Silver Bullet

Chanam could feel Luna’s gaze on him as he loaded the rifle. The girl was curious, which was a given considering she’d fallen out of time. And as her closest living descendent, Chanam had a responsibility to her. He carefully calibrated the scope on his rifle. Naturally, she thought he was fully occupied, but the biological and synthetic modifications he’d undergone in his youth gave him more than just quicker reflexes.

One stream of consciousness calculated various atmospheric conditions, another watched her through one of the OAD’s many cameras, and yet one more busied itself with worrying. One mind in a constant state of anxiety may have been unhealthy, but he’d survived this long.

The drone floated in place, feeding Chanam terabytes of data in nanoseconds. Its lens focused on her expression; lips pursed as she ran her fingers across her silver bracelet, blue eyes darting between the gun and the back of Chanam’s head. She almost reached for a ponytail that was no longer there.

“I can’t believe we still use them.”

[Luna is likely referring to the gun, 64% prob—]

Chanam turned off his neural interface’s social interaction amelioration program with a thought. As someone born a millennia ago, Luna wasn’t relying on one to convey the intricacies of conversation, so using it would only be detrimental. She couldn’t send concepts and images directly into his interface. She made up for it with archaic body language and spoken word. It was a wonder pre-interstellar humans could properly communicate.

“Guns? Or weapons in general?”

It was tricky for Chanam to pronounce the ‘g’s in Classical English, but he was a quick learner, even at his advanced age. When he first told Luna his age in Earth years, she told him he didn’t look a day over thirty. He responded that was because of stress.

“I think both?” Luna leaned closer to eye the rifle. “I mean, I’d hope after a thousand years we’d have moved beyond weapons—”

“Trust me when I say: you missed the worst of it.” Chanam could see his own shoulders tense at the deluge of memories. Luna took a sharp breath at the faux pas.

“So I hear.” Luna nodded, leaning back. “But I thought the weapons of the future would be more…futuristic?”

The Ranger turned around to look at her with his biological eyes and raised a brow. An expression of discontent she’d revived from his deepest genetic memories.

“Okay, so, gene therapy, evolving implants, all that is super advanced for me. I mean, in my time, we had ideas about it, but no real way to implement it. But guns? With actual bullet casings and everything?” She pointed at the rifle and swiveled her hand around. “It all seems so…mundane. Shouldn’t you be shooting plasma, or lasers, or I dunno, swarms of nanobots?”

Chanam sighed and concentrated on the scope once more, looking down the cliff and into the valley. According to his HUD, there’d been a river there once. In fact, there were signs of virtual sprays and graffiti where the river used to run. Children and teens decorated the walls of this valley in layers upon layers of augmented reality.

Heat signatures showed eight sets of footprints disappearing into an alcove. The people Chanam was hunting. He took the magazine out and pulled out two of the bullets, leaving seven high impact rounds and one special round inside the magazine.

“When you and the others woke from your cryosleep aboard the Odysseus, you quickly developed systems to organize yourselves, right? Distribution of labor and all that.” Luna blinked at Chanam’s question but reclined a bit more.

“The captain and most of the crew were long dead from the half-successful landing. Apparently, the AI was stuck in a feedback loop and only ejected us when the energy stores were running low. It was…messy when we first started.”

Chanam nodded, watching a few people exit the alcove over two kilometers away.

“But you organized. Bartering, as it always does, came about.”

“I had to sell all my piercings, my books, and most of my clothes.” Luna pinched her nose. “I guess it’s a testament to human cooperation that I could sell them at all rather than have my things stolen.”

“Human beings tend to come together in a crisis.” Chanam watched the last of the eight people leave the cave, magbikes in tow. “Those that prioritize their own selfish desires over the survival and happiness of a community often find themselves looking down the wrong end of a barrel. That’s the duality of economics. It starts out as a way to help organize resources, but it allows the greedy a place to thrive. Using only what you need is a way to reduce stress on resources, so communities can properly flourish. Why use bullets?”

The Ranger and his ancestor watched as six magbikes kicked up clouds of dust as they sped away. Chanam counted his breaths for nearly a minute.

“It’s the most efficient.” Chanam finally answered. “Some of the things you mentioned are possible but is only ever ‘worth’ the cost of use on large targets. It takes resources and manpower that could better be used elsewhere.”

He picked one of .50 caliber rounds he’d just emptied from the magazine and held it up for Luna to see.

“One of these costs around six terratts. With the software I have in my head and the OAD—” Chanam pointed to the floating ball observing them both. “–As my spotter, I never miss a shot. Six terratts to put down almost enemy I can see within ten kilometers, with my own choice of payload, in any habitable atmosphere. Bullets are easily fabricated. Plasma needs propery generation and cooling. Nanobots are expensive, risky, and very illegal. Railguns would cost several hundred terratts to have any effect. And lasers diffuse over long distances in atmosphere.”

Luna’s eyes widened. “Right, because currency and energy are the same! It’d be like firing a silver bullet!”

Chanam nodded. The movement was simple and elegant. He liked it more than any other method of affirmation.

“Cover your ears, Luna.” With a thought, his own cochlear implants protected his eardrums.

The Ranger fired. He watched through the OAD’s telescopic lens as the biker at the tail had their back cave in, bike sputtering to a stop. The spent casing was ejected. Before it hit the dusty red ground, another shot rang. A pair sharing a bike shared a fate as the tungsten-tipped round ripped through them both. The first gunshot’s echo had finally reached them, and the bikers began looking about.

Not swerving yet. They weren’t professionals. A spent casing was ejected, and an unfired bullet followed. He wouldn't need it.

The next shot entered a biker’s chest from the side as they began to swerve too late. The bullet exited the other side and nearly tore off the dead man’s arm. Even if they swerved, a Ranger’s Class 1 predictive shooting software was not so easily tricked. Another pair sharing a bike died before the last two decided that swerving wasn’t helping and began gunning out of the valley as fast as their magbikes would allow. The two were neck-to-neck. One looked worriedly at the other…before the bullet flew through their heart. The last looked back at the corpse for only a moment before hunkering down more. The last shot fired, and the biker saw a puff of dirt erupt besides them. They kept going.

Chanam picked himself off the dirt and dusted himself off, watching the survivor rush off into the fissured valley.

“Did you waste the last bullet?” Luna asked as she helped him pick up the casings and the two unfired shots. She was trying to avoid looking at the bodies in the distance, even if she knew that death was no longer final. “I’ve never seen you miss before.”

“I never miss.” Chanam made sure to say so with a ‘gruff’ tone. “The other benefit of bullets is the wonderful diversity of payloads. Corrosives, radioactives, stunners, injectors…trackers.”

Luna nodded and pulled up the hat she spent five terratts(!) manufacturing. She called it a ‘cowboy hat’, a relic of an age older than even her. She took great amusement in wearing it and walking bowlegged.

“Well done pardner.” She hopped to her feet. “Let’s go get what’s left of them there water rustlers.”

 “It cost me about fifty terratts, so let’s go grab the payload as we recover neural backups of the pirates.” He ignored her strange speech. So much of her communication was based on obscure cultural references. “They can pay back their new bodies with hard labor and by cooperating with the colonial authorities.”

The OAD projected a map of the valley with a blinking dot moving away.

“This colony may not have satellites yet, but the tracker will help us find their base, and eventually, all the places they dammed up the river. They won’t be holding the colony’s water supply hostage for much longer.” The map shut off and Luna gave a wry smile.

“I guess I can see why the mayor was so happy when you flashed your badge. Rangers really do get shit done.”