DOMINION

A Gunslinger Girl tale

By

Robert Frazer

"The gunner serves as least three jealous gods: his horse and all its sadlery and harness; his gun, whose least detail of efficiency is more important than men's lives; and, when these have been attended to, the never-ending mystery of his art commands him."

-Rudyard Kipling

"I don't understand," Agapita grunted, adjusting the mortar between her shoulders, "open ground, scarcely any cover... we should be making this attack at night." She came to a stop on the path, her heavy load clattering behind her, sounding all the world like a dented mess tin swinging from an amateur hiker's overstuffed Bergen.

Avise tried to suppress a frown as Agapita's pause also forced him to stop behind her, but the breathless tightness stretching across his chest pulled his face into an involuntary grimace. He turned his face away from Agapita to conceal the expression, making it look as though he was conducting a reconnaissance of the landscape. Back when he was Agapita's age he'd be running up these hills ten times a day... Avise scratched his head, subsconsciously checking his fingernails to make sure no dye crusted underneath them. He was 41, now... maybe he was getting old.

"Conditioning hasn't nuked your head so much that you can't walk and chew gum, Agapita. Keep moving." Avise masked filling his straining lungs with the indulgent sighs prompted by a trying subordinate, and waved his cyborg on. Keep plodding, it wasn't the first route march he'd done.

Agapita hefted her mortar again and continued trudging up the path. Her mind desired clarity, though - perhaps a consequence of her conditioned literal-mindedness, making her dislike uncertainty? - and she didn't let it drop. "What I mean is," waving her arm around in a sweeping gesture that Avise hoped would be interpreted by anyone watching them as the amazement of a tourist enchanted by the natural beauty of God's myriad wonders, "the approach is going to be obvious. We can't conceal it. It doesn't make sense." She fiddled with her bracelet. "I'm worried for the others. They're going to be right in harm's way today."

"That's sweet." Avise grunted, a part of him earnestly wishing the coming operation would erupt into a bloody slaughter, if only because then he wouldn't have to cart as much ammunition back down the hill. Agapita's head twitched, detecting the sarcasm laden in her handler's voice as much he was bowed underneath a load of her mortar-bombs, but she wasn't so undisciplined as to bite back against her master and didn't break her stride, taking her further up the hill towards the crest of the rise.

As it was, it brought them into view of their target - sitting in the centre of a wide level pasture, highlighted at its edges with a chasing purple gilt of brash heather and with piebald hills patched with forests and glades, was a group of half-a-dozen buildings (a charmingly old-school number). Around one dark wooden hall - probably the original alm whose hide had been wizened by the suns and snows of generations - were a group of five modern lodges, making an earnest attempt ("good effort" Avise would say, the officer in him appreciating his soldiers' inventive if ultimately unsuccessful initiative) to respect the venerable aura of their elder, albeit with better-dressed and capital-R Rustic corner columns and bright mahogany varnish on the wood.

Such a sad and miserable scene.

With joints stiffening with age and sons who would rather live in the big city than shovel sheep shit, the farmer of these hills had tried to move with the times and innovate, ploughing his savings into a group of holiday homes so that tourists could unwind in his secret garden, an emerald gem glinting far from the madding crowd. However, what the hapless farmer hadn't anticipated was that tourists like their Authentic Traditional Rustic Charm to come with instant hot water, air-con and free Wi-Fi. With the bank breathing down his neck, the farmer wasn't going to inquire too closely about the groups of young men who came out here for "long weekends" several times a year, rotating their names around enough that it had taken Section One and the national Finance Guard a long time to unpick the thread of their behavioural pattern from the bank statements and lead the Agency here; and amidst prime Adventure Holiday country, which passer-by would think anything more of pick-up trucks piled up with bags of equipment? Coiled rope and carabineers were heavy, after all. The unassuming holiday homes had become a key weapons cache, in the fresh and revitalising air of the countryside, far from the sooty fumes (and CCTV cameras) of the city, fuelling Padania's activities across half a province.

