War Criminals

by Gavin Smith

  ‘I know,’ Hogg said. ‘Doesn’t recognise me at all, and I know the difference between genuinely not recognising someone and blanking them for some secret-squirrel bullshit.’

  ‘Hogg, are you lying to me?’ she demanded.

  ‘For what reason?’ he asked.

  Paranoia was creeping in. Was he someone’s agent? An operator? Had he killed her dad?

  ‘So what were you and my parents doing? How come you waited until now to tell me?’ Miska asked.

  ‘That’s a long conversation,’ he told her. ‘And we need to discuss quid pro quo.’

  And there it was, another grafting convict, Miska thought. She couldn’t say she blamed him.

  ‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  You and everyone else, she thought.

  The pitch of the boat’s engine changed, Miska felt the boat slow.

  ‘Miska?’ Corenbloom said from where he was standing by the rear Wader. ‘I think you need to come and see this.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, without taking her eyes off Hogg.

  ‘A breadcrumb,’ Corenbloom told her.

  Chapter 18

  It had started to rain. They had only heard it at first. A distant percussion on the canopy high above them. Miska knew from bitter experience that the water would build up and build up on the nearly impenetrable canopy, until there was enough weight to bend the huge leaves – and then the jungle would be filled with waterfalls. Some of them had enough volume of water behind them to do serious damage. Miska had seen mechs knocked over, gunships forced into the ground and boats sunk. It was just another hazard they would have to look out for. Along with a forest full of ex-special forces mercenaries, sequestered slaves, and plant-based bioborgs, Miska thought. But that wasn’t her problem, right now. Her problem was her own people.

  Ahead of them the river widened out again into a turgid, swampy area. The trees were smaller, though still huge; the canopy was lower, though still far above them, and now broken by the storm-brought waterfalls. The trees that dominated the swampland had silver coloured bark, much of it spotted with huge fungal growths and crawling mosses. Their root structures made Miska think of a loosely clenched hand with too many fingers. These were the ambulatory mangroves, the walking trees of Ephesus, though Miska knew that for the most part they moved too slowly for people to see. Deeper into the ‘mangrove’ swamp Miska could see the higher ground. There, stepped waterfalls rose up into the highlands of the imaginatively named Northern Mountains.

  They had found Resnick’s ‘flotilla’. Four boats a bit bigger than the Bastards’ own and a handful of other smaller and individual watercraft. They had been tied off to branches sticking out over the river. None of the legionnaires were looking at the boats, however. They weren’t even considering how much bigger Resnick’s force obviously was compared to theirs. All their attention was focused on the ‘breadcrumb’.

  ‘It’s called canoeing,’ Corenbloom said.

  Someone had nailed what Miska assumed was a member of Triple S (elite) to a tree trunk. He had been stripped to the waist. Had two gunshot wounds to his chest, close range, judging by the powder burns, and another close range V-shaped wound in his head. Miska had seen it before as well. It wasn’t just an execution. The close range, the upper forehead, the exposed brain matter, it was designed to mutilate the body. The corpse’s hand was pointing north.

  She glanced at Corenbloom. ‘Grig?’ she asked. He nodded. It seemed the Ultra was showing the way.

  ‘Kaneda, Hogg, I want you on the banks, check the tracks, I want to know how many Waders and which way they went. Go careful, Resnick’s the kind of asshole who’d leave booby traps behind.’ Hogg nodded, and both he and Kaneda leapt off the boat and onto the muddy bank.

  ‘Mass, move the boat upstream, find a place to tether it, and then you and Hemi get the Waders ready. I want the rest of you on watch,’ she told them. People started to move.

  Another half-naked member of Triple S (elite) had been nailed to a tree. He had two gunshot wounds to the chest and one in the head. It was called Failure Drill and a lot of special operation forces units taught it. Her dad taught it to the Legion. What her dad didn’t teach was to claw the bodies afterwards. This corpse was pointing north as well. Miska knew that a lot of the Leopard and Crocodile Society members had implanted claws in their fingers so she assumed this was Gunhir. She glanced over at Corenbloom in the other Wader a little way off. He was looking up at the body.

