CHAPTER 3: A DECLARATION OF WAR LOST IN TRANSLATION

John shouldered his way through the knot of gaping players plugging the door and walked up to the three strange looking individuals.

“Thanks for coming to Performance Paintball. What can I do for you?” John felt kind of stupid asking that question because it was pretty obvious what the trio were there for, but it was hard to break the habit of his traditional greeting, something he probably said about ten thousand times a year.

The weird looking guy on the left turned to his strange looking triplet in the middle and gabbled something. The guy in the middle shrugged in a strange, all arms and hardly any shoulders manner and said, “We here are to fight.”

Before John had entirely translated the broken English in his head, Ron, Phil and Rich had piled out of the doorway and were suddenly standing between John and the prospective customers.

“John don’t fight, buddy. We do.” Ron leaned forward to emphasize the point and his shadow fell over all three of the visitors.

The weird looking triplet on the left made some noises deep in his throat and made a sweeping gesture with one arm that encompassed almost the entire field. The guy in the middle tilted his head back at an unnatural angle and stared up at Ron. “Good that is. Wish you more to fight?”

Ron kept staring right down at the lumberjack stand-in in front of him and stage-whispered out the side of his mouth to Phil and Rich “You guys keep the other two occupied while I stomp on this one.”

Before Ron could put actions to words, John stepped between the two groups. “Ron, I think we’ve got a translation problem here. Back off a second, ok?”

The trio of strangers stood watching impassively. They’d made no move to follow up on their challenge. Ron studied them carefully for a second or two longer and then backed off. “Ok John, but don’t let them give you no shit. Damn foreigners are always making trouble.”

Ron was a full-blooded Irishman who took his heritage seriously. Before discovering paintball, his primary hobbies had been picking fights in bars and drinking. Sometimes the drinking preceded the fighting. Paintball had mostly replaced those hobbies, but he was always hoping to be able to combine them. New England Paintball being what it was, he got that chance often enough to keep him happy.

John turned back to (for want of a better description) the French Canadians and said, “Are you here to play paintball”? As he asked the question, he mimed pumping a gun and pulling the trigger.

At the mention of paintball and John’s pantomime, the three visitors all started gabbling at each other at once; one of them even started hopping back and forth from foot to foot like he was walking on hot coals. The three settled back down after a second or two and the middle one said to John “War Games we here for are. Victors to fight we wish.”

John turned back to his protectors. “See – nothing to worry about guys. They’re probably visiting someone down at the shore and decided to play some paintball in the States. Remember those Malaysians that were here last year?”

From the clubhouse, Aden started laughing. “Hell yes! I must have won twenty-five hundred bucks from those guys! They thought they could play poker hahaha! Hey John, ask these guys if they know how to play five card draw!”

John ignored Aden’s remarks. If Aden had kept his poker winnings, the Malaysian’s visit wouldn’t have done the field any good. But Aden was a team player and had lent the money back to the tourists so that they could keep on playing. He was probably still collecting from them, and making something extra on the side.

John turned back to the visitors. “We call it paintball now. It used to be called war games, but not since we’ve gone mainstream.”

More gabbling amongst the visitors ensued. John heard the word paintball occasionally rising out of the babble. The one in the middle spoke again.

“Wish we get wet not. Wish we paintball war games fight. Wish we lycanthropes challenge to. Wish we planetary victory enormous.”

“Wishwe, wishwe, wishwe” said Ron. Sounds wishy-washy to me. They’re already all wet.”

“Shut up Ron. I’m still trying to figure out what this guy’s saying.”

Addressing the visitors, John said, “Let me get this straight. You want to play tournament paintball against the Werewolves?”

All three of the visitors shrugged their whole arm shrug. The one on the left did his little dance again, hopping from foot to foot. “Werewolves lycanthropes are? Tournament paintball war games fight are?” asked the one in the middle.

“Yes”, said John. “Lycanthropes is another name for Werewolves, yes. And you could call tournament paintball war games, I suppose. Yes.”

“Okaly-dokaly” said the lumberjack in the middle.

“Canadian bacon have you ey?” asked Ron, trying to imitate the visitor’s accent. “Crushed like worm you want?”

“Will one of you guys get this Neanderthal out of here?” John asked the team, gesturing to Ron. “He’s going to queer the whole deal. I can use the money and you guys could use the practice.”

