by Gavin Smith
‘Maybe, maybe not. If Resnick’s a Spartan then he fades away, maybe they serve up the rest of the squad. Triple S and New Sun use their influence to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible. Nobody notices the retractions in the news, and you’re still the bad guys as far as everyone can remember.’
‘We’re always going to be the bad guys,’ Miska said, ‘but Triple S are going to get caught, right? Sure, they get us out of the way. They do their little offensive—’
‘It’s not a little—’
‘But as soon as it gets investigated we’re back in the game and I go fucking head hunting. Make sure I’m drinking my next beer out of Resnick’s hollowed-out skull.’
Raff stared at her.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘We’re left with one of two possibilities. Either they only need the short-term gain to achieve whatever the fuck it is that they’re trying to achieve here,’ he suggested, ‘or—’
‘It’s just the first part of the strategy to deal with us,’ Miska finished.
‘Possibly both.’ Raff looked as though he was wrestling with what he was about to say next.
‘Don’t,’ she told him. ‘We leave now, our rep is fucked. It looks like we lost. We cut and run and we committed a war crime to boot. Nobody will touch us and nobody will hire us to fight Triple S in the future, and I really want to see them again.’
‘They’re fighting wars in ways you won’t … can’t fight.’
‘The lies?’ she demanded.
‘The PR, the media part of the campaign, whether you like it or not it matters.’
‘Where’s Resnick?’ she asked. Raff looked at her, saying nothing.
‘You really going to make me beat it out of you?’ she asked.
‘You just don’t like having friends, do you?’ Raff asked. He sounded more irritated than hurt. ‘He’s in-country.’ Resnick was down on Ephesus and on active duty.
‘There’s a ship just docked,’ she told him and then explained about the Sneaky Bitch.
‘Okay, I’ll look into it,’ Raff grudgingly told her.
Miska turned and headed for the door.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked her.
Overreact, Miska thought.
‘See if you can speed up the whole “we’re innocent” thing,’ she said over her shoulder, and left the room.
‘Vido?’ Miska said over the comms link, ignoring protocol as she made her way towards the elevator on Raff’s floor in the hotel.
‘Hey Miska,’ Vido’s beleaguered voice finally answered when she was riding the elevator down to the ground floor. ‘Sorry, I was speaking to Salik. The UN and Salik are happy for the Bastard Legion to withdraw to the Daughter. Frankly I think they’d be happy if we just left.’
‘I hear a problem,’ Miska said.
‘Triple S are saying that they will fire on us if we try to pull out,’ Vido explained. The elevator doors opened. The bar was a scene of utter destruction. The DoL mercs that had hassled them in the street were lying around among broken furniture and smashed glass. Nyukuti was sat at the bar. His PDW lay on the wood next to a very large glass of bourbon that the stand-over man was taking sips from. The barman was cowering behind the bar, and there were several journalists hiding behind overturned tables as well.
‘They came back,’ Nyukuti told her as she emerged from the elevator. She could see in the mirror behind the bar that his face was a mess.
‘So I see,’ Miska said. She noticed that Nyukuti’s folding boomerang sword was imbedded in a wooden carving of the Duke of Wellington, its blade bloodied. One of the DoL had pushed himself to his feet and was staggering towards Nyukuti. Miska had had quite enough for one day. She drew her SIG Sauer GP-992, dialled the velocity down to subsonic via her neural interface with the gauss pistol’s smartlink, and then shot him in the back of the knee. He howled as he went down. He doubtless had subcutaneous armour but it still would’ve hurt.
‘We didn’t fucking do it!’ she told the DoL mercenary as he rolled around on the floor clutching his wounded knee. ‘And you’re going to feel pretty fucking stupid when the truth comes out in a day or two!’
‘Miska?’ Vido asked over the comms link, more than a little concern in his voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told Uncle V over the comms link, ‘We’re just diploming with the DoL.’
‘Oh, right.’ Uncle V sounded more than a little dubious.
Miska sat down next to Nyukuti but swung the stool round so she could see the rest of the bar.
