by Gavin Smith
The only thing that had cheered her up had been redesigning the net representations of all the stolen vehicles and weapon systems. She had done away with the dreary committee-designed aesthetics that Triple S used. In its place she made the net representations of the hardware look like vehicles and equipment from a pre-FHC conflict that had taken place in a country called Vietnam. The conflict had spawned a number of apparently classic, according to her dad, vizzes. He had thoroughly approved of the new aesthetics. The addition of the ‘steel pot’ combat helmet to her own cartoon icon came from the same conflict.
However, she still had to run the Legion while she was immersed in the net, as well as make sure she ate, used the toilet, and apparently she was supposed to sleep as well.
Triple S had kicked up a lot of fuss about what people were already calling the Bastard Offensive. Colonel Duellona, the commander of the Triple S forces in-system, had cited infractions of the articles of conflict, none of which were holding much water. It was at times like these that she really appreciated Uncle V. He seemed to love this bullshit, whereas she didn’t quite understand why, despite them being on opposing sides of the conflict, she couldn’t just go and shoot Duellona in the head. There were some pretty stringent rules to this war designed to limit unnecessary loss of life. Most of the battles came down to a brief exchange of fire, some posturing, and then whichever side had the clear disadvantage surrendered. Miska’s response to the situation, which had been favouring Triple S and their New Sun employers, had been to hit hard and fast, ideally with the element of surprise, and do sufficient damage with the opening attack that the enemy wanted to surrender before things got any worse. While her tactics weren’t, strictly speaking, against the articles of conflict, they weren’t the ‘done thing’. Previous to the Bastards joining the conflict it had looked more like a dance, or one of her dad and Uncle V’s chess games. This had well-served the military contractors, mercenaries by another name, who were employed on either side. Miska, however, had turned up to fight a war.
Wage a war, she reminded herself. Now other people were supposed to fight for her.
She opened her eyes to pain lancing through her head. It was so intense that she was actually seeing white flashes. She suspected that her eyes needed some maintenance. She was lying in her collapsible cot in her hooch, drenched in sweat despite her lack of recent physical exertion. It was the humidity. The air seemed as much a sweaty liquid as a breathable gas, even at night. She was in need of some painkillers, a shower, a fifth of Scotch, about a day’s worth of sleep and some PT, probably in that order.
Most of the Bastards had been stood down, though McWilliams and Perez had been working to get some of the other experienced and newly sim-qualified pilots up to speed on the VTOL gunships and atmo-transports they had captured at Port Turquoise. Ideally they would take some of the pressure off the Pegasi assault shuttles.
The Sneaky Bastards had gone back out. They were still searching for FOB Trafalgar. Apparently some of the surveillance drones that MACE had sweeping their side of the river had found some interesting heat signatures.
Miska lay there in her own sweat for a few moments and listened to the base. It was reasonably quiet, though she could hear Nyukuti snoring softly through the thin printed wall of the pre-fabricated hooch. Beyond that she could hear conversation and the occasional laughter from the nearby hooches. She felt the hum of the generators, heard the sound of the cargo-handling exoskeletons shifting supplies around, and she could just about hear the sound of the canopy rustling in the wind. When the wind picked up it could sound like thunder going through the thick leaves above them. Other than the wind and the creak of the enormous trees, the jungle was quiet. There was no indigenous fauna. Plants handled some of the roles in the ecosystem that would normally be filled by animals. Predatory plants weren’t an issue without animals, but biting airborne seedpods and aggressive parasitical fungal spores were. The latter were causing more casualties than combat at the moment. Somehow the colonists, many of whom were Maasai, managed to avoid the worst depredations of the local flora. The colonists had left their homes in Kenya and Tanzania after it became progressively more difficult for them to pursue their semi-nomadic lifestyle in cosmopolitan Africa.
