Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Heads turned. I was forced to swap surreptitious action for haste.

  I grabbed the next man and pressed the gun against his bond. A sneeze of blood sprayed down with the shot. Of course, he did not complain, but when he lifted his hands they were, I decided, too bloody to hold a gun.

  People were shouting.

  I would not have time to free all of my men; but since I only possessed weapons for three of them this was, perhaps, no bad thing. I tried once more, attempting greater precision in my positioning of the mouth of the gun against the centre of the bond. I fired. The plastic snapped apart.

  ‘I have only three weapons,’ I said to the two remaining captives. ‘You are lucky in that you shall not be compelled to violate your position as bondsmen.’ From my left shoulder eye I saw several soldiers hefting their weapons into firing positions. There was no more time.

  Two of my freed men picked the handweapons from the floor, and the third fellow with bloody hands stood up. He could have stayed, of course, but he chose to come. I held my gun with both hands and began firing into the mass of enemy troops. There were so many of them that it was hardly possible to miss. Each shot sent a headed man sprawling.

  There was enormous confusion.

  We darted backwards and looked for cover. There were several varieties of weapon that the enemy could not risk firing in the enclosed space of the barrack for fear of injuring their own; but it was not long before files of men were being assembled with more suitable ordnance.

  The nearest exit was in the corner of the building. I sprinted for it, and ran smack into a man who was hurrying in from outside to see what the commotion was. This impact momentarily winded me, but one of my men was able to shoot the enemy down. Three of us were though the door, with the bloody-handed fellow almost there, when the sound of scores of volleys of needles filled the air behind us. I did not see, but can imagine, what happened to the men still wrist-tied against the wall. The man with bloodied hands staggered outside to fall into the black dust with a burr of needles in his back. The three of us did not look back.

  Four

  We three ran into the darkness. Of course we were pursued. Needles flickered past us like flaws in our vision software. Our good fortune was that the land rose half a league south of that camp, so that by hurrying up the incline we disappeared into the murk. The dust was thicker here, sometimes swallowing my legs to the mid-shin like a maw, but it had not been primed as a dustmine or with a clogging agent and so was easy enough to move on. My two men were close behind me.

  We came across a repair-automate, a machine so huge its top was invisible in the smirr. It had been broken, perhaps by enemy action, and had lowered its box-girdered belly into the dry dirt, and it was in amongst this twisted scaffold that we took temporary shelter. We rested our guns against spars and made careful observation of the land over which we had just come. Nobody was directly behind us, or at least, nobody that we could see in the murk.

  ‘What are your names?’ I whispered to the two headless with me.

  ‘Grande,’ whispered one, and ‘Kym Field,’ the other.

  ‘I am Jon Cavala.’

  ‘We know,’ said Grande.

  There were noises below us, and we fell silent. Presently a cluster of remotes came labouring up through the darkness. They stopped before the prow of the fallen automate, spun their clamshell heads left and right and then passed by climbing higher. This was a sharp moment, for I did not like the idea of permitting the enemy to get behind me. But I liked less the idea of revealing our position to remotes by firing at them, for they would transmit our location to the enemy mainframe and surely after that would come attack from the air that would crush us. Besides, I told myself, the land all around us, behind as well as in front, was surely filled with enemy anyway.

  Shortly after this three headed soldiers came up. Again we held fire, and lay silently. The soldiers examined the ruined hulk, poking through it unsystematically, and they failed to uncover our hiding place. After this desultory search they put up their weapons and sat on the ground not far from us. Then they removed their helmets to share the smoking of a curved cheroot.

  We were perfectly quiet, unobserved.

  The enemy soldiers spoke amongst themselves in low voices, chattering in their own tongue, which I could not understand. Then they fell silent. One pointed with his finger down the hill, and the other two looked in that direction. There was a dim fold of light gleaming down there somewhere, a damp-looking pearl-coloured line half a degree of arc in length: will-o’-the-wisp, or refracted light from some more distant explosion, who knows what it was? Whilst their attention was distracted, and their helmets were off, I took my aim and cut bulleted-channels through two of their skulls with two rapid shots, such that those two men slumped forward and fell on their dead faces. The third got to his feet, but with a weird slowness, not at all what you would expect: not a rapid leaping en garde!, but an almost leisurely uprise. Kym Field shot him in the side of his head as he turned towards us.

  We tried to take their guns, but they would not work. They were keyed in some way to their owners, perhaps. They did, however, have rations in their belts, and these we took and devoured at once.

  ‘We must find a storage facility,’ I told my two. ‘I have not had my pharmocopy in several weeks, and the lack of necessary hormones is impairing my ability to fight.’

  ‘Where must we look?’ asked Grande.

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Let us wait here for a little,’ suggested Kym Field. ‘And then explore over the far side of this hill.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  We lay in the dark. I believe the two others fell asleep, but I could not.

