War Criminals

by Gavin Smith

  She stared at him for a moment and then burst out laughing.

  ‘I am standing right here,’ her dad said from the screen. That just made her laugh harder.

  Nyukuti cleared out to let her talk to her dad. Her dad was watching through the screen. She could see Camp Reisman’s CP in the background.

  ‘You can kill as many of them as you want if you can tell me how a temper tantrum will help our current situation,’ he said. It felt like the telling off from a parent it was. Worse, she knew he was right.

  ‘You’re right. This needs some properly focused killing,’ she muttered, sounding like a sulky teenager even to her own ears.

  ‘You haven’t lost it like that for a while,’ he said more gently. Now she looked up at him.

  ‘I hate things like this. Being the target of lies. Feeling that there’s nothing you can do about it. Feeling helpless …’ She went back to staring at the cracked tile flooring.

  ‘We might have been the target here, but you get that you’re not the victim, right?’ he asked.

  ‘Honestly?’ Miska looked back up at her dad. ‘Not really. I didn’t want those people to die, didn’t want them to suffer the way they did, but I didn’t know them. Torricone may well have been right, but I don’t feel anything for them. Does that bother you?’

  ‘Not as much as it seems to bother Torricone,’ her dad said.

  Miska’s eyelids narrowed into slits.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she demanded.

  ‘It means you lost it because someone you feel for purposefully hurt you,’ he told her and then crossed his arms.

  ‘Oh bullshit!’ she snapped.

  ‘I thought you hated lies.’

  Miska went very quiet.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked a few moments later.

  ‘Send Corenbloom and the Doc to the scene of the crime, and then I’m going to go and talk to someone.’

  ‘Who?’ her dad asked but Miska was on her feet heading for the door.

  ‘You need to take a shower!’ he called after her. ‘You look like you’ve just killed a whole bunch of people!’

  Showered and changed, Miska had Vido liaising with Salik and the UN investigators, trying to get Corenbloom and Doc onto the aerostat. The UN had demanded that all the weapons and armour used in the attack be turned over to them. That further pissed Miska off as the railgun, the plasma rifle and the Machimoi combat exoskeleton were all expensive bits of kit that were too complex to just print, even with Daughter’s military grade printer. She had, however, agreed and some of Vido’s ‘old boys’ were handling the exchange. After all, the Bastards had nothing to hide.

  All through her shower she had been thinking about Torricone. Her dad had been right. The last time she had lost it like that had been when Raff had told her that her dad had been murdered. She had known for a long time that she had an anger management problem, what her psych profile described as a tendency to fall into psychotic rages, but she’d had a lid on it ever since she’d joined the marines. Torricone was pissing her off. There was no doubt about it. More to the point, he was trying to. Even so, what she had done wasn’t right.

  Do you care? she asked herself. After all, he was basically a weapon with a bomb in his head.

  Miska checked Torricone’s whereabouts with the Daughter’s systems.

  ‘Of course,’ she muttered.

  ‘Come to finish the job?’ he asked as she entered the multi-denominational chapel. Torricone was on his knees in front of a, frankly scary, hologram representation of Christ on his cross. Not for the first time Miska thought that religions could do with more cheerful iconography.

  ‘I came to … to …’ she started. He turned away from the hologram to regard her, one eyebrow raised. The hologram blinked out, plunging the institutional room and its bolted-down pews into gloom.

  ‘Apologise?’ he asked. ‘You?’

  ‘I apologise when I’m …’

  ‘Wrong?’ he suggested. He looked more intrigued than anything else.

  ‘Fuck this!’ she snapped. ‘I knew you weren’t going to make this easy.’ She turned to leave.

  ‘Easy?’ he demanded. ‘You nearly killed me, Miska.’ Now he sounded angry. ‘Do you get that we’re not actually toy soldiers? That we’re living, feeling people, just like you? It’s bad enough that you put bombs in our heads—’ he tapped the side of his skull ‘—but we also have to live in fear of you just flipping out and killing us when you hear something you don’t like.’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ It had practically exploded out of her.