Miska could see the attraction of New Ephesus to the Maasai, but what she couldn’t understand was why New Sun wanted the planet. It seemed to have little to offer in exploitable resources. The gas mining operations in Epsilon Eridani B’s upper atmosphere, which provided fuel for the colony and passing spacecraft, were about the most valuable industry in the system. So far, however, New Sun had shown little interest in the gas platform aerostats. She understood why the colonists were fighting. That pesky self-determination seemed to get in the way of the all-consuming profit margin again and again. She just couldn’t see where that profit was supposed to come from for New Sun. Raff was digging into it, and she’d asked Vido to do the same. So far, nothing. Raff was convinced that New Sun was a Martian-backed shell company, but the Martian threat was a familiar song sung by the CIA, in part to justify their existence. The song played well back home on Earth, where they lived in fear of the Small Gods’ tech. In fairness it was tech that had allowed the Small Gods to dominate much of the Sol System.
Miska used her neural interface to add painkillers to her blood from her internal medical systems, noting that she would soon need to top up her supplies. Trying to act responsibly while in command was taking its toll. She swung up out of her cot. She knew she could get one of her Bastards to change her sweaty sheets but the enlisted marine in her wouldn’t do that. She would change them herself, once she’d had a shower and located some Scotch.
‘Sneaky-One-One to Hangman-One-Actual.’ Sneaky-One-One’s details scrolled down her IVD. Sergeant Robert ‘Bob’ Kasmeyer, the leader of the Sneaky Bastards’ first squad. He’d grown up as an asteroid rat, run with the tunnel gangs formed by the children of other itinerant belt miners in the Sol system. Petty crime had turned to not so petty crime when he’d graduated to hijacking automated ore transports. He’d sneak on board the transports in their home port, disable communications and his accomplices would dock with the transports en route. Except that on his last job the automated transport had stowaways on board, in the shape of a tin-can habitat tethered to the sub-light ship. Kasmeyer’s part in the murders had earned him a life sentence.
He had excelled during training, particularly at stealth operations, and seemed calm and patient. These qualities, and being able to think on his feet, had got him command of the squad. His preference to observe and provide information over contact with the enemy was just the sort of leader that the Sneaky Bastards needed. That didn’t stop Miska groaning when she heard the message.
‘Hangman-One-Actual to Sneaky-One-One, this had better be good.’
‘We’ve found Trafalgar, repeat we have found Trafalgar.’
Triple S’s hidden forward operating base on MACE’s side of the river. It was good.
‘Okay, I want you to get what you can, defences, numbers etcetera, and then withdraw quietly. They can’t know we know,’ Miska subvocalised back.
‘Er … that’s not really an issue,’ Kasmeyer replied.
‘You compromised?’
‘I think you need to see this for yourself.’
Miska didn’t bother with the lens feed from the squads’ guncams. Instead she tranced in, appearing in the net as the stylised, spiky cartoon version of herself. Around her the computer-animated representation of Camp Badajoz looked like an old, squat, thick-walled fort from the Napoleonic War. It was the net architecture favoured by Salik, the mercenary broker who owned Waterloo Station. Cartoon Miska took hold of a flickering but dim neon line that symbolised the comms link between herself and Kasmeyer. Already accepted by the comms links encryption, she allowed herself to be sucked down the link.
Kasmeyer didn’t have a net representation beyond a faint, roughly human-shaped wire-frame grid that represented the various electronic s
ystems he was wearing/using. She knew that the armour he wore, and the thin shielding on the systems themselves, would mask any EM signature. She was only able to see them because of her command access. She made herself tiny and entered the net representation of his Martian-designed Xiphos gauss SAW, going straight for the guncam. Her carbine’s-eye view told her everything she needed to know.
Shit!
‘I’m on my way,’ she told Kasmeyer.
Rank had its privileges. One of Miska’s was her own Machimoi combat exoskeleton. They had captured them when the Bastards had taken the Excelsior from Triple S during the battle for Faigroe Station. There had been enough to equip a squad of soldiers with the power armour and three left over. One had already been used to replace losses in combat and Miska suspected the same would happen to the other two, but until then she liked having her own ride.
