by Gavin Smith
‘Pretty much as you said,’ Miska told him.
‘He held out for influence?’ Vido asked.
‘Just like you,’ Miska pointed out.
‘Makes you wonder why the Yakuza are being so quiet,’ he said.
Why’d he say that? Miska’s paranoia asked. Is he trying to introduce a seed of doubt here? Teramoto’s death on Barney Prime had been something of a blow for the Scorpion Rain Society, the largest and most influential Yakuza society on board the Daughter. It wasn’t clear who was going to emerge as the Society’s new leader. Though rumour had it that Kaneda, who had been a member of the Bethlehem Milliners, a bike gang associated with the Yakuza, was now a fully-fledged member of the Society and rising swiftly through the ranks.
‘This about Corenbloom?’ Miska asked. If the Yakuza had been protecting the crooked FBI agent from the Mafia then it was just another reason for friction between the two organisations.
Vido frowned.
‘You know what gets me about that guy?’ Vido asked. ‘He was good, I mean really good, and he went after some bad people, worked high profile cases. You know he worked on the Ultra investigation. Nearly got him in New Erebus. He was consulting with the local Feeb on Sirius 4 when they took him down. He just loved the street too much. He wanted to be like the people he put away.’
‘He said that you tried to have him killed,’ Miska said and then kicked herself. This was the kind of real-world bleed into her organisation that she couldn’t allow. Vido shrugged. He would never incriminate himself, he was a lawyer and a criminal after all. Miska knew some of it from the Daughter’s files. Corenbloom had become too ambitious. He, along with another corrupt FBI agent, a number of corrupt cops, and their criminal allies had tried to push the Mafia out of New Erebus. It had turned bloody.
‘He tell you he had Mass’s girlfriend killed?’ Vido asked.
That explained why Mass hated Corenbloom so much.
Her dad walked into the meeting room. He didn’t bother coming to attention or saluting with only Miska and Vido present. Instead he just nodded at Vido, who nodded back. Her dad was another person who Vido had made friends with despite the legion sergeant major’s best efforts to resist such a friendship.
‘You got your ass kicked,’ he said. Miska sighed. ‘How’d that happen?’
‘You seen the footage?’ she asked. Her dad nodded. ‘Should I be that outclassed?’
‘Martian nanotech?’ he asked.
‘At best. It felt like I was fighting Teramoto, y’know after he was …’ she told them.
Her dad turned to Vido. ‘That legal here?’ he asked.
Vido was shaking his head. ‘No, strictly forbidden under the articles of conflict, as mandated by the UN conflict inspector,’ he told them. ‘To be honest, some of the hardware they’re using, and now we are because we stole it from them, is borderline.’
‘Anything we can do about it?’ LSM Corbin asked.
‘Not unless we can prove it, and we’d better have really good proof. I can dig into it but I’ve not managed to find much on Duellona or Resnick,’ Vido told them. Miska and her father exchanged a look. ‘What?’
‘They came from nowhere, high-end military skills,’ her dad said. ‘Could be off-the-book members of the Spartans.’
Spartan was an umbrella term for Martian special operations units.
‘Martian boogie men?’ Miska asked. ‘Reds under the bed?’
Her dad shrugged.
‘We could hire a PR company?’ Vido said, though the resignation in his voice suggested that he knew his question was a waste of time.
‘Not a chance,’ LSM Corbin scoffed. Miska was shaking her head.
‘Well, at least give the journalist … Raff, a chance. I’ve spoken to him, he’s a good guy, sympathetic. He could tell our side of the story. Stop letting the guys tase him and tie him up,’ Vido told them, somewhat irritably Miska thought. She couldn’t help but smile. She noticed her dad was doing the same thing. ‘I’m serious, boss.’
‘No amount of PR is going to change who and what we are,’ Miska said. Or what I’ve done, she didn’t add. ‘But we’ll let the lenshead ride along next time.’
‘And you won’t tase him or tie him up?’ Vido checked.
‘Sure,’ Miska said. Uncle V didn’t look reassured. She decided to change the subject. ‘The gas mine job, you think it’s a bad idea?’
Vido shrugged. ‘We’ve got a good relationship with MACE, with the Colonial Administration. Why jeopardise that?’
