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

‘You and everyone else.’

‘When I bring you your father’s murderers.’

Miska stared at him.

‘You know I could drop you into a VR torture program, leave you there until you tell me what you know.’

‘No. You wouldn’t. You’re a high functioning psychopath. At a guess you’re a latent ASPD of the risk-taking subtype. That level of cruelty isn’t your thing.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Miska admitted. ‘But I think you know enough to know that people aren’t real to me unless I like them.’ She took a step towards him. Head down. ‘And I don’t like you,’ she whispered and looked up at him. There was just the slightest flicker in his mask of calm, realisation that he might have overplayed his hand.

‘I can be of use to you in other ways,’ he told her.

‘Talk fast, because you’re beginning to piss me off.’

‘Run a security lens check on the corner here,’ he said pointing to where the edge of the airlock met the bulkhead. Miska was getting more than a little fed up of this. It must have shown on her face. ‘Please.’

She sighed and connected to the Daughter’s security systems via her neural interface, the results appearing in her IVD. She frowned and then ran the check again, and then a third time.

‘You see it?’ Corenbloom asked. Miska ignored him and looked around at the nearby lenses.

‘It’s a blind spot,’ she finally said. It wasn’t a small blind spot, either.

Corenbloom nodded and then pointed at two tiny figures scratched into the black painted metal of the airlock’s frame. Miska zoomed in on it. It looked like the letters E and C. She turned back to Corenbloom.

‘Escape Committee,’ he told her. Corenbloom reached down and touched the letters then held up his fingers. There were little flecks of black paint on them. ‘This has been done recently as well.’

‘How do I know this wasn’t you?’ Miska asked. Suddenly she was starting to question just how cooperative the prisoners had been recently.

‘Not my sort of game,’ he said. ‘Besides, consider Occam’s Razor. Do you really think that nobody on board wants to escape?’ On balance she suspected she believed him. ‘I mean, you’ve already had one escape.’

‘Lomas Hinton is dead,’ Miska said. Hinton hadn’t come back on board after shore leave in Maw City. Though to be honest she had no real proof that he was dead. She looked down at the two letters scratched into black paint.

‘You really are a rat, aren’t you?’ she asked. It was petty and she knew it but he didn’t rise to the bait. He just watched her, impassive. ‘You go looking for my father’s murderers, how are you going to get the rest of them to talk to you?’

‘That’s my problem,’ he said. Miska suspected he would manipulate the Yakuza and the Bethlehem Milliners to do his legwork. ‘Do we have a deal?’

Miska still didn’t like this. She didn’t like it all. More so than Vido, Teramoto, even the Ultra, this somehow felt like getting into bed with the devil.

She nodded.

‘When do you want me to leave for Trafalgar?’

Chapter 8

Miska was taking one of the access ladders up to the Hangman’s Daughter’s bridge. Judging by how out of breath she was by the time she reached the bridge deck, it was obvious she needed the exercise. Just another thing she was angry with herself about.

I’m a fool. She had been lulled into a false sense of security by the combat and support elements of the Legion appearing to be so cooperative of late: embracing their training, embracing the work, getting paid, enjoying the myriad pleasures of Waterloo Station. Of course they wanted to be free. Of course they wanted the bombs out of their heads and, if they could get away with it, they would want the Daughter and the not inconsiderable hardware on board. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that with the weapons and training the prisoners had access to it would not be difficult for them to knock over and take control of one of the smaller colonies.

Miska reached the bridge deck and made her way along the short corridor. The ship’s systems recognised her and the blast door opened. The bridge was as quiet as ever. Hologram displays illuminated the gloom, showing local space in various different spectrums, telemetry and system diagnostic data cascading through the air. She made her way up to the raised captain’s workstation that gave her a commanding view of the other two bridge levels. Through the two storeys of wraparound windows Miska could make out the lights of Waterloo Station on her left as they slowly revolved around it on the top docking torus. Various shuttles and occasionally larger ships moved around the station, and through its three slowly spinning tori, she could see the torches of their manoeuvring engines flickering off and on. Epsilon Eridani glowed in the distance. The revolving docking torus slowly brought the red glow of Eridani B into view.

At the back of her head she had still known that she couldn’t trust any of the prisoners but now the need for the healthy paranoia that was a job requirement returned more fiercely than ever. Who was in the Escape Committee? Vido, Mass, Kaneda, Nyukuti? Torricone? Torricone seemed a very likely candidate, assuming the other prisoners would trust him, which they might not, given the erroneous conclusions they were jumping to about him and herself.

The captain’s chair suddenly felt like a very lonely throne. She spent a moment or two brooding, then her neural interface reached out for the Daughter’s systems and Miska tranced herself in.

Miska appeared in what looked like a bare, institutional smartcrete corridor. She was in Camp Reisman’s command post, the virtual reality construct designed to behave as close to reality as its USMC-hired programmers could make it. She had appeared in the empty corridor so she wouldn’t just materialise in front of any of the legionnaires, and thus break