From the vantage where they had surveyed all of this, Avise and Agapita walked down a short distance, turning off the track to a hollow behind a clutch of large boulders, rolled out of their furrow by millenia of glaciers in times passed, a location identified in their aerial photographs (well, Google Maps). Both handler and cyborg set down their packs with heavy thuds on the earth. As Avise set about extracting their gear and trying not to make too much of a racket with their clattering and scraping metal, Agapita stretched up to peer at the homes, sighting-in along a V-shaped crook between two of the rocks. The tell-tale glint of a scope or eyeglasses would have given away their position, but with a cyborg's sharp vision in their stead that was no longer an issue.

"Why do they give us eyes that can see into infra-red if we're have to fight in the day?" The cyborg continued to pout.

"It's like this, Agapita." Avise explained in a fatherly way, condescending to himself as much as his cyborg as he felt the prick of cynicism bite into himself too. He needed to watch that. He wasn't that old or godless yet. "The MP for this region is a member of the Prime Minister's coalition - one of the smaller, whiny little pinko Chihuahua parties, but his majority's been eroded so much over the last session that he now needs every vote that he can stick together. Unfortunately, there's an election here next week and the MP is in freefall. His competitor has up-ended the polls, and far from 'de-escalating' the conflict the rep's 'turn the other cheek' initiative has melted the police here contemptible wet rags and just given Padania a free rein for its 'tax collectors' to 'introduce levies for the legitimate government.'"

"Jesus hung out with tax collectors." Agapita said sweetly - and a little cheekily.

"Yeah, but the swingeing bastard wasn't still chasing me for INPS contributions from back when I was in fucking Nasiriyah." Avise growled, expelling a sudden jet of straining venom. Agapita's eyes widened. Avise harrumphed. "In any case, he's having a town-hall debate with his rival tonight, and so this operation is being done here and now to give him a chance to torpedo his rival. Once we smash the Padanians here there's a police convoy with TV crews from three of the Prime Minister's networks ready to swoop in behind us and take the credit for it; our elected representative can thus reveal it as a stunning coup for his security policy 'revealing the terrorists' overextended hand' and catch the other candidate flatfooted before he can script a response. That should give the government's man the poll-boost he needs. So sayeth the policy wonks, anyway."

Agapita nodded understandingly, as the hand of purpose was revealed and events and circumstances settled into an appropriate and explicable order. She went on to finish setting up her mortar, glancing again over the rocks at the charmingly pastoral scene beneath their position. "It makes you think, doesn't it?"

"Oh?" Avise pricked up his ears as he unpacked his own gear.

"This is a beautiful scene, but they've come down to spoil it." She seemed a little glum. "And it's thus setting that attracted them in the first place. It's almost as if it's designed to be despoiled - the serpent slithers, hidden in the grass." She seemed... ruminant, a weight slowly overcoming a block of inertia. Avise sought to deflect such momentum.

"So stamp on it, then. We're in a position to put it right Peacemakers make peace - one way or the other." Avise would have elaborated on his point but he was distracted by the squawking of his radio. "Seven, this is Zero." Jean's voice crackled fuzzily through the trees and hills, "we've eliminated the sentry watching the road - Marisa flung that wood-hatchet she picked up like a tomahawk. We're ready to move up. What's your own status?"

Avise glanced over at Agapita, who gave him a thumbs-up as she set down the legs of the mortar's bipod. "Hallo Zero, this is Seven. I was just about to call you, we're at our start line and ready to go."

As Avise and Jean exchanged their acknowledgements and goodbyes, Agapita whistled appreciatively. "That would have been quite a sight. Wish I'd been there."

"Eh...?" Avise wrinkled his nose in confusion.

"Marisa going all Sitting Bull on that guard. If it made Jean of all people mention it then it would have been really spectacular... shame I missed it." She glanced away with a wistful expression, genuinely disappointed at having lost out on one of the great spectacles that whose achievement was the purpose of life. Avise shrugged indifferently.

Agapita glanced over the rocks again in order to refine the position of the enemy in her mind. There was one long wide track cutting across the pasture to the group of holiday homes, and parked around them was a 4x4 and three battered pick-up trucks - the only thing that distinguished them from the mangy metal mules of some Somali scum was that security in Italy was not so bad yet that they could freely mount machineguns on the back. As she drank this in, Agapita was computing the trajectories of a hundred potential target points, filling the air with the delicate ribbon-tremble of sprites and zephyr-arcs at whose zenith mortar-bombs would float for one weightless heart-skipped moment, where one could easily imagine them slipping the ties of earth and drifting into eternity.

