2953-01-07 – Tales from the Service: The Expected Ambush
As Sara Swan finished setting up her ambush in a narrow hollow hidden from the brigands’ camp by the low shoulder of a nearby hill, she wondered whether someone with a knack for being persuasive might have resolved the day’s complications without bloodshed. This was of course only an idle thought; Sara had never been accused of being particularly eloquent.
The plan was simple – coax a group of two or three of the squatters out from their camp, trick them into investigating something down where they wouldn’t be visible to their fellows, then delete them. It wasn’t too hard to create a curious scene for them; she merely scorched a small teardrop-shaped swath of springy turf with her hand laser, then set up a few pieces of bent reflective polymer sheeting there in the middle. To anyone who saw it from a distance, it would look like the wreckage of a de-orbited satellite – and on a world where there weren’t supposed to be any satellites in the sky, that would be something to investigate indeed.
As to getting them out from their camp, the same ruse provided the simple answer for that as well. A chemical smoke-pot would give the scene a short-lived puff of black smoke, which the onlooker, after investigating, would conclude was that of the burning plants from the impact.
Most probably, the setup would only work once; when the first group sent to investigate failed to return or to report back over comms, their compatriots would know something was wrong, but not precisely what. Sara could probably do the deed without letting any of them know they were in danger, but that wasn’t her style, and it robbed her of the advantages of fear, which were always useful when one was outnumbered.
When all was ready, Sara retreated from the fake crash site, and remotely set off the smoke-pot when she got back to her pack and her rifle. In a few seconds, a pillar of oily black smoke curled into the air, slanting into the wind. If the brigands sitting on her Survey site weren’t blind, some of them would be along shortly. She lay down behind her already set-up phasebeam rifle and pulled a camo-net over herself to await them.
They weren’t, as it turned out, blind. Two black figures appeared at the top of the rise hiding the site from the camp. Sara sized them up with her magnifier; both grizzled-looking men held their arc rifles warily as they peered at her ruse, then began working their way down the reverse slope.
Sara set down the magnifier and flicked off the safety of her rifle. At a hundred yards, the short pulses of high-energy photons it emitted would punch right through most body armor, but she intended to aim for the head for her first shot. She brought the sights onto the trailing figure, then waited for the distance between them to grow. Even a few meters apart, the leader would take several seconds to realize his associate was dead.
The moment came, and Sara squeezed the trigger. With the snap-hiss of beam slicing air and the rifle’s cooling system venting heat, the man collapsed in a silent heap. She turned her rifle on the other, just as he turned to see what the noise behind him had been. He made it two steps back along the path before the second shot ended his miserable life like the first.
Sara remained motionless below her camo-net for almost a minute, then slithered out, replaced the net, and dashed forward. After taking both the heavy arc rifles, she rifled through the brigands’ pockets. Other than silver-wrapped ration bars, a canteen full of something foul-smelling, and a password-locked data-slate, they weren’t carrying anything of note. Their clothing wasn't marked with any obvious signs of allegiance, either. Either their boss had stripped them of identifying marks before parking them on the reactor site, or this group really was just a motley band of independent opportunists in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sara next examined their weapons in detail. They were standard, if battered, PPM Model 99s – ubiquitous, cheap, and overshadowed by newer and more expensive models. The Model 99, though, didn’t have any sort of smart-locking mechanism. Sara flipped off the safety on one of them and charged its capacitors. After taking everything she had a use for off both corpses, she blasted them both with the arc rifle a few times, which burnt the skin and set their clothing alight. This would hopefully conceal what she’d taken, and how she’d killed them.
Sara retreated to her camo-net again to watch once more. She waited for almost an hour, but no more brigands arrived to investigate what had happened to their fellows in that time.
Just as she was beginning to wonder whether it was safe to move, she spied movement on the ridge. Something – someone – was moving up there, slinking along the ridge-top. Sara grinned; her third victim had some sense. He was staying in sight of his fellows, and staying low, trying not to present much of a target. She lined up the phasebeam on him, using its scope magnification to get a better look.
The third brigand was younger and slimmer than the first two, though dressed similarly. He was armed only with a handgun and a knife, both tucked into his belt, and he clearly was no stranger to bushcraft. If he was any good, and left unmolested with the area, he might even be able to follow her trail across the springy turf, as little of an impression as each footfall made.
Fortunately for him, he never came down the concealed side of the hill to investigate closer. He spotted the two corpses on the slope, and watched them for a minute or two, probably having a chat with his buddies back at the camp on the comm. He slipped back as carefully as he came, and Sara decided as he did to make the coming night interesting. That one would be the last to die.
While this is not the story I had planned to release today, Nojus’s bit of digital brigandry has forced my hand. We are, it seems, in this account for the duration, which seems to be at least one more weekly episode after this one.
Never fear, I take this sort of help in good humor. If we didn’t want Nojus’s help on the feed, he wouldn’t be part of this embed team.
[N.T.B.] Damned right. Besides, this is going somewhere, and to make it interesting, I haven’t even told Duncan where that is.
