by Gavin Smith
It wasn’t what her dad wanted to hear. It wasn’t how military command worked, for a good reason. She glanced over at Mass. She remembered what he had said about Red. She might have been in command because of the N-bombs, but she wasn’t the Hangman’s Daughter’s ‘daddy’.
‘Something to add, Captain?’ she asked. Mass took this as invitation to join them.
‘Torricone?’ he asked. That was exactly the conversation she didn’t want to have publicly.
‘What about him?’ she asked.
‘What’s going to happen to him?’
‘What gives you the right to …’ her dad started.
Miska held up her hand and her dad went quiet.
What gives him the right? she thought. Everything that Grig had just said. ‘The UN is going to cut his head open. He’s evidence of sequestration.’
‘And then what?’ Mass demanded.
‘What do you want me to say, Mass? He does us the most use in the hands of the UN. New Sun removed his N-bomb when they sequestered him. The UN will probably give him over to the Barney Prime authorities where he’ll either serve out the rest of his bid, or more likely get freed on appeal.’
‘He needs to die,’ Mass said. Miska wasn’t sure whether Mass was actually angry with Torricone for defecting and for the fight they’d had, or not. Either way this was a power play. He was trying to weaken her position.
‘I’m not declaring war on the UN,’ she told him.
‘Send him,’ Mass said nodding at the Ultra. The Ultra looked up but didn’t say anything.
‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ Miska warned.
‘Sorry, boss, all I’m saying is that there’s a solution if you want it,’ he told her. She could see that a number of the nearby legionnaires had stopped what they were doing to listen. ‘I mean, if Torricone is subject to the same rules as the rest of us.’ Mass was clearly playing to the audience now. She almost told him to learn how to make a quieter power play. Like Vido. But then it struck her that they were probably playing good Mafiosi, bad Mafiosi.
‘Why wouldn’t he be?’ Miska asked, narrowing her eyes. She knew what was coming.
‘Because you’re in love with him,’ Mass told her.
‘You’re way out of line,’ her dad growled.
‘We all know it,’ Mass said.
‘Even if I was, it’s none of your fucking business,’ Miska told him, trying not to think too much about watching Torricone get marched away by Salik’s security, and the accompanying ache that memory brought. ‘But I’ll be honest, I don’t think you’re quite the observer of human behaviour you think you are.’
The Ultra stood up as Miska approached. She felt strong arms wrap around her as her own slid around his corded neck.
She kissed him because she was angry at Mass. She kissed him because nobody would try and shank the Ultra in the showers. She kissed him because he was pretty. Most importantly she kissed him because she wanted to. Despite the stench of chemicals he somehow tasted of spearmint. It started as a performance but she felt herself responding.
She broke the clinch to the sound of catcalls. There was something comedic about a Cyclops war droid not knowing quite where to look.
She couldn’t help but smile. It was less than subtle but she knew it would take some of the wind out of Mass’s argument. Then she saw the hurt expression on the Ultra’s face.
She had stimmed herself to stay awake long enough to strip down and clean all her kit. Then another, more thorough, shower in fungicide. It made her skin stop itching. It burned instead. Finally she made it to a real shower. Then the exhaustion engulfed her and she started to really feel the pain from her various injuries, the ache from her muscles. Finally she allowed herself to think about Torricone and she slid down the wall to the floor in the shower room.
Miska awoke some sixteen hours later. She had managed to make it as far as her bunk aboard the Little Jimmy before she’d crashed. She was awoken by a blinking comms message in her IVD.
‘What is it, Dad?’ she asked across the comms link. She knew she couldn’t go back to sleep. She had to follow up payment, authorise shore leave, see about getting the battle damage to the mechs fixed and the numerous other things that were involved in running your own private penal legion.
‘Salik wants to see you,’ her dad told her.
‘Okay, tell him I’ll come and see him when I get the chance.’
‘He’s outside.’
The airlock slid open. Miska frowned. Salik was there with one of his security detail and four of his ridiculous liveried servitor droids. Two were carrying ornate chairs, the third a similarly ornate table, and the fourth a picnic hamper.
