War Criminals, Gavin Smith [best novels for beginners .txt] 📗

hole the shuttle had cut through the canopy, the missile batteries, on their stubby wings, angling upwards. Both of the Pegasi would be trying to put trees between themselves and the inbound Triple S shuttles making their way towards them. Miska knew that the co-pilot in Pegasus 2 would be programming the missiles to use the trees as cover to close with the enemy shuttles. Ambush tactics were pretty much the only advantage they had.

‘Hard scans,’ McWilliams said over the comms, and she could hear the tension in his voice. ‘They’re flooding the jungle with lidar and radar.’ It was a bold move on behalf of the Triple S pilots. Good news for them if they found the Bastards’ shuttles, but it also gave their position away.

‘We’ve got weapons lock,’ Perez said.

‘Let them close,’ McWilliams told him over the comms link.

‘I know how to do my job, old man,’ Perez answered, but there was humour in his voice. The two Hard Luck Comancheros were old friends.

Miska checked the position of the Harpies. They had practically reversed their course and were burning hard for an artificial clearing by the banks of the Turquoise River to rendezvous with Mass’s Heavy Bastards.

Then she checked the spotter drone. The two Sirens were almost overhead. Between the mechs and the Harpies they were about to enter a target-rich environment. Again Miska felt the shuttle shift slightly as McWilliams adjusted their position. Then it shook as McWilliams fired every single missile in the racks up through the hole in the canopy. Even through the assault shuttle’s armour the sound of the rocket engines igniting was loud enough to trigger Miska’s audio dampeners. She saw some of the other legionnaires put their hands over their ears.

She checked the feed from the spotter drone. She barely saw the missiles. The feed was full of red flashes and explosions powerful enough to shake the drone as the Sirens’ ball-mounted point defence lasers took out missile after missile, but the aircraft had been too close to the canopy. One of the sirens was hit, thrown into a brief flat spin, the pilot managing to eject before the wreckage hit the canopy. Then something hit the spotter drone and the feed went down. Thoughts of yet more expenditure were replaced by worries about the second Siren.

Miska watched as Pegasus 2 waited until the last moment to fire all of its missiles at the two, now visible, enemy assault shuttles, hoping to expensively overwhelm their point defence systems. Harsh red light, fire and force filled the jungle under the canopy as Pegasus 1 and Pegasus 2 turned tail, their own point defence systems shooting down incoming missiles from enemy shuttles and launching counter measures as they fled through the jungle. Miska’s stomach lurched as she felt successive shockwaves from nearby detonating warheads buffet the Pegasus. She heard the brief thunder of rail cannon rounds pitting the assault shuttle’s armour and then they were out from under the canopy, over the riverside in the dawn’s rising sun. The two huge Harpies were below them. The mechs milled around the heavy lift drop shuttles.

McWilliams brought Pegasus 1 up over the canopy by the riverside to check what had become of the second Siren. Miska wasn’t sure what they were going to do if it had survived. The Pegasi couldn’t take on a fighter with just rail cannons and point defence lasers. Fortunately for them, they could see more smoke rising from the jungle canopy, another parachute drifting down towards the treetops.

‘What happened to the second shuttle?’ McWilliams asked over comms. Miska could hear the urgency in his voice.

‘The first one I took out, second one got tagged pretty hard, last I saw he turned tail and ran,’ Perez answered. ‘Will provide overwatch until Harpy-One and Two are ready to get their fat asses in the air.’

‘Understood,’ McWilliams said as he circled Pegasus 1 over the clearing.

‘Dad,’ Miska subvocalised over a direct link. The Cyclops’s head shifted at a funny angle, rotating a lens so it was looking at her. It was a bit weird but better than him looking at her with one of his ass lenses mounted on the point defence systems on the war droid’s hip joints. ‘I’m bored.’

‘What’re you complaining about?’ he replied. ‘Parachute insertion, you killed a guy and shot up a spider drone. That’s more than most colonels get a chance to do.’

Pegasus 1 dropped back through the hole cut in the thick canopy of trees and into the morning mist underneath. Even though the correct access codes for the day had been transmitted, the missile and laser batteries affixed to the huge trees, and in the various strongpoints around the hillside base, still tracked the shuttle as it came down towards one of the hilltop landing pads. Above and behind them, one of the Scarlet Sisterhood pilots was skilfully easing a lumbering Harpy through the same hole. Miska suspected the heavy drop shuttle was losing paintwork to the trees.

The rear cargo bay was coming down even as the landing struts touched the earth. Cool air conditioning was replaced by flying dust and grit kicked up by the shuttle, and, of course, the omnipresent humidity. Moments later Miska lost most of her visibility in a huge cloud of dust as the Harpy landed lower down the terraced hill on one of the reinforced landing pads. Miska pushed her goggles down over her eyes and made her way through the dust. She could feel the legionnaires pushing past her. They all knew their jobs. The stolen gear had to be thoroughly checked for back doors into their systems and other nasty surprises. Then it had to be catalogued, stored and other shit that Miska knew she was supposed to care about.

Another huge cloud kicked up as the second Harpy came down. Miska was vaguely aware of Pegasus 2 moving sideways in the air above them, a shadow in the dust as it came in to land. She spat, checked her