Rifling – Short Story Week 2019

Smoke rose in a thousand thin streams, gathering into a monotonous gray haze which smothered the harsh light of a distant sun, leaving only a faint, flat twilight. Beneath the pallor of the artificial stormcloud, both land and sky were wracked with the lightning flicker of energy weapons, shaken with the thunder of explosives, and showered in sheets of ash and dust.

From her perch atop what was left of the Celestial Stairway, Agent Trader looked down over a city not yet ruins, keeping watch over soldiers not yet dead. There had been fighting for five weeks already, with no end in sight; a long, gruesome grind, losing and gaining a block or a building at a time – like a protracted and bloody game of chess. Much of that time was spent waiting for engineers to disable or destroy the automated defenses in an area, followed by a brief, violent push to claim the vulnerable space and put new defenses in place.

That wasn’t her role in the game. She wore no uniform, took no overt action in the conflict between the forces of Alliant and Autarch, but she had an agenda all the same. Her particular set of skills allowed her to employ tactics common soldiers and combat drones could not, and coupled with the experimental prototype she carried… suffice it to say she could move pieces around on the board rather more quickly than the enemy tended to count on.

She set up her equipment with the methodical care of a sniper – and indeed, her instrument bore more than a passing similarity to the infamous assassin’s weapon, a large part of why she had been entrusted with this task in the first place. The tool she used now was not a rifle – well, not in any conventional sense – but the targeting system and scope were meant to be used at a similar range, and she had been fighting long enough to have plenty of experience with both.

Practiced movements saw the task done quickly. The boxy body of the instrument hummed into life – repurposed components housed in plain gray printed plastic – and she made certain everything was properly calibrated, using knobs and sliders to navigate through screens and settings like a DJ from the days of yore. Touch screens were too finicky for field work. While capacitors charged and positioning systems validated, she attached the gyroscopically-stabilized tripod, activated the scope and phase-shifted laser sight, then clipped on the digital monocle that would allow her to see them.

And then, at last, she could extend the long targeting antenna and settle down to see what the day offered.

Playtime.

Back during the early days of the war, when most people could still live fairly ordinary lives, when she had been a child – a few years before they had taken her and turned her into… whatever she was now – she remembered spending hours poring over the pages of a large book crammed with tiny pictures of people. She would wile away the hours of curfew studying the panoramic scenes, distract herself from the sound of bombs aboveground by searching for a certain character, or ask her mother endless questions about what had once been ordinary scenes, in the days before she was born.

This wasn’t so different, really. From up here, she could take in the vast sweep of the city, observing an endless series of ever-changing vignettes with a nearly omniscient eye. And if the subject matter was somewhat grimmer stuff, it was no less fascinating: a thousand tiny plays unfolding everywhere she looked, millions of souls engaged in a single great drama, struggling with matters of literal life and death.

Would today see some glorious triumph? A crushing defeat? Or some unforeseen twist that changed the game entirely? It was impossible to know, and that, to her, was the great game of it – the thing that kept her going even after all her connections had been severed and her soul crushed, the thing that kept her engaged in a war and a world that seemed to be growing bleaker by the day. So far as she knew, it was the only way to keep going.

In war, you took the cards you were dealt for the day and you made the most of them.

So what did the city have for her today? She began by panning slowly over the entire scene, double-blinking to tag locations that caught her attention, then returned to examine those points more closely.

Right. The largest and most obvious point of interest was set some distance away, on a broad rooftop plaza some distance from the front lines. Several squadrons of Autarch troops were gathered there, all lined up for some sort of formal event. On a raised stage, flanked on either side by the massive defensive turrets which made such an open assembly possible, stood a line of officers, undoubtedly addressing the grunts with the usual spiel – all the same lofty language and patriotic appeals the other side was using, but with the names switched around.

In front of them was a figure that could only be a prisoner of some sort – a captured Alliant spy, perhaps – kneeling in the center of the stage with hands bound, their face covered with a cloth hood. Some fashions never went out of style.

It was a bit more brazen than Trader tended to prefer, and she would have to be careful with the timing, but the opportunity was too enticing to pass up. Carefully, she set her sights on the officer with the largest constellation of stars on their shoulder – in this case, a bald and battle-weathered woman nodding emphatically at each point the current speaker made – and squeezed the trigger.

