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

stringent rules to this war designed to limit unnecessary loss of life. Most of the battles came down to a brief exchange of fire, some posturing, and then whichever side had the clear disadvantage surrendered. Miska’s response to the situation, which had been favouring Triple S and their New Sun employers, had been to hit hard and fast, ideally with the element of surprise, and do sufficient damage with the opening attack that the enemy wanted to surrender before things got any worse. While her tactics weren’t, strictly speaking, against the articles of conflict, they weren’t the ‘done thing’. Previous to the Bastards joining the conflict it had looked more like a dance, or one of her dad and Uncle V’s chess games. This had well-served the military contractors, mercenaries by another name, who were employed on either side. Miska, however, had turned up to fight a war.

Wage a war, she reminded herself. Now other people were supposed to fight for her.

She opened her eyes to pain lancing through her head. It was so intense that she was actually seeing white flashes. She suspected that her eyes needed some maintenance. She was lying in her collapsible cot in her hooch, drenched in sweat despite her lack of recent physical exertion. It was the humidity. The air seemed as much a sweaty liquid as a breathable gas, even at night. She was in need of some painkillers, a shower, a fifth of Scotch, about a day’s worth of sleep and some PT, probably in that order.

Most of the Bastards had been stood down, though McWilliams and Perez had been working to get some of the other experienced and newly sim-qualified pilots up to speed on the VTOL gunships and atmo-transports they had captured at Port Turquoise. Ideally they would take some of the pressure off the Pegasi assault shuttles.

The Sneaky Bastards had gone back out. They were still searching for FOB Trafalgar. Apparently some of the surveillance drones that MACE had sweeping their side of the river had found some interesting heat signatures.

Miska lay there in her own sweat for a few moments and listened to the base. It was reasonably quiet, though she could hear Nyukuti snoring softly through the thin printed wall of the pre-fabricated hooch. Beyond that she could hear conversation and the occasional laughter from the nearby hooches. She felt the hum of the generators, heard the sound of the cargo-handling exoskeletons shifting supplies around, and she could just about hear the sound of the canopy rustling in the wind. When the wind picked up it could sound like thunder going through the thick leaves above them. Other than the wind and the creak of the enormous trees, the jungle was quiet. There was no indigenous fauna. Plants handled some of the roles in the ecosystem that would normally be filled by animals. Predatory plants weren’t an issue without animals, but biting airborne seedpods and aggressive parasitical fungal spores were. The latter were causing more casualties than combat at the moment. Somehow the colonists, many of whom were Maasai, managed to avoid the worst depredations of the local flora. The colonists had left their homes in Kenya and Tanzania after it became progressively more difficult for them to pursue their semi-nomadic lifestyle in cosmopolitan Africa.

Miska could see the attraction of New Ephesus to the Maasai, but what she couldn’t understand was why New Sun wanted the planet. It seemed to have little to offer in exploitable resources. The gas mining operations in Epsilon Eridani B’s upper atmosphere, which provided fuel for the colony and passing spacecraft, were about the most valuable industry in the system. So far, however, New Sun had shown little interest in the gas platform aerostats. She understood why the colonists were fighting. That pesky self-determination seemed to get in the way of the all-consuming profit margin again and again. She just couldn’t see where that profit was supposed to come from for New Sun. Raff was digging into it, and she’d asked Vido to do the same. So far, nothing. Raff was convinced that New Sun was a Martian-backed shell company, but the Martian threat was a familiar song sung by the CIA, in part to justify their existence. The song played well back home on Earth, where they lived in fear of the Small Gods’ tech. In fairness it was tech that had allowed the Small Gods to dominate much of the Sol System.

Miska used her neural interface to add painkillers to her blood from her internal medical systems, noting that she would soon need to top up her supplies. Trying to act responsibly while in command was taking its toll. She swung up out of her cot. She knew she could get one of her Bastards to change her sweaty sheets but the enlisted marine in her wouldn’t do that. She would change them herself, once she’d had a shower and located some Scotch.

‘Sneaky-One-One to Hangman-One-Actual.’ Sneaky-One-One’s details scrolled down her IVD. Sergeant Robert ‘Bob’ Kasmeyer, the leader of the Sneaky Bastards’ first squad. He’d grown up as an asteroid rat, run with the tunnel gangs formed by the children of other itinerant belt miners in the Sol system. Petty crime had turned to not so petty crime when he’d graduated to hijacking automated ore transports. He’d sneak on board the transports in their home port, disable communications and his accomplices would dock with the transports en route. Except that on his last job the automated transport had stowaways on board, in the shape of a tin-can habitat tethered to the sub-light ship. Kasmeyer’s part in the murders had earned him a life sentence.

He had excelled during training, particularly at stealth operations, and seemed calm and patient. These qualities, and being able to think on his feet, had got him command of the squad. His preference to observe and provide information over contact with the enemy was just the sort of leader that the Sneaky Bastards needed. That didn’t stop Miska