by Gavin Smith
‘First of all I want a commission. Second lieutenant’s fine. I’ll work my way up.’
‘As what? You want a squad?’ she asked.
‘Intel. It’s where all the best people go and hide from combat, as I understand it.’
Miska resisted the absurd urge to defend Uncle V.
‘That means you’d be reporting to Major Cofino,’ Miska pointed out.
The smile that played briefly across his lips seemed to contain little in the way of actual humour.
‘Major Cofino,’ he mused. ‘You know he once tried to have me killed?’
‘I have no time for your prison yard bullshit,’ she told him. He shrugged.
‘Just business, never personal,’ he said, ‘but I want something else.’
‘What?’ she asked.
‘I want you to let me go.’
‘You and everyone else.’
‘When I bring you your father’s murderers.’
Miska stared at him.
‘You know I could drop you into a VR torture program, leave you there until you tell me what you know.’
‘No. You wouldn’t. You’re a high functioning psychopath. At a guess you’re a latent ASPD of the risk-taking subtype. That level of cruelty isn’t your thing.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Miska admitted. ‘But I think you know enough to know that people aren’t real to me unless I like them.’ She took a step towards him. Head down. ‘And I don’t like you,’ she whispered and looked up at him. There was just the slightest flicker in his mask of calm, realisation that he might have overplayed his hand.
‘I can be of use to you in other ways,’ he told her.
‘Talk fast, because you’re beginning to piss me off.’
‘Run a security lens check on the corner here,’ he said pointing to where the edge of the airlock met the bulkhead. Miska was getting more than a little fed up of this. It must have shown on her face. ‘Please.’
She sighed and connected to the Daughter’s security systems via her neural interface, the results appearing in her IVD. She frowned and then ran the check again, and then a third time.
‘You see it?’ Corenbloom asked. Miska ignored him and looked around at the nearby lenses.
‘It’s a blind spot,’ she finally said. It wasn’t a small blind spot, either.
Corenbloom nodded and then pointed at two tiny figures scratched into the black painted metal of the airlock’s frame. Miska zoomed in on it. It looked like the letters E and C. She turned back to Corenbloom.
‘Escape Committee,’ he told her. Corenbloom reached down and touched the letters then held up his fingers. There were little flecks of black paint on them. ‘This has been done recently as well.’
‘How do I know this wasn’t you?’ Miska asked. Suddenly she was starting to question just how cooperative the prisoners had been recently.
‘Not my sort of game,’ he said. ‘Besides, consider Occam’s Razor. Do you really think that nobody on board wants to escape?’ On balance she suspected she believed him. ‘I mean, you’ve already had one escape.’
‘Lomas Hinton is dead,’ Miska said. Hinton hadn’t come back on board after shore leave in Maw City. Though to be honest she had no real proof that he was dead. She looked down at the two letters scratched into black paint.
‘You really are a rat, aren’t you?’ she asked. It was petty and she knew it but he didn’t rise to the bait. He just watched her, impassive. ‘You go looking for my father’s murderers, how are you going to get the rest of them to talk to you?’
‘That’s my problem,’ he said. Miska suspected he would manipulate the Yakuza and the Bethlehem Milliners to do his legwork. ‘Do we have a deal?’
Miska still didn’t like this. She didn’t like it all. More so than Vido, Teramoto, even the Ultra, this somehow felt like getting into bed with the devil.
She nodded.
‘When do you want me to leave for Trafalgar?’
Chapter 8
Miska was taking one of the access ladders up to the Hangman’s Daughter’s bridge. Judging by how out of breath she was by the time she reached the bridge deck, it was obvious she needed the exercise. Just another thing she was angry with herself about.
