Target Rich Environment 2 Page 6

  The giant told me of a place in the steaming jungles of Gujara. There I sought out a legendary temple with carvings upon the wall where the last oracle of the Forgotten had prophesied of those who would be gathered to once again lead the Sons of Ramrowan in the final battle against the demons. There were three old symbols—the Priest, the Voice, and the General—representing those who must be found. Then more symbols, vague warning of some of those who would stand against the Forgotten’s chosen, such as the Crown, and the Mask, and then the Demon, the last of which surely represented the entire host of hell.

  In the distant south, in the coldest winter, I waited until the ice froze enough for me to walk across the ocean without being eaten by sea demons, so that I could knock upon the impenetrable gates of Fortress. They tried to blast me to pieces with their terrible magic before I convinced them that I too was a seeker of truth. I spoke with the guru and discovered that I was not alone in preparing for the end.

  Yet, doubts remained.

  Despite all my quests for forbidden wisdom into the darkest corners of Lok, the truth was finally revealed to me, not by a wall in a distant jungle temple or a fantastical being, but by one of my fellow Protectors. For it was I, Ratul, twenty-five-year Master of the Protector Order, who discovered the secret identify of one of our acolytes. A secret which would shake the very foundations of our society should it be revealed, for a lowly casteless had been chosen to bear the most powerful magic in the world.

  It took this clear fulfillment of prophecy to finally convince me, and through conviction at last came my conversion.

  The prophecies were real. The gods were real.

  It took more research before I was certain that this boy was meant to be the Forgotten’s warrior. I could never tell him who he really was. To do so would be to destroy him. And selfishly, in the meantime, I did not wish to deprive the Protectors of this powerful weapon which had revitalized and strengthened our waning order.

  As I tell you that tonight, I know it seems senseless that even after being converted I would still try to help the very Order which has done so much harm to the faithful. They may be misguided by the Law, but the Protectors are the best of men. They do more good than harm. Though they despise me now, and they will surely take my life soon, they remain my brothers.

  After that, I lived two lives simultaneously, Lord Protector beneath the eyes of the Law, and rebellious criminal in the shadows. While I still have faith the gods would show the General his path, it was my duty to search for the Voice and the Priest. I carefully checked every report from my Protectors involving religious fanatics. I did everything I could short of revealing my treachery to save what worshippers I could, ordering my men elsewhere, giving faulty intelligence, or even sneaking messages to the faithful to run.

  That was how I found the genealogy and secretly became the Keeper of Names.

  It was twelve long years after my conversion before I found the Voice in Makao. Yes, children, a true prophet walks amongst us once again. For their safety, I will not speak here of this person’s identity, but the Voice lives, and I give you my word that the Voice is real. The Forgotten speaks to us, and he requires great things of us before we may have our reward.

  Unfortunately there were witnesses to my discovery. Word of that event spread to my Order. I was required to explain my actions. Why had Ratul Without Mercy spared the life of an illegal wizard? I told the closest friend I’ve ever had the truth.

  He turned his back on me.

  My treachery was at last revealed, and I had to flee.

  My name is worth saltwater. I am the most hated man in the history of the Protectors . . . for now.

  I have hidden among the casteless and continued my search. It is here, in the borders of Great House Uttara, that I believe I have finally found the Forgotten’s High Priest. He is clever, but driven by anger and bitterness, like I once was. Yet it is his ambition which will finally free our people.

  We are out of time.

  Ratul had suddenly looked to the south, eyes narrowed dangerously. She knew that Ratul’s senses—augmented by the magic of the Protector Order—were far superior to anyone else present. Maybe he had smelled the smoke of the burning barracks, or the blood of warriors being shed. Perhaps he heard the screams of the dying as the casteless attacked the warriors.

  “That damned fool,” Ratul muttered, sounding now like the tired old man that he was. “I must go and save his life. Farewell.”