‘Tell Salik and the UN that we are non-combatants. We are withdrawing from the theatre of operations. If we are fired on then not only will we assume that we’re combatants again but we will take that as a breach of the articles of conflict and defend ourselves with every means at our disposal.’
‘Including space assets?’ Vido asked.
‘Including the Daughter,’ she told him. She heard the consigliere sigh over the comms link. ‘Get our people out of there, Uncle V,’ she said softly.
‘Understood.’ He sounded exhausted.
‘One more thing,’ she said, ‘I don’t care how you do it but get the Nightmare Squad down on Ephesus. I want them outfitted for a lurp,’ she told him, meaning long-range reconnaissance patrol, ‘but tell the Ultra he has to go as low tech as possible, no electromagnetics, no lasers or plasma, just slugthrowers.’ She was thinking about how the dead Triple S (elite) at FOB Trafalgar had been armed. ‘And tell the Ultra he needs to stay in contact with me.’
‘Why?’ Vido asked.
‘I don’t care how they do it but tell them to bring me Resnick, alive.’
‘Okay,’ Vido said. She could tell he thought it was a terrible idea but it sounded like he was too tired to argue with her.
Miska was aware of Nyukuti sagging down onto the bar next to her.
‘What?’ she asked turning to look at him. He just pointed at a viz screen in the corner of the mirror behind the bar. She saw the words ‘Breaking News’ on the screen. Miska was really starting to fear the news. She contacted the bar’s public systems via her neural interface, enlarged the viz screen so it filled the mirror, and then turned the sound up so it drowned out the moans of the beaten mercenaries behind her.
‘… with my head in a lead bucket all the way from the Sirius System.’ The smartly dressed young man on the screen looked very familiar to her but Miska couldn’t quite place him. He was sat next to Brennan Campbell, who was definitely on Miska’s shit-list. The sympathetic expression on Campbell’s face looked about as sincere as a prison daddy telling his bitch that he won’t come in his mouth. I’ve been around convicts too long, she decided. They were both being interviewed by some viz-presenter clone.
‘But surely you knew that coming here, to the conflict in Epsilon Eridani, would be a death sentence?’ the interviewer said.
‘I had to,’ the young man said. ‘Look, I’ve done some bad things in my life, I know that and I’m happy to serve my time, but she’s fu … she’s evil.’ Miska realised that they were talking about her. ‘She targeted the role model prisoners first, murdered them in front of us. Then she put the worst in charge. The serial killers, sex offenders—’
‘No I didn’t!’ Miska shouted at the viz screen.
‘—they ruled by gang rape.’ The man broke down, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he managed. Then Miska realised who he was. On the large screen she could see where the prison tattoos had been removed. He’d been spruced up considerably, given a hair cut, new clothes, but there was no mistaking Lomas Hinton, convicted drug dealer and, apparently, a consummate actor. Hinton had not returned from shore leave on Maw City. With a thought, Miska sent the detonation code for the tiny nanite explosive implanted in his head. Nothing happened. The signal returned to tell her that the N-bomb did not exist.
On the screen Campbell was patting Hinton’s shoulder. The New Sun exec looked like he’d seen acts of sympathy before but hadn’t really understood them.
‘New Sun employed the Bastard Legion, didn’t they, Mr Campbell? How do you explain this sudden reversal?’ the interviewer asked.
Now Campbell was all mock contrition.
‘Well, Cynthia, that was a disastrous lapse in judgement, and I can assure you that those responsible no longer work for New Sun,’ Campbell told the interviewer. ‘As soon as I realised what had happened I was in contact with Colonel Duellona. She sent Triple S (elite) to deal with the situation but sadly they didn’t get there in time. The Bastard Legion’s so-called Nightmare Squad had fled before the true extent of their crimes was discovered.
‘I can’t emphasise enough just how brave Mr Hinton has been in coming forward. He still had one of the N-bombs in his head and expected to be killed immediately. Fortunately New Sun had the surgical facilities to remove the N-bomb.’
The camera closed in on a fresh scar on the side of Hinton’s head.
