Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling

back a little. Larsson watched in fascination as the nitro powder flamed up with a sullen reddish fizzle.
    â€œWell, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Did you see that, Mike?”
    Havel caught himself before he answered Yessir. “I did.”
    â€œYes,” Larsson said. “Whatever’s happened, the stuff is slower-burning now. Not really explosive propagation at all, even if the primer had gone off, which it didn’t. Hand me another, would you? One of the ones you tried to fire.”
    He repeated the process and returned Havel’s Leatherman with an abstracted frown. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this stuff wasn’t nitro powder at all! It’s not burning at anything like the rate it should be . . . but that’s a physical constant!”
    Havel felt his mouth go dry. “So’s what happens inside a battery, or an electric circuit,” he said.
    â€œWouldn’t it be wonderful if all the guns everywhere have stopped working?” Signe Larsson said softly.
    Michael Havel stared at her for a moment, his face carefully blank; but he was thinking so hard he could hear his own mental voice in his ears: Girlie, if I were a bad guy and coming after you with evil intent, would you rather shoot me or fight me hand-to-hand?
    Something of the thought must have shown despite his effort at diplomatic calm; she turned a shoulder towards him and busied herself with wrapping her share of the group’s load in a spare shirt before tying that across her back with the sleeves. Havel shook himself; once they got back to civilization, her opinions would mean even less than they did now. He removed the telescopic sight from the rifle and dropped it into a pocket of his sheepskin coat; it might come in useful. Then he recased the Remington and tucked it into a hollow in the rock face before covering it with stones.
    Maybe it’s useless now, he thought. He certainly wasn’t going to lug an extra eleven pounds of weight through this up-and-down country. Still . . .
    He wouldn’t have admitted it aloud, but he just didn’t like discarding a fine tool that had given him good service. His freezer back in Boise still had a fair bit of last fall’s venison in it.
    And maybe the freezer isn’t working either, something whispered at the back of his head.
    Making the stretcher wasn’t too hard, now that he had the puukko knife and the saber saw from his survival pack. Two ash saplings nearby had the right seven-foot length; he looped the flexible toothed cable around the base of one and began pulling the handles back and forth, careful not to go too fast and risk heating the metal. It fell in a dozen strokes, and the second went as easily.
    A cable saw was damned useful out in the woods and much lighter than a real saw or a hatchet, but if he had to choose he’d have taken the knife. The puukko was the Finnish countryman’s universal tool, for everything from getting a stone out of a horse’s hoof to skinning game to settling a dispute with the neighbors in the old days.
    His was a copy of the one his great-grandfather had brought from Karelia a hundred years ago; eight inches in the blade, thick on the back, with a murderous point and a gently curving cutting edge on the other side; a solid tang ran through the rock-maple hilt to a brass butt-cap. There were no quillions or guard; those were for sissies.
    Havel always thought of his father when he used it; one of his first toddler memories was watching him carve a toy out of white birchwood, the steel an extension of his big battered-looking hands.
    He trimmed and barked the poles with the knife, and cut notches at either end for smaller sticks lashed across to keep the poles open—he had a big spool of heavy fishing line in his crash kit, light and strong. One of the groundsheets tied in made a tolerable base.
    Mary Larsson woke while they were lifting her in the bag, conscious