  Both the Waders were stood in a pool about halfway up a stepped waterfall. The going had been slow and uncomfortable. The hydraulic systems were anything but smooth, and without anything resembling a sensor system finding a solid footing was more luck than judgement. They had almost gone over more than once, and one of the legs had plunged into a sinkhole that had come close to taking them under. Nyukuti had been bounced out of the cupola, though he’d managed to hold on to the side. It was a more interesting journey than even Miska liked. The rain, or rather the sky waterfalls, were an added misery. The Waders’ cupolas were waterproof but that meant they held water inside as well. Each of the Waders had a pump but they just weren’t quite up to the job. As a result the Waders were slowly filling with water, to the point that Miska was starting to consider bailing. Not that they had any receptacles big enough to make such an activity worthwhile.

  All of them were wearing their rain ponchos but it didn’t matter how advanced the materials were, their wicking properties, whether they were designed to ‘breathe’, somehow the rain was finding its way inside. Miska was wet and cold, and even her normally upbeat mood was taking a beating.

  She knew the other seven legionnaires were less than happy too. Kaneda and Hogg had found tracks suggesting that twelve other Waders had gone north. With a minimum of four people to a Wader, that meant they were looking at as many as forty-eight enemy combatants, if not more, the majority of whom had special forces training and experience. Miska had tried to reassure them that they were just going to have a look, that if the opposition was too much they would turn back. They hadn’t seemed very reassured and if Miska was honest she wasn’t going to look, she wanted Resnick dead.

  ‘Boss?’ Mass asked.

  ‘We keep going,’ she told him.

  Mass started swearing at the Wader as it lurched forward.

  It seemed that the mangrove swampland was a series of broad waterlogged terraces underneath the jungle canopy. They had come to a broad open area at the top of the stepped waterfalls they had just negotiated. The water was no longer turquoise up here. It was a white/grey colour and full of floating tree debris brought down by the torrential rainfall. Some of it was big enough to threaten the telescoped legs of the Waders.

  They had found another corpse pointing north. Half-naked, he had been very extensively beaten to death. Miska had seen victims of mob violence that looked less beaten. His torso looked like a solid mass of bloodied bruise, his face a pulped, unrecognisable mess, and he’d been scalped.

  Hemi brought his Wader up close to Mass’s. Miska looked across at Corenbloom.

  ‘Kaczmar?’ Miska asked.

  Corenbloom nodded.

  ‘The scalping’s new,’ he added.

  She just nodded, there wasn’t much else to say.

  ‘Keep some distance between the Waders!’ she called. ‘Mass, follow the arrow.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Mass muttered, shaking his head.

  Everyone’s got a line they don’t want to cross, Miska thought.

  She glanced around at Hogg on the heavy machine gun. He looked less than pleased as well. Nyukuti, on the grenade machine gun, was just looking up at the body thoughtfully as the Wader set off on its lurching way again. She could only see the back of Raff’s head on the twin SAW mount at the back of the Wader.

  ‘Well that’s perfectly fucking horrible,’ Hogg muttered behind her.

  Miska hadn’t been watching ahead, like she should have b
een. She kept seeing movement in her peripheral vision. It didn’t track with the kind of movement that she would expect from people trying to be sneaky, nor did it seem like boats or archaic mechs. Instead the movement seemed to be coming from the trees. But she could not be sure if it was her mind playing tricks on her or not. Either way it was a serious breach of concentration.

  She turned round to look at the latest directional atrocity. The body had been butchered in the truest sense of the word. All the choicest cuts and ‘edible’ viscera had been laid out on a flat part of one of the roots. Teeth marks in the kidney let them know that a bite had been taken out of it. The body had been scalped as well. The arm was pointing north again, up another stepped waterfall that Miska wasn’t looking forward to traversing.

  ‘This is sick,’ Mass said.

  ‘If it’s frightening you then imagine what it’s doing to them,’ Miska pointed out, though she was reasonably sure that Resnick’s people weren’t seeing these bodies. That might make it worse. The Nightmare Squad were hunting them. Picking them off one at a time, making them feel helpless.

