The Bastard Legion: Friendly Fire

Book 0: The Bastard Legion

by Gavin G. Smith

Genres: Action & Adventure; Science Fiction; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

Four hundred years in the future, the most dangerous criminals are kept in suspended animation aboard prison ships and 'rehabilitated' in a shared virtual reality environment. But Miska Storrow, a thief and hacker with a background in black ops, has stolen one of these ships, the Hangman's Daughter, and made it her own. Controlled by explosive collars and trained in virtual reality by the electronic ghost of a dead marine sergeant, the thieves, gangsters, murderers, and worse are transformed into Miska's own private indentured army: the Bastard Legion. In Friendly Fire, the Bastard Legion are hired to pull off a daring power-armoured heist of propriety tech. Getting the tech will be hard. Getting off the planet, deadly.

Release date: October 19, 2017

Publisher: Audible Studios

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

Miska was a ghost in the blue and violet foliage of the jungle undergrowth. She was moving just a little too fast for her reactive camouflage ghillie suit to keep up. It left fractal images in the air, as though the undergrowth was flowing over her heavily obscured shape. She could feel the humidity and smell the sweet, fetid rot in the jungle air, but the inertial armour suit she wore under the ghillie regulated her temperature, helping to mask her heat signature. Miska had her SIG GP-992 in one hand, the combat knife her dad had given her in the other, and a big grin on her face. She was in her element.

The narco-insurgents’ supply depot was in a gulley covered by camouflage netting and partially obscured by the jungle canopy. It was a great place to hide but a lousy place to defend. The insurgents had pickets in fighting holes out in the jungle but Miska had been able to murder a path wide enough for the support squad element of the attack to move through stealthily. It would only be a matter of time before the pickets’ comms silence was noticed, though. Biometric monitoring hooked up to a central command net would have scuppered her plan but these were gangsters playing at being soldiers, not the real thing.

She slid under a gap in the camo net and found herself on a loose dirt slope overlooking the hive of activity that was the supply depot. There were stacks and stacks of the packed metacoke, which had been refined from the genetically engineered coca plants that had been introduced as a result of the hacked terraforming process. The bundles were being loaded onto robot mules in preparation to be moved to waiting shuttles, or snuck into aerodynamic containers and fired into orbit by the only electromagnetic cargo catapult on the moon. There were caves on the opposite side of the gulley. Judging by the jury-rigged ventilation embedded in the rock, Miska guessed they refined the coke in the caves. There were also two lean-to plastic shacks on the other side of the gulley, close to the entrance to the cave structure. According to the intel these were dormitories; the larger one was for the workers in the refinery, the smaller one for the gunmen and women who guarded them. Her job was to destroy the hacked printer that the insurgents were using to make their weapons and ammunition. She knew it was on the same side of the gulley as she was but intelligence had been sketchy as to its exact location, which was why she was going in alone ahead of the main assault.

Miska was moving down the slope towards a smartcrete gun emplacement on an outcrop that overlooked the gulley. There were four of the insurgents in the emplacement. They were looking inward rather than up the slope. She guessed they were there to protect the drugs from within rather than without. Still, if they’d had motion sensors she wouldn’t have been able to sneak up on them like this. Even trip wires would have made her life more difficult. This was a pretty rudimentary operation. She was starting to think that she wouldn’t even need the two squads of Bastards she had with her when she slipped, just keeping her footing as she made her way towards the gun emplacement. Loose dirt rolled down the slope in front of her.

Overconfident. Funny how her inner voice sounded like her dad.

