by Jack Colrain
She halted and nodded. “Then I expect I’d get off scot-free.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You shoot that thing with better grouping than I do, then maybe I’ll start feeling confident. Until then, I’ll go with what Shakespeare said: First, kill all the lawyers.”
Bailey stood up and joined Daniel in following her towards the line. “That, I would like to see,” he said. “I mean, the good shooting, not the lawyer-killing. Maybe.”
“Maybe you will,” Daniel said, loudly enough for both of them to hear. Loud enough for more than both, in fact, as the lanky German soldier named Althaus, who was closest on the line, turned at the sound. A slow grin spread across his long face. “Twenty bucks says the lawyer gets his ass kicked.”
Daniel hesitated, then called out, “I’ll take that bet.”
“Gambling’s illegal on base, West,” Kinsella called back. “But I’ll be happy to take you in and process you. Then, maybe you’ll get to see the inside of a military courtroom after all.”
“What about bragging rights, then?”
“Can’t spend them.”
“Spend them on confidence, like you just said.”
Althaus stepped aside to let her take his place while Palmer and Svoboda dropped out to let Daniel and Bailey take their spots. Hammond and Ying had turned from their observation position further behind the firing line, perhaps sensing the tension, and watched with interest. Kate Kinsella donned protective plastic glasses and gave a curt nod. “When I win, I’ll know you’re still talking out of your ass.”
Daniel put on his protective eyewear and plugged the little ear protectors into his ears. Kinsella was already shooting, the three-round bursts she had selected sounding almost like single cracks, and impacting on the Meggitt infantry targets seventy-five yards downrange in neat little sets. Daniel hefted the rifle and found it to be very well balanced and comfortable. Despite the forward pistol grip, it felt a little more like his dad’s old .30-06 than the semi-auto pistol Cody had given him for that trip to Boston a lifetime ago. All the rifles he had been training with so far felt more comfortable to him than pistols or carbines, in fact. Since there had been no specific order about fire selection, he chose single shot, semi-auto, snuggled the stock into his shoulder, sighted down the optics on a humanoid target shape 150 yards away, and snapped off a shot.
It went in a little higher than he’d anticipated—at throat level—so he adjusted downward and put a second round dead-center at center mass. Then he continued to squeeze off single shots. They came a couple of seconds apart at first, but soon more quickly.
“I’m out.” Kinsella had emptied her clip more quickly, so Daniel kept on shooting smoothly until he made the same call. Bailey had also been shooting, but Daniel wasn’t comparing their performances. “Shall we recover the targets?” Kinsella asked smugly.
It took a minute, but when the three targets were examined closely, Kinsella held her finger and thumb across her grouping; all of the penetrations were within a four-inch group, bar one burst that was off hitting the target’s left wrist. With a grin, she moved her hand across to the grouping on Daniel’s target.
Her grin faltered; the grouping there was exactly the same size, bar the one shot that had hit the throat area. “Jesus,” she muttered.
“You didn’t better her,” Bailey said approvingly, “but it don’t look like she bettered you, either. Where does that leave the bragging rights?”
“Relieved that they don’t have to worry who’d take the cash pot,” Palmer said.
“How about you?” Daniel asked Bailey.
Bailey indicated his own grouping, all within a two-inch disc of the target. It looked like somebody had put a shotgun to the target at contact-distance and squeezed the trigger. “Turning it up to E-Eleven, every time.”
“Definitely worthy of Superman,” Daniel said, surprised.
“Nah, that’s my training right there. Yours, too, West. You did pretty good there. Right, Kinsella?”
“Yeah,” she agreed, to Daniel’s surprise, “actually. You shoot one of these before?”
“No, I just do better with single shots because my dad and I used to have a lot of venison dinners.”
The faces of everyone around cleared in understanding. Kinsella chuckled. “Next time I go single-shot, you go three-round.”
“How about now? Just out of curiosity, no bragging rights.”
“Oh, hell, when I win, I am so claiming the bragging rights.”
