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

Miska was screaming. She somehow carried Torricone across the med bay by his neck and slammed him against the wall. Her knife had appeared in her hand. She was only partially aware of someone entering the med bay.

‘Miska!’

A hand grabbed her knife arm as the blade plunged towards a terrified Torricone’s chest. She was picked up and slammed into an operating table. Nyukuti appeared over her, trying to say something. She neck-locked him with her legs and then straightened them, skipping off the table and taking Nyukuti to the floor.

‘Miska!’ her dad’s voice from one of the view screens cut through her fury. The tip of her knife was millimetres from Nyukuti’s eye.

‘I’m sorry,’ Miska said. She was sat on one of the stools in the med bay, breathing heavily. Nyukuti was leaning against the wall. He nodded. Torricone didn’t look mollified by her apology in the slightest.

‘Fuck you,’ he told her. Miska looked sharply up at him. ‘You just can’t take responsibility for your actions, can you? Whether you did it or not, those people are dead because of the choices you made. Think about that the next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself!’

Miska was on her feet again. Nyukuti pushed himself off the wall and interposed himself between them.

‘Just piss off, mate!’ he told Torricone. Torricone turned his stare from Miska to the stand-over man.

‘What?’ Torricone demanded.

‘Seriously, I don’t want to get killed over whatever this is,’ he said, pointing between the two of them. Torricone kept staring at Nyukuti. The stand-over man didn’t turn away. ‘How far do you want to take this, brah?’

Torricone leaned around Nyukuti.

‘I’m fucking sick of this,’ he told her and stormed out of the med bay.

Nyukuti moved away from Miska before turning to face her.

‘It would be a lot simpler if you just fucked him,’ he told her.

She stared at him for a moment and then burst out laughing.

‘I am standing right here,’ her dad said from the screen. That just made her laugh harder.

Nyukuti cleared out to let her talk to her dad. Her dad was watching through the screen. She could see Camp Reisman’s CP in the background.

‘You can kill as many of them as you want if you can tell me how a temper tantrum will help our current situation,’ he said. It felt like the telling off from a parent it was. Worse, she knew he was right.

‘You’re right. This needs some properly focused killing,’ she muttered, sounding like a sulky teenager even to her own ears.

‘You haven’t lost it like that for a while,’ he said more gently. Now she looked up at him.

‘I hate things like this. Being the target of lies. Feeling that there’s nothing you can do about it. Feeling helpless …’ She went back to staring at the cracked tile flooring.

‘We might have been the target here, but you get that you’re not the victim, right?’ he asked.

‘Honestly?’ Miska looked back up at her dad. ‘Not really. I didn’t want those people to die, didn’t want them to suffer the way they did, but I didn’t know them. Torricone may well have been right, but I don’t feel anything for them. Does that bother you?’

‘Not as much as it seems to bother Torricone,’ her dad said.

Miska’s eyelids narrowed into slits.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she demanded.

‘It means you lost it because someone you feel for purposefully hurt you,’ he told her and then crossed his arms.

‘Oh bullshit!’ she snapped.

‘I thought you hated lies.’

Miska went very quiet.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked a few moments later.

‘Send Corenbloom and the Doc to the scene of the crime, and then I’m going to go and talk to someone.’

‘Who?’ her dad asked but Miska was on her feet heading for the door.

‘You need to take a shower!’ he called after her. ‘You look like you’ve just killed a whole bunch of people!’

Showered and changed, Miska had Vido liaising with Salik and the UN investigators, trying to get Corenbloom and Doc onto the aerostat. The UN had demanded that all the weapons and armour used in the attack be turned over to them. That further pissed Miska off as the railgun, the plasma rifle and the Machimoi combat exoskeleton were all expensive bits of kit that were too complex to just print, even with Daughter’s military grade printer. She had, however, agreed and some of Vido’s ‘old boys’ were handling the exchange. After all, the Bastards had nothing to hide.

All through her shower she had been thinking about Torricone. Her dad had been right. The last time she had lost it like that had been when Raff had told her that her dad had been murdered. She had known for a long time that she had an anger management problem, what her psych profile described as a tendency to fall into psychotic rages, but she’d had a lid on it ever since she’d joined the marines. Torricone was pissing her off. There was no doubt about it. More to the point, he was trying to. Even so, what she had done wasn’t right.

Do you care? she asked herself. After all, he was basically a weapon with a bomb in his head.

Miska checked Torricone’s whereabouts with the Daughter’s systems.

‘Of course,’ she muttered.

‘Come to finish the job?’ he asked as she entered the multi-denominational chapel. Torricone was on his knees in front of a, frankly scary, hologram representation of Christ on his cross. Not for the first time Miska thought that religions could do with more cheerful iconography.

‘I came to … to …’ she started. He turned away from the hologram to regard her, one eyebrow raised. The hologram blinked out, plunging the institutional room and its bolted-down pews into gloom.

‘Apologise?’ he asked. ‘You?’

‘I apologise when I’m …’

‘Wrong?’ he suggested. He looked more intrigued than anything else.

‘Fuck this!’ she snapped. ‘I knew you weren’t going to make this easy.’ She turned to leave.

‘Easy?’ he demanded. ‘You nearly killed me, Miska.’ Now he sounded