FirstShot came up, the menu offering him a selection of previously installed load choices, each one of which Waters had run through the program in his search for a winning handload for the matches. The newer were Juba’s experimental loads, the last the load he had selected, simply marked as #12. He clicked on it.

The number 12 load page came up, everything entered. It displayed his previous selections: bullet brand, bullet weight, bullet length, velocity, twist rate of barrel, height of scope above barrel, all the aspects of the bullet that could determine, support, or reduce its accuracy. Additionally, the point of zero was registered, for it would be the baseline off of which all further computations would be calculated. He had selected fifteen hundred yards for zero, verified that synchronization among rifle, scope, and load at that range in his last session.

He poked it again, and a blank menu called CONDITIONS arrived, and this is where the weather aspects under which the shot would be taken were factored in. But it wasn’t necessary to laboriously measure by Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter and enter them, one at a time. The genius of the FirstShot program is that pressing the GET CONDITIONS button at the bottom of the screen, the machine downloaded them from the U.S. Weather Service. Thus, in a second he learned, watching these numbers deploy in their slots, that it was 74 degrees Fahrenheit, with a southwest wind of 4 to 8 miles per hour, the humidity was 51 percent, the sky was generally sunny (18 percent, or intermittent, cloud cover), the altitude 1,457 feet above sea level. All these figures would be factored into the algorithm the little genius inside the box was about to solve in nanotime.

He pressed CALCULATE. Magically, a table rose before him on the screen. The machine decreed the amount in minutes of angle by which the scope had to be moved off its fifteen-hundred-yard zero to put the crosshairs on the target in these conditions. It was indexed by distance. He surfed the lengthy listing via the left-hand distance column until he got to the nearly exact value. It was 1,845 yards. Moving his eye right to left, he came to the elevation column. It read 13 MOA. Since each of his clicks was worth a half of an arcminute, he multiplied by two to come up with the number 26. He carefully turned the elevation knob atop the scope up 26 clicks. In the next column, the windage was listed; it gave him 4 arcminutes left. Factoring 4 times 2 equals 8, he cranked the windage knob eight snicks left on Herrs Schmidt and Bender’s magical tube.

That would do it. Now he found another turret on the tube and illuminated the red dot at the center of the—

His phone rang.

“Yes?”

“Juba, he’s up. Confused. Just discovered the cuffs. Seems to think he can pull his way free.”