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

in close enough for Miska to practically taste the stale cigarette on her breath. ‘He’s better off dead than your slave.’

Miska narrowed her eyes. Then something occurred to her.

‘Where’s Nyukuti?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ the Asian woman asked.

‘The Aboriginal guy with me,’ she told them.

‘Left him on the street,’ the dwarf told her. ‘No bounty on him.’

Miska wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. If Vido had been monitoring then he would send people out to get him. If not, well, the Bastards weren’t popular on Waterloo Station at the moment. The best-case scenario would be Salik’s security people picking him up.

She squirmed around in the chair she had been tied to. It was similar to a dentist’s chair, only with straps. It was oddly comfortable, yet suspiciously stained.

‘I’m strapped into your sex chair, aren’t I?’ Miska asked Gosia.

The Asian woman smiled, the dwarf chuckled. Gosia slapped her. It was surprisingly hard.

‘Ow,’ Miska said. ‘So you’re going to let old what’s-his-face die, then? Fair enough.’ She’d have to find another way to escape.

‘No, you’re going to let all the Crimson Sisterhood on board the Hangman’s Daughter go,’ Gosia told her.

‘Shan’t,’ Miska replied. She may have been being childish but frankly this was almost a welcome break from just how bad a day she was having.

‘Yes you wi—’ Gosia started.

‘So we’re still in the Epsilon Eridani system then?’ Miska checked. She guessed that Gosia wouldn’t want to stray too far from where her people were. Gosia stared at her. The bounty hunters exchanged a few looks.

‘We’re going to dump you in a time-contracted torture sense program. You know as well as I do that everyone breaks eventually. So how long you want to suffer is up to you,’ Gosia told her.

‘This all right with you guys?’ she asked the bounty hunters. ‘Could mess up the trial.’

‘Not our problem, we’ll have been paid,’ the Asian woman told her. Miska had to admit that she had a point.

‘Well anyway, good luck trying to force me to trance in to your torture porn program. You’d need one hell of hacker to get past my counter—’

Miska found herself standing in the middle of a purple-coloured cartoon forest with a comfortable looking quilted floor. All the flora was made out of fabric. Frolicking, animated plush unicorns in all manner of colours gambolled by. Miska had some vague idea that this was from some children’s educational sense game that had been popular when she was a child.

‘Oh, this is a nightmare,’ Miska muttered. ‘Fine, I give up, you can have the codes.’ A friendly unicorn trotted over to sniff at her. Miska tried to summon her attack software, in the form of a club with which to beat the unicorn flat, but nothing. Even allowing for how long they’d had when she was unconscious it was impressive just how extensively they’d hacked her integral computer and neural interface.

‘Do you want to give us the codes?’ Gosia’s disembodied voice echoed through the soft fabric forest. Miska held up her middle finger. ‘Just let us know when you’ve had enough. The safe word is Star Kitten—’

‘Star Kitten?’ Miska didn’t bother trying to hide her disgust.

‘Only use it when you’re ready to talk. Abuse it and we’ll just check on you when we feel like it.’

The problem was Gosia was right. Everyone did break eventually. Miska knew she should probably just spare herself the pain. The other problem was that she wasn’t built that way. Her dad and her sister had always said that she was stubborn. She braced herself. Then it felt like every single one of her nerve endings had been dipped in acid and the screaming began.

It had felt like an eternity. They had disabled her internal clock, so she had no idea how long it had actually been. With pain as a new constant she had intended to come to terms with it. Make living with pain her new reality and thus deal. That hadn’t worked. It had just really hurt. The verisimilitude of the sense program, in terms of sensory input if not environment, was so good that she had screamed until her throat bled. She was left lying on the comfy fabric forest floor in a puddle of red drool being watched by fucking unicorns. She knew she should just give in. She would break. But that in turn meant she would become a broken person. A different person. A weaker person. That, she couldn’t allow. Just telling them as a matter of practicality she could rationalise. It was the only sensible thing to do in the situation. And then the pain disappeared.

‘Why’d you stop? I didn’t say Star Kitten, you fucking pussies!’ she managed, staining the forest floor with some more red drool. ‘What is this? Aversion therapy for fucking unicorns?’

‘Sorry about that. I had to sample and loop your pain to spoof the program.’

The voice came from nearby and sounded familiar. Miska had a sinking feeling but it was still better than the constant agony. She looked up. Che Guevara was sat nearby, stroking one of the unicorns. Miska returned to her face-down position. As horrifyingly twee as her surroundings were, they were at least comfortable.

‘I hate being rescued,’ she muttered, the quilt-like forest floor partially muffling her voice.

‘That’s good. You’re not being rescued, just being offered an opportunity,’ the sentient communist virus told her.

‘Wait, are you the same one I met on Faigroe Station?’ she asked. She knew the virus tended to go where it felt it was ‘needed’ to fight the forces of capitalist oppression.

‘The same one.’

‘Does that mean Joshua’s body is on board?’ she asked. The sentient virus had possessed Joshua, an undercover data warfare expert who had been in Triple S’s employ.

‘All of Joshua is on board, although he is still in here with me, just taking a backseat for the time being, but yes, I am currently the Sneaky Bitch’s data warfare officer. They’re very impressed with me. Particularly because of the ease with which I