Allan Cole - Sten

"For almost an hour? An' the bloodstains don't hardly show."

Gregor smiled grimly. "I'm not the one with bloodstains. But Lanzotta's gonna be."

Sten waited.

"You went to him?"

"You have it locked. To tell him I'm sending off a letter to my father."

"I'll bet he was very interested," Bjhalstred said solemnly. "Very important for a young trainee to keep his family posted."

"It was about this clotting trainee stripe thing."

Sten eyed Gregor over his beer. "You still think you got raw 'cause they didn't give you any acting rank?"

"Straight. Hell, I deserve at least as much of a chance as anybody. They say these jack stripes are to pick out potential leaders. Why not me?"

"Maybe they figure you're nothin' but a potential wipe," Morghhan said.

"Try me," Gregor glowered.

"Shaddup, the both of you," Sten put in before Morghhan had time to bristle. "We are sittin' here, quietly drinkin' beer, and celebratin' that we can now get out of barracks for two hours a night an' get swilled."

"Cadre gives us enough grief, we don't have to go out and synthesize our own," Bjhalstred agreed.

Morghhan added a massive belch and went for more beer.

"I ain't just blowin'," Gregor said. "You know my father's got influence. All I want is justice. Tell you what. I see all they gave you is a double stripe. Since you and I are the only ones in this company with any intelligence—"

"Appreciate the thought," Bjhalstred said. "Glad you two fleet admirals decided to split a beer with an ol' scrunchie like me."

"That's not what I mean," Gregor said irritably. "Sten and I are the only two who're aware how much your whole military career depends on what happens right here in training."

"Military career," Morghhan said as he came back to the table. "Whoo. Things getting serious around here."

"Let 'im finish," Sten said.

"So I told my father to go straight to the Imperial Court. Get an investigation. Why is the Guard wasting its finest potential because the instructors couldn't pour piss out of a spaceboot unless there was a printout on the heel?"

"Come on, Gregor. You mentioned my name. What's this got to do with me?"

"I'll use you as an example. You only got two stripes. You ought to have been trainee platoon leader. Or better. If I hadn't had training already, I got to admit you'd be almost as good a troop as me."

"Yuh."

"So I'm gonna mention you in my letter. Make a stronger case, and when my father takes care of things, it'll do you some good too."

Sten started to say something, then decided to spend a few seconds unhooking Morghhan's fingers from the spare mug and inhaling it Then he put the mug down.

"I don't think I want that," he said, just as quietly as he could manage. "I'll make my own way, thanks."

"But—"

"Gregor. That's what it is, like you say. End program."

Gregor stared at Sten, then nodded. "Whatever you want. But you're making a mistake."

"My mistake."

Gregor got to his feet. "Anyway. I got a letter to write." And he was gone.

"Trainee Corporal Sten?"

Sten looked back from the doorway at Bjhalstred, who had snapped to rigid attention.

"You have my permission to speak, Trainee Bunghole Bjhalstred."

"Request plus or minus reading on that last, over."

"Stand by. Computing. Prog 1—somebody's either gonna be trainee fleet general or Guard cesspool orderly with thirty years' time in grade. I dunno. Prog 2—I'm gonna get imploded. Halstead said training was really gonna start tomorrow mornin', an' that's more than I can face without a hangover."

Three mugs clanked solemnly.

"Awright," Carruthers said in what were almost human tones. "What you're about to get is the most carefully engineered way of killing someone known to man. Imperial engineers designed it so not even maggotbrains like you could screw it up. Which is almost unbelievable.

"I need one idiot volunteer. You." She waved at Sten. "Post."

Sten slid out of the bleacher bench, double-timed to a position in front of the low stand, and waited at attention.

In the distance, behind Carruthers, ran the thousand-meter tree- and bush-studded emptiness of a firing range, lane-marked at its far end.

Carruthers opened the top of the lecture stand and took out a weapon. A smooth black triangle formed the stock/pistol grip, and a stubby inverted cone ended the seventy-centimeter-long barrel.

Carruthers handled the rifle reverently.

"You probably seen this, and handled it in the livees. This is the assault rifle Mark XI. We call it the willygun. Tell you something strange about this. This was invented more'n a thousand years ago, on Terra, by a designer named Robert Willy.

"It was a fine design," Carruthers said. "On'y problem was that lasers weren't that good and nobody knew for sure how to handle hunks of antimatter, which is what makes this piece so deadly."

She touched a stud, and a long tube slid out of the rifle's butt. "This is the ammunition. Antimatter Two—AM 2—the same stuff that powers spaceships. One tube contains fourteen hundred rounds. The bullet's a one-millimeter ball of AM 2, which is inside an Imperium shield, which is the only thing that keeps the whole magazine from exploding when it touches conventional matter.

"We once calculated, as a matter of interest, that one of these tubes has enough energy to power a scoutship all the way around this system at full drive level.

"Ain't that interesting, Bjhalstred?"

Bjhalstred jumped awake.

"You wasn't sleeping on me, was you, Bjhalstred?"

"NO, CORPORAL."

"That's good. That's very good. But why don't you come on out here and get down in pushup position to make sure you don't get sleepy.

"Anyway. Fourteen hundred rounds. If the Empire ever sold these guns on the open market, which of course they never will, each little tiny AM 2ball would cost a guardsman three weeks' salary. You see how good the Empire is to us?"

Carruthers waited.

"YES, CORPORAL," came the shout.

"Aren't you all glad you went and joined up?"

"YES, CORPORAL."

"You sounded a little weak on that one," Carruthers growled. "Assault rifle Mark XI. You got two controls. One is for your safety/single-shot/automatic fire mode selection, the other is the trigger. You got one dial, here on the butt, which shows you the state of battery charge. Each battery will give the laser enough energy for about ten thousand rounds, depending on atmospheric pressure, if any, and conditions.

"The laser is what is used to fire the particles. This means the only sight you got is this crosshair. You don't have to worry about trajectory or bullet drop or any of that other dust that's important with a conventional weapon.

"Which is what is special about the willygun. If you can point it at something, you hit that something.

"Demonstrator!"

Sten mounted the platform. Carruthers handed him the rifle. Sten handled it curiously. Light. Almost too light, like a toy. Carruthers grinned at him. "That ain't nothing you'd give your kid brother on Empire Day," she said, seeming to read Sten's thoughts.

Curruthers opened the stand again and took out an object wrapped in plastic and about fifty centimeters to a side. She jumped down from the stand and walked ten meters to a low table. Carruthers unwrapped the parcel.

"This here is meat," she said. "The stuff that soyacrap in the messhall is supposed to taste like. It's got about the same consistency as a humanoid."

Carruthers set the blood-oozing meat on the table and walked back to the stand. "Shoot me that deadly charging chunk of beef, trainee," she said.

Sten raised the weapon awkwardly to his shoulder, and aimed through the sight He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

"Helps if you take the safety off first," Carruthers snarled.