by Gavin Smith
‘Is he a spook?’
No, he’s not jealous, Miska decided, absently wondering if that bothered her. He is, however, very perceptive. She also suspected that Raff would either kill Torricone, or ask her to kill him, if he thought the ex-car thief suspected anything.
‘No, he’s not a spook. Not everything is a conspiracy,’ Miska told him, wondering how apparent her exasperation was when she subvocalised.
‘No, but your plan to steal a prison barge and turn it into a mercenary penal legion was,’ Torricone pointed out. The ground started to shake as the seven remaining Medusa-class mechs sprinted for the treeline. Moments later the two thin Satyr-class scout mechs, each of them half the size of the Medusas, sprinted by at a much higher speed, causing other Bastards busily going about their business to scatter out of their path.
‘Well yes,’ Miska admitted, ‘that was a conspiracy, but a conspiracy of one. Two if you count my dead dad.’ She was extremely conscious of the countdown in her IVD, the inbound assault shuttles full of Triple S (elite) and the lancing pain in her head. ‘Look, I don’t have time for any of this. If you’re not going to carry a gun then just fuck off out of my sight, will you?’
Torricone narrowed his eyes. She wasn’t sure if he was hurt or angry, and she certainly wasn’t sure why she would care one way or another.
‘Any wounded?’ he asked. Their last mission had been a difficult one. A small-scale black op that had turned bad. They’d encountered some kind of ancient alien artefact. Raff, who’d set up the job, had called it a ‘Cheat’.
‘Not on our side,’ Miska told him.
Since then Torricone had point blank refused to carry a gun. He’d augmented the rudimentary combat medic training he’d received from Miska’s dad with lessons from the doctor. Miska hoped that medicine was all the doctor was training Torricone in. The imprisoned serial killer had some truly unpleasant predilections.
‘That’s a first for you, isn’t it?’ It was an unusually spiteful thing for Torricone to say. Now Miska narrowed her eyes. ‘Sorry, that wasn’t … Permission to see to any enemy wounded.’
‘Go on, fuck off,’ she told him. For a moment Torricone looked as though he was about to say something else but thought better of it. He turned and trotted towards the bunker.
What was that about? she wondered as she turned and headed back to the assault shuttle. She was more mystified than hurt, and conscious of what a waste of time it had been.
Miska drew her fighting knife and stood over Raff. She knelt down, cut his hands and legs free and then removed the tape covering his mouth none too gently.
‘What the fuck!’ he demanded as Miska sheathed her knife. ‘Seriously, what the fuck?’ he subvocalised, more reasonably, over a secure private comms link.
‘Stop whining, lenshead, you didn’t get beat on,’ Miska said and then subvocalised: ‘I didn’t order it and I didn’t know they were going to do it.’
Raff sat up, leaning against the folded-up bench seats.
‘Colonel Corbin, I am a duly licensed war correspondent. The articles of conflict state that all operations will have an embedded—’
‘Parasite packaging our deaths as entertainment for the core systems?’ Miska asked, still keeping an eye on the countdown and checking on Mass’s platoon’s progress as they sprinted through the dark jungle. Through the feed from the lead scout mech she could see that the skyscraper-tall trees’ thick interlinked canopy was letting in only the odd stray beam of red light reflecting the gas giant overhead.
‘Seriously though,’ Raff subvocalised over the comms link, ‘I need your co-operation so I can get a better idea of the scope and capabilities of your outfit.’
‘My contract says you have to accompany us, it’s less clear on the degree of co-operation that entails,’ Miska said out loud. ‘They’re criminals, Raff, what do you expect? You’re the enemy,’ she added over the comms link. ‘And never mind evaluating us, you’re still on probation for walking us into that clusterfuck on Barney Prime.’
‘I never met a criminal who didn’t want to be famous,’ Raff said and then subvocalised: ‘The codes work?’
‘Yeah,’ Miska subvocalised back. ‘You must have drilled into them deep.’
‘One-time deal,’ Raff admitted over the comms link. ‘We’re not going to get away with something like this again.’
We? Miska wondered.
