was really hoping for someone else to step up for me if there was any shooting to do when we got back to Earth. Apparently, it was a necessary element to the training, something about my survivability percentage again. Now just as people don’t know how a basic network security key is coded, it turns out I didn’t know the first thing about guns. I didn’t know how to align the sights, I snatched at the trigger instead of squeezing it, I held my breath too long, I didn’t hold my breath enough, I closed my eyes when I fired.
Okay, now that I think about it, the last one does seem pretty dangerous.
I put so many rounds into a target that I almost dug a hole into the tree I was aiming at and my body ached from the effort. Shooting guns on TV looks easy, but in real life it’s loud and takes a whole lot of physical effort. Hendricks taught me one-to-one, which must have meant I was bad, and taught me two different ways to hold the gun. Each method required both of my hands wrapped securely around the weapon, but he taught me how to be accurate when holding it way out in front of me, or with my elbows tucked close to my body and the weapon near my chest. It took me a few hours, but I like to think I was getting the hang of it.
When they brought out the bigger stuff, I felt a little lost. The pistol was one thing, but when they were talking about short-action gas recoil interchangeable caliber whatevers, I think my mind just gave up. I tried a couple out and saw that they all had the same logo either on the barrel or the part where the empty casing came out.
“Hey, are we sponsored?” I asked Hendricks, who just smiled at me almost sympathetically.
“In a way,” he said, “guess who owns the corporation who owns that company?”
That didn’t surprise me. Ever since I first met Hendricks over three and a half years ago, and ever since I had started to open my eyes to the fact that Amir Weatherby and all of his friends weren’t always the nice guys, my ignorance had started to erode little by little. I’d always been one of those people who went through life taking everyone at their word and everything at face value, without ever really reading between the lines. Now I was, or I was starting to, at least, with the knowledge that ‘the company,’ which is how everyone referred to Amir’s business interests, existed on the dark side as much as it did in space and the other stuff people knew about.
Remembering that I was in bed with the guy, so to speak, as much as everyone else made me think that I was also probably not entirely a nice guy, but at least I was on the side most likely to survive what was coming in three years’ time. Not that it was so much my problem, because I was on a countdown to head to the big, shiny freezer in the sky in just over a year now. I was told there were a dozen people on the former International Space Station, gutting it and repurposing everything to install all the new wiring and stuff to accommodate the pods which went up silently a couple times each week.
After having the process explained to me, mostly because they wanted Annie to run the program and fly the things, I got a little more interested and even watched a launch once. That was kind of pointless, because all I saw was a couple of shiny balloons inflate, then the white pod rising lazily into the sky until I couldn’t make it out any more. I knew that it would keep rising really slowly pretty much all night until it reached the upper atmosphere and then a single rocket would fire a controlled burst to push it the rest of the way out where the gravity stopped it from falling back. After that, the little automated thrusters would nudge it along toward the ARC, where the remote piloting program would dock it lengthways along the main central spine of the station, parallel to the existing structure to create a second level as such.
I knew that the plans to fill the entire length both above and below were coming on, and the space guys planned to run them parallel to