When Sam was able to get his feet back under him, the two of them searched the armory. The door had a scorched hole in it where he presumed the lock used to be, and the inside smelled nothing like the rest of the facility. The entire room had been behind an airlock composed of thick metal in a hermetically sealed room. The guns couldn’t have been preserved better if they had been kept in barrels of oil.

Speaking of which… Sam slid a finger along the shining black metal handle of a rifle, dragging a trail through the thin, glistening sheen covering the weapon. As he watched, the streak of dry slowly closed up as the preservative did its job. Sam borrowed Faera’s knife and carefully dragged the oil from his finger onto the blade’s surface, watching it slowly spread.

“Good to know some of this stuff still works,” Sam said.

“This isn’t gonna spread up my arm or something, is it?” Faera asked, eyeing the new sheen to her knife.

“Preservative gradually degrades into simple hydrocarbons on any surface other than ferrous metal, plastic or rubber, and is easily killed with an application of actual oil,” Sam explained as he looked around.

The racks of small arms had no biometric scanners, but the goodies against the back wall all had the softly-glowing blue strips down their handles that indicated biometric locks. There were six RPGs, a control crown above a chest filled with Stinger drones, Kamikaze syringes, an anti-armor rifle, a portable nuke, and an empty space where the VAMPR should have been.

“Well, the nuke’s off the table,” Faera said with dry humor.

“Obviously,” Sam said, placing his palm on the transparent case containing the stinger drones. The chest blinked red with a buzz. Sam frowned and lifted his hand away. “Seems like I don’t have access.” He tried the RPGs and the rifle, and came up with the same result.

“My security clearance is gone,” Sam said, glancing back at Faera. He should have been able to unlock these weapons.

Faera gazed at the anti-armor rifle, presumably because it was the perfect solution to her dragon problem. The hundred-pound hunk of glossy black metal sat on its rack, rendered impotent by its safety mechanisms. Six individually-loaded bullets, each nearly the size of Faera’s forearm, rested in a case just below.

“Is there any way to disable the biometric locks?” she asked.

Sam shrugged. “Once the bunker’s computers died, there was no way to reconfigure the guns. Now your rifle, there, is just a huge paper weight. How about you? Do you know any magic that might bypass its security?”

Faera pursed her lips. “I do, but the spell’s of no use to us, because I can’t cast it.”

“Oh really? What’s your idea?” Sam asked, expecting a clever workaround involving changing a person’s biosignature.

“Well, that anti-armor rifle only needs to get a bullet in the chamber and have the bullet go off. Minor telekinesis could bypass the safety system and open the chamber from the inside. It would be doable for a fairly advanced magician like Theold, but not for me.”

“Huh,” Sam said, admiring the turn her mind took. Rather than trying to hack the security system, removing it from the equation was far easier. In truth, Sam could probably take the gun apart and jury-rig it to fire once, if he had the right tools. Unfortunately, Sam didn’t have the right tools.

“Let’s shelve the rifle idea, then.” He glanced at the RPG warheads. “The RPGs are much easier to jury-rig. Do you think they’d be able to take out a dragon?”

“I think they’d bloody him,” she said, eyes drawn to the conical tip at the end of the tube.

“Better than nothing,” Sam said. He followed the wall to a row of lockers labeled ‘S4M’, ‘4NN’, ‘T0M’. Sam put his palm on the reader, and the locker opened with a hiss of air to reveal a custom military outfit. Thankfully he still had some kind of clearance at the fall of man.

“Seems like you were ubiquitous. The face of the dystopian American military regime,” Faera observed, regarding the several lockers with his name on them.

“So I hear,” Sam said dourly, sliding on underwear and fatigues before adhering the armor together over it. The seams of the bulletproof jacket disappeared as the material bonded with itself, leaving Sam comfortably armored. “But I don’t remember any of it.”

“Let’s get something to eat,” Faera said from the floor, where she was stuffing ammo into a dark green canvas bag. A moment later, she stood, the bag slung over her shoulder. Sam grabbed a rifle and stuck six clips to his vest before following her out. Food first, plotting to kill a dragon later.

The two of them hunted dinner, and while Sam was a marginally better shot, Faera knew her way around forests and animals much better than him. She returned to the fire that night with five rabbits tied to her belt, resembling a fur curtain. Sam, on the other hand, had managed to scare away everything within shooting distance.

Linquala, for her part, nibbled on nearby shoots from young branches of trees, watching them with disapproving eyes as they ate. Sam devoured two whole rabbits before he slowed down enough to talk.

Sucking the grease from his fingers, Sam explained, “A VAMPR can be converted into a generator by setting it upright on a stand, opening the side panel, and unspooling the internal wiring. Plug that into the bunker’s power system, and adjust the settings on the gun to fire at a speed that matches the desired voltage. Then adjust the weapon’s field of operation to a small cube and drop something disposable into its field, like a rock.”

