Nebula Awards Showcase 2019

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  Only one way to find out.

  More firing was erupting from around the village. With Sergeant Rafiq pinned down, only Ben-Zvi’s fire team and maybe the two civilian security officers were returning the fire. That had to change. Marines took the fight to the enemy. They didn’t let the enemy bring it to them.

  “Sergeant Rafiq, if I cover you from that automatic crew-served, can you make it to the library? It’s made of stone, so it’ll give you better cover.”

  “If you can send some rounds to the east, too, I think we can. We’re taking small arms from there, and we’ve got to carry Parker.”

  “Can you let the two security guys know you’re coming? I don’t want them to take you out.”

  “Roger that. They pulled Omato out of the line of fire. She’s pretty fucked up, but she’s on her comms now.”

  Another heavy burst from the crew-served gun tore through the building, and Sergeant Rafiq passed, “With you or without you, we’ve got to go now!”

  “Irving, on my go, I want you to put rounds downrange to the east. No one shot, one kill. I need volume.”

  He nodded, his hand squeezing and relaxing on his pistol grip while Gracie checked her scope one more time.

  “On three,” she passed on the command net so every Marine could hear her. “One . . . two . . . three!”

  Gracie swung her barrel over the top of the wall, set her cross hairs on the wall about 15 centimeters to the left of the window’s edge, and squeezed the trigger. She shifted lower and slightly to the right and fired again as Rabbit started sending hundreds of hypervelocity darts across the square and in amongst the buildings.

  “Go, go!” Sergeant Rafiq shouted over the net.

  The muzzle of the enemy gun disappeared, and Gracie put her last 331 into the wall. She wasn’t sure if the rounds had penetrated completely through it, but she’d certainly gotten the shooter’s attention. With a WPT-310 now chambered, she swung back to the square and looked for a target. A flash of movement caught her at the edge of the scope, and she brought the crosshairs to bear, but realized that it was the boy, Space Dog, running away from the square, not toward it. A door opened ahead of him, and a panicked-looking woman came out, wildly beckoning him to her.

  She didn’t bother to see if the boy made it. Rounds started to impact around her, and she looked over the top of her scope, trying to spot a real target. She immediately picked up an FLNT soldier running full tilt towards the square, firing up at her as he went. With a smooth move, Gracie acquired the man through her scope, adjusted high, then fired. The round hit him just below the throat, and Gracie knew he was dead before he hit the ground.

  There was a thud next to her, and Rabbit grunted before spinning around and falling to the deck.

  “You OK?” she asked.

  He gave her a weak thumbs-up, then rubbed his upper chest, saying, “My bones stopped the round, but shit, that felt like someone hit me with a club.”

  The “bone” inserts that acted as body armor would stop most small arms rounds, but while darts might barely be felt, larger caliber slugs could still beat a Marine up pretty good.

  “Where was the shooter?”

  “Over there,” he said, pointing past Gracie. “I was turning to you when I got hit.”

  “Show me.”

  He picked himself up, and with a grimace, popped his head up and pointed. Gracie followed the direction, then both dropped as another round zipped past where Rabbit’s head had been an instant before.

  He can’t be, she told herself as she tried to analyze what she’d seen.

  There was only been one structure higher than their building in that direction: the water tower. While water towers seemed to be the platform of choice for snipers in Hollybolly flicks, they pretty much sucked for the job. A sniper on one was completely exposed with no route of egress. Not only a suicide position, but a stupid one because a sniper perched there would be taken out immediately.

  But this guy’s already proven himself to be pretty dumb. Why try to take out Rabbit instead of me?

  Gracie knew that she didn’t look much like a Marine at times. At 1.4 meters and 38 kg (and that after a Harvest Festival banquet), she could look like a little girl playing dress-up in daddy’s gear, especially when she had on her full battle rattle. But any soldier should have realized that since she was carrying the Windmoeller while Rabbit had his standard-issue M99, she was the threat, not him.