One of the gunwomen turned to look her way. That was fine, Miska decided, she could die first. A three-round burst, the gauss pistol’s recoil negligible. The velocity was dialled down to subsonic. The only noise the pistol made was the slight metal-on-metal clicking from the movement of its components. It still sounded loud to Miska. The three rounds hit the woman almost dead centre in the triangle formed by her forehead and upper cheeks, exactly where the crosshairs from the smartlinked pistol were overlaid in Miska’s internal visual display. The woman’s nose and one of her eyes ceased to exist, replaced by a red mess. Miska kept moving. The second insurgent died before any of the others had even realised what was happening. The third was turning when a three-round burst from the gauss pistol caught him in the side of the head. Again, if they’d been wearing helmets instead of bandannas, which were, to be fair, more comfortable in the heat and humidity, he might have survived a little longer. The fourth and final insurgent almost pulled the trigger, he almost managed to shout a warning. Miska’s fourth burst was hurried, the caseless, electromagnetically driven, thorn-shaped rounds catching the gunman in the mouth and throat. He slumped back and slid to the ground, leaving a red smear on the smartcrete. He was almost certainly dead but Miska put two in his head because it was better to be safe than sorry.

Sloppy. Again the voice in her head sounded like her dad as she crouched down behind the smartcrete and reloaded. She kept her knife in her left hand, fingers reaching around the hilt to pull a magazine from a quick release pouch at the front of her inertial armour. The magazine she removed from the pistol wasn’t even half empty but it was better to have ammunition and not need it than the other way around.

Miska was moving more slowly as she slid over the smartcrete and onto the steep narrow path that ran down the side of the gun emplacement to the floor of the gulley. She was giving the reactive camouflage time to adapt to her surroundings, letting her blend in like a chameleon. She reached the gulley floor and peeked round the edge of the outcrop, checking her surroundings. Further down the valley she could see the workers loading the bales of metacoke onto robot mules under the watchful eyes of the drone rigger who’d be running the team. She checked the dormitories and saw very little movement in either of them. Miska knew the refinery ran 24–7, so the workers were either in the refinery or sleeping. Further up, the gulley narrowed until it met the rock wall. What she couldn’t see was anything that looked like it contained a printer big enough to make weapons. Unless it was in the refinery, and she didn’t really want to have to go in there – too much chance of discovery. She was all but invisible, but she found that people tended to know someone was there when you got really close to them.

Process of elimination, she thought as she leaned against the outcrop. Despite the ghillie suit and her inertial armour she felt the thrum of power through the rock. She moved out slowly into the gulley, feeling exposed despite her camouflage. It looked like someone had taken a laser torch to the rock and hollowed it out. She suspected the rock had then been rendered down and used to form the smartcrete. Miska followed the heavy gauge power cables that ran into the mouth of the artificial cave and walked straight into two of the insurgents.

Both of them looked very similar: hugely muscled, tattoos, hair shaved around a topknot. Miska wasn’t sure if they were brother and sister or it was just ‘a look’. She’d bumped into the male insurgent. He’d grabbed at her blindly but, more through luck than judgement, had managed to snag the wrist of her gun-hand. Even boosted there was only so much muscle that Miska could fit in the wiry build of her small frame. It was the reason she favoured use of force multipliers like her knife. She didn’t bother resisting with her gun-hand. She was never going to win a contest of strength with the musclehead in front of her. Instead she lashed out at his face with her knife, cutting through his cheeks, filling his mouth with blood. He staggered back, dragging Miska with him. The female insurgent was trying to get round Miska’s attacker. Miska pushed the male insurgent, guiding his stagger into the female before ramming the blade up into his chin and through his mouth. She felt resistance from subcutaneous armour but the point of the diamond edge penetrated, reaching his brain. Miska could see the black titanium of the blade in his mouth. The male insurgent shook for a moment and then started to fall back. Miska pushed with all her might, knocking him into the female who went down underneath both of them. Miska wrenched her knife free. The male insurgent still had her wrist in a death-grip. Miska slithered over his body and then hammered the bloody knife down. The tip bit into the female insurgent’s skull. She had a surprised look on her face for just a moment and then she was still.

Really fucking sloppy! Except her dad tried not to swear in her presence. He failed a lot, though.

She wrenched her gun-hand free and rolled off the bodies into a crouch. Only then did she have the time to take in her surroundings.

