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

They might risk an air strike, though. Triple S definitely had air superiority in this particular conflict but that advantage was limited because of the terrain. ‘How’re things down in town?’ she asked.

‘Some of the Triple S combatants managed to make a break for it, but frankly I can’t see them coming back, and they’re just making their own repatriation that much harder. That said, we’re keeping an eye out for them. We’re keeping all the prisoners in the plaza where we landed. There’s quite a lot of them.’

It wasn’t quite a criticism. They had always known they were going to be outnumbered. It was more a warning that, although it might have gone their way this time, it could have easily gone the other way. She was aware of the recklessness of her plan. She was of the opinion that said awareness showed how much she’d grown as a person.

‘You strip all their gear from them? Weapons, ammo, armour?’ she asked. She particularly wanted the man-portable plasma weapons the Triple S troops had been using.

‘Yes, but that’s part of the problem. The gear we’re taking off the troops, guarding the enemy mechs, the airfield, the raw materials for their military printer, securing the vehicles. We’re stretched pretty thin.’

As ever, her dad wasn’t wrong.

‘I know that, Dad. This morning’s smash and grab isn’t me going back to my bad old ways, I promise. No more Barney-Prime-style clusterfucks but we couldn’t turn our nose up at this. We desperately need the gear and this will be the last chance we get to rob on such a scale.’

‘Because the next time they’ll have booby traps, literal and electronic,’ he said.

Miska nodded. It was a worry. Triple S (electronic) would have their hackers going after the systems of all the hardware they had taken this morning, and she was light on the net support side because of the threat criminal hackers posed to her. As soon as they managed to get all their stolen war machines back to base, everything would be shut down until she had personally had the opportunity to purge their systems of malicious code and back doors.

‘You found a weakness and you exploited it tactically.’

‘Still need to work on strategy, huh?’ Miska asked, smiling.

‘Keep playing chess with Major Cofino,’ her dad suggested. Miska had caught him and Uncle V playing a few games as well. That was the biggest threat posed by Vido Cofino, he made it very difficult not to like him.

‘I hate chess,’ Miska griped.

‘Well done today, it was a ballsy move but it paid off.’

‘By balls I’m assuming you mean ovaries?’ she asked.

It was downright disconcerting hearing the war droid chuckling with her dad’s voice.

‘Prioritise the vehicles, only take things that are multi-role, and can be used in combat. Dump all the soft-skinned bullshit and I’ll have Mass task the Satyrs to patrol for the ones that got away. We get back to Badajoz we’re going to stand down for a day or two, and then no more hairy shit.’

‘Understood,’ her dad said. The Cyclops’s head turned towards the river. ‘Looks like our relief is here.’

Her IVD headache had become a two-day-long net fatigue headache. They had turned Port Turquoise over to the allied mercenaries in the relief force. There had been some wrangling over the ‘spoils of war’ but nobody had really wanted to tangle with Miska over it, so the Bastards had got their hardware. A staggered airlift had followed as they ferried the remaining VTOL gunships and atmosphere transports that the Medusas hadn’t destroyed; the printer raw materials; captured arms and ammunitions, including some plasma weapons that Miska was very excited about; every single last piece of mech spare part they could find; the least damaged mech and the few armoured vehicles that hadn’t been destroyed. They had also recovered the missing Medusa, which had got bogged down in the Turquoise River. All the vehicles and a number of the weapon systems had required checking for back doors, viral mines and other surprises that Triple S’s electronic warriors might have left behind. It was exactly the sort of work that she hated. Simultaneously boring and repetitive but requiring a great deal of attention to detail, and she was the only one who could do it. The lack of combat hackers that she could trust, or intimidate to the extent she was sure they wouldn’t betray her, was becoming more and more of an issue. She had discussed with her dad the idea of hiring actual mercenaries to work for them, combat-capable hackers that didn’t have N-bombs in their heads, but that had its own set of security concerns.

The only thing that had cheered her up had been redesigning the net representations of all the stolen vehicles and weapon systems. She had done away with the dreary committee-designed aesthetics that Triple S used. In its place she made the net representations of the hardware look like vehicles and equipment from a pre-FHC conflict that had taken place in a country called Vietnam. The conflict had spawned a number of apparently classic, according to her dad, vizzes. He had thoroughly approved of the new aesthetics. The addition of the ‘steel pot’ combat helmet to her own cartoon icon came from the same conflict.

However, she still had to run the Legion while she was immersed in the net, as well as make sure she ate, used the toilet, and apparently she was supposed to sleep as well.

Triple S had kicked up a lot of fuss about what people were already calling the Bastard Offensive. Colonel Duellona, the commander of the Triple S forces in-system, had cited infractions of the articles of conflict, none of which were holding much water. It was at times like these that she really appreciated Uncle V. He seemed to love this bullshit, whereas she didn’t quite understand why, despite them being on opposing sides of the conflict, she couldn’t just go and shoot Duellona in the head. There were some pretty