War Criminals Read online

  Dedication

  To Phill, Abi, Merrill & Maisie

  WAR CRIMINALS

  BOOK THREE OF THE BASTARD LEGION

  GAVIN G. SMITH

  Contents Dedication

  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

  Chapter 1

  Miska drifted through the humid air. She was rendered almost invisible by the reactive camouflage of both the stealth chute and her own ghillie suit. The air reeked of the wet, perfumed rot that suffused the moon. Epsilon Eridani B was visible in the night sky overhead, the streaked bands of cloud glowing red from the reflected light of the system’s main sequence star. Miska could make out the vast mega storms that wrapped themselves around the gas giant. The planet was just a little larger than Jupiter. The moon’s position was such that the huge chunks of ice and rock that formed Epsilon Eridani B’s rings were clearly visible in the night sky. Miska suspected that if she knew where to look then Waterloo Station would just be another star, albeit a large and fast-moving one.

  Triple S’s big mistake had been the deforestation of the rear echelon areas of New Ephesus that they controlled. The rest of the conflict was being fought under the cover of the thick foliage of the monstrous, skyscraper-sized trees that covered much of the surface of the jungle moon. Miska was learning that Stirling Security Solutions’ biggest weakness was their over-confidence. No, not over-confidence, arrogance. The military contractors had assumed that the mech base was too far behind their lines to be at risk. Miska intended to prove them wrong.

  She dropped through the muggy night air towards one of the mech cradles. The thirty-foot-tall, roughly humanoid armoured fighting vehicle was upright and surrounded by a scaffolding structure. Both the cradle and the mech itself had been raised on hydraulics from the bed of the heavy-duty low loader truck parked directly behind the mech. There were eight of the low loaders and mech cradles, in two rows of four, but only seven of the Martian Military Industries Medusa-class mechs. Miska suspected that the missing eighth was in the concrete hangar at the end of the two rows, presumably undergoing maintenance or being refitted. That complicated things slightly.

  Beyond the hangar were two large Harpy-class heavy lift drop shuttles. The armoured behemoths, their huge engines mounted in two domed nacelles, were designed to carry mechs. The two rows of mechs were facing each other. It was sloppy. They should have been facing the perimeter. Not that the base was unprotected. Vehicle-mounted multi-role missile launchers and trailer-mounted point defence systems spotted the perimeter at regular intervals.

  Miska checked the Internal Visual Display superimposed over her vision. Her IVD overlaid the position of each of the thirty-six men of her Sneaky Bastards platoon. The perimeter wasn’t fenced but it was mined. Raff, her CIA handler, had provided a schematic of the mines. There was a further complication in that motion detectors covered the area of the minefield. There was only one real way to defeat motion detectors and that was to move very, very slowly. To that end the Sneaky Bastard platoon was formed of burglars, sneak thieves and other criminals who had demonstrated nerves of steel and a great deal of patience. All of them picked from the six-thousand-strong penal legion she had formed out of the inmates on board the prison barge the Hangman’s Daughter.

  The Sneaky Bastards had spent hours negotiating the minefield under the cover of their reactive camouflage ghillie suits. The whole thing had taken so long that all of them wore adult diapers. The minefield’s schematics would appear in the Sneaky Bastards’ own IVDs, or the head-up displays on their helmets’ goggles, and they were running a simple algorithm that told them if they were moving fast enough to risk discovery by the motion detectors. The algorithm erred heavily on the side of caution. Even so it must have been nerve-wracking as hell, which was borne out by the biometric data she was receiving from her soldiers. She guessed those that weren’t showing an elevated heartbeat and respiration were the clinical psychopaths in the platoon.

  Sneaking in through the minefield wasn’t something that Miska had the patience for. Lack of patience was one of the reasons she’d never wanted to be a sniper. That and the diapers. She had jumped from one of the Pegasus assault shuttles some distance away and glided silently into the base.

