Raven stood on the ridge and looked out over the battlefield.
Her fellow mercenaries scurried through the snow. They darted from tree to tree seeking cover, and shook the snowflakes loose when they pressed their backs to the trunks. Amidst the flurries, they popped out to trade fire with the advancing line of soldiers coming up the narrow valley's opening.
Independent mercs like Raven usually wore dark colors. Blacks, grays, browns. They did dirty work, so why not wear something dirt-colored? They were all hired guns. No uniforms, no standard-issue equipment. When they went to a fight, they took the clothes on their backs and however many weapons would fit into them, nothing else. They certainly didn't have any winter camo uniforms. All those black dots stuck out like sore thumbs on the snowy land, but independent mercs were a showy lot by nature. To many, their reputation was more important than sensible tactics. A reputation meant steady work and respect — as long as you survived your battles. But natural selection was at play here. The strongest and most cunning survived and amassed an incredible rep, the weakest were culled without mercy.
As in nature, as in business.
Their foe, on the other hand …
Golden Guard was a rated mercenary outfit. They also had a rep to uphold, but they played by a whole different set of rules. The rated outfits took on very large corporate clients — they often needed to wage 'clean' warfare so their clients' corporate rivals couldn't smear them with bad PR. Because of that, rated outfits prized uniformity and discipline. The Golden Guard mercs advancing into the valley wore standard-issue white camo uniforms, toted standard-issue PVK-77 blaster rifles, and followed standard-issue battlefield tactics. Golden Guard had none of the scrappy, ragtag charm that independent operators, like Raven and her compatriots, had.
Golden Guard were also winning, and quite spectacularly.
The soldiers in white continued to press forward, sweeping through the trees dotting the bottom of the valley. They hustled up the slope in groups, dropped to their knees, and raised their rifles to cover the next wave. They easily nailed headshots on any independent mercs foolish enough to stick their heads out of cover.
Her own side was an absolute mess. They ran around with no plan, no coordination, each fighting their own war at their own pace. All they could do was take potshots at the machine-like march of those well-trained troopers, and they got cut down in droves. At the very start, the planet baron who hired them had tried to keep things tidy, but it had all gone to hell within the first hour. 'Independent' mercs were called that for a reason — anything larger than a posse, and it all fell apart. Hiring large numbers of them might look impressive if you wanted to maintain order on a privately-owned frontier world, but wrangling so many lone wolves under control in the middle of heated combat was … tricky, to say the least.
Her side had known it was a losing fight the whole time. When the planet baron who owned this world had sounded the call for mercs to repel a rated mercenary outfit, all of them knew straight-away the rated outfit would probably win. But they fought the battle anyway. It was what they did; their job, and their life. They didn't care about the cause. To them, the battlefield was just an arena for earning rep, and the only thing that mattered was how gloriously you fought.
And, of course, the memories you captured along the way.
Raven raised her omnitablet. The palm-sized rectangle's touchscreen glowed with a grid of icons. All of them were vivid, jarring splashes of color compared to the big monochrome expanse behind her hand. Her finger went down the icons until it found the camera app. When she tapped it, a preview of her face appeared on the screen. Her skin was nearly as pale as the snow. Snowflakes speckled her jet-black hair. She turned away from the valley, held the tablet at arm's length, and angled it so it captured the battle raging behind her.
Once she'd framed it perfectly, she grinned and threw up the rudest gesture in the galaxy. She pressed her first two and last two fingers together, then splayed them and her thumb out wide so a massive V-shaped hole appeared in the middle of her hand.
'I'll split your skull open,' it told the galaxy.
She snapped the selfie.
Her face froze, and so did the battle behind her. Blaster bolts flashed between the trees, splashing the white with a red glow. Amazingly, she had snapped the pic just as a grenade went off. A bright orange fireball bloomed from the white snow, sending two smoking mercs flying through the air.
That's a keeper, she thought.
She lowered the omnitablet to her chest and thumbed the screen. Opened the starnet browser. Calcephor had a ViaDUCT node in orbit, and it was working just fine. It was illegal to tamper with those, since they were government property.
One of the main reasons the galactic government banned corporate militaries was because mercenaries — on paper — were neutral. A third-party to the conflict, untouched by corporate fealty. They had no incentive to carry out scorched earth tactics, or wage an endless guerrilla war if their 'cause' lost. They had no cause, besides money.