  Torricone didn’t say anything. He glanced behind him at where the hologram of Christ on his cross had been just moments before.

  ‘I mean, you pick a fight every time you see me, what’s that about? Are you just trying to hurt me?’ she asked more quietly. ‘Do you not get that I don’t care about these things, that I’m not … wired up properly?’

  Why are you telling him this? Her internal voice was a scream.

  ‘You certainly seemed to care earlier,’ he said softly.

  That made her stop.

  ‘It wasn’t about …’

  Torricone just watched her.

  ‘I like you, Miska.’ He pointed between the two of them. ‘I know … everybody knows that there’s something between us, even if you won’t admit it. It’s going to get me killed.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, looking down. ‘So what? We both know that nothing can come of it. You going to pull my hair every time you see me?’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Then what’s it like?’ Miska hissed, the venom in her voice surprising her. Because it did hurt. Every time.

  ‘I got a second chance.’

  Miska frowned. Pavor/Phobos, the Small God entity that had inhabited Teramoto’s body, had run Torricone through with a sword. The car thief should be dead. Only jumping into the artefact had kept him alive. He had been fully healed when they had emerged from it some hours later.

  ‘So, what?’ Miska nodded to where the hologram of Christ had hung in the air. ‘You’re resurrected? Got religion? Is that why you’re so fucking judgemental? Maybe you want to martyr yourself like Christ? Make mommy proud of you for once?’ She saw him flinch just a little at this last. It didn’t make her feel good.

  ‘I’ve never not had religion,’ he told her, ‘but if I get a second chance then what kind of a coward would I be if I didn’t speak up? Because somebody’s got to. What you’re doing is wrong and you need to stop.’

  She regarded him carefully. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t said before. Except this time …?

  ‘Maybe you’re right about us,’ she said carefully, ‘but you keep doing what you’re doing and that’ll fade and you’ll become just another irritant.’

  She turned to leave.

  ‘See, that’s the thing,’ he said. Miska paused. ‘Neither of us can be what the other one wants.’

  Miska left the chapel.

  The Central Concourse was strangely quiet as Nyukuti and Miska made their way down it. All the viz screens still seemed to be playing the story of the massacre on the aerostat.

  ‘Hangman-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual,’ a very harried sounding Vido said over a direct comms link. ‘Look, don’t shoot the messenger but I’ve got some more bad news for you.’

  ‘What?’ Miska subvocalised through gritted teeth, trying to ignore the stares from the few bar patrons on the Central Concourse.

  ‘The Sneaky Bitch just docked,’ he told her.

  ‘What?’ Miska demanded as she approached Raff’s hotel. She had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘The Crimson Sisterhood. Captain Gosia Tesselaar’s ship,’ Vido told her. Then it clicked into place. It was one of the corsairs that had attacked them when they had left the asteroid belt freeport of Maw City in the Sirius System.

  Shit! she thought. It was the last thing she needed at the moment, but frankly unless they started firing on the Daughter it
was going to be a case of having to wait and see what they were up to. She knew that Tesselaar wanted all the male members of the Crimson Sisterhood pirate organisation released from the Daughter. This included the captain’s own man, who was currently down on Ephesus as part of the flight crew of one of the big Harpy drop shuttles, along with a number of the other Crimson Sisterhood pirates. Just for a moment she was tempted to give Tesselaar what she wanted for a quiet life, but that would set a dangerous precedent.

  Suddenly Miska found herself standing in the shade. She looked up to see a large, implant-scarred, bullet-headed individual that she suspected had been injecting himself with silverback gorilla hormones. Glancing around she realised that there were several more approaching her and Nyukuti. She guessed they were members of the Dogs of Love.

  ‘So this is—’ the gorilla started. He stopped when Miska levelled her gauss pistol at him.

  ‘I don’t have the time,’ she told him. ‘Vido, there’s nothing we can really do about the Sneaky Bitch,’ she subvocalised over the comms link. ‘We’re supposed to be confined to the ship.’ She heard a pop from behind her and then a cry of pain as Nyukuti shot one of the DoL mercenaries with a hardgel round from his PDW’s over-barrel 25mm grenade launcher. ‘Make Salik’s security people aware that they’re known pirates.’

