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

answering her question. Miska was trying not to stare at his beautiful naked body.

‘I gave you the suit because it is combat spec, equipped with reactive camouflage.’

‘And it helped me gain entry to the aerostat,’ the Ultra told her, ‘as did the very high spec lock burner that seemed to have just the right code for access through the maintenance airlock.’ The lock burner belonged to the Legion but New Sun had supplied the codes. Other than by brute force it was supposed to be very difficult to gain entrance to a sealed habitat or ship via the airlock for obvious reasons. They were always the most heavily defended systems.

‘Something to say?’ Miska asked him.

‘Did it not seem … too easy?’ he asked. Miska turned to look at him. His sculpted face hinted at genuine concern.

‘Not from where we were standing it wasn’t.’

‘We took on something close to a platoon of trained soldiers,’ he pointed out.

He was right. It had been a bold strategy. It was something that a suitably equipped SF squad wouldn’t think twice about, but that wasn’t what they were.

‘And beyond guarding the prisoners, Grig and Bean did very little,’ he continued.

No, because you were killing on an industrial level, Miska decided not to say. She noticed that Nyukuti was paying attention to this conversation as well.

‘Why did you take the suit off?’ Now Miska changed the subject.

‘Slowed me down, restricted movement and the senses, and also I was no longer operating in vacuum,’ he told her.

‘But no armour, not even clothes?’

He smiled.

‘I’m an exhibitionist,’ he told her.

Miska narrowed her eyes. He had total confidence, being naked didn’t faze him in any way, but an exhibitionist he was not. She was putting the pieces together.

‘You’re a chameleon, aren’t you?’ she said staring at him. She knew her emotions were muted compared to other people’s but she still felt astonishment. If every single skin cell in his body were self-replicating nanotech reactive camouflage then he would effectively be invisible. It explained so much. How he had been able to murder so many people before he had been caught. The Dogs of Love mercenaries must have thought that they were fighting a ghost. ‘That’s Martian tech,’ she hissed, keeping her voice low, ‘illegal nanotech.’ She thought about it some more. ‘It’s not even Martian tech, that’s …’ her voice trailed off.

‘Small Gods,’ he finished for her.

She stared at him. There had been lots of stories about the Ultra concerning his tech. It had been classified when he’d been captured. She had assumed that the rumours of Martian and Small Gods tech had been exaggerations, imagining instead that he was some millionaire savant who could afford the very best cyberware.

‘What the fuck are you doing on board the Hangman’s Daughter?’ she demanded. ‘You should be locked away in a Hotel California.’ The Hotel Californias were government black sites where they tended to ‘lose’ high value prisoners. The Ultra just shrugged. Then something occurred to her. ‘Did you kill my father?’

The Ultra was shaking his head before she had finished asking the question.

‘No,’ he told her, ‘think about the timeline.’

He was right. She had seen the Ultra’s arrest in the news. It still didn’t make sense that they would have put him on board the Daughter rather than disappear him and try and reverse engineer the tech. Perhaps the case had just been too high profile for that.

‘Jesus Christ!’ she spat as something else occurred to her. ‘You are a completely illegal …’

‘Weapon,’ he supplied along with an arched perfect eyebrow.

‘I didn’t … I mean we are in breach of so many of the articles of conflict, not to mention intersystem laws. When we get back you’re going to have to …’ She stopped and looked up at him.

‘Go back in my box?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. It was ludicrous. She was apologising to a monster whose body count was at least in four figures but she found herself meaning it. There was something oddly vulnerable about him, like a child with an old soul.

Are you fucking crazed! the beleaguered remnants of her common sense screamed at her.

‘I understand,’ he told her. She knew it was ridiculous but his sad smile was breaking her heart.

Get a grip! You’re being played! she told herself.

‘Are you a Small God?’ she asked him. ‘A demigod?’

Grey silver eyes looked at her as he considered her question.

‘I don’t know what I am,’ he told her. She opened her mouth to ask another question.

‘Boss,’ Gunhir said from one of the workstations. A holographic display in front of him showed a Triple S Pegasus approaching the aerostat high above Epsilon B’s swirling storm fronts. ‘Major Resnick and some of his people are en route to relieve us.’

‘Resnick?’ Miska frowned. It was the first time she had heard mention of Resnick’s rank. She knew that the Triple S part of the operation was being handled by Elite, the military contractor’s SF contingent. She had made the same agreement with New Sun as she’d had with MACE. The Bastards were an offensive force, not a garrison. She knew enough to not want her people mixing with civilians. They were a blunt instrument, not a colonial police/peace keeping force. She had, however, expected Triple S (conventional) to take over from them.

‘Are we going to do this dance again?’ Nyukuti asked. He had been with them on board Faigroe Station when their employer had betrayed the Legion and sent Triple S to deal with them. He had been badly wounded by the Triple S mercenaries during the ensuing conflict. They had nearly killed him. On the other hand, he had killed one of them with his sharpened metal boomerang.

Miska ran the feed from the weapon-and helm-cams into the aerostat’s comms and opened an on-going feed to the Hangman’s Daughter.

‘Hangman-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual, you okay?’ Uncle V asked from the virtual CP in Camp Reisman.

‘Yeah, just a little bit worried about Triple S pulling another Faigroe Station,’ she told him.

‘I can set