“What are we going to do with all that time?”
“We-e-e-l-l-l,” Holliwell said, stretching it out, “unlike the Stardust Dreams, the Imperial Oath does have a mat in the first-class gym.”
“Oh, God. I’m getting too old for this. On Phalia, you threw me around like a sack of potatoes. Again, and again, and again.”
“Yes, but you were improving. It was getting harder and harder, and you didn’t fall for the easy ones anymore. You don’t need to be that good against a common thug. If you can avoid or deflect the first blow, you’re way ahead.”
“What I could really use is some tactical firearms refresher,” Hurley said. “Will we have time on Annalia to get some tactical range time in?”
“Not sure. I think so. It’s a five-day layover. But that gives me an idea. We’re not in hyperspace yet. I can load the Imperial Marines tactical firearms training simulators into the ship’s VR system.”
“You can do that?”
“On a modern ship like this? As a first-class passenger?” Holliwell asked. “Sure. Plenty of room in our allotment. If you’re not a first class passenger, you’re limited to the ship’s library.”
“Is that OK with our covers?”
“Sure. Hobby. Nothing more.”
“OK. Well, I think that would be a big help,” Hurley said. “Not sure at fifty-five how good I’ll be at slugging it out with anybody, but if I shoot him, then I don’t have to.”
The six weeks could have dragged, but they stayed busy. Hurley gradually improved at sparring until she occasionally caught Holliwell napping and dumped him. That wasn’t their only time in the gym. They continued with yoga, and both aerobic and resistance training. The gym had the newest electro-stim equipment, and, together with some care with their diets, they both developed strength and speed.
Hurley also spent a lot of time in the tactical firearms simulator, practicing with a semi-auto pistol selected to match her own in weight and feel. It wasn’t the same as tactical range time, but the reflexes would transfer.
She continued to wear the forearm rig. For the trip, she had the gun loaded, but without one in the chamber, so the weight would be right. The rig had two springs, and she could select either one or the other or both to eject the gun from her sleeve. She had three buttons for it in VR, which she kept up in her ‘rear vision,’ the part of the sphere her eyes couldn’t see, but which she could use when in the field with surveillance drones.
They played a game on ship, but only in their cabin. At any random time, Holliwell would say ‘Now!’ and Hurley would draw the gun as fast as she could and aim at the nearest door. Part of that was knowing which button to push, for which combination of springs, depending on how her arm was oriented. Between her practice and their game, she got very quick.
The buttons in the rear of her vision gave Hurley an idea.
“I had a question. Does your little bag of tricks include a small VR camera, like a surveillance camera?”
“Sure.”
Holliwell went to their luggage, in the walk-in closet of the bedroom of their suite, and returned with a small button camera.
“Pin it on the back of this hat.”
Holliwell did, and she put the hat on. Hurley logged into the VR camera, merged the feed, and had rear vision.
“You have another one?” Hurley asked.
“I have half a dozen. You do, too, I think.”
“I just need one more.”
Holliwell retrieved another and brought it back.
“OK, so put them at one-third and two-thirds, like at four o’clock and eight o’clock.”
Holliwell pulled the first camera off the hat, and mounted them as she requested.
Hurley put the hat on, logged into the two VR cameras, and had a bit of vertigo. The cameras were a little bug-eye, but not much more than the cameras on a surveillance drone, and between them she had full coverage. She merged them into her vision and her brain started to accommodate them. It might take a while to get used to and compensate, but if it worked....
“What are you up to?” Holliwell asked.
“Do you have full-sphere vision in VR?”
“No. I haven’t spent that much time in VR. Not in that way, anyway.”
“Well, I do,” Hurley said, “and with these cameras, I have three-sixty vision right now.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. I love it. Try and sneak up on me now. Ha!”
“Here, let’s try something. Sit here.”
Holliwell waved her to a chair in the sitting room.
“You know rock-paper-scissors?”
“Sure.”
Holliwell stood behind her and signed with his hand, either rock-paper-scissors, or a number from one to five.
“Three. Paper. Rock. Paper. Scissors. Paper. Two. Five.”
Holliwell walked around in front of Hurley and sat in the facing chair.
“That’s amazing. You can actually see all the way around? Without turning your head?”
“Sure.”
“Now!”
The door was to her right and a bit behind her. Hurley snapped her arm up and to the right and pointed the gun that suddenly appeared in her hand unerringly at the door without moving her head or losing eye contact with Holliwell.
“OK. That’s scary as hell. I’m glad you’re on my side.”
“Now I wish I had a forearm rig for the left arm.”
“Actually, I have a spare. They can be configured for right or left.”
“You do? And a spare gun? Can I have them?”
There were issues with the three-sixty vision. Hurley had no three-dimensional vision in over half the visual field, and there was a fuzzy edge where her natural vision and the camera vision overlapped. The overlap between the cameras was fine. She fixed the problem by adding a forward-facing camera, then adding three more cameras equally spaced between the first three. She now had clean overlap and parallax vision – meaning three-dimensional vision – over the whole three hundred and sixty degrees, without using her eyes at all.