  ‘Will do,’ Vido told her.

  ‘Back off,’ Miska told the gorilla, gesturing with her gun.

  ‘I’ve still got a few people on the station. I can see if we can get eyes on Tesselaar and her people,’ Vido said over the comms link.

  ‘If you can do that without getting us into more trouble, then sure,’ Miska told him. She glanced behind her to see Nyukuti practically back to back with her, his PDW at his shoulder, covering the DoL mercs trying to surround them.

  ‘What’s up?’ Vido asked.

  ‘The dogs are circling,’ Miska told him. ‘No offence,’ she said to the gorilla. ‘Look, tell your people we didn’t kill your guys … well, we killed some of them but it was a fight. We certainly didn’t torture anybody to death, that was Triple S when they relieved us.’

  Somehow the gorilla didn’t look convinced, but they were all backing away from the guns, helping the merc that Nyukuti had shot to his feet.

  ‘Miska …’ Nyukuti said.

  ‘You seeing this?’ Vido asked over comms. Miska risked glancing up at one of the viz screens, and then opened a window for the footage in her IVD so she could keep an eye on the retreating DoL mercs.

  The footage showed Medusas sweeping out of the jungle into Port Turquoise, weapons blazing. She watched one of the mechs turn their flame gun on a four-storey building. Triple S conventional had just retaken the town. It didn’t look as though they were being nearly as careful with collateral damage as the Bastards had been, but then Miska was starting to understand the lengths to which Triple S would go to punish those who had defied them. The footage showed gunship-escorted Harpies and VTOL transports in the air high above the wide Turquoise. There were landing craft, patrol boats and fortified barges carrying troops and vehicles below the shuttles and aircraft down the river itself. Miska knew that Camp Badajoz would be the next target.

  ‘I don’t give a shit, Vido,’ Miska was subvocalising over the comms as she walked into the hotel, Nyukuti in tow. ‘Contact Salik, contact MACE, tell them that I’m not having my people, or my gear, captured by Triple S. They have a choice, either we fight and we get paid for it, or we pull off-planet and head back to the Daughter.’

  There was an automated reception screen but much of the ground floor of the hotel was taken up with a bar. Frequented by journalists, the hotel bar was clearly meant to cater for a more moneyed clientele than many others nearby, though it still kept to the faux-Napoleonic decor that ran throughout the station. There were very few customers at the moment. Most of them would either be down on the moon covering New Sun’s offensive, or still reporting on the aerostat massacre. Still, it was nice not to be looked at with seething hatred for once. The few lensheads in the bar just looked shit scared of her.

  ‘MACE has been pushing to let us fight, but the UN are saying no and Salik’s backing them,’ Vido told her. That was what it had all been about. Remove one of the stronger, more capable forces from the Colonial Administration and then make an aggressive push.

  ‘Fine, get our forces ready to evac,’ Miska told him.

  ‘Nobody is going to like that, Miska,’ Vido told her.

  ‘Then get them ready to do it under fire,’ she said and then cut the comms link. She was giving some thought to going over to the New Sun offices on the station and shooting Campbell in the face, a lot.

  ‘Stay here,’ Miska told Nyukuti. He opened his mouth to protest. ‘Seriously, not today.’ He closed his mouth again and nodded.

  Miska knocked on the door to Raff’s room. It hissed open for her. Raff was standing looking at the wall, which had become a huge viz screen. He was watching footage of Triple S (conventional) rappelling onto rooftops in Port Turquoise, vicious one-sided gunfights, and burning vehicles.

  ‘They’re learning from you,’ he said when the door closed behind her.

  ‘We safe to talk?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s been swept,’ he told her and then pointed at the small white noise generator on the bedside table. The device would inhibit any attempt to listen in on them with long-range microphones. ‘Can’t say the visit was all that subtle.’

  ‘You’re embedded with us,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Yeah but everyone knows I’m not welcome, and then you come running to me when this happens.’

