Wars blaze across entire star systems, while crimes – like the theft of ancient artifacts – can victimize entire worlds. But while fleets and armies are dispatched to resolve differences in battle, criminal matters are often handled at a more… personal level. These moments are often less about justice than they are about revenge. A dish, as they say, best served cold.

THE BANU SEND THEIR REGARDS

Deep Space – Garron System

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A prudent man makes it his business to notice the little things; especially things like tiny bits of brain and polymer splattered above a doorway. Even in the cold dark of space, details like that can be important.

Given the haste with which the space-suited figure EVA’d towards the access portal of Comm Array Two-Seven-Niner, this guy was anything but prudent. No surprise really, outlaws don’t exactly screen for intelligence.

I shifted, my crosshair sliding left to settle on the Cutlass that was parked like a remora beneath a wide expanse of Two-Seven-Niner’s solar panel. The velvet black hull told me she was wrapped in that rubbery, sensor-absorbant coating; the kind of shit that helps you sneak up on people. The Cutlass sat cold, engines at low idle, cockpit lights out.

These were not your run-of-the-mill vandals ripping circuit breakers out of a Comm Array for laughs. And they weren’t low-lifes cannibalizing a unwatched station for sellable parts. This was a back-up team, checking up on a guy who’d gone silent.

I allowed myself a faint grin. He’s gotta be inside, right guys? I mean, that’s his Avenger parked beneath the other panel.

I knew exactly where the other guy was. Well, the parts of him that weren’t spattered above the doorframe. He and his friends were the reason I was out here.

Someone had been methodically shutting down relays in this sector for months now, creating blackouts in coverage that allowed smugglers — and far worse — to slip through the grid without observation. Normally that is just part of the cat and mouse chase that goes on out here.

That all changed when some crew of hardcores decided to hit a Banu hauler fat with a big-deal cargo. From all reports it was an ugly bit of work; no polite demands, no settle-this-shit-like-gentlemen. The hauler vanished, cargo vanished, crew presumed dead. And that pissed off some very rich, very important people. People that hire people like me.

Given the stealthcoat on her hull, I had twenty bucks that said that somewhere in the guts of the Cutlass was a stolen MILCOM adapted to pirate frequencies. But a comms network pointed in two directions and tapping into a phone system can lead you to the caller. My employer wanted that box intact. The object of my little exercise wasn’t to make a big, visible statement; it was to enable one.

I glanced back towards Hasty, pleased to see the glow of his headlamp disappearing into the Array’s tunnel entrance. I had no intention of letting him actually reach the breakers; if I did I’d have to un-ass my hide and go reboot the damn thing myself.

That meant I had about about twelve seconds. I had clocked myself making the breaker run; thrusting along the curved passage in zero-G, rounding into the open inner core and diving down to the power panel. At door-plus-twelve an intruder is just about as far from his ship as he can be without actually reaching the panel.

I’m a prudent man; I notice things.

For the last eight days I floated out here in a custom-built hide that was to all outside appearance just another rock in space. Who would think to look for a signature-dampening capsule anchored to a baby asteroid? Chuck me out of the ass-end of a passing hauler and this rig of mine will latch onto a suitable piece of rock and bring the whole bundle to a drift that matches the target area. Once done, I’m just another piece of the environment.

My gaze flicked to the digits in the lower left of the scope. Habit I guess, the hard-edged discipline of check and re-check. I knew before looking that the range was just a touch over fourteen kilometers. That sounds like a long-ass way, but truth be told, it is just a game of numbers.

Sniping has always been about the math. Back in the day, when warriors dressed like shrubs and crawled through planetside jungles, rifle shots were governed by a myriad of factors. Gravity, multiple winds, humidity, ballistic coefficient, even Coriolis Effect could play a role in a long shot. For centuries, ’long’ was a term defined in yards; well into the twentieth century a thousand yard shot was quite a feat.

But as tech advanced, engagements reached out to a mile or more. By the time one of those bullets hit its target, it had weaved a serpentine path through three dimensions like a drunken snake. The math was insane.

