Legacy of Empire: Book 4 in the Taken to the Stars Series by Chaney J.N. & Partlow Rick

Author:Chaney, J.N. & Partlow, Rick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Variant Publications
Published: 2023-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

“No music in here, huh?” Dani asked, looking around at the cavernous metal depths of the shooting range.

The great thing about the Liberator was that the ship was pretty damned big and, even better, Lenny could basically rebuild the interior at will—the parts that weren’t crucial to the drive and weapons systems, anyway. Any compartment could be rearranged by the squat, faceless worker robots he controlled like they were a swarm of worker bees, pulling metal panels free and setting them up in any combination we desired. Add to that the ship’s fabricators, which could turn out anything we had the raw materials to produce, and we’d been able to work up uniforms, armor, clothing, workout equipment…and the firing range.

Configured as it was, the setup had half a dozen lanes, like indoor ranges I’d shot at back in Florida, but a flip of a switch could remove the barriers and turn the whole thing into a tactical range with pop-up targets. I’d chosen the target arrangement for familiarization, mostly so I could lay out the weapons on the shelf of the lane.

“No, no music,” I agreed. “But I do have some earphones for you.” The plastic case was sitting next to the handgun and carbine on the shelf, and I passed it over to her. She looked at the foam-like plugs, then back at me dubiously. “Those aren’t just to protect your hearing, they’re also linked to our comms so we can talk even with the sound.”

She slipped them in, shook her head from side to side to make sure they were secure.

“Can you hear me okay?” I asked her.

“Like there’s nothing in my ears at all,” she confirmed.

“Okay, let’s start with the pistol, then.”

I’d chosen a standard sidearm rather than the heavy version, because I figured it would be easier to demonstrate. Field-stripping the weapon was fairly simple: just a matter of popping a couple levers to separate it into the frame, slide, and barrel, the loaded magazine already off to the side, the diamond shapes of the pulse cartridges twinkling under the overhead lights.

“This is a pulse weapon,” I told her, reassembling the pistol as she watched intently over my shoulder. I held up the magazine. “Each of these cartridges fires an expendable charge that pulses heat energy into the weapon’s ignition chamber and focuses it into a beam of something called scalar energy. And no, I don’t know what that means or how it works. In practice, a pistol this size and power can burn through very light armor, but otherwise is mostly for unarmored opponents. It doesn’t have much of a kick, but from what I’ve seen, it’s got the punch of something like a .357 Magnum when it hits someone. Getting hit by one of these is like someone stuck a white-hot piece of pig iron into your gut, so I’d recommend against it.”

I raised the gun to shoulder level in an isosceles stance and aimed the red circle in the sights at the pop-up plate twenty yards down the shooting lane, then squeezed off a short burst.

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