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

sub-munitions that exploded into shrapnel at head height. Both the shuttles burned hard to gain height, buffeted by the rising shockwaves. The landing pad looked like an island amid the fire. She saw two of the mechs among it all. From her perspective it looked like they were wading through a sea of flames. It was beautiful.

It took her a moment to realise what she was seeing as her vision filled with rapidly approaching fire.

‘Move!’ she screamed at Nyukuti as she dragged him to his feet. All around her legionnaires scrambled as one of the burning skyscraper-sized trees fell towards them.

Chapter 16

Everything is shit, was Miska’s first thought. It was raining dirt. On the other hand you’re not dead, she told herself. Somehow. She was looking up at an enormous tree trunk curving away from her. This particular part of it wasn’t burning but further along the huge trunk it was a one-tree raging forest fire.

Miska touched her eye and the glove came away sticky and red. The wound burned as well, presumably because of the defoliant that coated everything. She was pretty sure that her gas mask was no longer working. She pulled it off, and then screamed as some of the fused flesh came away with it. That was when she realised that not only was her eyesight a bit grainy, she could only see through one eye. It gets better and better.

‘You all right, boss?’ Kaneda had appeared, kneeling next to her. Kasmeyer was kneeling next to Nyukuti. Ash was falling from the sky like snow but at least the pollen fall had stopped. Miska stood up. Everything was on fire. Much of the earth had been burned to glass. There were pools of burning, bubbling plasma. There were huge craters everywhere. Pegasus 2 and Harpy 1 hovered, unsteadily, in the air overhead. She saw one of the Medusas being helped to its feet by another. Much of their armour looked like so much slag.

The air was filled with the acrid chemical smell of the defoliant. Her own internal filters would protect her from the worst of it but she felt her exposed skin, her throat, and her nasal passages burn. She tried to spit the taste out of her mouth but it wasn’t going anywhere soon.

‘We just got our asses kicked,’ someone said nearby.

Miska smiled, turned towards the source of the voice.

‘You see any tangos?’ she asked, meaning targets, the enemy. She climbed out of the trench and looked around at the devastation. Then she started giving orders.

Miska was frustrated at having to abandon Camp Badajoz when they’d fought so hard for it. She knew the forest fire would eventually burn out thanks to moisture and the inevitable rain but the tree fall had made using the base impossible and she simply didn’t have the resources to do anything about it.

Twenty were confirmed dead, five more missing and presumed dead. Frankly it was a miracle they hadn’t lost many more but they’d stuck together, watched each other’s backs and for the most part acted tactically sensibly. Other than the friendly fire, but Miska wasn’t completely sure that hadn’t been an attempt to kill her. After all, it would be difficult to find out who’d actually fired the shot with gun-and helm-cams down. Perhaps the shooter had been hoping that the pollen would somehow prevent the N-bombs from detonating and killing them all.

Somehow they hadn’t lost any of the mechs but all were damaged to some or other extent, and were reporting multiple system failures. The Satyrs had joined the Offensive Bastards in the trenches firing on the tree-creatures, occasionally having to be washed down with the defoliant mid-combat. They’d only lost the one Machimoi. Two had remained in the trenches and had to be treated similarly to the Satyrs. The rest had pulled back to exfil point three with Pegasus 1.

They’d washed the shuttles, the remaining Machimoi and the crouching mechs. Miska hated to think what prolonged exposure to the nasty defoliant was doing to her people. She now had those doing the washing wearing hostile environment suits. She hoped it wasn’t too little too late. They were setting up a decontamination station at exfil 3. It was a risk, they were still behind enemy lines, but she didn’t want them heading back up to the Daughter with any of that pollen on them in case they infected the ship. Somehow she didn’t think that Triple S or New Sun were terribly interested in Camp Badajoz any more.

Hogg was cleaning and dressing her eye. It hurt.

As an ex eco-terrorist, Miska knew that he must be appalled about what they had done to the jungle. In fairness it had been in self-defence. She was wondering why he wasn’t currently giving her a hard time about it.

‘You don’t seem very upset about what we’ve done to your beloved forest,’ Miska said.

He stared at her for a long time.

‘I understand what happened here,’ he finally said, clearly holding back emotion. ‘But this,’ he pointed all around. ‘This is a goddamned travesty, a disgrace to our entire species, and you enjoyed yourself, didn’t you?’ He was using tweezers from his medkit to remove splinters of goggle from her eye.

Something must have shown on her face, she decided. He was right, though, it had been pretty intense, even by her standards. But she kept on coming back to the friendly fire incident. Had someone been trying to kill her? One of the shooters who’d killed her dad?

‘Let’s just say you probably don’t want to push that line of questioning too far,’ she told him.

‘This wasn’t why I signed on,’ he told her.

Miska chuckled. Then she thought of Torricone. It was like a knife between her ribs when she remembered what had happened to him. What Triple S had done to him.

But Hogg wasn’t Torricone. He was more like the Ultra’s pet vigilante, Rufus Grig. Hogg had found a cause that had made him feel