laika
“People lie. Crosshairs keep them honest”
sharpshooter
Laika is a contract killer who most often uses her sniper skills to do her work. It is known that she worked as a freelance assassin and was involved in a disagreement with a major organization based on the Dark Web, who has now put out a contract on her. She lives and works in the UltraHorse Towers now because this offers her a safe refuge from those who are hunting her.
Even in group combat, Laika’s specialty is using a sniper rifle. To sow confusion, she also has a set of devices she can throw anywhere. The devices produce holographic images of herself, which lure and disinform her opponents. Laika is a self-taught physics geek, and she knows a lot about the state of the art of the science of ballistics.
Learning that she was an unusually accurate shooter with a rifle when she was helping to shoot rabbits for the farmers near her grandmother’s summer home was the event that made Laika into the professional sniper she is today. Laika sometimes wonders if she should have accepted the college scholarship she was offered instead of becoming a professional sharpshooter. Laika is a connoisseur of all things precision, and prefers to use Muller Waffe weapons or their Pistola Olivari counterparts. The very first time Nigel encountered Laika, he addressed her as “Miss” to which she promptly replied: “I never miss, grandpa.”
ice queen
Laika is ice cold socially, and slow to trust others. It is not clear if she’s emotionally stunted or just pissed off. She has no particular friends in the UltraHorse Towers community, and Laika's only known friend is Małgorzata, a veterinarian who was in her class at the boarding school she attended. Laika prefers being alone, nut she tolerates situations where she is surrounded by people as long as she is not obligated to interact with anyone.
Laika is Polish, but few people know that. She speaks English with a heavy accent. When she is alone. Laika sometimes sings along to some old recordings of 19th century patriotic Polish songs and often cooks a large pot of split pea and ham soup. On her birthdays Laika usually spends a bit of time looking at photos and clips and remembering her mother, who died when Laika was young. Laika is essentially addicted to sour cherry juice, and she will absolutely not go on missions or assignments unless she has had a glass of sour cherry juice first.
Laika does not like going to hospitals and prefers to treat her own wounds. Her friend Małgorzata has also treated Laika for bullet wounds, and broken bones. Laika orders her intimate undergarments from Kiss NTell, an expensive French label, but gets most of her other garments from used clothing stores.
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Laika’s target was a cult leader who had taken his thousand strong flock hostage in a barricaded compound. He kept everyone outside of a mile perimeter with a network of sensors and drones and several dozen mobile guards in vehicles in the woods
Laika’s plan was to set up a kill from 2400 meters, that’s about a mile and a half, with the new automatic double chamber rifle from pistola olivari. They’d helped her design the weapon.
She was still long ways away, but she was already thinking about the shot. The mantra Aim High went through her brain. But still, that old mantra had been advice that came from an old man who worked in Northern Europe where the air was often cold.
Here in Texas it was hot, so the warm air would alter the bullet’s trajectory and flatten it out due to the lower air density. She had a lot of experience aiming in hot situations.
Laika was in fact what’s known as a ballistics savant. When she was six Laika had used a straw and toothpicks to kill the flies in her grandmother’s rustic summer house, being able to instinctively calculate the ballistics of the different situations inside the house, on the porch, and out in the barns. And then when she was thirteen she got a series of paid jobs shooting rabbits and other varmints for the local farmers. She had to be good at that work, because the rough plowmen weren’t the types to pay someone who missed. These jobs lasted for the next four years of her summer vacations. So technically, Laika had been using a rifle as a professional tool since she was thirteen years old.
The Contract
As her transportation was ferrying her to the drop point, Laika was also musing about how she had gotten to this point. It’s not usual for a girl to become a sniper, but she had, and she had ended up working as a freelance assassin with a major organization based on the Dark Web. She had then become involved in a disagreement with those people, who had now put out a contract on her.
It seems reasonable that Laika had subsequently agreed to move to the UltraHorse Towers now, because that place would offer her a safe refuge from those who were hunting her. The only surprise was to Laika herself, surprised at how good it felt to be working for the “good” guys, as if there was really any black and white like that.
