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.’ Clavain nodded. ‘No, that’s good. Don’t knock Gatling guns; they have their uses.’ Xavier spoke. ‘Picking up reverse thrust plumes. Doppler says they’re slowing.’ ‘Did we scare them off?’ Clavain asked. ‘Sorry, no; this looks exactly like a standard banshee approach,’ Xavier replied. ‘Fuck,’ Antoinette said. ‘Don’t do anything until they’re closer,’ Clavain said. ‘Much closer. They won’t attack you; they won’t want to risk damaging your cargo.’ ‘I’ll remind you of that when we’re having our throats slit,’ Antoinette said. Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what they do?’ ‘Actually, that’s at the nice humane end of the spectrum.’ The next twelve minutes were amongst the most tense Clavain could remember. He understood how his hosts felt, sympathising with their instinct to shoot at the enemy. But it would have been suicidal. The beam weapons were too low-powered to guarantee a kill, and the projectile weapons were too slow to have any effectiveness except at very short range. At the very best they might succeed in taking out one banshee, but not two at once. At the same time Clavain wondered why the banshees had not taken the earlier warning. Antoinette had given them plenty of hints that stealing her imagined cargo would not be easy. Clavain would have thought that they would have decided to cut their losses and move on to a less nimble, less well-armed target. But according to Antoinette it was already unusual for banshees to foray this far into the zone. When they were just under a hundred klicks out, the two ships slowed and split up, one of them arrowing around to the other hemisphere before resuming its approach. Clavain studied the magnified visual grab of the closest ship. The image was fuzzy — Storm Bird’s optics were not military quality — but it was enough to disperse any doubts they might have had about the ship’s identity. The view showed a wasp-waisted civilian vessel a little smaller than Storm Bird . But it was night-black and studded with grapples and welded-on weapons. Jagged neon markings on the hull suggested skulls and sharks’ teeth. ‘Where do they come from?’ Clavain asked. ‘No one knows,’ Xavier said. ‘Somewhere in the Rust Belt/Yellowstone environment, but beyond that… no one has a fucking clue.’ ‘And the authorities just tolerate them?’ ‘The authorities can’t do dick. Not the Demarchists, not the Ferrisville Convention. That’s why everyone’s so shit-scared of the banshees.’ Xavier winked at Clavain. ‘I tell you, even if you guys do take over it isn’t going to be a picnic, not while the banshees are still around.’ ‘Luckily it isn’t likely to be my problem,’ Clavain said. The two ships crept closer, pinning Storm Bird from either side. The optical views sharpened, allowing Clavain to pick out points of weakness and strength, and to make a guess at the capability of the enemy ships’ weapons. Scenarios tumbled through his head by the dozen. At sixty kilometres he nodded and spoke quietly and calmly. ‘All right, listen carefully. At this range you have a chance of doing some damage, but only if you listen to me and do precisely what I say.’ ‘I think we should ignore him,’ Xavier said. Clavain licked his lips. ‘You can, but you’ll die. Antoinette: I want you to set up the following firing pattern in pre-programmed mode, without actually moving any of your weapons until I say. You can bet the banshees have us in their sights, and they’ll be watching to see what happens.’ She looked at him and nodded, her fingers poised over the controls of the weapons plinth. ‘Say it, Clavain.’ ‘Hit the starboard ship with a two-second excimer pulse as close to amidships as you can get it. There’s a sensor cluster there; we want to take it out. At the same time use the rapid-fire slug gun to put a spread over the port ship, say a megahertz salvo with a hundred millisecond sustain. That won’t kill them, but it’ll sure as hell damage that rack launcher and probably buckle those