A rising rumble and a cloud of dust rising from the road signalled the approaching Agency force. The wide-open grassy pasture was almost completely devoid of cover, and so rather than advancing on a broad front out of the trees the decision had been made to charge in on a thunder run and limit the impact of the enemy's fire lanes by presenting a narrow target, before fanning out around the complex and using the vehicles themselves as cover - like a line of naval ships showing their stern before coming about the beam to deliver a broadside.

Within seconds, Avise's heart pulsed and shuddered in beat with the familiar call, the reedy pebble-clattering rattle of automatic fire, as light began flickering from a loft window in the roof of one of the houses. The Padanians occupying the holiday homes were surprisingly alert and responsive - while the advancing cars hadn't signalled any intent, there was only one reason a column of vehicles would be approaching without being warned by their sentry at the end of the road. The lead vehicle in the Agency's column courageously held its course, dauntlessly turning its face to the wind as it accelerated on, closing vital yards as bullets hailstoned off of its reinforced frame, but suddenly its windshield cracked and crazed into a frost of ice before erupting out in a cloud of sharp stonesslewing wildly off the road with a ululating cry of engine-revs to crash to a halt on the grass.

The other cars tried to push on, but adding to the high-pitched and -paced automatic fire came a bass tone to form a hammering hurtful harmony - the concussive thuds of a fifty-cal. Figures tumbled out of second car to roll into the verges of the track as it dimpled, dented, and deformed under the punishing fire, beginning to spew smoke as the burning heavy rounds set its engine alight. The other cars had to hurriedly swerve and swing away, bouncing and yawing on the ground on their suspension, as the combined fire successfully fended them off and prevented them approaching.

"We're up, Agapita!" Avise yelled at his cyborg. Not wasting time with even a nod of acknowledgement, Agapita dropped the mortar-bomb that she'd been poised holding down the tube.

DHOO!

The 4x4 flattened, an unearthly force crushing it down as one would stamping on a Coke can.

DHOO!

As its bay was smashed into the ground one of the pick-up trucks reared up, its front wheels spinning and emitting the screech of twisted, tearing metal like a stallion horse rising and thrashing its legs in one last burst of mad foaming fury.

DHOO!

A second pick-up truck was neatly flipped onto its roof with the casual ease of a card-shark tossing up his hand as a bomb-blast flicked under one of its rear wheels.

DHOO!

Each bomb was literally only seconds apart - with conditioned computational precision, Agapita wasn't bothering to set mils on her mortar's base-plate but was bodily hauling the tube into new positions with one hand and clicking the fuse rings on the bombs by sightless feel with her other - each bomb still unerringly struck its mark, as the third pick-up truck was consumed in a fireball, the orange bloom seeping out of it with an almost sluggish laziness as squeezing an overripe fruit or a bright red boil, before suppurating a vile infected stream of acrid black smoke.

Avise risked a glance over the cover of the rocks to see for himself the effects of Agapita's handiwork. Even though their escape vehicles had been comprehensively destroyed, singeing the wooden walls of the holiday-homes and melting the tar on their roofs with the furious blazes now dancing at their feet like faggots heaped up onto the bonfire, it had done nothing to halt the intensity of the Padanians' fire. The divine wrath of a sudden explosive barrage from nowhere was usually enough to shock and stun any Padanian cell into submission, but these foes were bright with the light of the Morning Star and brazenly determined to be sinners before heaven. The Agency force had lapped around the holiday homes in a broad curve, pushing around the arc of the fifty-cal's sight. The lighter gun was continuing to punch the frayed line of cars with short, tight, lancing bursts, while the fifty-cal was sweeping left to right with swooping wings, an enormous spread throwing up wads and divots of turf around the cyborgs and soldiers who were pressing themselves down into the dirt and pasting themselves against whatever meagre whisker of a dip or a bump lay in the painfully naked terrain. While perfectly survivable, even a cyborg wouldn't much enjoy getting walloped with a half-inch shell so even they were keeping their heads down, and any fire that the Agency could snap back was scattered, desultory, and ineffective.