“So what happens to the rock?” Faera asked.

“Well, at whatever voltage you choose, let’s say 120 times per second, the rock gets pulled into a pocket dimension made by the gun, and each time, 5 parts per billion of the rock are converted into pure energy. Then the rock is spat out again, right where it was, with very little forward momentum since we made sure to dial that down.”

“Of course.”

“The energy that would normally be used to propel the rock at supersonic speeds gets fed into the bunker, and the rock just hovers there, slowly losing mass.”

“What happens when the rock loses too much mass?” Faera asked.

“Just add another rock,” Sam said with a shrug.

“What happens if you touch the field?” Faera asked.

“Don’t touch the field.”

“Would touching the field kill a dragon?”

“Touching the field would kill anything. Any part that is in contact with the field when the gun fires is shunted out of existence, then reappears doused with a boatload of energy. There is absolutely no defense, according to the manual.”

“So can we use it?”

“I wouldn’t,” Sam said, taking a bite of rabbit leg, savoring the taste of real meat. “It’s been trapped under moldy bones for hundreds of years. It can’t be in good condition.”

Casting an eye toward Sam, Faera thumbed the preservative that had spread to her entire blade, and sharpened it in the process.

“Fair point,” Sam said with his mouth full. Assuming it had enough air under all those bones, it might be fine. Preservative was trained to recognize and repair certain shapes, after all.

The next day was spent in the sweaty pursuit of the VAMPR, a gun that should solve their dragon problem. Sam dug into the mass grave, piling bones along the sides of the spherical cavern. Layer after layer of skeletons came up, men and woman and children and Ungrin. Necklaces and rings shimmered, and coins tinkled as rotten clothing fell apart. All manner of beetle and centipede skittered, chasing Faera up into a nearby hall. Sam set the skulls aside gently, trying to afford them some dignity in the afterlife.

And then he saw it. A flash of black against the murky white of bone. He dropped to his knees in the foul muck and pulled aside what was left of a shirt.

He’d been right. The VAMPR was here, if not in the flesh, then certainly in the bone. A ribcage had afforded the gun a pocket of protection from the slimy mess. The gun’s wiring was exposed, but the preservative had kept the guts of the machine in perfect condition. The covering panel was gone, buried somewhere deeper in the pile, or lost to time.

He reached down into the pit and pinched his fingers around the ribs, lifting the bones up and over the gun, careful not to nudge the weapon in any way. The machine gleamed in the soft blue light.

“Stay there,” he told Faera when she made to move closer to investigate what he’d uncovered. The hall where she perched was presumably outside the gun’s literal sphere of influence.

He held his breath as he reached in and gently wrapped his hands around the gun. When he didn’t immediately die, he lifted it free. Turning the gun to the side, aiming it away from himself and Faera, Sam checked the open panel and saw that it was flipped to the internal power configuration. Whoever had used it last had disabled the mechanism for power to bleed out from the gun, strengthening his hypothesis that there had been deliberate sabotage.

“Let’s get this thing outside,” Sam whispered to Faera. He slowly clambered up the slippery pile of bones, cradling the gun like a baby made of radioactive snakes, always pointing the business end behind them.

Sam was dizzy from holding his breath by the time they stepped, blinking, into the afternoon sun, nearly blinded after a day of spelunking.

“Ooh, what’s that?” Linquala asked, coming out of the woods and lowering her head to sniff the gun.

“Don’t!” Sam shouted, flinching away. “Touch it.”

Linquala raised her horsey eyebrows and turned to Faera. “What’s his deal?”

Faera shrugged. “He’s been cloned a lot. My guess is some kind of genetic defect.”

Sam frowned, fixing the two of them with his best sergeant glare. “This gun makes the anti-armor rifle look like a child’s toy. It destroys things with chunks of their own armor. And it’s been pried open, sabotaged, and possibly filled with enough matter to kill us instantly. Do not touch.”

“Yessir,” Faera said, whipping a salute. Linquala stood stock still beside her in mock seriousness.

Sam climbed on top of the bunker. From up here, he was able to see over the forest for miles in each direction. He pointed the gun toward the mountain, praying it would work as a backstop. Sam thumbed the power button, and his skin tingled as he felt power converge around him.

“Whoa, what’s that?” Linquala asked, her voice filtering up from below as the flat black monitor on the top of the gun began to boot up, running through diagnostics. The biometric scanners, though, remained lines of matte black against the shiny grip. Either the saboteur, or whatever idiot was in charge of the base, had deactivated the security system.

