by Piers Platt
Men. Men are in the woods now. He hears them knock into trees and snap twigs, steps loud in the still woods and the snow. The wind brings their scent to him, and his nose tells him there are four men, he knows them – they have killed wolves. He bites, and bones crunch. A howl of pain, but he bites once more. Crunch, howl, crunch. And then he is through, and the flesh tears one last time, and his leg slips from the death grip of the trap, and he is free. He hops, limps, and hops, as quick as he can, flees the men and the trap, and leaves drops of blood in a trail on the snow. But he is free.
Marksman
There is a feeling of raw empowerment that comes with holding a rifle – not grasping it in the awkward, tentative way recruits hold it, but possessing it with complete familiarity and knowledge, knowing where it balances, where it fits your body. There is guilt in that empowering feeling, too; guilt that a civilized person such as yourself could enjoy such intimacy with a weapon, but the darker, primeval part of you savors the feeling.
It’s not at all comfortable to assume a firing position on the ground, the gravel digging into your elbows, helmet heavy on your head, but the marksman seeks that discomfort, resting his weight on his bones. Preparing to fire is almost as darkly satisfying as firing itself – sliding the magazine into the chamber, slamming the bolt home with a heavy metallic chunk you can feel through your sweaty fingers. The rifle trembles with grim potential as you steady yourself.
Target practice has a rhythm that is almost spiritual, at once explosive and peaceful, exciting and relaxing. The rifle snugs into your shoulder and you begin breathing rhythmically, watching the target rise and fall through your sights as you breathe, in and out. Several hundred yards away, the target is shaped like a man’s torso and head, and on an automated timer – it will fall down and escape if you fail to hit it. You breathe in once more, squeezing the trigger ever so softly, feeling it ride a millimeter backwards. You breathe out, still squeezing the trigger, concentrating your whole being on lining up the center of the target with your sights.
Then, in the natural pause between breaths, the weapon roars, surprising you with its violence, and the delicate calm is destroyed as the butt of the rifle slaps back into your shoulder. In the same instant, your round hits the target, throwing the green man to the ground with a sharp ping of metal on metal. The next round is already chambered, ready to fire, as you shift aim and wait for the next target to pop up, dread satisfaction coursing through your body.
Final Relay
The girls had won their relay, tying the score for the final event. We lined up, four boys in each of the two lanes. I shivered on the slippery dock, partly from the cold, partly from anticipation, and slipped off my over-suit, fitting my cap and adjusting my goggles. As I took my place at the head of our relay, I felt Nic, our anchorman, slap my back, and John gave me an encouraging grunt. Let’s do it, boys. Turning slowly, I extended a hand to my adversary, wishing him good luck; his handshake was weak, and to my eyes he looked shaken, inexperienced. He wore a full, trunk-style suit instead of a drag-reducing Speedo, and his body lacked definition in the swimming muscle groups I was so familiar with.
I suppressed a mean grin, and pressed my goggles into my eyes one last time to check the seal, then bent swiftly at the knees and hips, exhaling with each compression of my nervous body. A quick glance at the beach told me that both teams and all of the parents were at the water’s edge, and excited children had waded in knee-deep so that we might better hear their throaty yells. The cheering rose to a fever pitch, and I felt a rush of adrenaline course through my body. I focused on the still, dark water between the far wall and myself, visualizing each stroke, each complex coordination of movements in their precise order. As the starter raised her gun, the cheering climaxed, and then died suddenly, expectantly.
“Boys, 15-18 years old, 200 yard freestyle relay. Swimmers, take your mark.” I set my feet, molding them with the smooth deck material, and my hands gripped the turning board hungrily.
The gunshot slammed out across the water, and I was already in the air as the echo reached me from the beach. As my arms and head sliced into the cold surface, I caught a brief glance of my opponent, still completing his somewhat awkward dive from the blocks. The sudden blast of the crowd was immediately drowned by the roar of the rushing water. In seconds the far wall loomed white before me and I flipped, legs hurling over my back to pound jarringly into the rough wall, and immediately shove off. As I surfaced from the turn I caught a second glimpse of my opponent, still approaching his own wall, and I yelled an incomprehensible scream of bubbles and noise at him in triumph. I tore toward the last wall, slamming my outstretched hand in to finish, and hauled myself, victorious, out onto the deck.
Last Pursuit
One more, Desh thought. Forty-nine kills completed. Just one more, and then you’re out. But no sooner had the thought formed than a mission update notification appeared in his heads-up display, and he felt a pit form in his stomach, cold dread washing over him. Don’t get worked up yet. It could be a routine update. He forced himself to ignore the notification, and instead checked his ship’s arrival time on his datascroll. Five minutes to deceleration.
Desh loathed interstellar travel, from the queasy feeling of the faster-than-light accelerations, to the interminable waiting aboard the transports. In an effort to encourage travel, the spaceliners featured exercise rooms and entertainment centers whose use could be purchased for a nominal fee, but a week or more of traveling through the vacuum of deep space drove most passengers slightly insane regardless of the activities available. For Desh, it just meant more idle time to spend fretting about the mission, worrying the details like a sore tooth. And more time trying to forget the anguished faces of his victims. So he sighed with relief when the arrival announcement flashed on the bulkhead displays, and he quickly made his way to his cabin to finish packing his gear.