A laser, invisible to the naked eye, crossed the intervening space nearly instantaneously, striking her target square in the chest. The woman – a brigadier, Trader thought – did not react. As far as anyone other than Trader could tell, nothing had happened, but on the screen of her eyepiece, a new icon appeared. The Autarch brigadier had been successfully tagged.

The fun part would come later.

Next, she tagged the Alliant prisoner, smirking a bit. That ought to shake things up a bit. Now then… it looked as though she still had a few moments before they tried to execute the spy. What else could she throw into the mix?

Aha! It looked as though she had a kindred spirit – another sniper, situated on the other side of the front line, in an area that concealed them from the troops on the rooftop, but not from her. The man was dressed in tattered civilian clothing – either undercover or one of the hundred little militias that had sprung up in the wake of the siege, each one seemingly with its own agenda and allegiance.

Whatever his reasons, the chap didn’t seem to care about the Autarch assembly – her optics revealed he was focused on somebody further down, his own slightly-less-invisible laser sights fixed on a particular nook near the base of the building. Keeping someone pinned down, by the looks of it.

Switching to infrared sensors painted the scene in shades of blue and white, giving away the secret – there was indeed a person huddled within the crevice, though the contours would have looked very strange to anyone unaccustomed to the distinctive thermal signatures of a Jump Trooper. Not to her, of course – she had spent most of her early career swatting down any jumpers foolish enough to think the night would protect them from poking their heads above the skyline.

Like the sniper, she didn’t know which side, if any, the jumper belonged to, but that was no reason to exclude them from the party – after all, she could ensure they weren’t harmed, and she had found causing chaos of any kind tended to advance her aims more than it did the enemy’s. One shot to tag the sniper, then, and a bit of messing around with the controls to get around the jumper’s cover – the targeting laser was a convenience, not a necessity. She didn’t need to have direct line of sight for it to work its magic.

One more. One more, and then she needed to change positions – the Celestial Stairway was the best vantage point for miles, and although she had spent the last half-hour clearing it out, nowhere was safe in this city for very long. What else did she have on the Alliant side of the line?

With her heat vision still active, she found herself spotting a cluster of people that hadn’t been obvious in the normal light – a shifting mass of souls clustered within the shadowed floors of an open tower – a skeletal structure that had probably once been a dock for autopters.

Now it was serving to shelter something between a boisterous party and a friendly riot. Citizens blowing off steam, seeking any distraction from the tenterhook tedium of waiting for the war to end. She’d been to those before. Scraps of food laid out like a banquet, gambling for bits of glass, dancing to terrible music made worse by amplification through speakers scavenged together by sheer gumption and mechanical sorcery. The main attractions, of course, made use of their most abundant resource – other people. People scrapped, and screwed, and told stories – humanity at its most basic. Trader hadn’t indulged in the activities, but the mere fact that they existed was a comfort to her. Even in the midst of death and destruction, life carried on.

They, too, were making the most of the cards they’d been dealt.

And so when she spied the person in the middle of the party with a dozen sticks of pernacitol stuffed down his pants, she found herself tagging the asshole before she had even finished working out the implications of adding him to the roster. After a second’s consideration, however, she found herself smiling again. In actuality, she could have hardly have asked for a better addition to the list – when everything was set in motion, the bomber’s explosives were sure to be triggered as a result, and the ensuing explosion could likely level half the block.

But only if she was quick about it.

Aware of how much was on the line, she flew through the deconstruction process, stowing away the tripod and collapsing the targeting antenna. She kept the scope on for now, to be sure everything was in place. The suicide bomber was the problem – they could set themselves off at any second, which would be disastrous in more ways than one.

And then disaster struck anyway.

A siren blared in her earpiece, signaling that someone had set off the electric tripwire in the hallway behind her. Enemy forces were on this floor. She spun, drawing her sidearm, but there was no point – her infrared eye showed an entire squad of soldiers closing in. Jump Troopers, using the new silent models. They must have scaled the interior of the cylindrical Stairway, bypassing her usual defenses.