  He said that not to the mob of dirty casteless who had been clustered around him, listening intently to his story, but to her. His testimony was really intended for her alone. These casteless did not know it yet, but they would probably all be dead by morning, caught up in the bloody purge which would follow Keta’s inevitably failed rebellion.

  She would live, as she always did.

  Ratul rushed out the door of the shack. She got up and followed. There was a faint orange glow in the distance as the arson fires spread.

  “There is a Protector there,” she warned him.

  “I know. I can sense the magic in his blood.”

  “Does it tell you which one?”

  “No, but I suspect who it will be . . .” Ratul turned back to face her, grim. “Since my treachery was revealed, each night as I have dreamed, the Forgotten has shown me the same vision. I am wading through waist deep snow, in the mountains of Devakula, and I know that I am being pursued by a mighty predator. It is one of the great southern bears, white as the snow, powerful and proud. In the dream, there is no escape. And every night, the bear gets closer and closer. Last night, it was so near I could feel the hot breath upon my neck, and when I looked up, it had a bloody scar across its face.”

  “Devedas.” She knew of him, but she knew a great many things, more even than Ratul. “Then if you go, you will surely die.”

  “There was one thing I did not speak of tonight. The last prophecy in that book I read in that dead man’s cottage all those years ago, that enraged me so. It foretold my death, cut down by a man I’d love as a son, who would love me more than his own father . . . That knowledge . . . comforts me.” The condemned man smiled. “I have no hate left.”

  “May the gods lift you, Ratul of many names.”

  “Thank you for all of your help, Mother Dawn.”

  Then Ratul went to seal his testimony with his blood.

  This story was released to come out about the same time as the second book in the series, House of Assassins, and it was a chance for me to write about a character who had not shown up very much in the books, yet who had been extremely important in the lives of a few of the main characters.

  With “The Testimony of the Traitor Ratul,” I used a style that was different than the main series. In this case I wanted Ratul to just tell his story in his own way. I had been listening to a few different Robert E. Howard collections on Audible at the time, and he used that tough guy sitting by the fire telling his tale method really well. I’m a big Howard fan, so I thought it would be fun to try that here.

  The third novel in this series, Destroyer of Worlds, will be out in 2020.

  SHOOTER READY

  This story originally appeared in Galactic Games, an anthology of science fiction stories with a sports theme, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, and published by Baen Books in 2016.

  A GOOD SHOOTER does all his thinking before stepping into the box. Survey the course, plan your strategy, check your gear one last time, get that out of the way while you’re on deck, because if you take the time to think after that, you lose. Shooting needs to come as natural as breathing. When it’s your turn and you’re there, waiting for that buzzer, hands raised to the surrender position, pistol in your holster, you don’t think.

  You just act.

  Clear your head and shoot. It isn’t draw stroke, move to the firing position, target, front sight focus, trigger squeeze, repeat a few hundred times until the course is done and you collect your trophy and your prize money and head to the after party to ban
g the hot groupies. That works for local circuits on your home world, but there’s nothing normal about this level of competition. When the difference between the first-place winner and hundredth-place loser is separated by a grand total of a second over eight or ten stages, there’s no time for this step A, step B, step C bullshit. That’s too slow.

  I’m the last pure flesh-and-blood human practical shooting champion for a reason. I’m beating cyborgs with laser range finders in their eyeballs, and vat babies literally born to shoot. I’m beating robots that were designed to be one-man SWAT teams.

  You know why I win? It’s because in my head I go to this place where I see everything, time means nothing. It’s Zen, man. I’m just shooting, five, six aimed shots a second, moving and manipulating as efficiently as I can, but never thinking about what I’m doing. Stimulus, response. After the match me and my coaches can watch the videos and see what I could have done better for next time, but I never think during the stage.

  Pure action, time ceases to exist. It feels slow, but it’s really fucking fast. I’m talking some Miyamoto Musashi-state-of-being shit here, you get me?

  Of course you don’t get it. If you got it, you’d have my job and I’d be the sports reporter.