‘We’re sorry for the part that we played in this morning’s terrible atrocity. It is unfortunate, the rather selfish anti-capitalist stance that the self-declared Ephesus Colonial Administration has chosen to take. It is the kind of resistance to a free market economy that needs to be opposed wherever it is found, but this is not the way that New Sun fights wars.’
Now he turned to face the camera. It was all clearly rehearsed.
‘I want the Colonial Administration to know that New Sun will make reparations to them, and to the Dogs of Love mercenary collective, for our part in facilitating this outrage.
‘Things have moved very quickly today. Mr Hinton only arrived a few hours ago from the Sirius System—’
The Sneaky Bitch! Miska thought.
‘—but we think we have a way that we can help this situation. To all members of the so-called Bastard Legion, I have this message: we know that you are being forced to fight in a war you must know is unwinnable against professional soldiers. You are being fed into a meat grinder for the gain of an evil, possibly insane woman. Our ships and our facilities on Waterloo Station, and down on Ephesus, are all currently broadcasting jamming signals, though obviously we cannot keep this up for long. But if you can make it to one of them then we have the surgical facilities to remove the nanite explosives from your heads.’
Miska stared at the screen. The interviewer was asking a question but all Miska could hear was the sound of blood rushing in her ears.
‘C’mon,’ she managed and strode out of the bar, Nyukuti in tow. She needed to calm down and then contact Vido. Find out who was out and about. Who was in a position to take New Sun up on their offer. And, if they made a move towards a New Sun facility, then she would have to kill them.
Miska’s cyberware included a degree of protection against electrocution. This could, however, be overwhelmed. A shotgun with large capacity magazines firing taser darts was more than enough to do that. Even with the armoured clothing she was wearing, there was still too much bare skin on display. She was peripherally aware of Nyukuti getting hit as well. The 30mm hardgel stun rounds, fired from two under-barrel grenade launchers, were overkill. She didn’t even feel the hooks in the capture net bite into her skin and deliver another fifty-thousand volts. She just flopped around on the ground, unconscious.
Chapter 12
Miska hadn’t been paying attention.
You’re taking this too personally, she told herself. She’d let her emotions get the better of her, dropped her guard, and now her entire body hurt. She suspected the pain was the result of all the muscle contractions from being ridiculously over-electrified. Even for someone with her military grade cyberware, she was lucky her heart hadn’t given out.
Her hands and ankles were strapped to some kind of reclining chair. There were restraints around her stomach and her head as well. Someone really didn’t want her moving around too much. It sounded like she was in a cavernous space, she suspected the hold of a ship, and there were at least four other people in there with her.
‘Ow,’ she said with some feeling as she opened her eyes. She was right, it was the hold of a ship and, with Captain Gosia Tesselaar standing over her, Miska guessed it was the Sneaky Bitch. ‘Hi!’ Miska said much more cheerfully than she felt.
Tesselaar looked every inch the belt pirate. Like she’d stepped straight out of a viz. Statuesque, wearing a red sleeveless one piece and thigh-high boots. Red was the colour of the Crimson Sisterhood, the pirate organisation that terrorised the Sirius System. Both her arms were covered in sleeves of tattoos, and she had red hair down to her ass. Implants animated her hair, which seemed to respond to Tesselaar’s moods. A large slugthrower pistol rode her hip. All she was missing was a tricorn and a cutlass.
‘Gosia! Great to see you again. Is this about a conjugal visit?’
Gosia glared at her with red, obviously implanted, eyes. Miska smiled sweetly.
There were three more people in the hold with her. A tall Native American, so heavily built with obviously boosted muscle that she was worried his skin was going to split. He had long braided hair that was shaved at the sides, and tribal tattoos running up his neck and onto the side of his head. He wore a duster and bristled with weapons – many of them non-lethal.
With him was an equally tall Asian woman, who wasn’t quite as heavily built as the Native American, but still looked like she could put you through a reasonably sturdy wall. Her hair was shorn, her tattoos were less tribal and more pictorial, and she also wore a duster over leather pants and a vest, and was equally heavily armed.
