Previously: A break in at the Secretary General's place. Oooo spooooooky stuff. Now for something completely different.
Johanna U.N. Peace Keepers Base, Washington D.C., North America May 17th, 2157
The railgun cracked hard as the bullet left the chamber. The gun shot backwards, jabbing itself hard into Ten’s shoulder, hitting that familiar calloused area. So many recoil shots from the rifle had almost completely numbed that spot on her shoulder. She could have the nerve damage repaired, but that would just make the action of shooting the railgun in the future that much more painful. Many soldiers had joked that they were surprised that the gun simply didn’t blow her away.
Ten was a fairly small woman, standing only about a hand shorter than the Sarge. And Sergeant Pixie—she stifled a giggle—was not a tall woman. Every time she thought of her commanding officer’s name she could not help but laugh. She briefly wondered why the Sarge hadn’t tried to put her foot down on people using that moniker.
Ten saw the puff of dust as the railshot slammed into the ground and she gritted her teeth in frustration. She traced the path of the bullet from the distortion through the air, and adjusted her aim. The computerized auto adjuster in the gun was only good for so much. The gun flickered a laze on the target every five or so seconds, and the scope would readjust itself according to the wind, the distance, the elevation, and about a dozen other factors that came into dealing with sniping. She glanced down the barrel, checking the hardsights. The gun looked like some alien weapon. A long flat barrel graced the front of the gun about a centimeter thick and five centimeters wide. The twin superconducting rails followed along the central barrel, passing a charge down the two rails, causing the gun to fire slugs out at almost eight kilometers a second. But even for Ten the computer in the gun could only account for so much. Sometimes you just had to pray and hope the shot went right the first time.
She adjusted her aim according to the external ballistics the last shot had shown and exhaled all the breath out of her lungs. In her mind she recited a Psalm. Psalm 143 to be specific. In your unfailing love… She shifted her aim up just a little to account for a slight pull from a sudden change in the wind. Silence my enemies… An itch manifested itself on her chin. She ignored it. Destroy all my foes. She lightly squeezed the trigger. For I am your servant.
The rail gun roared and she watched the bullet streak to the target hitting it less than a second after firing. She smiled as this time the shot sunk home, blowing the hay target apart in an explosion of debris. Snipers seemed to be by nature a religious lot. Maybe there was some sort of aspect of the divine destroyer, killing targets at will and without fear of retribution. Or maybe it was because they felt it was divine intervention to have the ability to stop or start a war with a single shot. She checked the range on her heads-up display.
Instead of a standard scope like the sniper rifles of years past had, the gun simply had a small internal camera with a tiny lens, so as to prevent glare flashes. That camera fed to a heads up display that hung in front of her right eye, notifying her of wind speed, distance, and several other details. The tiny opaque screen currently read one-point-five kilometers. She noted the tiny icon indicated remaining power reserves in the rifle was getting low and blindly grasped around in front of her for a spare while keeping her eye on the next target. Several moments passed and she found no charge pack within arm’s reach. She finally opened her left eye and the heads-up display turned off, coiling back to the side of her head. No packs left, she thought, scanning the ground.
Ten stood up holding her gun to her side like a staff and dusted her uniform off with her spare hand. Gathering the spent charge packs on the ground into her arm, she turned toward the equipping station for the sniper range. The entire zone had been set off specifically for sniper firing and at the moment she was the only one using several kilometer long firing zone. As she walked toward the equipping station she saw a familiar face standing to the side. Sergeant Pixie stood to the side of the equipping station with one arm across her chest while the other helped purse a lit herbal in her lips.
Ten set the empty charge packs on the station so that the quartermaster in charge could get the solar rechargers working on them and used her long barreled sniper rifle as a walking stick as she walked over to Pixie.
“What’s the word, Sarge?” she asked.
Pixie turned to face her as if she was surprised to see Ten standing there. Pixie looked her up and down before she pulled the herbal out of her mouth and tapped the charred end off that flittered to the ground.
“Good firing out there, Ten,” Pixie observed.
“Thank you ma’am.” Ten responded, wishing the Sarge would get to the meat of what she wanted to say.
