Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions (Death's Handmaiden Book 3) by Niall Teasdale (best summer reads txt) 📕

only saw in commercials and his eyes were an interesting blue-green colour which probably looked great under better circumstances. Now he was clinging to Mitsuko rather tightly and limping a little on his left leg.

‘That’s Nava,’ Mitsuko said, ‘our one-woman army. I admit, I’ve never seen her take on this many troops before, but… Uh, don’t say anything like that to her face. She doesn’t really like being thought of as a killing machine.’

‘If we get out of here, I’ll call her a goddess.’

Mitsuko smirked inside her helmet. What she said was, ‘Hands off, she’s my goddess.’

Hausman City.

The workstation Rhianna had her ketcom plugged into chimed and she walked over to check her results. Tapping at a file icon on the screen, she watched it expand into a window containing a message she had copied out of Oberstleutnant Stefan Sieger’s mailbox. After a second, she smiled.

She reflected that a smile was probably not the correct response for what she was seeing. This was the sixth message she had decrypted using a program the Greylings had commissioned and had the exclusive use of. It could crack about seventy-five percent of known encryption methodologies inside of an hour. It had another couple of methods it could beat in a few hours to a couple of days. Then again, when you used weak-ass cyphers like this, it took minutes. The messages Stefan had left in a folder called, of all things, ‘Tax Documents’ were all related to his ongoing collaboration with Befreit Beherbergen.

She had already been through the militia’s records of the missile strike. It was possible that Stefan would claim there was a very unfortunate typo in his message giving the order to fire at thirteen hundred, but Rhianna was not sure how you could mistakenly type 13 when you meant 21. It had also been an order to change the time when there was no reason to change the time. And there was no mention of friendly combatants possibly being in the target area.

Stefan Sieger House was in it up to his neck and he had panicked.

A message receipt indicator popped up in the corner of her screen and she tapped it to see what the Yosozume wanted. It turned out they wanted nothing, but they had observed an unusual change in the terrain in an area a few kilometres from the town Stefan had said contained the Befreit base. It seemed that a valley had suddenly appeared where there had not been much of one before. A valley with a camp in it. There were also indications of an artillery bombardment landing in the encampment, though the ship had not been able to detect any nearby weapons.

‘So, that’s where you’ve got to,’ she said as she scanned over the pictures the Yosozume had sent down. She shook her head, grinning. ‘That’s reallyunsubtle, Nava. Really impressive, but really unsubtle.’

Graugebiete Region.

‘We’re maybe five minutes away from Mel and Chess, Nava.’

Mitsuko’s voice sounded over the radio and Nava considered pouting. ‘Acknowledged,’ she said. Turning, she dropped a Magic Burst into a group of soldiers before turning and starting for the vehicle parking area.

She figured she had killed off around thirty percent of the Befreit troops. They were getting organised, finally, but they had lost a lot of people and morale was not high. On top of that, their command structure was a mess, their camouflage illusion was gone, their encampment had no power or communications, and the core of their mercenary support was dead. Given another hour or two, she figured she could wipe them out entirely, but the mission was to get Kyle and Kory out. She was just going to have to ignore her instincts for now. Well, she could take out a few more of them while she made her retreat…

Nava raised one of her pistols, aiming at the next concentrated grouping of soldiers.

~~~

‘They’re here,’ Melissa said. Invisibility had worn off both her and Rochester, so they were hunkered down in their stolen contragrav, watching for where they thought Nobuyuki would turn up with the others. And there he was, slinking between vehicles of various types.

Stepping out of their van, Melissa waved him over, just in case he was not sure where they were. Something caught her attention in the corner of her vision, and she turned her head to look toward the back of the valley. She figured it was one of Nava’s explosions, but it had seemed too high and… And something trailing pale smoke was rocketing toward them from the only watchtower still standing, the one right at the back of the valley. A missile. Someone had fired at missile. At her!

On reflection, she came to the conclusion that she should have panicked. She should have stood there, staring at the oncoming missile with her mouth open until it blew her to pieces. Instead, the training Nava had drilled into her for the last year and a half took over. Without even raising a hand, she focused on the air a hundred metres from her and a plane of semi-transparent energy appeared, six metres wide by four high, hanging in the air in what appeared to be an entirely unnatural manner. The missile was capable of over Mach one point three, but it had a kilometre and a half to travel. It had covered a bit more than two-thirds of that distance before Melissa got her Force Wall up and it was not even capable of dodging. It slammed into the plane of energy and exploded. The blast wave barely made the grass shift around Melissa’s feet.

~~~

Nava saw the missile passing overhead and her heart sank. For a fraction of a second. One of Melissa’s Force Walls appeared in the air just in time to block the missile’s path. A dumb missile, no avoidance electronics. Useful under the circumstances.

Turning, Nava lifted an SAH-301 and aimed at the watchtower which, on reflection, she should have nailed before now. It had not seemed important. Pushing her mind into the