“You’re going way over my head, I’m afraid,” Magroom said ruefully. “Are you sure it isn’t all done with mirrors?”
“That’s not a bad way of putting it, actually,” Archier responded with a smile. “Do you know anything about accountancy? The intermat works very much like double-entry bookkeeping.”
“I’ll try to find out something about it in Diadem.”
“The technical details are restricted. But as a creative artist, I’m sure you’ll be able to persuade the public data files to give you privileged access.”
Archier nodded to Lilac Willow’s captain. “Very good. Now let’s take a look at the gun turrets!”
The passages of the gun system were narrower than was usual for the more continuously inhabited parts of the vessel. The main travelators did not reach there. Only Archier, Arctus, Lilac Willow’s captain and (at his urgent pleading) Volsted Magroom squeezed into a small cage which shot straight towards the skin of the warship.
The cage smelled of oil and electricity. They debouched into a dimly lit tunnel which echoed constantly to faint sounds of metal singing on metal. After the luxury and frivolity he had grown used to aboard Lilac Willow, Magroom felt chilled by the bleak air of seriousness he sensed about the place.
He followed the Admiral along the tunnel. Archier paused at a place where a gap occurred in the right-hand wall. Separated from the passageway by a curvilinear grid was a second, parallel tunnel slightly smaller in diameter. Along it there swept at intervals gleaming, round-nosed, gold-plated cylinders. Each lay on its side, and even then stood nearly as tall as a man.
“You see the feeder system that serves each gun,” Archier told Magroom. “Those are the shells, which are being brought up from the magazine in preparation for the engagement. They are held in a secondary magazine below the turret and are fed into the breech automatically.”
Magroom stared at the deadly missiles in fascination. “What are they—fusion?”
“A standard shell carries a fusion charge, sufficient to destroy a ship on direct impact. But shells come in several varieties. Some carry a shaped fusion charge to punch a hole in a ship and disable it. Very few shells even reach their targets, of course. Even when aimed accurately enough they have to face short-range anti-shell weapons of various sorts, as well as deflector shields. A high rate of fire is what’s important.”
“Why are they so big? You can carry a fusion charge in the palm of your hand.”
“To give them mass. They’d have no range otherwise.”
Archier proceeded along the tubelike tunnel, which ran straight for the most part but occasionally snaked for no apparent reason. It ended in a short flight of steps. They climbed it and emerged onto the gun platform.
The scene was one of the strangest Magroom had seen, no matter how many times he had described it in his novels. The gun turret was a huge protuberance, one of twenty that studded Lilac Willow and comprised the front-line-o’-war’s main armament, the cause of her existence. The cannon, or gun, was a huge barrel-shaped structure, mounted in a spherical bearing that was a huge recoil absorber. The breech-loading mechanism was below the gun platform and out of sight, as was the main firing mechanism; it was just too big to accommodate comfortably outside the sweep of the hull.
The gun crew was all animaclass="underline" pigs, baboons and dogs who crouched before their command and data screens. They let out a cheer as their admiral entered the turret.
Magroom knew only a little about the specifications of these weapons. They had three-axis rotation and could aim towards a large portion of the celestial globe. When in use they extended their shell-stabilising barrels to a mile’s length (presumably all Lilac Willow’s gun barrels were now so extended). How far they could fling their shells he did not know, but he had heard a rumoured rate of fire of an incredible one round per second.
Archier was passing a few moments in encouraging banter with the platform crew. He strolled back to Magroom. “They’re keen, dead keen. Do you know the history of the long-range Star Force gun?” he asked amiably.
“Not much.”
“It’s the only answer to how ships may fight one another when moving faster than light. Beam weapons using radiation energy are clearly useless, and the feetol drive is too bulky to be fitted to missiles—if we did that, a ship the size of Lilac Willow could carry no more than a dozen or so. Even then, they would be very much slower than the ships they were launched against! So the breech-firing cannon it is. What makes it possible is that an object expelled from a feetol bubble retains a remnant of that bubble for a while, and so may still move faster than normal light. These shells are fired off at a tremendous velocity, about a million times the normal velocity of light. They go ploughing through normal spacetime, losing speed all the time as their remnant feetol bubbles dissipate. In good conditions they can range about half a light year before dropping below c.
“Do you see the reason why the shells have to be heavy? A travelling feetol bubble encounters the resistance of the normal space through which it moves. The magnitude of this resistance is an inverse function of the mass contained within the bubble. If the shells were too light, they would slow down even before their bubbles had weakened.”
There was a point Magroom had wondered about but had never been able to find out. “They have to be aimed across half a light-year? On a target no larger than a ship?”
Archier smiled. “No, that would be asking too much of our gun comps. The shells have limited self-guidance near the end of their trajectory.”
Staring at the massive gun, Magroom had to remind himself that this was not fantasy. This was real—and in deadly earnest.
It gave him an altogether different perception of things. This, he realised, was what maintained the Empire, which he had thought of as a vague entity up to now. Oh, he had heard of how the Empire would sometimes punish worlds, but it rarely happened and the stories had an almost fictional quality. It came home to him with a vengeance, now, that this warship with its twenty big guns was the reason why it rarely happened. In space, the Empire dominated; it could blast any rival force of ships to kingdom come. As long as it could do that, as long as no nonimperial fleets could defend disobedient worlds, there could be no effective rebellion.
All the effete decadence, the senses-soaked sophistication, he had grown used to since boarding Lilac Willow, faded into the distance. This was the sharp end, and here the Empire meant business.
An old refrain came to his mind: “Rule the Empire, the Empire rule the stars.” “But tell me, Admiral,” he said, “isn’t it true you haven’t got all that many of these ships left now?”
“That’s right,” Archier admitted with a sigh. “Not as many as we could do with, anyway. But that’s only because Diadem’s robot workforce has been on strike for the past hundred years, as part of their campaign to be recognised as sentients. As a result the Star Force yards are idle and no new ships have been laid down in that time. If the strike should end, we can begin replacing the fleets.” He shrugged, gesturing about him. “These guns were designed originally to be operated by fast-reaction robots, but they are so unreliable now. Still, animals serve well enough. Loyalty counts for more than you might think.”