Jia laughed. “Fine.” She inclined her head toward the AR room. “How about I get some sleep, and then tomorrow I show you my skills. Even better, you show me yours. I figure if I do, maybe you’ll crawl out of my ass and stop being a bitch for two seconds.”
“We’ll see.” Anne slapped the access panel and stepped inside. “Goodnight, Lin. Don’t be worried about tomorrow. There’s no shame in coming in second.”
Jia glared at the woman until the door closed.
Jia didn’t want Erik to become involved. That would only complicate the matter and feed into Anne’s argument. When he didn’t mention the woman at breakfast, Jia assumed Emma hadn’t told him. There was no way Emma wasn’t aware of the argument. Jia appreciated the AI’s restraint and understanding in the matter.
With an excuse about needing to check on something, Jia left breakfast and headed to the AR room. Anne waited inside, wearing the same expression she’d had after winning at darts.
“I’m hoping you’ll get the point without trying to set up anything too elaborate,” Anne explained. She tapped her PNIU a couple of times.
The blank room shifted, a two-person firing range forming, along with rifles hanging on either side and a box of preloaded magazines beside each position. There was no real detail outside of the firing lanes.
Anne grabbed her rifle and a magazine and slotted the ammo into her weapon. “You’re allegedly a good shot, but I want to see it for myself. This isn’t anything fancy, a dynamic firing range with stationary and moving targets of different types. Standing, ten targets per level, we’ll go until somebody misses half the targets on a given level. That person is the loser, and the other person is by definition the winner.”
“She hasn’t programmed any trickery into the simulation, other than adding near-complete noise suppression to the weapons,” Emma transmitted directly into Jia’s ear. “I would give you hints, but I suspect you would not appreciate that, given the nature of this particular confrontation.”
Jia’s jaw tightened. She didn’t respond to Emma. It would only give Anne an opportunity to accuse her of cheating and hiding behind others.
Anne lifted her rifle and flipped off the safety before taking up a shooting stance. “There are different ways to serve the UTC. You don’t have to be doing these kinds of tasks.”
“Having shooting competitions?”
“No, going to Alpha Centauri or deadly labs in France.”
Jia pulled her rifle off the wall and loaded it. “I’m fine with the way I’m serving. It wasn’t like I left the police department on a whim.”
Two stationary translucent holograms of masked men with pistols appeared in the distance. Jia fired at the same time as Anne. Both hit the targets without much trouble.
The next batch of targets appeared, a group of men at a farther distance, still stationary. Both women fired in rapid succession, hitting their targets without the use of burst fire. They’d cleared five of the ten targets for the level.
Jia smiled. She knew the difficulty was going to ramp up, but so far, she was enjoying it. Being tied with Anne wasn’t a horrible fate.
Their first moving target appeared, a hologram of a terrorist charging forward using serpentine movements and brandishing a knife. Jia hesitated for a half-second before anticipating and downing the man. She barely registered Anne’s muted fire right before that.
No surprise accompanied the appearance of multiple moving targets. Jia and Anne continued firing and striking all their targets with ease. The words Level One Complete appeared in floating holographic text.
“The next level will begin in thirty seconds,” Anne explained, ejecting her magazine and reloading. “And that’s how it’s going to continue until this is done. We don’t always get nice little breaks in battle, do we?”
“If you know about France, then you know I’ve fought in worse conditions.”
“No exo to do all the work now.”
“You need to reread my file. It’s obvious you missed a lot.”
Jia matched her and held her rifle closer, giving her forearms a chance to rest in the short interval between the next round. Success might shut the ID agent up, or it might not accomplish anything.
She was used to being doubted. It’d happened her entire life and career, and she’d learned words didn’t shut people up; only action and proof did. If Anne didn’t want to accept her after that, it would be the agent with the indefensible problem.
A glowing blue ball bounced in the air in the distance. The level had started without special notice. Jia whipped her gun into position as her competitor fired, not hitting her own target until a short breath later.
Jia was ready when more glowing balls appeared, again taking a moment to line up a careful shot and release. Anne was downing her targets slightly faster, but neither woman was missing a shot, let alone a target.
“Whatever else you might think of me,” Jia commented, “I’m a good shot. I always have been.”
“We’ll see. We’re just getting started.”
Jia wiped the sweat off her face and loaded a new magazine. Level sixteen was about to start. With a growl, a Zitark sprinted down the lane, which was now filled with stones. The alien leapt onto a rock and then another before heading down, the quick movements and level changes making it difficult to aim.
She released a burst, downing the Zitark and letting out a sigh of relief. Her accuracy had descended to seventy percent in the last couple of levels, as related by a scoreboard floating above the range. Anne had lost her speed advantage but was maintaining about seventy-five percent accuracy. Jia might not like the woman, but she was a great shot.
A new batch of holographic space raptors appeared and surged forward, growling and hissing in a harsh choir of murder. With the aliens sprinting across such a short distance, Jia didn’t have time to be too precious with her rifle. She emptied her magazine in rapid bursts and managed to down the targets before they’d closed on her.