  Being a sniper, despite all the advances since the Evolution, was still pretty much a man’s game. Gracie had run across misogyny more than once, but this was ridiculous, and she was going to enjoy taking advantage of it. If that cretin didn’t think she was the threat, she was going to prove him wrong—and enjoy doing so.

  “You ready to play the prey, Lance Corporal Rabbit?”

  He looked up at her in confusion. Gracie wasn’t one much for nicknames, and she’d always kept military discipline in her professional relationships.

  “He doesn’t seem to recognize that I’m the sniper here. You’re twice my size, so you must be the threat. So, if you’re up to it, can you pop up for a moment and run a few steps while I disabuse him of his notion?”

  A smile crept over his face. He nodded, saying, “My chest still hurts, Staff Sergeant, so yeah, I think I owe him this.”

  She held up her hand while she entered the range and the height differential. More math—lethal math. At 884 meters, this would be a longer shot, but the calculations were done the same way.

  “No matter how good he is, it’ll take two seconds minimum for a round to reach you, so no hero stuff. I want you back down in two.”

  She muted her earbud to the sounds of Sergeant Rafiq directing his squad and took three deep breaths to calm her pulse, then nodded. When Rabbit bolted up, she rose, rested her barrel on the top of the retaining wall, and only had to nudge her scope slightly up and to the right to have the enemy sniper in her crosshairs. She’d just acquired him when she saw him fire.

  “Down!” she shouted at Rabbit as she started squeezing her trigger—just as the man lifted his head to look over his scope as if trying to see if he’d hit her spotter. Gracie raised her point of aim to take advantage of the larger target and fired. She could see the trace as the round pierced the air, so she immediately knew she was on target. Long range sniping might be math, but it was almost art to see the round arc up, then curve back down and slightly to the right to impact his throat. Blood splattered the white paint of the water tower behind him as his weapon fell forward to tumble to the ground.

  “Did you get the bastard?” Rabbit asked.

  “What do you think? Of, course, I did.”

  Firing below them was intensifying. She keyed her earbud back on. Second Squad was getting in it deep. Although now that they were inside the library, they were dishing it out as well as taking it in.

  “Back to work, Irving.”

  She started scanning with her scope, trying to find targets and take the pressure off of Second Squad, but while she caught a few shadows, she was having a difficult time. The Marine Corps Miller was an outstanding scope, its targeting AI second-to-none, but snipers usually engaged at over 1000 meters at a minimum. Even with the scope at its widest display, she just wasn’t getting the field of vision she needed to spot the enemy as they maneuvered below her. Rabbit had fired four times since she’d taken out the sniper, and she’d yet to engage.

  “I need the Kyc,” she muttered.

  Gracie was more attached to the slug-throwing Windmoeller, but as they were 45,000 credits each, she only had one Miller Scope. She had attached a normal combat scope to her hypervelocity Kyocera, something quite a bit less sophisticated, but with a much wider and higher-contrast field of view. Normally, she wouldn’t have even brought the Kyc on the mission, relying instead on her Windmoeller for sniping and her Rino .358 for personal defense. Since she’d had
an eager Rabbit there willing to hump it, however, she had figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring it—and now that might prove to have been fortuitous.

  Keeping low, she scurried alongside the wall to where Rabbit had left the weapon. She powered it up and checked its readouts. Power was at 98%, and while the Kyc didn’t carry the 1000-round dart mags of the M99, she still had 150 slightly larger 3mm darts ready to throw and another two mags ready to use. She brought it to her shoulder and looked through the combat scope. As if a gift from the gods of war, she immediately picked up two soldiers hugging the wall of a building that was giving them cover from Marine fire.

  Not all Marine fire, guys.

  The combat scope must have brought her back to her time as a regular grunt, because instead of squeezing her trigger in the best Triple S fashion, she snapped off five shots in quick succession. With the Kyc’s negligible recoil and semi-automatic action, she could fire three darts per second, which beat the Windmoeller’s 1.8 seconds per round. The first two darts punched through the head of the lead soldier, both probably continuing to hit the second soldier in the chest. He didn’t drop but lunged backward as the next three darts chased him. He fell, only his legs visible as they churned to push him back out of her line-of-sight, so Gracie fired two more darts, at least one hitting him in the left leg.

