Niasi 3

"I am sorry, guildmaster, but I simply see no purpose to continuing to support your brethren." Arminia said, resisting the urge to adjust her presence coronet. A simple gesture like that could make her seem nervous, undermine her dominance of the conversation. But wow it had managed to get itself into an uncomfortable position.

"You can't simply give up on my guild, your Highness." Andreh Rudi responded. The man before her was fair-skinned and green-eyed, and by his accent, from the northern reaches of Crow's Land; he wore a fine formal tunic, and he was powerfully muscled, with calloused hands. One of his cheeks had an odd, spotted scar, a powder burn from a black powder explosion. Unlike Arminia, he stood, his tricorn(of an extremely fashionable fold and feather) held in one hand as he looked at her with the proper mix of respect and the urge to sell her his plan.

Arminia sighed, and took a sip of the steaming coffee that sat on her table(In fact it was not coffee, but a drink very like coffee made from native plants, much like how neither of the two were speaking English)

"Pray tell, Master Rudi, what purpose does the Gunsmith's Guild serve to the crown in this day and age?" Arminia countered. She'd dealt with tradesmen enough by this point to know that, unlike her more aristocratic subjects, an argument based on logic and reason would be far more effective on him than it could be on the Nobility.

"Your Highness, our knowledge of firearms, though simple compared to that found in the Skyship, is still extensive. If you were to wed our own experience with the raw data within the computer banks, we could produce even more efficient firearms, and we have plenty enough workmen to produce them in vast numbers. And if this theory of your minister's is true, and we really will encounter other peoples out in the sky, we may yet have need of those numbers of weapons." Arminia shook her head, taking another calm sip of coffee.

"Master Rudi, I have dealt with these pleas and ones like them every day since I took the throne. Always from women and men who have decided that they need the secrets of the skyship, that their profession is utterly critical to Astaria's expansion and survival. But I can't conclude the same. Before the Skyship fell, your guild produced perhaps three thousand firearms per month for all of Crow's Land. These were the typical smoothbore flintlocks. One bullet in twenty seconds, a hundred and fifty meters of range at best, around equivalent to what was used in perhaps the eighteenth century, according to those records of the Dawn Age. I understand that my mother used some of those records to have you expand her armies, and now you could produce perhaps two thousand bolt action rifles per month. By no means is this unimpressive; this evolution took two entire centuries in the Dawn Age." Arminia paused for emphasis.

"But our present capacity of autofactories could make half a million weapons in a month, and these are fully-automatic pulse weapons. In all honesty, Master Rudi, your guild is unneeded. You aren't unique in this. The autoplantations have made farming obsolete, the manufactories obsoleted by autofactories. We have moved to what is called a "post-scarcity" society, where our population, small as it is, can be supported entirely on our machines. Our farmers and manufacturers are free to do as they please, obsoleted by ancient inventions. Now, the Gunsmith's Guild will be joining them. You can continue to refine the gunsmith's art, and I'm quite sure you will, but you will receive no support from the crown. Thank you for meeting with me, Master Rudi, but I have a meaning with my spaceship designers. Good day."

______________________________________________________________________________

The meeting with the spaceship designers went far better.

“So this is your prelimenary design for a cruiser ship” Arminia mused, looking at the holographic image in front of her. It floated, translucent. According to the scale provided, it was nearly a hundred meters long, in the metric system that Arminia’s mother had imposed on the world to replace the measurement system of cubits and stones that had existed in Astaria beforehand. At that length, it was comfortably twice the size of the Queen Garretia class, which had been the largest and most powerful class of war galleon ever launched on the seas of Ladra. Apparently, around half of the ship’s length was taken up with engine systems, if the cut-away diagram was anything to go by.

“Tell me about the engine design, Baroness” Arminia said, glancing at Mikas Noyil, better known as Baroness Fire Hollow, head of Gallitea Shipbuilding. Arminia had found it useful to nationalize an existing shipbuilding firm; there was an amazing amount in common between a fusion powered spaceship and a square-rigged galleon.

“This design is essentially a copy of the one set forth in the records you provided, Your Highness.” She began. Arminia was quietly astonished at how different Fire Hollow sounded from most of her subjects, but Fire Hollow had been one of the few to grow up in the same high-technology environment as Arminia; their own use of the Astarian tongue was accented with scientific, carefully spoken words of English, taken from the skyship’s own recordings. “We were fortunate to be able to go directly to a Proton-Proton chain for fusion. The records attest that many ships used the “triple-alpha process” to work with helium, preferred for its stable chemistry, but its higher activation temperature meant it was never quite as efficient a process, though the engines were actually cheaper. But the proton-proton chain will let us make hydrogen with electrolysis. The basic design is simple; a laser kickstarts a self-sustaining hydrogen fusion process. Since only around four percent of a mass of hydrogen is turned into energy in the fusion itself, we use the remainder of the hydrogen as reaction mass. This is an enormously efficient process, whereas a ship that used the triple alpha process would have had to carry quite a lot of water for the same purpose. But in this case, some hydrogen fuses, the rest is expelled out the back of the ship as a white-hot plasma stream.”

“I have to admit, you lost me somewhere around ‘higher activation temperature,’ Baroness.” Arminia began. “But from your tone, I take it you’re satisfied with the design?”

“Oh, quite. And don’t feel bad. Your poor armswoman was lost somewhere around ‘proton’” Arminia and Mikas both glanced towards the door of the princess’ Presence Chamber, where Arminia’s personal armswoman, Sirka Nanin, stood with a prominent blush on her face. But Arminia was more concerned with the fact that, embarrassed or not, she was still alert for danger, and the pulse rifle on her back and sword at her hip were Sirka’s business, not the mysteries of fusion drives.

“She follows better than you might think, actually. She’s been my Armswoman for quite a while now, what is it, seven years?” Arminia looked directly at Sirka at the end of her sentence, so she had no choice but to respond.

“Nearly nine, your highness. I was assigned to you on your thirteenth birthday, remember?” Arminia turned back to the holographic starship, sure that Sirka’s math had to be wrong. Nine years?

“As for armaments.” Mikas began again. “I originally wanted to go for a single type of gun, the new heavy laser we’ve dubbed the ‘long twelve terahertz’ but ran into the issue that, to provide an appropriate chase armament would have required four entire batteries’ worth of them. Apparently, when you cram the nose of a ship full of all sorts of fancy ‘electronics’ gear that my scientist-witches tell me is critical, you don’t have room to mount an entire broadside’s worth of guns. So we settled on three batteries of the long twelves in each broadside. That’s thirty six guns per side. The chase armament is a single massive x-ray laser, much more devastating than any long twelve; its frequency is thirty exahertz, compared to the broadsides’ simple kilohertz. By our calculations, that gun would be able to flash-burn an entire city block from geostationary orbit, despite all the atmosphere in the way.”

Arminia’s only response was a low whistle.

“We’ve compared our design to those on record in the skyship,” Mikas continued “and we have to assume it will be effective at anything we might run against. At the very least, it’s going to be by far the best we can make with the technology provided.”

“And that’s all I can ask, after all.”