by John Barnes
The scream of the departing shot had not yet faded out when I saw the hand in the sight fly up into the air, jerking as the round entered his arm, and steered up through it (the shock wave making the arm first bulge and then collapse, like a toy balloon hooked to a compressed-air line).
Too fast to see that it happened at different times, blood sprayed from the shattered wrist, burst from his shoulder as the shot crossed to his head, sprayed once more as the shot went in through the eye. Then, in less than a hundredth of a second, it used up its remaining energy spiraling around inside his head. The shock wave in that confined space turned everything from his spine up into runny jelly.
I had to imagine that last part, but I enjoyed imagining it—if that sounds too horrible, well, Closers are horrible, and I like to see bad things happen to them. I knew that the watery goo that had been flesh, bone, blood, and brains would spray in a fine mist out through his nose, mouth, ears, and eye sockets, leaving his head to collapse into a bag of skin.
First time I saw that I upchucked. After I got to know Closers … I could do it over dinner and still order dessert.
My remote sight vaporized in a bright flash-and-bang.
An instant later Chrysamen’s NIF was spraying fléchettes in a black streak like a swarm of wasps into the open space before us. It occurred to me I was a bit of an idiot—the NIF was a much better weapon for this situation because the fléchettes home on human bodies within the target area and thus can find their targets without being aimed.
Maybe I’m just a caveman—die SHARK is a much higher-powered weapon, so I prefer it. But by using the NIF in this situation, Chrys was probably taking out 90 percent of the enemy.
NIF stands for Neural Induction Fléchette. The gadget itself looks a lot like a cordless electric drill, and makes a squealing noise that’s downright unpleasant when fired. The fléchettes—tiny needles no bigger than pencil points—fly for about three miles in about half a minute. But those three miles are only rarely in a straight line—normally the fléchettes circle the target area till they find the target people. When they do, they hit, burrow into the skin till they find a nerve—and then they take control. That is, they induce signals that make the nervous system do funny things—knock you out; give you terrible pain all over your body; turn your heart off; or temporarily blind you and make you vomit, lose bowel and bladder control, and itch all over (no kidding—that particular setting is very useful in riot work!).
So by setting her NIF to spray the area, Chrys had probably gotten the great majority of them—which unfortunately left a minority that was sighted in on us. The Closers don’t seem to have NIF, but their homing gear, if anything, is a little better than ours (somehow they seem to be able to detect any sight we aim through, which was how they got my remote so quickly). Moreover, they like brute force. I was expecting them to blow the whole mountainside apart any second.
I carefully slid to the side, then tossed out my second (and last) remote sight. I wasn’t eager to fire again, but I wanted to know what was going on.
Long seconds went by without motion. The thing about these future weapons that was really eerie was that since they only hit what you aimed at, even though a battle had just flared across the lumpy, snowy plain in front of us, even though somewhere out there a dozen Closer troops might still be sitting with fingers on triggers, or getting ready for an assault—the rocks and little hills looked just as they had before. No shell craters, no ripped lines from machine-gun fire, just one splash of blood, bright red in the morning sun, from the man I had hit. If not for that, the frozen waste in front of us could have been empty.
After more time, Chrys breathed, “I couldn’t have gotten all of them. They must want us alive for some reason.”
“Except they could easily have killed us with those first missiles. I think they’re trying for definitely dead, so they want to have our bodies in hand for sure, which is why they can’t use anything that won’t leave them enough to prove they got us. Did you set off a help beacon?”
“First thing. I bet you forgot again.”
“Sure did,” I admitted. “Reckon it’ll come out of my grade?”
I had only the corner of my eye to enjoy Chrys’s grin with; most of my attention had to be on the remote sight. “You’re incorrigible,” she whispered. After a long pause, she added, “How long do you expect we’ll have to wait for help?”
