Sharpshooter

by Steven Francis Murphy

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

A squad of them, men and women, crossed the road, weapons aimed high at the buildings around them. One of them passed close to the tank-sized hole, poking his weapon into the classroom. His mouth bulged with the mouthpiece for his cortical text messenger. He made a fist in the air, stopping his squad as he swept the room with the sensors in his weapon. Blue eyes and baby fat dominated his features under chilled red cheeks. His red nose was running, causing him to sniffle as the weapon panned left to right and back again.

The black girl didn’t turn to stare at him.

He’s got his active ECM up, Vannoy thought. Better let him know I’m here so he doesn’t panic and cut me down. She keyed her friend-foe beacon once.

The Trooper froze for a moment, blinking as his bright blue eyes focused on her. Fear washed over his teenage-fresh face and was replaced by a look of recognition. He lowered his weapon and smiled around his black C.T.M. mouthpiece at Vannoy.

His head exploded into a pink mist.

She saw it happen before she heard the crack. The Trooper plopped to the ground, twitched once, then lay still. His brainpan oozed out of the hole a jellified grey and raspberry goo.

T.A.I.: Hostile contact.

No shit, Vannoy thought, clucking her tongue through the cortical text message freqs until third platoon’s communications appeared on her left display. A cluster of laughing activists joined the school girl, pointing at the dead infantryman. Vannoy’s ECM block flashed red and recommended active defense again. Her teeth ground against the C.T.M. mouthpiece as the platoon leader’s red text feed came up.

Bravo Three-Six: Man down. Medic, medic, medic.

Vannoy ignored the flood of responding green text over her left eye and her ECM recommendation. Too much commo traffic, she thought. This would be easier if Corporal Davis hadn’t bought it on insertion.

Vannoy pulled the frisbee-sized, aerial recon drone from the pouch resting over her chest, activated it and tossed it underhand through the exposed classroom.

T.A.I.: Aerial drone active. Orders?

Vannoy: Pinpoint hostile contact, appeared below the message. A dull ache began to build in her jaw. With the cortical text messenger, it always felt like you were talking, but you never heard a sound. Nanofilament leads from the speech centers took the impulses and fed them from the dental implants straight into the mouthpiece before transmitting.

T.A.I.: Affirmative.

Vannoy watched the disk curve out of the classroom and climb into the sky. Then she retraced her steps back down the hallway. The Virtual Witnesses were chanting, “We’ll support our troops when the troops shoot their officers!”

A crack sounded, followed by an immediate thud. The pinned down squads responded with a fusillade of return fire.

T.A.I.: Hostile acquired. Range: one-two-zero meters. Bearing: zero-three-four degrees. Elevation: zero-four-two degrees. Urban structure. Wall composition, stone and mortar.

Vannoy turned into the nearest classroom to the target and ran to the outer wall. No windows in here, she thought. So much the better. She brought the Berdan-Oakley to her shoulder, pointing the nine-iron at the water-slick chalkboard.

“Babykiller, babykiller, babykiller,” the activists chanted. Vannoy tuned them out and took a deep breath.

Vannoy: Overlay. The embedded A.I. formed a translucent extrapolation over her right eye of the sniper from the aerial drone. It gave her the impression that she was looking through the wall. A white flash blossomed in front of the figure.

There was another crack. She could hear someone screaming for a medic above the gunfire. Multiple impacts of One-Sixteen’s return fire danced in bright white dots in her targeting overlay.

Vannoy: Verify Range. She reached up to rub her nose, then rested her right cheek against the stock of her Berdan-Oakley. The warmth of the accelerator’s power core in the stock helped to ease her aching jaw.

T.A.I.: Range: one-one-six meters.

Vannoy: Munitions select, APDU. She could feel the Berdan-Oakley vibrate in her hands as the weapon built the corkscrew nanofilament of armor-piercing depleted uranium, spinning it around the accelerator coil within the barrel. Jesus, you can’t hear it, but I still wish it wouldn’t act as if it were humming, Vannoy thought.

The subsonic humming stopped. T.A.I.: APDU up.

Vannoy: Enable. The target overlay locked onto the figure’s heart, highlighting it with a red dot. Awfully small target, crossed Vannoy’s mind.

Take a deep breath, she told herself as she put the tip of her index finger on the cold trigger. Vannoy let her breath fog out, applying pressure as she emptied her lungs until the finger fell home. A hole appeared in the wall. She watched the body crumple to the floor on her overlay.

T.A.I.: Hostile neutralized.

Vannoy: Verify. She held her weapon on the form.

“Somebody get a medic down here,” someone yelled, clear as a bell.

Must have spit the mouthpiece out, Vannoy thought. That took some doing. Normally, you had to place your fingers on certain pressure points in the jaw and cheekbones in order to get the mouthpiece out.

Vannoy replaced the visual extrapolation on her right with direct feed from the drone. She caught the translucent feed as the drone floated through a cracked window pane, panning over a careworn, rusty Dragnov sniper rifle. The rifle was as long as the figure next to it, lying in a growing pool of steaming blood.

Must have got him clean through the heart, Vannoy told herself.

