The Long Black (The Black Chronicles Book 1)

by J. M. Anjewierden

  The other women rejected far more dresses than Morgan would have. Even perfectly serviceable clothes that were only a little too loose were rejected alongside those that were liable to tear if she moved wrong.

  The attendant in the dressing room had gently suggested Morgan try on some long sleeved dresses, but Emily had just laughed and said that there wasn’t any need to cover up her scars. Doing so hadn’t occurred to Morgan, but most of the people she’d interacted with hadn’t commented on them either.

  The attendant had apologized and been too embarrassed to offer more suggestions, until Emily broke the ice by talking about some of her scars picked up in the military. This had spiraled into a competition where Emily and Morgan compared scars. Morgan won for quantity. Emily won for method obtained.

  Once they had four dresses worth buying Morgan had tried to get them to stop, but they insisted on getting at least twice that number.

  Morgan had to admit, at least to herself, that the dresses were cute. Especially the one that had been declared the perfect ‘little black dress.’ This was apparently a description of function as well as how it looked, but never mind that, Morgan felt pretty wearing it.

  “Does it always take this long?” Morgan asked them as they put the last dress back on its hanger and placed it with the others in the cart pushed around by another of Emily’s employees, a woman who had only spoken a single word, and that to introduce herself as Kate.

  “If you’re lucky and have the time, yes,” Gertrude said, laughing.

  “Is our next stop this friend of Emily’s then?”

  “Oh, no,” Gertrude said, quite seriously, “We’re not done here yet. There are still odds and ends to get, like underwear – that shouldn’t take as long – and then the really fun part. Shoes!”

  Morgan managed to suppress the moan threatening to burst out, but only because it seemed rude to complain when the other women were picking up the cost.

  “If it helps, I think you will enjoy shopping at Larry’s plenty,” Emily said, flashing her a lopsided smile.

  ***

  At Gertrude’s insistence Morgan had changed into one of her new dresses before they headed for their last stop, a pale pink wrap dress with sleeves that went down about a third of the way to her elbow and a deep pink sash holding it closed. The V-neck showed a little more of her upper chest than she was used to, but not greatly so.

  She hadn’t the courage to try the shoes with heels yet, so she was wearing the black flats, finding them still surprisingly comfortable. Not something she could work in, though.

  When they slowed down and dropped to street level in front of the store Morgan almost mistook it for a warehouse. There were no windows and all four sides had massive black planters just past the sidewalk running all the way around the building. Morgan couldn’t be sure, but they looked to be made of carbon nanotubes. It was an interesting choice for what was essentially a large plant pot. The guard stations in Pari Passu hadn’t been this fortified. They were pretty plants at least, carefully sculpted bushes cheerfully offsetting the dour nature of the building. Some of the shapes she recognized, like the bushes shaped to look the roaring lion on Albion’s seal or the dove clutching a sword and leafy branch in its talons that was Zion’s symbol. The two on either side of the – clearly reinforced – metal door at one corner of the building Morgan did not recognize, and she almost wondered if it was even a real animal. It was very round, with a big flat tail and two broad flat flippers, and a large droopy almost doglike snout. Whatever it was they all certainly took a lot of time to craft. Morgan had no idea how the dove sculpture didn’t break under its own weight in places, for instance. A sure sign the store was doing a good business, anyway.

  The sign in the door’s tiny window – not holographic but actual plastic hanging from some thin twine – said the store was closed, but Emily tapped the buzzer next to the doorknob anyway.

  She waited for a full minute, and then rang the buzzer again.

  It took a bit longer, but the speaker above the buzzer started up with a short burst of static, followed by someone speaking.

  “Closed. Come back tomorrow.”

  “I know you are closed. Tell Larry that ‘that damned taskmaster’ is here to see him,” Emily replied, completely ignoring the curtness of the stranger’s statement.

  “Seriously?”

  “Those exact words.”

  The connection closed with another bit of static.

  “A lot of this seems rather. . . old,” Gertrude said, gesturing to the door.

  “Larry is an interesting fellow. He hates to throw anything away simply because it’s old. Some of the pieces he has in there in his private collection were made on Earth 800 years ago, and still work. The ones more than a millennia old don’t function. At least I don’t think they do. He probably has the best collection in the galaxy, at least without Earth to compete with.”

  “And what exactly does he sell here?” Morgan asked.

  “As I said, the tools of self-defense,” Emily replied, “which covers a fairly broad range of things.”

  “Guns, honey,” Gertrude said, taking in Morgan’s uncomprehending reaction to Emily’s statement.

  “They are more than simply ‘guns,’” Emily said.

  “Lady Novan, you know more about weapons than the two of us do about machines and repairs, combined. Probably twice over. If I were to try to explain the dozen tools I use to fix an antigravity engine to you, they might as well all be ‘wrenches.’ Gun is a good enough explanation.”

  Emily did not respond, due to the door opening just as Gertrude finished talking. A young man, perhaps even close to Morgan’s age, was standing in the doorway with an awed look on his face. His name badge read ‘Wendell.’

  “Welcome, Colonel,” he practically stammered. “Larry is straight back in the range. Would you like me to lead you?”

