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

in the armpit. Grig had another round the neck as he tried to push the tip of his knife into the contractor’s skull. Mass held his victim against a tree; he had somehow managed to get his hooked fisherman’s knife through their inertial armour and was dragging it upwards. Both Gunhir and Hemi were sat upon struggling Double Veterans, knees pinning their arms. Gunhir was repeatedly clawing at his victim’s face, while the diamond-edged titanium teeth of Hemi’s māripi pounded another Double Veteran’s face into so much ground beef.

She hoped Artemis was enjoying the show.

Miska was becoming weaker, losing consciousness. Then a crossbow bolt landed in the mud in front of her. The crossbow bolt exploded. The force of the explosion battered into Miska and she lost consciousness.

Miska came to again, reawakened by struggling medical implants. Immediately the panic hit her as Resnick’s strangulation threatened to cut off the oxygen supply to her brain. She could feel her subcutaneous armour cracking under his incredible strength. Her knife was useless in her right hand. Then she saw the rock. The fingers on her left hand closed around it. The pinnacle of Martian military training and nanotechnology was killing her and she had a rock.

It was an awkward blow with her left hand, back into where she hoped his eye was. All she had to do, however, was think about what Resnick, this Martian drone, had tried to do to her Legion, the things that New Sun and Triple S had said about her, about her father, and she found the rage to power the blow. The jagged end of the stone caught him in the eye. There was a satisfying scream of pain. The grip on her neck loosened. Miska pushed with her legs and they both went sprawling into the mud. Then it was her turn to howl with pain as she elbowed him in the nose with her right arm. It jarred her compound fracture, but he let go of her. She rolled off him. Managed to push herself up onto her knees. Resnick’s eye was a bloody mess. Now he looked angry. Good. She smashed the stone into his face, turning the expression of incredulous rage red. She did it again. And again but this time he caught her left arm. He kicked out from the ground, catching her in the stomach and sending her flying with the force of the blow. Resnick was up on his feet again.

‘Why won’t you just die?’ Miska asked as he stalked towards her. It seemed like a reasonable question. Then Resnick was stood over her. He moved as though to stamp on her. Then his hand came up and he caught another crossbow bolt. He quickly threw it away from himself. Even as the crossbow bolt blew up in mid-air another thumped into his buttock and exploded. His leg blown from under him, he flopped into a messy somersault, his head battering into the earth on the way down.

Miska didn’t waste any time. She screamed again as her left hand wrestled her knife, which she had somehow managed to hold on to, out of her useless right hand. She threw herself into the air as Resnick tried to push himself up, a chunk missing from his buttock and the top of his left leg. She screamed out again as she landed on him, jarring her broken right arm, forcing him into the mud. She plunged the knife into his neck, pushing it upwards. She felt resistance from whatever armour he had under the skin, some subcutaneous inertial armour-like nanotech application, then resistance from his spine. She kept pushing as he bucked under her. She kept pushing until he was still. Then she twisted the knife and tore it out but she hadn’t finished. She pushed herself unsteadily to her feet, awkwardly clawing at the straps on her back before finally managing to pull out Nyukuti’s boomer-sword. The angular blade clicked open. She swung the blade again and again. She kept swinging it even as the others gathered around her. She kept swinging the blade even though every jarring movement sent agony coursing through her from her compound fracture. She kept swinging until Resnick’s head came off. Then she passed out from the pain.

‘This is for the pain,’ the Ultra’s beautiful voice told her. She opened her eyes and looked up at his face, made alien by the camo-paint. She opened her mouth and accepted the painkiller that would supplement her body’s own, seriously strained, medical implants. She needed them at the moment. At the very best she was horribly concussed.

‘Why did your reactive camouflage work back there?’ she asked him. They were down by the water again. She could see Torricone, hog-tied, lying face-down in the mud. Still sequestered, still following his last instructions as he struggled against the Ultra’s bonds. There was something pathetic about it.

‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps because it was part of me, perhaps Artemis allowed it.’

She noticed that her arm had been bound. She wondered when the medpak that had been driving the medgel on her back had stopped working. She was lucky that Resnick hadn’t hit her there.

She turned back to the Ultra.

‘You came back for Torricone?’ she asked. He just nodded. ‘Why risk discovery?’

The Ultra gave this some thought.

‘I think Artemis knew I was there anyway,’ he told her.

‘Why?’

‘Just a feeling.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she pointed out.

Silver eyes spent some time looking into her own.

‘Because if he died, if you killed him, it would hurt you, perhaps irrevocably,’ he told her.

Miska didn’t know what to do with that. Eventually she had to look away. There were four bodies wrapped in their ponchos down by the water. She looked around and saw Kaneda lifting Hogg’s crossbow.

‘What happened?’ she demanded.

‘My rifle stopped working. When Hogg didn’t shoot I went looking for him. It took a moment to work out how to work this thing,’ he said holding up the crossbow. ‘It was my