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

was a trap. He was there to draw her out. She relaxed her finger on the trigger and slipped it back over the trigger guard.

You have to stop walking into traps, she told herself. Even as she moved up the corridor Miska had no real plan as to what she was going to do when she reached the outside.

It was weird. Seven of the sequestered were faces she sort of recognised from the Hangman’s Daughter. They were all on their knees, stripped to the waist, many of them with prison tattoos on display. They looked like they were at prayer, except they had knives held to their own throats, as if they were about to fall on them. It was clear that it was a pose. Among the trees, the head-poles and the mist it was almost artful. And, Miska decided, not meant for me. This had been staged for someone else.

She was hunkered down by the strike craft’s interior airlock. She could see Torricone pacing backward and forward in front of the airlock as he ranted, his voice going hoarse. He was stripped to the waist as well. He had his back to her at the moment. A crucified Christ stared at her from his skin. He looked beautiful until he turned. The programmed madness was evident in his contorted, twitching facial features. His eyes were all Torricone, however. He looked trapped in his own eyes. After what he’d seen, the acts that his body had been forced to do, Miska was pretty sure that killing him would be a mercy.

Coward! her inner voice snapped. That was the easy way out. She stepped through the airlock anyway and levelled her weapon at Torricone.

‘Michael,’ she said quietly. He swung towards her. It was easy to believe that it wasn’t him any more. As long as she didn’t look in his eyes. He tensed, ready to charge. The pad of her finger started to depress the rifle’s trigger.

Then strange things happened in the air behind Torricone, as though she was looking at a distorted image of the undergrowth. Suddenly he was yanked backwards. She could see branches on the transplanted Earth foliage moving where Torricone had just been dragged through them.

It doesn’t make sense … Miska just about had time to think when the first of the sequestered deserters charged her. She swung round to face the screaming man. She squeezed the trigger and nothing happened. She just about had time to hit the sling’s quick-release. The AK-47/flamer combo dropped into the mud and he was on her. He stabbed at her with his blade. She guided the knife hand away from her and hit him in the throat hard enough to take him off his feet, crushing his windpipe. He hit the floor and she moved quickly away from him, expecting the rest of them to be all over her but as soon as the first hit the ground, the second was on his feet charging her. Miska fast drew the Winchester, levelled it, squeezed the trigger, wasn’t terribly surprised when it didn’t fire. She sidestepped the second sequestered deserter’s charge and used the shotgun as a club to take out his knee. He went sliding face-down in the mud and Miska stamped on his head until he stopped moving. Now the third was charging her. She threw the shotgun at him, distracting him momentarily as she drew the Glock. Tried to fire it. Nothing. She used it to break the sequestered deserter’s nose, free hand on the back of his head as she kicked out his knee and took him to the ground. He tried to get back up, blood all over his mouth. That was when Miska’s knife found his throat.

‘Enough of this, this Thirty-Six Chambers bullshit!’ Miska screamed into the apparently empty clearing. She had left bodies in the mud. That was entertainment enough, she decided. She was breathing a little heavy. Her squad hadn’t interfered because they were waiting for Resnick. Though she was pretty sure that nobody had a functional weapon at the moment, bar knives, hatchets and other exotic weapons. And Hogg’s crossbow, she thought. Miska hadn’t heard any violence in the trees which meant that her people hadn’t found Resnick’s so-called Double Veterans either. ‘Come out and play.’

Resnick was using her as bait for Artemis. Everyone likes gladiatorial combat after all, and Miska needed Artemis as bait for Resnick. The sad thing was that one of the reasons this job had appealed to her was because it had seemed so simple: fight in a war. Between Martian special forces, Small Gods, sequestered deserters and P-fucking-R, somehow it had become very complicated.

They came through the mist looking exactly like the mythological figures they so desperately wanted to be. Up close, in their ‘natural’ environment, Miska could see that there were four different types of the dryad drones. Each type shared characteristics with one of the four types of Earth trees present, the oak, apple, walnut and ash.

Artemis, however. Artemis was something else. She had a more obviously statuesque woman’s figure. A skin of smooth, sectional bark covered a powerful looking musculature, leafy twigs for hair, thicker branches formed a spine across her upper back and shoulders. She wore a loincloth of moss that became a skirt at the back and carried a long bow and arrows in her left hand. Both the bow and the arrows looked as though they had been grown rather than made. Her eyes were two glowing ovals the colour of amber resin. She had no mouth that Miska could see but the bottom part of her face curved down into a sharp point. She was stood with four of her handmaidens, among the overgrown Corinthian columns on top of the mound formed by the crashed ship. Miska had to force herself not to step back. Artemis was terrifying through sheer physicality alone. Miska was struck by the seeming futility of Resnick’s impending assassination attempt. Frightening or not, Miska felt