  “No, thank you, I know the way,” Emily said, “But perhaps you could do me a favor?”

  Somehow the awed look on his face intensified, and Morgan wondered if he could even remember his own name at that point.

  “Anything.”

  Emily pulled up a list on her uplink. She gestured to him and he primed his to receive information.

  “I assume you know this establishment? It is not far distant. Get everything on that list, exactly as it is there, and pay them with this,” she pushed a few more buttons, presumably authorizing temporary access to her accounts.”

  “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” He assured them, moving to the side to allow the women to enter the store past him.

  “Don’t overexert yourself. Forty minutes is perfectly acceptable. We don’t want it too early, after all.”

  “Why not just send your driver?” Morgan asked after the door had closed behind the young man.

  “I could have, but this way he gets to feel useful and isn’t hanging around here bothering us with his adoration.”

  “You’ve met him before?”

  “No, actually,” Emily answered, “but my reputation precedes me much more in a place like this.”

  The front end of the store was a narrow walkway leading to the other end of the store, a glass case separating the customer side from the staff, filled with small guns in a bewildering array of styles, though all sharing the same basic design, a horizontal grip with the switch below the barrel and the bits around it.

  All of the walls to their left were covered with an even more varied assortment of accessories. Morgan hadn’t ever seen a gun up close before. The Tinnys relied on brute force, short clubs, and the promise of retaliation rather than more advanced weapons. As such, the labels here helped her even less than the terms for dress types had. Magazines, holsters, barrels, triggers, and so forth.

  The wall just a meter or so back from the glass cases held larger weapons, clearly meant to be carried and used with both hands. These were more varied than the smaller ones were, with one hand grip, two, or none, attachments for lights or none, ro
und tube or not, and even some without an obvious barrel that could be seen from the side. Others had multiple barrels, including one that was probably almost as long as Morgan was tall with six barrels mounted in a ring configuration.

  At the end of the store the walkway snaked back around the wall, presenting another aisle more or less the mirror image of the front of the store, only these guns were of a different type. All of these had a much broader barrel, at least twice the diameter of the ones in front. They also looked. . . newer somehow? Morgan couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but the designs looked closer to the style and aesthetics she had seen elsewhere on Zion. The stuff in the first row almost reminded her of pictures she’d seen of Earth in the little time she’d had to study other topics like history since starting school.

  The walkway looped back around again, though this time the aisle ended maybe a third the way across the length of the building, with a wall cutting off the rest, a heavyset door with no windows leading, presumably, to the rest of the building, a staircase next to it leading upstairs. It had no door, but did have a small sign held across its length with twine that read ‘Employees Only.’

  Again these guns were obviously of a different type. They had barrels that were narrower than even the ones nearest the entrance, looking too small for Morgan to even fit her pinkie finger in, were she to try such an unwise thing. These were almost entirely made of reflective metal, instead of the ceramics, common metals, and plastics of the first row, or the carbon of the second. Morgan had picked up something of an eye for metals even before escaping Hillman; if she had to guess these looked to be an alloy with at least some iridium. Why did such tiny guns need to be so durable?

  She didn’t have time to ponder this too long, Emily led them straight through the door into what was helpfully proclaimed the range by an overhead banner.

  This portion of the building was two stories tall, mostly open, with a clear wall dividing the entryway from the rest of the room. Just past that there was a half wall divided into numbered lanes, each separated from the rest by two single-story walls perpendicular to the wall, as well as flat space on the top of the half wall, presumably to rest the guns on. Above each section there was a railing with a motorized clamp hanging down from it, extending all the way to the back of the range where the back wall was covered with some steeply angled piled of. . . something, Morgan couldn’t figure out what it was made of, just that it was presumably meant to catch whatever the guns shot out.

  Another helpful sign on the glass door read ‘Eyes and ears on at all times beyond this point.’

  Perhaps not so helpful, at least for someone like Morgan who was completely new to this.

  The wall directly to their right as they walked onto the range was covered to a height of two meters or so with small cubbyholes, each labeled with a number. Emily reached into one, pulling out a pair of clear glasses and a pair of ear protection not unlike what they used at the school when working around some of the noisier equipment. Ah, protection for eyes and ears. That was reasonable enough.

  “Do the numbers represent sizes?” Morgan asked, watching Gertrude pull out a set from another cubby.

  “No, that’s just so you know where to put them back,” Gertrude said, showing Morgan the small number stamped on her ear protection, the same number as the hole. “They should fit just about anyone.”

  Shrugging Morgan pulled out the ones nearest to where she was standing. The glasses were a light yellow color rather than clear, but they fit fine. She settled the ear protection on, noting that these had the same technology in the others she had used, which allowed sounds like normal speech through fine, stopping only those sounds loud enough to be harmful.

  There didn’t seem to be any other obvious exits out of the range, so where was. . . Oh, there he was. On the far left end of the range there was a man leaning up against the divider sitting on a stool, leaning over the top of it fiddling with some fasteners on a remarkably large weapon. It looked a bit like the small telescopes the Tinnys used to watch workers from the top of their towers, so it was probably to help sighting at long distances.