I’m a fool. She had been lulled into a false sense of security by the combat and support elements of the Legion appearing to be so cooperative of late: embracing their training, embracing the work, getting paid, enjoying the myriad pleasures of Waterloo Station. Of course they wanted to be free. Of course they wanted the bombs out of their heads and, if they could get away with it, they would want the Daughter and the not inconsiderable hardware on board. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that with the weapons and training the prisoners had access to it would not be difficult for them to knock over and take control of one of the smaller colonies.
Miska reached the bridge deck and made her way along the short corridor. The ship’s systems recognised her and the blast door opened. The bridge was as quiet as ever. Hologram displays illuminated the gloom, showing local space in various different spectrums, telemetry and system diagnostic data cascading through the air. She made her way up to the raised captain’s workstation that gave her a commanding view of the other two bridge levels. Through the two storeys of wraparound windows Miska could make out the lights of Waterloo Station on her left as they slowly revolved around it on the top docking torus. Various shuttles and occasionally larger ships moved around the station, and through its three slowly spinning tori, she could see the torches of their manoeuvring engines flickering off and on. Epsilon Eridani glowed in the distance. The revolving docking torus slowly brought the red glow of Eridani B into view.
At the back of her head she had still known that she couldn’t trust any of the prisoners but now the need for the healthy paranoia that was a job requirement returned more fiercely than ever. Who was in the Escape Committee? Vido, Mass, Kaneda, Nyukuti? Torricone? Torricone seemed a very likely candidate, assuming the other prisoners would trust him, which they might not, given the erroneous conclusions they were jumping to about him and herself.
The captain’s chair suddenly felt like a very lonely throne. She spent a moment or two brooding, then her neural interface reached out for the Daughter’s systems and Miska tranced herself in.
Miska appeared in what looked like a bare, institutional smartcrete corridor. She was in Camp Reisman’s command post, the virtual reality construct designed to behave as close to reality as its USMC-hired programmers could make it. She had appeared in the empty corridor so she wouldn’t just materialise in front of any of the legionnaires, and thus break the construct’s verisimilitude. The training construct wasn’t the stylised animation of the net. It was set up to look like actual reality. Her icon was pretty much a one-to-one representation of what she looked like but without the swell patches on her face and the medgel all over her hand.
‘Vido,’ she subvocalised as she opened a direct comms link to her XO, ‘I’m in the CP, where is Golda?’
‘He’s just outside in the rest area, waiting for you,’ Vido replied. He sounded a little harassed. Miska suspected there was considerably less sitting around in cafes bullshitting with his friends in the Legion than there had been in his previous job.
‘Can I get a minute with you to talk about the gas mining job once you’ve spoken to Golda?’ Vido asked. Miska sighed internally but agreed as she made her way out of the CP.
Outside, the camp looked like so many she had lived in throughout her entire life, first as a military brat and then as a leatherneck when she had joined the Corps. Printed smartcrete buildings, parade grounds, vehicle parks and workshops, the mess and, beyond the boundaries of the camp itself, the various customisable training environments. At the moment the training was concentrating on jungle warfare for obvious reasons. All of it was overseen from the tower in the centre of the CP that overlooked the entire base, much like a spaceport control tower.
Golda was sat at a plastic table underneath an aw
ning that stuck out from the side of the CP. It was used as a break area for the CP’s staff. There were a number of other tables and chairs scattered around, a few dispensing machines. Golda was sipping from a cup of lemon tea.
The Leopard Society boss looked deceptively spindly despite all the PT that her father had put the prisoners through. He was tall, his head shaved, and he wore a slight smile on his face that Miska had come to connect with intelligent criminals who felt they had the upper hand in some way. His BDU’s looked clean and pressed, which suggested that whatever training he had been doing hadn’t been that strenuous. He stood up and saluted as she approached. Miska didn’t like this. She had spent most of her military career in various special operations groups where military discipline had been much more relaxed. However, her father had insisted that this was important. Though nobody saluted in the field to avoid becoming sniper-bait.
