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

day. First he’d seen his friends massacred by wood nymphs, then he’d been taken prisoner by the Ultra and his band of merry serial killers. It was enough to make anyone soil themselves. She was still a little surprised when he pissed himself at Resnick’s very name. He was trembling. Shaking his head. ‘Really?’ she asked.

‘You don’t understand … those people …’

‘Are they a more immediate threat than me?’ Miska asked and put the barrel of the Glock to his head. The other captive was trying to scream through her gag, drool running down her chin.

‘Miska …’ her dad said.

‘I have a family,’ the captive told her.

‘Fair enough.’ Miska wouldn’t actually go after someone’s family. She shot him in the head, then a second time. Double tapping out of habit.

The Cyclops was moving towards her. Miska suspected her dad was about to disarm her, so she held up a hand to forestall him. She was surprised and impressed that he stopped.

‘Remove her gag,’ she told Nyukuti.

He shook his head.

‘CP,’ he told her. He was right. A close protection detail’s job was to look after their subject, not be at their beck and call. He couldn’t protect her if he was mucking around with a gag. Miska had the Glock in one hand, the flame gun in the other.

‘I’ll do it,’ her dad muttered. She could hear the disgust at what she’d done in his modulated voice but he reached down and removed the gag.

‘I don’t have a family, I’ll tell you!’ the woman practically screamed at them.

Miska could hear her dad telling everyone not to worry about the gunshots and go back to their tasks over the comms.

And she told them. Resnick’s squad of war criminals were all ex-special forces guilty of heinous acts. They were Triple S’s own pet atrocity makers. They were called the Double Veterans. On Ephesus their job had been to run black propaganda missions to make the Bastard Legion look bad. It wasn’t much more than Miska and the others had already figured out. The male captive had died for nothing. Still, it was nice to get it confirmed.

‘Where did they go?’ Miska asked as she attached the flamer to her AK-47 by joining the mounting rails. It would make for an awkwardly bulky weapon but it would make it much easier to carry both weapons and bring them to bear when needed.

‘They went north,’ the woman told her. ‘They had a flotilla down by the river. They had the conventional troops hold the line while they ran.’

Miska nodded.

‘How many?’ she asked.

‘Four squads,’ the woman told her. Miska guessed that could mean as many as forty-eight soldiers. ‘Three squads of the Double Veterans …’

‘And?’ Miska knew what was coming next.

The woman couldn’t meet her eyes.

‘Your people,’ she finally said.

‘You knew?’ Miska demanded through gritted teeth. She glanced at the man she’d shot. It went some of the way towards explaining why he was so frightened.

She was aware of the Cyclops ‘tensing’ next to her. Again it was too human a move for the war droid. She suspected that her dad was readying himself to stop her executing this woman.

‘When they give you what you want, you stop,’ Nyukuti, her stand-over man bodyguard told her.

‘Thank you,’ Miska said, then she holstered the Glock and walked away. Nyukuti and her dad fell in beside her.

At first she thought it was snow caught in the lights of the mechs. Then she realised it wasn’t so much falling as just drifting through the camp, sticking to whatever surface it landed on. It looked like pollen, only larger.

‘Tell everyone to cover any exposed cyberware, goggles, ear protectors, gloves,’ Miska told her dad as she slid her own goggles down and they adhered to her skin. She did the same with the ear defenders on her half-helm.

Then the screams started. They began human, but quickly became inhuman and were cut off by a wet tearing sound. Then came the flat hard staccato of metal being propelled by old-fashioned explosive chemical reaction. Tracers in the air to the north. Then fire. All the fire.

Chapter 15

Just for a moment Miska was transfixed. The two flame-cannon-equipped Medusas were dragons breathing fire as they lit up the night, and the treeline to the north of the camp burned. Then she was heading towards the flames. The carved wooden stock of the AK-47 nestled into her shoulder. With the flame gun bolted to it the weapon had become bulky, a struggle for even her boosted muscles to hold in position.

Miska could hear the faults being reported in the mechs, in the shuttles, in the combat exoskeletons. The crosshairs for her smartlink to the AK-47 were blinking on and off in her IVD. She brushed some of the pollen fall off the weapon with her left hand.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to all call signs, unless crucial keep reports of your faults off air. If you are combat ineffective then fall back to exfil area three. Switch off your smartlinks, go to your optical sights,’ she said over open comms and it quietened down. She didn’t like the way Pegasus 1 was wobbling around overhead, however.

Something was slithering across, no, through the earth towards her. Nyukuti had seen it as well. She heard the flat, hard staccato of his slugthrower SAW. Saw the earth ripped up in the light of the flickering muzzle flash.

‘The defoliant!’ Miska shouted at him. He glanced at her, clearly none the wiser. ‘The fucking squirter!’ she told him. She moved her hand from the AK-47 to the flame gun and squeezed the trigger. Fuel shot through the blue pilot flame and ignited into a line of dripping fire. She played it over the ground. An inhuman squealing noise filled the air. Nyukuti let the SAW hang down his front on its sling. The SAW’s cassette magazine was too bulky to allow the squirter to be attached by the mounting rails. He sprayed the burning ground with the powerful defoliant