“Well, we’ve been fighting …” I checked a time on my SHARK. “I shot that man twelve minutes ago. Figure we started five before that. So I’d say there’s three possibilities … One, this is part of the exercise, those are androids and not real Closers out there, and we’re supposed to improvise our way out of this. Two, those are Closers, COTA Main Base is already halfway down to hell, and we’re stuck here. In which case, we have to improvise our way out of this.”
She nodded. “And three is something you haven’t thought of?”
“Bingo. You know my methods … but anyway, the point is, if this isn’t part of the exercise—and I don’t think it is, because it’s way too realistic and expensive to waste on our field problem—then it’s a real Closer attack, and what are the odds they’ll attack two trainees out in the middle of a field exercise, and not go after any of the larger bases? My guess is they hit Main Base and everything else that shows from orbit five or ten minutes after the last time we talked to COTA, right after we got told to fill that silly bag with rocks and pretend it was the Dalai Lama. So if I had to bet, I’d bet we’re the last two ATN agents alive and at large on Earth in this timeline. The ATN will be back but it could be days, weeks, or years.”
She nodded solemnly, then suddenly heaved a baseball-sized rock up against the ledge above us, so that it bounced down onto the steep cliffside in front of us. On its third bounce it was blasted into gravel, stone chips flying all over. I got the position of two weapons from that and squeezed off ten NIF rounds, set to kill, toward each hiding place, but I wasn’t optimistic. After all, those guys were in holes that had evaded Chrys’s earlier shots, so chances were they were in pretty good cover.
“I don’t think it’s a training exercise,” Chrys said. “That was less than two seconds to track on the object and blow it apart. And moving as eccentrically as it was, that’s about the time you’d expect a machine already sighted in to take.”
“Yeah.” Another reason my shots had probably had no effect … most likely I was shooting at a weapon that was running on automatic control, and the soldier was somewhere else by then.
“I wouldn’t bet on it either,” I said. “Chrys, it really doesn’t look like we’re getting out alive; what’s the most effective thing we can do before they get us?”
“Record what we’ve got, but our recorders have been running right along. Maybe get a couple more of them. Damn, Mark, I had a grudge against these people, and it looks like we’ll never get a real shot at them.”
“I had one real shot at them before I was recruited,” I said, “and the revenge was just as good as you’re imagining.”
“What’d they do to you?”
“Killed most of my family. My mother and wife among them. Listen, I’ve got a ward—”
“A what? Translator problem—”
“I’ve got a kind of adopted daughter, back in my timeline. If you get out, and I don’t, nag ATN about seeing that she gets taken care of. Poor kid lost her mother to a Closer operation.”
“Sure,” Chrysamen nodded emphatically. “And there’s a guy I want you to look up for me, if you get out and I don’t.”
How is it possible at a time like that to feel your heart sink as if you were in eighth grade? But that’s exactly what I felt, there, wedged into those cold rocks in Tibet, eyeing the remote sight and waiting for the final attack.
“He’s my brother,” she added. “He’s quadriplegic … he was a Special Agent until the Closers did that to him.”
Despite the fact that probably we would be dead before the hour was out, the world sudden
ly looked a lot better. “Of course I will, if the need comes up,” I said. I chucked another rock, this time sideways down the slope, and they blew it apart again, from the same two positions. Whatever was down there, the NIF wasn’t working on it.
“Note for whoever reads the recording,” I said, “unless you’re a Closer, in which case let me say I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to stake your mother out on an anthill. It would be very nice if in the next version of the SHAKK there were a way of recording a target position, then turning off the remote sight, and men firing, so that we didn’t have to give away the remote’s position when we shot. Right now I can see them, and if I wasn’t going to lose the sight as soon as I tried it, I’d be firing hex bursts from the SHAKK to get them out of their holes.”
Chrys nodded, and added, “Mark’s teammate enthusiastically agrees.” Then she thought for a moment and said, “What would happen if you shot those hex bursts and then I knocked the sight off its rock? It seemed to take them a couple of seconds to hit it the last time; maybe they’d hit where it was, rather than where it had been knocked to.”