An odd feeling went through Raven. Like a droplet on still water, it sent invisible ripples through the world around her. As those ripples spread out, they revealed the vast webwork of interlocking forces underpinning the universe. Her hair stood on end and her sense of presence heightened. She was suddenly, keenly aware of her place in the universe, which ticked onward like clockwork.
Blaster bolt, she thought.
She continued tapping the screen, but she leaned her whole upper body to the left by about a foot. A split-second later, a blaster bolt seared the air as it whizzed by and warmed her cold cheek. Its red light glowed over her hands, and then faded as it disappeared into the sky.
Unfazed, she straightened up. Her eyes hadn't left the tablet once.
When it came to outfits like Golden Guard, the mercenary rating agencies constantly reviewed their war-product to calculate their rating. The rating determined their value on the market. Triple-A, which Golden Guard had, was the surest guarantee of a return on investment for their corporate clients. But breaking galactic law — such as shooting down a ViaDUCT satellite — would tank their rating about as quick as a really nasty PR disaster, like a civilian massacre.
And … send.
Using the starnet browser, she posted the selfie to her social media account as a status update.
> Another beautiful day on #Calcephor. #MercenaryAction #PlanetWar #IndieMerc #BattlefieldSelfie #GoodDayToDie #ValhallaAwaits
>
> -@RAVNSCRY posted this just now.
The browser confirmed it'd been uploaded to the ViaDUCT node.
While independent operators didn't care all that much about the law — nobody was rating them, except other people on social media — they'd collectively agreed downing ViaDUCT satellites was beyond the pale. And not just because it got government-funded mercenaries gunning for you, to enforce the law.
No, it was common courtesy to your fellow hired guns.
If you went around blowing ViaDUCT nodes up, how would they post selfies of their brave battlefield deeds to the starnet?
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
She took another look at the battle. It was going badly, obviously. But she'd gone up here to scout, not intervene. She turned around and strolled down the ridge. Her feet picked their way very easily through the snow-coated rocks.
All her life, she'd been extremely sure-footed.
Was it a predestination paradox?
If she was going to trip, she'd sense it before it happened. But if she sensed it before it happened, then she would stop herself. Since the universe was rigidly deterministic, every 'choice' was already made. She did not foresee herself tripping, and she did not trip. Those two canceled each other out, and hence she had perfect balance …
… unless she was drunk.
Then all bets were off.
She recalled a piece of classic lit, about a golden-skinned man who always saw the future with absolute clarity. Because of his ability, he had no consciousness. Consciousness was the ability to choose between options as a form of problem solving. Since he could see the correct path at all times, he didn't need the ability to mull over his choices. His consciousness became irrelevant, and evolution got rid of it.
Some — although not all — of the scientists studying her kind said that that might be the future of the human race.
Raven didn't care one way or the other.
It gave her an advantage on the battlefield. Nothing else mattered to her.
The likes on her status update were climbing. The satellite hadn't transmitted its batch update throughout the rest of the ViaDUCT network yet, so those views came from people connected to the same local node as her — her fellow mercs here on Calcephor.
She scrolled past the crude sexual comments and came to one from another female merc.
> Thiz is one powerful BITCH!
>
> -@TheHarpysTalons8181 posted this just now.
Raven hit the like button under her comment.
A new comment popped up in response, moving from 'bitch' to 'doggy-style'. More continued the canine metaphors in 'creative' directions. Raven shut down the starnet browser and shoved the tablet into her pocket. She wasn't bothered; she just wasn't in the mood to come up with equally-creative insults to shoot back at them.
A female merc who couldn't hold her own wasn't a merc for long.
She had a strange feeling about this job. It was a lot like her normal ability to sense the future, but … different. If her intuition was like a drop of water in a still lake, this was a sonar revealing the bottom of the lakebed. Deep, slow, resonant … and utterly meaningless to her untrained ears. She sensed something important, but the exact nature of it eluded her.
Whatever it meant, it was enough to make her check out early from this job.
This battle isn't going to last for much longer, she thought.
All around her, snowflakes drifted down from the clouds blanketing the skies. Numbering in the millions, they roamed all over the skies. Moving to-and-fro. Their descent seemed random, but it was totally fixed. The universe was ruled by physical laws: momentum, gravity, nuclear forces.
The big bang spewed matter unevenly throughout the newborn cosmos.
The matter came together into accretion disks, which coalesced via gravity into stars and planets.
