Warden

your aiming today.”
He waved a hand and the spheres ceased moving.
“We’ll return to stationary targets for now,” he continued. “But first I want to clarify something… in a real-world combat situation, you’ll rarely have time to spend more than a few seconds lining up your shots, even if the target is stationary. Scratch that… especially if it’s stationary. If a target isn’t moving, there’s a good chance it’s lining up you in turn. So, going forward, after you choose a target, I want you to aim and fire as quickly as you can. Act as if your life depends upon it, because one day, it very well might.”
And so Rhea continued her training for the rest of that day.

6
Rhea finished her target practice in the late evening. She only managed a modest improvement in her hit-to-fire percentage, from twenty-five to thirty-three. That meant for every one hundred shots she fired, thirty-three found their targets. Perhaps it wasn’t as great an improvement as one might expect, given the enhanced learning capabilities of her mind-machine interface, but considering how mind-numbingly boring and repetitive the target practice was, she felt lucky to have improved at all. By the time Bardain declared the session finished, she was weary to death of shooting at floating spheres.
Bardain cleared the training environment on her HUD, and the spheres vanished, as did the vaulted ceiling overhead, revealing clouds decorated pink and purple by the setting sun. Though she hadn’t been able to locate the sun because of the illusory ceiling, the light levels had diminished in the past half hour of practicing, so she already expected dusk. Bardain had forced her to continue well into the twilight, wanting her to get some practice in reduced lighting conditions.
“Tomorrow you’ll face some proper targets,” Bardain said.
“Looking forward to it,” Rhea said. “Shooting AR spheres gets a bit… monotonous after a while.”
“Oh, you’ll still be facing virtual targets,” Bardain said. “They’ll just be a bit bigger. Also, expect to do some dodging in return: tomorrow will be a full body workout.”
“I’m actually looking forward to that,” she said.
“Of course you are,” he said. “You’re a cyborg. Your bodies tire different than the more human among us. But I’ll let you in on a secret.”
He unzipped his cloak entirely and pushed back the left and right sides to reveal a torso covered in a black T-shirt and matching shorts. His appendages were exposed: in place of legs he had robotic prosthetics. His left arm was also robotic, as was his right, below the elbow. He wore black gloves, hiding his metal hands.
“I’m more machine than human,” Bardain said.
Rhea was speechless for a moment. Then: “You were in the Ganymede war?”
“No.” Bardain chuckled sadly. “I used to be a salvager.”
“Ah,” she said.
“Little bit of advice,” he continued. “Once you’ve paid your debt to Will, get out. He’s been lucky so far, but that’s because he’s only been doing this for a few years now. Eventually his luck is going to run out. It always does out there. All it takes is one mistake to lose a limb, or a life.”
Rhea regarded her teacher uncertainly. “But Will told me he’s been salvaging for most of his life. Not just a few years. Unless that was a lie.”
“Not a lie, but he only recently started traveling the Outlands, roving from city to city in his quest for salvage,” Bardain explained. “Up until a few years ago he kept strictly to Rust Town’s immediate surroundings, so that if any serious danger came, a quick dash back to the safety of the settlement—and the waiting sentries—would save him. That, or the defense turrets rimming the walkways of Aradne, ready to roast anything that might get past Rust Town’s meager defenses.”
“You’re talking bandits?” she asked.
“Worse,” Bardain replied. “Hasn’t Will told you?”
“No,” she said.
Bardain shrugged. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Feel free to look up ‘Creatures of the Outlands’ if you want an early primer. In the meantime, radio your friends. You can rest in my sitting room while you wait, if you wish.”
She notified Will that she was finished, and then glanced up. Gizmo was still there, hovering dutifully.
She took up Bardain’s offer, so that in a few minutes she found herself waiting in the spartan foyer of the lean-to. There was a chair, a small guest table, and nothing else. The inner door that led to the rest of the house was closed, as was the door to the outside—well, those doors were more hatches, really, complete with wheels to open them. There were no windows, either. She supposed visitors were expected to browse the Net while they waited.
And browse she did. She performed the search Bardain had suggested and discovered there were indeed far worse things than mere bandits and highwaymen out there. Actual horrors roamed the Outlands, though admittedly they were usually found away from populated areas, as the creatures had learned that traveling too close to the settlements was bad for their health. The monsters were escaped bioweapons, loosed by various warring nations over the years. These biologically engineered entities were manufactured using a variety of different techniques, some of which included combining several aggressive traits from disparate species into a single creature, as well as reactivating ancient, latent genes—such as the vestiges many bird species carried from their dinosaur forebears.
The original owners had long since lost control of these entities, which had only further mutated over the centuries as they battled amongst themselves until only the strongest survived. The bioweapons had been restricted to isolated pockets throughout the world, hiding underground and in cave systems, but when half the world’s cities were destroyed, creating the Outlands, the bioweapon population unsurprisingly boomed.
It didn’t help that in the early years after the destruction, Earth had devoted all of its resources to hunting down the Ganymedeans, ignoring the budding problem on its very doorstep. By the time the Earth’s military could pay the problem any attention, the bioweapons had reached critical mass—it was essentially too