‘They’re grown-ups,’ LSM Corbin pointed out.
‘There’s no way this isn’t going to feel like a knife in the back to them, no matter the realpolitik,’ Vido insisted.
‘Where are you on this?’ Miska asked her dad.
He gave the question some consideration.
‘I’d rather fight for the colonials. I think New Sun are assholes—’
‘Untrustworthy assholes,’ Vido added.
‘—but we’re either mercenaries in a free market economy or we’re not,’ her dad continued, ‘and I quite like the idea of making Triple S look stupid.’
Miska was a little surprised that her dad was prepared to go for the plan.
‘What is it they actually want us to do?’ Miska asked Vido.
‘Most of the gas mining aerostats are automated. They have a number of control platforms that are actually manned – human oversight, maintenance teams, storage depots, that kind of thing. New Sun are talking about a coordinated effort, attacking them all simultaneously. From the control platforms they can take control of the whole operation in the net.’
‘Why not just hack it?’ LSM Corbin asked.
‘Whoever’s running security will have their own hackers, and besides, it’s always easier from within a system,’ Miska told her dad. ‘Who’s running security for them?’
‘The Dogs of Love,’ Vido told them.
‘Competent but unimaginative,’ her dad said. Miska was nodding in agreement.
‘L’Amour’s a good guy,’ Vido pointed out.
‘You don’t think you’re getting a little too sentimental for this job do you, Vido?’ Miska asked.
A shadow passed over Uncle V’s face.
‘I just don’t like burning relationships with so little gain.’
‘How many?’ Miska asked.
‘Eight platforms,’ Vido told her.
‘We don’t have the shuttles,’ her dad said.
‘They’re just giving us one platform. Campbell told me it was a test of our abilities,’ Vido explained.
‘As opposed to us humiliating Triple S at their own mech base and in Port Turquoise?’ her dad asked.
‘Like I said, this is a bad idea,’ Vido told them. ‘They also want us moving all of a sudden. The moment we say yes they’ll send over the schematics. Operationally it’s up to us but we move four hours after accepting the job. They’re holding up the operation for us.’
At this news her dad did not look happy.
‘That’s not much time,’ he told her.
Miska shrugged. ‘We’ve both gone out with less prep. Time-compressed run through the job in VR?’ she suggested.
‘Who?’ Vido asked. ‘Everyone who’s combat ready is down on the planet. Everyone up here is on leave, they’ll all be drunk.’
He had a point.
‘I’ve got a really bad idea,’ Miska told them.
Chapter 9
Miska had overridden Uncle V’s objections and managed to curtail a major argument with her dad on the grounds of practicality. They’d only had four hours to plan and run time-contracted VR simulations based on the intel provided by New Sun. Her dad had left her with the distinct impression that their ‘discussion’ was not over yet. She could see his and Vido’s point. It looked like she had gone back to her bad old ways. She hadn’t. Or at least she didn’t think she had. Miska needed to know if the Ultra’s Nightmare Squad could be controlled. This was the best way to find out.
That was how she found herself in the passenger bay of the Hangman’s Daughter’s remaining prisoner transport shuttle. The shuttle had recently been up-armoured and armed, retrofitted as an assault shuttle, which was how it had started its life. It was no Pegasus but it would do in a pinch. Trying to control the ancient, armoured hulk of the shuttle in the upper cloud layer of Eridani B was proving something of a trial of fire for the newly sim-qualified pilot.
‘Ah! Fuck!’ Miska shouted as she banged her gel-covered right hand on her seat’s armrest. The shuttle was being kicked around so much in the upper atmosphere that she felt like she was on a small boat in the middle of an angry ocean. Atmospheric interference from the bad weather, however, would go a long way towards hiding the shuttle from the gas mining aerostat’s rudimentary sensors.
