Rogue(6)

“Well, you’ve never been shot at before, have you?” I asked.

“Sure, in live-fire exercises,” she said. She sounded proud of it. “I’ve heard a few cracks.”

“Right, but no offensive fire,” I said.

“No. But I’m sure I can deal with it.” I could see the indulgent smirk even with her back to me. It was a nice back, too. Dammit, she didn’t look like Deni, why was she reminding me of her? And she was too cocky, but it was all façade. Damned youngster.

“Well, that’s the test, isn’t it?” I said. She was still facing away from me. I crouched about twenty centimeters to get a good angle, then drew and fired. I still had one of those punk’s guns from that mixup that had started all this. I’d been carrying it as a curiosity.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! Five shots, unsuppressed, echoing in sharp cracks and tinny pings from all the metal surfaces in the shop. The first was about ten centimeters above her head. The second went past her right ear. After that, I kept them wide in case she dodged. They tore chips out of the upper wall above the stock rack.

Arms flailing, she came up on her toes, caught herself on the horizontal motor arm and staggered back. She whirled, eyes meter wide in horror. “ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?” she shouted.

Well, she recovered quickly from shock. Good.

“We’ve already established that,” I answered her, hand low, pistol pointing at the ground. “That’s not the issue. Now you’ve been shot at. Next time, instead of jumping, take cover. Then consider doing something about it. That’s today’s lesson.”

Panting hard, she leaned back on the worktable, hands gripping the edge. “You are off the fucking edge!” she said, sounding terrified. “You are a major space case!”

“You’re welcome,” I said. I kept a flat expression. This was the first test of many.

“I cannot work with you like this,” she snapped. Her face was hard, mean. “You are seriously out of it.”

“And how crazy would I be if I wasn’t fucked up after what I’ve done?” I asked rhetorically. There was an embarrassed silence for long seconds. “Go,” I said with a shake of my head. “If you can’t handle me, you can’t handle our target, and you can’t handle the environment we’re going to be in.”

“What?” she said, sounding as if she hadn’t understood me.

“Go,” I repeated. “I’ll have him send me someone else.”

Raising her voice in anger—or was it from temporary hearing loss?—she said, “I am assigned to this task, I will do it.”

“I thought you’d decided I’m a loon?” I asked.

“You are,” she said. “You are totally round the bend. But the job’s got to be done. I will not quit.”

“Want to bet on that?” I asked. “I don’t. It’s my ass, and I’m not trusting it to a quitter.”

She took a deep breath to steady the heaves she’d been having. “I may talk about quitting, but I never do,” she said. “I was last ass in my company the entire way through Basic, but I made it. I didn’t know how to swim and damned near drowned, but I did it. I had to go through survival training twice because I flubbed the orienteering test. I wet my pants and cried in the Black Ops support course, but I stuck it out. We had a blowout my first day on Gealach and three people died, but I stayed there. I rant and bitch, but I don’t fucking quit and you can’t make me.” There was palpable defiance and aggression there. If I wanted her to leave, I’d have to pick her up and throw her out physically. And she knew I could do it and didn’t care.

I couldn’t help myself. I grinned. I had the real core of her here, and it was an honest soldier. Everyone gets scared. Being scared isn’t the problem. Letting the fear take control is the problem. “That’s what I wanted to hear. Now get that gun made.”

She looked confused for a moment, then acceptance ran across her face. She shook her head and sighed and got to work, but she kept her gaze angled so she could watch me, and shifted as I did so I was never out of sight.

She really did learn fast.

The pistol she finished a div and a half later was ugly, but certainly functional. I’d given her a task I could do myself, so I could grade it. Combat worthy it was. Without proper tempering and finish it might not last five hundred rounds before failures became a problem, but that was plenty for a field expedient.

“Good start,” I said. “I need to plan some stuff. Come back at three divs and we’ll pick up then.”