Walter Williams - Conventions of War

Sula kept a watch on the death certificates filed in the Records Office and discovered that a minor member of the Ushgay clan had died in a bomb explosion, and a Naxid police officer had been run over by his own car. The death certificate gave no indication how the officer had managed this, but she decided that the next number ofResistance would claim the incident as an action of the Lord Richard Li wing of the secret army.

Sula bypassed the local police and the Legion of Diligence and acquired her team’s ration cards directly from the Records Office, splicing into the record the signatures and testaments of perfectly legitimate police officers and members of the Legion. She acquired a card for each of the team’s many backup identities and had each mailed to the communal Riverside apartment. She later changed the address in the records so it wouldn’t seem odd that so many people were sharing the same address.

She also acquired a card in the name of Michael Saltillo, the identity she’d established for Casimir. It might come in handy at some point.

Three days after the announcement about rationing, Sula was making deliveries in the High City, and called Sidney. He said that progress had been made and invited her to visit the shop.

Because she didn’t know Sidney well enough to assess whether it was safe, she left Spence and Macnamara in the truck, parked inconspicuously down the street. “If I’m ambushed,” she said, “try to pull me out. But if you can’t, make sure one of your bullets finishes me.”

Spence looked as if she weren’t listening. In Macnamara she saw horror, then acceptance. He nodded and said nothing.

This time she was able to go in the front door. The shop had been reopened, and the display cases and racks showed only weapons suitable to Naxid anatomy.

Sidney waited behind a tall ceramic desk, his mustachios newly waxed and elaborately curled. “That was fast,” he said in his ruined voice.

“Efficiency is my motto.”

From his desk, Sidney locked the front door and reprogrammed the sign out front to announce that the shop would reopen in an hour. “Come along,” he said, and took her to the back room.

The room was the same model of neatness and regularity it had been a few days earlier, though the smell of hashish was more subdued than on Sula’s first visit. On the immaculate surface of a workbench she saw a short rifle. Sidney turned on a lamp, picked it up and held it to the light.

“The Sidney Mark One, if you like,” he said. “I went for a simple firearm-nothing requiring a heavy battery pack or elaborate technology.”

Light gleamed on the rifle’s matte-black surfaces. It was obviously crude, with a stock made of pieces of carbon-fiber rod, a barrel that might have originally been a resinous pipe fitting, a receiver of metal, and iron sights.

“That was fast,” Sula said.

“Simple firearms are easy, if you don’t want elegance,” Sidney said. “It helped that the gun’s completely illegal-I didn’t have to add the unlocking code and thumbprint-recognition pad required by law. Computer-assisted lathes did the work. The hard part was the ammunition.”

He reached into a drawer, withdrew a tubelike magazine, and snapped it into place. “I wanted a traditional propellant, one that carries its own oxidant. I wanted it caseless so people wouldn’t have to worry about making cartridges.” He rooted around in the drawer and came up with some small yellow cylinders, like cigarette filters. “The propellant wasn’t hard,” he said. “It’s standard Fleet issue DD6 and will fire on a planet’s surface, in the vacuum of space, and underwater. Its ingredients are readily obtainable, and you can mix the stuff on your kitchen table and bake it in an oven.” He handed a few of the cylinders to Sula. They felt dry and grainy. She pictured grandmotherly types turning them out on cookie sheets and smiled.

“You can cast the bullets out of metal or hard plastic, then stick them to the propellant with epoxide,” Sidney said. “Unfortunately, neither bullet type will penetrate standard police armor, but they’ll be useful against softer targets.”

Sula examined the propellant cylinders again. “What do you use for a detonator?” she asked.

Sidney gave a grim smile. “I didn’t want people messing around with mercury fulminate and the like. Blow their own fingers off.”

“That’s the problem we’ve been having with our bombs.”

“Maybe I can help you with that. DD6, you see, will ignite at high temperature, so I built a standard laser-emitting diode into the breech.” A few competent movements of his hands broke down the weapon and held the part to the light. “This is the most critical piece of the gun, and it can be scavenged from practically every piece of communications equipment made. Comm units, music and video players…there’s no way the Naxids can prevent people from acquiring as many of these as they like. It will run off a little micro battery you can acquire anywhere. The operator will have to replace the diode every few hundred rounds, but it’s a quick job and you can do it in the field.”

Sidney reassembled the gun. “Breaks down easily,” he said, “and reassembles without fuss. The parts are machined to a fairly low tolerance, which means there’s a lot of slop in the movement and parts will wear out quickly, but it’ll stand hard handling without jamming. There’s no real safety, but you can lock the bolt back-so. This lever”-Flicking it-“switches from single shot to full automatic.”

“May I handle it?”

He smiled. “Of course.”

The gun was clean and cool in Sula’s hands. She raised it to her shoulder and felt the balance. The tubular butt was padded against recoil with scraps of foam and shiny tape, and it felt like a toy.

“Want to fire it?” Sidney asked.

Sula looked at him in surprise. “We can do thathere?”

In answer, Sidney spoke a few words into the air. There was a hum of machinery, and a slab of the floor lifted on hinges as a small elevator rose.

“I use it to move some of the heavier merchandise,” he said. He stepped onto the elevator, and Sula lay the rifle carefully against her shoulder and joined him. Sidney spoke another few words and the elevator descended.

Below the shop there was a darkened room that smelled of must and metal. Sidney turned on lights and Sula saw a storage area-largely empty-and a pair of wide epoxide sewer pipes that ran the length of the shop in the direction of the street, forming a firing range with targets at the far end. Sidney gestured at the far wall, where a target already lay waiting. He reached for a pair of ear protectors from a rack and placed them comfortably on his head. “Be my guest,” he said.

Sula got ear protection, braced the rifle on her hip and flicked the bolt with her thumb to let it slam forward. She put the rifle against her shoulder, gazed through the simple iron sights, took a calming breath, let it out, and squeezed the trigger. The bang was very loud in the small space, and there was very little recoil, which was normal with caseless ammunition. A hole appeared in the filmy plastic surface of the target, a hand’s breadth off center.

“Not bad,” Sidney said. “This gun’s strong point isn’t accuracy.”

Sula fired a few more rounds to get the feel of the weapon, then clicked to full automatic. She half expected the smooth, continuous roar of the weapons she’d trained with, the rifles that could cycle at over a hundred rounds per second, but instead there was a reliable chug-chug-chug action, slow enough so she could keep the weapon on target.

She fired several bursts, and then the magazine was empty. She lowered the rifle, and Sidney reached over her shoulder to press the keypad that would bring the target swaying on its cable to her. She’d riddled the center section.