A Tale of a Dystopian Future

Chapter 3

"So, you want to fight, huh?" said General Saya. "Fine, go ahead."

"But his power is too great to risk losing!" Shouted Lucas.

"I can lift a pebble! That is it! What a great use of my telepathy!" I said angrily, "Meanwhile, my ability to see everything in a 360-degree field for 2km will be completely useless on a battlefield."

"You have a point there," she said, grabbing a piece of paper and writing something down on it, handing it to me afterwards. "give this to the training Commander."

"Yes, Ma'am!" I say, then I turn and leave. I already have the map of the base memorized, so finding the training grounds is no problem, plus being able to most of the base helps a bit too. Once there, I find Commander Oliver.

"Sir, I have a note from General Saya," I say as I approach him.

"Oh, whats this?" he says as he takes it from me. "Aha, ok. come back tomorrow. you will be in squad Hope. I hope you can keep up, you will be joining an undermanned squad, who are already a week and a half into training. For now, I want you to go read up on as many different weapons you can, you will need to know how to use anything you might pick up off the ground out there. Handheld railguns, conventional Rifles, and even, if you're lucky, a laser rifle. Also, sidearms, like handguns, and submachineguns. You will also need to know how to wield swords, daggers, and staffs. Missile launchers too. We use everything and anything we can."

Back in my quarters, I have the spec sheets for the six different weapon types used. Conventional weapons are simple. A small explosion propels a bullet into your target. Laser weapons are the most interesting, they offer zero kickback, and impart zero force when they hit the target. They burn through things, this requires an immense amount of energy, hence why handheld models are so rare. The resources needed to build batteries that small, with such a large capacity, is too much to be feasible. and armour designed to ablate away in heat is to effective against them. However, they make great point defence systems, as ablative armour is to heavy to be effectively mounted on missiles. Handheld railguns, however, are much more common. All the models seem to use the same basic design. Due to the fact that A railgun needs to charge before being fired, automatic fire is difficult. The agreed-upon solution by most manufacturers is a rotating barrel design, where at the bottom of the rotation, the slug is picked up, and as the barrel rotates around to the top, it charges up, and at the top of the rotation, the charge is complete and the slug is fired forwards at speeds of anywhere from Mach 2, to Mach 6, depending on the module. Most slugs are tungsten, ranging in size from 1-3 cm, however, anything magnetic will work, as long as it is the correct size for the gun. I spent the rest of my day, and several hours into the night, studying various different modules of railguns, pistols, submachineguns, and rifles.

The next day, I woke up, had a shower, and went to get breakfast before heading to the training grounds at 7. as I got there, I noticed I was the second to arrive in the squad. As I walked up, the other man there, a tall person, about 6'1", with a sharp jawline, and close cut dark brown hair, turned to face me.

"Oh, are you the new member? My name is Dave, whats yours?" he asked.

"My name is Mark," I tell him. At this point, another two people show up. They introduce themselves as Linkon and Yancy.

"With the new guy, the squad is up to 4 people. We here operate in 6 man squads, plus the Sergeant. You lot need to make up for the work of half a person each." Said the Sergeant as he walked up to us. "Today, we will be at the firing range, you need to know how to use an auto-railgun."

We fell into line behind him and marched off to the firing range, where we checked out our practice weapons for the day.

"Listen up," the Sergeant said, "These are rated for 1.5 Mach, and fire iron slugs. They are not as powerful as combat rated ones, but they can still punch through several meters of concrete, even at a range of a kilometre. I will not tolerate these things pointed at people. Keep the power pack disconnected and the magazine out until we are ready to fire." From the storehouse, we go to a firing position, with the target, an old armoured car, 400m away. "This is the average engaging distance. show me how accurate you are." I connect the power, load the magazine, put the gun in single fire mode. The sights are useless to me, this may be difficult.

I breathe in and pull the trigger.