The Bastard Legion: War Criminals

Book 0: The Bastard Legion

by Gavin G. Smith

Genres: Science Fiction; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

Dirty, gritty and action-packed adventure featuring the galaxy's deadliest mercenaries, THE BASTARD LEGION MILITARY SCIENCE FICTION AT ITS BEST . 'High octane SF adventure with Smith's trademark twist' Jamie Sawyer, author of The Lazarus War It was the kind of dirty, violent work the Bastards were made for. Protect a bunch of colonists in the Epsilon Eridani system, whose moon had become a war zone as megacorp-backed mercenaries fought a brutal proxy war. Just the kind of fight the penal mercenary legion liked. But a hundred headless corpses are hard to explain, even for the Bastard Legion, and soon they are on the run, abandoned by their allies, and hunted by their most dangerous foe yet . . . but Miska's going to play them at her own game. The Bastard Legion: the galaxy's most dangerous criminals controlled by implanted explosives a nd trained by the electronic ghost of a dead marine. 'Gloriously action-packed and often brutal military SF adventure . . .' Publishers Weekly 'An exceptional talent' Peter F Hamilton A 'Dirty Dozen' or 'Suicide Squad' for lovers of 'Aliens', THE BASTARD LEGION series is a down and dirty military SF set in a world of mercenary actions and covert operations.

Release date: July 26, 2018

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 306

Sample

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 burrow. 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.

She pulled her own ghillie suit over her head and moved around the mech’s head to survey the situation. The Sneaky Bastards first squad, of which Kaneda was a member, had split into three four-man fire teams and had taken up covering positions. Second and third squad were cautiously advancing between the two columns of mechs, still all but invisible, towards the concrete bunker and the drop shuttles, respectively. The biggest threat was the trailer-mounted point defence lasers. They were designed to shoot incoming artillery, mortar shells and missiles out of the air but they could be repurposed for an anti-personnel role. The Bastards were relying on stealth and having the mechs between themselves and the point defence lasers to keep them safe. So far the Sneaky Bastards had mostly been engaging the spider sentry drones, leaving small smoking piles of wreckage in their wake. There were, however, more than a few dead guards hanging from the mech cradles and lying on the ground.

Miska’s audio dampeners filtered the otherwise deafening roar of the Bofors rail sniper rifle firing. She assumed the electromagnetically propelled, hypersonic, half-inch titanium penetrator had just blown a sizeable hole in something, or someone. Despite the noise there was no muzzle flash, and the near-invisible Kaneda would still be difficult to spot.

Miska peeked sideways into the net again.

Now let’s see if the command codes work. She turned to look at one of the point defence lasers. It was spinning, stopping, and then spinning in a different direction. It had been repurposed. It was searching for targets.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to all Sneaky Bastards call signs,’ Miska subvocalised over their own comms net. ‘They’ve repurposed the point defence lasers, everyone hold their positions.’ C’mon, she added silently. Things were going to get interesting very quickly if the virus with Raff’s command codes didn’t work.

‘Heavy-One-Actual to Hangman-One-Actual, what about me?’ Mass asked over a private link. Despite being the commander of the Heavy Bastards, Miska’s virtually trained, currently hypothetical mech platoon, the Mafia button man had come in with the Sneaky Bastards. While parachuting in Miska had checked his biometrics. It hadn’t looked like Mass had enjoyed the experience.

‘Very quietly, Mass, I want you to make your way up to the third level of the closest cradle to you, the one I’m on.’

‘Understood,’ Mass said and then over the command net: ‘Heavy-One-Actual on the move.’

‘Sneaky-One-Seven to all Sneaky call signs,’ Kaneda said over the comms net, ‘we’ve got movement from the maintenance hangar.’

Miska glanced that way and saw a squad of Triple S guards making their way cautiously towards the mechs.

‘Let them close,’ Miska subvocalised over comms and then admonished herself for not using the correct protocol. She glanced at the net feed again. Suddenly all the mech base’s systems and those of the vehicles present opened themselves to her. The expert system contained in the virus took over. It had a simple command: attack any personnel that weren’t members of the Bastard Legion until Miska told it to stop.

Three of the point defence lasers were firing. Where the Triple S squad that had emerged from the bunker had stood there was now just red steam, the dirt streaked with glass.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to all Bastard call signs. We’ve got control of the base’s systems,’ Miska announced over the command net. ‘Heavy-One-Actual, the Medusa is all yours.’ She heard movement on the cradle below her.

‘Understood,’ Mass replied.

Miska checked her IVD to see who was closest to her.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to Pegasus-One and Two, we’re ready for you.’

‘Pegasus-One to all Bastard call signs, myself and Pegasus-Two are inbound,’ replied McWilliams, an OG, or original gangster from the Hard Luck Commancheros prison gang, who was piloting the first of the two Pegasi assault shuttles. ‘Please be advised, if you haven’t switched off the air defences this will be a short flight.’

Then the ground shook. It had been a while but Miska instantly knew what it was. It was the thing that infantry feared the most.

‘Hurry the fuck up, Mass!’ Miska snapped, forgetting comms discipline for the second time. At least it had been over a private comms line.

Backlit by the hangar’s lights a huge shadow was thrown across the ground.

‘I mean it, Mass!’