“Company inspect in four hours. I need you back at the barracks getting the place cleaned up. I want to be able to eat off that floor!” Pixie said with stern tones.
Ten simply nodded. Why hadn’t she called? Or sent someone else over here? Ten knew that Pixie seemed to enjoy her command, and she was very hands on, sometimes more than necessary. She saluted and left the range, shouldering the gun as she jogged off towards their barracks.
Pixie watched Ten jog off into the distance before she pulled out some binoculars to inspect the shots on the range. Each shot had been at a minimum of a kilometer and a half, and/gu none were much further than beyond it. If I recall, the record for a sniper shot on a confirmed kill was two and a half. But that record was made back during World War Three. She wondered if anyone could make it now. Ten might be able to if she really tried for it.
She put the binoculars back on the stand where the quartermaster was cleaning the power packs off with a rag. She spent another moment gazing over the range, then dropped the herbal to the ground and smashed it under her boot. She caught the quartermaster glaring at her as she littered the ground with the debris, but she disregarded his look and walked out of the shooting range, heading for the Commissary. There was a meeting tonight with all the non-commissioned officers and above, but beyond that, she had the rest of the day to herself. Such meetings happened irregularly enough to leave her slightly curious to what it was about.
She passed by the vehicle garage and paused for a moment as a machine caught her eye. The motor crews had been performing some heavy maintenance on the Katzenmeir super heavies this week and one lay almost completely gutted out in one of the large scrapyards. The monstrous tanks easily weighed one-hundred metric tons if not more, and they had the presence of some construction vehicle, not a war machine. Their massive treads spread out their tremendous bulk over the ground, keeping the vehicles from sinking into the ground. Pixie admired the war machines for a moment. These had never actually been deployed in the battlefield since their inception. These models were maybe only two or three decades old, and they showed very few signs of damage. The tanks almost seemed to be in pristine condition.
The three turrets lay disassembled to the side of the tank on a large tarp. The wiring for the tremendous twenty-pound railgun was spread all around the motor bay coiling from the interior of the machine to the actual cannon, and the two smaller auto-cannons had also been disassembled to their component parts as the machine crews manually cleaned them. She noted that the machine-guns on the left and right flanks were still resting inside the tank, awaiting their own maintenance.
The smaller guns used the same type of weapon technology common in the infantry Baldwin rifles. The guns fired a complex round, consisting of a copper bullet that the shaped charge detonated at the back heated to a molten state. The copper spike ripped into its target, impacting like an explosive charge, ripping it apart. The interesting issue with the weapon was the harder and more resistive the target was, the greater damage it suffered, but Pixie wasn’t quite sure on why that was. Infantry personal armor as a result had been changed to more protect against other weapons such as flechette launchers as the bullet proof vests were getting soldiers killed.
The ones on the side of the super heavy tank were able to fire such copper bullets at rapid fire, and each easily held a magazine of several thousand shots. Pixie simply nodded in respect to the great machine.
The rest of the motor pool was silent as workers moved around, cleaning and maintaining equipment. The crews for the machines seemed to be engaged with other duties elsewhere. The walkers such as the Dire Wolves and the Hunters lay resting, ready for their crews to jump inside at a moment’s notice. She saw a familiar face, Captain Adrian Tanaka, climbing down from the cockpit of his Dire Wolf. He waved down a mechanic that was still scrambling about the yard and said something to the man before he finished his descension. Adrian dusted his hands off, and looked around the yard before he caught Pixie in his view. He waved at her and started walking towards her.
She waved back and walked up to join him. The short man pulled the gloves off his hands as he approached her with a grin on his face. Pixie met him about halfway across the motorpool. The two embraced like old friends, and then Adrian pulled out an herbal and offered her one as well. Pixie waved him away. She already had the bitter aftertaste in her mouth from the last one, and she now wanted to find something minty to get the taste out. She didn’t know why it was that she smoked those things. Must just be nerves. Smoking seemed to be an almost exclusive military habit now. She had rarely seen any civvies outside light up.
“What’s the word, Captain?” Pixie asked, being careful to address him by his superior rank. He had never actually said anything about the rank difference, but she was careful all the same.
