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

‘I’ll bet,’ Miska said, though it certainly made sense now. ‘What an extraordinary coincidence.’

Che just smiled at her. Miska couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more going on here. Either that or she was being stalked by a sentient computer virus that thought it was a pre—FHC Communist folk hero.

‘How’re you finding being human?’ she asked, largely for something to say. She was still trying to pull herself together.

‘I started off human, a long time ago,’ he said almost wistfully. That got her attention. ‘I’d forgotten how much I appreciated a good shit.’

‘Lovely,’ Miska said. She was aware of someone moving behind her. She pushed herself up and looked. It was her, writhing on the forest floor, body painfully contorted, agony etched into her silently screaming face. It was the spoof program, what Gosia and her crew would be seeing in the real world. She knew it would be accompanied by some similarly spoofed biometrics. Che had rendered both her and himself invisible to them. For a moment she couldn’t look away.

‘I had no choice,’ he told her. He genuinely sounded sorry, even ashamed of himself.

‘How long?’ she asked.

‘Five minutes,’ he told her.

It had felt a lot longer. She turned away from the image of her immediate past.

‘You said you weren’t here to rescue me?’

‘I’m going to return use of your integral computer and your neural interface to you,’ he explained.

‘Good of you,’ Miska told him. Her initial thought was to open every door on the Sneaky Bitch, including the ones to the outside. Well maybe not the ones to the cargo hold I’m in, she decided, modifying her plan. Given time she could work herself free. Mind you, I probably shouldn’t kill Joshua/Che, either, she thought.

‘There are conditions,’ he told her. Miska sighed. ‘You can’t kill anyone on board.’

‘Not kill anyone …!’ Miska exploded. ‘I’m killing every last one of these fuckers. Horribly! I may get some of my people and come back here and kill them again just to be on the safe side!’

‘Then you can stay here and frolic with the unicorns,’ Che told her.

‘If I stab you in here with an actual unicorn?’ she enquired.

‘I’m serious, Miska.’

‘You think I’m not? Why can’t I kill them? I mean they’re fucking pirates!’

Che looked momentarily embarrassed.

‘What?’ Miska demanded.

‘They’re my friends,’ he admitted.

‘You can make new ones!’

‘Do you want out or not?’

‘Fine.’ Miska sighed. ‘I won’t kill any of them.’

Che studied her for a moment or two.

‘Yeah, you’re going to have to try a bit harder than that to convince me,’ he finally said.

Miska threw her hands up in the air.

‘Seriously, Che, they’re not going to stop. Sooner or later I’m going to have to kill them. I may as well get it over and done with now.’

‘Those are the rules, take it or leave it. And I’ll be watching.’

‘The gun tramps, they’re not crew. I can kill them, right?’

‘No.’

‘Fine! I’ll go back to the torture!’ she said and crossed her arms.

‘You can’t be serious!’ He was starting to sound more than a little peeved with her. She wasn’t serious but she felt like digging her heels in.

‘Anyway, what’s your interest?’ she asked. Che narrowed his eyes. He was probably suspicious of the change in subject.

‘I am aware of what’s going on in-system at the moment. I suspect that, despite yourself, you’re on the side of angels this time—’

‘You know me, Che, fighting the good fight. Keeping the colonies safe from megacorp abuses.’ She offered him a fist bump, which he ignored.

‘Except when you change sides and go to work for New Sun.’

‘Oh, you know about that.’ Miska withdrew the proffered fist. ‘Well, I am a mercenary. Highest bidder and all that.’

‘Yes, it’s why you’re not being fully rescued,’ he told her.

‘Anything you can tell me about what’s going on? I don’t suppose you know what New Sun is up to?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Che said. ‘But I suspect the situation is being manipulated by the Small Gods.’

That got her attention.

‘Really?’ she asked. ‘Mars?’ She was thinking about Deimos, the entity that had inhabited Teramoto’s corpse.

‘Mars is always involved in colonial conflicts to one degree or another. Triple S and New Sun are just fronts for Martian interests.’

‘You brought Hinton here? Cut a deal with New Sun?’ she asked.

‘We brought Hinton here but the captain knew that Triple S had been in contact with Maw City about you. She made a deal with them in the Sirius System. Hinton was part of the deal, as was the bounty hunters taking a crack at you,’ Che told her.

Miska knew that with her out of the picture they could totally trash her reputation.

At least it was confirmed. Miska was giving some thought to going to the nearest Martian Embassy and asking them to leave her alone. Well, stop picking fights with their proxies, she chided herself. Then something occurred to her.

‘I won’t kill anyone if you get my gun and my knife back,’ she told him.

Che stared at her for a moment, a unicorn nuzzling his face.

‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight, you promise not to kill anyone but you want me to give you weapons?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she told him, nodding enthusiastically. ‘My dad gave me that knife, I’m not leaving it here with these assholes.’

Now it was Che’s turn to sigh. He seemed to decide it was the best deal he was going to get.

‘Very well then.’ He faded away.

Miska found she had access to her integral computer. The first thing she did was change her icon from the realistic looking one to the spiky cartoon version of herself, complete with her steel helmet. The second thing she did was beat a unicorn to death with her club.

The torture program was in a wooden crate in the hold of the Sneaky Bitch’s net icon. Miska didn’t know anything about historical sailing ships but she was pretty sure that the corsair’s virtual representation was supposed to be a seventeenth or eighteenth century pirate vessel. They nearly always