‘Stay out of our way,’ Miska told him out loud. ‘Get off the shuttle if you want but you get left behind if you’re not back here when we’re done, and I have a feeling Triple S are going to be pissed when they get here.’ She walked down the ramp and back out into the jungle night and the hive of activity. She was pleased. Everyone was doing what they were supposed to without having to be told. If you want stuff stolen, criminals are the right people to ask, she decided. The low loaders were driving up into their modular airlocked slots in the Harpies’ holds. There was a steady line of cargo lifters and movers from the hangar to the heavy shuttles.
‘Sneaky-Two-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual, I think we’ve got something you want to see,’ the sergeant from the Sneaky Bastards’ second squad told her over a direct comms link. Miska checked his position. He was in the hangar.
‘On my way,’ she told him, trotting towards the large poured-concrete building. The mech that Mass had put out of action was still burning, its flickering light illuminating the Bastards’ efforts.
‘Well now,’ Miska said, grinning.
‘Thought you’d like it,’ the smiling sergeant said. Miska was pleased to see that, despite the find, the four-man fire team were still alert, looking outwards rather than inwards. Her legionnaires stole spares, ammunition, tools and anything else that wasn’t nailed down. It was like watching locusts at work. She checked the countdown. Captured Triple S guards and support staff knelt, facing the wall, under the watchful eyes of another fire team from second squad.
‘Oh, I like them,’ Miska said, still grinning as she looked over the two Martian Military Industries Cyclops war droids. About the same size as a combat exoskeleton, the Cyclops were state of the art combat drones, capable of bipedal and quadrupedal movement. They had modular weapons hardpoints and a limited AI that allowed a pretty sophisticated level of autonomy. Matte grey with no right angles, their smooth lines helped lower their sensor signature and it looked like these ones came equipped with reactive camouflage. Both of them carried the same weapons load-out: a turret-mounted 20mm Dory/light multi-role missile battery combination. They also had ball-mounted point defence lasers at their shoulders and hips. In short, they were a fast and formidable weapon system. ‘Good work,’ she told the fire team.
Miska patched her comms into Pegasus 1. The assault shuttle was still circling the base. She piggybacked on the shuttle’s more powerful transmitter to reach the Hangman’s Daughter docked high above them at Waterloo Station.
‘Hangman-One-Actual to Hangman-Actual,’ she said. ‘We’ve found you another body.’
She sent an order through the virus’s expert system to automate one of the war droids. It burst into life, startling the fire team, but they made way for it as it ran across the hangar, leaping a cargo lifter exoskeleton, and made for the assault shuttle. The second droid was reserved.
‘Acknowledged,’ the gruff voice replied after a few moments of lag. She couldn’t be sure but she didn’t think her dad was particularly enthused by her plan. Still, studying the Cyclops she couldn’t help but feel that, despite the name, the head looked more feline than anything else. She pointed at the remaining war droid.
‘I think I’ll call it Kitty,’ she decided.
‘To LSM’s face?’ the sergeant asked. There was some laughter from the other three members of the fire team. Miska just smiled.
Miska had promoted her dad to legion sergeant major, effectively making him the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer. That said, even those that had been promoted to officer knew that LSM Corbin was still the de-facto second in command o
f the Bastard Legion. He might have been an electronic ghost created from the uploaded personality of her father, existing only as an icon in the virtual construct they used to train the Bastard Legion, but he was still both feared and respected among the convict legionnaires.
Then the second Cyclops burst into life as well. Immediately another two limbs unfolded like switchblades from the mech’s existing forelimbs. These new limbs ended in two slender chainsaw blades. Miska couldn’t be sure but she suspected that the teeth on the chainsaws were synthetic diamonds fused to the titanium, just like her fighting knife. She liked that. It felt like synchronicity – after all, her dad had given her the knife when she’d made it through boot camp.
‘What in the good goddamn!’ her father demanded, his voice emanating from the war droid. Miska was delighted that some Martian designer had seen the need to equip the Cyclops with such a good quality voice synthesiser. ‘I feel like a praying mantis carrying a pair of switchblades.’