  The FLNT soldiers had layered plate armor on their torsos, but their legs were unprotected, and the man left a smear of blood on the ground as his legs disappeared.

  “Dingo-Three and Charlie-One-Two, we have two armored vehicles, Kuang Fen 10’s, approaching your position from three-four-niner, two klicks out. We are diverting the Minidrag to intercept, and Charlie-One is on the way. ETA for the platoon is forty-five mikes, so hold on.”

  Gracie glanced over at Rabbit, who met her eyes. Kuang Fen, an Alliance-registered company, was a new supplier of relatively cheap military equipment. While nothing they had was as good as Federation, Brotherhood, or even Confederation equipment, they were a match for what Gentry, the major supplier to local governments and mercenary units, could put out. More importantly, a KF-10 was more than capable of taking out a lone Marine squad and sniper team. Intel apparently hadn’t caught on to the little fact that there were KF tanks in the sector.

  “Hope the Minidrag can take them out,” Rabbit passed on the P2P.

  “That’s out of our hands for now, so keep firing.”

  Over the next five minutes, Gracie dropped three more FLNT fighters, one as he crouched to fire a shoulder-launched missile at the library. She picked up the Windmoeller again to put a round through the missile as it lay in the dirt so no one else could pick it up and use it. As she searched for more targets, her mind was on the Marine drone as it closed in on the KF-10s.

  The fight, more than a klick-and-a-half away and within their sight from the roof, was over in seconds. The lead KF-10 erupted in a ball of flame, and moments later, the Minidrag was knocked from the sky. That left one tank still in the fight, and it looked huge as it pushed forward.

  “Now what?” Rabbit asked, firing off another burst of 20 darts.

  “Keep shooting.”

  There was whoosh, then a boom as a missile crashed into the side of the library, blowing a hole through the stone. Gracie tried to spot the gunner to no avail. She could almost feel the enemy close in though. The hammer would fall when the KF-10 arrived.

  “You still with us?” she asked Sergeant Rafiq on the P2P.

  There was a pause before he answered, “We’re down to three effectives. That last one, shit, I’m down hard, bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not going anywhere. I just gave Ben-Zvi the order to retreat to the west, and I’d suggest you do so, too. We’ll try to give you some cover, and when that fucking FLNT tank gets here . . . well, we’ll see what happens.”

  A death sentence, Gracie knew. The FLNT didn’t see the value of prisoners.

  She tied Rabbit in to the net, then said, “I don’t think so, Sergeant. We can keep them off you.”

  She looked over at Rabbit who nodded his agreement.

  “You can take out a KF-10? Don’t think so,” Rafiq said, then groaned in pain.

  “Lieutenant Hjebek and the rest of your platoon are almost here.”

  “Look, Staff Sergeant, I . . . we appreciate the sentiment, but this time, the dice rolled against us. All of us here, we talked about it, and we agree. Get out of here. Semper fi,” he said before breaking into a fit of coughing and cutting the net.

  “Keep at it, Irving,” Gracie said, snapping off another round. It didn’t hit the running soldier, but it made him dive for cover.

  The enemy tank was getting closer, and Gracie pulled up a threat assessment. The KF-10 would be vulnerable to any Marine anti-armor, but the two teams, or whoever was left of them, had used theirs in anti-personnel mode to push back the assault. A few antennae and the periscope were vulnerable, but not to her when armed with only a Kyocera.

  But what about the Windmoeller? she wondered.

  She didn’t have any more WPT-331 rounds, but a WPT-310 would still be better than her 3mm darts. She changed weapons, then shot a range to the tank. It was about to enter the northern edge of town, 1,245 meters away from her. She took a few moments to enter the environmentals. Gracie was an excellent marksman, but hitting a 4cm-wide periscope lens on a moving tank at that range was going to be a task.

  “You can’t take out a tank with that,” Rabbit said when he realized what she was doing.

  “No, but maybe I can blind it,” she said as she took her three calming breaths.

