Jin stared down the sight the way Roic told him to, and squeezed the trigger.  The buzz in his hand startled him, but there was no recoil, and he managed not to drop it.

Encouraged, Jin let Roic show him how the automatic laser sight worked, and fired again.  This time, he didn't jump.  And again.  The charge hit the wall pretty nearly just where he'd intended, this time.  Jin didn't exactly smile, but he felt his jaw ease.

Mina was by this time eager to try, Let me!  Let me!, so Jin reluctantly gave the device up to her.  Roic went through his instructions once more, prudently kneeling behind Mina and keeping a hand hovering to help steady her—she had to hold the thing up in both fists—and the drill was repeated.

Roic stood up, reset the code, and holstered the weapon.  "Better?" he asked Jin.

"Yah," said Jin, in some wonder.  "It's like a tool.  It's just a tool."

"That's right."

This time, when Roic smiled down at him, Jin smiled up.  He let the Armsman lead them back into the recovery room.

#

Miles leaned forward and spoke earnestly into the secure holovid recorder.  "I just want you to know, Gregor, that if the planet melts down over all this, it wasn't my fault.  The tripwire was laid long before I stumbled across it."

He considered the opening remark of his report cover for a moment, then reached out and deleted it.  The one good thing about the very asynchronous vid communication entailed by Nexus info-squirts, moving at light speed between jump points and ship-carried through them, was that if you didn't think before you spoke, you could at least think before you hit send.  Not that he hadn't generated some of his best ideas as his brain raced to catch up with his moving mouth.  Also, some of my worst.  He wondered which kind his recent examples would ultimately prove to be.

He glanced around the consulate's tight-room, which he had all to himself, having run out the exhausted Johannes before embarking on this private and personal recording.  Since Johannes was the closest thing to an ImpSec analyst the out-of-the-way consulate boasted, Miles had spent much of the past two days in training him in just what information, out of the uproar of the local planetary feeds, to screen and forward to Galactic Affairs on Komarr.  Multi-tasking, always a good thing.  Johannes proved a diligent enough student.  If the attaché had been one of the Imperial Service's brighter stars, he'd have been sent to some hotter posting, but if he'd been less responsible, he wouldn't have been sent to such an autonomous one.