‘Hey Kitty,’ Miska said brightly. ‘Walk with me.’
‘What did you just call me?’
Miska just nodded to the second squad fire team and made her way out of the hangar, now almost bare.
‘Harpy-One to all Bastard call signs, we’re fully loaded and buttoned up,’ the pilot of the one of the captured Harpies said. They’d broadcast it on a frequency that, while not exactly open, wasn’t going to take too much effort to break for people listening in. It was exactly the sort of mistake that criminals masquerading as military amateurs would make.
‘Harpy-Two to all Bastard call signs, the same,’ the pilot of the other Harpy said over the same frequency. Both the Harpies’ flight crews had been picked from male members of the Sirius-based pirate fleet, the Scarlet Sisterhood. In fact Harpy 1’s pilot’s lover had fired on Miska while she’d been piloting one of the Pegasi during her last visit to Maw City, the pirate base in the Dog’s Teeth asteroid belt.
‘Hangman-One-Actual to Harpy-One and Two, okay, full burn for Camp Badajoz, we’ll be right behind you,’ Miska told them over the same frequency. It wasn’t the sort of mistake an operator of her calibre made, but then you played the cards you were dealt.
She heard the roar of the Harpies’ huge engines as hot winds buffeted her and anything that hadn’t already been stolen or wasn’t nailed down turned into so much flying debris. Miska knelt, shielding her face with her arm, and tried not to inhale too much dirt as the Harpies clawed their way into the sky like ancient rockets. They looked so ungainly, so heavy. Miska still struggled with the concept that they could fly. As the dust clouds swept past her, Miska realised that the Cyclops had taken a protective posture over her.
‘Dad!’ she muttered, a little embarrassed.
‘Force of habit,’ he told her. They continued walking towards Pegasus , even as it took off. Over by the bunker the burning mech was tottering. It fell over with a deafening thump, making the ground shake and sending yet more dirt into the sky. Miska and her dad’s new Cyclops body just kept walking.
‘No casualties,’ her dad said over a direct comms link. ‘Objective achieved. That’s leadership.’
The Sneaky Bastards were folding back towards the landing area as Pegasus 1 came into land.
‘No casualties is cool, not sure about the no action part.’
‘Well you’re a colonel now,’ her dad pointed out. She wasn’t sure but she suspected he was making fun of her. Working out of Waterloo Station and the mercenary contracts that entailed meant that the Bastard Legion had to have some semblance of a military hierarchy. She was in charge of six thousand possible combatants. She’d stopped short of letting Uncle Vido and her dad call her a general. It was a catch-22 situation, though. Waterloo Station might have required her to give herself a high rank, but the other mercenary officers didn’t feel that she’d earned it. They were right, but she’d met enough officers to know that many of them didn’t deserve to be in charge of an orgy in a licensed brothel.
‘I thought you said that my plan was reckless,’ Miska said as they reached the Pegasus. She was checking the position of all her people in her IVD. The Sneaky Bastards were all on board. She saw a figure sprinting towards the assault shuttle from the hangar. She checked his ident. He was one of the Hard Luck Comancheros who’d been helping strip down all the engineering equipment. He was supposed to have been on one of the Harpies.
‘Move it, you maggot, or you get left!’ It seemed that her dad had spotted the straggler as well.
Everyone’s going to be so pleased he can join us on missions now. The thought brought another smile to Miska’s face.
‘I said your plan was just the audacious side of reckless,’ he told her as the Comanchero sprinted past them and into the shuttle’s cargo hold.
‘Pegasus-Two to all Pegasus and Harpy call signs,’ Joseph Perez, the pilot of the other assault shuttle, still hovering overhead and providing cover, said over secure comms. ‘We’ve got two incoming fast-movers from the east, and two, no, three assault shuttles inbound from the same direction.’
Perez was another Hard Luck Commanchero. Miska and her dad had tried to break up the gangs initially, but their current thinking was to let each of the gangs use their specialities where it complemented military objectives. It might result in ghettoisation but frankly as long as Miska could stop them killing each other she was reasonably happy. She climbed into the assault shuttle’s crowded cargo hold and knelt down. Somehow they managed to make room for the Cyclops to perch on its thin legs above the heads of the Bastards in the hold. The shuttle lurched into the air.
