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

‘Dad!’ she muttered, a little embarrassed.

‘Force of habit,’ he told her. They continued walking towards Pegasus , even as it took off. Over by the bunker the burning mech was tottering. It fell over with a deafening thump, making the ground shake and sending yet more dirt into the sky. Miska and her dad’s new Cyclops body just kept walking.

‘No casualties,’ her dad said over a direct comms link. ‘Objective achieved. That’s leadership.’

The Sneaky Bastards were folding back towards the landing area as Pegasus 1 came into land.

‘No casualties is cool, not sure about the no action part.’

‘Well you’re a colonel now,’ her dad pointed out. She wasn’t sure but she suspected he was making fun of her. Working out of Waterloo Station and the mercenary contracts that entailed meant that the Bastard Legion had to have some semblance of a military hierarchy. She was in charge of six thousand possible combatants. She’d stopped short of letting Uncle Vido and her dad call her a general. It was a catch-22 situation, though. Waterloo Station might have required her to give herself a high rank, but the other mercenary officers didn’t feel that she’d earned it. They were right, but she’d met enough officers to know that many of them didn’t deserve to be in charge of an orgy in a licensed brothel.

‘I thought you said that my plan was reckless,’ Miska said as they reached the Pegasus. She was checking the position of all her people in her IVD. The Sneaky Bastards were all on board. She saw a figure sprinting towards the assault shuttle from the hangar. She checked his ident. He was one of the Hard Luck Comancheros who’d been helping strip down all the engineering equipment. He was supposed to have been on one of the Harpies.

‘Move it, you maggot, or you get left!’ It seemed that her dad had spotted the straggler as well.

Everyone’s going to be so pleased he can join us on missions now. The thought brought another smile to Miska’s face.

‘I said your plan was just the audacious side of reckless,’ he told her as the Comanchero sprinted past them and into the shuttle’s cargo hold.

‘Pegasus-Two to all Pegasus and Harpy call signs,’ Joseph Perez, the pilot of the other assault shuttle, still hovering overhead and providing cover, said over secure comms. ‘We’ve got two incoming fast-movers from the east, and two, no, three assault shuttles inbound from the same direction.’

Perez was another Hard Luck Commanchero. Miska and her dad had tried to break up the gangs initially, but their current thinking was to let each of the gangs use their specialities where it complemented military objectives. It might result in ghettoisation but frankly as long as Miska could stop them killing each other she was reasonably happy. She climbed into the assault shuttle’s crowded cargo hold and knelt down. Somehow they managed to make room for the Cyclops to perch on its thin legs above the heads of the Bastards in the hold. The shuttle lurched into the air.

‘What about phase two of the plan?’ Miska asked over direct comms to her dad as she linked into the Pegasus’s external lens feed. The assault shuttle dipped its nose and burned hard. Pegasus 2 followed as they flew into the jungle, weaving in and out of the huge trees under the thick, almost solid jungle canopy. Fire illuminated the mech base behind them as the vehicle-mounted launchers fired missile after missile into the air. Some of the missiles exploded almost immediately as the incoming aircrafts’ point defence systems shot them out of the sky.

‘Phase two is the other way around,’ her dad told her.

Chapter 3

Miska had a map of the surrounding area overlaying her vision. Her IVD headache, what she was thinking of as her ‘command headache’, was worsening. She was trying to resist the urge to feed herself painkillers from her internal medical systems. She would only do that if she felt that the headache was compromising her concentration. Being in command felt like she was doing very little, physically anyway, yet somehow it was still tiring.

The Pegasus’s utilitarian cargo bay was full. People and gear were packed in tightly, swaying as the craft weaved its way through the trees. The thick leaves of the huge trees’ upper branches were so efficient at capturing sunlight that there was little foliage other than the multi-coloured patchwork of parasitical mosses underneath the dense canopy. That left more than enough room for assault shuttles, and even larger craft, to fly in between the massive trees.

Miska patched into the shuttle’s sensor systems. They weren’t running active sensors like radar and lidar – both were only of so much use in the jungle, but they could give away the shuttles’ position. Passive sensors weren’t showing any pursuit. She checked the net feed from the mech base but that had gone down. Triple S’s own combat hackers would have made taking back net control a priority, particularly with their own missiles shooting at them. She checked on the Heavy Bastards’ position. The mech platoon was less than a mile from the Turquoise River. Pegasus 1 and 2 were closing with them rapidly. She checked the Harpies. The heavy lift drop shuttles were still en route to Camp Badajoz. So far everything was going to plan.

Miska checked the external lens feed. Thin beams of reflected red light were making it through the jungle canopy. She could make out the Medusas’ running lights as the shuttles overflew them. The larger mechs were making no attempt at concealment. She had to check the transponders on both the Satyrs to find the smaller, faster, stealthier scout mechs.

‘Just look at all that ass,’ her dad said, his voice emanating from the Cyclops. The war droid was drawing a few looks from some of the legionnaires on board. Ass was old USMC slang for armour. Back before the so-called Final Human Conflict, four