"A whole civilization of squishy ranged-damage guys! Neat. I continue to be very excited to try a gun."

"Tell you what, if you're that hard to damage, we can try sparring again with me in an exosuit and we'll see who feels squishy," the marine sergeant says, and Forrester chuckles. "Range first though."

The range is a relatively large room by the scale of ones in the ring, large enough to see the curvature of the floor reach much of the way up to where the roof would be, if it wasn't cut back significantly. The walls are armored and padded, and holoprojected targets of either bullseye targets or human figures are set up to allow shooters in a small arc on one side of the room to shoot across the spin, into the spin, or with the spin.

"This is a short distance personal protection testing range," the Sergeant says. "It's only 10 [yards], so this is just about pistols and close in weapons, adapting for the spin of the ring we're in. The gravity you're feeling is from the floor pushing up on you as it moves about 45 [yards] per second, which means even though your pistol is shooting at close to ten times that, you need to account for wildly different factors than shooting at range on a planet or magical gravity field. When you fire in planetary or magical gravity, the bullet is affected too and drops slightly over its flight time. You might be familiar with that from an arrow, and it matters for a bullet too. But here, as soon as the bullet leaves the gun, it's not moving with the ring anymore, so it will continue straight even as the floor keeps moving and spinning you around. It means even over somewhat short ranges, bullets don't go quite where you might expect, and we practice a lot given how many small-diameter rings there are on this station to build the reflexes."

He takes a slim pistol from from the range's associated arms locker, and automatically checks it, removing the magazine and then checking and clearing the chamber. Both were already empty. "This is the Macy Six," he says. "Martian Armaments Caseless, 6 [twenty-fifths of an inch]. This is a relatively light weapon, it won't do much to people in protective armor, but it's semi-automatic. It will fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, and even if it's light, it has a decent chance of killing anything you point it at and hit. Which is why you must assume it is always loaded unless you have verified it's not yourself, including the ready round in the chamber, and to never point it at anything you're not willing to harm, not a person, not an animal, not a piece of ugly art, not the bulkhead between you and space. That doesn't matter if the safety is on, though it damn well will be until you're ready to fire, and it doesn't matter if you think you know it's empty. We're going to use it here because you will be able to fire controlled shots, and the smaller magazine and hitting power won't matter for learning the basic safety procedures and adapting to the range. I will start by showing you how to check that it is safe and you showing me that you can do that, then we'll discuss how you will be instructed to ready on the range when you're loaded, then we'll practice loading and readying it, and then we will shoot. This I think will be fun for us, but the important thing is that this is a weapon, and it's one you're not familiar with, and so I will see you respect it, am I understood?"

"Completely." She watches the demonstration of how to check the magazine and the safety intently. (She runs around with a bomb-throwing alchemist. Guns are new; safety procedures are not.)

Finally convinced Samora is ready after training on handling and shooting position, the marine has her step to the firing arc, and he lights up a holographic target on the spinward wall, and then a second, offset target appears below it. "This range is mostly for practicing dealing with spin normally but we're also set up for practice like this. The offset target is where to shoot to hit the matching point on the real target. 'Shoot here, hit there' kind of deal, got it?"

"Yes. That's clever."

"Harder than it looks, too," he says. "The calculation system needs to know what rounds you're shooting, muzzle velocity, distance to the target, spin rate and radius within the hab, all sort of data. Like a lot of the best stuff, it makes it look easy enough any grunt can handle it." He formally takes a step back and raises his voice to a carrying tone. "Ready on the range! Range is clear, in your own time, six shots."

Samora takes aim, goes perfectly still, and fires six shots, pausing for a second or three after each one to observe the results and adjust for the way the weapon kicks in her hand. 

After each shot, a black shot marker appears in both projected targets, appearing with a lag which is almost imperceptible except for how a brain notices it's not just being torn through a paper target.

She's not used to the weapon, or to shooting at targets this small, but she's used to targets that move and fight back and this is neither. All six shots land somewhere on the target, though one just barely, and two hit the bullseye.

When she's done, she puts the safety back on as instructed and grins. "This is a lovely weapon."