The printer looked not unlike an ancient printing press. The large machine had seen better days but the conveyor was still churning out slug-throwing weapons made from patent-hacked templates. The only light was from the sun streaming in through the cave mouth, but even the shadowed parts of the cave were bright as day to Miska as her realistic-looking cybernetic eyes amplified the existing light. Other than the printer, the slugthrower rifles and the plastic crates of ammunition, the cave was empty. She turned her attention back to the cave mouth, surprised that nobody had heard the scuffle. Satisfied that the alarm hadn’t been raised, Miska holstered her gauss pistol, then flicked the blood off the stayclean finish of her knife and sheathed that as well. The dead male insurgent’s boot was lying across the terminator between light and shadow, on show for anyone who happened past the cave mouth. She sighed and reached down for him.

Moving the bodies felt exactly like dragging two hundred-and-fifty-pound sacks of growth hormones, steroids and boosted muscles across bare rock. Satisfied that the bodies were out of sight for the casual passer-by, she started attaching the charges to the printer. Blowing up the printer was the bullshit side of strategic planning to Miska’s mind, though she’d always been more of a tactician (it was why she lost to her dad when they played chess). Yes, she could see the strategic gain in denying the enemy a resource like the printer, but it wasn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference in the oncoming fight, so she felt it could have been done after the fact. But no, the military thinking was printer equals weapons, and we don’t want the enemy to have them.

Miska worked slowly with the charges even though she knew it was only a matter of time before someone found one of the bodies she’d dropped. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, she thought. Get it right now, save time, fuck ups and lives later. She had studied the schematics of the printer. The charges weren’t large, there would be no spectacular explosion, she hoped, but she knew where to put them to make sure the printer was permanently out of action. She was placing the fourth charge when she heard the shouting. It came from above. They’d found the bodies in the gun emplacement.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to all Hangman call signs, are you in position?’ Miska subvocalised over the comms link.

‘Hangman-Two-Actual, affirmative,’ Nyukuti replied. Even over the comms Miska could hear the eagerness in his voice.

‘Hangman-Three-Actual, we are ready for dust-off on your go,’ Mass answered. The Mafioso was stood in the belly of one of the Bastard’s two recently-acquired Pegasus assault shuttles a little over twenty miles away.

Miska finished setting the final charge and shifted the M-187 laser carbine that she’d slung across her back so it was ready in her hands. She moved to crouch by the entrance to the cave. Insurgents were pouring out of the smaller of the two dormitories. There seemed to be little actual organisation, just a lot of running around and shouting. Miska smiled. She was going to introduce real chaos into their already disorganised lives.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to all Hangman call signs, I’m about to make some noise,’ she subvocalised across the comms.

‘Hangman-Two-Actual, understood,’ Nyukuti said.

‘Hangman-Three-Actual, we are inbound,’ Mass informed them. That gave them two minutes. Two minutes to stay alive. They were into the first contingency plan now as their initial plan had been to wait for the assault shuttle and Mass’s squad to arrive, but she’d dropped too many bodies. She might not have been found yet but they were effectively compromised.

She raised the laser carbine to her shoulder, switched the hybrid weapon from laser to its under-barrel mounted grenade launcher via the smartlink, and fired. There was a popping noise and then the smaller dormitory exploded. The blast knocked over a number of the insurgents who had been too close to the dormitory. As the roof caved in Miska knew that the shrapnel from the fragmentation grenade would have torn apart anybody inside the flimsy structure. With a thought Miska sent the detonation commands through her neural interface to the charges in the printer. The dull crumps of the explosions came almost in unison. Miska barely felt the pressure waves from the blast but she grunted as something hit her in the back causing her inertial armour to harden.

The insurgents were taking fire from two of Nyukuti’s four-man fireteams from the ridge overlooking the gulley behind Miska’s position. Her audio filters cut out the hypersonic screaming as automatic weapon gunners in each fireteam poured suppressing fire down into the gulley. Miska saw stone turned to powder where the 6.3mm penetrators, fired by Nyukuti’s squad, hit the cliff-side. The squad’s riflemen cut down insurgents still out in the open. Miska was pleased. It was disciplined. They weren’t just going wild. Her Bastards almost resembled a military force, though they still had a way to go before they were comparable to her beloved Marine Corps.

