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

Miska’s wiry build was a mass of compact muscle but, even boosted, at the end of the day she was small. Some might even say petite. The guard’s dead weight shouldn’t have been a problem but just as she reached for him a sudden gust of wind caught her chute. It pulled her over the mech catwalk’s railings. She managed to keep a hold of the dead guard with one hand, her gauss pistol still in the other. The body was half hung over the railing as her chute blew around in the humid wind.

‘Shit,’ she hissed.

‘Den?’ a voice asked from below.

‘Fuck my life,’ Miska added.

‘You okay?’

Miska heard the first voice confer with another. She knew that the moment the wind died she would swing back into the mech and probably pull the body over and they would be blown. She touched the SIG to the drop holster riding her thigh. The holster’s smart material sucked the pistol in and she reached into her webbing for the chemical reaction wand. She touched the wand to the stealth chute and turned it into carbon dust. Immediately she started to drop, swinging towards the mech cradle’s superstructure. She let go of the guard’s body before she pulled it off the cradle and reached for the superstructure. Her fingertips scrabbled at carbon composite, her ghillie suit getting in the way. She was falling. She managed to get a tenuous grip on one of the spars with her right hand. To her ears it sounded like she’d kicked a drum kit down a flight of stairs. Miska found herself face to face with another guard. She knew he couldn’t see her but he would have heard the noise and she suspected that her reactive camouflage would make the night air look like a pair of curtains blowing in the wind. An expression of surprise crossed the guard’s face as he tried to make sense of what was going on. He was, nevertheless, bringing his Kopis gauss carbine up. Miska knew that standard operating procedure for dealing with someone concealed with reactive camouflage was to fill the air with flechettes fired from the carbine’s 30mm under-barrel grenade launcher. That would hurt.

Miska was holding on to the cradle’s superstructure with her right hand. The drop holster was on her right thigh. Even with boosted reflexes she would be too slow but you had to try, didn’t you? She started to move. The barrel of the grenade launcher looked huge. She saw the guard’s mouth open to cry for help, or subvocalise a comms message. A crossbow bolt appeared in the guard’s cheek. He spat blood through newly broken teeth and collapsed to the ground, far too noisily for Miska’s tastes. She didn’t need to check her IVD to know who had fired the shot. Hogg, Vernon, consecutive life sentences for conspiracy to commit kidnapping, aggravated vandalism, mayhem and assassination. Hogg had been a member of the New Weather Underground terrorist organisation and was an occasional penal legion conscientious objector. She might have enslaved them all and implanted nano-explosives in their heads, but combat was only for those who wanted it. Though they did get shore leave and spending money for combat time. On this occasion he had agreed to active service because it allowed him to ‘kill corporate scumbags’. A member of the Sneaky Bastards’ first squad, he was the only legionnaire armed with a printed compound crossbow.

Miska heard boots clattering on the walkway below as a third guard ran up the ramp to investigate the noise. The only sound the suppressed, subsonic round fired from a slugthrower made was the metal-on-metal of the rifle’s internal mechanism. The noise came from the ground close to the mech cradle. Miska heard a grunt, followed by a clatter, as the third guard hit the deck. Again, making too much noise.

‘Shh,’ Miska whispered to herself as she climbed onto the catwalk. She checked to see who’d fired. According to her IVD Kaneda, Atsushi was stood on the cleared ground a little way from the mech cradle, covering it with his weapon. Even with the low light amplification of her artificial eyes Miska couldn’t see Kaneda because the young bōsōzoku gang-member-turned-sniper was concealed by his own reactive camouflage ghillie suit. Hogg was a little way from Kaneda, by the corner of the neighbouring mech cradle. Hogg and Kaneda had their own problems, however. Two spider sentry drones, basically gauss squad automatic weapons with thermal imaging lenses and six legs, had skittered round the mech. The drones were searching for the two Sneaky Bastards. A third joined them. This one, however, made for the mech cradle and started climbing.

‘Fuck, shit!’ Miska muttered. She could hear the spider making its way slowly up the cradle towards her. Then it went quiet. She checked Kaneda and Hogg’s position on her IVD. She could see the two spiders were slowly edging towards them. Their audio sensors must be pretty impressive, she decided. Kaneda’s biometrics suggested that the sniper was completely calm. Hogg’s showed a different story. Miska assumed that the spider drone on the cradle with her had stopped moving, that it was listening.

Miska loosened her M187 Tyler Optics laser carbine on its sling before bringing it to her shoulder. She tapped her toe on the catwalk and heard the metal-on-metal skittering noise as the spider sentry drone ran towards her.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to all Bastard call signs, I am compromised, going hot,’ she said over the hitherto silent comms net. The spider drone appeared at the top of the ramp. The reactive ghillie suit hid her from its lenses, momentarily. The heat-dampening properties of her inertial armour hid her from its thermal imaging, momentarily. She squeezed the trigger. The mech cradle was bathed in hot red light. Air particles exploded between the barrel of the carbine and the drone as she fired a three-round burst of harsh light. Superheated composites exploded and the drone collapsed to the ground.

Immediately Miska was forced to duck down as