ONE
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Gretchen Trujillo, and I will be killing you today.”
It’s always interesting to me to see how this line is taken. Today, in the bare, wrestling-mat-covered multipurpose activity room of the Colonial Union Diplomatic Academy, there were two surprised looks, two smirks, one unreadable expression and one thoughtful expression.
And, well. This is actually a more varied response than I usually get; most of the time the room is evenly split between “surprised” and “smirking.” Most of the surprised looks would come from the recruits who weren’t aware that murder was part of their orientation session for their Colonial Union Diplomatic Security Force training. The smirking came from the ones who sized me up physically and were pretty sure they could take me in a fight.
A hand went up, from the recruit who had looked thoughtful. “Yes?” I said.
“Why will you be killing us today?” the recruit asked.
“What’s your name?” I asked the recruit, although I already knew; they give me files, after all.
“Jensen Aguilera,” the recruit replied.
“Well, Jensen, that’s an excellent question,” I said, and then drew the sidearm that had been hidden by my coat and shot him in the face.
The other recruits looked shocked. I shot them all in turn, one also in the face, the rest center mass.
“What have we learned today?” I asked the recruits.
“That you’re a good shot,” said another of the recruits, who I knew to be named Faiza Vega. She was the one whose expression had been blank. The glowing splotch on her chest, put there by the nanobotic paint round I shot her with, was beginning to fade. The rounds were designed to startle rather than to injure, or (obviously) to kill.
Still, the startle could be significant. No one expects to be shot on their first day of training. Especially not by someone who presents like a midlevel bureaucrat, and who looks like the closest they’ve ever gotten to a fight was a round of slaps with a frenemy after too many cocktails at a diplomatic mixer.
“You did learn I was a good shot,” I agreed. “But that wasn’t what I wanted you to get out of that.”
“We learned that when someone tells you they are going to be killing you, you should believe them,” Jensen Aguilera said. His face was now entirely paint free; the nanobotic paint was designed to fall off almost immediately.
I pointed at him. “Closer. What I want to impress on you is that, as a member of the Colonial Union Diplomatic Security Force, you will need to be prepared for threats to yourself, and those you protect, at any time.” I motioned around the room. “Even in places where you believe yourself to be perfectly safe.”
“All right, but your ambush wasn’t exactly fair,” began one of the smirkers, a man I knew was named Owais Hartley, and that was as far as he got before I shot him in the face—again—and then shot everyone else in the room as well, for good measure.
“Another thing you should prepare yourself for is the fact this universe is not fair,” I said. “Those who mean you harm will not be nice about it. They’re not going to give you time to prepare. You will have to work with what you have with you, whatever that is. Starting with your brain.”
“That’s easy to say when you’re the one holding the gun,” Hartley said. Being shot in the face twice, even with rounds designed to be (physically) harmless, had not improved his disposition.
“Fair point,” I said, and tossed the handgun to him. He reached for it, as much as in surprise as in opportunity, and by the time he’d caught it I was already well within his arm length and slashing at him with a training knife. Its edge was not at all sharp, but it was covered with red nanobotic paint, which streaked his right arm when I slashed down on it, followed by a curving diagonal mark across his abdomen down to his left leg. The two recruits closest to him took a step back, alarmed.
“Now your brachial artery is severed,” I said, stepping back from the stunned Hartley, who wasn’t expecting more death paint on him. “That probably wouldn’t kill you if you applied pressure to it. Unfortunately for you, I also severed your femoral artery, which would kill you, and fast. But you probably wouldn’t be paying attention to that, because I just disemboweled you. Chances are you would be so preoccupied with keeping your guts off the floor that you wouldn’t notice you were bleeding out from the leg.”
“Holy shit,” said the recruit next to Hartley, named Fatima Ali. She was looking at the bold streaks of red scrawled on her fellow recruit.
“Holy shit indeed,” I said, and then slashed at her. She yelped in surprise and took a step back, holding her throat, now covered in red.
“She wasn’t expecting that, was she?” I said to the recruit on the other side of Hartley, named Hamisah Meng, and before she could answer I slashed her too, one horizontal and one vertical slash across her torso, which would have opened her up like a box.
I dropped the knife and squared up against the next recruit in the group, a hulking mass with the name of Kostantino Karagkounis. He had been the other smirker, along with Hartley. “Well, come on,” I said, to him.
“Ma’am?”
I opened my arms. “No gun, no knife, and you have fifty kilos on me, easy,” I said. “Your file says you were a constable back on Erie. You know how to subdue an unruly person. Subdue me.”
To his credit, I could see Karagkounis thinking about where the trap might be. He was in fact at least fifty kilos more massive than me, and at least half a meter taller. He had mass on his side, and he knew it, and he knew I knew it too. He was trying to figure out how I would counteract his bulk, whether it would be with speed, with agility, or by using his own mass against him when he attacked. At some point he thought he knew how I was going to get one over on him and made his move.
Ten seconds later he was on the ground, my fingers jammed into his nostrils and the tips hooked into his sinus cavity. This wouldn’t kill him, and I wasn’t interested in injuring him at this point, but getting my fingers out of his face without my active cooperation would not be pleasant for him.
“Stay down,” I advised him.
He exhaled through his mouth and nodded. I extracted my fingers and wiped them on his shirt, and then patted him on the shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. He moaned.
I stood up and there was Faiza Vega, my knife in her hand, waiting.
I smiled and pointed at her weapon. “Why not the firearm?” I asked.
“It’s probably keyed to your biometrics,” Vega said. “Ours were.”
I nodded. “You’re former Colonial Defense Forces.” Which, again, I knew already.
“I got bored with farming,” Vega said, and attacked.
She was good, I’ll give her that. Her initial thrust was smartly timed, and had I been a tenth of a second less attentive, I would have one less lung, virtually speaking. After that, we both spent a considerable number of seconds sizing each other up for strengths and weaknesses.
I don’t know what she thought mine were, but in less than a minute I knew hers: She thought she was still in the Colonial Defense Forces. Before the current state of affairs, the CDF had been recruited from the ranks of the elderly back on Earth. In exchange for their service, these old people were given new, highly engineered bodies that were super strong, super fast and super resilient.
This was great (well, except for the appallingly low survival rate over just two years), but when you mustered out of the service you were given yet another new body, this one designed within normal human parameters. You became ordinary again, in other words.
Now all your combat skills, honed in a super body, were mapped onto a body far less capable and strong. Unless one had a job regularly involving combat after the switch, it meant that when you went to fight, everything was just a little … off.
Vega’s job after her service was, as she mentioned, farming. A noble profession. But not one requiring the skills she was currently trying to use on me. Which is why, in another twenty seconds, my knife was out of her hand, and she was on the floor.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said, looking up at me.
“I get that a lot,” I said, and stood.
I looked over at Jensen Aguilera, who was the only recruit I hadn’t killed this round. He put his hands up, clearly not wanting to die for the third time. I nodded and then looked around. “All right, I’m done murdering you for now. Gather round, please.”
Copyright © 2025 by John Scalzi
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