  The Wader rocked from the bow wave of Hemi’s approaching machine. Miska didn’t like having both the Waders so close together but if they couldn’t trust their comms then anything too complex to be relayed by hand signal had to be done verbally. She could see Kasmeyer had gone pale in the other archaic mech.

  Miska’s head shot round, convinced that she’d seen something moving in her periphery, again. She’d noticed Hogg, Nyukuti, and Kaneda in the other Wader had done the same a couple of times.

  ‘Bean,’ Corenbloom called over to her. It was clear that the disgraced FBI profiler had been studying his fellow inmates. ‘Though again the scalping is new. I suspect that Kaczmar and Bean are starting to bond.’ Miska could tell by the tone of his voice that Corenbloom didn’t like the idea of this. Miska wasn’t sure she liked it herself.

  This is what you wanted, she told herself, your own pet atrocity. Well, this is what it looks like.

  ‘I think this is the Ultra testing his people,’ Corenbloom suggested. That made a degree of sense as well. Make sure they were up to the job. Though she also wondered how much of this was revenge for Triple S trying to copycat their ‘work’. Miska nodded. She signalled to Hemi to take the point in his Wader as they started their ascent.

  Jesus Christ, Miska thought. She heard muttering from behind her in the Wader’s cupola, retching from the other Wader. Kasmeyer. She was beginning to have serious doubts about him, though she guessed that throwing up was probably a perfectly reasonable response to what they were looking at.

  It looked like a medical diagram. Skin and flesh peeled back, the body’s interior revealed, displayed, but somehow it reminded Miska of a pinned butterfly she’d once seen in one of her dad’s pre-FHC vizzes.

  ‘This will be the last one,’ she said out loud. The Ultra had done this himself. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  You knew he was a killer, she told herself. Only that wasn’t quite true. She had known that he was a monster.

  They were on another broad, open, waterlogged, terraced plateau. Through a rare gap in the canopy above them, probably the result of the torrential rain, Miska could see the shadows of the mountains. It was daytime again; they’d travelled through the night and Miska was starting to feel the fatigue seep into her bones. She had seen the others yawn as well. They’d had precious little sleep in the last forty-eight hours.

  The body was pointing towards land to the north and west of them. A fungal forest was growing on the muddy banks. Miska wondered just how close they were to the source of the Turquoise.

  Lightning threw the distant mountains into sharper relief. Miska looked away from the flare and saw an inhuman face in the water. It sank into the greyish murk.

  ‘Mass, hull down!’ she ordered. ‘Check the water!’ She signalled the other Wader to do the same thing. The Wader started lowering itself as thunder rolled across the sky. It was a dangerous move. If they were about to be attacked from the water with the stilt-like legs extended they were just too exposed, one good hit and the Wader was done for. Though for all she knew whatever she had just seen in the water was this very second attaching demo charges to one of the legs.

  ‘Incom—’ Raff managed before cannon rounds flew overhead and impacted into the tree with the corpse, making fibrous wounds in the wood. The corpse was now little more than a few limbs nailed to the tree as green tracers flew overhead. Miska glanced behind them as the Wader’s cupola sank into the water, three-quarters submerged. She could see cannon round tracers arcing in towards them from the distance. They were splashing into the water behind Hemi’s Wader as well. The Wader’s sudden loss of height was momentarily confusing the long distance fire but Miska knew that wouldn’t last long. They were taking fire from at least three different positions south of them, back the way they had come. Judging by the cannon fire, three of the Triple S Waders had skirted around behind them, or been camouflaged well enough to hide from them as they passed. That wouldn’t have been difficult in the poor light and heavy rain with no decent optics or sensors.