The drone floated over the sniper’s head, the image dimmed for a moment before it took on a green hue. There was a sat phone headset rig on his head, along with a pair of third-rate Net Goggles from Indonesia. His soft baby fat filled out the cheeks around the sniper’s sightless brown eyes.

“Proud of yourself, Staff Sergeant Rebecca Lynn Vannoy?” the old grey woman asked, now standing next to her. “You shot that poor boy right through the heart. You know what your corkscrew rounds do to a body? Tunnel through flesh and blood leaving an exit wound the size of a dinner plate. Look up at his guts on the back wall, why don’t you?”

The room filled with a slow motion three-dimensional video of a nanofilament corkscrew, thirty centimeters long, spiraling through a test subject. In this case the subject was a dead pig hanging on a rope. Pink putty gore spewed out the exit side of the carcass, leaving a large cavity filled with squirming maggots.

Vannoy’s knees buckled and gave out, dropping her butt-first onto the wet floor. Sobbing, she rolled over onto her knees, holding the Berdan away from the floor. Stomach muscles flexed and convulsed, pushing bile against her mouthpiece, burning the back of her throat before spurting through her nose.

Her Berdan clattered down onto the wet floor.

She pressed at the pressure points until her jaw popped loose, the black C.T.M. spilled out with the vomit. The cold, Syrian air rushed into her lungs before she vomited again. The burning, acidic taste on the back of her throat made it hard to breathe. Somewhere deep in her mind, Vannoy’s inner warrior argued with her. Get it together, this is the job.

Soldiers from third platoon came running into the room. One of them hauled Vannoy to her feet, “Hey, you got that bastard. You hurt, Sarge? You hit? What’s wrong?” Others crowded into the classroom, some setting up a security perimeter while others stared at her.

The vid of the little boy’s face flickered behind Vannoy’s closed eyes. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, filled her head again. White text, civilian text, appeared on her TAI’s CTM net.

Virtual Witness: Your war is over, bitch. You’ve been hacked and we’ve got evidence of your crimes against humanity. You are going down! Peace Out!

She fell out of the Trooper’s grip and puked a third time.

Steaming hot vomit splattered onto her warm Berdan-Oakley.

The Present:

“It is a recursive loop, Colonel,” Santoyo said. “I’m trying to clear it.”

“I hate this crap. I had a pop-up attack last week,” Colonel Sabine Kipper, the Regimental Commander said. “Her eyes are open.”

“That won’t last,” Santoyo replied. “Where is that f...ing commo puke with the anti-virus?”

“This is justice?” the Imam yelled at Vannoy from a sea of angry, bearded men that shoved Santoyo and Colonel Kipper out of the way. “There is no justice in Western Courts if a woman, a child killer, can be found guilty of no crime. Even your own technology provides the proof and you are blind to what it tells you.”

Vannoy realized she was lying on the ground near the gut truck. She saw Kellie standing on the steps. The veteran Sharpshooter looked right into Vannoy with her deep brown eyes and asked, “I wonder how you sleep at night, knowing that you prostitute yourself out to the Army in order to murder other people’s children.”

“I don’t sleep worth a shit, bitch,” Vannoy said. “Happy?”

“Excuse me?” Kellie said, a look of pure shock washed across her face.

“Give me that,” Santoyo said to a nearby bespectacled soldier, yanking the interface dermal patch from him. She slapped it against Vannoy’s neck and the things that didn’t belong vanished.

“Definitely pop-ups,” Colonel Kipper said. “Power down your TAI, Sergeant Vannoy.”

“But, ma’am... I’ve still got to...” Vannoy stuttered, her stomach turned on her. Her eyes started to shift back and forth into a REM state bringing ghost images of the angry mob back into perception.

“Going to lose her again,” Santoyo said, turning to the communications soldier. “Go get me an antiviral patch that works, you fucking idiot!”

Vannoy clucked her tongue once and the TAI shut down.

“It’s off,” she said and looked at Santoyo.

She sat up after a moment. Kellie gave her a mug of tea and told her to drink up. When Vannoy finished the mug and handed it back, most of Saber Company was standing around, looking down at her.

Vannoy stood up and looked at Lt. Santoyo. “I’m pretty screwed up, LT. Still think I should re-up?”

The Colonel and Lt. Santoyo smiled at each other. A few of the other Sharpshooters reached down to help Vannoy up to her feet.

“Becca,” Santoyo said. “For better or worse. We’re family. We’ll get through it.”

“Besides, Sergeant, it isn’t like you are alone,” Colonel Kipper said. She pointed at her own head. “We’re all fighting it. I think it’d work out better if we fought it out together. Hooah, Sharpshooters?”

“Hooah!” the one hundred and twelve women responded.

The communications soldier came running back with another patch, shoving his glasses back up onto his face. “I got you another patch, Sergeant Vannoy.”

Vannoy took the patch, considered it and looked to Santoyo. “Strippers, you said?”

Santoyo nodded.

“Well, surely they’ll be better looking than Richard,” Vannoy grinned.

“I guarantee it,” Colonel Kipper said. “I had to, ah, umm, inspect them myself.”

Vannoy thought about the last fly in the ointment. “What about my daughter?”

“What did I tell you, Sharpshooter?” Santoyo said. “One battle at a time.”