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

way through Port Turquoise towards the CP. A line of earth and powdered concrete erupted into the air from the impact of the 200mm projectile fired from the approaching Medusa’s shoulder-mounted mass driver. The tungsten-cored penetrator left a glowing trench in its wake. The hypersonic round tore open the reinforced concrete front of the bunker. Miska let the assault squad fire a few la-las through the hole. Then she ordered the mortar section to start dropping the bombs in, and not stop until the CP surrendered. She heard the familiar pop of the mortars firing. This was followed moments later by an explosion and more dust filled the air.

‘This is Miska Corbin. I’m assuming you all know who I am. You’ve got until the approaching mech reaches the CP to surrender,’ she said over an open frequency. ‘Or I burn you out.’

Heavy-Two-Three hadn’t even covered half the distance before she received a message from the Triple S commander surrendering.

Chapter 5

Triple S’s command staff had stumbled out of the command post into the waiting arms of Miska’s Bastards. They were covered in powdered concrete, their eyes were bloodshot and they were more than a little dazed. The highest-ranking surviving officer from the mass-driver-gutted bunker staggered towards her, stuttering something about the articles of conflict. Miska reassured her that that they would be followed even as the Triple S officer was pushed down to her knees by one of the railgun squad’s assistant gunners. All of this in the shadow of the Medusa. The mech, cradling its railgun/flame-thrower combination weapon as though it was an oversized carbine, looked for all the world like another legionnaire, a giant in combat armour.

Everything was in hand. Miska walked past the mech to look out over Port Turquoise. It was quiet now the Triple S rank-and-file had seemed eager to follow the order to surrender. The northern corner of town where her stolen mechs and their Triple S counterparts had fought was a mess. Rubble everywhere, buildings that looked as though somebody had taken a bite out of them, and huge craters in the surface of the road.

‘Well, balls,’ Miska muttered. She had been tight on the ROE, the rules of engagement. She had told Mass and the other mech jockeys to check their backgrounds when firing their weapons, to try and keep collateral damage to a minimum. That was probably why they had closed for hand-to-hand fighting so quickly. She hadn’t liked making the ROE so tight. Her responsibility was to her legionnaires first and foremost, to give them the best possible chance to survive, but Port Turquoise was peopled by the very colonists that had hired them. It was difficult to liberate dead people.

She was aware of Torricone heading down the hill towards the town about a hundred feet to the north of her. Miska quickly checked her IVD. Two of her Bastards were KIA and several more were injured. She would review the gun-and helm-cam footage along with the footage from the drones and find out what happened. What they all could have done differently.

‘What are you doing?’ Miska asked Torricone over a direct link. ‘We’ve got wounded.’

‘They volunteered,’ Torricone answered and then severed the link. She’d heard disgust in his voice. It was a flagrant disregard for her orders and he was going to have to be dealt with sooner rather than later. She didn’t think Torricone felt that the last two missions, during which they’d both been in some pretty tight scrapes together, had bought him any slack. He just didn’t seem to care any more. Not since they had come back from Barney Prime. What she couldn’t work out was why he hadn’t just elected to stay in suspended animation.

Miska saw the Cyclops war droid that her father’s electronic spirit inhabited running on all six of its limbs through the hillside base towards her. The two Pegasus assault shuttles were still circling overhead. Doubtless Triple S relief forces were en route but forces employed by the Colonial Administration had set out in an ad-hoc flotilla of ferries, cargo boats, and a few ageing riverine patrol craft to occupy Port Turquoise the moment the attack had started. All the river craft were loaded to the gunwales with mercenary troops in the employ of Military Active Command Ephesus sent to relieve the Bastards. Miska had made it clear when she had gone to work for MACE that, like the USMC with whom she had served, they were an expeditionary force, a fighting force, not a garrison unit. They would be relieved.

‘You know that whole galloping thing looks undignified, don’t you?’ Miska said as the Cyclops reached her.

‘Gets me places quicker though. Being in this metal body, I don’t know why we don’t just let drones do all the fighting these days,’ her dad said.

‘Hacking, upkeep, and frankly humans are cheaper and more surprising.’

‘I certainly think we were that. Where’s he going?’ The Cyclops pointed at Torricone with a metal thumb, a human gesture that seemed incongruous coming from the armoured war droid.

‘See if he can help anyone in town,’ Miska told her dad.

‘You sign off on that?’

‘Sure,’ Miska lied. She had the disconcerting feeling that the Cyclops was staring at her. She was grateful that her dad didn’t push the matter. Torricone was becoming a real problem, in more ways than one.

‘ETA on your relief?’ her dad asked instead.

‘The forward elements are about twenty minutes out,’ she told him, magnifying her vision, checking the river, but it seemed that the flotilla was still over the horizon. ‘MACE have got a couple of high altitude surveillance drones up. No sign of Triple S response yet.’ They would know that this situation wasn’t going to be solved with a few shuttles full of their QRF. The captured mercenaries would complicate things as well. Their contracts would have stipulations as regarded the risks they would have to take from their own forces counterattacking in just such an eventuality.