  The mech’s armoured head and the top of the cradle were less than twenty feet below her now. She could see a guard standing on the highest level next to the Medusa’s head. He wore full combat armour, an inertial suit with hard plate over the top and a high-threat helmet, but his carbine was slung. Even from above Miska could tell by his body language that he was bored and oblivious. Miska drew the SIG Sauer GP-992 from the drop holster on her thigh. The power of her gauss pistol was dialled down so the rounds would be silent. That meant they didn’t have the velocity to go through the guard’s armour, which in turn meant that she only had the tiny target of the guard’s unprotected face and currently she was looking at the top of his very protected head. She had to time this just right.

  ‘Hey,’ she said quietly. Her feet were level with his head. He looked up. If he saw anything at all it would only be disturbances in the air as the reactive camouflage struggled to keep up with its surroundings. Miska fired the SIG twice, the crosshairs from the gauss pistol’s smartlink overlaying the guard’s face in her IVD. Two red holes blossomed on his face as her boots touched the composite surface of the cradle. The guard started to topple. She reached for the guard to lower him quietly to the catwalk. Miska’s wiry build was a mass of compact muscle but, even boosted, at the end of the day she was small. Some might even say petite. The guard’s dead weight shouldn’t have been a problem but just as she reached for him a sudden gust of wind caught her chute. It pulled her over the mech catwalk’s railings. She managed to keep a hold of the dead guard with one hand, her gauss pistol still in the other. The body was half hung over the railing as her chute blew around in the humid wind.

  ‘Shit,’ she hissed.

  ‘Den?’ a voice asked from below.

  ‘Fuck my life,’ Miska added.

  ‘You okay?’

  Miska heard the first voice confer with another. She knew that the moment the wind died she would swing back into the mech and probably pull the body over and they would be blown. She touched the SIG to the drop holster riding her thigh. The holster’s smart material sucked the pistol in and she reached into her webbing for the chemical reaction wand. She touched the wand to the stealth chute and turned it into carbon dust. Immediately she started to drop, swinging towards the mech cradle’s superstructure. She let go of the guard’s body before she pulled it off the cradle and reached for the superstructure. Her fingertips scrabbled at carbon composite, her ghillie suit getting in the way. She was falling. She managed to get a tenuous grip on one of the spars with her right hand. To her ears it sounded like she’d kicked a drum kit down a flight of stairs. Miska found herself face to face with another guard. She knew he couldn’t see her but he would have heard the noise and she suspected that her reactive camouflage would make the night air look like a pair of curtains blowing in the wind. An expression of surprise crossed the guard’s face as he tried to make sense of what was going on. He was, nevertheless
, bringing his Kopis gauss carbine up. Miska knew that standard operating procedure for dealing with someone concealed with reactive camouflage was to fill the air with flechettes fired from the carbine’s 30mm under-barrel grenade launcher. That would hurt.

  Miska was holding on to the cradle’s superstructure with her right hand. The drop holster was on her right thigh. Even with boosted reflexes she would be too slow but you had to try, didn’t you? She started to move. The barrel of the grenade launcher looked huge. She saw the guard’s mouth open to cry for help, or subvocalise a comms message. A crossbow bolt appeared in the guard’s cheek. He spat blood through newly broken teeth and collapsed to the ground, far too noisily for Miska’s tastes. She didn’t need to check her IVD to know who had fired the shot. Hogg, Vernon, consecutive life sentences for conspiracy to commit kidnapping, aggravated vandalism, mayhem and assassination. Hogg had been a member of the New Weather Underground terrorist organisation and was an occasional penal legion conscientious objector. She might have enslaved them all and implanted nano-explosives in their heads, but combat was only for those who wanted it. Though they did get shore leave and spending money for combat time. On this occasion he had agreed to active service because it allowed him to ‘kill corporate scumbags’. A member of the Sneaky Bastards’ first squad, he was the only legionnaire armed with a printed compound crossbow.

  Miska heard boots clattering on the walkway below as a third guard ran up the ramp to investigate the noise. The only sound the suppressed, subsonic round fired from a slugthrower made was the metal-on-metal of the rifle’s internal mechanism. The noise came from the ground close to the mech cradle. Miska heard a grunt, followed by a clatter, as the third guard hit the deck. Again, making too much noise.

