by Gavin Smith
She was answered by a soft chuckle.
‘I’ve stimmed him,’ Nyukuti told her. If he was concussed Miska was pretty sure that wasn’t the thing to do.
‘You weren’t really paying attention during the field medic training, were you?’ Miska asked the stand-over man. Nyukuti looked at her for a moment or two.
‘You are a tiny blood-painted goddess who I have dreamed. We should return to Australia and stain the sands red,’ he told her.
Miska pursed her lips.
‘Maybe another time,’ she told him.
‘I feel fine,’ Gunhir told her.
‘You go and see the Doc when we get back to the Daughter, you understand me?’ Miska told him. Gunhir nodded. ‘Okay, Nyukuti you’re on point, then Gunhir and me, Kaczmar brings up the rear, diamond formation.’ Gunhir and Nyukuti nodded. Miska put her hand on Kaczmar’s shoulder and communicated her orders via hand signals. As she turned away from the huge serial killer she felt a massive fleshy hand on her shoulder. She almost flinched away from his touch but instead turned back to face him.
‘Thank you,’ he shouted. Miska stared at him while the feeling that something just wasn’t quite right intensified. She just nodded. Then the shuttle’s ageing fire control system woke up and sprayed the burning combat exoskeleton with flame retardant foam.
The prison shuttle had docked at the passenger airlock. There was a small passenger lounge and a series of suit-lockers. The airlock had apparently doubled as an EVA exit as well. The Dogs of Love mercenaries and a few of the aerostat’s security staff had tried to fortify the lounge area with strategically placed crates of raw material for the aerostat’s printer. They had partially closed the interior blast doors to the surrounding corridors to use as cover as well. Miska suspected that the stun grenades had done their job but it had been the fragmentation grenades that had done the real damage. Though she also saw flaps of bloody skin and limbs that were consistent with the damage done by railguns. There would have been little left of the bodies hit by Kaczmar’s Sarissae. She had her SIG in her hand as she surveyed the carnage wrought by her fire team. The others were covering the bodies. There was the occasional sob or moan but there were very few wounded, and those were deep in shock. Miska noticed that Kaczmar had a wide grin on his face.
‘This was everything the Corps promised but never delivered,’ he said.
The corridor leading to the Command & Control had been painted red and was spotted with corpses. Each of them had been efficiently dispatched, their left and right common arteries cut. Miska was grateful that there were no civilians among the dead. What she couldn’t understand was how the Ultra had done it without them responding. There were four bodies leaking precious blood into the corridor leading to the C&C. Nobody was fast and stealthy enough to do all four without any of them getting a shot off. One, yes, maybe two if you were good, but not all four. The precision of the cuts was extraordinary. This was viz/sense game nonsense. It was nearly impossible to kill like that. She felt Gunhir’s eyes on her. The door to the C&C slid open.
Command and control was a utilitarian collection of consoles illuminated by strip lighting and the holographic displays of the various systems, some of which showed local weather patterns in the clouds below the aerostat. The closest things the C&C had to comfort were the ergonomic chairs and the peeling magnolia paint.
All the civilian staff were cowering in one corner of the room, many of them with tears running down their faces. Opposite them, the Ultra was leaning against one of the consoles. Miska was less than pleased to see that he was naked. He held his dripping knife in his left hand. His left arm was bloodied to the elbow, like a red opera glove. A gangly man with a goatee wearing the uniform of the Dogs of Love mercenary cooperative was sat on one of the chairs next to the Ultra and he looked scared shitless.
‘You the Dogs of Love commander?’ Miska asked the man, presumably Lieutenant Larouc. He nodded. ‘I’m here to discuss nominative determinism.’
‘Did you go commando in my spacesuit?’ Miska asked the Ultra. She wasn’t entirely sure if she liked the idea, or was repulsed by it. Possibly both. They had sent Larouc and the C&C personnel to join the other prisoners that Grig and Bean were guarding. Kaczmar was standing guard by the door to C&C and Nyukuti still seemed to consider himself her bodyguard. He was hanging back but keeping an eye on her. Gunhir had been given the unenviable job of liaising with Triple S.