  Apparently satisfied with his work, he straightened up, raised the gun up to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. Even through the glass wall – which was highly unlikely to be simple glass, now that Morgan thought of it – and despite her ear protection, it was loud. Loud to the point that the glass door shook slightly. He fired again and Morgan realized she wasn’t hearing the sound of the gun firing, but of the bullet hitting the far wall – and exploding.

  Morgan felt her eyebrows rise without any conscious thought on her part.

  “What is that?” She asked.

  “It was an NCR-7 standard issue battle rifle. Now it is a travesty of good taste and style,” Emily replied over her shoulder, still looking at the rifle through the glass.

  “Because of the exploding bullet?” Gertrude asked.

  Emily laughed. “No, that’s normal. He’s replaced the stock, the sights, the grip, even the magazine well it looks like. What is that on the. . . did he attach an underslung shotgun on the thing? Is nothing sacred to this man?”

  At this point Morgan started tuning her out. The words were gibberish to her, but the tone? That Morgan knew all too well. She’d used it herself a few times when discussing some ridiculous repair job one of the other tunnel rats had perpetrated on some poor machine that she then had to fix.

  As she went on Morgan turned to Gertrude and shrugged, who in turn rolled her eyes and opened the glass door. This managed to get the attention of Larry, who had finished firing the gun for the moment.

  “And what brings you here, oh harridan of my nightmares?” He said in a booming, but not unfriendly, voice, standing up. And up, and up some more. He was probably the tallest man Morgan had ever seen. He was also very broad, with a shaved or bald head and a bushy goatee, with skin somewhat between Morgan’s and Gertrude’s in color.

  “Oh, nothing too unusual. Gertrude finally decided she needs something smaller than Gunny Suoh’s hand cannon, and Morgan here is a babe in the woods who needs something to protect herself with.”

  “What, you think this is like the bad old days, that I’m just here to get whatever you need?”

  “Of course not,” Emily replied immediately, pausing for a moment before adding, “This is worse than the bad old days. Now I have to pay you.”

  Larry laughed. “True enough. It’s good to see you, Colonel. You too, Gertrude. I wish I could have made it out the other day.” He turned to Morgan, sizing her up. “A babe in the woods then? Have you ever even held a firearm?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, at least you won’t have any crap you need to unlearn. Come here,” he added, beckoning her over. Once Morgan was standing next to him he pointed to a placard that was nailed to the divider wall beneath the other sign that said ‘Lane 1.’ “These are the basic rules of gun safety. They are not suggestions, they are not guidelines, they are rules. Tell me, do you work, are you in school?”

  “School for starship mechanics,” Morgan supplied. “Plus working as a janitor and ground car mechanic’s assistant.”

  “Okay. This is just as important – more really – than the chemical and tool safety rules you have at school and work. You screw with this and if you’re lucky you might end up dead. If you are unlucky someone else will end up dead. You understand me?”

  Morgan nodded, looking at the sign. There were only four rules, written succinctly.

  The gun is always loaded.

  Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.

  Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.

  Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.

  “Logical,” Morgan said as she finished reading.

  “Those rules have existed for hundreds of years because they work. Now, a gun is a tool like any spanner or bolt you work with, with many uses. Often times simply having a gun will be enough to g
et criminals to back off, but it isn’t a magic button. It also isn’t for everyone. There is no shame in being unable to try to kill another human being, even someone who is trying to hurt or kill you. Do you think you can do that, if it came down to it?”

  Gertrude chuckled a bit, “I think she’ll do just fine there.”

  “So does the Colonel, or you wouldn’t be there,” Larry agreed, “but I need to hear it from her.”

  Morgan thought about it before answering. She’d certainly been willing to attack the thieves to help Gertrude, but punching someone and shooting them were different things, emotionally. She knew she could still kill someone with just her fists, but knowing it and feeling it were different things. If she had had a gun when they’d attacked her again would she have used it?

  Probably? It was hard to be sure, after the fact.

  “I think so,” Morgan said honestly.

  “Good answer. It is not an easy question, and being too sure at this point generally means you haven’t thought about it enough. Before we get into what kind of weapon is right for you let’s have you start out on some of the classics to get a feel for shooting.”

  ***

  Morgan lost track of time as Larry explained the basics to her, how to stand, how to squeeze the trigger, how to use different kinds of sights. He stuck to handguns since the point was to get her something she could carry with her.

  At some point Wendell returned with Emily’s order, which turned out to be dinner ordered from one of her – and Larry’s – favorite restaurants. As they ate Larry explained the three main types of guns to Morgan and Gertrude.

  “Gunpowder has been used, little changed in formula, since many centuries before man left Earth. There isn’t anything on Earth that works better to propel a projectile at high velocity at sizes small enough to be carried, at least not until we can figure out how to finally miniaturize rail guns.”

  “Rail guns?” Morgan asked.

  “One of the main weapons on things like spaceships. We can explain those later. Anyway, there are in fact several designs of handgun that trace their roots all the way back to Earth, the most obvious of which is the 1911 design, which is still used with only slight modifications today.”