“By keeping my mouth shut and listening when I’m in the presence of people who are smarter than I am.” Kalico followed Step back to the airtruck, helped him unload the rifles. These came in a blanket-wrapped bundle of four secured on the ends with straps.

“There you go,” Step told her. “Everything Frank Freund had in the shop. That’s three bolt guns and a single shot. Now, the fifty-caliber bolt gun only has five cartridges, and it was kind of experimental. You have to mix and match with the other ammunition for the other guns, but don’t get too wild when you start shooting. Not counting the big fifty, there’s only a total of forty-six cartridges.”

“Forty-six? That’s all?” Kalico asked as Step pulled out the ammo box. “Can Freund make more?”

“Yeah, well, that’s where it gets sketchy. Frank figured you were going to ask exactly that, so he was telling me as we were loading the stuff. Gunpowder is nitrocellulose. We can make nitric acid. The problem is cellulose. Most of that is made from either cotton or wood pulp back in Solar System. We’ve got cellulose in our terrestrial plant stems, but not like you’d need to easily make gunpowder. The best source we’ve got might be from wheat, oat, and rye straw. But Frank’s not sure. I could turn Cheng on it, but he’s already overwhelmed.”

“What does that mean?” Michaela asked hesitantly.

“It means you’d better not start any long, drawn-out gunfights,” Step told her. “And do most of your shooting with the bolt guns.”

“These guns shoot bolts?” Lara asked, straightening from where she was picking at some of the cracked basalt. “We’ve got plenty of bolts. I saw a bin full of them in the equipment storage.”

Step’s expression went quizzical, and then descended to disbelief.

“What do you expect? She’s a geologist,” Kalico said by way of explanation. “Not that I’d have known the difference back in the early days myself.” To Lara, Kalico said, “Bolt gun refers to the way the rifle loads ammunition. To shoot it you have to cycle a bolt to load and unload the chamber. A single shot only holds one cartridge at a time. It’s slower to operate.”

Lara gave her a blank look.

“Trust me. You’ll learn.”

Step gave Kalico a squinty and skeptical look. “So, Supervisor, you’re out in the ocean, already had one person eaten, and you’re going to trust yourselves with rifles for protection? Not even considering that bullets don’t go through water, your people are Corporate scientists. No offense, but in an emergency, they’re more likely to blow their foot off than some menacing sea beastie.”