  ‘Maybe I want to tell our side of the story.’

  Raff turned to look at her, one side of his face illuminated by the huge wall screen. He concentrated for a moment and the grisly images from the aerostat massacre appeared on the wall screen.

  ‘This is why you have journalists with you,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh bullshit, Raff!’ Miska snapped. She was tired of getting lectured. ‘The lensheads covering this are in bed with New Sun’s PR company.’

  ‘Of course they are,’ Raff told her. ‘They have a good working relationship. The journos get what they need from New Sun and Triple S, and you’re letting me get tied up in the back of a shuttle. Guess who controls the narrative?’

  ‘I run a slave legion made up of hardened criminals, so positively spin that for me!’ she shouted at him. ‘Do you just want to be a sanctimonious prick, or are you actually going to be of some fucking use?’

  Raff sighed and went and sat on the bed. Miska glanced at the footage from the aerostat that still covered the wall.

  ‘Can you change that over?’ she asked. Raff studied her for a moment or two and then concentrated, switching it back to Triple S’s offensive down on Ephesus.

  ‘That bothering you?’ he asked. There was something in his voice, suspicion maybe.

  ‘Did you get my message?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, the net on this station isn’t up to much information-wise. Sports, porn and gun template catalogues is fine, information on war criminals with spec-ops backgrounds is sketchier. But the woman you pointed out, I recognised her from that mess during the Rotterdam drug wars.’

  ‘That it?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I’m pretty sure one of the other guys was ex-SAD, Fifth Special Forces originally. I think he was a counter insurgency specialist. Dishonourably discharged. SAD recruited him …’

  ‘When you were looking for morally ambiguous operators,’ she finished for him. Like her, she didn’t add.

  ‘Rumour has it he went too far even for us.’

  ‘So Resnick’s got a squad of sick bastards,’ Miska said.

  ‘So they frame you for the aerostat massacre. That’s assuming you didn’t do it. I mean, you took some very sick people with you. Your very own atrocity in a box.’

  Miska turned to stare at him.

  ‘That look like me?’ she asked, meaning the aerostat massacre. ‘You’ve tried
to get me to do those kinds of things in the past, to send messages. Have I ever done it?’

  ‘Not for me, not for the company. For yourself? I’m less sure. I mean, what are you going to do when you catch up with the guys who killed your father?’

  ‘That will be medieval,’ Miska admitted, her voice cold.

  ‘And like I said, you set up your Nightmare Squad for a reason.’

  ‘To scare people.’

  ‘Good work. Why did you take them on this job?’ Raff asked. She realised what he was doing. A confrontational debrief, to get to the truth quickly. On the other hand at least he wasn’t hitting on her.

  ‘To see if I can control them,’ she told him.

  ‘And can you?’ he asked.

  It was a good question. Was I in control or was the Ultra? she wondered. One thing she was sure of: she didn’t control the Ultra.

  ‘I’m having a difficult day, Raff. I’m in no mood for an interrogation. Are you part of the problem or the solution?’

  He sat up on the bed.

  ‘Okay, I’m sorry. I don’t have much in the way of good things to tell you. This looks really bad.’

  ‘But it’s bullshit,’ she said. Raff just looked at her. ‘I mean it, Raff, we didn’t do that. Okay, I mean we did some of that, but we weren’t fucking peeling people.’

  ‘They didn’t have long to set that up. They couldn’t have known who you were taking until shortly before the op happened.’

  ‘So they’ve got from when we left the aerostat until we get back to the Daughter, maybe two hours.’

  ‘Then they’re running through their files on the Nightmare Squad’s past crimes, got them in their IVDs, trying to recreate them.’

  Something occurred to Miska.

  ‘Did anyone get eaten?’ she asked.

  Raff stared at her.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Raff exploded. ‘You’re going out on jobs with fucking cannibals?’

  ‘Hey, this was your idea,’ Miska pointed out.

  ‘This wasn’t … Okay, look, so this is a hastily set up series of copycats. The investigators are going to see through it pretty quickly.’

  ‘And go after Triple S?’