None of that stuff mattered in space, where neither gravity nor air could play havoc with a bullet’s trajectory. The bullets themselves held little resemblance to the sleek, tapered projectiles of old, now just short osmium rods that packed the highest amount of mass into a cylindrical form factor. Beyond its incredible density, fine osmium particles — the kind you get when a bullet disintegrates on impact — will act like Greek Fire in the presence of oxygen. In the right conditions you get a natural armor-piercing incendiary.

They ain’t cheap but damn, they are spectacular.

Ten of those rods, each a whopping 1200 grains in weight under normal 1G, lay nestled in Christine’s magazine. She was my baby, a custom LR-620 originally built by Klaus & Werner. The polished rails were overclocked fourteen percent over MIL-SPEC, thanks in large part to a high-density capacitor pack that ran the length of her underbarrel. The scope was an upgrade as well, swapping out the Marine Corps “lowest bidder” glass for a top-of-the-line Behring PSG-1. That’s a lot of shop talk to say that my sweet little Christine was the Princess of Fucking Darkness if you happened to be downrange.

In atmo, where air and grav start to drag at a bullet the moment it leaves the muzzle, Christine could punch a burning hole through forty mils of plate armor from three thousand meters out. But here in the black, with nothing but nothing between me and my target, a bullet can go a whole lot farther.

That’s where the math comes back in. Riflescopes back on Earth worked in MOA, minutes of angle. At a thousand yards, a one-MOA error could put your bullet about a quarter-meter off target, not so good when your average human is barely half a meter wide at the shoulders.

At a range of fourteen klicks, that same one-MOA error widens out to over one and a half football fields; five times the length of the Cutlass. Hitting something at that distance was a game of infinitely tiny fractions, or just sheer luck. Off by a hair at the muzzle is off by a mile at the target.

Of course, I didn’t believe in luck. The mantra of sniper school was “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” My thumb rode across a small switch that spun up the gyro stabilizers in Christine’s stock. Yeah, the motors would give off a slight magnetic signature, maybe enough to escape the cloaked metal coffin that surrounded me. But nobody would be around long enough to notice.

I pushed the scope, zooming in on the trapezoid of ballistic glass that defined the Cutlass’ forward canopy. I was thankful for the side-shot; the steep rake of her upper pane could glance an incoming round, even one coming in as hot as this. At a neural command my armor quietly went rigid, fusing rifle, shooter and asteroid into one solid form as my finger drew back on Christine’s trigger. She responded with a soft, throaty thunk.

The big railguns, naval ship weapons, can hurl a car-sized round scorching downrange at Mach 15. Christine couldn’t match that, but she could throw a thumb-sized rod of metal at Mach 9. At that speed it took just over five seconds for the slug to hit the glass.

The canopy exploded inward, spalling transparent shards through the cockpit. You don’t have to see the pilot, much less hit him directly, when you can fill his compartment with a cloud of hypervelocity razor blades.

The Cutlass vented atmo in a gush of dying breath, pushing her nose in a dead-stick drift to starboard. A small chuff of satisfaction escaped my lips as I swung the crosshair back to the Comm Array’s front door. It wasn’t likely the pilot got off a warning, but Hasty would know real quick that his radio went dead. He’d damn sure feel the crunch when the nose of the Cutlass scraped against the side of the station.

A tiny grin tugged at my lip; another twenty bucks says Hasty beats his inbound time getting back out.

The corridor began to glow as a headlamp swung madly from her depths. My crosshair was centered on the opening when Christine barked again, a second bolt hurtling across the void.

Five. Four. Three…

In times of uncertainty, a prudent man would have paused; taken a moment to peer out from behind cover and size things up. Hasty didn’t stop until he saw his ship rolling belly-up beneath him.

He was standing like that when the bullet hit him square in the chest and another layer of vaporized chunks sprayed across the doorway.

Looking through the scope I watched the crimson mist dissipate into the void. Before toggling the beacon that would call in the clean-up crew I said the words, just as I was instructed.

“The Banu send their regards.”