‘Sure. What’re you planning to do?’
‘Interview a witness.’
‘This is an interesting situation,’ Nava said before Courtney could ask anything.
‘Interesting? You were here when it happened? You saw it go down?’
‘Yes. It’s interesting because the evidence gives conflicting pictures of the shooter.’
Courtney frowned. ‘Are you always enigmatic?’
‘I’m not being enigmatic. This was an attack using a Laser Strike spell. The maximum range is about a kilometre, but no one would seriously try to use it at eight hundred metres without a magitech sniper rifle to extend the effective range. That’s a military weapon, but no military sniper, or professional assassin, would use Laser Strike to try to kill someone under these circumstances.’
‘Because?’
‘Tracing the shooting location is too easy. Kyle Maynard identified the location almost immediately, correct? You were there in three minutes and you found nothing. So, a professional weapon, a professional escape plan, but the method was amateurish and they missed. The picture’s… inconclusive, confusing.’
‘Hm. We may end up having to call in the ASF on this one.’
‘The Allied Security Force won’t be able to do more than you can with the available information, Courtney Martell. You do realise that the sniper may try again?’
‘Yeah. That I figured out when I couldn’t find him or her. We’ll be moving all the future speeches indoors.’ Courtney gave a shrug. ‘The weather’s supposed to take a downturn overnight anyway.’
Nava looked up at the clear, blue sky above them. ‘That’s a shame. It’s been excellent flying weather and I’ve been too busy to indulge. It’s also excellent weather for sniping. And yet, the sniper missed.’
‘Yeah… The school has sniper rifles in storage. We could be looking for a student with a grudge. It’s something to work with at least.’
‘Good luck with your work.’
~~~
MagiTag had come out of military research into a method of training combat magicians. It was still used for that purpose, having a number of advantages over the alternatives. It familiarised magicians with the types of weapon employed by battlefield and police magicians. It was not especially expensive to deploy and it was relatively easy to use. Most importantly, it avoided the issue of people throwing potentially lethal spells around just to learn tactics.
The name, however, had come from a marketing team who had been given the task of commercialising it as a civilian game. There were enough people out in the Clan Worlds – about forty percent of the population, averaged across all the clans – who had just about enough magical potential to register that marketing to them was viable. They were more or less useless as magicians; those who bothered to learn could manage enough magic to levitate a coffee mug. Most of them were magically illiterate, but they could activate a lot of magitech items, which other people could not. And that meant they were potential customers for a game which involved running around shooting at people with magitech weapons. MagiTag™ had been born.
Nava was, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite good at it. It should not have come as much of a surprise, but it seemed that the people running the game for the MagiTag Club had not got the memo. They watched as she moved around an abstract obstacle course of cover-providing objects, silently demolishing her opposition with an almost frightening efficiency. The MagiTag pistol she was using seemed much like an extension of her arm. She barely aimed at her targets, but she always hit. Each hit took another opponent out of the ‘battle royal’ tournament. She was beating people three years her senior without trouble.
In turn, Nava found the MagiTag gear restrictive. It came in two parts: the weapon and the receiver harness. The latter was generic, a pair of plastic pods which sat on your shoulders, held in place by straps. It was, basically, a magic detector, but it was tuned to detect hits from MagiTag weapons which it converted into a simple display: green was good, yellow was wounded, and red was dead. Two yellow hits made for a red, or you could go right from green to red if a precise enough hit was registered. Military models gave more detailed information on where you had been hit.
The weapon Nava was using was a pistol, but there were carbine and rifle versions available. They were hardwired to cast a single spell, powered by a quintessence battery, a Q-Cell, in the form of a magazine which slotted into the grip. You got six shots per magazine and there were ten people in each game. That meant you had to swap magazines at some point and you had to be somewhat careful since you got three spare magazines to work with. Miss too often and you would be out of ammo and a sitting duck.
Nava did not miss. However, the basic messenger pulse spell the weapons fired had no penetration and there was the issue of limited ammunition in each magazine. In close quarters like this, she would normally have dispensed with a weapon, done her aiming by hand, and been able to keep shooting until she was exhausted. But this was a game and you had to abide by the rules.
Abiding by the rules, Nava turned a corner and spotted her last adversary more or less where she had expected him to be. He also saw her, and his pistol began to rise so that he could take aim. Nava squeezed the trigger of her pistol, not bothering to lift it from where she was holding it beside her right hip. On her target’s left shoulder, a large, glowing panel went from green to red and that was almost immediately followed by a horn sounding to indicate that the match was over. Nava’s target – a handsome young man with a shock of blonde hair and bright blue eyes – sagged his shoulders in mock resignation and then gave Nava a broad grin full of very white
