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

obviously we cannot keep this up for long. But if you can make it to one of them then we have the surgical facilities to remove the nanite explosives from your heads.’

Miska stared at the screen. The interviewer was asking a question but all Miska could hear was the sound of blood rushing in her ears.

‘C’mon,’ she managed and strode out of the bar, Nyukuti in tow. She needed to calm down and then contact Vido. Find out who was out and about. Who was in a position to take New Sun up on their offer. And, if they made a move towards a New Sun facility, then she would have to kill them.

Miska’s cyberware included a degree of protection against electrocution. This could, however, be overwhelmed. A shotgun with large capacity magazines firing taser darts was more than enough to do that. Even with the armoured clothing she was wearing, there was still too much bare skin on display. She was peripherally aware of Nyukuti getting hit as well. The 30mm hardgel stun rounds, fired from two under-barrel grenade launchers, were overkill. She didn’t even feel the hooks in the capture net bite into her skin and deliver another fifty-thousand volts. She just flopped around on the ground, unconscious.

Chapter 12

Miska hadn’t been paying attention.

You’re taking this too personally, she told herself. She’d let her emotions get the better of her, dropped her guard, and now her entire body hurt. She suspected the pain was the result of all the muscle contractions from being ridiculously over-electrified. Even for someone with her military grade cyberware, she was lucky her heart hadn’t given out.

Her hands and ankles were strapped to some kind of reclining chair. There were restraints around her stomach and her head as well. Someone really didn’t want her moving around too much. It sounded like she was in a cavernous space, she suspected the hold of a ship, and there were at least four other people in there with her.

‘Ow,’ she said with some feeling as she opened her eyes. She was right, it was the hold of a ship and, with Captain Gosia Tesselaar standing over her, Miska guessed it was the Sneaky Bitch. ‘Hi!’ Miska said much more cheerfully than she felt.

Tesselaar looked every inch the belt pirate. Like she’d stepped straight out of a viz. Statuesque, wearing a red sleeveless one piece and thigh-high boots. Red was the colour of the Crimson Sisterhood, the pirate organisation that terrorised the Sirius System. Both her arms were covered in sleeves of tattoos, and she had red hair down to her ass. Implants animated her hair, which seemed to respond to Tesselaar’s moods. A large slugthrower pistol rode her hip. All she was missing was a tricorn and a cutlass.

‘Gosia! Great to see you again. Is this about a conjugal visit?’

Gosia glared at her with red, obviously implanted, eyes. Miska smiled sweetly.

There were three more people in the hold with her. A tall Native American, so heavily built with obviously boosted muscle that she was worried his skin was going to split. He had long braided hair that was shaved at the sides, and tribal tattoos running up his neck and onto the side of his head. He wore a duster and bristled with weapons – many of them non-lethal.

With him was an equally tall Asian woman, who wasn’t quite as heavily built as the Native American, but still looked like she could put you through a reasonably sturdy wall. Her hair was shorn, her tattoos were less tribal and more pictorial, and she also wore a duster over leather pants and a vest, and was equally heavily armed.

The third member of the ‘Duster Crew’, as Miska was starting to think of them, was a very short, very stocky, heavily bearded white guy. She suspected he had been going for a biker look, except his endomorphic build, probably due to growing up in a high gravity environment, made him look like a dwarf in one of her fantasy sense games.

She was pretty sure it was the kind of thing the ‘dwarf’ was sick of hearing. So: ‘You know you look like a dwarf in a sense game?’ she asked.

He actually growled and took a step towards her.

‘If you’ve electrocuted and tied me up and I’m still not intimidated, do you really think growling will do the trick?’

‘I thought you were supposed to be some bad-ass special forces operator?’ the dwarf asked. He had a Norwegian accent. It got better and better.

‘Well,’ Miska began, ‘I was having the shittiest of shitty days and I have to admit I let my guard down. So good work, team! I’m guessing you three were the take-down crew?’ she asked. Nobody answered. It was getting embarrassing. She suspected that they had some military experience between them, but it looked like three amateurs had captured her. That said, they hadn’t been mucking around. Emptying the magazines of an auto-shotgun loaded with sabot taser darts was a pretty sound plan.

Miska looked at Gosia.

‘Gun tramps?’ she asked.

‘Bounty hunters,’ the Native American rumbled.

‘Cool,’ Miska said. ‘Well, now you’re going to have to let me go or have the deaths of some six thousand people on your hands.’

‘Not our problem,’ the Asian woman said. Miska smiled at her but then turned the smile on Gosia.

‘No, but it is Gosia’s, unless she wants her honey to lose a quite vital lump of his cranium.’

‘Try it,’ Gosia told her.

‘No, because I don’t want to kill him yet. Besides, I’m sure the hold is shielded enough. Doesn’t matter, your gun tramps—’

‘Bounty hunters,’ the Native American repeated.

‘—will want their bounty, which means you’ll have to move me, and then the signal will find him. Even if it doesn’t there’s a threshold on how long I can be away before it triggers them all.’ Which was half true and half a bluff. It was a bit more complicated than that.

‘I told you last time,’ Gosia said leaning