  The Zen state . . . Well, your body knows what to do because you’ve already trained it. Millions of rounds over thousands of hours, shooting and shooting and shooting until your hands bleed. I’ve loaded so many mags that there are dead spots where my fingers can’t feel anything. I spent so much time at the range that my wife left me and I didn’t notice she was gone for a week. I’ve shot so many rounds that my sinuses are permanently filled with carbon. No, seriously, flowers and perfume smell like smoke. I fired six hundred rounds this morning before coming to this interview.

  By the time you get to this level, you’ve performed so damned many repetitions that the actions are burned into the pathways of your brain. It knows what to do to win, even if you consciously don’t.

  If you waver for even a fraction of a second, you’re too slow. That’s how the robots beat most of us. People blame it on them being so much faster and stronger. Robots don’t get tired. Robots don’t have muscle tremors. They don’t have a heart that’s pounding too hard to make that two-thousand-yard shot after running up Puke Hill at the Ironman. That’s bullshit. That’s a cop-out.

  The robots win because they’re programmed to win.

  See this? This was the body I was born with. I’m not genetically engineered. I’m not augmented. I’m not on stims. There’s no Hampson device plugged into my brain downloading techniques right into my memory. I’m just a man with a gun.

  I win because I’ve programmed myself to win.

  That’s why I’m the last human champion, and that’s why I’m the best there has ever been.

  As he watched the old interview play, it made him smile. I sure was a cocky little bastard. He’d been so confident and full of himself back then, but nothing taught humility quite like a decade of getting your ass kicked.

  “Could I get your autograph, Mr. Blackburn?” the fan held out the projector. “You were a legend. On New Hebron we’ve got these nasty carnivorous whistle spiders. I watched your lesson on snap shooting, and it’s saved my ass a few times.”

  “Glad to hear it, kid.” He used his fingertip to sign the hologram. That made the fan happy. There weren’t as many fans as there used to be, but he was still enough of a draw that gun companies kept hiring him to sit in their booths during arms expos. “Why don’t you grab some swag?” He looked around for the marketing guy. “Hey, Frank, hook this young man up with a T-shirt. Here you go. Keep practicing, and don’t forget to check out the”—he had to look at the logo on the T-shirt in his hands to remember which minor company he was shilling for today—“Krasnov. When you think directed energy weapons, think Krasnov.”

  The crowd moved on. People played with disabled guns, shouldering them, flipping switches, and looking through sights. Most of them were polite enough to keep them pointed in a safe direction. Salesmen cut deals, money was exchanged, and purchase orders placed. The off-world dealers just bought the schematics so they could pay royalties to print the guns in their own shops, which was way cheaper than shipping them across space. There were a lot of big money types wandering around, buyers from different militaries, government agencies, and large corporations, but most of the crowd were regular gun nuts who just wanted to play with cool new things and score free stuff. Arms expos always felt the same, even on backwater colony planets.

  Since being a minor celebrity at this sort of thing paid his bills now, he knew them very well.

  The next man to enter the booth was obviously one of the big fish. He didn’t bother to look at the merchandise. He was wearing a gold VIP badge and one of those super-expensive suits with the light-transmitting fibers that made the wearer seem to glow. The man didn’t care about the free pens, buttons, and probably wasn’t a T-shirt type. Passing the salesmen, he went right to the minor celebrity guest. “Are you Scott Blackburn?”

  “Yes, sir.” He tried to read the man’s badge, but the name and company weren’t lit. “How can I help you?”

  Now that he was closer, it was obvious the man was Human 2.1, maybe even higher. He towered over everyone else in the booth, and was just too obnoxiously ageless and perfect. It was like looking up to a god. “Are you the Scott Blackburn who won the tri-systems practical shooting championship from ’78 to ’81?”

  “That’s me.” But the post-human already knew that. Their brains were wired with facial recognition programs.

  “You were the best competitor?”

  He couldn’t tell if that was a question or a statement. “Briefly?”

  “Forgive me if I am unclear. I only downloaded English a few minutes ago. I am Mr. Lee. May I buy you lunch?”

