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

thing. Nearly all of the legionnaires had seen combat in the two months since they’d arrived in-country. They had even lost people, but frankly the fighting had been pretty well-mannered so far. Most of the mercenaries in this conflict knew each other and socialised on Waterloo Station, and their parent organisations didn’t want to pay out too much in death duties and lost equipment. What tended to happen was that shots were fired, to keep face, and then surrender was negotiated based on who was most likely to win any ensuing battle. It led to a lot of arguments among mercenary commanders but the casualties were kept low. This was one of the reasons that the ‘violence of action’ approach that the Legion was taking was working so well. That and she was treating it like a war rather than a game. But she was careful to observe the niceties of the articles of conflict, whatever her detractors might say.

Two flashing icons appeared in her IVD. She sighed. It looked like she was going to be another tourist in this battle. Her head throbbed as she opened the lens feed from the two Satyr-class scout mechs.

‘You okay?’ Torricone asked over a direct link. She hadn’t even realised that she’d closed her eyes and been rubbing the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Miska looked around. She also hadn’t realised that Torricone was still on the shuttle. She found him sat on the deck close to the bulkhead that separated the cargo bay from the steps that led to the cockpit. He was watching her. She couldn’t read his expression. There was just a slight moment of irritation as she wondered if he was stalking her.

‘Fine!’ she snapped and too late realised she’d said it aloud. A number of legionnaires glanced her way. She saw Torricone frown. She was aware of one of the Cyclops’s lenses swivelling around to look at her. She decided to concentrate on the lens feeds from the Satyrs. This battle was shaping up to be just like watching a viz, again.

Both the lenses had been extended on telescoping arms from the top of the scout mechs. They only just broke the surface of the river, iridescent water lapping at them, occasionally obscuring the view. Port Turquoise was the regional capital for the area. Half its waterfront was given over to a small-scale commercial port. Cranes, cargo-handling mechs and exoskeletons served a small fleet of flat-bottomed riverine drone craft that ran luxuries and construction and arboculture supplies for the vertical farms up and down the river, and brought harvested crops, meat and other animal by-products back to the port. The other half of the port had been a marina, not just for the wealthy, it seemed like everyone owned a river craft in Port Turquoise. Now, however, the waterfront had been fortified. Smartcrete bunkers and barriers provided blocking strongpoints in key areas. Between the two lens feeds Miska could see two heavily armed patrol boats in the water and one Medusa-class mech on dry land.

The two Satyrs moved a little closer to the port, the tops of their armoured, reactive-camouflaged hulls breaching the bright turquoise-coloured water enough for them to launch similarly camouflaged rotor drones. Two more blinking lens feed icons appeared in Miska’s IVD. She opened them as well. As the rotor drones rose in the air, the town behind the port was revealed. It lay in a small basin of clear-cut hills in the shadow of the jungles. Before the current unpleasantness it had been home to about fifty thousand people, the majority of them involved in the gas mining industry, arbocultural industry, the port, or the Colonial Administration. Until New Sun’s mercenary forces had bewilderingly invaded.

The small town was set out in a neat orderly grid, and few of the buildings were much higher than three storeys. The shuttle port had been on one of the clear-cut hills around the town. It had been expanded into a military shuttle port and a base for the occupying mercenaries. The port was well protected, the town had a number of strongpoints with heavy weapon emplacements, but the majority of Triple S’s defences were jungle-facing. It was the most obvious direction of attack. Which was exactly the reason that Miska hadn’t come that way.

The rotor drones were busy mapping the town’s defences, the missile launchers, point defences, the gunships, the four Medusa-class mechs and so on. They would be feeding the information back to the waiting Medusas as target packages. Then, between the tactical computers and the pilots, they would start prioritising and doling out the targets. The shuttles would head in once the missile launchers and point defences were dealt with. She just hoped that Mass and the others remembered their rules of engagement. People lived in that town. They were about to take thirty-foot-tall armoured behemoths in and start a fight among the people they were, in theory, there to ‘liberate’. Miska felt the shuttle shift a little underneath her. They were waiting for Mass to start it all.

She saw the bow waves first. Six of the seven Medusas marching in a rough spearhead formation towards the port. Heads breaking the water first, huge metal hands tearing waterproof coverings from their weapons. Miska couldn’t see the seventh Medusa as the two understrength mech platoons waded through the increasingly shallow water, glowing slightly from the water’s residual iridescence.

Several of the shore point defence batteries exploded but Miska hadn’t seen anyone fire yet. Then she saw a strange disturbance in the air and recognised it as a one of her fast moving scout mechs hidden by reactive camouflage. Another point defence battery was turned to wreckage by Dory fire from one of the nearly invisible Satyrs. The Triple S mech guarding the port was turning to face the water only to be hit by pellets of hydrogen superheated to a plasma state from Mass’s mech’s shoulder-mounted plasma cannon. At the same time he was