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

sure if it was her mind playing tricks on her or not. Either way it was a serious breach of concentration.

She turned round to look at the latest directional atrocity. The body had been butchered in the truest sense of the word. All the choicest cuts and ‘edible’ viscera had been laid out on a flat part of one of the roots. Teeth marks in the kidney let them know that a bite had been taken out of it. The body had been scalped as well. The arm was pointing north again, up another stepped waterfall that Miska wasn’t looking forward to traversing.

‘This is sick,’ Mass said.

‘If it’s frightening you then imagine what it’s doing to them,’ Miska pointed out, though she was reasonably sure that Resnick’s people weren’t seeing these bodies. That might make it worse. The Nightmare Squad were hunting them. Picking them off one at a time, making them feel helpless.

The Wader rocked from the bow wave of Hemi’s approaching machine. Miska didn’t like having both the Waders so close together but if they couldn’t trust their comms then anything too complex to be relayed by hand signal had to be done verbally. She could see Kasmeyer had gone pale in the other archaic mech.

Miska’s head shot round, convinced that she’d seen something moving in her periphery, again. She’d noticed Hogg, Nyukuti, and Kaneda in the other Wader had done the same a couple of times.

‘Bean,’ Corenbloom called over to her. It was clear that the disgraced FBI profiler had been studying his fellow inmates. ‘Though again the scalping is new. I suspect that Kaczmar and Bean are starting to bond.’ Miska could tell by the tone of his voice that Corenbloom didn’t like the idea of this. Miska wasn’t sure she liked it herself.

This is what you wanted, she told herself, your own pet atrocity. Well, this is what it looks like.

‘I think this is the Ultra testing his people,’ Corenbloom suggested. That made a degree of sense as well. Make sure they were up to the job. Though she also wondered how much of this was revenge for Triple S trying to copycat their ‘work’. Miska nodded. She signalled to Hemi to take the point in his Wader as they started their ascent.

Jesus Christ, Miska thought. She heard muttering from behind her in the Wader’s cupola, retching from the other Wader. Kasmeyer. She was beginning to have serious doubts about him, though she guessed that throwing up was probably a perfectly reasonable response to what they were looking at.

It looked like a medical diagram. Skin and flesh peeled back, the body’s interior revealed, displayed, but somehow it reminded Miska of a pinned butterfly she’d once seen in one of her dad’s pre-FHC vizzes.

‘This will be the last one,’ she said out loud. The Ultra had done this himself. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

You knew he was a killer, she told herself. Only that wasn’t quite true. She had known that he was a monster.

They were on another broad, open, waterlogged, terraced plateau. Through a rare gap in the canopy above them, probably the result of the torrential rain, Miska could see the shadows of the mountains. It was daytime again; they’d travelled through the night and Miska was starting to feel the fatigue seep into her bones. She had seen the others yawn as well. They’d had precious little sleep in the last forty-eight hours.

The body was pointing towards land to the north and west of them. A fungal forest was growing on the muddy banks. Miska wondered just how close they were to the source of the Turquoise.

Lightning threw the distant mountains into sharper relief. Miska looked away from the flare and saw an inhuman face in the water. It sank into the greyish murk.

‘Mass, hull down!’ she ordered. ‘Check the water!’ She signalled the other Wader to do the same thing. The Wader started lowering itself as thunder rolled across the sky. It was a dangerous move. If they were about to be attacked from the water with the stilt-like legs extended they were just too exposed, one good hit and the Wader was done for. Though for all she knew whatever she had just seen in the water was this very second attaching demo charges to one of the legs.

‘Incom—’ Raff managed before cannon rounds flew overhead and impacted into the tree with the corpse, making fibrous wounds in the wood. The corpse was now little more than a few limbs nailed to the tree as green tracers flew overhead. Miska glanced behind them as the Wader’s cupola sank into the water, three-quarters submerged. She could see cannon round tracers arcing in towards them from the distance. They were splashing into the water behind Hemi’s Wader as well. The Wader’s sudden loss of height was momentarily confusing the long distance fire but Miska knew that wouldn’t last long. They were taking fire from at least three different positions south of them, back the way they had come. Judging by the cannon fire, three of the Triple S Waders had skirted around behind them, or been camouflaged well enough to hide from them as they passed. That wouldn’t have been difficult in the poor light and heavy rain with no decent optics or sensors.

‘Mass, get this Wader moving and keep it moving, swing round a hundred and eighty degrees and back it up towards the land,’ Miska shouted. ‘Nyukuti, signal the others to do the same, I want you to hold off on the grenade launcher until they’ve closed with us.’ She didn’t bother waiting for a reply. She knew they’d follow orders. As they turned, Mass’s driving station swivelling with the Wader so he could face the direction they were moving in, she heard Hogg open up with the Heavy Machine Gun. Miska traversed the huge 20mm cannon as far to the right as she could, looking through the rudimentary optical sight built into the slit in the weapon’s