At one time in his career, arrival announcements had triggered an adrenaline rush in anticipation of the mission, but all he felt today was exhaustion.
Exhaustion is acceptable, given the circumstances, Desh reasoned. But it’s still a sign of weakness. His target had canceled his business trip, but Desh had already been en route to the man’s intended destination, and he had wasted nearly two weeks traveling to the wrong planet as a result. Two weeks stuck on spaceliners, with nothing to do but watch the mission clock count down.
But that’s not why I’m tired.
He touched the metal bracelet on his right wrist, his finger sliding over the smooth surface, coming to rest on the button in the center. As he pressed it, a three-dimensional hologram appeared over the bracelet, a spinning golden number 1.
My first kill, fresh out of Training. Strangling a loan shark in his office above a laundromat.
As Desh watched, the numbers changed, counting upwards with increasing speed.
Fourteen: poisoning a minor government functionary on Mars.
Thirty-two: faking the suicide of an unfaithful husband.
Each of his targets’ faces clawed up out of his memory in turn, their eyes full of fear, anger, desperation. And then the numbers stopped, and he watched as the ‘49’ spun slowly, and then winked out. Number fifty would soon have a face, too, but for Desh, the number meant only one thing.
Freedom.
Over the long, tense years, the meaning of those numbers had changed so much. Desh had signed his contract with the Guild to vault his way out of poverty and into the privileged class, like most guildsmen. The Guild’s famous “Fifty for Fifty” deal was the same for each of them: if he completed fifty missions, he would be entitled to fifty percent of the commissions he had earned. He couldn’t choose his missions, and he couldn’t fail to complete those he was assigned – success, or death while trying, were the only acceptable outcomes. Guild training was brutally direct on this matter; Desh still remembered the video they had used to illustrate their point, in which several masked men demonstrated just how long a guildsman who tried to b
reak his contract could be made to suffer before dying. Recalling the images, Desh shuddered involuntarily. The sizable fortune that would soon be deposited to his account was of only marginal interest to Desh; what mattered far more was bringing an end to the missions, the ceaseless trips through the void, and the pleading, desperate faces he found waiting for him with each new assignment.
Desh opened his datascroll and accessed the mission brief for the hundredth time, but instead of reading, he watched the ship’s external footage on his cabin’s viewscreen. Silently, the spaceliner coasted through the navigational satellites, whose yellow lights winked to show the path toward Aleppo. His mission brief stated that the planet’s gravity was slightly less than that of Earth, which of course allowed them to excel at the industrial work Aleppo had become known for. Even a five percent gravity drop could yield significantly higher profit margins, he knew, with less stress on heavy machinery and less fuel to boost the finished products into orbit. Desh shook his head, and forced his gaze away from the viewscreen, concentrating on the mission brief.
His target was an industrial baron who owned several interplanetary conglomerates, and whose draconian employment practices had upset the local unions. The man was wealthy enough that he might have been able to live on Earth, but having been born on Aleppo, he had decided to call it home. Given the barren terrain appearing on his viewscreen, Desh failed to see its appeal entirely. The colonists had begun atmospheric introduction, but they were still decades away from making the atmosphere breathable, and since most of the world’s industrial plants belched out toxic gases anyway, nobody was in a particular hurry. A rocky planet, rich in ore deposits but utterly devoid of indigenous life, Aleppo’s chief terrain feature was a massive canyon nearly encircling the equator, as if a giant claw had torn the planet’s crust. It was in this canyon that the colonists had built their settlements, choosing to remain below ground and inconspicuous in case the planet hid any nasty surprises the early explorers had failed to document. Desh planned to follow their example.
The ship slowed again in final approach, and Desh felt the stabilizers and maneuvering rockets firing. He picked up his backpack and headed for the ship’s docking tubes. The docking process was completed in less than ten minutes, and Desh was one of the first passengers off. Once onto the planet’s orbiting transfer station, he followed the signs for the planetary shuttle terminal.
In the terminal, Desh walked past the mass transit shuttles and found the private shuttle area. Several pilots offered Desh their services, but a slight man kneeling and tightening his boot cords caught Desh’s attention. That’s the signal. One benefit of being in the Guild – though the downsides were many – was that Desh had never been disappointed with the quality of personnel hired to support his missions. The pilot straightened as Desh approached, motioning toward his shuttle and offering to shoulder the bag for him. Desh declined, and the man shrugged.
Desh took a seat in the passenger cabin, closing the privacy door to the cockpit to discourage the pilot from initiating a conversation. The shuttle ride was smooth, no doubt another effect of the planet’s low gravity and thin atmosphere.
Okay, you’ve put it off long enough. Call Headquarters.
He pulled out his holophone, dialed a number from memory, and then punched in a code at the prompt.
“The line is encrypted, you may proceed,” a robotic voice told him.
“Contractor 211, requesting mission update,” he told his phone.
