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

‘Where are you now?’ she asked.

The Ultra did not answer. Instead he just nodded to Bean, who panned the camera around.

‘Oh,’ Miska said.

‘We left a couple of presents for you as well,’ he told her.

‘Personally I would have opened with this,’ her dad said as the Cyclops looked around Camp Badajoz. Miska was doing the same, her artificial eyes amplifying the faint red light that managed to penetrate the jungle canopy. There had been a fight. That much was clear. Triple S had laid down a lot of fire both from slugthrowers and actual flame guns, which, outside of the huge flamers carried by bunker-busting mechs, wasn’t a weapon that a modern army tended to use.

The camp itself was a natural amphitheatre with hills on the south, west and east side. The CP, many of the hooches, and the shuttle/gunship landing pads were built into the hillside, along with SAM, point defence and artillery emplacements. Ammunition storage, machine shops and the mess were in the basin formed by the hills. The northern, jungle-facing perimeter was a raised trench system made of bulldozed earth. Miska, Nyukuti and the Cyclops her dad was wearing were looking down on the base from just below the brow of the southern-most hill.

Her own mechs were kneeling down behind whatever large, solid cover they could find. They were organised in a rough circle around the perimeter, though she’d ordered Mass to make sure that the north was particularly well defended. What she couldn’t understand, however, was why the Triple S mechs were frozen in place like petrified giants. They had creepers crawling up them as well.

The hillsides were covered by row after row of impaled, headless bodies. All of them wearing Triple S uniform. Miska hadn’t checked all the bodies but she was pretty sure that most of them were Triple S (conventional) and support staff.

‘I sent him after Resnick,’ Miska said by way of explanation. The Ultra was nothing if not focused.

After the Ultra had shown her what had happened to Camp Badajoz, Miska had sent the Satyr scout mechs in for a fast recon. When they had confirmed the Ultra’s intel the rest of the Bastards had joined them. She’d had mech and infantry secure the camp. Pegasus 1 was providing air support from above and the Armoured Bastards were splitting their time between patrolling and nesting in the nearby trees to provide overwatch. She had the Satyrs patrolling the perimeter using their reactive camouflage. Kasmeyer’s fire team were scouting to the north but she had told them not to go too far.

‘I kind of want to meet whoever is doing this and shake their hand,’ Miska said.

The Cyclops turned its head towards her.

‘These were just soldiers,’ her dad told her.

‘You’re right. We need to go and get Resnick, Duellona and that oily fuck Campbell and feed them to whatever this is,’ she suggested.

‘That’s a better idea,’ her dad admitted.

Nyukuti chuckled. He was an unobtrusive shadow wherever she went, despite his armoured bulk.

‘Sneaky-One-Actual to Hangman-One Actual,’ Kasmeyer said over an open comms link.

‘Hangman-One-Actual, what’ve you got?’ Miska asked. She was seeing light-amplified footage from Kasmeyer’s helm-cam. She accessed the helm-cam footage from the other three members of the scout team. The forest just outside the camp looked diseased somehow. She saw several canisters the size of old-fashioned oil cans. They had biohazard signs on them and were riddled with holes.

‘Looks like Triple S rolled them down the hill and shot them up,’ Kasmeyer told them. ‘Smells fucking horrible, chemical stench.’

‘Okay, get out of there,’ she told them. ‘Get back here. Hangman-Two-Actual will assign you a search area in the camp.’ From the helm-cams she saw the scout team move quickly away from the chemicals.

‘Sneaky-One-Seven, to Hangman-One-Actual,’ Kaneda said over open comms. According to her IVD he was heading back towards the trench system in the north. ‘This seems to be where much of the fight was. I’m seeing lots of fire damage here as well.’ She accessed his helm-cam. He was right. They were moving through a large area of recently burned moss and scorched root structure. It looked like a green hell.

‘Offensive-Two-Actual,’ the lieutenant in charge of the Offensive Bastards second platoon said over comms. ‘You need to see this.’ Miska minimised the feed from the scout team and opened up Offensive-Two-Actual’s helm-cam feed. He was up by the landing pads. Aim-lights attached to their M-19s played over the light-amplified images of the same containers that the scout team had discovered. These ones weren’t riddled with bullets. Instead they were strapped into plastic pallets by the side of the landing pad as though they had just been unloaded. Nearby, a cargo-handling exoskeleton looked frozen mid-movement. There was no pilot but there were bloodstains in the pilot area.

‘Looks like death-strength defoliant,’ Offensive-Two-Actual said. He moved around and shone the aim-light onto the rifle-like apparatus. Their barrels ended in nozzles and they had canisters the size of a small fire extinguisher attached to them. They were in crates that had been smashed open in a hurry, and it was clear that several of the squirters were missing. ‘Looks like we’ve got some military grade super-soakers as well,’ Offensive-Two-Actual added.

‘Offensive-Two-Three-Actual,’ the sergeant in charge of second platoon’s third squad said. ‘We’ve got some flame guns here as well.’ Lights played over opened crates with the flame guns and fuel canisters. Again they were next to the landing pads and again some of the weapons were missing.

‘Pass them out?’ her dad asked.

‘Hell yes,’ Miska said. ‘Check them first but make that happen.’

‘Didn’t do them much good,’ Nyukuti said, tension in his usually calm voice.

‘Depends,’ her dad said. ‘It might have enabled Triple S to break out and make it to the river.’

Miska glanced at Nyukuti. He didn’t look convinced. She didn’t think they had enough information to support her dad’s idea just yet.

‘I don’t think they had time to equip everyone with them,’ Miska told the stand-over man, and then to her dad: ‘Do