Cibola Burn

The first man who floated by didn’t notice him until he’d already been shot. Havelock’s paint round bloomed orange against the man’s chest. The one behind him had already launched, his body sailing between one handhold and the next, unable to change his trajectory. Havelock hit him twice, once in the leg, then in the belly. In a real fight, there would be blood in the air now. Fine red droplets spinning into orbs and already coalescing and beginning to clot. The third man was still far enough down the corridor that Havelock didn’t have a clear line of sight. Half a dozen blue paint rounds hissed past him, splattering the ceramic bulkhead. Suppressing fire. Not a bad plan, but there was no one left to exploit it.

Havelock pulled gently at the handhold behind him to keep from drifting out, reloaded his pistol, and counted incoming rounds. The “dead” engineer floated in the corridor, a sour expression on his face. Havelock counted fifteen rounds, then there was a pause and the slick metallic sound of the pistol ejecting the paint round magazine. Havelock pulled a few centimeters forward, looking down the hall. The last man – Williams – hadn’t even taken cover while he fumbled to reload his gun. Havelock fired three times, hitting him only once. The accuracy on the pistols stank, but it was enough to make his point. The last engineer barked out an obscenity.

“All right,” Havelock said into his hand terminal. “That’s a wrap, guys. Let’s get the cleanup crew out, and meet back in the conference room in thirty.”

It was hard to judge the training sessions. On the one hand, they had been going for eight days now, and they were not ready for real action. The engineers weren’t soldiers. The three who’d had some training earlier in life were so out of practice that they were worse than the absolute beginners. At least the novices knew they didn’t know anything.

And on the other hand, they were getting better faster than Havelock had expected. With another week or ten days, they’d be at least as competent as a squad of rookies. Maybe more.

Security trainees were driven by any number of things – the need for a job, an idealistic view of helping people, sometimes just a narcissistic love of violence. The engineers weren’t like that. They were more focused, more driven, and there was a palpable sense of the team against the enemy. Murtry’s defeat of the terrorist cell downstairs left them at once excited and edgy, and Havelock didn’t see anything wrong with the bloodthirst, so long as it was channeled and controlled.

For the next half hour, the engineers and the security team – Havelock and two others from this skeleton crew – went through the corridors, holds, and locks cleaning up the mess from the exercise. The paint polymerized quickly, peeling off the walls and grates without flaking much or leaving fragments on the float that someone could breathe in. The engineers had also manufactured sets of personal vacuuming systems that filtered everything from tiny particles of the paint casing to volatile molecules out of the air. They laughed and joked and traded friendly insults as they worked, like junior belts cleaning a dojang. Havelock hadn’t intended the cleanup as a team-building exercise, but it worked well enough that he was starting to tell himself that he had.

The conference room where they had the orientation before the exercise and the postmortem afterward had been designed for the false gravity of thrust. An oblong table was bolted to the floor with crash couches around it that the engineers didn’t use. Havelock didn’t know how the decision had been made to ignore the table and rotate the consensus for up and down ninety degrees, but every meeting was like that now. The engineers and security floated against the walls or in the open air, the “floor” to their right, and Havelock took his place by the main doors.

“All right,” he said, and the murmur of conversations stopped. “What did we learn?”

“Not to trust motherfucking Gibbs when he tells us the corridor’s clear.” Laughter bubbled after, but it wasn’t angry or mean. Even the man being mocked was smiling.

“Wrong answer,” Havelock said with a grin. “The right answer is don’t hurry when you’re clearing a space. We have a natural tendency to see an empty space and think it’s safe. Doors and corners are always dangerous, because you’re moving into something without being sure what’s there. By the time you see the enemy, you’re exposed to them.”

“Sir?”

Havelock pointed to the woman with the raised hand. “Yes.”

“Sir, is there an algorithm for this? Because if we could get some kind of best-practice flowchart that we could study when we’re not here, I think it would help us a lot.”

“We could classify them by the types of doors or corners,” someone else said. “And what plane we could use to approach them. Seem to me like we’d be better off shifting the axis so that whatever we’re coming to reads as down.”