“Oh screw them,” said Ron, walking back towards the clubhouse. “There’s something fishy about those guys. I bet they speak perfect Engrish and they’re just laughing through their teeth at us. I bet they’re working for the EOE and this is some kind of stupid set up. Why don’t they take their masks off so we can see who they are? Ask them that, John. Stupid French Canadians!” Ron was still grumbling as he disappeared inside the clubhouse.

John waited for the hubbub to die down. Admittedly, these were the strangest players to ever have walked onto the grounds at Performance Paintball, but then, paintball did seem to have its fair share of strange. As for French Canadians, heck, he liked their bacon.

He’d thought about asking them into the clubhouse but decided against it. As long as they were in Ron’s face, he wouldn’t keep quiet. John decided to take them down to the field house instead and work out the details there. Besides, all the necessary paperwork was there also.

“Hey Rich, Dave? Come on down to the field house with me and we’ll get the details straightened out with these guys, ok?”

“Why don’t you go Dave? Let me get the guys moving on practice,” said Rich.

Dave considered for a moment. “Yeah, ok. Hey, we got a bunch of new harnesses in from TJ. I was going to give them out to the guys. They’re on the bench. And don’t forget we’ve still got to finish talking about the field.”

Rich nodded and waved an ok as he headed back to the team. Dave and John ushered the triplets down the path to the field house.

***

About an hour later, Dave joined the team at the target range where practice was already in full swing. Rich stood behind Tony and Ian who were up at the firing line, swinging their gun barrels back and forth, up and down, pumping out shot after shot as Rich called off random targets.

“Blue Square! White Triangle! Red Square! White Triangle! Green Circle!”

Off to the side of the shooting lanes, Greg and George recorded hits and misses on clipboards as Tony and Ian worked through the drill, seeing how fast they could acquire and hit new targets as they were thrown at them. Between each shot, the shooters brought their barrels back to a ready position centered on the middle of the range.

The Werewolves had built a reputation on the tournament circuit as one of the finest collection of shooters of any team in the league. That reputation had been earned at the target range. The team spent a good half a day at the range every practice session running through a huge variety of drills, some designed to enhance pinpoint accuracy, others for dealing with multiple targets, still others for hitting moving targets, or targets at extremely long ranges.

That, combined with record keeping that bordered on the ridiculous, but that nevertheless let them focus in on areas that needed improvement, had proven to be their secret weapon. They’d established minimum performance levels, tracked everyone on a team graph and put the data to use during games.

Give the Wolves a distance, a general assessment of the cover and the tactical situation, and they could tell you within a tenth of a percentage point how many shots it would take to get an elimination, how long it would take to tag an opposing player, or both.

Dave wandered over and looked at the stat sheets over Greg and George’s shoulders. From the recordings, Tony had upped his percentages a bit and Ian was just under ninety percent as usual. The fast acquisition drill was a must master for everyone on the team, which meant that if you wanted to be considered for the first string, you needed to be hitting your targets more than eighty percent of the time.

“Time!” Rich called out. “Next!”

George and Greg handed the clipboards off to Steve and Mark, picked up their Silver Spirit guns, checked to see that their magazine feeders were loaded and stepped up to the firing line.

Rich re-set his stopwatch, checked the firing range to make sure it was clear, asked George and Greg if they were ready and again started calling off random targets, deliberately trying to screw with the shooter’s heads; sometimes he’d name the same target three times in a row, other times he’d select the most widely separated ones, sometimes he’d establish a pattern like naming all the blue targets one after another, only to abruptly shift to something else entirely.

George was laughing as he shot, amused by Rich’s attempts at screwing him up. Dave watched him for a few seconds and then stepped up behind him.

“You’re staying on target too long. Don’t line up and then fire. Fire while you’re moving through the target and bringing your barrel back to center.”

“Yeah, yeah,” George said as he kept on pumping. “Who shot who last, grandpa, huh?”

“Who get’s the final say on first string, huh?” asked Dave in return.

“You and your girlfriend Rich over there,” returned George.

George was a mouth, and a valuable team asset as a result, even if it did mean putting up with a lot of lip during practice. The team could almost always count on George goading another team into getting so angry that they made stupid mistakes. Dave couldn’t complain too much, since George was one of his protégés.

Dave believed in the philosophy that the best way to win a game was off the field before it even started. Get the other team so mad they weren’t thinking straight while keeping your own guys loose and arrogant.

On the other hand, George had also gotten the team involved in plenty of pre-game brawls; he hadn’t yet learned how to refine his technique to the same subtle knife’s edge as Dave’s. The real skill lay in getting the other guys hopping mad right before they stepped onto the field, and thereby denying them a target to take their mad out on. On the field they’d ramp themselves up even further in a bid to ‘get even’. Usually all they got was stupid.