‘Hangman-Two-Actual to Hangman-Two-Nine, take your team down into the gulley,’ Nyukuti told his squad’s third fireteam. Miska wanted to add that they weren’t to advance forward of the bottom of the slope. They all had carefully designated fields of fire. She forced herself to stay quiet; she had to trust them to follow the plan. Instead she risked moving out of the cave mouth and looking down the gulley towards the bundles of metacoke and the robot mule train, controlled by the drone rigger, which was making its way rapidly down the gulley towards the treeline. Miska raised the carbine to her shoulder and the crosshairs appeared in her IVD over the back of the rigger’s head. He was wearing a hard helmet but she doubted it would be enough protection to stop a laser. She squeezed the trigger. Unforgiving, hard, red light connected her carbine to the back of the rigger’s head. The superheated hardened ceramic composite material of his helmet blew out and his head was turned into a hollowed, red, steaming bowl.

Miska was aware of movement above her in the gun emplacement. She ducked back into the cave just as an explosion shook it. Powdered rock and smartcrete rained down, along with a smoking body. Miska assumed that someone had hit the gun emplacement with a grenade from a launcher.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to Hangman-Two call signs, please be advised I am in the cave beneath the gun emplacement.’ She left unsaid that they had to be careful she didn’t get killed, as her death would trigger the explosives in the lowjack collars that each of the convict-mercenaries wore.

‘Hangman-Two-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual, acknowledged,’ Nyukuti said over comms. He sounded like he was concentrating. Fleetingly Miska wondered if he was enjoying his promotion to sergeant and squad leader. Somehow she doubted it. He would resent the responsibility.

As she hunkered down in the cave mouth there wasn’t much for her to do other than take the odd opportunistic shot with her laser. Any insurgents left alive in the gulley were keeping their heads down and presumably had no interest in drawing attention to themselves. Nyukuti’s support squad, Hangman-Two, were keeping the insurgents left in the refinery pinned down. She thought about opening up the feeds from the convict-mercenaries’ gun and helmcams in her IVD but she always found that a little distracting when she was operational. Besides which, part of the point of this action was for Mass and Nyukuti’s squads to prove that they could operate without close supervision and as part of an integrated force.

The hypersonic screaming was closer this time. Hangman-Two’s advanced fireteam had moved down into the smartcrete gun emplacement on the outcrop above the cave and started laying down fire. Stolen Martian Military Industries Kopis gauss rifles and a Xiphos gauss squad automatic weapon fired across the gulley, forcing the gunmen in the cave refinery to keep their heads down.

‘Mech! Mech! Mech!’ someone yelled over the comms link. It was the cry that all infantry feared. A flashing icon in Miska’s IVD identified the voice as belonging to Hangman-Two-Nine, who was in charge of the forward fireteam. Then Miska was moving out of the cave mouth, counting on the ghillie suit to keep her hidden among all the chaos. She glanced down the gulley and saw the ancient Bismarck-class quad mech crawl out of the jungle, knocking down trees with each of its four legs.

She barely had time to recognise the mech before she was in the air in a cloud of powdered rock. She hardly registered the impact as she hit the ground some twenty feet away from where she’d been standing. In the moment before her internal air supply kicked in and reflated her lungs, it felt like she would never be able to breathe again. Still enveloped in the cloud of rock dust, it took a moment for her to work out what had happened. She had been hit by an enormous pressure wave that had battered her diaphragm despite her hardened bone structure and subdermal armour. Even through the thinning cloud of rock dust she could see that the cave and the gun emplacement no longer existed. What little rock remained was glowing red from the heat of the friction from the impact of the Bismarck’s 500mm mass driver main gun. Miska knew that if she checked the biometric feeds from Hangman-Two-Nine through to Two-Twelve she’d see four flat lines.

She shrugged off the ghillie suit. The reactive camouflage had been destroyed in the impact. It would just get in the way now. The rock cloud was keeping her hidden for the moment. The Bismarck would have thermographic sensors but it was an old design, and the coolant system in her battered but still functional inertial armour should keep her hidden.