  ‘Shh,’ Miska whispered to herself as she climbed onto the catwalk. She checked to see who’d fired. According to her IVD Kaneda, Atsushi was stood on the cleared ground a little way from the mech cradle, covering it with his weapon. Even with the low light amplification of her artificial eyes Miska couldn’t see Kaneda because the young bōsōzoku gang-member-turned-sniper was concealed by his own reactive camouflage ghillie suit. Hogg was a little way from Kaneda, by the corner of the neighbouring mech cradle. Hogg and Kaneda had their own problems, however. Two spider sentry drones, basically gauss squad automatic weapons with thermal imaging lenses and six legs, had skittered round the mech. The drones were searching for the two Sneaky Bastards. A third joined them. This one, however, made for the mech cradle and started climbing.

  ‘Fuck, shit!’ Miska muttered. She could hear the spider making its way slowly up the cradle towards her. Then it went quiet. She checked Kaneda and Hogg’s position on her IVD. She could see the two spiders were slowly edging towards them. Their audio sensors must be pretty impressive, she decided. Kaneda’s biometrics suggested that the sniper was completely calm. Hogg’s showed a different story. Miska assumed that the spider drone on the cradle with her had stopped moving, that it was listening.

  Miska loosened her M187 Tyler Optics laser carbine on its sling before bringing it to her shoulder. She tapped her toe on the catwalk and heard the metal-on-metal skittering noise as the spider sentry drone ran towards her.

  ‘Hangman-One-Actual to all Bastard call signs, I am compromised, going hot,’ she said over the hitherto silent comms net. The spider drone appeared at the top of the ramp. The reactive ghillie suit hid her from its lenses, momentarily. The heat-dampening properties of her inertial armour hid her from its thermal imaging, momentarily. She squeezed the trigger. The mech cradle was bathed in hot red light. Air particles exploded between the barrel of the carbine and the drone as she fired a three-round burst of harsh light. Superheated composites exploded and the drone collapsed to the ground.

  Immediately Miska was forced to duck down as the other two spider drones that had been hunting for Kaneda and Hogg started suppressing her position with long bursts from their gauss SAWs. Electromagnetically powered rounds tore up the cradle all around her. The firing lessened and Miska risked a look. One of the drones was receiving hit after hit fired by the still-hidden Kaneda, but the subsonic rounds were struggling to penetrate its armour. Both the spider drones on the ground were attempting to acquire Kaneda. Miska fired a three-round burst at the other drone, and it exploded. The remaining one turned its SAW towards her. A crossbow bolt lodged in the spider’s SAW’s feed mechanism and then exploded. The wreckage of the drone slumped to the ground.

  ‘Sneaky-One-Seven to Hangman-One-Actual, I’m coming up,’ Kaneda told her over comms.

  ‘Understood,’ Miska answered. In her IVD she was aware of the Sneaky Bastards platoon breaking down into squads and then fire teams. She assumed that Triple S’s troops in the hangar and the shuttles had been thrown into an uproar but she couldn’t see or hear anything yet.

  Miska moved quickly to the Medusa-class mech’s hermetically sealed external hatch. She flicked the ghillie suit over her head, knelt down and attached a lock burner to the hatch, feeling the camouflaged ghost of Kaneda pass her as she did so. Now she could hear gunfire, the hypersonic scream of gauss weapons, an explosion that sounded like a 30mm fragmentation grenade going off. She readied her carbine before turning her back to the hatch, feeling like she always did in situations like this: that everything was taking too long. The lock burner finished its work and the mech’s external hatch sprang open. There was a disturbance in the air as Hogg joined her by the open hatch, watching her back while she entered the mech.

  Miska moved into the war machine’s cramped cockpit, situated in its heavily armoured chest area. She sat on the ergonomically designed chair, felt it shifting into a comfortable configuration, noting, not for the first time, how much more comfortable Martian Military Industries fighting vehicles were compared to any others she had experienced. Miska closed her eyes.

