A few dozen of those fifty-gram antimatter pellets hitting the hull at six thousand kps would do real damage even to a strike cruiser. If I was lucky enough to catch it with the cooling ports open I might even cripple the main gun, which would be a heck of an accomplishment for a tiny little attack boat.
I watched the missiles dodge and weave their way towards the target. One was vaporized by a secondary battery, and then the cloud of ionized coolant dissipated and the ship’s point defense lasers opened fire. But I could see I’d timed it right. Just a few more seconds until my missiles reached effective range. One blew up, and then another, their protective bubbles of plasma boiled away by an increasing number of lasers. But there were fourteen left. The lead missile was about to fire…
The sim froze, and I realized my com was buzzing.
“Hello?” I said, momentarily disoriented by the sudden transition.
“Alice?” Lina’s face popped up on the com channel, looking concerned. “Where are you? Aren’t you supposed to be joining me for rounds this morning?”
“Morning?” I blinked slowly, and looked at the time.
“Oh, crash! I’m sorry, Lina, I lost track of time. I’m on my way. Don’t let me slow you down, I’ll catch up. I’m really, really sorry!”
She laughed. “Don’t worry so much, Alice. I’m not mad. Have you been up all night? What were you doing that was so interesting?”
I shut down the sim, and started climbing out of the VR pod.
“I was looking through the ship’s education database, and I found all these space battle sims,” I admitted. “Darn it, I knew this VR stuff was addictive.”
“Ah, so that’s what does it for you? You know, usually when a girl gets so into her sims that she loses track of time, it’s a completely different kind of scenario…”
“Lina! I’m officially fourteen, you nut. I’m way too young to be hearing about whatever freaky stuff spacers do with their sims.”
“If you say so, Alice. I had you pegged as a vanilla girl anyway. You know, sunsets and poetry and long walks on sandy beaches.”
“Oh. Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“See, I know what I’m talking about. Don’t be shy if you ever need advice. Trust me, I’m an expert on pretty much everything.”
“Do I even want to know what ‘everything’ includes?”
“I don’t know, do you?” She teased.
“Not today,” I decided. “Ugh, that was stupid of me. I can’t believe I stayed up all night trying to learn how to blow up imaginary spaceships.”
“Sounds better than learning on real ones,” she observed. “Well, drag your butt down to the mess hall so we can get some food in you. We’ve got a big day ahead of us. We arrive at Zanfeld tonight, and the captain wants a readiness check on all the ship’s weapons before we drop out of the Delta Layer.”
“I’m on my way, Lina.”
All the girls teased me about my little misadventure, but they also fed me so I couldn’t complain. I sheepishly promised to pay more attention to my clock from now on, and then Lina and Jenna dragged me off for their inspection of the ship’s magazines.
Their contents were a bit of a surprise to me. Intellectually I’d known that the Square Deal must be decently well armed, but the giant rack of missiles still caught me off guard. Hundred-ton anti-ship missiles, not much different than the ones that the ships in that sim had been firing at each other.
“Pretty sweet, huh?” Jenna said proudly. “This is the primary magazine for all twelve portside missile tubes. Each tube has a secondary magazine that holds eight missiles ready to launch, which is enough for most attack patterns. Those are actually the only missiles we keep hot, because it’s a pain to maintain them that way.
“Where are the warheads?” I asked, because the missiles I was looking at clearly didn’t have payloads mounted. What kind of warhead would a civilian ship use, anyway? I couldn’t see chemical explosives doing much to a pirate ship, but the missiles had a lot of delta vee. Maybe some kind of kinetic kill vehicle? Well, no, that wouldn’t work. If there was one thing I’d learned in the last few hours, it was the power of point defense lasers. Getting a payload within a few thousand kloms of a target was hard enough. Physically touching it would be pretty much impossible.
Lina led me to another hatch. “The warhead magazine is through here. Our missiles all use the same payload couplings, so we can mix-and-match whatever warheads the missile gunner calls for. Those bots over there fetch warheads and attach them to missiles when we’re expecting trouble. You can see we’ve got the good stuff, too.”
I found myself staring at the neatly engraved labels on the stacked warheads. Casaba howitzer rounds. Nuclear shotgun systems. Six gigaton planetary bombardment warheads. Bomb-pumped laser arrays. Crash, this was the same kind of loadout a Dominion warship would carry.
Lina giggled at my expression. “You look so cute with your mouth hanging open like that. Why are you so surprised?”
“Lina, this is awesome! But how do we get away with it?”
“What do you mean, Alice?”
“I mean, we could flatten a planet with this much firepower. Isn’t it illegal or something?”
“Ah, you’re still thinking like a dirtsider. Alice, who would pass a law like that, and how could they enforce it? Every ship that ventures off the major space lanes needs to be armed for self-defense, and you can’t drive off a pirate with the piddling little beam weapons a cargo ship has room for. You need nukes, and lots of them, or you’re an easy target.
“Besides, even if the major colonies tried to regulate spacecraft weapons, how would they enforce the ban? There are a million dark colonies willing to sell us the radioactives they mine, and we can fab our own warheads.”
“A real navy still has a lot more firepower than any merchant ship,” I pointed out.
“True, but the important thing is we aren’t helpless. A customs cutter can’t just order us to cut our drive and submit to boarding on a whim, because we can easily fight them off long enough to jump out of the system. We’d have to avoid that colony in the future, of course, but there are thousands of colonies just in this sector. So any colony that tries to regulate spacers too heavily will just drive off all the merchants in the area, and end up having to build their own trading ships.”
“Which would have to be armed just like the independents,” I realized. “Is that why the Merchant Association has so much power?”
“Partly. They also have the backing of the major insurance companies, and a pretty shrewd governing board. The Association is good at minimizing conflict between spacers and the colonies, which gives them a lot of influence on both sides.”
“I see. Still, I never realized space was so chaotic. It feels weird that there’s no one in charge of things.”
“Would you prefer the Inner Sphere? The Sol Sector is so heavily colonized there’s no dark space left, and major powers like the Dominion or the Polytechnic Swarm hold tens of thousands of systems each. They can enforce whatever regulations they like within their territories, and their border controls are good enough that they’ve just about eliminated piracy.”