She didn’t bother to wake Nyukuti, who would have insisted on coming with her, but she did inform the MACE duty officer that she was going out. He tried to insist on her taking an escort but she didn’t want to draw any more attention than she had to, and besides, she outranked him.
The Machimoi power armour was in a small pre-fab hangar on the edge of the terraced landing pads. There were lights on in the hangar but none of the support crew were anywhere to be seen, and sentry duty had been left to an unobtrusive surveillance drone. Miska did not approve.
Inside the hangar the Machimoi combat exoskeletons were ten-foot-tall, grey, nearly featureless, almost organic-looking suits of armour. The same smooth lines and lack of right angles that Miska had come to expect from all MMI tech. She sent a command to the armour and it split open for her. She clipped her laser carbine to the bottom of the ammunition hopper for the power armour’s main weapon, a 20mm Dory railgun, and then climbed into the armour. The padding changed shape to securely grip her small frame. Her hands slid into the control gloves, feet into the control slippers. The Machimoi was by far and away the most comfortable combat exoskeleton she had ever piloted. Even more comfortable than some of the African models she had used, and far more comfortable than the Honey Badger and its variants favoured by the Corps.
The suit ‘buttoned up’ around her. Her neural interface connected with the exoskeleton’s systems and suddenly she was a ten-foot-tall armoured killing machine. The feeling of power was palpable. She was wary of just how addictive it was, but couldn’t stop a smile creeping across her mouth. She strode out of the hangar and into the humid night, Dory at the ready like an oversized rifle as the two stubby halves of the flight fin unfolded from the exoskeleton’s back and slid together. Telemetry cascaded down her IVD. All systems appeared to be optimal. A quick run, the suit’s servos amplifying her own muscle power, then she jumped into the air and she was flying. The neural interface meant that the suit’s sensors were now her own.
Despite what she had seen through the guncam, Miska felt good. She knew it was reckless going out on her own but they were, after all, supposed to be in friendly territory. Ten-feet-tall or not, the vast scale of the trees was humbling. She flew through banks of steamy mist. Feedback from the Machimoi’s sensors made the mist feel like sweat beading on her skin. Far below her the patchwork quilt of moss and lichens gave away to tall fungal forests – the bane of the foot patrols. All of this was visible in the suit’s optics, which amplified beams of faint red light from the gas giant above that managed to penetrate the jungle canopy.
I need more moments like this, she decided. And then it was over and she was approaching the Sneaky Bastards’ position. FOB Trafalgar looked like an anthill rising out of smaller, surrounding anthills on the hard-packed dirt floor far below the canopy.
An anthill that had been covered in stakes with headless bodies impaled on them.
Miska touched down close to Kasmeyer’s position. With all of her legionnaires using their reactive ghillie suits even the Machimoi’s excellent sensors were struggling to pick them up. She could only tell where they were by their transponder positions, which overlaid her vision.
‘Hey, Kasmeyer. I take it you didn’t do this?’ Miska asked.
‘The twelve of us?’ he asked grimly. There were at least a hundred bodies arranged around the hill. Judging by their gear alone, at least some of them must have been Triple S (elite), the rest were presumably support personnel. Her people didn’t do this. Probably weren’t capable of doing it, and she was trying to think of any of the other mercenary units who were. She was coming up blank.
‘What’ve you got?’ she asked, as Kasmeyer threw the ghillie suit over his head and shoulders and became visible. He had a small build, his narrow face remarkable in just how unremarkable it was. Miska could see from transponder positions that the rest of the squad were remaining concealed, watching their back, including Kaneda and Hogg.
