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

face, with its hollow cheeks and wild, manic eyes, looked out at her from the unbuttoned power armour.

Bean, Swanky. Sentenced to consecutive life sentences for eleven proven murders and suspected of many, many more. Bean had lived in the wilds of the Scottish parklands with his ‘family’, a clan of incestuous, torturing, murderous cannibals, who based their existence on an old folk tale. They had moved around the vast wilderness feasting on campers, hikers and other visitors to the park. Rumour had it that they had been able to do so for so long with the co-operation of the Scottish tourist board who felt their presence in the park helped encourage the more macabre visitors. After the family had been caught in an extensive police operation and sentenced, they had been split up and sent to different prisons. Swanky had ended up on the Daughter. Frankly, he disgusted Miska, and he knew it. She looked up to find him watching her again. He smiled, his filed-down and capped teeth like pointed canines, a line of drool running down his chin.

‘What do you think, Fatman?’ Bean asked the closest person he had to a friend.

Kaczmar, Charles. Like Miska, he was an ex-marine. Unlike Miska he had kidnapped, tortured and murdered over thirty people before dumping their bodies into space. He had been working as a miner in the Sol System’s asteroid belt. Nicknamed the ‘Fatman’ he had only been caught when one of his victims had survived long enough in vacuum to be picked up by a passing ore freighter. A one in a million freak occurrence. The victim, one of Kaczmar’s co-workers, had recognised the Fatman, identifying him to the authorities on Ceres, before succumbing to his wounds and the ravages of vacuum. Kaczmar hadn’t put up a fight when the SWAT team had stormed his bunk area. When asked why he’d committed the murders he had told the prosecutor that he was bored.

He certainly lived up to his name, Miska thought. He was four hundred pounds of pure butterball. That said, there must have been something under that sea of fat because, somehow, he managed to keep up with her dad’s gruelling PT routines – but without losing any body fat. Miska suspected he was some kind of freak of nature. The gyroscopic harness he wore, which supported the Sarissae railgun, had needed to be altered before it would fit his corpulent bulk. The Ultra insisted that Kaczmar had a genius level intellect. If that was the case then Miska hadn’t seen any indication of it, and it certainly wasn’t on display now as he turned his huge, hairless head towards Bean, his little piggy eyes staring, his facial features like a tiny island among the folds of fat, and farted audibly in answer.

Bean giggled like a nine year old.

‘A well thought out and considered answer,’ Bean told his huge ‘friend’. At least, Miska was pretty sure that was what he’d said.

‘You know how to use that?’ Grig asked Bobo Gunhir, the second cannibal on the squad.

For someone who had struck fear into the great and good of Kenya and Nyota Mlima, the so-called Cannibal of the Glass Desert looked surprisingly normal. Solidly built, his hair cropped short, a neatly trimmed goatee covering his chin, he looked much more like a soldier than a criminal. Miska found this a little reassuring.

The ‘that’ Grig was referring to was a Martian Military Industries Appolion plasma rifle. It had been one of two man-portable plasma weapons found when the Bastards had captured the frigate Excelsior from Triple S, after the battle of Faigroe Station. Incredibly expensive, it fired hydrogen pellets that had been superheated to a plasma state. It was a devastating weapon. Gunhir paused while attaching a PDW over the Appolion’s barrel as a secondary weapon, and looked up at Grig, studying him for a moment.

‘In Kenya we called this weapon the Tears of the Sun. We used them to assassinate prosecutors, judges, high-ranking police officers and other dignitaries in their armoured vehicles. Please be assured, I know what I’m doing.’

Grig nodded. Miska could understand the vigilante’s concern. As eager as she was to see the Appolion in play, she wasn’t keen to lose it, and Gunhir’s part in this was pretty crucial for a newcomer to the squad.

‘You good?’ Miska asked Nyukuti, sitting next to her. He had just finished attaching his PDW to the mounting rails underneath the barrel of a printed, magazine-fed 30mm grenade launcher. The stand-over man looked over at her and nodded. Given his capability for torture, Miska had asked the Ultra why he hadn’t wanted Nyukuti on his squad. The Ultra had told her that the stand-over man didn’t want to hurt people enough. Sadly, Miska had known what he meant. For Nyukuti torture had been a means to an end, for the rest of the Nightmare Squad hurting people was the end, and now she had to make sure they all stayed on the leash. She knew that Grig wasn’t happy. Part of the agreement he had with the Ultra was that they would only go after really bad people. They were about to attack an aerostat full of gas mining civilians and mercenaries just doing their jobs. Grig reminded her of a spree-killing Torricone. She had been happy that talking Grig into the op had been the Ultra’s problem, not hers. One Torricone was more than enough, even if this one was a torturer and mass-murderer.

‘Everyone ready?’ she said at the same time as the Ultra. He smiled and gestured to her. ‘No, it’s your command, I’m just along for the ride,’ she told him.

Or because you’re bored, or because you’ve got something to prove, the voice inside her suggested. She tried to ignore it.

‘You all know what you’re doing. We stick to the plan and it will be just fine,’ the Ultra told them. She hadn’t heard an implied threat in his voice but she was aware of a number of very