‘I stashed your spacesuit in a safe place. I will retrieve it before we leave,’ he told her, not answering her question. Miska was trying not to stare at his beautiful naked body.
‘I gave you the suit because it is combat spec, equipped with reactive camouflage.’
‘And it helped me gain entry to the aerostat,’ the Ultra told her, ‘as did the very high spec lock burner that seemed to have just the right code for access through the maintenance airlock.’ The lock burner belonged to the Legion but New Sun had supplied the codes. Other than by brute force it was supposed to be very difficult to gain entrance to a sealed habitat or ship via the airlock for obvious reasons. They were always the most heavily defended systems.
‘Something to say?’ Miska asked him.
‘Did it not seem … too easy?’ he asked. Miska turned to look at him. His sculpted face hinted at genuine concern.
‘Not from where we were standing it wasn’t.’
‘We took on something close to a platoon of trained soldiers,’ he pointed out.
He was right. It had been a bold strategy. It was something that a suitably equipped SF squad wouldn’t think twice about, but that wasn’t what they were.
‘And beyond guarding the prisoners, Grig and Bean did very little,’ he continued.
No, because you were killing on an industrial level, Miska decided not to say. She noticed that Nyukuti was paying attention to this conversation as well.
‘Why did you take the suit off?’ Now Miska changed the subject.
‘Slowed me down, restricted movement and the senses, and also I was no longer operating in vacuum,’ he told her.
‘But no armour, not even clothes?’
He smiled.
‘I’m an exhibitionist,’ he told her.
Miska narrowed her eyes. He had total confidence, being naked didn’t faze him in any way, but an exhibitionist he was not. She was putting the pieces together.
‘You’re a chameleon, aren’t you?’ she said staring at him. She knew her emotions were muted compared to other people’s but she still felt astonishment. If every single skin cell in his body were self-replicating nanotech reactive camouflage then he would effectively be invisible. It explained so much. How he had been able to murder so many people before he had been caught. The Dogs of Love mercenaries must have thought that they were fighting a ghost. ‘That’s Martian tech,’ she hissed, keeping her voice low, ‘illegal nanotech.’ She thought about it some more. ‘It’s not even Martian tech, that’s …’ her voice trailed off.
‘Small Gods,’ he finished for her.
She stared at him. There had been lots of stories about the Ultra concerning his tech. It had been classified when he’d been captured. She had assumed that the rumours of Martian and Small Gods tech had been exaggerations, imagining instead that he was some millionaire savant who could afford the very best cyberware.
‘What the fuck are you doing on board the Hangman’s Daughter?’ she demanded. ‘You should be locked away in a Hotel California.’ The Hotel Californias were government black sites where they tended to ‘lose’ high value prisoners. The Ultra just shrugged. Then something occurred to her. ‘Did you kill my father?’
The Ultra was shaking his head before she had finished asking the question.
‘No,’ he told her, ‘think about the timeline.’
He was right. She had seen the Ultra’s arrest in the news. It still didn’t make sense that they would have put him on board the Daughter rather than disappear him and try and reverse engineer the tech. Perhaps the case had jus
t been too high profile for that.
‘Jesus Christ!’ she spat as something else occurred to her. ‘You are a completely illegal …’
‘Weapon,’ he supplied along with an arched perfect eyebrow.
‘I didn’t … I mean we are in breach of so many of the articles of conflict, not to mention intersystem laws. When we get back you’re going to have to …’ She stopped and looked up at him.
‘Go back in my box?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. It was ludicrous. She was apologising to a monster whose body count was at least in four figures but she found herself meaning it. There was something oddly vulnerable about him, like a child with an old soul.
Are you fucking crazed! the beleaguered remnants of her common sense screamed at her.
‘I understand,’ he told her. She knew it was ridiculous but his sad smile was breaking her heart.
Get a grip! You’re being played! she told herself.
‘Are you a Small God?’ she asked him. ‘A demigod?’
Grey silver eyes looked at her as he considered her question.
‘I don’t know what I am,’ he told her. She opened her mouth to ask another question.
