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

hadn’t managed to upload, so he hadn’t assimilated the Camp Badajoz experience. Miska wasn’t sure she’d helped much when she told him what a buzz it had been.

She had let her dad in on the plans. It was clear that he hadn’t liked them, but he hadn’t argued. The UN still hadn’t released the news of their innocence of the aerostat massacre. The whole punishment squad thing was complicating that. MACE and the Colonial Administration seemed prepared to accept that the punishment squad were either sequestered or, to their minds more realistically, a rogue element. Whatever, Miska had thought when her dad was telling her this. MACE were happy to deal with the Bastards again, but the UN was hampering this. Her dad had told her that Vido was handling the PR and legal problems.

She had the remaining members of the Offensive, Sneaky, Heavy and Armoured Bastards gather just under the jungle canopy, in sight of the waterfall, that fed the pool, that fed the tributary river that snaked through the trees to join the Turquoise. The river was much narrower this far north than it was down by Port Turquoise. She had to move her head to look at all her Bastards because of her loss of depth perception. A few of them were walking wounded, and they would be medevac’d. A number of them hadn’t got their goggles down quickly enough and the pollen had destroyed their artificial eyes. Others had prosthetic limbs that no longer worked. Most of them had the thousand-yard stare – last night’s fight had been intense and against a terrifying foe that none of them understood. A few were perfectly composed. She knew what that level of fearlessness in the face of what they had faced last night meant, especially in a prison population. They were the psychopaths. They were probably the people that she was going to be addressing. The people she needed.

‘What we did last night was as incredible as it was unprecedented. Those things walked through Triple S conventional, while Triple S elite ran away,’ she told them. It wasn’t entirely clear that was what had happened but it was starting to look more and more like the truth. ‘Well, we’re not impaled on spikes. They didn’t take our heads.’ That wasn’t entirely true. They’d lost a few heads early on in the fight. ‘I’m not going to bullshit you, I’m going north to where those things live. I’m going to hunt Resnick and his black propaganda squad, these so-called Double Veterans. I’m going looking for our sequestered people.’

She heard a lot of muttered ‘fuck that’s, saw some of them shaking their heads at the mention of ‘those things’.

‘I’m willing to offer double combat pay,’ she told them. That got the attention of some of them. She could see them doing sums in their heads. She wasn’t actually entirely sure how she was going to pay the double time as, strictly speaking, nobody was paying them at the moment, but Resnick, Triple S and New Sun had all really got under her skin.

‘Triple,’ Mass called from the ranks. There were a few half-hearted cheers.

‘Two-and-a-half times normal combat pay,’ she told them, ‘my final offer.’ She could work out how to make that come true later. ‘I need nine people; we’ll be taking flame guns and defoliant,’ she told them. She was also going to take all the 30mm HEAP grenades she could find. If possible she wanted the belts that fed automatic launchers on the Waders filled with HEAP grenades.

Mass stepped forward, as did Hemi. Miska had expected this. She nodded at them both. Mass returned an ironic salute.

Corenbloom stepped forward. Miska looked at him and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged.

‘Golda ordered me to, he wants an intelligence element with you,’ he explained. Something about the story didn’t quite fit but she let it go. He’d held his own during the battle.

‘I’ll go,’ Hogg said stepping forward, leaning on his compound crossbow.

Miska nodded to him. She was intrigued to know what he had to say.

Raff stepped forward as well.

She shook her head. Raff was more than capable of looking after himself. Her people knew that embedded journalists were allowed to carry arms but it would look weird if she didn’t object.

‘This is the story of a lifetime,’ Raff told her. ‘There’s no way I’m missing out on it. I’ll carry my weight, besides,’ he looked at the rest of the Bastards present, ‘nobody else seems to be in a hurry to volunteer.’

He had a point.

‘You gonna let this lenshead put you to shame?’ she asked them. She was a little surprised to see a few shameful faces looking down.

‘We’ll go,’ Kasmeyer said as both he and Kaneda stepped forward.

‘Is that it?’ Miska asked. Nobody seemed terribly eager to meet her eyes but, frankly, she didn’t blame them.

‘Just seven then?’

‘Eight,’ Nyukuti said.

It would have to do.

The undergrowth started to wave around in the downdraft as Pegasus 1 appeared overhead, sinking down through the gap in the trees. A positively ancient-looking flat-bottomed riverine patrol boat hung by cargo straps underneath the assault shuttle. Pegasus 1 lowered the boat, which they had ‘borrowed’ from MACE, into the calmer part of the waterfall-fed pool.

‘Get the Waders on board,’ Miska told Mass and Hemi.

Chapter 17

Miska drove the boat. It had been the least sophisticated riverine patrol boat that she had been able to find in the short amount of time they had. Made of hardened plastic, protected by ceramic armoured plate and run off a screw-shaped impeller hydro-jet, the patrol boat had been stripped of the majority of its systems and all its weaponry – most of which had been electromagnetic or laser based. It had a satellite uplink, GPS and sonar, largely for finding river debris, but Miska had turned them all off.

The two Waders – she hesitated to call them mechs – were stowed back to back on the flatbed, their telescoping legs folded away underneath