‘You’re not combat ready,’ Rufus Grig said, looking at her medgel-covered shooting hand. He was in charge of the power armour element of this hastily cobbled together operation. He was standing in one of the Daughter’s ancient, but also recently upgraded, Wraith combat exoskeletons. The front was unbuttoned and his head was visible under the peeled-back armoured plate. In his mid-thirties, Grig was of Afro-Caribbean descent but came from London. With freckles and short dreadlocks, he was a handsome man, Miska supposed, but his dark eyes were dead – there was nothing there at all. His eyes made his face look slack somehow. An ex-member of Britain’s SAS, he had stood up to some local thugs where he lived in London and then come home to find his entire extended family butchered. That had resulted in a torture and killing spree that had culminated in a hostage situation. It had only ended when a number of Grig’s erstwhile colleagues had breached the tower block where he was holed up and taken him down non-lethally. He hadn’t said anything during his trial. The judge might have been more lenient had it not been for what she had called ‘the astonishing brutality’ of his crimes.
Miska had approached the vigilante shortly after she had taken control of the Daughter. Grig had made it perfectly clear that she was no better than all the other scum on board and that given the chance he would kill her – thus setting off all the N-bombs, or so he believed – and rid humanity of six thousand pieces of human excrement. Miska still half expected him to try it.
The Nightmare Squad was the worst of the worst. She was still surprised that Grig had agreed to work with the Ultra. The Ultra, for his part, remained convinced that Grig was just as much a serial killer as he himself was and merely needed an excuse.
‘She’ll be fine.’ The Ultra whispered but somehow his voice still carried. Even though he was wearing Miska’s own spacesuit, his long platinum silver hair tied back, he looked like an alabaster statue of classical perfection given motion. He remained the most beautiful guy Miska had ever seen. She’d never been comfortable with how it made her feel when she looked at him, mostly because she knew it was artifice – a created look that was the product of technology, not impossible genes. He had been sculpted.
Grig looked unconvinced by his squad leader’s words.
‘How’s Skirov’s reconstruction coming along?’ the Ultra asked, changing the subject. He must have had the knife he was toying with printed. Miska hadn’t seen the design before, though the blade was titanium with a fused synthetic diamond edge, just like her own. To her eyes the Ultra’s blade was almost elegant in its functionality. It looked like the most practical killing knife she’d ever seen. Miska wondered how many of the Ultra’s artfully murdered victims had met their ends at the edge of a blade like that.
‘Slowly,’ Miska finally answered, taking her eyes off the knife. Skirov was a warewolf, a heavily reconstructed cyborg made to resemble a machine version of the old Earth werewolf myths. He had replaced too much of his body with machinery and ended up divorced from his humanity, becoming a psychotic murder machine. He had been extensively deconstructed before he, like the Ultra, had been sentenced to solitary confinement aboard the Hangman’s Daughter. Miska had been putting a small amount of the money the Legion earned into having him reconstructed. Another killing machine in the arsenal, she thought.
‘Be nice to have a puppy,’ Bean said, though his Scottish accent was so thick that Miska had to run his words through her head a few times before she could work out their meaning. The intention was for Skirov to join the Nightmare Squad when he was fully reconstructed. Like Grig, Bean was wearing a combat exoskeleton. Unlike Grig’s, Bean’s suit was the spare Machimoi. His narrow, weaselly face, with its hollow cheeks and wild, manic eyes, looked out at her from the unbuttoned power armour.
Bean, Swanky. Sentenced to consecutive life sentences for eleven proven murders and suspected of many, many more. Bean had lived in the wilds of the Scottish parklands with his ‘family’, a clan of incestuous, torturing, murderous cannibals, who based their existence on an old folk tale. They had moved around the vast wilderness feasting on campers, hikers and other visitors to the park. Rumour had it that they had been able to do so for so long with the co-operation of the Scottish tourist board who felt their presence in the park helped encourage the more macabre visitors. After the family had been caught in an extensive police operation and sentenced, they had been split up and sent to different prisons. Swanky had ended up on the Daughter. Frankly, he disgusted Miska, and he knew it. She looked up to find him watching her again. He smiled, his filed-down and capped teeth like pointed canines, a line of drool running down his chin.
‘What do you think, Fatman?’ Bean asked the closest person he had to a friend.
Kaczmar, Charles. Like Miska, he was an ex-marine. Unlike Miska he had kidnapped, tortured and murdered over thirty people before dumping their bodies into space. He had been working as a miner in the Sol System’s asteroid belt. Nicknamed the ‘Fatman’ he had only been caught when one of his victims had survived long enough in vacuum to be picked up by a passing ore freighter. A one in a million freak occurrence. The victim, one of Kaczmar’s co-workers, had recognised the Fatman, identifying him to the authorities on Ceres, before succumbing to his wounds and the ravages of vacuum. Kaczmar hadn’t put up a fight when the SWAT team had stormed his bunk area. When asked why he’d committed the murders he had told the prosecutor that he was bored.
