On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 238, of 240 so far.

Timing is Everything

Jarlsson sat cross-legged on the floor of the abandoned building, his surroundings lit by an LED lantern at his side. Items were scattered in a rough semicircle around him, including several paper-thin acrylic tablet computers, a pocket-sized atomic-decay clock, and more than a dozen books, some of them cracked and yellowed with age. It was the final object, though, which dominated the scene.

Three metres away, lurking in the shadows, the sleek rifle was locked atop a gyroscopically balanced stand, its firing mechanism rigged to a cryptographically-paired remote which hung from a chain around Jarlsson’s neck. It had a single button, with a fingerprint sensor embedded in its surface.

The rounds the weapon fired were ordinary in the extreme for a rifle of its size and purpose; plain old .308 Winchester, and their provenance was impeccable: Jarlsson had ten bullets that had spent decades in airtight conditions in a military museum’s exhibit overflow storage, and which had been subject to metallurgical analysis to verify their integrity. Forensic science had come a long way, but armies and state security services had been doing ballistic metallurgy for longer than anyone else. Authenticity was important.

The rifle was trained on a stained brick wall at the very far end of the cavernous space, more than a hundred metres away. The wall didn’t matter, but the distance did, and even more important was the building’s location.

It had been a factory for much of its two-century lifespan, not far from the centre of the capital, expanded and demolished and rebuilt and expanded again, but had now stood silent and empty for decades. Time and weather had made it unsafe, and it had intermittently been inhabited by undesirables of various stripes: drug users, itinerants, and the poor. Ultimately it was sealed up, and when Jarlsson made his way inside weeks ago, his were the first eyes to look upon the place in many a year.

One of the tablet devices pulsed a message, drawing his gaze. He now had a limited window of time in which to make his decision, and then if appropriate, to make his shot. Six hours and counting.

Jarlsson had studied well, for a very long time now, and the materials he had brought with him were only a fraction of those he had used in preparation for the day’s task. There was absolutely zero margin for error, but that was unavoidable. In all likelihood, it would be his last ever job, but that wasn’t important. His own life, such as it had been, was insignificant compared to the good of the county and the world.

How long has it been since we were free? he asked himself, as he did every single day.

It was his ritual, to keep his mind focused on his goal and nothing else. The answer came easily, as all practised things do: sixty-eight years. Almost seven decades since war, since the bomb, since the occupation which had become an annexation and then an absorption. Seven decades since his country had become a province, and lost its flag and its currency and its language, and even its name. So long that those who had seen it happen as young adults had mostly died, and those who had grown up within it had either forgotten their anger or never cared in the first place.

But he cared. He had been raised to, and trained to. And now, after a lifetime of preparation, the final few hours had come. Today, if he had done all of his work properly, the regime would fall.

There was a lot to account for. The curvature of the Earth and its orbital period, for example. Stellar drift. Barometric pressure differentials. The really hard part were intervening surfaces, like the brick wall that the rifle was trained upon. Jarlsson had been a young man when the old factory was torn down to build the later one. Its previous incarnation had loading doors on the southern side, big metal roller-shutters, not far from where the wall was now. But critically, they had been nearer to the rifle’s location, by about half the length of the building. It was just within feasibility.

Jarlsson had watched the news reports as he grew up; everyone was required to, especially the children. Propaganda and lies. The nubiform promises of a bright and socialist future had quickly condensed into hard reality: the new factories, and the worker habitats, and the camps. Conscriptions and murder and authoritarianism. It was all he had ever really known, but his late father had ensured that he also knew how things had been before. Spared because of his scientific qualifications, the elder Jarlsson had played the game well, publicly showing allegiance and privately devoting every hour to either his son’s training and indoctrination, or the creation of the weapon that would now finally have its chance to be fired.

There was a sound from nearby, and it startled him, but it was just a rodent. Even in this place, sealed up for so long, life found a way. Surely that was today’s lesson for the ages.

Jarlsson stood up, taking a tablet device with him, and he kicked at one of the precious old books, sending it skittering across the debris-strewn floor, its back cover partly ripped off. He had no further need of it. With a few cross-checks, he nodded, and then threw the tablet device in the same direction. It landed on its corner and flipped over a few times before lying flat, undamaged of course, but also having reached the end of its usefulness.

He had been right. The numbers worked. His father would have been proud. It was viable.

The rifle already had a round chambered and ready, and Jarlsoon took the chain from around his neck, cradling the remote trigger unit in his palm. It was anticlimactic, as he always knew it would be, but this, too, did not matter. The time for pondering, and planning and preparing, was finally over.

He looked at the weapon, so familiar in its front half, and so strange beyond, with a servo-mechanism in place of a trigger guard, and an accelerator and small but ingenious reactor where the stock would be expected. The air around it was dry; ionised and very faintly flickering. There was nothing else left to do.

Jarlsson closed his eyes, visualising the broadcast he’d watched thousands of times, enough to know every facet of it by heart. The face of the dictator, standing on the grand steps in front of what had been a conquered country’s seat of government, surrounding by his guards and his soldiers. His great victory. A vulnerable position, but his security had been thorough. Now, though, all of his security was gone, as long-dead as the man himself, and the world changed by his actions.

“But not forever”, Jarlsson said to himself in the quiet darkness of the place. He rested his thumb on the control, feeling it unlock upon recognising his biometrics. Now his focus was strictly on the practical matter of ballistics.

Eight-hundred and sixty metres, and negative twenty-four thousand eight-hundred and twenty days, per second. The path was clean. He would still be four years old when the dictator’s victory speech was cut off by a world first which would never be inscribed in any history book. An impossible, undefendable, and utterly lethal chronoshot.

Timing is everything, Jarlsson thought, and then he pressed the button.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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