“I knew to anchor my shield in the ground, Sergeant. It was something no one mentioned to me before I went down there, so I assumed the lack of information was part of the test. Did they mention that to you, Contos?”

“What do you mean, anchor your shield in the ground?” Contos retorted sharply.

He looked annoyed, and Andrew assumed it was because he had done better than Contos, or anyone else for that matter, he assumed, now that it was obvious that no one had been told to anchor their shields in the ground before being fired at by the rifleman. Clearly, his granny had known things that these people didn’t, which he found surprising, and it also meant he would have to be careful about his assumptions from now on. And how much she showed them, for that matter.

“You sort of dig your shield into the ground. Here, I’ll put up a colored shield, and you can see what I do.”

“What do you mean, color your shield?” Howsen asked.

“You just change the frequency slightly so that it shows up a particular color.”

He brought up his shield and changed the frequency a bit into the infrared, which meant it gained a slight shade of purple.

“Wow. I’ve never seen that before,” Howson said, sounding surprised.

“But how do you change the frequency?” Contos asked.

Andrew shrugged. “I don’t know how to describe it. When you create your energy shield, you pull in outside energy to create it, right? Sunlight usually for me, at any rate. You then naturally use the visible spectrum, which makes your shields invisible because, well, I don’t know why, but it does. So I just mentally tell it to change the spectrum slightly.”

They all looked at him like he’d just escaped from the lunatic asylum. He looked around at the others, shrugged at the disbelieving or uncomprehending expressions on their faces, and then went back to the subject at hand.

“So, having created the shield, you just force it down into the ground a bit. Probably not a good idea to force it down too far in somewhere like an urban environment where there’s lots of underground power and water and sewerage and all that stuff, but it generally doesn’t need to be too far.”

He pushed his shield into the ground slightly to demonstrate. The ground was hardpacked dirt here, so the thin line that the almost non-existent edge of his shield created in the ground was a lot more obvious than what would have been in other circumstances. He released the shield and knelt down to look at the ground and found he could still see a faint indentation where his shield had been. The others got down and looked as well.

“Damn.” Commented Howsen.

“The other thing you can do is brace yourself and angle the shield slightly. Or a lot, depending on the circumstances. It’s like angled armor on a tank so that the effective armor is considerably thicker than the actual armor because of the angle.” He looked over at Sergeant Duncan, who was standing watching and listening to everything but not commenting. “It would be handy to know whether just angling the shield works without digging it into the ground, Sergeant. Can you get your sniper chap to give me another couple of shots?”