Part 4 (1/2)
She didn't need all the gear, she had enough direct interface crammed into her unadorned skull to make a far cleaner shot than the armscomp link could possibly calculate. But it was weapons check, and so she was checking weapons, gear included, the basic SWAT rule being that everyone checked everyone else's gear too, not just their own. Sighting down the open, eighty metre, low-ceilinged s.p.a.ce, the targets showed bright and clear on comp-vision, a range of holographic spheres and highlighted trajectories across the range's virtual imagination. Lowered the short, snub-nosed rifle, a mental deactivation of comp-viz, and the long, empty underground range turned blank and dull once more, lit only by the reinforced inset glow-lights for depth perception down the length.
Warning call down the row of booths, and then someone fired, four short, staccato bursts that a.s.saulted the eardrums with a familiar rhythm. Cl.u.s.ters of vicious dark holes erupted in quick succession across four solid target outlines on the far wall, like swarming black insects. Echoes racketed, then silence. The riddled targets replaced themselves.
”Not bad,” called Hiraki's voice, a softer echo after the gunfire. ”Uneven rhythm, third out at point two, fourth scattered, adjust recoil, target acquisition down and left point four. Sandy?”
”Trigger tension down five,” she yelled down the line of booths, ”RPS up one. Comp it and watch the recoil on your transition, that Panchi-3 kicks like a horse. Use a bigger mag if you like, keeps the nose down.”
”Gotcha, Sandy.” Zago's voice, deep and strong. No one ever questioned her fire a.n.a.lysis, she was quite literally the walking armscomp on such things. She had no idea how straights saw it, though even augmented straights seemed to struggle. How were these things difficult? Trajectories in a three-dimensional s.p.a.ce a it was only data. Data was easy. Visual, graphical data in particular. And of course if there was a firearm in League or Federation s.p.a.ce she hadn't seen, tested, stripped and written field reports on a she would have been surprised.
CSA SWAT weren't as good as her old Dark Star team at such basic things as shooting, and of course no GI ever had to worry about recoil all that much, but they made up for it in other areas. Like lateral thinking, forward planning, and the ability to avoid walking into traps because of things called ”hunches” a all very alien to the vast majority of the League GI soldiery. And so she adjusted, and tried to accept their weaknesses while playing to their strengths.
”So aside from the fas.h.i.+on sense,” Vanessa continued, ”what's the problem?”
”I don't like being used. Besides which, my resources aren't sufficient yet to do a proper threat a.n.a.lysis. Never walk into a firezone without one.”
”You know,” said Johnson, still reading from his screen, ”for such a bigshot spec ops commander, you can be a real p.u.s.s.y sometimes.”
”You seem to know all the cliches, Steve. Don't make me repeat the one about old soldiers and bold soldiers.”
”How did that go again?” Vanessa asked.
”There ain't no old bold soldiers,” Johnson announced.
”Ah, that's right, I could never remember how that one went.”
”So you're an old soldier, are you, Sandy?”
”Fifteen,” Sandy told him, allowing the armscomp to adjust itself on auto as she fed it corrections. ”In GI years, that's ancient.”
”I'm thirty-two,” Johnson told her. ”You're a baby.”
”Compared to the c.r.a.p I've seen in my life, Steve, you're a fetus.”
”My, how compet.i.tive,” said Vanessa. ”I suffered the traumatic dismemberment of my pet bunbun at the age of ten when my cousin Pierre shoved a live wedding firecracker up its a.r.s.e. Do I get points for that?”
”Cool!” said Singh from Vanessa's far side.
”What's your mental age?” Johnson challenged Sandy, taking his eyes from the screen for the first time. ”There's gotta be a psyche profile for GIs, there's one for d.a.m.n everything else.”
”h.e.l.l, they gave you one,” Vanessa agreed, ”that's sure the thin edge of the wedge.”
”Vanessa,” Sandy stated with commendable pleasantness, ”you're not being very helpful.”
”I'm the unit CO, that's my job.”
”Tell me about it,” said Singh.
”You can't measure mental age on GIs,” Sandy told Johnson, only too aware that Vanessa habitually ridiculed those conversations she thought were headed in unhelpful or even dangerous directions. ”Mental age is a rough approximation of mental development, which is hugely accelerated with League advances in developmental and foundational tape-teach. GIs never really go through ”infancy” as you'd understand it, anyway. The childlike emotional state is specific to straight humans, GIs skip it entirely. There's just developed and less developed, though GIs internalise information in their early years at a similar pace to a straight human child. It's a very rapid learning phase. Mine just continued six or seven years, most GIs only need about three a and regs only about one and a half.”
”But you don't remember any of it?”
”Almost nothing a memory-wise, everything that happened to me before about nine years ago is very fuzzy.”
”Weird life,” Singh remarked.
”I was in combat much of that time a” She shrugged. ”a they're not memories I miss. And I don't think I would have liked myself much, back then. Mentally I'm a different person now a which is why I don't remember much from then. My psychology's changed so much it's like a computer trying to access data stored in a different, out-of-date format. My brain today just doesn't recognise it. It surprised the h.e.l.l out of my minders, they'd never had a GI mature over such a long period before.”
”So are you going to remember stuff from today in ten years' time?” Vanessa asked. Giving her a concerned look from her booth, weapon temporarily lowered to safe-hold against the rim of the booth.
