Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

odd coils around the forestock. It was painted a dark black-green and had a big hole where the magazine should have fit.
    Diamond sighed. “This weapon is wonderful, but you are a goodcustomer. I should warn you that I don’t have the resources to make it work.”
    “What?” Megan asked. “You’re selling a broken gun?”
    “It’s not that,” Diamond said, tapping the section of wall beside the gun. An image displayed of a man set up on the ground, holding the rifle and looking through the scope at some run-down buildings. “This is called a gauss gun, developed using research on some Epic or another who throws bullets at people.”
    “Rick O’Shea,” I said, nodding. “An Irish Epic.”
    “That’s really his name?” Abraham asked softly.
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s horrible.” He shivered. “Taking a beautiful French word and turning it into … into something Cody would say.
Câlice!
”
    “Anyway,” I said. “He can make objects unstable by touching them; then they explode when subjected to any significant impact. Basically he charges rocks with energy, throws them at people, and they explode. Standard kinetic energy Epic.”
    I was more interested in the idea that the technology had been developed based on his powers. Ricky was a newer Epic. He wouldn’t have been around back in the old days when, as the Reckoners had explained, Epics had been imprisoned and experimented on. Did this mean that kind of research was still going on? There was a place where Epics were being held captive? I’d never heard of such a thing.
    “The gun?” Abraham asked Diamond.
    “Well, like I said.” Diamond tapped the wall and the video started playing. “It’s a type of gauss gun, only it uses a projectile that has been charged with energy first. The bullet, once turned explosive, is propelled to extreme speeds using tiny magnets.”
    The man holding the gun in the video flipped a switch and the coils lit up green. He pulled the trigger and there was a
burst
of energy, though the thing seemed to have almost no recoil. A splash of green light spat from the front of the gun’s barrel, leaving a line inthe air. One of the distant buildings exploded, giving off a strange shower of green that seemed to warp the air.
    “We’re … not sure why it does that,” Diamond admitted. “Or even how. The technology changes the bullet into a charged explosive.”
    I felt a shiver, thinking about the tensors, the jackets—the technology used by the Reckoners. Actually, a lot of the technology we now used had come with the advent of the Epics. How much of it did we really understand?
    We were relying on half-understood technology built from studying mystifying creatures who didn’t even know how they did what they did themselves. We were like deaf people trying to dance to a beat we couldn’t hear, long after the music actually stopped. Or … wait. I don’t know what that actually was supposed to mean.
    Anyway, the lights given off by that gun’s explosion were very distinctive. Beautiful, even. There didn’t seem to be much debris, just some green smoke that still floated in the air. Almost as if the building had been transformed directly to energy.
    Then it hit me. “Aurora borealis,” I said, pointing. “It looks like the pictures I’ve seen of it.”
    “Destructive capability looks good,” Megan said. “That building was almost completely knocked down by one shot.”
    Abraham nodded. “It might be what we need. However, Diamond, might I inquire about what you mentioned earlier? You said it didn’t work.”
    “It works just fine,” the merchant said quickly. “But it requires an energy pack to fire. A powerful one.”
    “How powerful?”
    “Fifty-six KC,” Diamond said, then hesitated. “Per shot.”
    Abraham whistled.
    “Is that a lot?” Megan asked.
    “Yeah,” I said, in awe. “Like, several thousand standard fuel cells’ worth.”
    “Usually,” Diamond said, “you need to hook it up by cord to its own power unit. You can’t just plug this bad boy into a wall socket. The shots on this demo were fired using several six-inch cords running back to a dedicated generator.” He looked up at the weapon. “I bought it hoping I could trade
a certain client
for some of his high-energy fuel cells, then be able to actually sell the weapon in working condition.”
    “Who knows about this weapon?” Abraham asked.
    “Nobody,” Diamond said. “I bought it directly from the lab that created