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

their weapons down on Ephesus, but now it was just yellow dust. There was still a lot of mud to clean off, however. The Ultra had offered to clean her guns. Stubbornly she’d insisted on cleaning the Glock herself. She would do the rest later when her right arm worked again. The Nightmare Squad had passed on any spare ammunition to Mass, Corenbloom, Hemi and Kaneda.

Kaneda was ahead of her, Corenbloom behind, pushing the bound and still-struggling sequestered Torricone ahead of him. Mass and Hemi were on the other side of the street. Raff was moving more casually, coming along for the ride but trying to make it clear, through distance, that he wasn’t one of the Bastards.

There weren’t a lot of people on the street but even hardened mercenaries decided to give the five mud-covered, heavily-if-anachronistically armed Bastards a wide berth. Especially when their leader was carrying the commander of Triple S (elite)’s decapitated head.

Miska magnified her vision when the concourse’s curve brought Salik’s nineteenth century townhouse into view. There were four guards that she could see. They looked like Triple S (conventional). She guessed they’d run out of special forces operators. She called the targets for the rest of the fire team.

‘They try and bring their weapons up, nail them,’ she subvocalised. The electromagnetically-driven rounds the carbine-configured Kopis gauss rifles fired would move a lot faster than their own chemical explosion-driven rounds would. She should have had McWilliams bring down some gauss weapons with him. And a platoon of Offensive Bastards, she thought, but they had been too intent on evaccing. They had no idea when Artemis was going to trigger the planet-wide pollen bloom.

Lomas Hinton had been shot to death in the stall of a toilet. There had been at least three shooters according to the news reports. Somebody had put the head of a decapitated rat in his mouth and, to really drive the message home, the words ‘rat motherfucker’ had been painted on the stalls in the victim’s blood.

Someone had fire-bombed the Waterloo Station offices of New Sun’s PR company. The words ‘tell the truth’ had been painted on the walls.

A number of ‘reporters’, those who had toed the New Sun/Triple S line, had their tongues cut out. The words ‘tell the truth’ had been tattooed on their foreheads. Again they had claimed that three masked assailants had done this.

Needless to say, the Bastard Legion were being blamed. Given how Mass had chuckled when he’d seen the news report, there was a chance that the Legion was actually responsible this time. There was certainly something Mafiaesque about the attacks, Miska decided. What worried her a little was that the attacks must have had hacker support so that the ‘assailants’ hadn’t been caught on security viz. If it had been the Legion, then she was less than pleased about the use of a hacker. They were dangerous to her. On the other hand, she hadn’t been there so it wouldn’t be fair to criticise their call. All of this had, of course, caused outrage on the station. As a result the Hangman’s Daughter was currently clamped to the station with Salik’s security force, the elements of Triple S that had been up on the station, and a few other mercenary groups including the Dogs of Love camped outside.

Salik had, however, reluctantly agreed to allow Pegasus 1 to dock at the lower ring after Miska had explained some of what had happened down on the planet. Nor had there been a security force waiting for them. It seemed that the CEO of Waterloo Station hadn’t informed Colonel Duellona of Miska’s return. They had become aware of the U.S.S.S Teten when they had approached Waterloo Station to dock. The FBI destroyer had lit them up with radar and lidar but they still didn’t have the jurisdiction to move on them, it seemed. Still, their close proximity to the station suggested that the powers-that-be were giving some thought to granting the FBI some kind of authority.

One of the Triple S mercs outside of Salik’s house noticed them.

‘Don’t—’ Miska started. Kaneda’s suppressed marksman-configured M19 whispered. A red smear appeared on the wall behind the observant mercenary.

‘Don’t!’ Mass shouted, M19 carbine up, backed by Hemi’s SAW as they closed with the guards. ‘We will kill you!’ Mass warned them. The other three mercenaries decided that they didn’t want to die today.

The liveried servitor droid seemed almost as upset as Salik’s security detail when Salik let Miska, Raff, Corenbloom and the still-struggling Torricone into the house. She had thought that Mass was going to complain about Miska taking Corenbloom with her instead of him, but Mass was a combat officer. Corenbloom was intel. He would be more useful upstairs.

They had tracked mud all over the antique rugs and carpets. Corenbloom pushed Torricone into the drawing room ahead of him. Miska followed. Raff tried to make himself as unobtrusive as possible. She was a little disappointed that nobody gasped when they saw what she was carrying.

Salik was sat on his chair like the troubled monarch he was. Chin on his thumb, index finger pointing up past his nose. Duellona, face like thunder, was sat on an antique two-seat sofa next to a very nervous looking Campbell. There were two other people in the room. A grey-faced woman, her hair in a bun so severe it seemed to stretch her features, sat in one of the antique chairs. She wore an understated skirt suit the same colour as her face. The other woman was at least six and half feet tall. Her head was shaved, both her ears were pierced and stretched, and she wore a red power suit. Miska recognised her as Kiserian Omiata, a Maasai elder and head of the Colonial Council.

‘Ah, Miska,’ an unhappy-looking Salik said as she entered the room. ‘I spoke with your sister this morning.’

‘How was that?’ Miska said, looking around. Corenbloom moved the struggling Torricone to one corner.

‘Bracing,’ Salik told her.

‘She always was the difficult one,’ Miska