“You’re not going to try to move sight? They’d sight in on your hand.”
“I just planned to hit it with a rock. If it doesn’t bounce anywhere where we can get it, we still have another SHARK left with two remote sights. We’ll just have to be careful in setting it up.”
“Unh-hunh. Well, it’s a lot nicer than sitting here and waiting for them to bring in more forces. Okay, let’s try it. I know which two rocks they’re behind; I’ll sight in, squeeze off, oh, say, four hex bursts, do it again. At the end of my second group of four, you chuck a rock at the sight.”
Chrys nodded, and said, “Probably it won’t work, but it’s better than sitting on our butts. But before we do that, let me see if I can get the other remote set up, so we can see what happens.” She detached a remote sight from the other SHAKR, crawled down the ledge, then carefully took the bowl from her mess kit, balanced the sight on top of it, balanced that on top of a tent pole, and raised the whole thing to the top of a pile of scree. The sight fell off the bowl, but it landed facing outward, and when we checked we found we had a decent view of the country in front of us.
“Okay,” she said. “You’ll fire four bursts, reaim, fire four more. On the fourth, I knock over your remote with this.” The rock in her hand was the size of a tennis ball. “Then we see what happens. Just to liven it up I’m going to spray the target spots with the NIF right after all that, in case you’ve flushed anything human from cover.”
“Deal,” I said. “Let’s see how this one goes.”
I sighted carefully on the better of the two targets, a narrow cleft between a couple of boulders; I figured there was some kind of microcave there, probably our boy was lying in under a slab of rock held up by two boulders, and that the NIF fléchettes just hadn’t been able to see him in there. “Ready?” I asked.
“Ready,” Chrys responded.
I squeezed the trigger four times, as fast as I could. There were four deep roars. A hex burst is the middle setting on the SHARR; it fires a group of six rounds that fly in formation to the target, then strike in a hexagon pattern about a meter across. There’s about as much kinetic energy in a SHARR round as there is energy in one of our hand grenades, and so the effect is pretty spectacular.
I wasn’t watching; I twiggled the cursor over to the other target. This one was a crevice under a large boulder; I wasn’t at all sure how he was managing to fire from under there. Maybe he was sitting behind the boulder, sighting with a remote sight that I hadn’t spotted, and then firing through a hole that led under the boulder and connected to the crevice I could see. Anyway, I moved the cursor to the crevice and squeezed the trigger as hard as I could four times.
Beside me, Chrys’s wrist and elbow snapped in a hard sidearm throw. The rock flew straight and true and knocked over the remote sight—which promptly fell forward and rolled down the cliffside.
There was a hail of shots as the remote sight was chewed to bits by Closer fire, but as we watched on the other remote sight, we saw it was coming from other locations. “Great,” Chrys said. “We got two, and three more are revealed. At this rate we only need about a dozen remote sights to be sure we get them all.”
I nodded. “Pity we only have two left. Did you see what happened to the targets?”
“The little cave collapsed when the boulders in front of it blew apart. You probably buried that guy under a twenty-ton slab.”
“Good,” I said. “I hope he’s still alive under there.”
“Mark, sometimes you turn my stomach. I don’t like them either, and I’m glad to do them harm, but spare me your bloodthirstiness, please … I don’t see any reason to rejoice in pain and suffering.” She sighed. “Anyway, I saw the other one take a NIF hit—he was trying to crawl out from the rubble where his hiding place got torn up.”
“So … want to hit those three hiding places and then see where matters stand?”
“Sounds good. Let me find the right-sized rock. We cut that one pretty close last time—if you’re going to do three, I think you’d probably better keep it to three bursts each.”
“Sounds right to me. My turn to set the remote sight.” I crawled forward and to the side with it, then very gently pushed it over the side of a boulder so that it fell onto a lower one, facing outward. “You want to do the honors with the SHARK, or shall I?”