“That’s right. Me and my ugly girlfriend. Later on the three of us are gonna make a sandwich and you get to be the meat. Ooops, looks like you just missed one. You miss another one and you’re going to be under 80 today.”

“I missed it because you almost made me puke. Go kiss your girlfriend and leave me alone – I’m working here!”

Dave let it go, otherwise the two of them would be bantering all day. He walked on over to Rich and waited for the current string to finish. Finally, Rich called time on the drill.

“These the last two?” asked Dave.

“Yeah – except for you and me. Everyone else is doing run-throughs. Do you want to go now or later?”

“Let’s wait till after – I still have to get my gear together and chrono my gun. I see you passed out the harnesses. What did everyone think?”

Rich spread open the front of his uniform jacket to reveal the TJ harness. A double row of silvery 12-gram co2 cartridges rested against his chest on suspenders, like a Mexican banditos bandoleer. Each 12-gram was held onto the harness by an elastic loop and angled downwards from upper right to lower left – one of the improvements the team had suggested.

The original harnesses had held the gas cartridges in horizontal loops. Angling the loops made it easier and slightly quicker to pull a cartridge for use. Slightly was measured in tenths of a second, but as the team’s stats had proved, one tenth of a second spread over fifteen players using anywhere from five to twenty-five cartridges during a game could add up to more than half a minute of playing time. Since many a game had been won or lost in less time than that, ‘slight’ was most definitely relative.

“Have you used it yet?” asked Dave.

“Yeah, we tested them before we started target shooting. The elastic is perfect. You can jump up and down all day long and nothing falls out, but when you pull one, it slides out smooth as butter.”

The team had also suggested putting a few small beads of silicone gel on the inside of the elastic loops, and that idea seemed to be working well.

Dave grinned. “Perfect. What about the tube loops?”

Around Rich’s waist on the belt portion of the harness was another series of loops, these retaining plastic tubes, each about eight inches long, each one capped off and holding ten paintballs. Rich pulled one of the tubes from its loop and then fingered the area of the loop where it was attached to the belt.

“They’ve got the beads on them too and every other loop is velcroed. You can use it for ten-rounder or you can make one loop into two and carry those larger tubes. There’s a double row of loops in the back and the belt is Velcro too. No more buckles.”

“Looks like they got everything. So you can carry what? Two dozen 12-grams and 360 rounds?”

“If you use the ten-rounders. If you use the tubes, you can carry 900 rounds. They’re still a little shy on 12-gram space, but we can still use the wristbands and the Quick-changer holds another seven, and that’s plenty.”

Dave did some quick arithmetic in his head; between the harness, the quick-changer and two wristbands, they could each carry 41 of the 12-gram gas cartridges and that would give them over two thousand shots. More than enough to shoot the maximum load with plenty of reserve.

Of course, each player would customize what they carried during a game based on each player’s preferences and the dictates of the tactical situation. Sparky, for instance, being a member of the Imperial Guard, would probably load up to the maximum. He spent a lot of time during a game providing cover fire and usually lasted until the end or almost the end of a game. He wouldn’t want to run short. Dave, on the other hand, spent a lot of time during a game getting shot at rather than shooting. He usually carried a lighter load than many of his teammates.

Rich fingered the team patch on his harness strap. “Looks pretty cool too, huh?”

Dave nodded. “Yep. TJ really did it up right. Let me go get suited up and then we’ll get that target shooting in, ok?” As he spoke, Dave began heading towards the clubhouse.

Rich followed along. “So what finally happened with those guys?”

“The lumberjacks? Heh. Talk about weird. Those guys never took their masks off the entire time we were talking to them.”

Rich interrupted him. “You think they’re some kind of scam the EOE’s trying to pull on us?”

“I thought so at first, but now I don’t think so. They’re just weird. I asked them why they hadn’t taken their masks off, but I don’t think they completely understood me. They said something about it ‘not being allowed’. I think its some kind of stupid team-thing. You know, like sprinkling sugar water on the shrine.

“Anyway, it looks like John is going to do pretty well out of the deal. Those guys want to practice against us for a month and then – get this – they want to play a hundred game series.

“We’re going to cream them – but I think we should drag it out so the field can makes its money.”

The pair reached the clubhouse and stepped inside. They made their way over to the manager’s bench where Dave opened up his gear bag and started assembling his gun.

