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

you got?’ she asked, as Kasmeyer threw the ghillie suit over his head and shoulders and became visible. He had a small build, his narrow face remarkable in just how unremarkable it was. Miska could see from transponder positions that the rest of the squad were remaining concealed, watching their back, including Kaneda and Hogg.

‘The hill has been excavated. The bunker complex is well equipped. They’ve been recycling all their waste. It’s even got a printer. It must have been set up either at the very beginning, or before the conflict started.’ Kasmeyer didn’t come across as frightened but she could see the tension in his face. Miska looked at the nearest corpse. Fungus had already started growing out of its neck stump. The largest fungal blooms made the impaled corpses look like their own species. Mushroom people. She was no expert but she didn’t think they had long been dead. The corpses were still dripping despite the aggressive fungal growth.

‘Any idea what happened?’ she asked.

‘The complex is partially collapsed. Lots of signs of violence but whatever happened it happened quickly. Lots of blood inside but I checked their weapons, most of them had a full magazine.’

That got Miska’s attention. The Machimoi’s head turned to stare at Kasmeyer.

‘You sure?” Miska asked. “Most of these guys are recruited from SF. They’re SEALs, SAS, KSK, people like that.’ She didn’t mention that they’d have top of the line implants, which meant wired reflexes comparative in spec to her own.

Kasmeyer just looked up at the Machimoi.

‘Weird thing, they’re all carrying slugthrowers. No lasers, no man-portable plasma weapons, no electromagnetics. All very low-tech. They don’t even have gauss kisses on the weapons. They even had old-fashioned optical sights,’ he told her.

That was weird. Miska could see the point in carrying slugthrower weapons. The higher the tech, the more chance of something going wrong. She often carried a shotgun herself as a backup weapon for her delicate laser carbine, and she still had a printed AK-47 that she had taken from Faigroe Station. To equip everyone with slugthrowers, however, suggested they were worried about an EMP. That didn’t make any sense. It would be insane for a conflict like this to go nuclear.

She also couldn’t work out why they had been out here. There had been rumours about the FOB flying around since before the Legion had arrived. Every transport crash, every lost soldier was attributed to a ghost force from Trafalgar. If, however, they had this many people, many of them ex-SF, then they could have caused absolute chaos behind the MACE’s lines.

Miska used the Machimoi’s optics to zoom in on the closest corpse’s wounds. They were wide, brutal, surprisingly thick. The ragged skin around the neck wounds made it look as though the heads had been torn off. A combat exoskeleton would be strong enough to do something like this, but even the strongest would struggle to tear through MMI body armour.

What, then?

A new war droid?

A Small God?

Aliens?

‘What’s north of here?’ she asked Kasmeyer, and then answered her own question by bringing up a map in her IVD.

‘More jungle, you go far enough and you get to the mountains and the headwaters of the Turquoise. It’s supposed to be swampy up there.’

Miska was running through information on the area as they spoke. The Maasai colonists on this part of the moon had spread out from Port Turquoise. They hadn’t penetrated as far as the FOB yet; there were no arbocultural settlements further north than their current position. She was staring north now, the Machimoi’s optics and sensors cutting through the night but revealing little more than steamy mist, spore clouds and seedpods floating on the warm breeze.

‘You find their heads?’ Miska added, nodding towards the closest mushroom-topped corpse. Kasmeyer just shook his own head.

‘We’ve got something else to show you,’ he said. Miska looked down at him. ‘Kaneda found it, but your skel armour won’t fit.’

Kasmeyer had Kaneda watch their back as Hogg led her into the tunnel complex within the hill. Miska’s artificial eyes were good enough that even as they entered the tunnel she could make out the weathered lines on Hogg’s face. Of an age with her father, Hogg was far too old for active service but he kept up with the younger legionnaires and his PT results and biometrics suggested he was more than fit enough. Miska suspected his fitness was down to his life as a fugitive, living rough in the wilderness.

The earthen tunnel smelt like people had died in here. The copper smell of blood mixed with shit. Hungry mosses had already crept in to feed on the biological waste. The tunnel was big enough for her Machimoi and Miska was just about to make such a comment when she saw the collapse ahead. It wasn’t often that Miska enjoyed being small but this was one of those times as she squeezed through a freshly-dug hole in the pile of earth that blocked the tunnel, carbine at the ready.

It was so dark on the other side of the collapse that both of them had to use the powerful flashlights mounted on their weapons – there wasn’t enough ambient light for her eyes to amplify it. Miska played her torch around the collapsed earth. She half convinced herself that it looked like something had come through the wall of the tunnel.

That’s just your mind playing tricks on you, she told herself.

‘Miska,’ Hogg said from the darkness, his light playing over a large humanoid figure. It took a moment for Miska to realise what it was. It looked like an updated version of the venerable Wraith combat exoskeleton. The design was well over a hundred years old but they were robust and comparatively low tech compared to something like the Machimoi. They were still used by fourth-tier colonial militias and some police forces for crowd control. There were some on board the Hangman’s Daughter, designed for use in the unlikely event of a prisoner riot.

Instead of the venerable Retributor