“You go ahead. Let’s not break up a winning pattern.”
This time it went a little better, at least at first. The nine hex bursts whizzed out toward the little cracks and crevices where the Closers had dug in, and Chrys said that the ground exploded nicely around every one of them. She NIFfed at least one more of them, and another hidey-hole sprayed blood, indicating that probably a round had found its way to the warm human body concealed within.
This time she got the remote sight with the rock so that it fell into a concealed place, a little spot behind a rock, but to get to it we would have had to climb down through two whole meters of open ground, and it was pointed facedown into the ground, so it might as well have been on the Moon for all the good it did us. I was just about to say something when it suddenly blew to pieces; that better Closer homing ammo had done its trick.
“Just one place shot—but that might only mean there was just one target,” Chrysamen said, looking through the screen of her SHARK. “Maybe we should—”
With a flash and bang, the last remaining remote sight blew up. Now we couldn’t look at them without being shot—I remembered how easily I had hit the hand of the Closer setting his sight, and what had happened to him, and shuddered a little. To shoot a SHARK at them now with any chance of success, I would have to poke my head out. It would be only an instant until it was blown apart; it didn’t give me any additional sympathy for the Closers, but I couldn’t help wondering what one of those slugs spiraling around in the brain pan at hypersonic speeds would feel like. Probably like nothing at all … it would happen too fast. I hoped.
“Got any ideas for last-ditch procedures?” Chrys asked.
“Move back as far as we can into the best cover we can find, spray with NIFs at intervals to slow them down, and SHARK anything that pops its head up at us.” And try to look brave while they kill us, I added mentally.
“That’s what I thought of,” she said. “And we’ll have to not talk, since we’ll need our ears.”
“Far back” wasn’t much—the hole in the cliff we were in wasn’t more than twenty-five feet deep, and so all we could really do was move from our position behind the boulders covering the ledge in front of us, into the rubble at the back. It gave us maybe fifteen feet, which was nothing at all. I crouched behind one boulder, watching the line of rocks in front of us with my SHAKR in hand and Chrys’s beside me; a scant six feet to my right, Chrys squatted behind rubble, her NIF and mine ready to hand, watching her watch. When she judged enough time had gone by, she sprayed the NIF once, in a short burst, out over
the outer rim of the boulders; this far back in the shallow cave, the squealing echoed weirdly, like a flock of rabid bats bursting from the bowels of the Earth.
We held our breaths, listening for anything—and then suddenly there was a wailing, ululating, sobbing sound far out beyond us, followed by the booming report of a SHAKK-type weapon.
I glanced at her curiously; she let loose another squealing flock of fléchettes, and then we waited a long time, but there was no further sound.
“I set it to start at high pain and keep adding pain till blackout, then kill,” Chrys said. “Hoping it would give us some idea how many of them were moving around out there.”
“At least two, before,” I said, “and now probably still at least one.”
We couldn’t talk any longer—we had to keep our ears open for the danger approaching us. The cave was amazingly cold, and my position was getting cramped and uncomfortable; I realized the sun probably never penetrated this far, and these rocks hadn’t been warmed since they’d cooled from their making. It was still midmorning, less than an hour after our battle had started.
I crouched, looked through the sight of my SHAKK, and waited.
Chrys counted off another time interval—I knew without checking that she was smart enough to vary them—and sprayed again. This time there were no screams, and we sat still. More minutes ticked by, and again she sent a flight of fléchettes squealing into the space in front of us. This time there were screams, probably from two or three people; they went on for quite a while, and no shot ended them, but one screamer stopped abruptly, and then the other. She sprayed again, and no sound came.
I glanced sideways at her. She was listening with all her attention for the sounds that did not come. Her coverall was grimy from climbing, and under her hard hat her soft black curls were beginning to escape in little, untidy ringlets. Her breath hissed out in a white cloud, and finally she said, “That might have been it. Now we wait and stay on the drill for a while.”