The Mafia button man still didn’t answer.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to all Sneaky call signs, continue to hold your position,’ Miska told them

The Medusa-class mech stepped out of the hangar. She guessed its comms had been taken offline due to whatever work they had been doing on it. That would explain why the virus hadn’t suborned it.

With a thought, Miska dialled down the power on her M187 and prepared to ‘lase’ the mech. She could then send the targeting info to the inbound Pegasi, who could feed it to their missiles’ guidance systems. The world went red again as the base’s point defence system targeted the mech, to little effect other than scoring up its paintwork. The mech raised the 30mm chain-fed railgun it carried like an oversized carbine and fired a short burst at one of the offending point defence systems. The electromagnetically-driven cannon rounds tore the laser to pieces. The 200mm mass driver on its back unfolded and fired, and another point defence laser ceased to exist. The show of firepower was, as ever, awe inspiring and terrifying if you were that way inclined, Miska supposed. She might not have felt the fear but there was a sense of mounting concern, and she quite wanted Mass to get his Medusa up and running.

Another point defence system was sent tumbling into the jungle as 30mm rounds ripped into it. The enemy Medusa was moving towards the two columns of mechs. Miska knew that advanced sensor systems would be searching for her Sneaky Bastards. Suddenly all the umbilicals connecting Mass’s Medusa to the cradle exploded away from the mech. It stepped out from the cradle, the 30mm railgun already firing. Mass put round after round into the other mech, shooting continuously as he moved far enough away from the cradle for the back-mounted plasma cannon to swing into place. Both weapons firing, Mass’s mech advanced on the Triple S Medusa. Plasma fire ate through the other war machine’s thick armour. Doubtless the Triple S pilot was competent enough but they hadn’t expected the sheer ferocity of Mass’s attack.

Mass concentrated all of his fire on the torso. It was the most heavily armoured area because it was where the pilot sat. Mass was firing plasma bolt after plasma bolt into the chest and concentrating the railgun fire in the same place. The Triple S mech came to a halt. Material that shouldn’t burn flamed as the huge armoured humanoid figure became a pyre. It was quite beautiful, Miska decided, as she became aware of the base’s forces broadcasting their surrender on all frequencies. She ordered the expert system embedded in the virus to stop killing.













Chapter 2

There was running. The Sneaky Bastards’ first squad remained with the mechs. Second squad raced past the still-burning mech for the hangar. Third squad were running for the two Harpy-class heavy lift drop shuttles. Miska could hear the Harpies powering up as she walked between the mechs, making for the hangar.

‘Hangman-One-Actual to Heavy-One-Actual, I want those Harpies covered by your mech,’ Miska told Mass over the comms link, using her command override to cut through all the chatter.

‘The … uh … what, boss?’ Mass asked.

‘The heavy drop shuttles, the mech carriers,’ Miska told him. She could feel the heat of the burning mech as she closed with it. There was something primeval about the huge, humanoid-shaped war machine on fire. She felt the ground shake as Mass passed her in his own Medusa, railgun and plasma cannon levelled at the two heavy shuttles.

She sent a command to the virus to have the SAM emplacements missile-lock the two Harpies. The virus responded immediately but Miska still wasn’t happy. She knew she should have a hacker in the net. The expert systems were too vulnerable but she needed to be out here. There were a number of good choices for combat hacking, legionnaires who’d all but fulfilled the role when they had been career criminals. The problem was they presented the biggest threat to her failsafes, to the tiny nano-explosives she’d replaced the bomb collars with. The deactivation codes for the nanobombs were well protected but nothing was completely safe and these were people whose job it had been to break through computer security. Miska could have done it herself but she was supposed to be command now, something she had never wanted.

‘Under the articles of conflict agreed upon by—’ a husky-voiced woman started over the same comms link the Triple S commander had used to surrender.

‘One of those Harpies leaves the ground by even so much as an inch and I’ll blow you out of the air. Leave the engines cycling. If you’re not out of that shuttle and face-down in the dirt in thirty seconds flat, I’ll blow you into the air.’ She cut the comms link. Her dampeners kicked in as the Bastards’ two Pegasus assault shuttles screamed overhead, manoeuvring engines burning as they bled off speed. The two vaguely insectile, armoured pieces of airborne military tech, bristling with weapons, circled over the base. The first Pegasus touched down while the other covered it from the air. The loading ramp was already down, her Bastards sprinting from the shuttle. Time was key here. They had maybe twenty minutes before Triple S’s quick reaction force reached their position. If they had fast-movers, atmosphere fighters, then they’d be there all the faster but that was what the multi-role missile launchers were for.

The Bastards had been able to take the mech base because it was far enough behind the New Sun’s forces’ lines that they were overconfident with their security protocols. Triple S were far too reliant on their automated systems as well. Such things were only as good as their weakest link, and said link was almost always found in the pinkware, a person. It appeared that her handler, Raff, had found the weakest link and exploited it. They would not have been able to pull this off without his help.

Thank Christ for the weird no-orbit rules, Miska thought. She could understand why the articles of conflict for this particular little mercenary proxy war stipulated no space combat. Ships were expensive and she wouldn’t have wanted to risk the Hangman’s Daughter in a space battle. The huge prison barge had been built as a troop carrier close to a hundred-and-fifty years ago. She might have been well armoured, designed to take a pounding getting troops into place, but she was no warship. The no-orbit rule insisted on by the New Sun megacorporation, the aggressors in . . .