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

make out the letters E and C scratched into the metal. She was sipping one of the beers that Salik had left behind.

She was aware of the guard droid’s approach but she only looked up when it crouched down next to her. It had a viz screen mounted on its head. It was one of the droids her dad used for PT, exhorting the legionnaires to greater effort through the medium of creative verbal abuse. At the moment, however, the image on the screen was that of a concerned father.

‘Breakfast beer?’ he asked. It was her third but she didn’t feel like telling him that. ‘You need to get that eye replaced.’ The guard droid pointed at the eye patch dressing she wore over her left eye.

‘I’ll add it to my list of things to do.’

‘You okay?’

‘It was a rough one, Dad. I don’t mind being shot at, stabbed, punched, kicked and strangled, but I didn’t like the way they came after us on this one.’

‘It’s something you may have to get used to,’ he told her.

‘As long as people realise the consequences,’ she said. Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Then she looked up at the screen. ‘Come to tell me I handled this wrong?’

The image on the viz screen just shrugged. ‘You’re commanding unconventionally, but Grig has a point. I’m uncomfortable with the Nightmare Squad but you know that. Frankly, you were up against some pretty heavy odds and you lost a reasonably small amount of people.’

‘If you don’t include the sequestered,’ she muttered.

‘They made their choice. I heard you lost Nyukuti to friendly fire.’

‘Someone sent Kasmeyer after me. And Hogg knew something. He knew you from the Occupation.’

‘Me?’ her dad asked.

‘He was part of the resistance.’

‘I never …’ he started. ‘Edited memory.’

Miska just nodded

‘You think someone killed Hogg?’ he asked

‘I had the Doc check his wounds,’ Miska told her dad.

‘Is that why Corenbloom pulled all the blades from the guys you went after Resnick with from the armoury?’

‘Yes. Hogg was killed with a printed USMC pattern fighting knife—’

‘Just like the kind we give to the legionnaires,’ her dad finished.

‘Kaneda, Grig, Kasmeyer, Hogg, Bean and Corenbloom all carried one. Everyone else had their own blade. Doc checked each of their blades against the wounds, no match.’

‘Raff?’ her dad asked.

‘Nobody was paying that much attention but—’

‘It’s not a difficult knife for anyone in the Legion to get hold of, and you couldn’t surveil them in Artemis’s no-tech zone. I take it that Triple S didn’t carry the same kind of blades?’ he asked. Miska just shook her head. ‘So an inside job?’

‘Yeah, and one of the guys I’ve got investigating it is one of the suspects.’ Though she was pretty sure that it hadn’t been Corenbloom.

‘And you think this is to do with me?’ her dad asked. He sounded uneasy.

‘I think all of it is, somehow. I mean it makes sense. Think of the circles we move in, the things we do and we … I don’t know … we seem to keep bumping up against Mars, against the Small Gods.’

‘When’s this over?’ her dad asked.

Miska looked up at the screen in surprise.

‘You know when this is over. When I find the people who killed you.’

‘And what about the people who ordered it, and their bosses, and their bosses. You going to kill everybody, Miska?’

Was she? Right now she just wanted to rest.

She had lain on top of one of the Centaur APCs and tranced in. She had done the bare minimum she had to get done on that particular day in the CP at Camp Reiman. It had mostly been admin stuff. She had made an appointment with a ’ware clinic that Salik had recommended, to get her eye replaced. Even doing the bare minimum, it had seemed like a long day. Having tranced out, looking up at the hangar deck’s ceiling, she knew she needed some downtime, some time to heal and get back into a solid PT routine.

She sighed when she saw the blinking comms link. She opened it.

‘You’ve got be fucking kidding me!’ she snapped. She rolled off the top of the APC and landed on the deck, crouched like a cat. She howled in pain. In her anger she had forgotten just how bashed up she was. She managed to recover enough to storm across the hangar deck, relieved that she was armed.

The exterior airlock door hissed open.

‘Seriously, have you got a death wish?’ Miska demanded.

‘We need to talk,’ Torricone told her.

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! Miska thought. Such a bad idea!

Torricone was curled up against her back, asleep, his arm draped over hers in her cramped bunk on the Little Jimmy.

Also by Gavin G. Smith from Gollancz

Veteran

War in Heaven

The Age of Scorpio

A Quantum Mythology

The Beauty of Destruction Crysis: Escalation

The Bastard Legion

The Bastard Legion: Friendly Fire The Bastard Legion: War Criminals

Co-authored with Stephen Deas, as Gavin Deas: Elite: Wanted

Empires: Extraction

Empires: Infiltration

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Gollancz an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

Copyright © Gavin G. Smith 2018

The moral right of Gavin G. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 21730 0

www.gavingsmith.com

www.gollancz.co.uk

Table of Contents

Dedication

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Also by Gavin G. Smith from