“Yes, Ma’am.” Honor managed a wan smile. “I’ll tell him you said that, not chew him out for a perfectly normal combat response.”

“Good.” Dame Estelle scrubbed her face with the heels of her hands and straightened her shoulders with a visible effort. “Actually, I’m afraid what happened to Matt Howard worries me even more than what happened to the strike team,” she said, and Honor blinked in astonishment.

The commissioner’s mouth twisted at her expression, and she rose from behind her desk, turning the com terminal to direct its pickup at her coffee table. A strange weapon lay on it, looking very like some crude version of a pulse rifle, except that it had neither a magazine nor a proper stock. Instead of a vertical butt stock, it ended in a flat, horizontal arc of curved metal, perpendicular to the line of the barrel.

“See this?” Dame Estelle’s voice asked from beyond the pickup’s range.

“Yes, Ma’am. What is it?”

“This is what killed Matt, Honor. My people tell me it’s a single-shot, breech-loading flintlock rifle. One built for a Medusan.”

“What?!” Astonishment startled the response out of Honor before she could stop it, and Dame Estelle’s hands appeared on her screen as the commissioner lifted the clumsy-looking weapon.

“That was my response,” she said grimly. “This—” she touched the curved metal arm “—is the butt plate. It’s made of metal because there’s no decent wood on the planet, and it’s shaped like this because Medusans don’t really have shoulders. It’s designed to go across the firer’s chest to absorb the recoil, but that’s not the most interesting part of it. Look.”

She turned the weapon on its side and gripped a small knob on the trigger guard, then cranked the entire guard through a half turn. A plug of metal dropped vertically out of the barrel, and the commissioner lifted it to show the opened breech to the pickup.

“It’s a very ancient form of breech-closure for nitro-powder weapons, though I understand it usually operates in line with the barrel, not vertically.” Dame Estelle’s voice was almost distant, a dry, lecturer’s voice like a buttress against her own shock. “It’s called an ‘interrupted screw,’ ” she went on. “Basically, it’s nothing more than a long, coarse-threaded screw with the threads cut away on two sides so it only takes a half-turn to engage or disengage it. One of my com techs is an antique weapons buff, and she tells me it’s the only practical way to achieve a gas-proof breech seal on a weapon that uses loose-loaded propellant. They shove a hollow-based projectile of soft lead about eighteen millimeters in diameter in here, put the powder behind it, and close the breech.”

Her hands demonstrated on the screen, and she turned the weapon on its side.

“Then they pull back this hammer, which opens this little pan, and they put more loose powder into it. When they pull the trigger—”

The S-shaped hammer snapped forward, striking the lump of flint in its jaws against the roughened inner surface of the pan lid, and a brilliant spark flashed.