“Those guys don’t have a clue what they’re getting into,” he continued. “John had to give them a copy of the IPSL rules and they’re coming back next week to borrow one of our guns so they can copy it.”

“Copy it?!” Rich exclaimed. “What do you mean ‘copy’ it?”

Dave shrugged. “I don’t really know to tell you the truth. Their English is so bad it got to the point where John and I were just saying ‘yeah’ and ‘uh-huh’ to keep the conversation going. I just think they want to make sure that whatever they’re shooting is in compliance with the rules – or they’re trying to steal whatever secrets they think we have. I figured we’d give them Ol’ Betsy and it wouldn’t matter what they did with it.”

Rich nodded. Ol’ Betsy was the oldest of the team’s community-property guns. It had been raided for parts any number of times, been lent out to guests, was often neglected and regarded as something of an evil talisman by the players. It had originally been retired after gaining a reputation as a Murphy’s gun. When in use, it always seemed to develop problems at the worst possible moment.

Ol’ Betsy had also never been upgraded; anyone that thought they’d be learning any secrets would quickly find out that they were looking at five-year-old technology. In other words, seriously ancient.

Dave spent a few minutes inspecting his Silver Specter gun. It was a beautiful piece of work, lovingly hand-crafted by the guru of paintball guns himself – Thomas Colins, owner and founder of CC Gun Works, himself the son of Thomas Colins Sr., the world-renowned weapons designer.

The grip was polished cherry wood that glowed with a buttery tan color tinged with a hint of red. Smoothly carved into the grip were a series of patented ambidextrous finger grooves, custom fitted to Dave’s hands.

The pump handle riding about three quarters of the way down the eleven-inch barrel matched the handgrips. In cross section it showed a complex series of curves, the result of an ergonomic, computer-aided design.

The rest of the gun was a burnished slivery-gray, tapering from the tip of its mirror-honed barrel to the slightly bulging stock and gas adapter at the rear, its smooth lines broken only by the pump, the hand grips and the magazine feed port positioned almost directly over the trigger.

The trigger itself was a custom aftermarket job, made out of gleaming jeweler’s silver, its front face fitted to Dave’s finger alone, its sides featuring a hand-carved Werewolf’s logo. The triggers were the only components on the gun not made by CC Gun Works; they’d been provided by another of the team’s long-standing sponsors – Teutonic Triggers.

Dave pulled his 12-gram quick-changer out of his gear bag and began threading it onto the back of his gun. It was the latest version of the world famous Greek Guy magazine quick changer.

When The Greek Guy Inc.’s changer had originally been introduced, the tournament scene had been falling apart, the result of a rampant technological arms race. The league didn’t seem able to hold its own against manufacturers who kept introducing equipment that emphasized speed over accuracy, electronics over finely machined mechanical devices and accessibility over skill.

The bottleneck had always been the 12-gram gas delivery system. That is until the introduction of larger capacity systems, the so-called ‘constant-air’ devices. Once those hit the market and were legalized for tournament play, the bottom fell out of the skill department.

The tournament circuit became seriously diluted; any grandmother who could walk and pull a trigger (not even necessarily at the same time) suddenly found herself competitive. Once competition no longer required any serious skill, the media started pulling out; sponsors started dropping their support and the IPSL found itself ranked below the NHL in the Nielsen ratings.

The Greek Guy’s device changed all of that almost overnight. It provided skilled players with a greater gas capacity like the constant-air devices, but also retained the player’s ability to control the velocity of their shots within legal limits.

It also gave the IPSL a standard that they could hang their hat on, one that re-introduced skill into the game. Within a year of substituting the quick-changer for constant air devices, the league had almost entirely recovered.

Dave worked the quick changer’s lever and watched as the cam and spring device caused a 12-gram cartridge to pop into the ready-position. He put his gun down on the bench, loaded cartridges and tubes of paint into his new harness and then slipped it on. He slid a tube into the magazine feed port of his gun.

“OK,“ he said to Rich, “I’m ready. Let’s go shoot some targets.”

The two players left the clubhouse and climbed back up the trail towards the target range.

“You know,” said Dave, “Those French Canadians call themselves the ‘Whack Splats’. They are whacked. Right before they left, you know what the one doing all the talking said to me? He said ‘Beat you we. Are Conquerors of the world be we.’ Like beating us would mean they’d be the IPSL champs or something.”

Rich snorted. “Like they’d even beat us you mean.”

“Yeah”, said Dave, “Fat chance of that.”