IVD full of red warning icons, Miska pushed herself up onto one knee. She could hear again. Her audio dampeners had presumably switched off her hearing when the mass driver had fired. She could hear a hypersonic ripping noise. The mech’s ball-mounted rotary railguns were tearing up the top of the ridge where the rest of Hangman-Two had been.

‘This is Hangman-Two actual,’ Nyukuti said over the comms. ‘Taking heavy fire. I’ve pulled my fireteam back into the treeline. We’re moving up the valley, looking for another position.’ Now Nyukuti sounded like he was enjoying himself, though Miska knew there wasn’t much they could do while the mech was still in the gulley.

Miska felt the ground shake. She could just about make out the squat shape of the mech, its armoured main body cradled by its four spider-like legs. She tried to get a lock on it with her smartlink but her optics just weren’t good enough. She needed thermal and she hadn’t brought her helmet with her. She lifted the carbine into a firing position.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to Daughter-One-Actual,’ she subvocalised as she upped the power on the carbine with a thought. ‘I’m sending you a targeting package.’ She squeezed the trigger on the carbine. Superheated air molecules and rock dust particles exploded in a line between the barrel of her carbine and the squat shape of the mech stalking through the cloud. She painted the target. Sent the information over the comms to the rapidly approaching assault shuttle. She watched the battery icon’s energy bar in her IVD disappear but she tried to keep the diffuse beams of hard light on the mech for as long as possible.

‘Daughter-One-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual, received, Harpies inbound,’ the co-pilot in the assault shuttle said over the comms link. Daughter was the call sign for the air element of the assault. Miska threw herself to one side as she heard the hypersonic ripping noise, the report of each railgun round merging with the next as they were fired rapidly from the Bismarck’s rotary belly guns. There was a trench where Miska had been knelt moments before but the mech was still firing blind, though the cloud of rock dust was starting to settle. Miska needed cover quickly but she was blinder than the Bismarck; she was only able to see the mech because of its bulk. She replaced the empty battery in her carbine, hoping the dust wasn’t going to foul the delicate weapon. She was very aware of the countdown running in her IVD showing the time until the assault shuttle’s estimated arrival. She needed to stay alive for another thirty seconds.

The assault shuttle was fast but the multi-role Harpy missiles were faster. The joint-mounted ball lasers of the Bismarck’s point defences cast the dust-filled gulley into hellish red light. One of the inbound missiles exploded in the air, hit by an angry red beam. Miska was running. She needed to find cover or religion quickly, and she preferred the former option. She actually heard the clank of the missile’s impact, the shaped warhead going off as it penetrated the Bismarck’s thick armour. Then the mech exploded.



Miska opened her eyes. Her head was ringing and she was covered in dirt. She checked her IVD, she’d been unconscious for a little over twenty seconds. The force of the blast had blown the rock dust away but the air was thick with smoke and the sky was on fire. She had no idea why she was still alive. It took a moment to realise it wasn’t the sky that was on fire. The camo netting that covered the gulley was being systematically burned away by Hangman-Three. Mass’s squad, the assault element of the operation, had mounted flamethrowers under the barrels of some of the Dory railguns carried on the flight-capable Machimoi power armour suits they were wearing. Bits of the burning netting were falling from the sky like rain. It was quite beautiful to watch, Miska decided.

Get up and move or you are dead! This time it was her own voice she heard screaming at her. She rolled to her feet. She was almost on the other side of the gulley now, close to the darkened entrance of the cave network that contained the drugs refinery. She was looking straight at one of the narco-insurgent gunmen. Bulging veins and wild bloodshot eyes suggested he was high on his own supply. The crosshairs from the carbine’s smartlink were already in the centre of his face. Miska squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The rock dust must have damaged the weapon’s delicate optics. It was a problem with lasers. Miska swept her carbine to one side with her left hand, reaching for the gauss pistol in her drop holster with the right. She already knew that she was going to be too slow. Again, something hit her in the back. Again, the air exploded out of her. There was an odd burning sensation and she was sure she felt something moving through her body. Part of her chest, a red part that was best kept inside her skin, exploded onto the ground in front of her. Even the gunman who had been about to kill her looked surprised. The shot had come from behind.

