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

were. Miska recognised the common element. The virtual ship had sails, cannons and was made of wood.

She was using one of the stolen stealth programs that had come with U.S.S.S Jimmy Carter, the electronic warfare ship she had stolen from the NSA. So far it was proving a lot more sophisticated than the Sneaky Bitch’s intrusion countermeasures, the visual manifestations of which appeared to be some very unconvincing pirate mannequins. She crept out of the hold and up the wooden steps onto the deck and looked out over the smooth, black, glass-like ocean that represented space. In the distance she could make out another ship. Miska turned around and glanced up at the masts. There were no sails up. The ship was still on the ocean. The Sneaky Bitch was running cold and silent. They didn’t want to be seen by the other ship.

They’re a long way from home for piracy, she thought. She picked up a telescope from the rail and in doing so snuck into the corsair’s passive scanners. She looked at the other ship through the telescope. She recognised it, or at least the type. The net icon was of an ironclad from the First American Civil War. It was a US government ship. She was pretty sure she knew which one as well. She interrogated the ship’s systems and her hunch was confirmed. It was the U.S.S.S Teten, the FBI destroyer that was part of the multi-agency taskforce that had been assigned to capture her and recover the Hangman’s Daughter. They had no jurisdiction in the Epsilon Eridani system, and any aggressive move against the Legion could be seen as an act of war, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t take delivery of a bounty. It was a bold move for Gosia. The last time the Teten and the Sneaky Bitch had encountered each other they had been exchanging munitions. That said, Gosia and her crew weren’t wanted for piracy in the Epsilon Eridani system.

‘It never rains but it pours,’ Miska muttered to herself. She wondered if her sister was still on board the FBI ship.

A map and a pair of compasses represented the navigation system. Miska confirmed her suspicions. They were still in-system. Gosia wouldn’t want to be too far from her people on the Daughter if she thought she was going to get the information she wanted from Miska. Miska was still, however, several light minutes away from Waterloo Station. The icon for the comms system was a signalling mirror. Miska folded herself down and flung her consciousness out across space in an occulted black beam of light.

The lag was killing her, but slowly and surely she was getting the U.S.S.S Jimmy Carter – or the Little Jimmy, as she called the stealth ship – systems up and running. She was mostly programming it for autonomous flight. Finally she was as ready as she was going to be.

She received three-minutes-old footage of the hollowed-out raven skull, which was the Little Jimmy’s net representation, detaching from the Hangman’s Daughter, which looked like a cross between an old prison hulk and some mythological funeral barge. The Little Jimmy made its way as stealthily as possible out of Waterloo Station space. Again, the New Sun’s ban on space warfare made this easier than it otherwise would have been. When the Little Jimmy spread its sails and accelerated there was no way that Waterloo Station traffic control wouldn’t pick them up, but by that time the ship would be gone.

Miska hated math, even computer-assisted math. The trick was to decelerate far enough away to fold away the sails and bleed off heat as discreetly as possible, but still keep enough velocity to drift in on the Sneaky Bitch. All the while relying on the stolen ship’s top of the line stealth systems to keep her invisible to the pirate corsair’s passive scanners. They couldn’t risk lidar and radar if they wanted to remain invisible to the Teten. Trying to work out the math for this, even with the help of the Little Jimmy’s dumb AI navigation so-called expert system, had given Miska another headache.

There was a horrible, disorienting, wrenching sensation as she ceased to exist in the Little Jimmy’s systems as the ship accelerated. Minutes later she existed again and the lag was down to nearly negligible milliseconds. Miska folded the sails down and bled the heat off. Heat would be the biggest threat of discovery. Now she needed to let the Little Jimmy’s admittedly excellent autopilot handle the extremely difficult manoeuvres that would be required, using only its compressed gas manoeuvring systems. She would have to move quickly now. She dropped one of her fuzzy worms. This one was yellow in colour. It burrowed into the wood, merging with the Sneaky Bitch’s systems. It contained one of the most sophisticated NSA intrusion programs that Miska had found when she’d stolen the Little Jimmy. Then she spoofed the security lenses in the hold she was being held in, occulted an instruction to one of the maintenance systems and tranced out.

Miska half expected all sorts of alarms to go off when she tranced out but they didn’t. She was impressed with Che’s spoof program despite herself.

Her body was still a mass of aching muscles but the twelve hours or so she’d been away from Waterloo Station had at least given her hand, and some of her other bruises, contusions and burns, time to heal.

A wheeled maintenance droid was trundling towards her. She frowned. Someone had painted a disturbing clown face on the front of it. It extruded a small, spinning circular blade.

‘Now wait a minute, haven’t you got anything a little less spinny?’ she asked as the blade moved closer to her right wrist restraint. ‘No, I’ve changed my mind, I’m pretty sure I can free myself.’ She grimaced and closed her eyes. Something sprayed up into her face. She risked opening one of her eyes. The wrist restraint had been cut but the circular blade had gouged a