”Definitely,” Sandy a.s.sured her with a faint smile. ”I plateaued about seven years ago, the rest was just normal learning, like anyone learns a my memories from about seven or eight years ago are crystal. It's just beyond that it gets progressively more fuzzy. But, I mean, age is a tenuous guide for anyone, it depends how you spend your time. Twenty formative years spent partying or on uplink VR won't create as much mental maturity as twenty years spent reading books and practising concertos.”
”Or practising combat drill and killing things.”
”No, that's character building.”
”Sure, if you want the character of a chainsaw.”
”Jesus, Steven,” Vanessa exclaimed, exasperated. Sandy only smiled. Steve Johnson was what Vanessa called a typical SWAT male. Women, Vanessa opined, tended to join organisations like SWAT because they wanted to achieve something, be it personal, political or ideological. Men tended to join because they liked blowing stuff up. Sandy hadn't noticed any lack of enthusiasm during Vanessa's combat drills, but she had to concede the basic point, however much it puzzled her.
”And you're wondering why I'm so soft and cuddly instead?” Armscomp found the correct alignment and she locked it in. Deactivated the safety, selected to single shot, yelled, ”Live fire!” to the range, and sprayed a split second burst across the row of sixteen targets with index finger depression alone. Range-comp read back sixteen bullseyes, straight through the centre.
”Hah!” Kuntoro shouted back. ”Number thirteen is one point three centimetres from centre. You're slipping, Sandy.”
”One point four,” Sandy replied calmly, ejecting the magazine and stripping the weapon back down. ”Round thirteen misfired, KT series tend to do that every twenty rounds or so. There's something erratic between the mag feed and the ignition charge. That's why I don't use them.”
”They're not meant for single fire, though,” someone objected. ”You put *em to full-auto and there's nothing in the range bracket that's got the firepower.”
”Like I said,” Sandy replied, ”that's why I don't use them.” They all knew Sandy rarely used full-auto weapons, rapid-fire was a compensation for human inaccuracy. Sandy could place individual rounds in a thirty-round-per-second burst to within fractional millimetres over a hundred metres or more, provided the targets weren't too far apart and all in some kind of straight line, and her index fingers moved just as fast as most handweapon autofire mechanisms, militarygrade electromag excluded. Of course, in real combat, targets were rarely so obliging, but it was good practice nonetheless. Compared to what she could accomplish in single-fire, autofire was crude and imprecise. Sometimes necessary, it was true, but not in many situations she expected to encounter in a civilian city.
”f.u.c.kin' h.e.l.l,” Johnson said, grinning and shaking his head as the targets replaced themselves. ”I've been seeing that for close on a month now, and it's still the most f.u.c.kin' incredible thing I've ever seen.”
”Just data, Steve,” Sandy said, hooking the weapon's exposed comp insert to the booth hardfeed for direct diagnostic. ”Data's easy.”
”How does anyone ever kill a GI, anyway? If they can shoot you, you can shoot them.” With a meaningful nod at the sixteen bullseyed targets in a row.
”You could probably shoot the b.a.l.l.s off a gnat from a hundred metres blindfolded, just going by the sound,” Singh remarked with a similar over-enthusiastic grin.
”GIs make stupid mistakes,” Sandy told them. ”Like I've already told you a hundred times.” They just loved to talk about it regardless. When it came to blowing stuff up, she was the undisputed master. She supposed this was why famous holovid stars got sick of talking about their work-to them that was all it was, work, and nothing particularly remarkable. But casual acquaintances found it fascinating, and bombarded her with the same predictable questions, to the point of exasperation. ”You gotta get creative.”
”But that's why they made you smart, right? That never worked on you?”
Sandy sighed. ”Nothing works on me, Arvid. I'm fifteen years old, eleven of which were operational. Most GIs in the war didn't make it past three.”
Ibrahim was not impressed at being called away from Ops Control to attend to his office, and the desk that resided there. It was his enemy, that desk. A broad, powerful mahogany, made of tiak wood, from regional plantations. Built into its firm frame was the latest communications gear, full interface and multi-dimensional. It enticed him to sit behind it, and bureaucratise.
Ibrahim did not like to bureaucratise. He liked to work. Bureaucracy was N'Darie's job, and she did it well. Ibrahim preferred to work from Ops, where he could talk to his people, and benefit from their observations. Or from Intel offices, where he could judge first-hand the latest data, rather than briefly view what his a.s.sistants would sift for him, secondhand. He liked to feel the gears working, and watch the progress made. He did not want to read about it on his terminal. He did not want to be ”informed.” He wanted to know, personally and immediately.
But now, he sat behind his mostly bare, infrequently used desk, and waited for his office door to open. The two agents in suits who waited to the side of the room offered no conversation, nor would he have partic.i.p.ated had they done so. He merely examined his terminal, and read the latest piece of bureaucratic irrelevance that N'Darie had sent him, and waited. He was not impatient. He merely wanted the door to open. Soon.
Click, and it did so. Kresnov entered. Blue eyes, cool and effortlessly penetrating, immediately flicked to the suited pair. Her stride did not waver as she walked to a particular spot before the desk, and halted there. It was the same spot, Ibrahim had noted, upon which she always stopped. Everyone had one. Familiar co-workers and acquaintances came close. The inexperienced and nervous behind that. The fearful further to the left, so the door was not at their back. Kresnov's spot was unlike all others-a shade back from middle distance, but precisely to the centre, and unconcerned of the door. Her eyes never left the two agents.