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

giving this up as a bad idea, she decided as her thumb worked the nozzle. The ignition switch sounded deafening to her ears in this confined space but the pilot light flickered into life and illuminated the damp, fungal-infected mess with a cold blue light.

She moved through the ship with much more purpose than she felt. Every step sent up spores from the fungal growths underfoot. She had pulled her gas mask down but she could still feel the spores making her exposed skin itch. She had assumed if there was a Small God then this would be where she would find them, but she was starting to suspect that this had been little more than a one-way transport from Earth. She was about to turn back when she saw the open door to the bridge just ahead. She stopped and listened. All she heard was the steady drip-drip of condensation. Nothing moved inside the ship and she couldn’t hear anything outside, certainly no mass gunfight. Satisfied that she was alone, Miska moved carefully and quietly into the bridge. The view screen had shattered and earth had half filled the bridge. Miska wasn’t sure that roots should be able to grow into and through armoured hull the way they had here.

She was about to back out when something occurred to her. Miska ran a search for net access, expecting to find nothing. She was reasonably sure that a hundred years ago they had relied on hardwired connections, due to the war. She was more than a little surprised when she found the faintest trace of a connection.

She stood motionless in the half-buried bridge for a moment.

‘This is a stupid idea on so many levels,’ she told herself. That was underselling the idiocy of what she was contemplating. There were so many reasons not to trance in to a Small-Gods-connected hundred-year-old net. Not least because of some of the horrible net infections that were chucked around during the War in Heaven. With all their tech down she wouldn’t even have a window into the real world. To make matters worse they were in the middle of enemy territory and she had nobody to provide trance-watch for her.

Just for a moment she thought about Nyukuti.

But she had to know.

She found the least fungal piece of damp earth she could and sat down. Then she closed her eyes and reached for the faint connection.

If anything it was a disappointment. It was a fragment of the ship’s net, presumably being run off some still-functioning backup power source, which was impressive in its own way. This wasn’t net architecture. It was net archaeology. The disappointment was that the system had been cleansed. It was a flat black plain of ashes interspersed with the odd data fire and the husks of black obelisks that had presumably once housed systems and information.

Cartoon-net-Miska sighed and prepared to trance out when the owl landed on the closest obelisk husk. Miska stared at it. Then she shouldered her club full of attack software and made her way towards the owl.

‘But you’re just an owl, right?’ she said as she looked up at it. She had seen the bird before when she had been forced to trance in to the net back on Barney Prime. When she had met the net icon of the woman in the ancient dress, in a VR construct of a cliff top that overlooked an equally ancient coastal town. The owl had been there perched on the ruins of what Miska had suspected was some kind of temple.

‘I am, indeed, an owl,’ the owl confirmed. She spoke with the accented voice of a woman. Miska struggled to guess the age of the woman. Either quite young or very old, as though the voice had a dichotomous nature to it.

‘You know that talking owls are reasonably rare,’ Miska explained, though she supposed anything went on the net, even way out here. ‘You got a name?’

‘Yes,’ the owl told her.

The bird wasn’t moving her beak. Miska was just hearing the voice.

‘I’ve often thought that people who take language completely literally don’t really understand communication. I don’t have time for games. I’m guessing this is some weird Small Gods circle jerk. You’ll feed me some cryptic shit and then expect us mere mortals to dance on the end of your strings.’

‘But you have time for obnoxious speeches?’ the owl asked. There was no rancour in the bird’s old woman/young girl’s voice. It had sounded like a genuine enquiry.

‘Shall we get to the point?’ Miska asked.

‘If we hold back anything it is either for the sake of security, or because we do not know,’ the owl told her. ‘We are most certainly acting in our own best interests, but yours as well.’

‘Who is we?’ Miska asked.

‘That would be security.’

‘You know, you could just hire us,’ Miska suggested.

‘If we had discovered what was going on quickly enough, we probably would have,’ the owl told her.

‘Well, exposition me,’ Miska told the bird. She had to admit she was intrigued. ‘Who is the Small God?’

‘Artemis,’ the owl told her. Miska shook her head. ‘Goddess of the woods and the hunt.’

‘Yeah?’ Miska asked. ‘African? Native American? Scandinavian?’

She was impressed, and quietly pleased, when the owl appeared to have a pained expression on her raptor features.

‘Greek,’ the owl told her. It made sense. The Small Gods who claimed to be manifestations of Greek and Roman mythology tended to be the main players back in the Sol System. They seemed to feel that they had the right to their namesakes. The most aggressive being Mars/Ares, of course.

‘So some AI, alien or otherwise, grows herself a body out of nanotech from the Grey Goo Wastelands after the bombing, steals herself a long-range strike craft and flies here to set up her own kingdom of shrubbery? Then, I guess, things get tricky when the colonists arrive. But why does New Sun care? Is it just Small Gods family squabbles? Because I get that.’

‘You’re missing a few pieces,’ the