Death's Head Read Online Free PDF

Maybe that’s why I’m so terrified.
    Youngster dies as he lived, in silence; but I hear his death inside my head, even without a knife to summon his thoughts, and his screams are no less terrifying for being silent.
    I’m huddled in my pool at the end of a deep tunnel, crouching in the water when a Death’s Head appears. Raising his pulse rifle, the man sights along its barrel and begins to tighten his finger on the trigger.
    It’s instinct alone that saves me.
    Throwing myself to one side, I scream at the top of my lungs before he has time to take a second shot. “Human.”
    The man hesitates, and that hesitation saves my life. Up goes his visor, his lips already moving as he relates the news to his commander or someone else on the surface. “Human,” I hear him say.
    A crackle of static.
    “Name?” he demands.
    It takes me a second or so to remember.
    Whoever is on the other end obviously gets impatient, because the soldier in front of me opens his mouth just as I remember.
    “Sven,” I tell him. “Ex-sergeant, Legion Etranger.”
    The law of the legion requires me to tell him I was once a sergeant. It’s a way of identifying troublemakers early.
    “Where did you serve?”
    The name of Fort Libidad comes growling off my tongue. I’m beginning to regret quite how loudly when he raises his rifle for a second time; but it’s unconscious and nothing suggests he feels anything other than shock.
    He relates my name and last posting to his unseen superior, who promptly comes back with another question. “How did you get here?”
    How indeed?
    I walked for days beside a ferox who decided to keep me for a pet… Somehow, it seems the wrong answer, so I decide on another.
    “Captured.”
    “And they let you live?” The question obviously comes from him, because there’s not time enough for it to come from the surface.
    I nod.
    “Just you,” asks the man. “You were the only one captured?”
    “The only one from the fort,” I say. “But there was a girl here when I first arrived.”
    “She died?”
    “The ferox ate her,” I tell him.
    I ate her.
    And I find myself on my knees, vomiting again.
    “Can you walk?” he demands.
    I look at him. Something keeps me from saying, Of course I can walk.
    Instead I limit my reaction to a nod. And when he turns, I crawl naked from my pool of water and follow him toward a wire ladder that seems to hang in space. It disappears into speckled darkness above, and I realize it’s still night out there and I can see stars inside the circle of the chimney’s distant top.
    A tiny lift motor runs up the edge of the ladder, and he makes a loop from his own belt, hooks it under my shoulders, and fixes the buckle to a hook. I’m being drawn upward before I realize he’s activated the machine.
    “What the fuck’s that?” he demands as we crawl past sections of ceramic jammed across tunnel entrances halfway up. He has his helmet light playing across the sides of the chimney. I guess he didn’t see the makeshift barricades on his way down.
    “Armored ceramic,” I tell him.
    The light when he turns blinds my eyes.
    Muttering something, the man tilts his head. And then repeats whatever he originally said.
    “Ceramic?” he checks, looking at me.
    “Yes,” I say. “Stolen from the fort.”
    The man mutters into his throat mike. “Will do,” he says finally. “We’re on our way out now.”
     
    HANDS HELP ME over the rim and I stare at the starlit sky. A sight I haven’t seen since the hunting trip, when Youngster tricked me away from the caves so the others could kill Anna—from a ferox that is almost compassion.
    “Can you stand?”
    What is it about officers and idiot questions?
    Of course I can stand, I start to say, then discover I can’t and swallow the rest of my sentence anyway. The boots in front of me belong to a Death’s Head colonel. Small, intense looking, with wire-framed spectacles, he wears one of the empire’s most easily identifiable