He certainly lived up to his name, Miska thought. He was four hundred pounds of pure butterball. That said, there must have been something under that sea of fat because, somehow, he managed to keep up with her dad’s gruelling PT routines – but without losing any body fat. Miska suspected he was some kind of freak of nature. The gyroscopic harness he wore, which supported the Sarissae railgun, had needed to be altered before it would fit his corpulent bulk. The Ultra insisted that Kaczmar had a genius level intellect. If that was the case then Miska hadn’t seen any indication of it, and it certainly wasn’t on display now as he turned his huge, hairless head towards Bean, his little piggy eyes staring, his facial features like a tiny island among the folds of fat, and farted audibly in answer.
Bean giggled like a nine year old.
‘A well thought out and considered answer,’ Bean told his huge ‘friend’. At least, Miska was pretty sure that was what he’d said.
‘You know how to use that?’ Grig asked Bobo Gunhir, the second cannibal on the squad.
For someone who had struck fear into the great and good of Kenya and Nyota Mlima, the so-called Cannibal of the Glass Desert looked surprisingly normal. Solidly built, his hair cropped short, a neatly trimmed goatee covering his chin, he looked much more like a soldier than a criminal. Miska found this a little reassuring.
The ‘that’ Grig was referring to was a Martian Military Industries Appolion plasma rifle. It had been one of two man-portable plasma weapons found when the Bastards had captured the frigate Excelsior from Triple S, after the battle of Faigroe Station. Incredibly expensive, it fired hydrogen pellets that had been superheated to a plasma state. It was a devastating weapon. Gunhir paused while attaching a PDW over the Appolion’s barrel as a secondary weapon, and looked up at Grig, studying him for a moment.
‘In Kenya we called this weapon the Tears of the Sun. We used them to assassinate prosecutors, judges, high-ranking police officers and other dignitaries in their armoured vehicles. Please be assured, I know what I’m doing.’
Grig nodded. Miska could understand the vigilante’s concern. As eager as she was to see the Appolion in play, she wasn’t keen to lose it, and Gunhir’s part in this was pretty crucial for a newcomer to the squad.
‘You good?’ Miska asked Nyukuti, sitting next to her. He had just finished attaching his PDW to the mounting rails underneath the barrel of a printed, magazine-fed 30mm grenade launcher. The stand-over man looked over at her and nodded. Given his capability for torture, Miska had asked the Ultra why he hadn’t wanted Nyukuti on his squad. The Ultra had told her that the stand-over man didn’t want to hurt people enough. Sadly, Miska had known what he meant. For Nyukuti torture had been a means to an end, for the rest of the Nightmare Squad hurting people was the end, and now she had to make sure they all stayed on the leash. She knew that Grig wasn’t happy. Part of the agreement he had with the Ultra was that they would only go after really bad people. They were about to attack an aerostat full of gas mining civilians and mercenaries just doing their jobs. Grig reminded her of a spree-killing Torricone. She had been happy that talking Grig into the op had been the Ultra’s problem, not hers. One Torricone was more than enough, even if this one was a torturer and mass-murderer.
‘Everyone ready?’ she said at the same time as the Ultra. He smiled and gestured to her. ‘No, it’s your command, I’m just along for the ride,’ she told him.
Or because you’re bored, or because you’ve got something to prove, the voice inside her suggested. She tried to ignore it.
‘You all know what you’re doing. We stick to the plan and it will be just fine,’ the Ultra told them. She hadn’t heard an implied threat in his voice but she was aware of a number of very dangerous individuals shifting uncomfortably. Over the comms link Miska heard the Ultra give the shuttle pilot the order to rise out of the gas clouds. Miska enlarged the feed from the ageing shuttle’s external lenses in her IVD. She saw tendrils of cyanide-laced hydrogen swirl around the shuttle, reaching out for it as it rose out of the clouds towards the gas mining platform.