Miska sank to her knees. Friendly fire. She fell backwards and looked up at the sky again. Except the sleek, armoured shape of the assault shuttle visible above the burning netting obscured the sky. Hangman-Three flew into the tracer fire that crisscrossed over her head. The Machimoi combat exoskeletons the squad wore made them look like giant, high tech knights.

From an opening higher up the cliff face an insurgent fired a missile from a portable launcher at the assault shuttle. The Pegasus banked sharply, shedding chaff and firing point defence lasers. The missile exploded before it reached the assault shuttle and then it looked liked the entire cliff face exploded as the Pegasus poured railgun fire down onto it.

Well, it seems to be going okay, Miska thought surprisingly calmly and then watched her own biometrics flatline. Despite her apparent death, she was still aware of all the explosive collars the Bastards wore detonating. It was a ripple effect, the signal reaching the closest first and then very quickly spreading out. She could hear the pop of the explosions. It was an oddly innocuous noise. Combat exoskeletons fell from the sky and then the assault shuttle nosed forward and hit the ground with an almighty crash, accompanied by a sound of shrieking metal that shook the earth. Dead-Miska reckoned she was lucky it hadn’t landed on her, or exploded.

Something hit the ground nearby. She somehow managed to turn the neck of her corpse to look at it. It was Nyukuti’s severed head. She could make out the printed circuit tattoos. His eyes were still open. He had a surprised look on his face.

‘I’m not sure if I’m dreaming or not,’ Nyukuti’s severed head said.

‘You’re not,’ Dead-Miska reassured him. He was convinced that his dreams were his real life and his waking existence was unimportant. It was how he had justified most of his crimes. At Miska’s words there was a look of relief on his face.

‘Well, that was a total fucking clusterfuck!’ Miska’s dad’s voice echoed down the gulley. She could just about make out Gunnery Sergeant Jonathan Corbin, United States Marine Corps, deceased, silhouetted against the sun. She would have sighed, or at least shaded her eyes from the sun, but she was dead now.













Chapter 2

They were back in the briefing room in the command post at Camp Reisman. Her father had left them ‘dead’ in the gulley and the surrounding jungle for a good long while to think about what they had done before triggering the resurrection function in the virtual training construct. The sophisticated VR program strived for verisimilitude as much as possible – if the brain thought it was real then it learned the lessons that it was being taught. The exception to this was death. The only time the verisimilitude dropped out was when people’s virtual representations died. This was because the brain needed to realise that you weren’t actually dead so it didn’t psychosomatically shut itself down. It was also to try and minimise the psychological damage. People needed to learn from their mistakes, not get post traumatic stress disorder from them. That was why death in the construct was no worse than death in a particularly harsh sense-game. It didn’t stop some people from developing PTSD as a result of their training. Miska had heard about vets struggling to separate combat experience from the VR simulations. She’d always enjoyed them – but then again, she enjoyed combat. Though getting shot in the chest had kind of sucked.

Sucked, sucking chest wound, she thought, smiling at her own joke.

‘Something funny?’ her dad asked. He was pissed, his flinty eyes staring at her like two gun barrels.

The briefing room was a featureless poured smartcrete cube. The support and assault squads were crowded around a table in the centre of the room. Most of them were still in their combat gear, the construct’s full sensory immersion allowing her to smell their sweat. Sometimes she wondered if the construct took the whole verisimilitude thing too far. A holographic model of the gulley and the surrounding jungle hovered in the air over the table.

Miska shook her head. ‘No, Gunny,’ she said to her dad. She commanded the Bastard Legion, the six-thousand-strong mercenary company made up of the convict inmates aboard the Hangman’s Daughter, the space-going prison barge she had stolen. The virtual ghost of her murdered dad had total authority in the training construct, however. Command was a fine line. It was difficult sometimes, having her father subordinate to her, particularly as she had never reached a rank higher than corporal in the Marine Corps. Most of the time, particularly in front of the virtual representations of the prisoners, her father toed the line, but today he wasn’t happy.

‘Where’d you go wrong?’ he asked her. Miska forced herself to focus on the hologram. She knew she had to. . .