Jia’s hand snaked out to grab from the row of magazines she’d set up between levels. She reloaded just as one of the targets on Anne’s side reached the agent. Another batch of Zitarks surged forward, and this time, Jia and Anne took out their respective targets at a distance.
Neither woman had said anything to the other for the last ten minutes. Their concentration was on the holograms conjured by the system. They’d had nothing but the frustratingly short breaks between levels for rests.
Level Sixteen Complete.
Time blurred. Despite her effort and concentration, Jia’s heart maintained a calm, slow pace. Quick-loading her rifle didn’t challenge her body like the near-constant movement of an actual battle.
Jia wasn’t surprised when a Leem target appeared and jogged forward, his movements covered by blasts from his lightning gun. Though the new alien wasn’t as fast as the Zitarks, her first shot disintegrated against the crackling shield surrounding it, and precious seconds passed before she realized the shield flickered off for a brief moment after three or four steps. A burst headshot downed the alien before he’d made it halfway.
She couldn’t spare any attention for Anne, with new targets appearing almost immediately. There was nothing she could do but establish the timing and down the enemy. Jia had become a machine, an automated turret that existed only to destroy simulated targets.
The seconds blurred into the minutes as more elaborate combinations of targets appeared, including mixed Leem and Zitark assault forces, a nightmarish scenario she hoped never to see in real life. One interesting tidbit of humanity’s expansion into the universe was the realization that none of the Local Neighborhood races interacted much beyond the most basic high-level diplomacy.
Level Twenty Complete.
Aiming, Jia barely registered the targets anymore. Aliens, monsters, people, drones. It didn’t matter. Some flew. Some didn’t. Trigger pull followed trigger pull. It was impossible to get through a target set without reloading midstream. There were too many, and they wer
e too fast.
She never succumbed to the temptation of full auto. The target lanes had widened steadily throughout the levels, making that firing mode useful for nothing but suppression, and all simulated attacks were distractions, not damage.
Her current targets, a batch of fast-flying drones ahead of a menagerie of aliens, froze. The entire course turned red.
Jia hung her rifle back on the wall, rolled her neck, and wiped sweat off her brow with her sleeve. The number of targets hit was listed on the scoreboard, but that wasn’t as important as the last statistic.
JIA LIN: ACCURACY 50.25%. ANNE DEVEREAUX: ACCURACY 49.75%.
Anne set her rifle down with a frown. “I’ll admit you have skills.”
The tone was reminiscent of a person being asked to choke down ground glass. The ID agent stomped toward the door without further comment. Jia didn’t stop Anne, waiting in silence until the door closed.
“Yes!” Jia pumped her fist in the air. “Ha! Take that.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Erik had just put his shears in a drawer and closed the lid of his penjing container when the door slid open and Jia stepped through. He couldn’t complain about Lanara’s work. It was nice to not to leave his hobby behind, but it was time to focus on Jia
She’d been in a hurry after breakfast, and he’d been curious about what she was up to. It wasn’t as if she could swing by a commerce tower to do errands aboard the ship.
He hadn’t bothered her about it, figuring if she wanted him to know, she would tell him. Partners, both romantic and professional, needed their space. Anything that threatened the ship or the mission would be brought up by Emma.
Jia slapped the access panel with a huge smile on her face as if she’d personally finished off a conspiracy leader. She grinned at Erik before sitting in a chair.
“Breakfast finally agreeing with you?” Erik asked with a chuckle.
“Agent Devereaux has apparently decided she begrudgingly accepts you, but she still has an issue with me,” Jia replied, her amused tone confusing Erik.
“I kind of sensed that after the darts.” Erik shrugged. “But I just thought she was taking her darts too seriously. I knew plenty of people like that in the Army.”
Jia snorted. “It’s less of a problem. I’ve…solved it.”
Erik nodded slowly, concern etching his face. “You didn’t solve this the same way you solved your problem with your old partner, did you?”
“No, I didn’t punch her.” Jia laughed. “But I won’t say I didn’t think about it.”
“Who am I to talk? I punch people all the time.” He waved a hand. “That and shoot them.”
Jia related her encounter with the agent the night before and their firing range showdown. Erik listened carefully, his amusement growing with the additional details.
“I don’t think it’s enough,” Jia finished. “But at least it’s something. She’s now seen proof that I carry my own weight. Being better at the range will help more in combat than throwing darts.”
“Depends on the dart.” Erik smiled. “But to be honest, things aren’t as bad as we were thinking.”
“They aren’t?” Jia’s brow furrowed.
“Yeah. I want you to think back to how the 1-2-2 treated both of us at the beginning, and how long it took to bring them onboard. Even after we got Captain Ragnar, we still had assholes doubting us.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, the trip down the hostile Memory Lane oddly nostalgic. “But in the end, we forced them to acknowledge us both, and hell, you can push it farther.”
“To what?” Jia frowned. “Before I was a cop? My parents?”
Erik gestured to her and himself. “To us. We didn’t get along right away, either. You thought I was a crazy out-of-control lunatic, and I thought you were too far up your own ass.”
Jia rolled her eyes. “It’s redundant for someone to be called both crazy and a lunatic.”
