"Mr. Rook is a panzerhund, very strong, fast, and resilient. I am a rasierhund, we trade strength for agility and have some unique offensive capabilities. Sparky is of the new generation. He underwent warhund augmentation when he was serving in the Döbian special forces."

"We are all technically warhunds but the mass production models during and after the war were more focused on integration with regular forces and reduced cost of production, which is why they have much more obvious wetware. They are getting better. Vika, for example, hardly looks augmented and neither does Sparky."

Rook combed through the black fur on his arm until he found a seam. If I hadn't known what I was looking for I would have thought it was a scar. "As you can see, we look normal but our bodies are fully synthetic. Regular warhunds are colonized by nanomachines then surgically augmented."

He pounded his chest. "We were purposely built from the ground up. That's why we don't age. Normal warhund augmentation can slow the aging process, but we were designed to be eternal."

"Why?" I asked. “Why would you want to live forever?”

"What do you mean, why?" Rook looked at me with confusion. "Why would you not want to live forever in perfect health?"

"Because it would suck." I said. "There's no change, no growth, no end. Do you really want to keep on fighting forever until you die?"

"Yes, absolutely." Rook nodded. "Once I was a deluded soul who believed they could change the world with pamphlets and protests. I was someone drunk on their own importance. The camps showed me the error of my ways."

He swallowed as if he knew his next words would be bitter. "It is a special hell to see the people who believed in you suffering and dying because of the dreams you put in their heads. I told them once people saw what we were doing they would rise up, that we would be heroes. Instead we ended up in concentration camps."

"I had completed my mandatory military service so I was selected by Gershwin for his later trials. I survived, many others did not. Tell me, do you know what purpose violence serves?" He asked.

"Not in a philosophical sense, but in a real one. If violence was a tool do you know what it would say on the package?"

I thought about it for a second. "You could say it allows the strong to take from the weak. Or that it separates the two."

"No. Violence or the threat of violence are tools to modify behavior, no more and no less. If a hund with a gun is shooting at me, why do I shoot him back? Is it to kill? Is it because he is bad? No, it is to get him to stop."

"But what about the camps? Wasn't killing all of those innocent people a form of violence?" I asked.

"Yes, but a tool being misapplied does not change its purpose. You can hammer a nail with a wrench. But that does not make it a hammer."

He clenched his fist and squeezed, just like I had seen Simon do the day before. "I am war, I am violence of action, I am death. I am one of the last panzerhunds and this world has not known my like before or since."

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He slowly relaxed his grip. "I would rather die surrounded by waves of enemies and be thrown in a mass grave with my brothers than linger forever in a beautiful garden like some useless statue. You believe this life I have chosen makes me lesser."

I tried to protest but he cut me off.

"And to some it would be. But I know who and what I am, what I want, and what I’m good at. I am a panzerhund, I will not pretend to be something else."

"Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war." I said, quoting a long dead Japanese warrior.

"But I am not a gardener." Rook replied.

***

"So we aren't shooting the rocket launcher?" I asked, disappointment showing in my voice.

"Yeah, I forgot we were supposed to be keeping a low profile. We can't shoot that in here safely without venting the fumes, so no big booms today." Knight explained.

"My balls are turning the most lovely shade of blue." Rook said. "No need to check for yourself, but rest assured they are in fact quite azure." He walked off, leaving Knight and I alone.

"Mine too." I said, realizing that this was the second time I had almost gotten to shoot one. "I've got a serious case of blue bean."

Knight looked over at me in surprise. "How horribly vulgar." If the hot pink furred hund made a gagging noise.

"Look, that's your fault. You got us all worked up. Now you get to live with the consequences. What else do you have?"

"Well there are the Döbian buzzsaws, some dumb pistols, some smart PDWs… oh yeah and this." He reached under the cart and pulled out a much shorter version of the Hammer smart shotgun. "I did some math and realized that 80% of the acceleration happened in the first twenty centimeters. You lose about half the ammunition capacity with the shorter barrel but end up with a much better handling weapon. I also added a hydraulic shock absorber, an IR illuminator and a pulsed IR laser. Oh, and then there's this."

He loaded the weapon, shouldered it, hit a switch on the side and then pulled the trigger. It should have made a noise like a cannon but instead all I heard was a faint zip as the slugs exited the barrel followed by what could only be described as the sound of thunder and lightning as three electrically charged slugs hit the steel target fifty meters away.

The force of the recoil rocked him back on his heels but Knight recovered surprisingly quickly. "Math is a beautiful thing." He said as he looked at the deep pits in the steel plate. "The humans designed it with the option to load longer rounds, they just never got around to designing them. Each slug has dual capacitors. With one capacitor launching three slugs at once, they travel subsonic, but deliver five times as much electricity when they hit."

"Woah." I did the math. "That's enough juice to fry just about anything."

"Yes, it is." Knight looked at his modified shotgun with pride. "I tried shooting a slug twice as fast by discharging both capacitors at once but the rails melted and the recoil broke the shooting rest. The same thing happened when I tried to fire all three at full speed."

He switched back to supersonic mode and aimed at the target again. This time when he pulled the trigger there was a loud crack and sparks flew off the target as the slug blew a pinky sized hole in the two centimeter thick steel.

"The softer metal of the slug deforms on impact and puts pressure on the tungsten penetrator from all sides so that going through the plate becomes the path of least resistance. Or at least that's the simplest explanation." He sent another slug through the plate.

"When it hits soft tissue the hydraulic pressure breaks apart the slug and makes it dump all its energy into the target. The terminal ballistics are pretty much ideal, a few centimeters of penetration followed by fragmentation and total penetration of just under thirty five centimeters."

He sighed. "The ammunition capacity still leaves something to be desired though. You only get sixteen shots and the ammunition itself is very heavy. You can carry ten times as many rounds for the buzzsaw for the same amount of weight. But perhaps that is less important for law enforcement applications."

"It's beautiful. Now gimme." I said with my hands held out and an eager look on my face like a child finally getting that video game they had always wanted.