  Now we get to see if Raff’s access codes work, she thought. Because if they didn’t, this operation was going to go badly wrong.

  She used one of the codes that Raff had given her and tranced into the mech’s net.

  Miska appeared in the virtual representation of the mech as a small, spiky, angry-looking cartoon version of herself. Her image was ghostly and transparent, the visual manifestation of the stealth programs she was running. Only Miska could see her icon, in theory anyway. She was carrying a club and wearing a pre-Final Human Conflict ‘steel pot’ helmet with the words ‘Make war not peace!’ written on it.

  The mech’s icon looked like a giant faceless samurai wearing armour constructed of ultra-modern stealth material.

  For the purposes of viewing the mech base’s communications network, the Medusa’s icon’s chest cavity was transparent. The mech base’s net architecture was all smooth, stealthy, black ultratech lines and oddly subdued neon. It was doubtless designed by some overpaid military net architects to look professional and intimidating. It just looked like they were trying too hard. The base’s net was an isolated system. There was only virtual wasteland around the stealth samurai figures representing the mechs, the data fortress that was the hangar, and the oddly hi-tech anachronisms of the cannons and ship’s boats that represented the base’s defensive weapon systems and Harpy heavy drop shuttles.

  Subdued beams of flashing neon light represented the, presumably panicked, comms messages being relayed back and forth as it became apparent to the Triple S personnel that the base was being attacked. The isolated net’s intrusion countermeasures were on full alert, a dome of black fire rising up around the network – but it didn’t matter. Miska was already in and nobody seemed to be paying her transparent cartoon icon the slightest bit of interest. She pulled one of her fuzzy worms out of the pocket of her battle dress trousers. The worm was transparent, just like her, and she placed it on the virtual radio that represented the mech’s comms systems.

  ‘I’ll just put this here,’ she whispered to herself. Immediately the worm, containing Raff’s access codes and a high-spec virus designed to suborn weapon systems, started to b
urrow. Cartoon Miska smiled and tranced out.

  She was out of the seat and heading for the hatch as soon as her eyes opened, and she almost tripped over the nearly invisible Hogg on trance overwatch. Outside, everything was going smoothly if you ignored the on-going fire fight and the fact that she’d hoped to suborn the base’s systems before Triple S had even known the Bastards were there. She made her way quickly up to the top of the mech cradle.

  Kaneda was kneeling down, his ghillie suit thrown over his head so he could better see what he was doing. His accurised heavy barrel M-19 designated marksman’s rifle was leaning against the catwalk’s railing. Miska noted that the integral suppressor had been pulled back and replaced with a gauss push, designed to electromagnetically help the slugthrower’s rounds into the hypersonic.

  Kaneda had a case open on the floor in front of him and was rapidly assembling a Bofors rail sniper rifle. The sniper was a handsome, fresh-faced, wiry Japanese man in his early twenties. His air of youth had dissipated somewhat since the death of his abusive boss, the Yakuza lieutenant Teramoto Shigeru, at Kaneda’s hands. Teramoto’s death had apparently been the result of a ‘friendly fire’ incident. Now, as Miska watched Kaneda screw the long barrel into the sniper rifle and attach a gyroscopic stabiliser to the mounting rail, she caught glimpses of the irezumi tattoos that denoted the sniper’s graduation from bōsōzoku gang member to fully-fledged member of the Yakuza. It appeared he was going up in the world.

  ‘You should be able to do that under the ghillie suit, Kaneda,’ Miska told him as she hunched down by the mech’s head and took stock of the situation.

  ‘I can,’ Kaneda told her as he finished assembling the rifle, ‘but this is quicker.’ Kaneda pulled the ghillie suit back over his head and disappeared, except for a few disturbances in the air. He dragged the extended sniper’s sleeve over the long rifle and that too disappeared. Miska was only aware of him taking position on the cradle because of her boosted hearing.