Five minutes later, the whole team was clustered around the pair while they compared shot groupings. Kevin Bailey had stuck with what he’d been trained to do since he didn’t have a dog in this fight. West might have been a lying sack of shit when he’d first arrived, but Bailey hadn’t noticed him do anything shady in the past three weeks, so his anger had cooled a lot. His Michelle, back in Oakland, wouldn’t want him to bear a grudge, he knew. She’d say it would be a bad example to Sam, their little boy. Kevin knew he couldn’t be around as much as he’d like for his son, but he wanted to be the best possible role model for him when he was.
Now, West’s hand spread across the spatter of his three-round burst groupings, and still left a couple outside of the group. It remained a decent spread for the average recruit with a new weapon, Kevin thought. “That’s a ‘yours is bigger’ that you don’t want to brag about,” Kinsella said, indicating her two-inch-wide single-shot grouping in the center of the target’s head.
“That’s pretty impressive,” Daniel admitted. He sounded a little uncomfortable to Kevin, but it didn’t sound like it was because Kinsella had beaten him. There was something else there, and he didn’t really want to wonder what the emotion was that he heard, but noticing it couldn’t be helped.
“Yours is actually OK, too,” she told him. “For an FNG.”
“Now that the fun’s over,” Hammond’s voice interrupted them, “perhaps we can get back to some actual work?” He looked over the targets. “Superman, you and West win the silver and bronze medals at the Camp Peary Olympic shooting event. That would be mowing the lawns around Admin and the PX, respectively.” He turned to Kinsella. “You get the gold: some extra hours of long-range precision marksmanship training in place of KP.”
“Drop your cocks and grab your socks, gents! It’s a fine morning for reveille.” Hammond rapped on their locker doors as he went along. “Sleep is for tortoises, ladies and germs! Haul ass!”
Daniel was already awake and pulling on running shoes. It was Thursday, and he’d gotten the hang of Thursdays being sweats-and-sneakers running days after two mornings of running in full battle gear. As usual, it was still dark outside, but the dry dirt road running through the fields stood out just enough by virtue of its being paler than the surrounding ground. Daniel hadn’t taken long to get the idea that it was best to start jogging up to speed as early as possible before the run properly started. For one thing, it meant he no longer lagged behind his more experienced comrades; for another, it meant he wasn’t so chilly before the sun came up. Getting the blood flowing, the heart rate up, and the temperature to normal, all in one go.
He no longer needed to either catch up or get a head start on the others, of course—in fact, the early morning runs felt more comfortable and right than they had just a couple of weeks before—but it was a habit he had gotten used to and already couldn’t imagine stopping. They were simply a part of his healthy routine now. No one else in either the Homies or the Webbies seemed to dislike the runs that much, either, but he imagined they’d undergone much harsher treatment in basic training, especially those from foreign militaries.
To Daniel’s surprise, this morning Hammond took a right turn onto a slightly narrower track that curved round a low hill. The squads followed without needing a verbal command, and Daniel recognized it as one of the tracks that led around to the firing range. He couldn’t help being slightly surprised that they were heading that way while running in track gear. If they were headin
g to the range on foot, he would have expected them to be in BDUs and carrying rifles and packs, like they had on previous occasions when there’d been night shooting drills or early morning shoots.
A Humvee was waiting at the road entrance to the range, and a man and a woman were standing next to it, consulting a clipboard. Daniel immediately recognized Gray from the Armory.
The black woman with him was a complete stranger, wearing BDUs with rank insignia he didn’t recognize, and no unit insignia. She had the same air of confidence about her that Evans, Kinsella, and Captain Ying all had. As he got closer, Daniel saw the corner of a visitor’s badge tucked into one pocket and wondered why an authorized visitor needed to be in BDUs at all.
“Wow,” Daniel muttered. “Gray outside of the Armory? It must be the apocalypse.”
“Either that or his ex’s lawyer is visiting the base today,” Kinsella commented. “Usually, getting him out of the Armory is like getting a statue to go for a walk.”
Hammond walked on up to Gray and the woman, greeting them with a slight wave, and took the clipboard from her. He nodded at what he saw, and said, “OK, open her up.”