“You exited faster-than-light travel almost twenty-five minutes ago – why have you taken so long to call in?” a supervisor asked him.
“I didn’t think I should call in from a public shuttle terminal,” Desh told the man, exasperated.
“You should have called from your spaceliner,” the supervisor chided him.
“I’m calling now,” Desh said. “What’s the update?”
“The client’s becoming impatient – this was a time sensitive mission, and we’re several weeks behind schedule.”
Desh tapped his fingers against his armrest with impatience. “Did you remind them it was their intelligence that sent me to the wrong planet?”
“Regardless, they’ve opened up the contract to local bidders.”
“They’ve done what?” Desh asked, sitting up in his seat.
“The contract is still valid, but fees will be paid to whichever party completes the assignment first.”
“And if the local guys, if these … amateurs … get there first?” Desh asked.
“That would constitute a failed mission,” the man told him. “And I don’t have to remind you of the consequences of failure.”
Desh swore. “I just got here! I haven’t even made contact with the target yet. I need to do reconnaissance and surveillance, plan the mission—”
“Normally, yes. In the circumstances, I suggest you cut those activities short.”
“How long has the contract been open to locals?”
“Three days.”
“Well, the target’s security team will have caught wind of it by now. They’re going to be expecting an attempt.”
The line stayed silent.
“My last mission, and you’re telling me my only option is to do a hit-and-run on a target that’s expecting me, with local hitmen likely to interfere,” Desh pointed out.
“Headquarters staff will be standing by to support you in whatever way we can,” the supervisor replied.
“That’s reassuring,” Desh told him, and hung up.
Desh felt a trickle of sweat run down the back of his neck – the force of gravity was becoming more noticeable. He opened the cabin door and saw that the planet’s canyon now filled the forward viewport. Desh walked forward and took the seat next to the pilot.
He pulled up a picture of the target on his datascroll and held it out for the pilot to see. “I need to know if this man is alive.”
The pilot frowned, but glanced at the photo. “Lloyds? Yeah, he’s alive.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. If a guy like Lloyds got taken down, the whole planet would know about it.”
Desh grimaced. Wonderful.
“I think he’s opening a new titanium refinery on the South Rim this evening,” the pilot continued. “I saw something about it in the news last night.”
“Take me there.”
The pilot began to ask Desh a question, but caught sight of Desh’s expression, and thought better of it. Instead, he concentrated on guiding the shuttle onto its new course.
Desh set his backpack on his lap, opening the main compartment to unfold a large, clamshell-shaped device, his Forge. Hello, old friend. He ran his open palm lightly over the smooth metal, smiling faintly. I hope they let me keep you when this is all over. Just for old time’s sake. Accessing his internal computer, he sent the device a series of commands, and watched as nanomachines in the backpack’s open tray whirred to life. The butt of an auto-pistol soon began to emerge. The pilot glanced over briefly, then carefully kept his eyes fixed out the front viewport. While Desh waited, he slaved his internal communications device to the shuttle’s radio.
“Radio check.”
The pilot touched his ear-piece and nodded. “I got you. We’re coming over the South Rim.”
Desh craned his neck to look out the polarized window next to him, noting a jagged edge of cliff close below them. Beyond the cliff’s edge and far below it, a sprawling industrial park belched flame and fumes into the red sky. The pilot made a steep bank, bringing the craft down and sharply to the left, cruising just above the factories.
“What now?”
Desh thought for a second. “Give me a pass over the new plant.”
Desh picked up the completed auto-pistol, loaded it with practiced ease, double-checked that its digital point-of-aim reticule appeared on the heads-up display of his optical implants, and then placed the weapon in the waistband of his pants. In his Forge, the nanomachines were already at work on a grenade.
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nbsp; “Coming up on the plant,” the pilot reported.
“Slow down.”
The pilot took the shuttle through a wide, slow turn, allowing Desh an excellent view of the plant out his window. None of the machinery seemed to be operating, but he identified the glass-domed main entrance by the large, lighted tunnel leading to it.
“See if you can find us somewhere inconspicuous to set down.”
The pilot hesitated. “If you want to get in there, we’re going to have to land in a bay with atmospheric seals … I don’t have survival gear onboard.”
Desh had forgotten the planet’s air was not breathable. Focus! he told himself. If we land in a bay, the shuttle’s going to get recorded on security cameras. But I don’t have a choice at this point.
“Then set down in a bay. Close to the plant.”
The bay the pilot chose was mercifully empty – he landed with a slight jolt, and the bay doors sealed behind them. As the bay repressurized, Desh slipped into a large trench coat, pocketed the grenade from his backpack, and then closed the device, slipping it on. He took a minute to detail his plans with the pilot, and then exited the shuttle quickly, heading for the nearest air-sealed pedestrian tunnel. He pulled his coat close around his jumpsuit, hugging the thin material to him for protection.
There were no guards at the entrance to the new plant, and Desh allowed himself a silent sigh of relief. He stepped out of the entrance tunnel into a large, domed arboretum, ringed with shops and food stalls. The factory could be seen through enormous reinforced glass windows on the far side of the trees, the heavy pipes and valves looking strangely incongruous behind the imported trees.