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

the other two spider drones that had been hunting for Kaneda and Hogg started suppressing her position with long bursts from their gauss SAWs. Electromagnetically powered rounds tore up the cradle all around her. The firing lessened and Miska risked a look. One of the drones was receiving hit after hit fired by the still-hidden Kaneda, but the subsonic rounds were struggling to penetrate its armour. Both the spider drones on the ground were attempting to acquire Kaneda. Miska fired a three-round burst at the other drone, and it exploded. The remaining one turned its SAW towards her. A crossbow bolt lodged in the spider’s SAW’s feed mechanism and then exploded. The wreckage of the drone slumped to the ground.

‘Sneaky-One-Seven to Hangman-One-Actual, I’m coming up,’ Kaneda told her over comms.

‘Understood,’ Miska answered. In her IVD she was aware of the Sneaky Bastards platoon breaking down into squads and then fire teams. She assumed that Triple S’s troops in the hangar and the shuttles had been thrown into an uproar but she couldn’t see or hear anything yet.

Miska moved quickly to the Medusa-class mech’s hermetically sealed external hatch. She flicked the ghillie suit over her head, knelt down and attached a lock burner to the hatch, feeling the camouflaged ghost of Kaneda pass her as she did so. Now she could hear gunfire, the hypersonic scream of gauss weapons, an explosion that sounded like a 30mm fragmentation grenade going off. She readied her carbine before turning her back to the hatch, feeling like she always did in situations like this: that everything was taking too long. The lock burner finished its work and the mech’s external hatch sprang open. There was a disturbance in the air as Hogg joined her by the open hatch, watching her back while she entered the mech.

Miska moved into the war machine’s cramped cockpit, situated in its heavily armoured chest area. She sat on the ergonomically designed chair, felt it shifting into a comfortable configuration, noting, not for the first time, how much more comfortable Martian Military Industries fighting vehicles were compared to any others she had experienced. Miska closed her eyes.

Now we get to see if Raff’s access codes work, she thought. Because if they didn’t, this operation was going to go badly wrong.

She used one of the codes that Raff had given her and tranced into the mech’s net.

Miska appeared in the virtual representation of the mech as a small, spiky, angry-looking cartoon version of herself. Her image was ghostly and transparent, the visual manifestation of the stealth programs she was running. Only Miska could see her icon, in theory anyway. She was carrying a club and wearing a pre-Final Human Conflict ‘steel pot’ helmet with the words ‘Make war not peace!’ written on it.

The mech’s icon looked like a giant faceless samurai wearing armour constructed of ultra-modern stealth material.

For the purposes of viewing the mech base’s communications network, the Medusa’s icon’s chest cavity was transparent. The mech base’s net architecture was all smooth, stealthy, black ultratech lines and oddly subdued neon. It was doubtless designed by some overpaid military net architects to look professional and intimidating. It just looked like they were trying too hard. The base’s net was an isolated system. There was only virtual wasteland around the stealth samurai figures representing the mechs, the data fortress that was the hangar, and the oddly hi-tech anachronisms of the cannons and ship’s boats that represented the base’s defensive weapon systems and Harpy heavy drop shuttles.

Subdued beams of flashing neon light represented the, presumably panicked, comms messages being relayed back and forth as it became apparent to the Triple S personnel that the base was being attacked. The isolated net’s intrusion countermeasures were on full alert, a dome of black fire rising up around the network – but it didn’t matter. Miska was already in and nobody seemed to be paying her transparent cartoon icon the slightest bit of interest. She pulled one of her fuzzy worms out of the pocket of her battle dress trousers. The worm was transparent, just like her, and she placed it on the virtual radio that represented the mech’s comms systems.

‘I’ll just put this here,’ she whispered to herself. Immediately the worm, containing Raff’s access codes and a high-spec virus designed to suborn weapon systems, started to burrow. Cartoon Miska smiled and tranced out.

She was out of the seat and heading for the hatch as soon as her eyes opened, and she almost tripped over the nearly invisible Hogg on trance overwatch. Outside, everything was going smoothly if you ignored the on-going fire fight and the fact that she’d hoped to suborn the base’s systems before Triple S had even known the Bastards were there. She made her way quickly up to the top of the mech cradle.

Kaneda was kneeling down, his ghillie suit thrown over his head so he could better see what he was doing. His accurised heavy barrel M-19 designated marksman’s rifle was leaning against the catwalk’s railing. Miska noted that the integral suppressor had been pulled back and replaced with a gauss push, designed to electromagnetically help the slugthrower’s rounds into the hypersonic.

Kaneda had a case open on the floor in front of him and was rapidly assembling a Bofors rail sniper rifle. The sniper was a handsome, fresh-faced, wiry Japanese man in his early twenties. His air of youth had dissipated somewhat since the death of his abusive boss, the Yakuza lieutenant Teramoto Shigeru, at Kaneda’s hands. Teramoto’s death had apparently been the result of a ‘friendly fire’ incident. Now, as Miska watched Kaneda screw the long barrel into the sniper rifle and attach a gyroscopic stabiliser to the mounting rail, she caught glimpses of the irezumi tattoos that denoted the sniper’s graduation from bōsōzoku gang member to fully-fledged member of the Yakuza. It appeared he was going up in the world.

‘You should be able to do that under the ghillie suit, Kaneda,’ Miska told him as she hunched down by the mech’s