Gray unlocked the rear hatch of the Humvee and dragged out a dark metal weapons case. He grunted with the effort, making Daniel wonder how many rifles were in it.
“Right, ladies and germs,” Chief Hammond said cheerfully, “form up around the weapons case.” They did so, arranging themselves in a semicircle around the rear of the Humvee and its cargo while leaving room for Hammond and Gray to breathe. The woman had dropped back to the driver’s door and was watching the crate.
Daniel had spent the past few weeks being introduced to a lot of weaponry which, while strange to handle, at least looked fairly recognizable as such, with a pistol grip, a magazine for bullets before or behind that, maybe a rail for optics, and sometimes a second pistol grip under the barrel for steadying the weapon’s aim. Most of what he’d seen had been based on the old AR-15—or the M16 as it was designated in the military—or copies thereof. There’d been larger weapons also, like the M60 machine gun; its more compact descendant, the Squad Automatic Weapon, or SAW; and even the often vehicle-mounted .50 Cal, which was belt-fed rather than carrying a magazine.
Up till now, he had thought the six-barreled rotary guns, which were mounted on some vehicles, were the weirdest looking firearms imaginable.
Now Hammond lifted up an object from the crate, saying, “Meet the Mozari’s idea of a sidearm,” and Daniel knew how wrong he had been in thinking all weapons he’d train with were loosely the same style. There were six of these new weapons in the crate, and they looked even more science-fictional then any sort of blaster or phaser he’d seen in movies. All those futuristic props had been designed by humans who’d wanted them to look like firearms, and usually by cosmetically modifying real, blank-firing weapons. The contents of the crate in front of him had been designed by an actual nonhuman species, as actual weapons.
The Mozari weapon had a sheath that wrapped around Hammond’s forearm and several oval slots around the rounded end of that, into some of which Hammond had put fingers and thumb. Flared strakes stretched from the sheath section, through a sort of metallo-crystalline ruff about where his sheathed wrist would be, and carried on about thirty inches beyond that.
“Those are not M4s,” Casey Peters murmured admiringly.
“Whatever they are,” Kinsella replied, “they look turned up to eleven.”
“At least. Sexy, huh?”
“Sexier than you.”
Gray’s glare zeroed in on them. “It’s good to see you’re paying attention to the subject of the exercise,” he said pointedly. “These are most definitely not any AR-15 variant, and you’re not wrong about them pretty much being turned up to eleven.” Gray indicated the weapon in Hammond’s hands. “We’re calling this the XR-01. Whether the X stands for Extraterrestrial or Experimental is above my paygrade and, frankly, I don’t give a shit. That said, ten of these came down in each Mozari cargo pod. DARPA—and no doubt other similar agencies across the globe—have spent the past month analyzing them and trying to figure out what makes them tick.”
“With the aim of reproducing them for us,” Hammond put in.
“What they found,” Gray continued, “is that these are man-portable railguns. They don’t use combustible chemicals to propel a projectile; they use some kind of electromagnetic power, just like the maglev trains at theme parks do, but with a lot more speed. These babies will launch a bolt of nickel-tungsten alloy at 20 kilometers per second.”
“For comparison,” Hammond interrupted, “the average high-velocity rifle round has a muzzle velocity of around 1,200 meters per second. That’s 1.2 kilometers per second compared to the XR’s 20 kms. That’s a serious firepower advantage, especially at longer ranges.”
“What is its range, Chief?” Casey Peters asked.
“Beyond the horizon, unless something gets in the way. And, sooner or later, something will always get in the way, so we’re going to be spending a lot of time learning proper point control here. This is a precision weapon, not a spray-and-pray one. Currently, these are the most dangerous handheld objects on this planet.”
“We hope,” the woman behind them said quietly.
“The US and Chinese Navies have both experimented with railguns in recent years, but only ships are large enough for the engines capable of generating the amount of electrical energy needed to propel a projectile with enough kinetic force to do worthwhile damage. That’s Commander Proctor’s department.” He nodded to the woman, and now Daniel realized that her insignia were naval.
