Dame Estelle dumped the weapon back onto the table and returned to her desk, swinging her terminal until she looked out of it at Honor once more, and her face was grim.

“A Medusan could reload this a lot more quickly than we could,” she went on. “If he puts the butt directly over one of his arms, he could actually reload and re-prime it with that arm without even lowering it from firing position with the other two. And it’s a lot longer-ranged and more accurate than you might think. The barrel is rifled, and the explosion of the powder—old-fashioned black powder, not even nitro-cellulose, they tell me—spreads the hollow base of the projectile, forcing it into the rifling and spin-stabilizing it. It’s no pulse rifle, Honor, but according to my weapons buff’s best guesstimate, this thing is probably accurate to two or even three hundred meters… and we have no idea how many of them are out there.”

“Dear God,” Honor murmured, her mind racing as she envisioned thousands of Medusans armed with those primitive but deadly weapons.

“Exactly,” the commissioner said harshly. “It’s crude, very crude, but that’s because someone took considerable pains to make it look that way. The actual manufacture is quite good, and, given the current Medusan level of technology, it’s an ideal weapon for them: simple, sturdy, and within their own manufacturing capabilities, even if only barely. But there is no way—no way—this many sudden advances could occur naturally in one lump. My com tech tells me it took centuries for Old Earth to advance from crude, fuse-fired smoothbores to anything remotely like this. In fact, she insists no one on Old Earth ever produced one that incorporated all of these features, except for something called a ‘Fergusson Rifle,’ or something like that. And that one never went into mass production. So—”

“So at least the design had to come from someone off-world.” Honor’s voice was equally harsh, and Dame Estelle nodded.

“My own opinion, precisely. Some greedy idiot has jumped the Medusans’ ability to kill one another—or us—by something like fifteen hundred T-years.” The Resident Commissioner looked strained and old, and her hand trembled slightly as she brushed hair back from her forehead. “He’s brought this abortion in through my security, and he’s turned it over to the nomads in the Outback, not even to the Delta city-states. Even if we nail him, there’s no way to put this genie back into the bottle if he’s taught the Medusans how to build the things. In fact, they’re bound to figure out how to make heavier weapons—real, honest-to-God artillery—so unless we want to take over the role of guaranteeing the Delta’s security with off-world weaponry, we’re going to have to encourage the city-states to learn how to make the goddamned things just so they can defend themselves! And worst of all, our forensic people think the Medusans who killed Matt were hopped to the breathing slits on mekoha—the same off-world mekoha we’ve been seeing clear on the other side of the Mossybacks.”