  After a while I roused my men and the three of us climbed to the top of the hill. Creeping through the dark. Grande came up to me. ‘Sieur Cavala,’ he said. ‘I am troubled.’

  I did not reply. As we started down the far side of the dark hill the ground was broken into craters and gouges, and we had to tread carefully. There was a great deal of litter mixed in with the black dust.

  ‘There is,’ Grande said, after a moment, ‘a certain shame in breaking our duty as bondsmen.’

  ‘Not for you,’ I replied. ‘For you and Kym Field were following my orders, as was proper for you to do. The shame, which - I agree - is great, is mine alone.’

  He was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘I find myself disinclined to die.’

  I understood what he meant. ‘I too,’ I said. ‘But this by itself, merely wanting to live, this is not inherently shameful. For life is the gift of the All’God, and we must not squander it.’

  ‘Is this a decent philosophy for a soldier?’ he asked. ‘Are such thoughts proper?’

  His question annoyed me. ‘Your philosophy should be to follow my orders,’ I retorted. ‘That should be enough for you.’

  We roamed the hillside for a long time, on two occasions dropping into the dust as noises clanked past us. At the bottom of the hill we found a road, its paving slabs cracked and dislocated as if the tabletop on which a domino-game was laid had been kicked heartily from beneath. Except that the domino tiles were all three metres long and one wide. Lights glimmered on the far side of this road and we made our way cautiously.

  The lights belonged to an open truck that was moving, awkwardly through the dust towards us. A dozen headed troops sat in the back. But the foolishness of it was that I did not realise that this is what the lights meant until we were almost upon it. Blinded, perhaps, by the urgency of my need for pharmocopy I told myself that the lights were a building, a storehouse, a medical supply facility, and I hurried towards them. And so it was that we blundered suddenly into the headlights of the approaching vehicle.

  The surprise of our appearance, and the ferocity of our reputation, was perhaps of service to us. The engine noise rose and the truck accelerated towards us as if to run us down. But it was a simple matter to step aside, myself and Kym Field on one side, Grande on the other.
And then the sides of the truck moved smoothly from right to left before us, with the heads of the troops visible above the board, such that it was like a fairground test of marksmanship. We fired and fired again, and the mass of men on the back was thrown into confusion, huggle-muggle in panic. Needles flashed out from them in all directions, but they were poorly aimed and none struck us.

  The truck lurched away from us, and I tapped Kym Field on the flank and ran past Grande, who followed. In moments we came upon a low wall, broken in many places, and behind this we took cover.

  *

  We stayed where we were, listening to the noise of shouts and the retreating engine roar. Then the noises changed. The engine stopped, and the shouting sounded more purposeful. Troops formed up and perhaps came looking for us. We stayed where we were.

  Then we heard the sound of fighting, the snick of needles and the distinctive clump of clubs being fired. Then, without warning, half a dozen soldiers came piling through the gap in the wall. It was so startling that I almost did not realise that these were as headless as I. My weapon was up and my finger almost pulling the trigger before I saw.

  Their weapons, likewise, were on us. ‘We are headless,’ I said.

  There was a pause, and then weapons were lowered. For a moment we all listened to the noises on the far side of the wall. They swirled and chattered, and then they began to recede. ‘They are going away,’ I said. ‘They are chasing us in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Who are you?’ hissed one of the newcomers. ‘Why are you not wearing your armour?’

  ‘We three are what remains of the Thirtieth Troop of Cainon Headless. Or I am. I don’t know which troop these two belong to.’

  ‘We are the Sixth Troop of Rotier Headless,’ said the leading headless. ‘Where are your weapons?’

  ‘We were captured,’ I said. ‘Then we escaped capture.’

  He stood, silent, for a while to think about this. For a moment I thought he might turn in disgust and move away. But then he spoke. ‘I was a restaurateur,’ he said. I waited to see where this non sequitur might lead. ‘A man died in my kitchens - an undercook. His family insisted I be prosecuted, as responsible for his death, and so I was.’ He paused again. ‘Since being beheaded, and since joining the military, many things that were previously certainties to me have become unsettled.’ I understood him to be saying that the fact that we, though bondsmen, had broken from captivity was merely one more such unsettlement. ‘But,’ he added, as if testing the idea, ‘was it well done?’

  ‘We fought,’ I said. ‘We killed some of the enemy, and those of us who died doing it went to the All’God with clean souls. I believe it was well done.’

  ‘War is a strange time,’ said the former restaurateur.

  ‘Your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Causta.’

  ‘If I may suggest, Sieur Causta,’ I said. ‘It might perhaps be overscrupulous of you to reject us from your troop on the grounds that we violated our duty as bondsmen.’

  ‘I have no desire to reject you. But I confess I am uncertain what our strategy may be.’

  ‘I assume we must fight the enemy until a counter-attack reconnects us with the main body of Pluse troops.’

  ‘This is what I have been assuming,’ said Causta. ‘But I have doubts.’