‘Boss,’ Gunhir said from one of the workstations. A holographic display in front of him showed a Triple S Pegasus approaching the aerostat high above Epsilon B’s swirling storm fronts. ‘Major Resnick and some of his people are en route to relieve us.’
‘Resnick?’ Miska frowned. It was the first time she had heard mention of Resnick’s rank. She knew that the Triple S part of the operation was being handled by Elite, the military contractor’s SF contingent. She had made the same agreement with New Sun as she’d had with MACE. The Bastards were an offensive force, not a garrison. She knew enough to not want her people mixing with civilians. They were a blunt instrument, not a colonial police/peace keeping force. She had, however, expected Triple S (conventional) to take over from them.
‘Are we going to do this dance again?’ Nyukuti asked. He had been with them on board Faigroe Station when their employer had betrayed the Legion and sent Triple S to deal with them. He had been badly wounded by the Triple S mercenaries during the ensuing conflict. They had nearly killed him. On the other hand, he had killed one of them with his sharpened metal boomerang.
Miska ran the feed from the weapon-and helm-cams into the aerostat’s comms and opened an on-going feed to the Hangman’s Daughter.
‘Hangman-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual, you okay?’ Uncle V asked from the virtual CP in Camp Reisman.
‘Yeah, just a little bit worried about Triple S pulling another Faigroe Station,’ she told him.
‘I can set up a QRF but it’ll have to come from Ephesus, so it won’t be all that Q, if you know what I mean,’ Vido told him. Miska knew that they were stretched too thin. They needed another shuttle the same size as the Pegasi and enough volunteers for a permanent QRF on the Daughter. She was hoping that Golda might be able to help her with that, though she would need to integrate members of the Leopard and Crocodile Society into the rest of the company and the other platoons. None of which was going to help her this time.
‘Nah,’ Miska said. ‘If it goes off it’ll be over a long time before they get here, just monitor the situation,’ she told him.
‘Okay. I’m going to have second platoon and Pegasus-One stand-to for my own peace of mind,’ Uncle V told her.
‘Understood,’ Miska told him. It wouldn’t do any harm and she liked that Vido was showing initiative.
‘If it’s any consolation I think it’s too public,’ he told her.
‘Nyukuti, relieve Bean, I want you looking after the prisoners,’ she told him.
He opened his mouth to protest. She knew he would want to stay close to her.
‘Not now,’ she told him. He nodded and left C&C. ‘Hangman-One-Actual to Nightmare-Two-One?’ she asked over comms.
‘Two-One here,’ Bean answered.
‘I need you to go and get my suit and stow it in your armour’s storage compartment,’ she told him. ‘Nightmare-One-Actual will tell you where it is. Then get back to the briefing room as quickly as possible.’
‘Understood,’ Bean told her.
‘Hangman-One-Actual, to all Nightmare call signs. We may have trouble in the shape of Triple S (elite). I’m going to meet them in the departure lounge. It kicks off, we use Contingency-Three. Any questions?’
Nobody said anything. She turned to the Ultra and gestured towards Kaczmar with her thumb.
‘Make sure that dumb fuck knows what’s happening,’ she told him. ‘He’ll need some cyberware in his ear when we get back to Waterloo Station.’ The Ultra nodded and crossed the C&C to communicate with Kaczmar.
‘This is Colonel Corbin to Major Resnick,’ she said, opening a comms link to the approaching shuttle.
‘What is it, Corporal?’ Resnick answered.
Mature, Miska thought. She could feel Gunhir watching her again.
‘Were you a friend of Major Sheldon’s?’ she asked. Major Sheldon Cartwright had been the officer in charge of the Triple S contingent that had come to Faigroe Station to kill the Bastards after they had taken it. Resnick didn’t answer. ‘If you’re planning a burn, I just thought you should know that it didn’t end well for old Sheldon.’
‘Why don’t you grow up and try and act like a professional long enough for us to do the changeover, you fucking amateur?’ he asked.
Real mature, Miska thought. What bothered her most was that SF operators didn’t behave like this, even if they didn’t like each other. There was always too much at stake and it just wasn’t professional. It showed the total contempt that he had for her and the Bastards.