  ‘Mass, get this Wader moving and keep it moving, swing round a hundred and eighty degrees and back it up towards the land,’ Miska shouted. ‘Nyukuti, signal the others to do the same, I want you to hold off on the grenade launcher until they’ve closed with us.’ She didn’t bother waiting for a reply. She knew they’d follow orders. As they turned, Mass’s driving station swivelling with the Wader so he could face the direction they were moving in, she heard Hogg open up with the Heavy Machine Gun. Miska traversed the huge 20mm cannon as far to the right as she could, looking through the rudimentary optical sight built into the slit in the weapon’s ballistic shield. Water was lapping over the cupola as Mass awkwardly manoeuvred the Wader round. He was trying to step to the side as well but the water resistance was making that difficult.

  More tracers now but the tracers were only one in every three of the inbound rounds. Hogg called out a position. Miska followed his tracers and saw movement about a quarter of a mile from them to the south. She magnified her vision and started firing, aiming high and leading the movement, giving the Triple S Waders time to walk into the falling cannon rounds.

  Miska saw cannon rounds splash down in front of the Wader. Saw their wake in the water and heard them thump against the armour having been slowed down enough to be harmless. The Wader was mostly facing south now. It was at just enough of an angle for both Miska and Hogg to fire. She was aware of Corenbloom firing the 20mm cannon and Kasmeyer firing the HMG in the other Wader.

  ‘Raff, you’re rear security!’ she shouted over the dull bass boom of the cannons and the higher and faster shots from the HMGs, hoping that the CIA agent’s noise filters would enable him to hear it. She was very conscious that they could be backing into an ambush. ‘Mass, use the trees for cover! Nyukuti, tell Hemi to do the same! Then I want you on local security, watch the water and the trees around us!’ She fired again, and then used the pedals, which were now underwater, to move the cannon around and fire at one of the other Triple S Waders. Mass moved the Wader behind a tree and Miska had to stop firing.

  ‘Boss!’ Hogg practically screamed in her ear. ‘In the trees we can spot and snipe!’ Miska glanced at him. She wanted Hogg where she could keep an eye on him but she knew she was being selfish.

  Hemi’s Wader was making a huge bow wave as it splashed through the water trying to move behind cover. Incoming cannon and HMG fire tore up the bark of the enormous tree they were making for. She saw rounds splashing into the water, others sparked off the Wader’s armour. She assumed the latter were HMG rounds and not cannon rounds. When they’d made it behind the relative and temporary safety of the trees Miska stood up and signalled for Kaneda to spot from the trees. The sniper pulled his sodden ghillie suit over himself and leapt off the Wader. Tiny molecular sized hooks on his gloves, kneepads and boots helped him scale the tree like a spider. Hogg did the same. The
y looked like large, wet, moving patches of moss scaling the huge trees. The firing had stopped but Miska knew that the Triple S Waders would use the lull to close with them. Just for a moment she thought of how much easier this would all be with modern weapons. I mean we might be dead by now, but at least it would’ve been over quickly. The Bastards hadn’t had much in the way of decent weapons when they’d assaulted Faigroe Station. On Barney Prime they’d had to make do with modified civilian weapons. Just once she’d like to be able to bring all the toys to bear on a problem.

  ‘What’s the plan, boss?’ Mass asked from the driver’s seat.

  ‘Let Hogg and Kaneda spot for us while these Triple S assholes close. Then, when we know where they are and they’re in close enough range, we make a run for dry land laying down as much ordnance as we can,’ she told them. High-noon-style gunfights like this were mostly a zero sum game and three on two lessened their odds considerably. All they had going for them was Hogg and Kaneda acting as spotters.

  ‘Raff, anything behind us?’ she asked.

  ‘Not that I can see,’ he replied. It wasn’t the most reassuring reply.

  ‘Nyukuti?’

  ‘No fish,’ the stand-over man replied. She knew he was smiling by the sound of his voice.

  The face in the water! Just for a moment she convinced herself that she had imagined it but she knew she hadn’t. If she hadn’t seen the face, ordered the Waders hull down in the water, then Triple S would have had them dead to rights. Was it a warning? she wondered. She tried to remember what it had looked like but she had only caught a glimpse of it, just a sense of the inhuman.

  She heard a whistle from above her. She looked up to see Hogg free his hands from his ghillie suit to signal the position and distance of the three incoming Waders.