From then on Hurley wore a hat all the time and carried both guns. She had to train her left arm the same way she had her right – even harder for the off-side arm. For their ‘Now!’ game, she would use whichever arm was best for the closest door.
In the tactical firearm simulator, she set it for three-sixty vision and two handguns, and kept working in the simulation all the way to Annalia. Sometimes she ran the simulation left hand only, to work up her reflexes on that side.
Hurley also increased the resistance training on her left arm so it would match her right. She wasn’t quite ambidextrous by the time they got to Annalia, but she was close.
Annalia and Earth
Hurley and Holliwell had ignored the stop at Estvia in the middle of the fourth week of the passage from Phalia to Annalia. The Imperial Oath dropped about a third of its five thousand passengers, and took on about the same number of passengers for the Estvia to Annalia leg. She had also resupplied, by the simple expedient of rotating out containers with a freighter that docked to her. All this was done while under way at one gravity, so passengers were not inconvenienced. Once all that was complete, the Imperial Oath transitioned though the Estvian hypergate and resumed her journey.
When the Imperial Oath arrived at Annalia, Hurley and Holliwell went down to the planet in the first-class section of one of the shuttles. Their luggage, as before, was sent on to their hotel by the passenger line, Imperial Interstellar Lines. The Imperial Oath would swing back through Terre Autre and Center on her way back to Phalia, so Hurley and Holliwell needed to change ships here. There was a five-day layover for a ship headed to Dalnimir by way of Earth.
The former Autarchy of Annalia had been about the same size as the former Kingdom of Phalia, but it lay on the direct route from the former Democracy of Planets to the original Sintaran Empire. Most liners and freighters could not make that long a run without resupply, and Annalia was the resupply point of choice due to its locatio
n. The spaceport was immense, to handle all the passenger and freight and resupply operations required to support all that commercial activity.
When they finally got to their hotel room, a suite on the top floor of the Gustav Adolph Hotel in downtown New Delorme, the planetary – and provincial, and sector – capital, Hurley collapsed on the sofa in relief. The hotel, like everything else in New Delorme, was new, built within the last forty-three years, since Delorme had been utterly destroyed in the Sintar/Alliance War.
“What a zoo! That spaceport is insane.”
“It is rather busy, isn’t it?” Holliwell asked with a chuckle.
“I’ll say. I thought I would enjoy being out in the open again after six weeks on board ship, but after that spaceport I’m just happy to be here in the hotel.”
“Speaking of being out in the open, I checked once we had QE contact again. There’s a huge Imperial Navy base here, which you would expect what with all the commercial traffic, and they have a contingent of Imperial Marines as well. Near the base is a tactical firearms range. A lot of the Marines practice there. It’s expensive for civilians, but I’ve booked you some time there.”
“Excellent. When are we going?”
“Tomorrow. We need to do it before we change appearances again, and do that before we do the clothes shopping. So it’s best to get your range time out of the way immediately.”
Where the Annalian Navy headquarters, also destroyed in the Sintar/Alliance War, had been located nearly five hundred miles from the capital, Imperial Fleet Base Annalia had been built closer to the rebuilt city. It was barely a hundred miles away, on the other side of the spaceport. Holliwell and Hurley took a commuter train out to one stop past the navy base, then an autocab to the range.
The range itself was located along a bluff line facing the river. Several meandering box canyons ran back into the bluff, which made a great place for a tactical firearms range. There was a three-hundred-sixty degree backstop after you made the first corner. Holliwell had booked Hurley time on three of the ranges, in half-hour slots. Hurley was assigned her own range master at the building that was the range headquarters.
“All right. So the way we work it here is you walk back into the box canyon, firearm holstered. You draw and shoot at the first targets, then keep your pistol at the ready as you proceed. There’s a sign to tell you when the course starts – which is once you’re around the corner – and one to tell you when it ends. There’s no restriction on direction of fire, because you have backstop all the way around once you turn the corner, and there’s nobody else on the course when you go in. They’re smart targets, so when you shoot at a target, if it goes down, you hit it in a lethal spot. Got it?”
“Got it,” Hurley said.
“Are you using range guns, or did you bring your own?”
“I have my own.”
“Well, go get ‘em then. You’re on in five minutes,” the range master said.
“I’m good to go right now.”
Hurley was in street clothes, nothing special, though she was wearing ear plugs and eye protection, in the form of autodark sunglasses, and wore a pocketed field vest for her extra mags and bullets. She was also wearing a hat with decorative studs spaced around the hatband. He looked her up and down, but said nothing, just nodded.
The range master waved them toward a side door, and they went out and got into a small electric cart. He drove them to the beginning of the range.
“The previous fellow is already out, so just let me check there’s no one in there.”
He checked in VR through infrared cameras located throughout the valley. No thermal indicating mammalian life inside the canyon.
“OK, infrared shows clear in VR, so you’re good to go. No shooting until the ‘Begin Here’ sign, then you’re good.”
“Understood,” Hurley said, and walked into the canyon.
The range master turned to Holliwell.
