the top of a peak that has been flattened to take it. There’s one road, which crawls round the mountain in a slo
wly rising spiral, cut into the living rock. This forms the only way in.
High walls, looking down on the spiral, mean every step of the approach can be targeted from the ramparts. The black rock into which the spiral is cut is studded with steel doors for its final twist, which must be vast to be visible from here.
‘It’s hollow,’ I tell Neen.
He nods. ‘Yes, sir.’
Maybe Colonel Vijay told him that, as well.
My guess is one of the earlier COs decided he needed more space, so had the rock beneath his base quarried to provide it. The quarrying will be deep and the rock strong. This is not an easy place to capture.
As General Luc approaches the castle, a steel door slowly opens and his vehicle disappears, presumably inside. We’re two spirals below, with twenty scout cars ahead, each one leaving a safe distance, in case of mines . . .
Although I’d like to see someone dig this road.
As we finish our second loop around the mountain, the faces around me tighten. Neen looks determined, Shil resigned. Rachel is reciting a table of distances, wind speeds and deflection settings, her default position in times of stress. Ajac is doing his best to look like Neen.
Iona simply looks scared.
‘Being scanned,’ the SIG says. It shivers as it handshakes the castle’s security settings. No idea what it tells it. That it’s General Luc’s new housekeeper, probably. ‘Sven,’ it says, a moment later, ‘I think you should . . .’
Yeah, I know I should.
This is the bit I always hate.
The kyp in my throat leaps as I swallow the information the SIG is feeding me. There’s a taste of static, and my combat trike lurches as a spasm locks my muscles. But it’s fleeting and the gyros kick in anyway.
‘You OK?’ Shil asks. ‘Sir?’
‘Yeah. Just busy.’
Floor plans blossom inside my head. The hidden part of the castle is vast. There are dormitories for a thousand Wolf Brigade, and enough weapons for twice that number. Real weapons: pulse rifles and missile launchers, grenades and smart bombs. The armoury, fifteen floors below, is lined with mesh behind ceramic plate. It holds more ammunition than I’ve ever seen in one place.
The Wolf is ready for war.
That’s interesting. General Jaxx had an intelligence service second to none. So how come he didn’t know? Unless the Wolf’s naturally suspicious, and his suspicions are accidentally right.