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

‘Diplomacy,’ she told him. ‘Corenbloom suspects you.’ This last she whispered so quietly that she barely made a noise. She hoped Raff’s boosted hearing picked it up but nobody else’s had.

Raff’s expression didn’t change. ‘You’re not exactly known for your diplomacy,’ he told her back as she walked away.

Corporal Hemi Kohere was sat with his back against one of the Waders watching the dark riverbank go by. He was holding a weapon that looked half club, half knife. Made of wood, it was intricately carved with individual tooth-like blades embedded in the head. The blades reminded Miska of the circular teeth of a hammerhead shark. It was a wicked, if not entirely practical-looking, weapon. Between the archaic weapon, the inverted lower canine tusk implants, and the wooden-like quality his tā moko tattoos gave his face, he did not look as though he’d be out of place with the ferocious jungle spirits of this moon.

‘What’s that?’ Miska asked.

‘It’s called a māripi,’ Hemi said. His accent was lovely, Miska decided, his voice surprisingly soft. ‘Supposed to be shark’s teeth. My ancestors used to get them the hard way. They’d wade out into the sea. Cut themselves and wait for the sharks to come. Punch them in the mouth.’ He looked up at Miska, one eyebrow cocked.

‘Sure,’ she said, laughing, though she could half believe it. He smiled.

‘Local hard wood. Carved it myself, though I had to use a laser, the wood here’s really tough, has to be to hold the trees up. The teeth are titanium with a fused synthetic diamond edge,’ he told her with obvious pride in his voice.

‘Yeah, my blade’s the same,’ she told him. She sat down next to him and drew the double-edged, black-bladed knife that her dad had given her when she’d finished boot camp. She passed it to him. He handed her his māripi. It had a heft to it but it was surprisingly well balanced and felt comfortable in her hand. Hemi inspected the diamond-fused titanium cutting edge of her knife, the ring on the end of the hilt. He looked at her questioningly.

‘It’s based on a sword that belonged to my favourite character in a sense game I played growing up,’ she admitted.

Hemi laughed.

‘A person made this,’ he said, holding her blade up, ‘not a machine.’

‘Yeah, it was the armourer on the base where I trained, he was a friend of my dad’s.’

‘It has mana,’ Hemi said and handed it back.

‘Thanks,’ she said, though she only had a vague idea of what mana was.

‘And it’s been used,’ he said.

‘You get all that from just holding it?’ Miska asked.

‘Just playing the odds,’ he said.

She laughed and handed the māripi back.

‘I like your thingy—’

‘Māripi,’ he supplied.

‘—as well.’

He shrugged. ‘Can’t use mechs, maybe we can’t use guns.’ He held the māripi and made a striking motion with it. ‘I’ll bite these maero.’

‘Maero?’ Miska asked.

‘Wild people, evil faeries who lived in the woods in the south island of Aotearoa back on Earth, where my people are from.’

‘Aotearoa?’ Miska asked.

‘Land of the Long White Cloud,’ he told her.

‘I’ve never heard of it, pretty name though. I thought the Maoris were from New Zealand.’

Hemi just laughed.

‘We’re not facing maero though, are we?’ he asked.

‘What makes you say that?’ she asked.

‘I saw what happened to the Cyclops.’

‘Yeah?’

‘So the arrow hits. Roots grow out from it and wrap around its head, crushing it. Where’d the extra matter come from? It can’t create it out of thin air.’

‘The Cyclops itself.’ She had suspected the same thing.

‘So something is modifying the matter at a molecular level,’ he said. It was clear he was much more than just some dumb gang leader, regardless of how ferocious he looked. ‘Which means …’

‘Nanotech,’ Miska supplied. She’d been thinking the same thing herself, but then she’d been trained about this sort of thing in the Marine Raider Regiment, and then more comprehensively when she’d joined the CIA.

‘But the defoliant works on it, which means that the nanites must have some kind of flora component to them.’ He looked sideways at her. It sounded ridiculous but she thought back to what Doc had told her about Ephesus’s flora, how it appeared to have been tampered with or engineered at some point in the past. She knew Them, the aliens that humanity had fought some hundred years ago in a sixty-year-long war, had been composed of naturally occurring bio-nanites. Their original form had been a sort of extremophile coral.

‘You put this all together yourself?’ she asked.

Hemi shrugged.

‘I like reading, sense documentaries, vizzes, that kind of thing. I was doing some courses in VR when you interrupted my sentence,’ he told her. There was no reproach in his voice that she could hear. He was just providing her with information.

Maybe that’s something we’ll have to look at, she thought. If individual legionnaires wanted to learn stuff beyond their training she certainly had no objection.

‘Any ideas where it’s coming from?’ he asked.

‘A few,’ she admitted.

‘Pretty sophisticated stuff, any idea how you’re going to deal with it?’

‘You’re going to hit it with your māripi,’ she told him.

This time his laugh was a proper belly laugh. It seemed to echo through the jungle. Heads turned their way. She noticed Nyukuti staring at Hemi for a moment or two.

‘Dude, shut up,’ Miska hissed but his laughter was infectious.

She nodded towards Nyukuti when they had stopped laughing.

‘There a problem there?’ she asked.

Hemi turned and looked at Nyukuti.

‘He hurt some friends of mine,’ he finally said, the smile gone now. ‘Everyone breaks but Whānau don’t break easily. Too proud. But with him it would have been better if they’d broken easier. Every minute a year when he dragged them into his dreams.’

Miska knew that when Nyukuti had been a stand-over man he had used custom-made sense programs to torture the criminals he preyed on into giving up their loot.

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘I want to fight him, not kill him. I just want to know which of us is stronger,’