Rise of a Valkyrie

Part 42

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Kayla exhaled, squeezed her finger gently, and broke the trigger on her pistol. The slide jumped back, and the weapon barked loudly. She'd struck her target two inches left and below center at the hundred-yard range.

"That's great, Barnes, but you're still twitching the sights a little," explained the shooting cadre next to her. "You're anticipating the shot—moving to absorb the recoil before it even happens."

Kayla grinned. "I guess I'm a little impatient to get to the point."

"For sure," the cadre smiled. "And I'm not saying that you should be trying to get that perfectly controlled shot in the middle of a gunfight. But, if you develop the basic skills as much as you can, you're going to improve your performance under stress. Do you dry fire?"

Kayla shook her head.

"In your downtime, empty your service pistol and rack the slide to set the trigger, then aim and shoot, and be sure to watch the sights carefully."

"Okay, I'll do that," Kayla promised, hungry for any advice that would make her better.

"Do it about a million times and you'll be shooting at a high level," the cadre finished.

The next part of the course was named Combat Phase, and the intensity didn't let up. Before any of the girls were let near a weapon, they were ushered into classrooms to cover the basics of gun safety. The cadre began by showing them a graphic video from another class of a Ranger accidentally discharging her weapon and killing a nearby girl.

"Who wants to kill their best friend today?" The cadre asked dispassionately, while the stunned class watched the horror on the young woman's face.

An accidental, or negligent discharge was one of the most serious crimes any member of the organization could commit—even grounds for instant dismissal. The girls saw this lesson driven home several weeks into the course, when a particularly excitable Ranger shot her rifle into the sand while walking back from a gun range. She was led away, begging and pleading, taken to the Physio-development center to have her nanite's flushed out before being sent home.

The Rangers saw only expressions of contempt on the faces of the cadre as the class was lined up for a speech from the course's director on the seriousness of their new profession.

"This wasn't a one-off case," shouted a furious officer. "You're all starting to act like you wandered into fantasy land! Playing at wonder woman and getting high on life? Consider this your wake-up call because mistakes in this organization are usually rewarded with death; either yours, or your teammates. Is that clear?"

"Yes ma'am," the class solemnly chorused.

They trained on every small-arms weapons system, from pistols and rifles, to shotguns, and machine guns. They learned to field strip, clean and maintain all of them, then went back and focused on the standard service pistol and carbine until they could reassemble them blindfolded.

"It's strange," Christie observed to a cadre member, "that you still depend on explosive driven bullets. Why don't you use rail accelerated, or laser weapons? Other security forces do."

"We use advanced charges to get high muzzle velocity, so you can shoot an effective round out to four thousand yards from the carbine," explained the woman. "But ninety percent of all combat engagements will occur at around three hundred yards anyway. I don't care how good a shot you are; you're not hitting anything at extreme range whilst bullets are cracking past your head. But another reason is dependability—bullets almost never misfire, and mechanical stoppages are easy to fix. All the sophisticated weapons you describe are well and good in a controlled, civilized environment, but if you're alone on a barren planet, and your fancy, electronics-dependent laser-rifle malfunctions, what are you going to do?"