‘The hill has been excavated. The bunker complex is well equipped. They’ve been recycling all their waste. It’s even got a printer. It must have been set up either at the very beginning, or before the conflict started.’ Kasmeyer didn’t come across as frightened but she could see the tension in his face. Miska looked at the nearest corpse. Fungus had already started growing out of its neck stump. The largest fungal blooms made the impaled corpses look like their own species. Mushroom people. She was no expert but she didn’t think they had long been dead. The corpses were still dripping despite the aggressive fungal growth.
‘Any idea what happened?’ she asked.
‘The complex is partially collapsed. Lots of signs of violence but whatever happened it happened quickly. Lots of blood inside but I checked their weapons, most of them had a full magazine.’
That got Miska’s attention. The Machimoi’s head turned to stare at Kasmeyer.
‘You sure?” Miska asked. “Most of these guys are recruited from SF. They’re SEALs, SAS, KSK, people like that.’ She didn’t mention that they’d have top of the line implants, which meant wired reflexes comparative in spec to her own.
Kasmeyer just looked up at the Machimoi.
‘Weird thing, they’re all carrying slugthrowers. No lasers, no man-portable plasma weapons, no electromagnetics. All very low-tech. They don’t even have gauss kisses on the weapons. They even had old-fashioned optical sights,’ he told her.
That was weird. Miska could see the point in carrying slugthrower weapons. The higher the tech, the more chance of something going wrong. She often carried a shotgun herself as a backup weapon for her delicate laser carbine, and she still had a printed AK-47 that she had taken from Faigroe Station. To equip everyone with slugthrowers, however, suggested they were worried about an EMP. That didn’t make any sense. It would be insane for a conflict like this to go nuclear.
She also couldn’t work out why they had been out here. There had been rumours about the FOB flying around since before the Legion had arrived. Every transport crash, every lost soldier was attributed to a ghost force from Trafalgar. If, however, they had this many people, many of them ex-SF, then they could have caused absolute chaos behind the MACE’s lines.
Miska used the Machimoi’s optics to zoom in on the closest corpse’s wounds. They were wide, brutal, surprisingly thick. The ragged skin around the neck wounds made it look as though the heads had been torn off. A combat exoskeleton would be strong enough to do something like this, but even the strongest would struggle to tear through MMI body armour.
What, then?
A new war droid?
A Small God?
Aliens?
‘What’s north of here?’ she asked Kasmeyer, and then answered her own question by bringing up a map in her IVD.
‘More jungle, you go far enough and you get to the mountains and the headwaters of the Turquoise. It’s supposed to be swampy up there.’
Miska was running through information on the area as they spoke. The Maasai colonists on this part of the moon had spread out from Port Turquoise. They hadn’t penetrated as far as the FOB yet; there were no arbocultural settlements further north than their current position
. She was staring north now, the Machimoi’s optics and sensors cutting through the night but revealing little more than steamy mist, spore clouds and seedpods floating on the warm breeze.
‘You find their heads?’ Miska added, nodding towards the closest mushroom-topped corpse. Kasmeyer just shook his own head.
‘We’ve got something else to show you,’ he said. Miska looked down at him. ‘Kaneda found it, but your skel armour won’t fit.’
Kasmeyer had Kaneda watch their back as Hogg led her into the tunnel complex within the hill. Miska’s artificial eyes were good enough that even as they entered the tunnel she could make out the weathered lines on Hogg’s face. Of an age with her father, Hogg was far too old for active service but he kept up with the younger legionnaires and his PT results and biometrics suggested he was more than fit enough. Miska suspected his fitness was down to his life as a fugitive, living rough in the wilderness.
The earthen tunnel smelt like people had died in here. The copper smell of blood mixed with shit. Hungry mosses had already crept in to feed on the biological waste. The tunnel was big enough for her Machimoi and Miska was just about to make such a comment when she saw the collapse ahead. It wasn’t often that Miska enjoyed being small but this was one of those times as she squeezed through a freshly-dug hole in the pile of earth that blocked the tunnel, carbine at the ready.