Damn it. She wasn’t cut out for close-quarters work – not in a straight firefight, at least. That left her with only one option.

Without hesitation, she executed the classic defenestration defense: blowing out the window with her sidearm and diving through.

They would follow, of course – they could fly, and where they were falling from more than a mile above the surface of the city, they would have plenty of time to catch her, even if she’d had a jump pack of her own, which she didn’t.

But she had something better than wings up her sleeve.

Magic.

Dark shapes burst from the tower, following her like a flock of crows intent on murder, but she was rapidly reaching terminal velocity – just enough of a head start to pull off her technological sleight-of-hand.

Yes, she had to play with the cards she’d been dealt…

Fumbling slightly as she fell, she still managed to keep hold of her special equipment, turning it around so the antenna pointed at her chest and then pulling the trigger. Another icon popped up in her display, adding her to the list of targets.

…but she had been given a chance to stack the deck.

Armored figures clustered around her, reaching out, but in the heartbeat before they made contact, she initiated the teleportation sequence.

The machine hummed, then beeped, and then everything in the world went still.

And then, almost instantaneously, everyone she’d tagged took the place of the next person on the list.

•••

The chain of events that followed took place over approximately a tenth of a second, but to Agent Trader, the sequence seemed to stretch, taking a hundred times as long. It was only the second time she had ever subjected herself to the swap, and this was a far cry from the laboratory setting of her first jump.

Somewhere slightly out of sync with time and space, she had a supernatural awareness of each step as it occurred, able to tell what was happening even though most of the action was no longer within her field of vision.

With the settings she had established earlier, the last one on the list was the first to vanish. In an instant, she was no longer falling, but standing on a platform surrounded by enemy officers, having taken the place of the Autarch Brigadier. The Brigadier, in turn, was shunted into the position of the prisoner, approximately half a second before an executioner pulled the trigger.

Half a second too late for the unfortunate officer.

Like a series of billiard balls, the spy, spared the gruesome fate of the person who’d likely condemned them in the first place, now suddenly found themselves in a sniper’s nest overlooking the scene of their own execution – a scene that was shortly to become a riot, once the Autarchic troops saw what had happened to their commander.

The sniper, of course, traded places with his prey, which was bound to be confusing… but not as confusing as the jump trooper who had suddenly appeared in the middle of a post-apocalypse party in full swing. That might lead to some problems, but it was unlikely the jumper would make much trouble – and it would certainly cause less commotion than a bomb going off.

Speaking of which, the suicide bomber completed the circle, assuming Agent Trader’s unenviable position of plummeting through the air while surrounded by very angry people with very large guns, but none of them had to worry about it very long. As she had expected, the rigors of spatial displacement had caused some distress to the already unstable pernacitol, producing an eye-searing explosion of green light that drew the eye of every soul on the rooftop where Agent Trader now stood.

Had things gone according to plan, it would have blown them up instead, but sometimes that was simply how things shook out. Besides, it offered her an opportunity of a different sort – while everyone else was distracted, she was able to activate her holographic disguise, turning her into one of the Autarch officers. She might be behind enemy lines, but if she could avoid drawing attention during the next few minutes, she ought to be able to slip away undetected during the confusion that was bound to follow.

Behind her false face, she allowed herself one last smile. She had drawn a winning hand, and the game continued.

But fate, it seemed, had one more card to turn.

The rooftop assembly erupted into shouting and screaming, and while no one paid much attention to her, she couldn’t slip away just yet. Trapped in place, she alone was equipped to notice the needle-thin beam of light sweeping invisibly over the crowd. The spy in the sniper’s nest had just found himself in possession of the perfect means, motive and opportunity to enact revenge. And since she was unable to move without betraying her identity, there was little doubt which officer presented the easiest target.

Checkmate by a wild card. What a game.

Well, she might as well fold while she still had the chance – she couldn’t let the Autarchs claim her equipment, and she didn’t have time to use it again.

As the sniper dialed in on her position, Trader sighed and shook her head ruefully. With shaking hands, she pulled a chip from the rifling rifle, held it close, and counted down the seconds in in her head.

She’d had a pretty good run, hadn’t she? Made the most of things.

Anyway – had to happen eventually.

In the game of war, as with all things, you won some, and