The planet's iron core rotated, generating an electromagnetic field and reshaping the surface through tectonic activity.
The system's star passed through the magnetic field, heated the air in the atmosphere, and sent it whispering across the sculpted land.
The snowflakes, seemingly untethered to anything else, danced on that frigid wind, at the mercy of one hundred billion mathematical equations set in motion by the big bang.
Raven was also part of the massive universal machine.
She had her own trajectory across the cosmos. A world-line through spacetime, stretching backwards from her present position. Though she came from a distant system, all the matter in her body had been deposited throughout the universe and shaped into her present form according to those primordial calculations. She was a cog inside of the cosmic machine, a part of the same equation knocking all those snowflakes through the sky. She had been destined to come here at this point in time and stir them with her presence. The forces that'd set it in motion could be traced back to the big bang, given enough computational power.
People said she was a cold woman.
Which was true.
But only because her gift gave her the proper perspective on things.
It was called the 'Objective Eye' — the ability to see the mechanical framework of the universe, to understand the way its parts operated, to sample the arrangement of the physical forces and calculate what would happen a few steps further down the grand equation. It wasn't a conscious ability. Raven wasn't even that good at math. It lurked in her unconscious mind, silently tallying the state of the cosmos, untangling the chaos theory that made their deterministic universe seem random and arbitrary. Just as human beings can learn to speak without consciously understanding grammar or linguistics, those who possessed the Objective Eye laid bare the nature of existence without knowing a single math formula.
Suddenly, a high-pitched whine cut through the skies and made her ears perk up. It came from behind her, coming up the valley …
Oh, no …
She lunged forward and rushed down the slope, as quickly as she could. Her feet slammed down on the rocks. Each impact shot up her legs and made them throb, but she had no time to waste. Each time she bounded across a rock, she launched herself further into upward the air, and it hurt so much more every time she slammed down. Her pumping legs throbbed and throbbed as the brutal rock underfoot hammered her soles again and again …
Can't stop!
Her heaving mouth sucked cold air into her lungs, freezing her from the inside, but then she thought about the raging inferno waiting for her if her strength flagged for just a second …
And then, like a droplet on still water, the mechanical equations that made the universe around Raven tick onward revealed themselves.
In her mind's eye, she saw the entire ridge covered with fire.
One second, one second, just one second—!
Spotting a wide, narrow gap in the rocky slope, she dove inside it. Her momentum carried her into the wall and slammed her against the side, pummeling her shoulder and ribs through her jacket. She lashed her arm up. The rock punched her forearm so hard it left a huge throb from wrist to elbow, but it took the blow in place of her skull. She bounced off the rock and smacked against the floor, and the whole planet seemed to spin out of control—
Then the Starhammer fighter jet screamed overhead. The ordinance it had left behind dropped and planted seeds of explosive flowers all over the ridge. As they bloomed, an earth-rattling roar and gales of hot wind blew down from above. Then a tidal wave of rocks, ripped up from the ground crashed down on the slope. Some landed on her, punching her prone body, but none of them were big enough to do lasting damage. If they were, she probably would've sensed it …
Probably.
She rolled over and sat up, her back against the side of the gap. Adrenaline shot through her body at the speed of light. Her hands shook; she clenched and unclenched them to try and restore order to her shaken body.
The Starhammer continued to scream through the skies, but the Doppler effect had turned its piercing whine into a throaty roar. Ahead of her, she saw the tiny gray birdlike shape bank left across the white skies and disappear behind a mountain.
She took a moment to relax after her brush with death.
A massive flurry of snow, scattered by the bombs, fell down and coated the hole.
Although Raven could see the future, she could only see about one second ahead. Enough time to avoid getting shot and tripping over her own two feet, but beyond that …
If her death had been set in motion and she didn't have enough time to escape it, she'd die like everybody else.
What a waste of a good gift, she thought.
Allegedly, some people with the Objective Eye could see decades into the future. Raven found that hard to swallow — probably just scam artists preying on naive executives and stock brokers. But the long, slow intuition, that sonar wave under the still lake, continued to creep through her and unsettle her. She still could not say what that ominous feeling meant exactly, but …
Maybe she had more power than she realized.
If she could hone her ability … expand its reach further into the future … she might just become the greatest — and the richest — mercenary in galactic history.
As her heart rate returned to normal, Raven smiled craftily at the snowy skies.