‘I initially thought canapés and champagne, but decided that a submarine sandwich and fine beer might be more appropriate,’ Salik announced. They were sat in the middle of the otherwise empty hangar deck.
‘You were right,’ Miska said through a mouthful of sandwich, though she did like champagne. She hadn’t realised how hungry she was. Salik was drinking tea and eating more refined sandwiches. They even had the crusts cut off. ‘Would have thought you’d be pleased to see the back of me?’
Salik gave her question some thought.
‘Well you have been … difficult … but I spend most of my working life trying to hide my revulsion of people like Campbell … I’m not sure I like what you do here but I also know that I profit from the misery of conflict so I am in no position to judge you, and you are refreshingly honest and straight forward.’
‘Wow,’ she said, and took a swig of her beer and then another mouthful of the sandwich. ‘Thanks for the testimonial, but so?’
‘I have a proposition for you,’ he told her. ‘Let me represent you as an agent. I can find you work. Find free ports that will accept the Daughter, run interference for you with the colonies, and find employers that otherwise wouldn’t touch you. I can open up whole new markets for you, get you on preferred suppliers’ lists.’
Miska stopped chewing, swallowed and took another swig of the beer. It was really good beer. It was certainly an attractive offer. It would take some of the worry out of wondering where the next job was coming from.
‘Despite the ship, despite the number of inmates, I don’t think we could muster more than two companies. We’ve got a few mechs and a few combat exoskeletons but we’re short on vehicles, air support and shuttles. There are better equipped, and if I’m honest, more professional units out there. Why us?’
‘Because you had considerably less than this when you started, because you play fair, because you scare people, and because I see a great deal of potential. With me as a mentor …’
‘You know I have an overabundance of paternalistic advisers here?’ she asked.
‘A poor choice of words,’ he admitted with a degree of chagrin.
‘Wouldn’t it be a conflict of interest?’
‘You would simply be a preferred supplier for conflicts I’m running, nothing unusual about that.’
‘We get the final say on who we work for? I’m becoming asshole-averse.’
Salik looked a little pained. ‘Ideally I will act as buffer between you and the assholes,’ he told her, ‘but yes, you would have final say.’
‘Jobs we find ourselves?’ she asked, thinking about Raff.
‘I get no cut.’
‘How much for the ones you get us?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes as she took another bite of her sandwich.
‘Twenty-five per cent,’ he told her.
‘Fuck off!’ she said with a mouthful of bread, meat, cheese and peppers. ‘Twenty-five for a series of conversations while we risk getting our asses blown off? Ten per cent.’
‘Twenty.’
‘Fifteen.’
Salik didn’t look entirely happy.
‘Agreed,’ he finally said. ‘I’m not sure how profitable this will be, but if nothing else it’ll be interesting.’
They had talked about the evacuation of Ephesus for a little while. A
s Councillor Omiata had suspected, quite a few people had chosen to stay, including the councillor herself. Salik suspected that the Maasai colonists were already in contact with Artemis but nobody else was, so there was a panic, particularly from the various mercenary units, to get off-world before the lights were switched off.
After Salik had left, Miska had found herself sat on the deck leaning against the bulkhead close to one of the airlocks. She could make out the letters E and C scratched into the metal. She was sipping one of the beers that Salik had left behind.
She was aware of the guard droid’s approach but she only looked up when it crouched down next to her. It had a viz screen mounted on its head. It was one of the droids her dad used for PT, exhorting the legionnaires to greater effort through the medium of creative verbal abuse. At the moment, however, the image on the screen was that of a concerned father.
‘Breakfast beer?’ he asked. It was her third but she didn’t feel like telling him that. ‘You need to get that eye replaced.’ The guard droid pointed at the eye patch dressing she wore over her left eye.
‘I’ll add it to my list of things to do.’
‘You okay?’
‘It was a rough one, Dad. I don’t mind being shot at, stabbed, punched, kicked and strangled, but I didn’t like the way they came after us on this one.’
