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problems.’
    Kit appeared
beside them, looking up and around with the expression of someone
expecting doom to rain down from on high at any moment. ‘The
network security here is… scary,’ she said.
    ‘And this is
all to protect Yliaster?’ Fox asked.
    ‘Oh, not just Yliaster,’ Terri replied. ‘That’s the biggest project
we have going on here at the moment, but there are a few other
things happening here which we really don’t want anyone knowing
about. Nothing illegal, obviously.’ The last was added quickly.
    Fox smiled. ‘I
didn’t think there would be.’
    ‘That suit you
used when you rescued me last month, the invisibility surface was
invented here. The development work to make that Gauss pistol of
yours into a viable, mass-produced weapon was done here and, uh,
you should see the latest development.’ Terri gave her a grin. ‘I
think you’ll get a kick out of that. But we’ll get you settled in
first. All the accommodation is right at the bottom.’
    ‘How far down?’
They were headed for a bank of elevators, and one of those was
actually marked as ‘Accommodation Only.’
    ‘About a
hundred and fifty metres.’
    ‘I’m glad I’m
not claustrophobic.’
    ~~~
    ‘Uh, yes… Uh, the
pistol that Mister Martins built for, uh, you, uh, Miss Meridian
provided us with, uh, a considerable amount of, uh, practical
data.’
    Fox looked at
the man speaking, letting her mind work over the sentence to make
sure she had actually got what he was saying. His name was
Whittaker Whitwallace and that had probably been enough to provide
a degree of isolation as a child, but his brain had probably done
everything it could to make that worse. He was tall, very thin,
with watery blue eyes, and thinning blonde hair. He wore a tatty
lab coat over a counterpressure vacuum suit which made him look
even thinner. His workshop was cluttered with various dismantled
weapons; Fox actually recognised some of the parts.
    ‘Jackson said
he’d got useful data from it,’ Fox said.
    ‘Uh, yes and he
passed that data and the basic, uh, mechanism to us and, uh, we got
on with making of it what we, uh, could.’
    ‘I think
Jackson mentioned a rifle.’
    ‘Uh, indeed. We
will have a, uh, rifle variant available for use soon. Uh,
primarily for Special Forces units. We have standardised on a, uh,
four-millimetre projectile for military consumption. Uh, an assault
rifle with underslung electromagnetic grenade launcher.’
    ‘Twenty-five
mil?’
    ‘Indeed. You
know your ordnance, Miss Meridian.’
    ‘I have
something of an interest.’
    He nodded,
seeming to become rather more interested himself. Fox noted that
Terri was smirking. ‘We also have a squad support variant of the
rifle with a heavier barrel, uprated cooling and a large,
three-hundred-round, box magazine… and a
six-thousand-round-per-minute cyclic rate of fire. Uh, we believe
that should make a difference in fire suppression situations.’
    ‘It may do,
yeah,’ Fox replied, wincing.
    ‘But you will
want to see its big brother.’
    Fox blinked at
him. ‘You built something bigger?’
    ‘Well… bigger and , uh, smaller. We have had railguns on tanks and ships
for a couple of decades, railguns and coilguns in space, but these
are all high-calibre weapons. We decided to uh… Perhaps you should
just see it.’ He was grinning, not an entirely pleasant sight.
    ‘Sure. Let’s
see it.’
    It was set up
in a firing range next door, a large gun, shaped somewhat like a
Gatling machine gun, but bigger, with a hopper-style ammo magazine
mounted over it. It was set up on a mounting pole, facing down a
fifty-metre expanse of open space which ended in moon rock.
    ‘It’s loaded,
if you would, uh, like to give it a test fire,’ Whitwallace
said.
    Fox walked over
to the weapon and took the ear defenders which were hanging off one
of the twin pistol grips at the back, slipping them on. There were
goggles too, so she added them before checking over the controls.
There was