E.S. Raye

Once this blog is posted, and I go to add it to the Gas Giant Gambit Master Blog List, I’m going to add Delilah to the “Characters” heading, but the truth is, she’s not really a character.

She’s Gus’s ray-gun.

But to me, she’s every bit as much a character as Moe, Ray, and even Gus, herself. Hell, Delilah may be the most important “character” in my personal pantheon.

The Delilah-verse

Before we get into Gus’s trusty weapon’s description and fictional history, I want to touch on her real-world inception.

While Gus will be the first of my characters to wield the ray-gun by name, she’s not actually the first in my published works to carry it, nor was the gun even conceived of for her.

In fact, in the little shared universe I’m creating with much of my work, Delilah is the connective tissue.

When it comes to who carries her first, “Ray-Gun Rick,” a tertiary character in my sci-fi/noir short story “The Stuff Legends are Made Of” in Rare: A Dark Anthology of Unusual Secrets is the first of my published characters to have Delilah. She hangs over the bar in Rick’s Café Terra Firma for most of the story, but he does wear her on his hip at least once.

Delilah is never mentioned by name in that story, but as the author, I’m here to tell you, that’s her.

“The Stuff Legends are Made Of” takes place several hundred years after the events of Gas Giant Gambit, but it was written after I finished GGG’s manuscript.

On the other hand, the idea of Delilah herself predates GGG by several years. Delilah was actually created for my World War II superhero, The Cobalt Fist. I’m not ready to tell that massive story yet, but I will get to it–it’s the reason I started writing in the first place.

And to add to that, my current work-in-progress, the sci-fi/World War I epic, Shallow Trenches, Open Skies, is turning into a backdoor origin story for the ray-gun.

Delilah in Gas Giant Gambit

By the time we meet Gus at the beginning of Gas Giant Gambit, she’s had the ray-gun for a long time. She even cryptically refers to Delilah as a “family heirloom.”

And the gun is old–ancient, even–and the holster and gun-belt match, with a scratched and pitted buckle emblazoned with an equally archaic “US ARMY” stamp.

Like all the “modern” pistols and long-guns that appear in Gas Giant Gambit, Delilah utilizes “coolant caps”–vials of liquid coolant the guns use with each pull of the trigger. Caps act in place of ammo, and the vials are often worn in loops on gun belts or bandoliers.

But due to Delilah’s advanced age and early design, she uses the coolant in a slightly different way–she expels a cloud of coolant vapor after every shot. The cloud is freezing cold and just pink enough that it has stained the glove on Gus’s gun hand with a rosy hue matching the color of the beam she slings.

The pistol itself looks like the the US Army, circa 1941, tried to build a Flash Gordon-esque ray-gun (and that’s not far from the truth). It’s big for a pistol, and has a line of exhaust ports resembling those on the engine of a P-40 Warhawk running the length of the left side.

To complete this WWII motif, some painted a Warhawk shark’s grin on the side of the gun opposite the exhaust. The painting, chipped, pitted, and faded, appears to be as ancient as the gun herself.

Delilah’s Future

As I mentioned at the beginning, Delilah is an important element in my work, and not just because she ties what I affectionately call the “Delilah-verse” together. She’s also important within the universe as well.

There are a lot of details about her that I just can’t share yet, given the stories I still want to tell. But I have started hinting:

Many of the characters in Gas Giant Gambit recognize Delilah as important, and try to obtain the magnificent gun for themselves.

Why?

You’ll have to stick around to find out.