"No funny business," said Nom, as he handed Mitzner her tool belt. It was actually more of a weapons belt, if she was being honest. Mitzner wasn't inclined to be honest at this moment. The six armed guards, in addition to Nom, that Oola had brought with them was really start to wear away the polite fiction that she wasn't a prisoner.
"I wouldn't want to upstage you," she said, taking the belt and clipping it back on to her waist.
Mitzner shielded her eyes from the light with her hands. This was pure pantomime for the benefit of her audience, as her eyes instantly adjusted to almost any lighting conditions.
"That's the boulder you're not particularly attached to? Over there?" she asked, pointing.
The boulder was about 500 meters out, part of a cliff side.
"That's your target," said Oola.
"We should be twice as far away then," said Mitzner "How is anyone supposed to be impressed with my markswomanship at this range?"
"This distance will be fine," said Oola.
"Stop stalling, outsider!" barked Nom.
Mitzner raised her hands above her head in mock surrender. She hoped the gesture translated well enough for Nom to be properly offended.
She whipped out her particle pistol and spun it around on her finger. Mitzner was a woman of many skills, but she felt her gun twirling was truly galaxy class. She gave the weapon an extra twirl just so everyone knew the score.
Once she had a proper grip on the gun she looked down at the small display screen at the back and pressed it twice.
"I'm going to go ahead and use one of the really messy settings," she said as she did so "Because you strike me as people who will appreciate fireworks over surgical precision."
She closed one eye, barely took the time to aim, and fired. The charged particle beam struck the boulder and caused it to explode like a bomb.
Wagner yelped in surprise. Oola smiled broadly.
"I could also use it to shoot a kernel of corn off the head of a cat at that same distance without hurting the cat. So now the million credit question is: if I was from an enemy faction that had access to weapons of this kind, how are any of you still alive?"
She basked in the silence as the assembled humans attempted to work that out.
"These weapons," said Nom at long last "You could make more of them?"
"Well, no," admitted Mitzner "I just shoot the things; I couldn't hope to build one. Plus I doubt you have the facilities to make them anyway. However I'm sure there are other things we could do to upgrade your weaponry. Ensign?"
"Me?" asked Wagner, shocked out of his daydream "I can't do something like that! That's the kind of thing Dr. Kang or McAfree get up to. I'm really only trained to analyze soil samples and evaluate spacial anomalies. You know, science, not the engineering projects of insane gods."
"Oh nonsense, I'm not asking you to boot-strap a bunch of cavemen up to spaceflight. I'm asking if there's anything you can do to improve on the arms and armor of this group of metal-working city-dwellers," said Mitzner "They're like five standard deviations below our tech level, maybe six. There must be something you can do."
"Well," said Wagner "I did notice that their guns are unrifled..."
"See? What did I tell you," said Mitzner "And that's just weapons. Ensign Wagner here can help you with agriculture, metallurgy, architecture-"
"Um..." Wagner attempted to interject, but Mitzner didn't let him.
"-animal husbandry, ceramics, you name it. We can be a tremendous help. That is, I think we can help each-other."
"Aha," said Oola "The point emerges. What sort of help were you wanting us to provide?"
"Well I'm going to need to try to get a signal to my people in orbit eventually, but at the moment I'm more worried about two crew mates of mine who became lost when we crashed our shuttle. If our crash-bubbles worked theirs probably did so, so they must be alive out there somewhere."
"Why do you think we would know anything about where your friends are?" asked Oola.
"You found us, didn't you?" replied Mitzner, with a shrug.