Star Trek: Bendross
Episode 05 Training
(Summer, 2072)
By
And
The Bendross Players
Hamilton lined up his weapon on his target and pulled the trigger. The handgun made a ripping noise, and the rough center of the target disintegrated.
The gauss gun impressed Hamilton. It used powerful magnetic coils to accelerate steel needles down range. The needles were tiny, but they moved very quickly. They hit with a terrible shredding power.
The colonists would be armed with two varieties of these weapons. A handgun and a more powerful assault rifle sort of thing.
Kerenski wasn't too impressed. "It's not efficient. It's too powerful for killing people. If you cut the muzzle velocity by half you'd get many more shots and less risk of blow through and unintentional collateral damage."
Eric Stillwell, the physicist/engineer in their squad looked up. "Interesting. You have one false assumption. You assume we're going to be fighting humans with these things."
Kerenski stopped and grew thoughtful.
Hamilton looked at his weapon distastefully. He'd been thinking that there were a couple of situations on the street where's he'd have loved to have this hand cannon at his side. It sort of made Kevlar look optimistic. Now he was picturing wasting ET with it. "I'll tell you one thing." He said "If it boils down to cowboys and Indians with this thing you can count me out. I am not playing that massacre game."
Eric looked surprised "I hadn't thought of that. I was thinking of monsters. Remember Jurassic Park?"
"Ah." Hamilton nodded. "Are we going to have enough shots for these things?"
Eric nodded "As long as the reactor's in one piece and we have steel to shred for needles, we should be fine."
"Ah. Okay..."
-*-
Down range, Rudy was firing very short, very accurate bursts with his gauss gun.
"You've done this before." Jon Dou said. "The Siberian rescue?"
Rudy looked at her. A lot of his celebrity companions referred to his few televised "adventures". Once it was discovered that Rudy traveled and did things with little regard for what was possible or dangerous, he had reporter tailing him. Once when a friend of his was taken hostage in Siberia. Rudy had not panicked had not wrung his hands. He simply gathered the material and the people he needed and mounted the rescue himself.
Rudy had been mildly annoyed to discover that one of the crew people in the LTA craft he'd used to slip into the area had been a ringer for a video-news service. Half the television audience in the world had been watching the operation as it happened.
On the other hand there was no such thing as bad publicity.
People who hadn't done such things had a tendency to casually refer to them as though they were the type of people to have such adventures. Rudy had made being a daredevil adventurer fashionable.
Rudy turned and fired more needles into the target. "I'm the richest queer since Malcom Forbes. And I am public about it. I've been shooting for years."
Jon Dou looked appropriately abashed, but her shooting accuracy improved somewhat.
-*-
Further down the range Alicia Bendross was having a dispute with Sergeant Blume.
"You have to learn how to use this weapon." Sergeant Blume insisted.
"But why?" Alicia asked, puzzled. "I'll have my body guards with me."
"What if something happens to your body guards?" Sergeant Blume said reasonably.
"Then I will call for help." Alicia concluded.
"What if help is too far away?" Blume pressed. He wasn't allowed to bellow at Alicia, or order her to do anything. This made him an extremely unhappy DI.
"I don't plan on going that far away from the main colony," Alicia said. "I am the supervisor, not an explorer."
Blume rolled his eyes. "Because this is a new planet we can't guarantee your safety on any part of it in the beginning. You need to be prepared for any eventuality."
"I am." Alicia said. "I have paid experts to think of everything bad that might happen and then take steps to prevent them. I am very well prepared."
Blume squeezed the bridge of his nose. He tried desperately to think of some way to convince the young heiress to train herself to do something that she thought was not necessary. Would you please, please just shoot the gun?" He almost whispered.
Alicia grimaced for a little bit and then quickly grabbed up the weapon. She looked at it idly for a moment and then pointed it at the target quickly. The gun ripped. The center of the target disappeared. Alicia set the gun down, casually thumbing the safety on. "There. Are you happy?"
Blume blinked at the target down range. Alicia had just fired the gun as well as anyone could possibly expect to. "That'll be fine." Blume said. "Just fine."
He was dreading the basic agriculture course.
To be continued...
Disclaimer: Paramount owns all things Trek. I claim original characters and situations in this story for me.