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

good about those he killed. It was just another excuse as far as Miska was concerned.

Hogg applied medgel to the burns that covered most of the bottom part of her face and over her eye. ‘What would you have done?’ Miska asked nodding back towards the ruins of Camp Badajoz.

‘In fairness, probably the same as you,’ he told her, distracted as he adhered a medpak to the back of her neck to drive the medgels. ‘We were too late. We needed to try and communicate with them but I think that Triple S had already started this war.’

Miska couldn’t decide if he was being a little too pragmatic for someone as idealistic as he apparently was.

‘I need to speak to you,’ Hogg told her.

‘Go ahead,’ Miska said.

Hogg looked around at the other legionnaires nearby. Miska followed his eyes. As far as she could tell everyone was busy going about their business.

‘We could do with a degree of privacy,’ he told her.

‘Nobody is paying us the slightest bit of attention,’ she pointed out. If they were to walk off into the woods together then that would just draw more attention to them.

He leaned forward.

‘We’ll talk later,’ he whispered.

‘Hogg—’ she started.

‘Boss, we’ve got something I think you’ll want to see.’ It was Mass’s voice over the still-static-filled comms. They hadn’t been able to reach the Hangman’s Daughter since the attack.

‘Is it important?’ Miska subvocalised over comms, cursing that he couldn’t send images to her IVD.

‘Could be.’ Mass’s response was annoyingly non-committal.

‘Where are you?’ she asked. Mass told her.

‘Your right eye will try and compensate for the loss of the left. You’re going to lose between twenty-five and forty per cent of your depth perception until you get it replaced. You’ve got pretty high grade milspec artificial eyes, so it will probably be lower than higher,’ Hogg explained.

‘Cool, I’ll look like Snake Plissken.’

‘I’ve no idea who that is,’ Hogg told her.

Miska sighed and wished her dad were here. He would have known what she was talking about. She stood up.

‘Did you kill the captives?’ he asked her.

‘Only one of them,’ she told him. ‘He was part of the problem.’

Hogg watched her. She couldn’t read the expression. She gestured towards his crossbow.

‘Ready to go and kill some corporate scumbags?’ she asked.

‘I absolutely am,’ he told her.

‘So what am I looking at?’ Miska asked. She was standing in a partially demolished concrete bunker. It had been used for storing missiles for the gunships and transport when she’d been stationed here.

In a darkened corner of the bunker she saw two open-topped cars, each about the size of a small truck. The cars had armour bolted onto them. Four long telescopic legs, that looked hydraulically driven, were folded up underneath them. On the front of each car there was a 20mm cannon, plus what looked like a very old-fashioned heavy machine gun mounted on one side, and an automatic grenade launcher mounted on the other. A double SAW was mounted on the rear of each of the vehicles. All the weapons had that recently-printed look to them, all of them were protected by a ballistic shield, and all of them were old-fashioned slugthrowers.

‘That looks like the worst quad mech ever,’ Miska said. She glanced at Hemi and Mass. Hemi was grinning, she suspected mostly at Mass who was looking at the two open-topped mechs with reverent awe. Yep, Miska decided, Mass’s got armour fever bad. Even Kaneda, who’d apparently found them, had a slight smile on his camo-painted face.

‘They’re Waders,’ Mass told them.

‘It looks like a well-armed mule,’ Kaneda said. Miska was inclined to agree.

‘They’re modded agricultural mechs, they use them to get through the mangroves. Look what those sick bastards have done to them.’ Mass was clearly impressed. The two Waders were clearly very primitive bits of kit. It made sense to take machines like this north.

‘Why’d they leave them?’ Miska asked.

‘They didn’t,’ Kaneda told them. ‘Tracks in here suggest that there were at least ten more of them.’

That’s a lot of potential bad guys, Miska thought.

‘These were spares,’ Hemi suggested, ‘or those things killed too many of their people and they didn’t have enough to make it worthwhile taking them.’

‘Check them for booby traps,’ she told them.

‘Because you’re going north, right?’ Mass asked.

Miska turned to look at him.

‘Probably into more of those tree-things and we can’t risk taking mechs or air support in there,’ she told him. ‘Want to get yourself killed just because you want to try out a new toy?’ she asked.

‘And to impress you,’ Mass said still grinning. It was infectious.

‘Still bucking for promotion, huh?’ she asked him.

Mass gripped Hemi’s arm.

‘Need to get out of this young man’s way,’ he told her.

‘Until that day?’ Miska asked. Her smile had gone.

‘Until that day,’ Mass agreed. His smile had only left his eyes.

Exfil point three was a grotto-like clearing in the jungle. The pool at the base of the waterfall was of sufficient size that there was a slight break in the overhead canopy to let the light in, which in turn meant that the pool was surrounded by non-fungal undergrowth, a relative rarity on Ephesus.

The shuttles, with the exception of Pegasus 1, were parked back in the shadows under the canopy. The mechs, having been defoliated and then decontaminated, were being loaded into their cradles. Most of the Bastards were preparing to head back to the Daughter. There was just no practical way to transport them into all into the north, not with the pollen fall, as much as Miska wanted to. She’d had Hogg collect some of the pollen. She would have it taken back to the Daughter for the Doc to look at, though she already had her suspicions as to what it was. The weird arrows had given it away. That was not a practical way to deliver a weapon in this day and age.

She had managed to get through to the Daughter and spoken to her very worried dad. The copy of him that had been wearing the Cyclops