There were steel weapons lockers with mesh fronts along the left hand side of the room. The shape of rifles and submachine guns could be seen faintly though the mesh. Opposite the door was a low desk; as Wendy and Elgars entered the room a dark, burly man pushed a wheelchair out and came around to the front.

"You have problems?" the man asked.

"Nothing we couldn't handle," Wendy said with a shrug, still bleeding off adrenaline.

"Who's your visitor?" the man said, watching her with eyes that knew darned well that it hadn't been something minor.

"David Harmon, meet Captain Anne O. Elgars," Wendy said with a smile. "Captain Elgars took a little damage a while back and she's not quite up to form." Wendy frowned. "Actually, she's got amnesia, so she doesn't have a clue about weapons. But she used to. We need to see what she remembers."

"Remembers?" Harmon said with a frown. "My legs don't remember running. How are her hands going to remember shooting?"

"The doctor said she's remembering most of her motor skills; she can write and eat and all that stuff. And . . . well . . . I think the Blades would safely say that she recalls some basic fighting skills. I thought we could try at least."

"You ever been on a range?" Harmon asked Anne. "Blades?" he queried Wendy.

"Crazy Lucy and Big Boy," Wendy said, jerking her chin at Elgars. "She spent most of her time toying with them."

"I do-o . . ." Elgars said with a frown. "I do-o-o 'member . . . W'a'n't toy'ng."

"The captain's still recovering," Wendy said quietly. "She's . . ."

"Got a serious speech impediment," Harmon said. "Yeah, well ain't none of us whole in this fucking place," he continued with a snort and a gesture at his legs.

He unzipped the ballistic bag and started extracting hardware. "MP-5SPD. Nice. Silencer package. Did you used to do point, Captain?"

"Du-du-dunno," Elgars answered. "Do' 'member."

"She also had a Barrett in the locker," Wendy added.

"That doesn't make sense," Harmon said with a frown. He pulled out the next piece and frowned. "Desert Eagle .44. This is not the weapon of a sniper. At least, not one from a regular unit. Were you in special forces or something?"

"No," Elgars said and frowned. "At least, I d-d-don't thin'. P-p-papers s-s-say Th-th-Thirt'-Third. Then uh S-s-six hunnert." She frowned again and snarled, bearing even, white teeth. "S'all wrong."

Harmon looked over at Wendy with a lifted eyebrow. "You didn't mention that."

"She's on 'detached duty,' " Wendy said with a shrug. "Hospital detachment. I don't know if they're going to put her back through training or what. But it makes sense for her to re-learn the basics."

"Uh huh," the weapons instructor grunted. "Makes as much sense as anything else that has happened to me in the last six years."

He cleared the chamber on both weapons and rolled over to a locker. "Get her a set of earmuffs and I'll set up the range."

* * *

Harmon extended the Glock to the captain and watched her hands carefully. "The weapon is not loaded, but you never take a person's word for that. Keep it pointed downrange and keep your finger off the trigger."

Elgars took the pistol with a puzzled expression and rotated it from side to side. The indoor range had been set up with man-sized targets placed at various distances between five and thirty meters. She glanced in the chamber and cocked her head to one side like a bird then picked up one of the magazines. "S'fam-uh . . . famil'ar. Kin ah lock an' load?"

"Go ahead," said Harmon watching carefully.

Elgars swept the unloaded weapon back and forth keeping it pointed downrange. "Th'somethin' wrong," she said, turning to look at the instructor. Following her body the pistol swung to the left and down. Directly at the wheelchair-bound range-master.

"Up!" Harmon said sharply, blocking the swing of the pistol up and out. "Keep it pointed up and downrange! Go ahead and pick up the magazine and seat it, then lock and load. This time, though, keep it pointed downrange, okay?"

"S'rry," Elgars said with a frown. "S'all wron'. S'righ' an' wron' a' same time." She picked up the magazine with a puzzled expression, but there was no fumbling as it was seated and she jacked back the slide.

"Uh, 'The firing line is clear'?" Wendy said with a grin.

" 'Re'y on uh lef'?" Elgars muttered with a frown.

Harmon smiled. "Ready on the left? The left is ready. Ready on the right? The right is ready. Firing line is clear. Open fire."

Before the former police officer's chin could hit his chest all five targets had taken two shots in the upper chest and one in the middle of the face. The sound was thunder, a series of blasts like a low speed machine gun, then the magazine dropped to the ground and the weapon was reloaded. He had never seen her hand move to pick up the spare; the weapon seemed to reload itself by magic.

"Bloody hell," Harmon muttered while Wendy just stood there with her mouth open.

"Was that okay, sar'nt?" Elgars asked in a shy little voice.

"Yeah, that was pretty good," Harmon said, waving away the cordite residue. "Pretty good."

Rochester, NY, United States, Sol III

1014 EDT Sunday September 13, 2009 ad

"I think this is goin' pretty good," Colonel Cutprice opined. He ducked as a stray railgun round glanced off the shot-up piece of combat armor shielding him. "Could've been worse."

"Would've been worse if it hadn't been for that late shipment of Bouncing Barbies," Sergeant Major Wacleva grumped. "And the Spanish Inquisition."

" 'I've got a list, I've got a little list,' " Sunday said, belly-crawling over to their position. "We could use a few Bouncing Barbies out here, sir." He popped his head up over the armor and ducked back down. "There has been a fine killing, but it could always be better."

Cutprice shook his head. "You know why they're called 'Bouncing Barbies,' Sunday?"

"Yes, sir," the sergeant replied. "They really ought to be called Duncan's Folly. But they call 'em 'Barbies' because it is alliterative and, like Barbie, they just up and cut you off at the knees if you get anywhere near them. You know she would. The cold-eyed bitch."

The M-281A anti-Posleen area denial weapon was one of the few commonly available bits of "GalTech," the technology that the Galactic Federation had first offered then been unable to supply in any significant quantity.

The device was the bastard child of a mistake, a mistake made by one of the members of the 1st Battalion 555th Mobile Infantry. In the early days of the conflict, Sergeant Duncan, who was a notorious tinkerer, had tinkered a Personal Protection Field into removing all its safety interlocks and then expending all of its power in a single brief surge.

The surge, and the removed safety interlocks, had created a circular "blade" that cut through several stories of the barracks he was in at the time. And, quite coincidentally, through his roommate's legs.

It took quite some time for all the right questions to be asked and in the proper way. But finally it was determined that the boxes were relatively easy for the Indowy technicians to produce, even one at a time. And they easily could be fitted into a human device called a "scatterable mine platform."

The resultant artillery round threw out forty-eight mines, each of which was slightly mobile and had a conformable appearance; the mine was a flattened, circular disk, somewhat like a "cow-patty." The surface could change color and texture depending upon the background, but the default setting was the yellow of Posleen blood, for reasons that became obvious.

After being released from the artillery round in flight, the disks would scatter across a "footprint" about two hundred meters long and seventy meters wide. Then if anything came within two meters of it, the mine would "hop" up one meter and create a field of planar force that extended out fifty meters in every direction. The field would cut through anything except the most advanced Galactic armor, which meant sliced and diced Posleen.