All those years ago somebody had been watching her as she shot rabbits in the north pasture of Rolnik Nowak. It was a scout, who had heard about Laika, and then she got offered a gig to kill a guy who deserved it. The gig was supervised by an old time veteran assassin who’s eyes had gone bad, so he needed someone else to pull the trigger.
This is where she picked up the unconscious “Aim High” mantra. But aim high wasn’t all she learned from that old man. She also learned that it was important to control one’s own body. Holding one’s breath was fairly easy, and she eventually did learn about controlling her own heartbeat from the old veteran, who claimed he had learned it from some Buddhists years ago. Laika could now stop her heartbeat voluntarily for up to a minute at a time.
But she hadn’t really gotten along well with the old man, and so she just left after a year with him. Soon thereafter she was eighteen, the first semester at university was over, and Laika’s future was unclear. She felt that university had too many creeps and a ton of drunk guys who hit on her. She had been pushed into the physics department, and she did well enough in those classes, but it wasn’t enough.
So she left university and started her own business by going directly to the clients she had met through the old man. Those people were in several different organized crime groups in Eastern Europe, and Laika became a gang assassin for all of them. She actually enjoyed the work of killing off rival gang members, and it wasn’t unusual for her to have taken out members of her own clients’ gangs. She got a lot of respect for her 100 percent average, never a miss or mess of any kind, just a surprise bullet appearing out of nowhere to end somebody’s life.
Positioning
Now Laika was still 500 meters away from the position she had chosen, sneaking forward and looking to select the shooting spot. The spot behind the pump shed up ahead looked good, and the light was going towards the target. Getting into a shooting position was a good job for a single person. It wasn’t just what you can see, but what can see you. And you’d ideally like to triangulate in such a way that nobody else can see both your position and the target’s position.
In her general loneliness this was a good job for Laika. Apart from Małgorzata in the last year at the Angielska School for Girls in Poznan, she had had few friends to play with as a youth. She wasn’t part of any of the social groups at school and mostly stuck to herself.
She had been there on a special scholarship, different from the other girls. While they all talked about boys and clothes and parties and their favorite music, Laika was alone in a world by herself mostly. Alone at the school on many holiday breaks, as her grandmother was an awfully busy woman, Laika learned how to entertain herself, by herself. Her parents were gone when she was only six, and then she spent summers with her grandmother, and the rest of the year at the boarding school.
Setting the Sights
There he was, in the window as had been predicted. After several hours studying footage and photographs, she could recognize him. Then he was gone. But she knew he would be back. This was the right place, the right position, and the right target. She started her sighting routine, getting it all set up, doing the different calculations, adjusting the crosshairs and then testing the trigger tactility.
She almost felt sorry for the target. Even with the drones and mobile guards, this place was too easy to target. He had selected a refuge that was in fact not perfect. She was pleased that her own need for refuge had been dealt with more efficiently.
When she had needed refuge, when her potential assassins had obtained a body data file on her, and she could be picked out of a crowd at any airport, train station or public gathering place, she had decided that she’d better lay low. She had previously done some work for extreme social activists, and through one of those groups she heard about the UltraHorse situation just a few months after the attack on the towers had been launched.
A day later she stole a plane from the estate sale of one of the guys she’d killed and flew down from Poland to Brazil in only three stops, using the autopilot to traverse long distances while she slept. But she didn’t stay in the jungle for long. The first thing UltraHorse did was send her back out on her first assignment for them, this hit on the cult guy.
The Shot
With the Pistola Olivari rifle cushioned on the pad, Laika waited. A minute later the window was again occupied. The target was there, the time was now. She pulled the trigger just as the target had bent down. Laika’s bullet pierced the window and flew into the wall beyond. Laika knew the second shot was still ready, so she stayed focused, not breathing, heart stopped, and kept her eyes on the crosshairs, letting the gyroscopes do their work. Then the target stood back up and Laika got him as he looked at the hole in the window with a surprised expression on his face.
