"Ah," sighs Miles. "Yes. Thank you for the explanation."

"Thank you for sharing your knowledge and the tools of your people so readily." He hesitates. "How did the story you told my cousin end? The one of Komarr?"

"I suppose it hasn't. Komarr is still a part of the Barrayaran Empire. My father and those who agree with him have made good progress in getting everyone to calm down and stop doing horrible things to one another. He has a lasting reputation as an evil murderer on Komarr and among the rest of the planets of Men, and a... more complicated reputation than that at home."

"That's what I ought to be doing. Metal and weapons and planning an assault on Angband seem much easier, though. You told my cousin you planned to learn today about the war?"

"Yes. It seems like important information to have."

"Moringotto is a Vala. The greatest of all of them, once. There's a tradeoff, for them, between flexible power and entrenchment in the world, and he's poured a great deal of himself into it - the fortress, Angband, the orcs, the Balrogs - so I would expect he no longer has the capacities typical of the Valar, such as the ability to make and discard any form at will. But he still might be able to do that. He has the Silmarils, the last work of my father and the most priceless art of our people. They contain the original divine light of Aman. They can heal, they instantaneously restore the strength that otherwise bleeds away from us in the Outer Lands, they make us stronger and faster, and their presence brings joy and reassurance. They cure grief more readily than anything else. I don't know what advantages they'll lend the Enemy, because it is supposed to be that evil beings cannot touch them. 

We fought around a million orcs, in the campaign to take this continent back. We won. Orcs are weak and disorganized. Balrogs - well, you've met one. Moringotto has a few of the minor Powers on his side, some not so minor, and we do not yet know how to kill any of them."

"Well. That's... a difficult problem."

(Not quite out of adolescence, accidentally in charge of an army, leading them to victory in a mad scramble—caught up in intrigues on the planet of his ancestral enemy, near-singlehandedly saving them from a nasty civil war—uniting ten thousand dispirited squabbling prisoners into a disciplined force capable of assisting in their own rescue—Miles has solved a difficult problem or two in his life.)

"One day you really have to tell me all of those stories. Let's add this one to the ledger first, though, shall we?"

"Happily."

"I don't expect my strength to lie in learning to disassemble your weapons. Tyelcormo'd probably be good at it, but he's off sulking and I'm not sure where to find him. You could also just head out and call for volunteers, we have lots of capable people."

"If I happen to find Tyelcormo I'll ask him; otherwise I suppose I'll look for volunteers. Curufinwë has also expressed interest in taking things apart."

"When he surfaces from the project of designing a magic artifact to prevent biological decay, which may well be in ten years, he'll doubtless be eager to do so. He rather focuses on things, I wouldn't interrupt him. Tyelcormo, you're going to need to know how these weapons work if you're going to test our first efforts at them." He doesn't say that at a particularly raised volume.

The implications of Elven hearing are... interesting. And Curufinwë's approach sounds familiar, although Miles himself more commonly spends days on things than years.

Celegorm catches him on his way back to the shuttle. "I'm interested in learning how your weapons work."

"Good. I'll be happy to show you."

Into the shuttle they go. Miles - who is not wearing his armour today - picks up a few incomprehensible objects from various racks.

"Would you prefer to work here or somewhere else?"

"Here's fine. You mentioned the shuttle will run out of fuel; will the weapons as well? And how are they fueled?"

Miles opens up each of the three objects and extracts from them three slightly different smaller objects, each approximately rectangular.

"These are power packs. They store the 'fuel' - electricity - that the weapon uses. At some point I should find someone interested in learning how to make that on the necessary scale and figure it out with them, but it's not urgent, it's one of the least difficult engineering problems facing us and I'm not about to run out."

"All right." He examines them, fascinated.

"When the weapon and the power pack are separated, the power pack is the more dangerous of the two; under certain conditions, particularly if subjected to extreme heat, the power pack may explode." He outlines safe handling practices: in short, don't light it on fire, don't pry it apart, and don't jam conductive metals into it. He also outlines the most efficient way to turn each power pack into a bomb if a bomb is actually what you want, and the likely strength of the resulting explosion. "But hopefully you won't ever need to do that; we have only so many power packs and making them is much trickier than charging them."

"Noted. Do you have other ways to make explosions?" 

"Yes, plenty, but my supplies are again limited and unlike these they cannot be reused, so I judge them less urgent to teach about. For now: the weapons themselves."

He indicates each in turn, disassembling and reassembling it over the course of a few descriptive sentences.

"Stunner. Fires a sort of immaterial projectile which makes living things it touches fall unconscious temporarily, if aimed well, or temporarily lose function and sensation in affected areas, if not. Useful for any situation in which you might want to take prisoners. It has the shortest effective range of the three. Nerve disruptor. The Balrog-killer. Its projectile is similar to lightning, but nastier; it destroys nerves and brains when it hits them. Plasma arc. The one that made the Balrog ooze unpleasantly. Its projectile is mostly heat. Very destructive, and effective at a longer range than either of the other two."

"They don't work at all outside their range? With an arrow, skill can lengthen your range -"

He shakes his head. "When we get around to demonstrations - is there a good place for that nearby? - I'll show you. The projectile itself can only survive intact for so long in each case. Now - the pulling them apart and putting them back together that I just did is a feature deliberately included in the design, so if any part is faulty it can be swapped out without trouble: here is what each of the parts does and how to determine its condition. First, these indicator lights here on the stunner power pack and here on the side of the weapon itself describe the level of charge remaining in the power pack..."

On he goes through all the parts of each weapon, detaching them from the rest, describing their function and appearance and how they fit together, and then moving on to the next. When the three weapons are laid out on the floor in pieces, he asks, "Do you want to try putting them back together now?"

He does, very very quickly and quite delightedly. "I know you keep saying there's no creator of your things, but they feel like they have one. Someone extraordinarily focused on a specific set of design constraints, and excelling at them so obsessively - it's very impressive."

"Nicely done," says Miles. "The way invention works among Men, it's most likely that twelves of twelves of people all collaborated on the design of each weapon, and then passed it on to many other people who designed machines to make each of the parts, and then even more people revised and refined and innovated on all these designs over time."