So we sit in the early morning light, under the shadow of a huge tree, with a sticky wind rustling oak leaves and stirring dust. Her hair is damp at the neck and her skin smells of soap and sweat. I promise to kill General Luc the first chance I get. I promise it will be a slow and painful death and he will die in absolute-
Leona tells me this isn’t what she wants.
She wants me to pay attention. So I try not to notice her scent or how the skin of her neck feels under my touch. Although it doesn’t help my concentration when she shifts back and starts to unzip her jacket, revealing a vee of sweat beneath.
Her breasts shift either side of three dog tags that hide behind her vest’s green cotton. One tag to be buried with her body, one to be returned to her regiment, and one for central records so everything is up to date.
Don’t imagine that will happen.
Removing the chain, Leona ignores her dog tags, and holds up the key next to them. This would be simple, if not for its handle, which looks like the bastard son of a circle and a square.
Then she leans forward and unbuttons my shirt.
Next to my tags is a planet buster.
I took it on Hekati from a man who tried to kill me. He’d been given it by members of the Silver Fist. All he had to do, they told him, was twist its top and all his enemies would disappear.
He should wait until the next full moon.
By then, the shock troops intended to be somewhere else.
Somewhere that turning time inside out and destroying a sentient ring world wasn’t going to cause them problems. Because the U/Free can be very strict about things like that.
Only I screwed their plan and their ship too. Screwed the lot of them. But the ring world still died and I heard it happen.
‘Remembering Hekati?’ Leona says.
I nod abruptly.
‘It will get better.’
She smiles when I growl that I’ll take her word for it. Reaching out, she opens my hand and drops her chain into the middle, folding my fingers around it.
‘Fuck,’ the SIG says. ‘That’s-’
‘None of your business,’ Leona replies.
A tingle like static burns the centre of my palm.
‘Profiling,’ the SIG says. ‘Genotype human equivalent. Status DH class 2, override complete . . .’ It sounds like someone else.
My planet buster has a flip-up top, a purple ring that needs turning to set the core and a locking mechanism to stop the top opening accidentally. The key Leona gives me is simply a key.
‘What do I do with it?’
‘What do keys usually do?’ Taking her chain from my hand, she hangs it round my neck and buttons my shirt, before resting her forehead on mine. ‘The empire is not a thing,’ she says. ‘It’s an idea. You understand?’
‘No. I don’t understand at all.’
‘The long game.’
‘Leona, I can’t play chess.’
‘Then learn fast,’ she says firmly. ‘Or find people to play it for you.’
My face is to the sun and hers in shadow. Over her shoulders, half life-size in the distance, are the Aux, a dozen officers from the Wolf Brigade and the Wolf himself.
I’m impressed he’s left us alone this long.
‘Yes,’ Leona says. ‘I know. It’s time.’
Reaching out, she touches my face and her eyes glisten.
As we climb to our feet, she takes my hand and walks me back to where the others wait. And she keeps her face turned to mine and her smile in place, as if I am the one about to die.
Leona refuses General Luc’s offer of a blindfold.
She does, however, beg a cigarette from Neen, whose fingers shake badly when he lifts his hand to shield the flame. Trickling smoke between her lips, Leona glances round and nods towards a wall.
‘That’ll do, I guess.’
Soldiers from the Wolf Brigade continue loading trucks.
Food and ammunition and crates of weaponry. Kemzin 19s, half a dozen Z93z long-range rifles, a couple of mortars, a heavy machine gun, on a tripod so unwieldy it takes three men to carry.
They turn to watch us as they pass.
We’re a minor part of a play parallel to their own. Nodding to Colonel Vijay, the Wolf says, ‘I’ll leave the arrangements to you.’
Colonel Vijay says nothing.
‘Sir?’ I say.
Both men look in my direction.
It’s easy to read the colonel’s eyes. The last twenty-four hours have filled them with horror, sadness and a sense of hopelessness. The Wolf’s stare is harder to translate.
‘Permission to carry on, sir?’
It is the Wolf who nods.
Pulling my SIG-37 from its holster, I switch to hollow-point while the gun is still at my side and walk towards Leona. She’s still smiling when I raise the SIG and blow out her brains. No one said she had to be against a wall. No one said there had to be a firing party.
‘Find shovels,’ I tell the Aux. ‘Get yourselves over to that oak and dig a grave. I want her buried and prayers said before we move out.’
Sergeant Toro sends for entrenching tools, those flip-down spades with spikes one side and shovel blades the other. I could crack the Wolf’s skull with one blow. Only my idiot colonel gave his word and we’re stuck with that.
Ajac breaks the first of the dirt, hacking through a root that gets in his way. He’s broad and blond and strong as an ox. But he grew up on a deserted ring world in a goat-infested village that called itself a city. He digs until the sweat running down his face hides the tears he’s ashamed to show.
Then Neen volunteers.
He didn’t know Leona. None of them did, not really. But, by the end, she was one of us and that is enough. When Neen is exhausted, I take my turn.
Shucking off my coat, I strip off my shirt, wrap both hands round the handle of the entrenching tool and cut through roots in short, brutal strokes. Each one is General Luc’s skull being smashed beneath my blade.
A crowd begins to gather.
At first I think they’re drawn by the ferocity of my digging. But it’s the scars on my back that have them muttering to each other. They’ve never seen an officer who’s been whipped before, and my scars are clear enough to be counted.
Most men would be dead.
‘Lieutenant,’ says a voice. It’s the Wolf. So I don’t bother to look up.
‘Sir?’ I say, slamming my entrenching tool into a root.
‘Your back . . .’
‘Whipped for hitting an NCO.’
‘You were a trooper?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But you made sergeant?’
‘Made sergeant, sir. Lost it for hitting an officer.’ Another crack of the entrenching tool and its blade skids off a root to split a block of black stone. Obsidian, I’ve seen it before.
‘You were whipped for hitting an NCO. But not for hitting an officer?’
‘The penalty for hitting an officer is death, sir.’
General Luc knows that.
There is probably an army somewhere with different rules. I imagine they’ll lose to the first serious enemy they meet. Militia exist to die. Conscripts hold the enemy’s attention while the professionals get on with the real job.
As for the rest of us . . .
Legion, Death’s Head or Wolf Brigade, it doesn’t matter. Our officers can be trusted to behave in public. The rest, and I include myself in that, are in for life. We’re a fuck of a lot less dangerous to other people that way.
Scrambling from the grave, I discover it’s as deep as I’m tall.
So I carry Leona to the edge and have Neen pass her down to me.
From the front, as she lies face up, staring at the blue sky above, you’d never know that most of the back of her skull is missing.
‘Fill it in,’ I tell the Aux.
One of Luc’s officers checks his watch.
The Wolf shakes his head, and the major goes back to staring straight ahead. The men who finish loading their trucks drift over in twos and threes and find themselves staying. When Leona’s grave is full, and its overspill heaped into a mound, as overspill always is, we seem to have most of the Wolf Brigade around us.