Luck Doesn't Adjust for Wind

I did not look at Pierce. I did not look at Holt. I walked to the firing position, set my kit, checked the wind indicators along the range with the same reading I had been developing since 0400 — the primary westerly had shifted twice since morning, was currently running at eleven knots with a variable component from the northwest that would require a correction no fixed calculation would cover. The distance Holt had specified was a number that Lieutenant Pierce, standing at the edge of the platform, had apparently found amusing. I heard him say something to the officer beside him. I did not hear the words. I did not need to.

I settled into the position.

Found the stillness.

Not the stillness of emptiness. The stillness of complete organization — every variable accounted for, every adjustment made, every piece of the problem resolved before the solution was attempted. My grandfather had taught me to play chess at six years old and had explained that every move you make has already been made in the mind before the hand touches the piece, or the hand should not be touching the piece at all. I had spent twenty-three years applying that principle to a different surface.

I breathed once.

I fired.

The round crossed six hundred and twenty meters of Mojave air, accommodating eleven knots of primary wind, a variable northwest component that I had calculated would arrive in the final hundred meters of flight and had pre-adjusted for, and a thermal gradient off the desert floor that shifted the trajectory one centimeter left of the expected impact point.

I had adjusted for that too.

The scoring officer walked the target back.

Garrison looked at it first. His face told me everything I needed to know about the impact before Holt crossed the platform to take the paper from the officer's hand.

Holt gripped the target in both fists.

He looked at it.

He looked at it again.

I watched his face run another sequence — longer this time, less controlled, the sequence of a man whose model of the situation has been structurally interrupted and is trying to rebuild around the new data.

Then he tore the paper.