“You can watch in VR if you want. There’s cameras all up and down the valley. Channel 382 is the main one, you can access the rest from there, but that one’ll track her. This course isn’t too bad, except for the first couple. That usually catches people napping.”
Holliwell nodded and logged into the VR. The main channel was set up to change cameras automatically as the shooter advanced. He could see Hurley, stopped just short of the ‘Begin Here’ sign, probably switching over to her three-sixty-degree camera vision.
Hurley stepped past the sign and started walking along the trail through the canyon, her arms at her sides. She was in three-sixty view, in her ‘see everything, look at nothing’ mode, the one she used to monitor the whole battlefield during operations.
She had gone about forty feet when silhouette targets popped up on both sides of her simultaneously. She reacted without thinking.
Holliwell watched Hurley advance along the path, then two targets popped up simultaneously, one directly to either side of her. Both arms shot up straight out from her sides, a gun appearing in each hand. Both guns went off in quick succession, and both targets fell.
“Damn!” the range master said. “I’ve never seen anybody do that. Not even when they knew it was coming.”
Holliwell watched her continue through the course, firing from either hand as the situation warranted. She never turned her head to look at the targets, just faced front throughout. When she got to the ‘End Here’ sign, she stopped, reloaded both pistols, replaced them on the forearm rigs, and reset the forearm rigs. All that done, she walked back down the path and out to where they waited.
Hurley’s performance on the other two ranges was similar. They got progressively more difficult, but her ability to fire from both hands and to perceive her surroundings completely left her with little problem in completing the courses successfully.
As she walked out of the third box canyon, the range master turned to Holliwell.
“I want to thank you for bringing her out here today. I never saw anything like it. And I’ll give you a piece of free advice. If you’re ever in a shoot-out and she’s on the other side? Change sides.”
On the train back to the city, Hurley was expressive.
“That was a lot of fun. I wasn’t sure how well that would all work out. But all the practice and drill paid off. I had no problem at all reacting instinctively to the situation as it developed.”
“Yeah, the range master was impressed. I was worried when they started putting innocents on some of the silhouettes, but you didn’t shoot any of them. Just the bad guys.”
“I guess my pattern recognition there is pretty good. Maybe because we have the same issues in the field. It’s an automatic consideration. But it sure was fun.”
She sighed.
“OK, so that’s done. What’s next?”
“Changing looks again,” Holliwell said. “I’m going to age quite a bit, and lose the goatee, and you’re going back to the salon. I was thinking shorter – a pixie cut or the like – and darker. Brunette.”
“Won’t I look too young for you then? We’ve been pretty well matched this time, what with my red hair.”
“No, it’ll just look like you dye your hair. Which gives you an excuse to get it done on Dalnimir. Your blonde will look like it’s the grey growing out.”
“Ah. Good. That works,” Hurley said.
“Then we go shopping.”
Hurley spent the next morning in the salon. Wash, iron out the perm, cut, dye job. Fresh manicure. She emerged with a brunette, straight pixie cut, the professionally short hair of a journalist on assignment. While she was gone, Holliwell applied gray to his own hair at the temples, combing in a silvering agent and letting it work until he had the effect he wanted, then washing it out. He did the same with his mustache, and shaved off the goatee.
Hurley and Holliwell then went out and bought another completely new wardrobe in downtown New Delorme. This time it was enough for the transit to Dalnimir – another three and a half weeks on ship – plus clothing for their stint on
Dalnimir, however long that might be.
They both bought travel clothes for aboard ship suitable for an older couple. He bought clothes for their destination appropriate to a retired university professor. She bought clothes appropriate to a working journalist on a city assignment, practical clothes for someone on their feet all day yet businesslike enough to be taken seriously. She spent quite a bit of time finding a hat that would match her cover and allow the placement of her cameras.
They then took every other stitch of clothing they had along and donated it to a charity store a mile from their hotel. There would be no Phalia or Alexa clothes in their wardrobe to enable backtracking them.
They threw out all their miscellaneous toiletries and makeup items, except for those in their professional kits behind the secret panels of their trunks, which was all unmarked as to source anyway. They bought new replacement items in New Delorme so it was all Annalia-sourced.
When Paul Gulliver and Ann Turley presented themselves at the Annalia spaceport, they had become Howell Culligan, retired professor of sociology, and Jan Purny, investigative reporter for Galactic News Service, a Stauss Interstellar company. Records would show they were both Annalia natives, and had a condominium in New Delorme halfway between the university and downtown. Jan Purny’s byline appeared as a contributor in dozens of exposé-type stories over the last twenty years.
In their first-class suite aboard the IPS Solar Fire, Purny flopped on the sofa once the porters left.
“Oh, wow. Back on ship. How many weeks is it this time?” Purny asked.
“Three and a half. It’s almost three weeks just to Earth,” Culligan said.
“So what do we do for three and a half weeks? Stay in practice, sure, but what else?”
“Well, I downloaded to the ship your tactical firearms simulations, so you can stay in practice. I also downloaded all the Dalnimir press coverage for the political and crime sections for the past year.”
“Really? We have room for that?” Purny asked.
EMPIRE: Investigation Page 4