Aheto-Cudjoe, Golda. A senior boss in the pan-African Leopard Society crime syndicate. He was Congolese by birth, from an affluent middle class family. Aheto-Cudjoe had apparently turned his not inconsiderable intellect to crime at an early age, though that had not prevented him from getting an undergraduate degree in business management and economics, and a postgraduate degree in international relations. Selling hacked counterfeit weapons for popular net-based sense games had apparently financed both degrees. He had graduated from Oxford University in Kinshasa, and a mixture of practically applied intelligence and ruthlessness had seen him rise through the ranks of the Leopard Society. When the Kenyan authorities had cracked down on one of the Leopards’ most profitable human trafficking rings, and gone on to openly declare war on the Society, Aheto-Cudjoe had been the mastermind behind the retaliatory Glass Desert insurrection. The Crocodile Society, the Leopard Society’s military arm, had used asymmetrical warfare against the Kenyan police and judiciary so effectively that eventually the military had to be called in. Aheto-Cudjoe’s well-publicised trial had been more than a little controversial. He was convicted of killing two Nyota Mlima SWAT team members during his arrest. His defence had argued, quite convincingly, that Aheto-Cudjoe had been acting in self-defence. Certainly they had not been able to gather enough evidence to convict him of any of the other criminal activities he had most certainly been involved in.
‘Colonel Corbin,’ Golda said and bowed slightly, gesturing for her to join him at the table before sitting down again. Miska did the same and ordered a soft drink from one of the nearby dispensing machines. A tiny serving drone brought the drink to their table. ‘I understood you wanted to see me?’
‘And I’m guessing you can work out why,’ Miska said warily. She didn’t think she was a stupid person, far from it, but she also knew there were some really smart prisoners on board the Daughter. Golda was definitely one of them.
‘I think whenever white people hear the words jungle and warfare they automatically think of black people.’ The smile was still there. The sunglasses were making it more than a little difficult for Miska to read him. She could order him to take them off, or even make them disappear with a thought, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it would be an admission of weakness.
‘Oh bullshit,’ Miska muttered. ‘You grew up in a nice suburb of Kinshasa and spent most of your adult life in the shadow of the Nyota Mlima spoke, selling immigrant workers to off-world colonies as disposable slave labour. So don’t come like that with me.’ Nyota Mlima 2 was one of the huge equatorial orbital elevators, or spokes, that reached up from the surface of the Earth into high orbit. The first Nyota Mlima had been destroyed by kinetic orbital bombardment during the War in Heaven. Its towering ruins had been turned into a huge memorial garden.
Golda watched her for a moment or two and then smiled.
‘Allegedly,’ he added. ‘Let us not pretend.’ His English was heavily accented but perfect. ‘You are interested in Bobo, not me, for the Ultra’s atrocity squad.’
‘And you have been holding your people back from active duty with the Legion until you had some leverage to bargain for position,’ Miska said. She felt a little bit of pleasure in Vido’s words that Golda would be just as much, if not more, of an asset than Bobo Gumbhir who, under Golda’s command, had become known as the ‘Glass Desert Cannibal’.
‘I am not sure that Bobo is who you think he is,’ Golda told her. ‘Every act of terror, every atrocity, was carefully calculated and psychometrically tested in simulations to work towards our ultimate aim. Bobo is a thoughtful and quiet man who relishes peace as much as violence.’
And that might well have been the truth, but all that Miska knew was what Gumbhir was actually capable of. After leaving a trail of mutilated and often partially-eaten bodies all over Sub-Saharan Africa, he had been caught red-handed, the blood of a Nairobi judge’s family still smeared all over his face. He had killed seven of the police officers who had tried to arrest him. More to the point, the Leopard Society had almost succeeded. They had almost convinced the Kenyan authorities to leave them to operate with impunity.
‘What do you want?’ Miska asked. She had discovered that prisoners loved to talk as a result of having so much time on their hands. She was watching as a Pegasus assault shuttle, escorted by four Machimoi combat exoskeletons flying in diamond formation, came in to land on the other side of the parade ground.
