A sharp c-r-a-c-k! tore the crisp morning air. The rifle had fired. But the buttplate had barely nudged Jathmar’s shoulder. He stared down the barrel past the front sight at the target, which was pristine. It was only fifty yards away. There was no wind. His sight alignment had been perfect, he knew it had been, but the bullet hadn’t struck the target. He hadn’t missed a shot that simple since childhood.
He peered at the rifle in consternation. It had fired, which was comforting to his violated sense of normalcy, but the recoil had been so puny as to be almost non-existent and the bullet had failed to punch a target only fifty yards away. Even the sound of the rifle had been off. That sharp crack wasn’t anything like the deep-throated bellow the Ternathian Model 9511 was famous for producing when fired. That characteristic roar had earned the rifle its most common nickname: Thundergun. Only this Thundergun had barely wheezed.
Jasak’s voice punched through his shock.
“It fired!” Jasak was saying again and again. “It fired. But why? I don’t understand. It fired.”
“Ye-e-s-s,” Jathmar said slowly, “but it didn’t fire properly.”
Sogbourne frowned. “What do you mean by that? Explain.”
Jathmar scratched the side of his head, trying to figure out where to begin. He was still scratching when Gadrial called out a request to join them at the firing line. A moment later, she and Shaylar were standing beside the shooting bench, staring down at the rifle in Jathmar’s puzzled hands.
“Well,” Jathmar said, “for one thing, the sound was wrong. Much too quiet.”
“Quiet?” Sogbourne gaped. “That hellish crack was quiet?”
“You know,” Jasak frowned, “now you mention it, the noise was louder the last time we shot this gun.”
“Yes,” Jathmar said, although his voice was distracted by the thoughts colliding uselessly in his head. “For another thing, the recoil was all wrong. It was much too soft.”
“Recoil?” Sogbourne asked.
“Yes, the recoil that occurs when the gun is fired. The release of all that gas pressure moving forward shoves the butt of the rifle, this part,” he carefully moved the rifle into a new position, muzzle-up, to show them which part of the rifle was the butt-plate, “back against my shoulder.”
“Why?” Jasak asked, looking mystified.
“Because of physics. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. When the gas propels the bullet forward at such a high speed, with all that tremendous gas pressure, the energy released propels the rifle backwards, in an equal and opposite direction. The bullet goes one way and the rifle goes the other way, so it punches your shoulder. The faster the bullet moves out of the gun barrel, the more energy there is to slam backwards. If you have a big, heavy gun, some of the weight will tend to compensate, but there’s still an opposite reaction. The gun will travel backwards while the bullet travels forwards, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
The Arcanans, he discovered, were staring at him as though he’d lost his mind.
“Ah, Jathmar,” Gadrial said carefully, “that’s a very interesting theory. But it doesn’t work that way here.”
Others were shaking their heads.
“But that’s impossible,” Shaylar said. “There’s always a reaction.”
“Oh, well we’re familiar with the idea of recoil,” Gadrial reassured her. “We just don’t let it get in the way.”
“‘Get in the way’?” Jathmar repeated. “That’s one of the basic laws of physics. It underlies everything. It has to ‘get in the way,’ Gadrial!”
Gadrial’s brow furrowed. “Not here. Half of what we do on a daily basis wouldn’t work if that was a physical law underlying everything. Heavens above, dragons couldn’t fly if we had to worry about silly things like recoil all the time!.”
Jasak Olderhan exchanged a long and worried look with Commander of Twenty-Thousand Sogbourne.
“I want to shoot this,” Gadrial said abruptly. “I shot it before. I want to shoot it again. Jathmar, I’ve forgotten how to operate it. Could you show me again, please?”
“Well, certainly, if you really want to.” He loaded it for her, slipping half-a-dozen rounds into the tube-fed magazine, worked the action to chamber a round, then showed her again how to hold it, how to aim it, and how to fire it. She had trouble holding it steady and on target, because the weapon was much too heavy for her, but she did a creditable job of aligning everything, and then she squeezed the trigger…
It clicked.
Just clicked. Not even a crack, let alone a roar.
Jathmar stared in utter consternation.
“That’s impossible!” he blurted. “Why didn’t it fire? It should have. It just did!” He did something he shouldn’t have done. It wasn’t safe. It certainly wasn’t smart. He took the gun from Gadrial, thumbed back the exposed hammer to cock it without working the action, tucked it against his shoulder, and squeezed.
C-r-a-c-k!
The buttplate jostled his shoulder. The target remained pristine, but the cartridge that had failed to fire for Gadrial had fired on the first try for him. He nearly dropped the rifle. In fact, he had to fumble for it as the gun started to slide out of his numb hands and a film of sweat broke out across his whole body. His hands actually shook as he lowered the rifle gingerly to the shooting bench.
Jathmar stared at Gadrial.
She stared back.
“That’s impossible,” he said, voice flat with shock.
“Why?” Jasak asked, brow furrowed.
“It just is,” Jathmar insisted. “The primer should have worked for Gadrial, too.”
“Does this kind of thing ever happen in Sharona?” Gadrial asked.
Jathmar started to answer, then halted. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “there are misfires or hang fires. A misfire is a cartridge that doesn’t function at all. A hang-fire is one that for some reason doesn’t ignite properly. It goes off more slowly, usually due to the powder not burning at the proper rate, which is one reason we always point a gun’s muzzle downrange, away from anything we don’t want to shoot. A hang-fire can go off a second or two later.”
“Maybe,” Jasak suggested, “we should experiment with more shooters?”
Jathmar nodded, feeling dazed.
Ten minutes later, he was so confused, he could barely think straight. It was flatly impossible, but they’d given it a thorough, rigorous testing. When Jasak Olderhan, Gadrial Kelbryan, or Twenty Thousand Sogbourne tried to fire a Sharonian gun, nothing happened. When Jathmar or Shaylar pulled the trigger, the gun fired-but with only a fraction of its original power. A bullet that should have nailed a target a thousand yards away wouldn’t travel fifty. They had to move the target back to the twenty-five yard line before Jathmar’s bullet would even reach it.
Even Twenty Thousand Sogbourne was puzzled by the admittedly weird performance of Jathmar’s hunting rifle. “What’s going on, Magister Gadrial?” he demanded in exasperation.
“I don’t know. Jathmar, tell me again how the guns work. What makes the bullet leave the gun?”
Jathmar drew a deep breath and launched into another explanation of powders and primers and gas expansion. He told her what gunpowder was, how and why it burned, what priming compounds were and why and how they exploded when struck with a sharp blow. He didn’t do a very good job of it, in part because he was thoroughly rattled and in part because he wasn’t an expert in arms manufacture or the chemistry of weapons development. But he told her what he could.
Gadrial listened intently.
“In essence,” she said with a frown that only seemed abstracted, since Jathmar was perfectly well aware of how agile her mind was, “what you’re describing is the incarnation of motive energies, which are harnessed through a distillation process that transfers their latent arcane energy from the etheric plane to the physical, and the action of this device, this ‘fire-making pin,’ is a physically expressed incantation that causes the latent motive energies distilled in these various compounds to combine in a sudden, complex spell of release. Ye gods, Jathmar, it’s mind boggling!”