A grey streak with a brown tip - Henrietta - leapt up and sprinted across the line of the Agency, her P90 rasping sustained fire - even with fully automatic fire at a run she had no difficulty maintain her aim, and was rewarded for the bold assertive move as the light gun abruptly cut out - a hit? - and just as suddenly she almost comically somersaulted, flipping head over heels as her leg was snatched out from underneath her - and landed in the undergrowth a good twenty feet away. The plucky little girl was still firing as she bounced.

The sky was a lovely shade of blue, with long, thin, stringy clouds not holding back the sun.

It took Avise a few seconds to recognise that his vision had changed. He was lying on his back on the ground behind cover, and he felt... vacant. It took a moment for the fluid smacked into the back of his skull by the suddenness of his fall to settle and fill out the rest of his head again. With that came hearing, and the maddeningly distant, teasing, peripheral snap, snatch and zip of parting air as bullets snickered a mosquito-hum overhead.

Realisation hit him with the force of the earthquake that had been heralded by the first tremor - Agapita had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and slammed him back down into cover just as another shooter from a third building had begun firing on the fratello's own position.

"Sir! Are you hit?" Agapita looked worried, the mortar momentarily forgotten.

"...MotherFUCKER!" Avise howled in sheer indignation, pushing off Agapita, grabbing his AR 70/90 from where it lay beside his pack and rolling out prone beside the rocks, blatting off a full magazine in one indignant screaming stream before rolling back into cover. He had no idea if he hit anything, but it certainly made him feel better.

"Shoot at me, you fucking raghead? Me, you insignificant little squit? Me, you fucking sandnigger!" Avise spat, fouling the words with the deepest tar he could dredge from the sump of his stained lungs. There certainly weren't any jihadis in Padania's ranks, but through the red mist of his near-miss reactive rage Avise couldn't tell the difference. Expelling the soot also took away the taste of the burn of his anger, though, and as he rolled back beside Agapita the mist had cooled and dissipated.

"We've got to take out that fifty-cal." Avise grunted, pushing himself up onto his elbows.

Agapita blinked several times quickly as a pair of rounds ricocheted off of one of the boulders above her, spinning off harmlessly into the air. She curled her lip in distaste - even if they were safe from harm behind the big boulders, with a cyborg's sensitive hearing the stings of near-misses were a frustrating irritant, like a cloud of determined flies that could just not be batted away. Ironically, for a cyborg being missed was more distracting and inconvenient than actually getting shot.

"We can't stay here either sir." Agapita grimaced. "we're impervious to small-arms in this position but if they've got enough link to fling about with gay abandon like that then they're likely to have heavier weapons too, and an RPG or a grenade-launcher could easily flush us out from cover."

Link. The way she said it, Avise had an memory surface of a couple of months back when he'd seen Agapita and a few of the second-generation girls playing with link - a belt of machine-gun rounds - draping it over their arms and around their shoulders and pretending to be Twenties flappers with feather boas.

"They could, but even then the others are more exposed to the threat." Avise shook the memory out of his head to focus on the present. He needed to explain this clearly to Agapita. "The mission plan wanted the terrorist location to be captured intact, but you are now going to change your ROE on my specific authority and instruction. Start firing HE into the building containing the machine gun, continue until the machine gun ceases firing."

Agapita blinked and nodded, "Yes, sir." She immediately turned and grabbed another mortar-bomb.

DHOO!

The effect was immediate. The roof of the building caved in as the mortar-bomb plopped through it, throw up wood, tiles and scraps of tar like a lead weight into water. The machine-gun fire immediately snapped off, and didn't start again.

Avise allowed himself a grin. "Okay, Agapita, now switch to smoke and lay down a screen to let the others approach-"

DHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The breath was knocked out of Avise's lungs as a wall rushed up and smacked him reeling. He stumbled back and collapsed, limbs splayed wildly. Instantly Agapita fell down on top of him, although this time she'd just been knocked over too.

"Wh- wh-" Avise was suffocating, the weight of his cyborg on top of him made him unable to inhale, and he sucked thinly and helplessly. Sensing it, Agapita rolled off, her face apologetic, and helped his handler up. Avise tried to suck in a great lungful of air but immediately fell down into a coughing fit as it was tainted by a foul sulphrous stench. Squinting as his eyes suddenly stang with an acid hiss, Avise used the boulders as a support as he looked up to the battlefield.

