War Criminals by Gavin Smith (ereader for textbooks .TXT) 📕

la-las, and a mortar squad, before beginning their sweep north and south along the hilltop base, respectively.

Despite being blinded by dust she knew her surroundings from the surveillance images she’d studied while planning the mission, and the footage shot by the rotor drones. This part of the hillside base consisted of a series of fortified pre-fabricated cabins, known as hooches, used as barracks for the Triple S troops. They were connected by shallow defensive trenches and, in an excavated hollow defended by smartcrete barriers, there was a bunker with a commanding view of both the town and the jungle. She was pleased to note that the point defence systems, on this side of the hill anyway, had all been taken out.

She was left with a railgun squad, assault squad and mortar squad.

‘Get set up, I want—’ Miska started. Rounds impacting the earth all around interrupted her. She scrambled for the closest trench, Nyukuti by her side. The eleven men from fourth platoon did likewise. Further along the stretch Miska saw their attackers. A Triple S fire team. Miska immediately had her carbine to her shoulder and was advancing towards them. There was a loud pop as she fired the carbine’s 30mm grenade launcher, filling the trench with razor sharp flechettes.

‘—mortar set up, targeted on the bunker, la-las the same, stay well clear of the western approach, fire on my mark,’ Miska continued as she stalked through the trench firing the laser, the beam beating the flechettes to their mark, possibly even burning a few out of the air en route. Nyukuti was following her down the trench, his SAW at the ready but there wasn’t enough room to fire around her. The laser superheated the hard armour plate, causing it to explode. The flechettes found exposed skin. Steaming flesh blew out through destroyed armour. The fire team either went down or scrambled around the corner in the trench. One of the assault shuttles flew overhead raining down railgun fire on some unseen target.

‘Railguns to provide security,’ she finished as she reached the corner of her trench, slipping in steaming viscera, a humid blood mist hanging in the air over the corpses. The battery icon for her carbine was blinking in her IVD. She’d had to up the weapon’s power to cut through all the crap in the air.

‘Reloading,’ she told Nyukuti. She heard railgun fire from nearby. Nyukuti nodded and came round her as she replaced the battery in her carbine, checking the rotor drones to see if either of them had eyes on her position. They didn’t, and she didn’t want to re-task them. She listened for a moment but even with her dampener she couldn’t hear anything from around the corner of the trench. She removed a 30mm fragmentation grenade from one of the loops on her webbing.

‘Frag out,’ she warned Nyukuti, then knocked off the safety cap with her thumb, depressed the arming stud and threw it into the next trench. They were showered in more dirt as the frag exploded and then Nyukuti was around the corner, firing burst after hypersonic burst from his SAW. Miska followed, her carbine at the ready.

‘Offensive-Four-Two-Three-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual. We have a drone in the air and a targeting solution for the CP,’ said the corporal in command of the mortar squad she had been left with. Miska tapped Nyukuti on the shoulder to stop him. Both of them hunkered down in the trench, Nyukuti covering forward, Miska covering back the way they’d just come. The red miasma still hung in the air behind them. Nyukuti had made two more bodies in the trench in front of them. Miska checked the feeds from the rotor drones. As she watched, Heavy-Two-Two tackled one of the enemy mechs and brought it to the ground. Moments later she heard the clanging of metal hitting metal. Miska was pretty sure it was the last thing the Triple S mech-jockey had expected. He was flailing to get up. Heavy-Two-Two knelt on the enemy mech and extended the synthetic diamond-toothed chainsaw blades from his forearms. They were intended as arbocultural tools – the mechs used them as machetes when operating in the thick jungle. Heavy-Two-Two repurposed them, pushing the spinning blades into the armoured torso of the enemy mech in a fountain of sparks.

Heavy-Two-One, Hemi’s Medusa, wrapped its arms low around the legs of the enemy mech he was fighting and then straightened up. With enormous mechanical strength Heavy-Two-One lifted the Triple S Medusa into the air and, with a clearly audible scream of protesting metal, dropped the mech over his back and onto its head. Miska couldn’t help but grimace, there was no way that wouldn’t have damaged some of Hemi’s weapon systems.

Heavy-One-Two was covering one of the enemy mechs that was down on its knees, hands in the air.

Heavy-One-Actual, Mass’s mech, was stamping on the Triple S mech that it had knocked over with the thrown truck. In many ways that was the problem with the Triple S mech jockeys. They treated their mechs as moving weapon platforms and thought in terms of strategy and tactics. Her Bastards, on the other hand, were thinking of this as a scaled-up prison yard brawl. They weren’t interested in the ‘rules’ of mech combat. They didn’t know better than to think of the mechs as anything other than thirty-foot-tall, armoured extensions of their own bodies. The Triple S jockeys had come for a war and got a street fight. It had worked in the Bastards’ favour this time.

Miska checked on Heavy-One-Three and Heavy-Two-Three. They were both still covering the landing pads. As she watched, Heavy-One-Three fired its Vengeance railgun over Port Turquoise’s rooftops, shredding a moving VTOL transport like it was so much confetti.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to Heavy-One-Actual, can I borrow Heavy-Two-Three, please? He looks bored,’ Miska asked.

‘Be my guest,’ Mass answered. He sounded out of breath.

Miska told the corporal in charge of the mortar section to send the targeting package to Heavy-Two-Three. Heavy-Two-Three stood up and started making its