  ‘We must find pharmocopy,’ I said. ‘I need a purse of it immediately, and if you do not need one now you soon will. We must find a store and obtain a supply.’

  ‘This seems a sensible aim,’ he agreed. ‘But where will we find it?’

  We spent two days - perhaps a little more or less, for it was difficult to keep time in that unchanging dust-dark - in one another’s company. For a long time we did nothing more than stumble through the dark, taking cover where we could and when we chanced upon the enemy, killing some. Kym Field had received a needle in his thigh when he and I and Grande had chanced upon the truck, and we did not have pliers or any similar necessaries to remove it. He could still walk, limpingly, and he could still fight; but over a day or so the motion of muscle in his leg made the wound much worse, and soon he was bleeding so heavily that no quantity of bandaging could prevent it. We lay him down beside a road and left him. I do not know what happened to him afterwards.

  We came across much rubbish. There were many empty containers, all of which we searched for useful things. In the dark, once, I stumbled over a wheeled wire-mesh trolly, of the sort that supermarkets provide to their customers to port their shopping about the store. It lay on back with its pitiable little wheels up in the air. I do now know what it was doing there. We found a hubcap. We found an artificial leg, its motor broken, and many folded pieces of paper, and strips and scraps of rag. We found a roll of wrapping material, brand new: that variety of wrapping material in which transparent plastic is covered in myriad blisters of transparent plastic. Another time I found a surfboard, patterned in red-dotted purple, like a giant’s severed tongue: a strange sight indeed amongst all that endlessly dry and war-scorched dust.

  I was feeling increasingly ill, and desperate for pharmocopy. When we at last discovered a warehouse I was recklessly eager to storm it.

  ‘The enemy possess it,’ Causta pointed out.

  ‘A raid,’ I insisted. ‘Surprise - suddenness - for there are only a few guards.’

  ‘You are too hasty.’

  ‘Pharmocopy,’ I urged, ‘is more to us than food. For we can fight without food for weeks, but without our purses we will sicken and die.’

  He thought for a time, and then agreed. But our attack, when we mounted it, was impromptu and ragged. One of Causta’s men fired a club into a fuel bin, causing it to explode. But there was only a second of fire, and then the flame was replaced by oddly blocky clouds of smoke pouring out, rising and billowing like black sacks filled with hot air. Grande and I rushed the main entrance, shooting without precision at the three or four headed enemy. They returned fire, but I ignored them. I shouldered the door open and had time, just, to see that the space inside was filled with soldiers - hundreds of them, all armed, all starting up. My rage at the hopelessness of it was more painful than either my broken ribs or my lack of necessary hormone.

  I tried to lift my handgun, but I caught the barrel of it against the doorframe and it jarred from my grip. This, perhaps, seems improbably clumsy to you. Perhaps you consider my actions to have been subconsciously motivated by a desire to surrender and save my life. I do not know. All I can say is that, at that moment, any motivation must have been subconscious, for I was aware of no conscious thought at all.

  Five

  The enemy had learned a lesson from our previous escape. Now they bound us tying left wrist to left ankle, right to right. We sat with our knees up and our arms forward for many hours; it was not a comfortable position. My ribs were hurting more than they had done before. The pain was tolerable, but I was certain I could feel the point of break in the two ribs, the rough ends of the fracture, settling out of true. Though it’s silly to admit it, it was the aesthetic of this that bothered me more than anything else. Would my chest become distorted if the bones set badly? In the event, they did not; but I worried over the question for a long time.

  ‘You are not in your proper uniform,’ said one enemy soldier to me.

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Did you discard it? Was it taken from you?’

  ‘The latter.’

  ‘So you were in captivity,’ he said, starting back from me. ‘You are one of those—’ Realisation had made him fearful. He hurried off to find his captain.

  I did not greatly care. The question that most concerned me, at this juncture, was whether we were liable to execution for breaking our duties as bondsmen. Death would surely have been the natural consequence of such action on Pluse, but I spent a long time wondering whether the same protocols would govern the actions of the enemy. I needed to know in order to decide whether I should prepare my soul to meet the All’God or not. And if not, what I should do.

  Finally an off
icer came over to us. He was holding a data tablet. He spoke Homish fluently. ‘I must ask you certain questions. I must ask your names.’

  ‘We are men of the Thirtieth Troop of Cainon Headless and the Sixth Troop of Rotier Headless,’ I said.

  ‘Are you in command?’ he asked me, checking some details off from his data tablet.

  ‘Syrophoenician,’ I said.

  He looked up sharply. ‘Is that your name?’ he asked.

  This was a moment about which my whole life shifted and hinged.

  Though I was tired and ill, lacking pharmocopy and drugged with defeat, nevertheless I had a flash of insight. I deduced that this man was holding in his hand data about our troop disposition. This must have been derived from the same database that the enemy had infiltrated with their virus. They had of course downloaded our data, including perhaps names and ranks.