Hyperion 3: Endymion by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons [Dan Simmons]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hardcore Sci-Fi, Epic
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2011-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

"No," said A. Bettik.

I turned to look at him as he leaned against the steering oar. "No?" I said.

"I saw M. Lamia's weapon when she was on the Benares," said the android. "It was an antiquated pistol-her father's, I believe-but it had a pearl handle, a laser sight, and was adapted to hold flechette cartridges."

"Oh," I said. Well, the idea had been appealing. "At least this thing's been well preserved and rebuilt," I said. It must have been kept in some sort of stasis-box; a thousand-year-old handgun would not have worked otherwise. Or perhaps it was some sort of clever reproduction that the Consul had picked up on his travels. It did not matter, of course, but I had always been struck by the . . . sense of history, I guess you would call it ... that old firearms seemed to emanate.

I fired the flechette pistol next. It took only one burst to see that it worked quite nicely, thank you. The floating ration pak was blown into a thousand flowfoam shards from thirty meters away. The entire wave top jumped and shimmered as if a steel rain were pelting it. Flechette weapons were messy, hard to miss with, and eminently unfair to the target, which is why I had chosen this. I set the safety on and put it back in my pack.

The plasma rifle was harder to sight in. The click-up optical sight allowed me to zero in on anything from the floating ration pak thirty meters away, to the horizon, twenty-five klicks or so away, but while I sank the ration pak in the first shot, it was hard to tell the effectiveness of the longer shots. There was nothing out there to shoot at. Theoretically, a pulse rifle could hit anything one could see-there was no allowance necessary for windage or ballistic arc-and I watched through the scope as the bolt kicked a hole in waves twenty klicks out, but it did not create the same confidence that firing at a distant target would have. I raised the rifle to the giant moon now setting behind us. Through the scope I could just make out a white-topped mountain there-probably frozen CO2 rather than snow, I knew-and, just for the hell of it, squeezed off a round.

The plasma rifle was essentially silent compared to the semiautomatic slug-thrower pistol: only the usual cat's-cough when it fired. The scope was not powerful enough to show a hit, and at those distances, rotation of the two worlds would be a problem, but I would be surprised if I had not hit the mountain. Home Guard barracks were full of stories of Swiss Guard riflemen who had knocked down Ouster commandos after firing from thousands of klicks away on a neighboring asteroid or somesuch. The trick, as it had been for millennia, was seeing the enemy first.

Thinking of that after firing the shotgun once, cleaning it, and setting away all the weapons, I said, "We need to do some scouting today.

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