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

isn’t a very old star, maybe a billion years.’ That sounded old to Miska. ‘I’ve read the survey, and there were some questions the surveyors couldn’t answer. The plant life is very advanced for a moon in a system that young. The exobotanists couldn’t understand why the moon was so fecund with flora when the sun is so far away. This is connected to some kind of heat exchange from Epsilon Eridani B that the physicists don’t quite understand.’

None of this sounded like something an ex-marine should concern herself with, Miska decided.

‘What are you telling me, Doc?’ Miska asked.

‘One of the possibilities was that the ecosystem, and perhaps even the planetary mechanics, had been tweaked somehow,’ Doc told her.

Miska let that sink in. It definitely sounded like something well above her pay grade.

‘If that’s the case could this … I don’t know, have some kind of ramifications for biotech?’ she asked.

‘Almost certainly,’ Doc told her. She made a mental note to ask Raff if biotech was part of the New Sun portfolio. She suspected it was.

‘So who tweaked the ecosystem?’ she asked. Doc didn’t answer. There was that feeling at the back of her mind again. Something wasn’t right. Something about this made her think of the artefact they had tried to steal on Barney Prime: some supposedly ancient alien doodah that had released a truly horrible entity that had inhabited Teramoto’s dead body. It had also saved them from the orbital bombardment. A boon and bane but any way you looked at it, weird shit that she didn’t want to have anything to do with.

‘Okay, thanks, guys, is there anything more you can do down there?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Corenbloom answered. ‘We’ve got more than enough to prove the Legion didn’t do it. So it’s just a matter of dealing with the PR fall-out but I think that the UN is going to want to keep this pretty quiet.’

‘Okay, talk to Vido, you’re on the next shuttle back to the Daughter,’ she told them.

Corenbloom nodded but she was pretty sure that the Doc looked disappointed.

The clanging noise that the shuttle made as it slotted into the plug-like docking port of the Hangman’s Daughter, and was then sucked slowly into the mother ship’s superstructure, sounded different to any other dock. It sounded like home to Miska.

‘Good work, everyone,’ she told them as they exited the shuttle onto the Daughter’s cavernous hangar deck. Surprisingly there was nobody doing PT today but the guard droids were there to escort the Ultra back to his pod. It wasn’t much of a reward for his part in the job. The rest had been given shore leave but would have to store all their battle gear first. Though they were allowed to carry handguns and knives on Waterloo Station. They had strict ROE for barroom brawls. If the other guys drew a knife then they could, same for guns. They were under orders to help each other out if they saw another Legionnaire in trouble. The two most important ROE for shore leave was to never start a fight but to always win them. It was the only way for her people to get peace and quiet from the other mercenary companies. Many of whom still barked when her Bastards walked by – a reference to the explosive collars they had worn during their first job.

A blinking icon appeared in her IVD. She opened it. In the window she saw Uncle V in the control room. He did not look happy.

‘You need to see this,’ he told her. Miska looked around. There was a comms screen next to the airlock. She patched the message through to that. It was a net news viz. She immediately recognised the slaughter just outside the airlocks on the aerostat.

‘… the level of barbarity involved beggars belief,’ the war correspondent was saying, ‘Those not killed in the initial onslaught were subsequently tortured to death while trying to surrender.’

The image changed to an ashen-faced Triple S (conventional) mercenary stood by the blast door to the C&C. She could hear the sound of retching in the background. Through the open blast door they could make out Lieutenant Larouc and some of the Masaai crew suspended in the air by hooked chains. They had been peeled open layer by layer, like a medical dissection. There was something familiar about their grotesque postures. It took Miska a moment to realise where she had seen scenes like this before. The Ultra’s file. This was how he liked to kill.

‘We should have seen this coming,’ Nyukuti muttered. He was right. They had been set up. Royally suckered. She had walked them right into it.

‘Salik wants to speak to you,’ Uncle V was telling her but she was barely listening. She had just remembered where she had seen the blonde woman before. She had been a Marine Raider, like Miska, but she had been based on Earth. She had been involved in some kind of scandal involving the torture of enemy combatants in some brushfire European conflict. There had been deaths involved. ‘We’ve had death threats from the Dogs of Love,’ Uncle V continued. That was a shame. She liked L’Amour, their leader.

‘I’m angry,’ the Ultra said quietly. Miska glanced over at where he stood, looking naked and pure. She knew how he felt.

Chapter 11

Miska was staring at the footage playing on the view screen next to the airlock. It showed Resnick talking to her on the aerostat, among the dead. It had clearly been shot by one of his squad’s helm-cams. Resnick’s face was blacked out.

‘You people fucking disgust me, you’re a disgrace …’ he told her and Miska just turned and walked away with the others. Except Kaczmar. Kaczmar had stayed and when he had leaned towards Resnick the Triple S (elite) commander had flinched away. It had been an act, all of it. His words had probably been scripted. There was no way a guy like that was