Inside were many mysteries.
The female mercie lifted out a foot-long, flat-black cylindrical container that necked down at the end where it joined the barrels. It was connected to and rested upon a nest of thick, insulated cables. When this unit was out of the receiver, and hanging off to one side, it exposed a clear glass or crystalline block that had fibrous material laced all through it. After detaching the block from the interior of the receiver, she set it in her lap and with clips and wires hooked it up to a palm-sized LCD readout. Satisfied by what she saw, she wiped the ends of the crystal with a swab dipped in a tiny vial of some kind of solvent. She was careful not to touch the areas after she’d cleaned them.
Then the mercie snapped the weapon back together even more quickly than she’d stripped it. Her precise, seemingly automatic movements told Ryan she could have repeated the procedure blindfolded.
Damm noted Ryan’s interest in the procedure and said, “Nothing like that on your world, huh?”
“Just the ones Nara and her friends brought with them,” Ryan said.
“I guess the nuke war sort of put a crimp in your R and D,” Damm said. “Don’t suppose you could have gotten much farther than the neodymium-glass laser, which is probably fifty generations removed from what we’ve got now.” The merc leader took the rifle from the woman, detached the magazine, and, to Ryan’s surprise, handed the weapon over to him.
It was amazingly light and warm to the touch. No more than three pounds without the magazine, he guessed. He shouldered it and found the fit, cheek to stock, very comfortable. The balance was even better; triple deadly, in fact. Slightly nose heavy, and quick on the point, which was just how Ryan liked his blasters.
He looked down the adjustable leaf rear and bladed ramp front sights. There were no dovetail grooves for a scope mount, which surprised him. He turned the rifle over and found a jeweled nub on the underside of the flash-hider. It faced the same direction as the muzzle. The back side of the little diamond’s housing ended in a thin tube that ran along the join of tribarrels, and disappeared into the front end of the buttstock. To Ryan, it looked like part of a laser-targeting device of some kind.
Up close he could tell the dark-blue barrels weren’t made of steel, but of some densely layered, polymer fabric set in clear resin. He could see its weave when the light hit the surface just right. He guessed it provided better heat dissipation and longer wear than steel.
“What you’ve got there is state of the art,” Damm said. He pointed at the lump of scar tissue on his chin. “A near miss from a rifle just like that one gave me this beauty mark. Another couple of inches and it would have taken off my head.”
“Why two triggers and three barrels?” Ryan asked.
“Front trigger is for single shots,” Damm told him, “the back one is for bursts and sustained fire controlled by those selector switches on the side of the receiver.”
Ryan checked out the switches. One of them pointed to the white letter S . It could also point to the red letter F. He figured it had to be the safety. The other switch determined the pulse length.
“The tribarrel configuration focuses individual laser beams a few micromillis apart on the target,” Damm went on. “Get a kind of harmonic chain-saw effect that way. Big-time atomic disruption, which magnifies the temperatures at the point of impact, and the beams’ cutting power by a factor of a hundred thousand or so. You’ve got to make sure of your background when you touch off one of these. The pulses can travel a long, long way before their energy’s used up.”
Looking at the blaster, Ryan couldn’t help but ask himself why Damm was telling him all this. Because he was bored? Perhaps. Because he felt they were on the same wavelength? Fellow outsiders, freebooters, soldiers for hire? Less likely, but could be. Or was it because it didn’t matter a piddling rad-blast what he showed him? Ryan decided that had to be it. With what lay outside the trailer, Damm knew that he wouldn’t grab one of the rifles and try to escape. There was nowhere for him to run.