“Somewhere around nine megajoules per shot,” Proctor added. “And that gets us a velocity of around 3 kms. You can see why this is so radical for us. How this weapon is powered to allow it to hit 20 kms with over-the-horizon accuracy is… well, a mystery. And we’ve been working on railgun development for over twenty years.”
Hammond nodded to the weapons case. “West, you look interested and smart; you want to pick one up, see how it feels?” Daniel nodded and stepped forward, reaching down to lift one of the railguns. Stabbing pain flashed across his back, and he had to adjust his stance before he could get it out of the crate without crippling himself. He wondered momentarily what the hell the damn thing was made of. He pretty much had to hug it to carry it, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if it weighed a hundred pounds. Casey Peters seemed to feel the same when Hammond nodded to him to try. Even the massive Palmer, who was built like a pro weightlifter anyway, held it rather clumsily.
Hammond grinned, Gray guffawed, and even Proctor had to suppress a giggle. “Heavy, isn’t it?” Hammond asked mildly.
“I think the damn thing weighs as much as I do,” Daniel said.
“Actually, about half as much. Seventy-five pounds, give or take.”
“Feels like more.”
Hammond nodded. “That’s your muscle memory lying to you. It feels like more because you’re used to carrying rifles that weigh seven or eight pounds, and this is ten times as heavy.”
“Jeez,” Peters groaned. “If I want to carry something that heavy, there’s a girl in St. Louis—”
Gray cut him off by holding up something that looked a little like a zig-zagging pineapple ring. “This is the magazine that came with it—and I mean it when I say magazine and not clip. This baby carries a hundred rounds. They may be small, but they pack a punch, believe me.”
Jessica Evans frowned and commented, “If something like this gets out into the wrong hands, like the Mozzarellas...”
“Luckily for us, these come with some built-in safeguards, the main one being that all the Mozari technology is interconnected, which means this bad boy will only work for someone wearing one of the suits that came down in the Mozari pods.”
“You can bet somebody will find a way to reverse-engineer it and make it work without,” Bailey said.
“Maybe,” Hammond acknowledged, “but they’ll regret it if they do—the recoi
l’s a bitch, even with a Mozari Exo-suit. It’s a guaranteed arm and collarbone breaker without one.” He shouldered the weapon and turned. “Come with me.”
He led them around to a part of the range that had a wider variety of terrain. The sun was now up, and the range shone a welcoming warm gold. A grimy and rusting early-model M1 Abrams tank sat tiredly among some man-shaped plywood targets at the foot of an earthen embankment about a thousand yards away. Its sloping armor plates were designed to deflect incoming projectiles, but from the state of the desert camo paintwork on it, Daniel guessed it had spent the last couple of decades as a static target for exercises on the range.
Hammond put his XR’s stock to his shoulder and sighted on the tank, then fired. There was almost no sound, since there was no chemical explosion to propel the projectile downrange. There was just a sharp sound somewhere between a whir and a whisper. A thousand yards downrange, the tank rocked at the same instant, and then there was a muffled explosion, flame and white smoke bursting from the turret hatches as a shell detonated somewhere inside it under the impact of one of the XR projectiles.
Peters and Palmer both winced, and Daniel jumped. “Damn,” Peters said, “what a waste.”
Hammond held up the XR for their attention. “MBT and artillery pieces have an upper muzzle velocity of two-and-a-half to three kms, about the same as the Navy’s experimental railguns. Which is nothing, compared to this. Now, you may be wondering why you’re being introduced to such a highly classified weapon derived from the Mozari. The answer is simple, and it has nothing do with being cool, Superman.” Bailey’s face remained studiously expressionless. “These weapons came from the Mozari pods. Which means that, should we find ourselves in a combat engagement with the Mozari—or any other equivalent ET species—this is the very least we can expect their troops to carry.”
“The least?” Kinsella had already looked aghast at how the XR compared to the artillery pieces she was used to working with. “You mean they could have more, or worse?”