The boot finished, and Sam’s breath caught in his throat. The VAMPR’s load was in the red, far beyond the maximum specifications in the manual. The gun was currently storing eighty million kilograms of material. The only thing that had saved the bunker was one of the simplest safety mechanisms put in place by the designers of the gun.

They lied about its maximum capacity.

“Okay…” Setting the gun to purge, Sam dialed down the speed to a thousand feet per second.

“What are you doing up there?” Faera shouted. “Linquala’s getting nervous.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Discharging the gun,” Sam said, taking aim at the mountain. “You may want to cover your ears.”

After waiting a few seconds and offering a silent prayer that the gun didn’t explode, Sam pulled the trigger.

An earth-shaking boom rattled Sam’s ribs as a boulder twenty meters across manifested in midair, creating an explosion of displaced air. The boulder flew hundreds of feet, snapping treetops off with inexorable force, until it touched ground and began carving a trail through the forest, travelling toward the mountain like a giant bowling ball. The concrete sphere finally came to a halt embedded in the side of the mountain.

“What the hell was that?” Faera asked, appearing beside him. Linquala followed shortly beside her, forcing Sam to wonder how she had climbed the side of the bunker.

“That,” Sam said with a steadying breath, “was technology used in a manner it was never designed for.”

The bunker’s northeast side had a dent in it where the boulder had appeared out of thin air. Chips of hardened, weather-resistant concrete were scattered around the edges. Sam plucked a shard of stone from his forearm.

“The good news is the gun is operational,” Sam said, hefting the weapon. “Give me a few minutes to change the settings. We don’t want to blow up an entire city.”

He knelt back down and began turning the virtual dials on the rifle’s display, chewing his lip as he worked. They wanted to be far away from the dragon when they fired, so Sam turned the range up as far as it would accurately go. They wanted minimal casualties, so Sam set the penetration depth to stop somewhere around the back of the dragon’s skull, give or take a few inches based on the amount of air that got trapped in the gun. He set the width to about the size of two fists put together--should be plenty to explode a Tyranus-sized head.

Sam set the gun to fire the matter the instant it was taken, so the torn chunk of flesh would travel through the vacuum created by the gun to impact into its former resting place at… He turned the dial up to three thousand meters per second. It was a common setting for large buildings or tanks.

“Okay, that should do it,” Sam said, sliding away from the bulky rifle. He nodded to Faera. “Check it out.”

Faera settled down in front of the rifle.

“Aim at that tree,” Sam said, pointing to a pine that towered over its brethren some three hundred yards away.

Faera closed her eye and centered the gun’s faintly glowing iron sights on the target, took a long slow exhale, and squeezed the trigger. There was a click that couldn’t be heard, only felt as the trigger made barest contact with the sensory plate behind it.

The tree exploded as two distinct thunderclaps filled the air. The first sound was the tunnel of air collapsing just behind the chunk of wood racing down the vacuum, and the second was the near simultaneous impact and subsequent detonation of the tree.

Faera’s eyes were wide as she watched the top of the pine soar skyward as smaller pieces of wood shrapnel came raining down on nearby trees. Finally the green cone turned sideways, losing a bit of its inertia as it made its way back down to earth.

“That tree had to be fifty feet tall,” Faera said, turning to gaze at Sam.

He gave her a grin. “I’ve always wanted to try a VAMPR.”

Faera frowned. “But you know exactly how to use it. How is it that you’ve never used one?”

Sam tapped his head. “I’ve got the manuals for every weapon conceived by man in here. They weren’t going to let us practice with weapons with that kind of stopping power underground,” he explained.

“Every weapon?”

“Except staffs.”

“Did you know about maces?”

“Look,” Sam said, pushing himself to his feet. “I know about every weapon more sophisticated than a crude bludgeon, okay?”

“Atlatl?”

“What?”

“Longbow?”

“I’m pretty sure I--”

“Blow dart.”

“Okay!” Sam said, putting up his hands. “I know most modern weapons, let’s leave it at that.”

“In so many good ways, you have so much to learn, Sam,” Faera said, smiling as she stood, hefting the VAMPR with a grunt.

“I know, right?” Linquala said. She breathed in right behind Sam, causing a draft to creep up his neck.

“Now show me how to turn the safety on,” Faera said. He shook his head, suppressing a smile as he bent to show Faera the safety feature, the on-off procedure, and how to modify the performance of the weapon using the display.

After they were done practicing, Sam and Faera made their way down a wooden ramp Linquala had grown up the side of the building. It seemed as though the special material of the bunker wasn’t able to resist the accelerated growth of Linquala’s trees.

Sam spent the rest of the day working on the RPGs, using the VAMPR to make precise cuts in the steel, giving them unrestricted access to the trigger mechanisms. By the end of the day, he had three RPGs jury-rigged to fire their explosive lances regardless of the biometric locks, and had dialed in the scope on the VAMPR.