‘A commission.’
It seemed to be a popular request today.
‘You want a squad?’ she asked, considering making him the same offer she had made Corenbloom.
‘I assume that you’re aware that I am more than capable of looking after myself. I have nothing to prove. I will also assume that you are aware that my talents lie in the strategic rather than tactical.’
Miska knew he was right. He was more experienced than she was at running combat operations, albeit a particular type of combat operation, but she had to balance that with just how much power she could risk turning over to this extremely dangerous individual.
‘Where?’ she asked. She suspected he would be best off running combat operations. What he didn’t know about warfare he was more than capable of learning, probably more so than she was herself. She wasn’t, however, going to turn over command of live troops in the field to someone who hadn’t commanded them in that field. She just couldn’t, Marine Corps doctrine was too ingrained in her thinking.
‘Vido Cofino is stretched working as your executive officer and the Legion intelligence officer. Let me take some of the latter responsibilities off his shoulders.’
Intelligence, again. Miska was thinking back to her earlier conversation with Corenbloom.
‘And what do I get?’ Miska asked.
‘I will speak with Bobo, that is all I can do …’
‘Oh bullshit!’ Miska snapped. ‘You’re a smart guy but don’t treat me like I’m an idiot.’ She let some of her actual anger leak through. ‘I know who pulls the strings.’ She saw the muscles around Golda’s mouth tighten.
‘Very well. Bobo will join your atrocity squad.’
‘And?’ Miska demanded. Golda watched her through the dark lenses of his sunglasses for a few moments.
‘Members of both the societies that I have a degree of influence in are free to volunteer for active duty, if they wish. I suspect many of the Leopards won’t, though some have skills that could be put to use in a support capacity. I suspect many of the Crocodiles will.’
‘I appreciate you talking so openly about it,’ Miska told him. He just nodded. He took his sunglasses off. His eyes were a deep green colour, like the sea.
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ he asked. There was no challenge in his voice, only curiosity.
Miska frowned. ‘Building a mercenary force.’
‘If you were smart you would realise that you have a perfect opportunity to create a force that is a perfect synergy between a military and criminal organisation. You may as well realise this now, because I assure you Vido Cofino and his associates have.’
Miska wasn’t quite sure wha
t to make of his words.
‘If the Legion is being subverted then I would know about it,’ Miska told him.
‘I don’t mean subversion. I mean sometimes you need a military solution and other times …’
That she could understand. On more than one occasion they had relied on individual legionnaires’ criminal skills rather than their military ones. Golda appeared to be stating the obvious. Miska frowned again.
‘You have a problem with Major Cofino?’ she asked. She only just stopped herself from calling him Uncle V.
‘I have a great deal of respect for Vido Cofino, and I look forward to working with him more closely.’
For the second time that day Miska couldn’t shake the feeling that jaws of a trap had just closed around her. The jaws of a leopard.
Miska found Vido in one of the rec rooms in the CP. He was bullshitting with some of his fellow wiseguys. Mafia old boys, mostly caporegime, or street bosses, and soldatos. They were of an age with Vido, or older, making them too old for active service. Miska and her father had to be a little careful putting them to work. They were trying to limit Vido’s empire building, but they also didn’t want to insult the old boys. Everything was a balancing act and they hadn’t found anything appropriate for them to do just yet. They were up on their feet and saluting as Miska walked into the room. Somehow they made their salutes seem like old country, gentlemanly courtesy. She had them stand at ease and exchanged a few words before dismissing them. Everything was friendly, everything pleasant. She had no doubt that any one of them would have killed her in a heartbeat given the opportunity.
‘Hey Vido,’ Miska said by way of greeting. The programming on the training construct was so good that he even looked tired here.
‘Hey boss. How’d it go?’ he asked meaning the meeting with Golda. Miska sent a message to her dad.