We’re still kicking your ass and taking your jobs, Miska thought with no little satisfaction.
‘Okay, it’s going to happen real fast,’ she told him. So we don’t have to spend too much time in each other’s company, she didn’t add. ‘We’ll meet you by the airlock. You send two of your people, and they run to relieve my guys watching the prisoners, we get on our shuttle and you do what you want.’
‘You need to get a hold of your fear,’ he told her. Fear? Miska wondered. We’ve been killing Triple S since we got here. She decided not to tell him that as well. It was clear that he was trying to goad her. ‘I’ll tell you how we do this—’ he tried to continue.
‘No, we do this my way or we walk off right now and you guys can have fun and games chasing the prisoners round the aerostat,’ she told him. There was no answer. ‘Asshole,’ Miska muttered.
‘If it goes bad do you want me to save money or cry the Tears of the Sun?’ Gunhir asked. He was talking about the use of the expensive plasma rifle.
‘Cry me a river,’ Miska told him as she headed for the door.
Nyukuti caught up with them at the devastation that was the small departure lounge by the airlocks. They stood among the mangled dead and waited by the airlock that they had cut through. There was a clang as the Triple S Pegasus docked at one of the other airlocks a little further down the departure lounge.
‘Are we killing these guys?’ Kaczmar shouted. Miska turned towards him.
‘No! Not unless they move on us! And shut up!’ she shouted back slowly, hoping that he could read her lips. He just stared at her, the look of concentration on his tiny face nearly lost among the folds of fat.
‘Open the airlock,’ Resnick told her over an open comms link. She was currently in control of the aerostat’s systems. She sent him access and the airlock opened. The Triple S operators came out of the airlock weapons at the ready, scanning the area, looking very professional. An eight-strong squad, two of them wearing Machimoi combat exoskeletons, and Resnick himself. Both the Nightmare Squad and the Triple S mercenaries were trying to look as though they weren’t pointing guns at each other.
Resnick walked over towards them, staring at Miska. She suspected that he was trying to intimidate her. She wasn’t really feeling it.
‘Messy,’ he s
aid.
‘I want to see two of your guys running to relieve my people guarding the prisoners,’ Miska told him.
Resnick looked around at the carnage.
‘So you hit a soft target with overkill but then shit yourself when real soldiers turn up?’ he asked her.
‘What are you trying to achieve here?’ she asked him. ‘If you wanna fight then throw down. If not, then you obviously don’t like us so let’s get on with our day.’
Resnick was looking them over, an expression of disgust on his face. He paused for a moment when he came to the Ultra.
‘Why is that man naked?’ he asked.
‘Fuck this,’ Miska said reaching the end of her patience. ‘Guys,’ she said out loud but opening a direct comms link to Grig and Bean. She didn’t want to use their names or call signs in front of Resnick. ‘Leave the prisoners, make your way to the rendezvous.’
‘Aye,’ Bean answer.
‘Understood,’ Grig replied.
‘Good luck finding your prisoners,’ she told Resnick.
He nodded at two of his people. One of them, a blonde woman, caught Miska’s eye. She looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place her. If she did know the blonde woman then it had to have been from her time in the marines, or the CIA’s Special Activities Division.
‘You people fucking disgust me, you’re a disgrace—’ he started but Miska just turned and walked away, making her way towards the prison shuttle. Gunhir and the Ultra followed, as did Nyukuti, though he kept an eye on the Triple S operators. Kaczmar remained, staring at Resnick. Miska stopped by the ruined airlock and turned to look at the huge serial killer. She could only see one side of Kaczmar’s face but it looked as though he was studying Resnick. He leaned forward.
‘I’m hungry!’ he shouted at Resnick. The commander of Triple S (elite) in the Epsilon Eridani system took an involuntary step back. Miska couldn’t help but laugh. Kaczmar turned his back on Resnick and the Triple S squad and lumbered after Miska and the others.
‘Tell Kaczmar he can go into Waterloo Station restaurant of his choice, and eat as much as he likes,’ Miska told the Ultra as they made their way into the prison shuttle.