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

the construct’s verisimilitude. The training construct wasn’t the stylised animation of the net. It was set up to look like actual reality. Her icon was pretty much a one-to-one representation of what she looked like but without the swell patches on her face and the medgel all over her hand.

‘Vido,’ she subvocalised as she opened a direct comms link to her XO, ‘I’m in the CP, where is Golda?’

‘He’s just outside in the rest area, waiting for you,’ Vido replied. He sounded a little harassed. Miska suspected there was considerably less sitting around in cafes bullshitting with his friends in the Legion than there had been in his previous job.

‘Can I get a minute with you to talk about the gas mining job once you’ve spoken to Golda?’ Vido asked. Miska sighed internally but agreed as she made her way out of the CP.

Outside, the camp looked like so many she had lived in throughout her entire life, first as a military brat and then as a leatherneck when she had joined the Corps. Printed smartcrete buildings, parade grounds, vehicle parks and workshops, the mess and, beyond the boundaries of the camp itself, the various customisable training environments. At the moment the training was concentrating on jungle warfare for obvious reasons. All of it was overseen from the tower in the centre of the CP that overlooked the entire base, much like a spaceport control tower.

Golda was sat at a plastic table underneath an awning that stuck out from the side of the CP. It was used as a break area for the CP’s staff. There were a number of other tables and chairs scattered around, a few dispensing machines. Golda was sipping from a cup of lemon tea.

The Leopard Society boss looked deceptively spindly despite all the PT that her father had put the prisoners through. He was tall, his head shaved, and he wore a slight smile on his face that Miska had come to connect with intelligent criminals who felt they had the upper hand in some way. His BDU’s looked clean and pressed, which suggested that whatever training he had been doing hadn’t been that strenuous. He stood up and saluted as she approached. Miska didn’t like this. She had spent most of her military career in various special operations groups where military discipline had been much more relaxed. However, her father had insisted that this was important. Though nobody saluted in the field to avoid becoming sniper-bait.

Aheto-Cudjoe, Golda. A senior boss in the pan-African Leopard Society crime syndicate. He was Congolese by birth, from an affluent middle class family. Aheto-Cudjoe had apparently turned his not inconsiderable intellect to crime at an early age, though that had not prevented him from getting an undergraduate degree in business management and economics, and a postgraduate degree in international relations. Selling hacked counterfeit weapons for popular net-based sense games had apparently financed both degrees. He had graduated from Oxford University in Kinshasa, and a mixture of practically applied intelligence and ruthlessness had seen him rise through the ranks of the Leopard Society. When the Kenyan authorities had cracked down on one of the Leopards’ most profitable human trafficking rings, and gone on to openly declare war on the Society, Aheto-Cudjoe had been the mastermind behind the retaliatory Glass Desert insurrection. The Crocodile Society, the Leopard Society’s military arm, had used asymmetrical warfare against the Kenyan police and judiciary so effectively that eventually the military had to be called in. Aheto-Cudjoe’s well-publicised trial had been more than a little controversial. He was convicted of killing two Nyota Mlima SWAT team members during his arrest. His defence had argued, quite convincingly, that Aheto-Cudjoe had been acting in self-defence. Certainly they had not been able to gather enough evidence to convict him of any of the other criminal activities he had most certainly been involved in.

‘Colonel Corbin,’ Golda said and bowed slightly, gesturing for her to join him at the table before sitting down again. Miska did the same and ordered a soft drink from one of the nearby dispensing machines. A tiny serving drone brought the drink to their table. ‘I understood you wanted to see me?’

‘And I’m guessing you can work out why,’ Miska said warily. She didn’t think she was a stupid person, far from it, but she also knew there were some really smart prisoners on board the Daughter. Golda was definitely one of them.

‘I think whenever white people hear the words jungle and warfare they automatically think of black people.’ The smile was still there. The sunglasses were making it more than a little difficult for Miska to read him. She could order him to take them off, or even make them disappear with a thought, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it would be an admission of weakness.

‘Oh bullshit,’ Miska muttered. ‘You grew up in a nice suburb of Kinshasa and spent most of your adult life in the shadow of the Nyota Mlima spoke, selling immigrant workers to off-world colonies as disposable slave labour. So don’t come like that with me.’ Nyota Mlima 2 was one of the huge equatorial orbital elevators, or spokes, that reached up from the surface of the Earth into high orbit. The first Nyota Mlima had been destroyed by kinetic orbital bombardment during the War in Heaven. Its towering ruins had been turned into a huge memorial garden.

Golda watched her for a moment or two and then smiled.

‘Allegedly,’ he added. ‘Let us not pretend.’ His English was heavily accented but perfect. ‘You are interested in Bobo, not me, for the Ultra’s atrocity squad.’

‘And you have been holding your people back from active duty with the Legion until you had some leverage to bargain for position,’ Miska said. She felt a little bit of pleasure in Vido’s words that Golda would be just as much, if not more, of an asset than Bobo Gumbhir who, under Golda’s command, had become known as the ‘Glass Desert Cannibal’.

‘I am not sure that