Redemption Ark

Clavain did not know whether to laugh or cry when he saw the weapons and realised how antiquated and ineffective they were compared with the oldest, lowest-lethality weapons of a Conjoiner corvette or Demarchist raider. They had obviously been cobbled together from several centuries’ worth of black market jumble sales, more on the basis of how sleek and nasty they looked than on how much damage they could really do. Apart from the handful of firearms stored inside the ship to be used to repel boarders, the bulk of the weapons were stowed in concealed hull hatches or packed into dorsal or ventral pods that Clavain had earlier assumed held communications equipment or sensor arrays. Not all of the weapons were even functional. About a third of them had either never worked or had broken down, or had run out of whatever ammunition or fuel-source they needed to work.

To access the weapons, Antoinette had pulled back a hidden panel in the floor. A thick metal column had risen slowly from the well, unfolding control arms and display devices as it ascended. A schematic of Storm Bird rotated in one sphere, with the active weapons pulsing red. They were linked back into the main avionics web by snaking red data pathways. Other spheres and readouts on the main panel showed the immediate volume of space around the ship at various magnifications. At the lowest magnification, the banshee ships were visible as indistinct radar-echo smudges creeping closer to the freighter.

‘Fifteen thousand klicks,’ Antoinette said.

‘I still say we should pull the evasive pattern,’ Xavier murmured.

‘Burn that fuel when you need it,’ Clavain said. ‘Not until then. Antoinette, are all those weapons deployed?’

‘Everything we’ve got.’

‘Good. Do you mind if I ask why you were unwilling to deploy them earlier?’

She tapped controls, finessing the weapons’ deployment, reallocating data flows through less congested parts of the web.

‘Two reasons, Clavain. One: it’s a hanging offence to even think of installing weps on a civilian ship. Two: all those juicy guns might just be the final incentive the banshees need to come in and rob us.’

‘It won’t come to that. Not if you trust me.’

‘Trust you, Clavain?’

‘Let me sit there and operate those weapons.’

She looked at Xavier. ‘Not a hope in hell.’

Clavain leaned back and folded his arms. ‘You know where I am if you need me, in that case.’

‘Pull the evasive…’ Xavier began.

‘No.’ Antoinette tapped something.

Clavain felt the entire ship rumble. ‘What was that?’

‘A warning shot,’ she said.

‘Good. I’d have done the same.’

The warning shot had probably been a slug, a cylinder of foam-phase hydrogen accelerated up to a few dozen klicks per second in a stubby railgun barrel. Clavain knew all about foam-phase hydrogen; it was one of the main weapons left in the Demarchist arsenal now that they could no longer manipulate antimatter in militarily useful quantities.

The Demarchists mined hydrogen from the oceanic hearts of gas giants. Under conditions of shocking pressure, hydrogen underwent a transition to a metallic state a little like mercury but thousands of times denser. Usually that metallic state was unstable: release the confining pressure and it would revert to a low-density gas. The foam phase, by contrast, was only quasi-unstable; with the right manipulation it could remain in the metallic state even when the external pressure dropped by many orders of magnitude. Packed into shells and slugs, foam-phase munitions were engineered to retain their stability until the moment of impact. Then they would explode catastrophically. Foam-phase weapons were either used as destructive devices in their own right, or as initiators for fission/fusion bombs.

Antoinette was right, Clavain thought. The foam-phase slug cannon might have been an antique in military terms, but just thinking of owning such a weapon was enough to send one to an irreversible neural death.

He saw the firefly smudge of the slug crawl across the distance to the closing pirate ships, missing them by mere tens of kilometres.

‘They’re not stopping,’ Xavier said, several minutes later.

‘How many more slugs do you have?’ Clavain asked.

‘One,’ Antoinette said.

‘Save it. You’re too far out now. They can get a radar lock on the slug and dodge it before it reaches them.’

He unstrapped himself from the folding flap, clambering down the length of the bridge until he was immediately behind Antoinette and Xavier. Now that he had the chance he took a better look at the weapons plinth, mentally assaying its functionality.

‘What else have you got?’

‘Two gigawatt excimers,’ Antoinette said. ‘One Breitenbach three-millimetre boser with a proton-electron precursor. Couple of solid-state close-action slug guns, megahertz firing rate. A cascade-pulse single-use graser, not sure of the yield.’

‘Probably mid-gigawatt. What’s that?’ Clavain pointed at the only active weapon she had not described.

‘That? That’s a bad joke. Gatling gun.’