The third member of the ‘Duster Crew’, as Miska was starting to think of them, was a very short, very stocky, heavily bearded white guy. She suspected he had been going for a biker look, except his endomorphic build, probably due to growing up in a high gravity environment, made him look like a dwarf in one of her fantasy sense games.
She was pretty sure it was the kind of thing the ‘dwarf’ was sick of hearing. So: ‘You know you look like a dwarf in a sense game?’ she asked.
He actually growled and took a step towards her.
‘If you’ve electrocuted and tied me up and I’m still not intimidated, do you really think growling will do the trick?’
‘I thought you were supposed to be some bad-ass special forces operator?’ the dwarf asked. He had a Norwegian accent. It got better and better.
‘Well,’ Miska began, ‘I was having the shittiest of shitty days and I have to admit I let my guard down. So good work, team! I’m guessing you three were the take-down crew?’ she asked. Nobody answered. It was getting embarrassing. She suspected that they had some military experience between them, but it looked like three amateurs had captured her. That said, they hadn’t been mucking around. Emptying the magazines of an auto-shotgun loaded with sabot taser darts was a pretty sound plan.
Miska looked at Gosia.
‘Gun tramps?’ she asked.
‘Bounty hunters,’ the Native American rumbled.
‘Cool,’ Miska said. ‘Well, now you’re going to have to let me go or have the deaths of some six thousand people on your hands.’
‘Not our problem,’ the Asian woman said. Miska smiled at her but then turned the smile on Gosia.
‘No, but it is Gosia’s, unless she wants her honey to lose a quite vital lump of his cranium.’
‘Try it,’ Gosia told her.
‘No, because I don’t want to kill him yet. Besides, I’m sure the hold is shielded enough. Doesn’t matter, your gun tramps—’
‘Bounty hunters,’ the Native American repeated.
‘—will want their bounty, which means you’ll have to move me, and then the signal will find him. Even if it doesn’t there’s a threshold on how long I can be away before it triggers them all.’ Which was half true and half a bluff. It was a bit more complicated than that.
‘I told you last time,’ Gosia said leaning in close enough for Miska to practically taste the stale cigarette on her breath. ‘He’s better off dead than your slave.’
Miska narrowed her eyes. Then something occurred to her.<
br />
‘Where’s Nyukuti?’ she asked.
‘Who?’ the Asian woman asked.
‘The Aboriginal guy with me,’ she told them.
‘Left him on the street,’ the dwarf told her. ‘No bounty on him.’
Miska wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. If Vido had been monitoring then he would send people out to get him. If not, well, the Bastards weren’t popular on Waterloo Station at the moment. The best-case scenario would be Salik’s security people picking him up.
She squirmed around in the chair she had been tied to. It was similar to a dentist’s chair, only with straps. It was oddly comfortable, yet suspiciously stained.
‘I’m strapped into your sex chair, aren’t I?’ Miska asked Gosia.
The Asian woman smiled, the dwarf chuckled. Gosia slapped her. It was surprisingly hard.
‘Ow,’ Miska said. ‘So you’re going to let old what’s-his-face die, then? Fair enough.’ She’d have to find another way to escape.
‘No, you’re going to let all the Crimson Sisterhood on board the Hangman’s Daughter go,’ Gosia told her.
‘Shan’t,’ Miska replied. She may have been being childish but frankly this was almost a welcome break from just how bad a day she was having.
‘Yes you wi—’ Gosia started.
‘So we’re still in the Epsilon Eridani system then?’ Miska checked. She guessed that Gosia wouldn’t want to stray too far from where her people were. Gosia stared at her. The bounty hunters exchanged a few looks.
‘We’re going to dump you in a time-contracted torture sense program. You know as well as I do that everyone breaks eventually. So how long you want to suffer is up to you,’ Gosia told her.
‘This all right with you guys?’ she asked the bounty hunters. ‘Could mess up the trial.’
‘Not our problem, we’ll have been paid,’ the Asian woman told her. Miska had to admit that she had a point.
‘Well anyway, good luck trying to force me to trance in to your torture porn program. You’d need one hell of hacker to get past my counter—’