  The tank was still advancing, and Gracie had to estimate what that would do to her sight picture. She made her decision, then fired. A moment later, she saw the round ping off the periscope turret, four or five centimeters low.

  She immediately adjusted, but the driver juked the tank to its right just as she fired again, so she never saw the impact of her round. With the side aspect she had now, the shot would be almost impossible, but she held the target in the hopes that it would turn back to her.

  There was an explosion behind her. Gracie spun around as three figures burst through the door to the roof that had been blasted right out of the frame, hitting Rabbit hard on the head. Gracie swung her Kyocera around and fired an un-aimed shot which took one soldier in the thigh and dropped him, causing the man behind him to stumble. She fired again, hitting the second soldier on the top of his head. The third soldier, however, fired a three-round burst at her. One hit her in the left arm and caused her to drop her Windmoeller, her entire arm aflame with pain, while another hit her square on her left knee.

  With a smile of . . . satisfaction? . . . scorn? he lowered his rifle and pulled out an enormous boarding gun. Probably over 100 years old, it fired a short-range rocket that had the power to blow right through her body armor. He was slowly raising it to bear down on her when a string of darts hit him in the side where his plate armor deflected them. He spun and fired, the rocket crossing the ten meters to where Rabbit lay on the ground, the muzzle of his M99 wavering as he tried to keep it on target.

  Rabbit never had a chance. The rocket blew apart his upper torso. The man stopped, looking at Rabbit’s body for a moment before turning back to Gracie. That small delay was enough to give her a chance to pull her Rino from her thigh holster, and his eyes widened in shock as she fired, double-tapping the trigger. The first .358 hollow-point hit him in the forehead, the round expanding and lodging ten centimeters deep into his brain.

  Gracie felt a pang of loss, but she couldn’t stop to mourn Rabbit. She stumbled to her feet, arm numb, and picked up the Kyocera again. The final assault was about to kick off below, and she intended on taking out as many of the enemy as possible. Heedless of how exposed she was, she leaned over the top of the wall, firing round after round. She thought she dropped at least four of them, but she wasn’t sure. The whole time she was firing, the sound of the KF-10 reverbe
rated between the buildings as it made its way to the square.

  She heard Sergeant Rafiq ask the lieutenant how far out the platoon was, but she didn’t bother to listen to the reply. She knew there was no way the reinforcements could reach them in time.

  “I’m still here with you, Dylan,” she told him. “Hang in there.”

  “Shit, Staff Sergeant, you’re as stubborn as they said. But you sure as hell ain’t no Ice Princess like they say, though. You’ve got balls, sister.”

  “And so do you.”

  And the KF-10 rolled into the square, big and mean, blue-diesel engine pumping out smoke. She knew her Kyocera was useless against it, but she fired off 100 rounds, more as a statement than anything else, as the tank gunner raised the 80mm gun to take her under fire.

  She knew she should do something, but there wasn’t much left in her box of tricks. The big gun was going to take off the entire top of the building, and her leg was already swollen and immobile. Math worked for snipers, but also for tanks—80mm trumped 3mm.

  Gracie kept firing, though. The gun was halfway up when there was a loud whoosh from beneath her, and a smoky plume raced across the square to hit the tank right below the commander’s cupola.

  The gun stopped tracking. No massive explosions, no turret flying through the air. The tank just stopped cold.

  “Scratch one tank,” Corporal Ben-Zvi passed on the command net.

  “Fuck, Abe, I told you to take your team and get out of here,” Sergeant Rafiq passed.

  “Ah, I’ve always been a fuck-up, Sergeant. You know that.”

  The cracka-cracka-cracka of an M110 sounded below her, its rounds shooting across the square to disappear out of sight.

  “I’m still effective up here,” Gracie passed. “And thanks for taking out the tank, but this isn’t over. We’ve still got a job to do.”

  But it was over. With the KF-10 gone, the will of the FLNT fighters seemed to slip away—that or the fact that they knew a Marine platoon was minutes out. Gracie fired one more shot at a retreating figure, but that was it before Lieutenant Hjebek led the rest of the platoon into the village.