Benito, Dona's second handler, had tried to ingratiate himself with the older Avise once by showing him a strategy computer game. You built structures, sent out army men, tried to destroy the opponents' own. Even if they were being blasted by tanks, buildings could still look as fresh as the day their foundation stone was laid - until a certain number of hits were inflicted, at which point they immediately changed into flaming ruins at the click of your fingers. That was all Avise could think about - the change was so instant and absolute, and equally as unreal and implausible.

The building containing the machine gun that Agapita had fired her last mortar-bomb at was... deleted. Nothing of it remained, except the excavated imprint of its cellars, as if the whole structure had been lifted out by its foundations and set down on the other side of the hills, out of view. A giant eraser had been pulled through its closest two neighbours, leaving two walls standing but rubbing out their gable ends and interiors, literally gutted as one would split open and pull out the intestines of a fish. The roofs and walls of the other modern holiday homes were peeled back like half-picked scabs. The old wooden alm that had been the centre of the complex had been flash-fried to an emaciated , tottering cinder frame, that as he looked collapsed into a cloud of ash. The whole view was astonishing for how... open it was - a black mushroom cloud was swelling in the air above it, sucking up all the smoke and splinters on the ground, leaving a bright vacuum beneath it that glowed with the sun.

Avise hadn't seen destruction so concentrated since the day F-15s had obliterated the roadblocks obstructing his column during that day at Constitution House. Even the Bolzano Remembrance Day mortar attack had been discreetly concealed behind a curtain of smoke, whereas here it was laid bare.

"Good grief." Agapita's mouth hung open. "Did I do that?"

Avise glanced up at the roiling mushroom devouring itself in the air, wreckage falling out of and drifting down from it, for all the world as if a slow-motion shot from an action blockbuster had been transposed to real life. "...I think you might have."

Agapita's mouth closed up into a grin. "Cool."

Avise arched his eyebrows but was prevented from commenting as his radio squawked again. "Avise!" Jean yelled. In the shock of the blast even he'd forgotten radio protocol. "What was that?"

"One of Agapita's bombs must have set off their weapons cache." Avise beheld the devastation. "Is everything alright over there?"

It took a moment for Jean to respond. "Several of the cyborgs have taken hits, nothing major." It said something about Agency life that being literally dismembered was only a moderate inconvenience. "Worst off is Allison, she took several bullets in the back when shielding Brian after his windscreen burst and it looks like her spine's damaged. No problem, it'll give the Tech Department an opportunity to test that Lumbar Shunt they've developed." Within seconds Jean's firm demeanour had clamped down again. "And Seven?"

"Yes, Zero?"

"ROE was quite specific precisely for this sort of reason - if we'd been closer that blast could have caught us. As it is the heat wave just reminded Amadeo not to wear styling gel to a mission." There was another pause - a guffaw, despite himself? Avise couldn't tell past the static of the radio. In any case, the slip was immediately suppressed. "This will be reviewed in the Mission Failure Analysis. Zero out."

"Pardon me for saving your life." Avise's eyes flicked open. He hadn't said that out loud, had he? He spun around. No - Agapita had, over his shoulder.

Avise pulled off Agapita's beret with a flourish and ruffled her hair. "Long arms reach far, eh? Grab your rifle dear, we'll need to close in now and assist with the sweep."

"There's a bright side sir." Agapita said breezily as she picked up her SA-80 and worked the action to make it ready.

"What's that?" Avise asked as he slotted a fresh magazine into his AR 70/90.

Agapita hocked a thumb over to the gutted house. "If we've blown up all their weapons, that means there's less to carry back down. Less clean-up, less scrap to melt down. Should save the state a bit of cash. Maybe that'll earn you a tax rebate."

Avise laughed. "Always concerned for my welfare, aren't you Agapita?"

"Of course sir" Agapita's smile was open and guileless.

Avise waved away with his rifle barrel. "Come on then."

With a happy nod Agapita followed Avise down the slope towards the still-burning ruin. As she moved through the grass, she felt her boot hit an object. She glanced down and saw a plastic edelweiss fridge magnet, pockmarked with melted streaks and bubbles but still recognisable.

Long odds for that to land at that exact spot - the hand of Providence didn't need to be fist, it could be revealed with a finger-tap.

With a swift movement she pocketed the magnet for her souvenir collection, and hurried on after her handler.

THE END