  “Well, I’m working . . .” but apparently the Krasnov marketing manager knew who Mr. Lee was, and was making shooing motions to get Scott out of the booth. This Mr. Lee must have been in position to buy a shitload of guns. “What’s this about?”

  “It is about being the best, Mr. Blackburn. Ultimately, everything is about that.”

  This is it, folks. We’re here at the first stage of the Grand Halifax Open Class Invitational. As you can see, our reigning champ, Scott Blackburn, is stepping into the box. There’s been a lot of talk on the circuit this year about the threat posed by the new Diomedes 5 competition robots. After last year’s narrow victory over the Diomedes 4, which the Diomedes Corporation blamed on a last-minute programming error, the pressure is on Blackburn. They claim that this new generation is significantly faster than last year’s model. The question on everyone’s mind, can the human champ hold on one more year? What do you think, Jess?

  My money is on Blackburn still, Javier. The kid’s got heart. This stage will follow the highlighted route, with the shooter engaging holographic moving targets from five to five hundred meters. They’ll be starting with pistols, and then switching to long guns once they clear the obstacles. Grand Halifax scoring is brutal, anything other than an X-zone hit adds half a second to your overall time. A miss adds a whopping two whole seconds. To put that in perspective, the X-zone on a Grand Halifax hologram is ten centimeters wide, and the whole hologram is only thirty centimeters across.

  Pure accuracy will go to the machine, but it remains to be seen if it’s got the programming to pay the bills . . . They’re ready. We’re switching live now to Blackburn.

  “Shooter ready?”

  “Shooter ready.”

  BEEP.

  And he’s off.

  Damn, that’s fast. Blackburn is already at the first array. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody clear a star that quick. He’s in top form today.

  You can see him dodging through the obstacles. He’s not even slowing down as he shoots on the move. Blackburn’s running a 6mm 3011 set on three-round burst. As you’re watching, keep in mind he’s still experiencing some recoil there. That’s no energy weapon,
and the 6mm loads still make major power factor . . . Did you see that, Jess?

  Holy moly, that was quick!

  Blackburn’s reloading on the move. Remember, the Diomedes has an autoloader in its wrist and performs half-second mag changes.

  Transitioning to the long gun, now Blackburn’s got to slow down enough to nail the longer-range targets.

  He’s not slowing down much.

  Grand Halifax is at .7 standard gravity and has zero wind, so all that training on Mars is probably coming in handy for Blackburn right now.

  Remarkably, he’s still down zero points. Not a single miss. He’s switching to the shotgun barrel for the final speed run. And . . . the stop plate is down.

  55.64 seconds clean! Down zero points. That is the fastest that anyone has ever run this stage at Grand Halifax. He burned it down.

  Starting the day by setting a new stage record? Team Blackburn has got to be feeling pretty good about keeping the championship in human hands for one more year. We’re going to the pit to try and catch a word with Scott Blackburn. He’s unloading and showing clear to the safety officer, and it looks like Tom has caught up with our champ for a word—

  Hang on. Switch back. Diomedes has already started its run.

  Transcript note: Period of stunned silence. Transmission resumes.

  Jesus . . .

  Diomedes 4 just ran the course in 38.08.

  I’ve never seen anything like it.

  I think we’ve just witnessed the end of an era, Javier.

  Or maybe the beginning of a new one, Jess.

  From the team of security guards surrounding them, and the way every local vendor in the place bowed nearly to the floor as they passed, Mr. Lee was a big fucking deal. Despite that, they just went to the convention center food court to eat.

  The glowing post-human man-god ordered chicken fingers. “Let me begin by saying the history of your sport fascinates me. To succeed requires a combination of grace, fine motor coordination, and skill. It is not about pure accuracy, like some other sports, but accurate enough, while going extremely fast. Engaging multiple targets from different positions and on the move, from conversational distance to long range, switching between different weapon systems as you go, it is all very exhilarating to watch. It is no wonder it has become one of the most popular sports on many planets.”