‘What about phase two of the plan?’ Miska asked over direct comms to her dad as she linked into the Pegasus’s external lens feed. The assault shuttle dipped its nose and burned hard. Pegasus 2 followed as they flew into the jungle, weaving in and out of the huge trees under the thick, almost solid jungle canopy. Fire illuminated the mech base behind them as the vehicle-mounted launchers fired missile after missile into the air. Some of the missiles exploded almost immediately as the incoming aircrafts’ point defence systems shot them out of the sky.
‘Phase two is the other way around,’ her dad told her.
Chapter 3
Miska had a map of the surrounding area overlaying her vision. Her IVD headache, what she was thinking of as her ‘command headache’, was worsening. She was trying to resist the urge to feed herself painkillers from her internal medical systems. She would only do that if she felt that the headache was compromising her concentration. Being in command felt like she was doing very little, physically anyway, yet somehow it was still tiring.
The Pegasus’s utilitarian cargo bay was full. People and gear were packed in tightly, swaying as the craft weaved its way through the trees. The thick leaves of the huge trees’ upper branches were so efficient at capturing sunlight that there was little foliage other than the multi-coloured patchwork of parasitical mosses underneath the dense canopy. That left more than enough room for assault shuttles, and even larger craft, to fly in between the massive trees.
Miska patched into the shuttle’s sensor systems. They weren’t running active sensors like radar and lidar – both were only of so much use in the jungle, but they could give away the shuttles’ position. Passive sensors weren’t showing any pursuit. She checked the net feed from the mech base but that had gone down. Triple S’s own combat hackers would have made taking back net control a priority, particularly with their own missiles shooting at them. She checked on the Heavy Bastards’ position. The mech platoon was less than a mile from the Turquoise River. Pegasus 1 and 2 were closing with them rapidly. She checked the Harpies. The heavy lift drop shuttles were still en route to Camp Badajoz. So far everything was going to plan.
Miska checked the external lens feed. Thin beams of reflected red light were making it through the jungle canopy. She could make out the Medusas’ running lights as the shuttles overflew them. The larger mechs were making no attempt at concealment. She had to check the transponders on both the Sa
tyrs to find the smaller, faster, stealthier scout mechs.
‘Just look at all that ass,’ her dad said, his voice emanating from the Cyclops. The war droid was drawing a few looks from some of the legionnaires on board. Ass was old USMC slang for armour. Back before the so-called Final Human Conflict, four hundred years before, it had meant tanks. While tanks still existed, there were just some places they couldn’t go.
‘Feeling more confident?’ she subvocalised over a private link to the Cyclops but her dad didn’t answer. Miska looked around at the legionnaires in the belly of the Pegasus with her. She wasn’t sure when it had happened but, despite the horror stories that had come back from the Faigroe Station and Barnard’s Prime jobs, many of them had stopped giving her the surly, insolent looks. Some of them were actively embracing the life of a mercenary in a penal legion, and the limited rewards that offered.
She wasn’t sure when or how the change had come about. It could have been the influence of the senior criminals, like the Mafia consigliere Uncle Vido, supporting her and taking officer’s ranks in the legion. Or perhaps they had just decided that it was more interesting than being held in suspended animation. Plus they got to steal things and shoot at other people. Every so often Miska reflected that she was perhaps a bad influence on all these thieves and murderers. That said, she had the most enthusiastic, and therefore the best paid, legionnaires with her on this job. Even so, she still caught the odd resentful glance out of the corner of her eye. Like the one Torricone was giving her right now. She thought about opening up a direct comms link and demanding to know what his problem was this time. You’ve got far more important things to concentrate on, she chided herself. Torricone had been a pain in the ass since they had returned from their disastrous mission to Barney’s Prime. That, however, wasn’t what bothered Miska. What bothered her was why she cared, one way or another. Sure, he was pretty, but so what? Not as pretty as the Ultra.