At this news her dad did not look happy.
‘That’s not much time,’ he told her.
Miska shrugged. ‘We’ve both gone out with less prep. Time-compressed run through the job in VR?’ she suggested.
‘Who?’ Vido asked. ‘Everyone who’s combat ready is down on the planet. Everyone up here is on leave, they’ll all be drunk.’
He had a point.
‘I’ve got a really bad idea,’ Miska told them.
Chapter 9
Miska had overridden Uncle V’s objections and managed to curtail a major argument with her dad on the grounds of practicality. They’d only had four hours to plan and run time-contracted VR simulations based on the intel provided by New Sun. Her dad had left her with the distinct impression that their ‘discussion’ was not over yet. She could see his and Vido’s point. It looked like she had gone back to her bad old ways. She hadn’t. Or at least she didn’t think she had. Miska needed to know if the Ultra’s Nightmare Squad could be controlled. This was the best way to find out.
That was how she found herself in the passenger bay of the Hangman’s Daughter’s remaining prisoner transport shuttle. The shuttle had recently been up-armoured and armed, retrofitted as an assault shuttle, which was how it had started its life. It was no Pegasus but it would do in a pinch. Trying to control the ancient, armoured hulk of the shuttle in the upper cloud layer of Eridani B was proving something of a trial of fire for the newly sim-qualified pilot.
‘Ah! Fuck!’ Miska shouted as she banged her gel-covered right hand on her seat’s armrest. The shuttle was being kicked around so much in the upper atmosphere that she felt like she was on a small boat in the middle of an angry ocean. Atmospheric interference from the bad weather, however, would go a long way towards hiding the shuttle from the gas mining aerostat’s rudimentary sensors.
‘You’re not combat ready,’ Rufus Grig said, looking at her medgel-covered shooting hand. He was in charge of the power armour element of this hastily cobbled together operation. He was standing in one of the Daughter’s ancient, but also recently upgraded, Wraith combat exoskeletons. The front was unbuttoned and his head was visible under the peeled-back armoured plate. In his mid-thirties, Grig was of Afro-Caribbean descent but came from London. With freckles and short dreadlocks, he was a handsome man, Miska supposed, but his dark eyes were dead – there was nothing there at all. His eyes made his face look slack somehow. An ex-member of Britain’s SAS, he had stood up to some local thugs where he lived in London and then come home to find his entire extended family butchered. That had resulted in a torture and killing spree that had culminated in a hostage situation. It had only ended when a number of Grig’s erstwhile colleagues had breached the tower block where he was holed up and taken him down non-lethally. He hadn’t said anything during his trial. The judge might have been more lenient had it not been for what she had called ‘the astonishing brutality’ of his crimes.
Miska had approached the vigilante shortly after she had taken control of the Daughter. Grig had made it perfectly clear that she was no better than all the other scum on board and that given the chance he would kill her – thus setting off all the N-bombs, or so he believed – and rid humanity of six thousand pieces of human excrement. Miska still half expected him to try it.
The Nightmare Squad was the worst of the worst. She was still surprised that Grig had agreed to work with the Ultra. The Ultra, for his part, remained convinced that Grig was just as much a serial killer as he himself was and merely needed an excuse.
‘She’ll be fine.’ The Ultra whispered but somehow his voice still carried. Even though he was wearing Miska’s own spacesuit, his long platinum silver hair tied back, he looked like an alabaster statue of classical perfection given motion. He remained the most beautiful guy Miska had ever seen. She’d never been comfortable with how it made her feel when she looked at him, mostly because she knew it was artifice – a created look that was the product of technology, not impossible genes. He had been sculpted.
Grig looked unconvinced by his squad leader’s words.
‘How’s Skirov’s reconstruction coming along?’ the Ultra asked, changing the subject. He must have had the knife he was toying with printed. Miska hadn’t seen the design before, though the blade was titanium with a fused synthetic diamond edge, just like her own. To her eyes the Ultra’s blade was almost elegant in its functionality. It looked like the most practical killing knife she’d ever seen. Miska wondered how many of the Ultra’s artfully murdered victims had met their ends at the edge of a blade like that.
‘Slowly,’ Miska finally answered, taking her eyes off the knife. Skirov was a warewolf, a heavily reconstructed cyborg made to resemble a machine version of the old Earth werewolf myths. He had replaced too much of his body with machinery and ended up divorced from his humanity, becoming a psychotic murder machine. He had been extensively deconstructed before he, like the Ultra, had been sentenced to solitary confinement aboard the Hangman’s Daughter. Miska had been putting a small amount of the money the Legion earned into having him reconstructed. Another killing machine in the arsenal, she thought.
‘Be nice to have a puppy,’ Bean said, though his Scottish accent was so thick that Miska had to run his words through her head a few times before she could work out their meaning. The intention was for Skirov to join the Nightmare Squad when he was fully reconstructed. Like Grig, Bean was wearing a combat exoskeleton. Unlike Grig’s, Bean’s suit was the spare Machimoi. His narrow, weaselly