‘It’s something you may have to get used to,’ he told her.
‘As long as people realise the consequences,’ she said. Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Then she looked up at the screen. ‘Come to tell me I handled this wrong?’
The image on the viz screen just shrugged. ‘You’re commanding unconventionally, but Grig has a point. I’m uncomfortable with the Nightmare Squad but you know that. Frankly, you were up against some pretty heavy odds and you lost a reasonably small amount of people.’
‘If you don’t include the sequestered,’ she muttered.
‘They made their choice. I heard you lost Nyukuti to friendly fire.’
‘Someone sent Kasmeyer after me. And Hogg knew something. He knew you from the Occupation.’
‘Me?’ her dad asked.
‘He was part of the resistance.’
‘I never …’ he started. ‘Edited memory.’
Miska just nodded
‘You think someone killed Hogg?’ he asked
‘I had the Doc check his wounds,’ Miska told her dad.
‘Is that why Corenbloom pulled all the blades from the guys you went after Resnick with from the armoury?’
‘Yes. Hogg was killed with a printed USMC pattern fighting knife—’
‘Just like the kind we give to the legionnaires,’ her dad finished.
‘Kaneda, Grig, Kasmeyer, Hogg, Bean and Corenbloom all carried one. Everyone else had their own blade. Doc checked each of their blades against the wounds, no match.’
‘Raff?’ her dad asked.
‘Nobody was paying that much attention but—’
‘It’s not a difficult knife for anyone in the Legion to get hold of, and you couldn’t surveil them in Artemis’s no-tech zone. I take it that Triple S didn’t carry the same kind of blades?’ he asked. Miska just shook her head. ‘So an inside job?’
‘Yeah, and one of the guys I’ve got investigating it is one of the suspects.’ Though she was pretty sure that it hadn’t been Corenbloom.
‘And you think this is to do with me?’ her dad asked. He sounded uneasy.
‘I think all of it is, somehow. I mean it makes sense. Think of the circles we move in, the things we do and we … I don’t know … we seem to keep bumping up against Mars, against the Small Gods.’
‘When’s this over?’ her dad asked.
Miska looked up at the screen in surprise.
‘You know when this is over. When I find the people who killed you.’
‘And what about the people who ordered it, and their bosses, and their bosses. You going to kill everybody, Miska?’
Was she? Right now she just wanted to rest.
She had lain on top of one of the Centaur APCs and tranced in. She had done the bare minimum she had to get done on that particular day in the CP at Camp Reiman. It had mostly been admin stuff. She had made an appointment with a ’ware clinic that Salik had recommended, to get her eye replaced. Even doing the bare minimum, it had seemed like a long day. Having tranced out, looking up at the hangar deck’s ceiling, she knew she needed some downtime, some time to heal and get back into a solid PT routine.
She sighed when she saw the blinking comms link. She opened it.
‘You’ve got be fucking kidding me!’ she snapped. She rolled off the top of the APC and landed on the deck, crouched like a cat. She howled in pain. In her anger she had forgotten just how bashed up she was. She managed to recover enough to storm across the hangar deck, relieved that she was armed.
The exterior airlock door hissed open.
‘Seriously, have you got a death wish?’ Miska demanded.
‘We need to talk,’ Torricone told her.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! Miska thought. Such a bad idea!
Torricone was curled up against her back, asleep, his arm draped over hers in her cramped bunk on the Little Jimmy.
Also by Gavin G. Smith from Gollancz
Veteran
War in Heaven
The Age of Scorpio
A Quantum Mythology
The Beauty of Destruction Crysis: Escalation
The Bastard Legion
The Bastard Legion: Friendly Fire The Bastard Legion: War Criminals
Co-authored with Stephen Deas, as Gavin Deas: Elite: Wanted
Empires: Extraction
Empires: Infiltration
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Gollancz an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © Gavin G. Smith 2018
The moral right of Gavin G. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 21730 0
www.gavingsmith.com
www.gollancz.co.uk
Table of Contents
Dedication
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Also by Gavin G. Smith from Gollancz
Copyright
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