“There’s the old Jia.” Erik grinned. “But we came to an understanding, and we went from good partners to great ones even before we hooked up. That’s the way things work.” He shrugged. “Even in the military with a more unified culture, new soldiers had to get used to the way things were done and the other soldiers’ personalities.”
“This isn’t the first time we’ve had to work with others. And we’ve never had much trouble with Malcolm.”
“Because we separated support and ops.” Erik inclined his head in the general direction of the cockpit. “It’s not like we were worried about Malcolm having our backs in a firefight. These ghosts change everything.”
“I suppose I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“And we’re a ragtag group of irregulars, making this harder. Things will gel, and from what you told me, Agent Prissy Pants isn’t all talk. It’s good to know she can shoot things and hit them.”
Jia snickered. “’Agent Prissy Pants?’ I’d love to see you say that to her face, but I doubt it would end well for team morale.”
Erik lay down on the bed and rested the back of his head in his hands. “She’s probably thinking the same thing about you. Some of this is just her busting your balls to make sure you can take it.”
“Do I need to remind you I don’t have any balls?” Jia joked.
“You’ve seen how Kant is, and if she can get along with him on a mission, she can get along with us. If this is about something else, I don’t think you should worry.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m glad you had your little showdown.” Erik smiled. “I was worried I’d have to beat all this fresh meat into line with force of will, but you went ahead and made her shut up with an example of skill. This goes beyond that. I think Anne’s more pissed with you than me because of what you represent.”
Jia frowned. “What exactly do I represent?”
“A prodigy.” Erik sat up, now looking serious. “It’s easy for her to accept me at the end of the day. I was in the Army for longer than she’s been alive. Everything I’ve accomplished since coming back to Earth is filtered through that background. But you’re closer to her age, and you went from being a detective to where we are now.”
“You think she’s jealous?” Jia’s slight smile didn’t speak to her disapproval of the idea.
“She whined about your family background,” Erik recalled. “I’m sure she’s had to fight hard to get her position and prove to people she’s worth it. In a couple of years, you’ve gone from a naïve detective no one regarded to Lady Justice, the famous former detective. Nobody blinks an eye at you stepping into a terrorist situation or capturing a flitter thief when you’re out shopping. And that’s before we get into your piloting.” He laughed. “I’m sleeping with you, and I might have a hard time believing everything you’ve done if I hadn’t been there.”
Jia rolled her eyes. “I hope I don’t have to sleep with her to get her to calm down.”
“She’ll be fine,” Erik replied. “That’s my point. I think she bugged you because she reminded you of all those assholes at the 1-2-2 who questioned you, but you weren’t living up to your potential there because of them.”
“True.” Jia folded her arms. “And you don’t think we have the opposite problem with Kant? That he might be too happy-go-lucky?”
Erik shook his head. “I knew tons of guys like him in the Army. He’ll be all jokes and smiles when we’re not getting shot at and a lethal warrior the second bullets start flying.”
“And what about Janessa and Wei?”
“Not our problem.”
Jia dropped her arms. “How are they not our problem?”
“Because they won’t be going out on missions with us,” Erik explained. “Lanara asked for them, and they are her responsibility. If she needs our help, she can ask for it, but we know Lanara.
“We could have stuck her in front of a Hunter, and she’d be ranting to the alien what a loser he was for not maximizing the efficiency in his engines. That’s before she screamed at one of his monsters to o
rder it to help her.”
“You’ve got a point.” Jia chuckled. “Janessa doesn’t strike me as the type of woman who is going to spend much time challenging Lanara, and when I’ve talked to Wei at meals, he seems happy with her leadership. He told me he’s always needed a firm hand.”
“See?” Erik smiled. “Not our problem. Leadership’s not about micromanaging teams. It’s about having good people you trust who can manage others. There’s also another thing to keep in mind about us.”
“What’s that?” Jia asked.
“Alina isn’t our boss.” Erik’s expression turned stern. “I think we have a good relationship with her, and she’s obviously given us a lot of good gear, but if she screwed up and sent us people we can’t work with, we have a simple solution—we just refuse to work with them. If Anne’s head remains up her ass, I have no problem benching her and telling her to take it up with Alina.”
Jia nodded solemnly. “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“So do I. So do I.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Jia sighed, her eyes closed. She put a hand to her forehead. Without opening her eyes, she could tell by Erik’s deep snores it wasn’t time to get up. His ability to adapt to shipboard life was as impressive as it was frustrating.
She slid out of bed, adjusting the blanket so Erik was covered before grabbing clothes out of the closet. Times like this required mental exercise before she could hope to sleep again, but she didn’t want to have another showdown with Anne.
A different destination was in order.
Jia entered the bridge and headed toward the pilot’s seat. She stopped and placed her hand on the back, smiling softly. People said no one was truly gone as long as you remembered them. It was hard for her to pilot the Argo without remembering Cutter.
Emma materialized in the co-pilot’s seat, wearing a leather jacket, a wool-lined cap, and goggles. “There are drugs available that could help you sleep with minimum side effects.”
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