TRAINING

The room was your standard Space Marine compartment. The décor was gun metal grey accented with a green only seen in the military. Weapons hung in racks on the walls. The main feature of the room was a grizzled old Drill Instructor. His white hair was buzzed short and his unshaven jaw was ridiculously square.

"This is your standard issue G-78 linear accelerator rifle." He hefted the rifle. It was a futuristic piece of polymer and metal. "This is 30 inches of portable man-made sudden death. It will accelerate a 10 mm projectile down range at a speed that would make your mama wet her pants. It will impact with enough force to punch a hole through a starship bulkhead. I'm not talking defense screens, I'm talking interior walls. It's still more force than you can imagine."

Mark was the only real person in the room. Once he had finished the registration setup, the tutorial started. The tutorial was being administered by a grizzled old Gunny Sergeant.

Angie could watch him on the monitors, if she wanted to. She could look across the lab and see him, his body, sitting in a chair. Neither thing was likely to be helpful. It was t-minus 30 minutes. There wasn't much time for anything. Billy Long Hair and Billy were finalizing Mark's pod. Meanwhile, Mark was using the an old fashion VR helmet. Once his pod was ready, he would have to disconnect and change devices.

Right now Angie and Janet were making sure the software and hardware was ready to go. The powerup sequence had worked perfectly. Actually, all of the start up sequences were working the way they were supposed to. Mostly all of the systems were working. The small problems were easily fixed. For the hundredth time Angie asked Janet "If I go into the game, are you sure you can handle this?"

For the hundredth time, Janet answered the same way, "I'm sure." She waited long enough for Angie to start to talk again before she finished the answer. "And I would be worse than useless in the game. Same for Billy Long Hair and Lizzie and Nona and Joe and Tazuki. Our best positions are right here monitoring the system."

"I'm not the best player in the world."

"And as team leader you get some bonuses." Angie frowned, Janet continued quickly, "besides, I'm the worst player in the world. So let's stick with your plan."

Angie's frown deepened. "My new plan."

"Your new plan." Janet fixed her with a look. "Can we get to work now? We need to..." her voice trailed off. Angie followed her look to a large screen monitor.

On the monitor they could see Mark running through a combat course. Three TU'COn riflemen fired from exposed positions. Really exposed positions, like the TU'COns didn't know they could hide behind the sandbag wall. Mark missed the first one. Technically, the enemies were shooting back, but their aim was so bad and their shots were so far off that Mark would have to try real hard to get hit. Much like the practice TU'COns, Mark missed again.

"Maybe I'm not the worst player in the world," Janet said. She looked at Angie quickly and then back to the monitor. Mark had zeroed in and shot the first one. His second shot was amazing and took out the second shooter. "See, he's getting it." The slight relaxation that had passed through both Janet and Angie vanished as the next shot went so wild that a dead bird crashed to earth. Feathers fell like rain.

"Are you kidding me recruit?" The Gunny Drill Sergeant roared. "That was the worst shot I have ever seen!" The Drill Sergeant summed up what Angie was thinking.