Marcelle let silent feet carry her into the engineering space where Moirrey had taken up residence. First Lord had offered the woman a bigger space and a full support team, but Moirrey had waved them off as a distraction from what she needed.
Looking around, Marcelle figured that more people would have just gotten in the way of stuff. And Moirrey had stuff piled everywhere about the place. Hopefully, Saana Robles would be back soon from Petron and could start sorting this crap out.
Looking at the engineer at work, Marcelle decided she could have stomped in here as loud as she wanted, with a full marching band, as long as she didn’t actually threaten any of Moirrey’s projects. Moirrey was head-down on some welding project, black shield in place and sparks dancing in the air, oblivious to anything else.
Moirrey.
Marcelle carried the long, metal case lightly in one hand, a superlight alloy in a style still called an anvil case from the depths of history, when apparently you carried anvils in them. Or something.
The box was one hundred and seventy centimeters long, twenty thick, and sixty wide. Matte black. Marcelle would have thought it perfect for most electric guitars, if she still played regularly and needed something so grossly overdone to protect an axe from the hazards of travel.
It rang with a dull thump as Marcelle up-ended it and slammed one end down onto the marble floor with enough force that she might have chipped tiles. Heaven knew she wasn’t going to damage the case unless she brought a hand weapon to the fray.
Moirrey flinched, powered off her laser, and slid it blind into a cute, leather holster sitting by her right hand on the counter. She flipped up the faceplate with a grin that most people might need the welding mask to be protected from.
“Wazzat?” Moirrey asked.
Marcelle leaned her long frame forward and rested her chin on her hands on top of the case.
“You said somewhere between a meter and a half, and two, right?” Marcelle replied.
“Did.”
“So I went and found you a case,” Marcelle grinned.
“Looks like one of Jessica’s sword cases,” Moirrey observed. “She gon’ miss it?”
“Same manufacturer,” Marcelle said. “Contacted them and got a smoking hot deal, on account of my connection. They are apparently making bank on these things now, once everyone found out Jessica used their model. Will this work?”
“Gimme.”
Moirrey was up off her stool and grasping at the box, so Marcelle let go and stepped back. Moirrey spun and flipped the case up onto the counter, next to whatever she had been welding, and pulled a tape measure from some hidden pocket.
You could never imagine how much gear Moirrey carried with her at all times until you had watched the woman strip to do laundry on someone else’s starship.
“Perfects,” Moirrey exclaimed after a second.
Marcelle watched the tiny woman pull open the second drawer down and extract a wooden dowel rod, tapping it once on the floor with a ringing thud and then placing it into the hollow interior of the case.
The stick was a golden brown, with wavy, oil-like patterns in the wood. Marcelle guessed it to be right around a meter and a half long, and at least two centimeters across.
“Where did you find that?” she asked.
Moirrey grinned.
“I mights be a bits famous,” she admitted. “An’ tole someone it were a present for Jessica, whens I were done. Gots a good deal. Still freakin’ ’spensive.”
“I would hope so,” Marcelle said. “That’s wild olive. Those things grow for centuries, and not on Ladaux.”
“Yup, but grows good on Pohang,” Moirrey agreed. “They exports it and furniture makers mostly buys the stuff. The iron were the easiest part, once I figured out how bendy I wanted it.”
“Bendy?” Marcelle asked. “It’s a spear. It’s not supposed to bend.”
“Ah, but it were,” Moirrey countered. “Is a pilum. Ya heaves it at th’ther guy. Diamond-shaped tip punches through a shield like a bodkin and maybe hits him anyway. Either way, the middle of the shaft is supposed’ta bend when it lands, so’s you canna throw it back, and canna even pulls it outs yer shield. Serious troubles when crazy Roman dude with a gladius comin’ fer yer liver.”
Marcelle nodded. Her job had been finding Moirrey the books, not actually reading them herself, beyond skimming enough to know what questions the crazy engineer would ask next.
Her job was finding things. What people called a dog-robber, because in the old days, sometimes you had to take a bone away from a hungry dog to feed a pissy admiral. Jessica had needs, Marcelle found her things. No incriminating questions asked.
Same with Moirrey.
Marcelle watched the woman pull a metal piece from the same drawer as the spear body. Marcelle figured it was about as long as her arm, with a cup at the bottom to fit over the end of the wood, a four-pointed punching tip like a special dice at the other end, and a shaft behind the head about as big around as one of her fingers.
Moirrey placed the spear-head into the box along with the olive rod and gave a satisfied grunt. Marcelle walked close enough to study the result. Just needed some foam, maybe some ugly fake fur, like her first guitar case, and a few spots to store spare strings, picks, and towels. She’d be all set.
“Okay, so I get that part,” Marcelle said to her tiny sidekick. “The fetial is a priest, and he walks up to the border, says the magic phrase, then throws the spear across the border as a formal declaration of war.”
“Yup,” Moirrey agreed. “More to it, historically, but we’s not about to give them thirty-three day’s notice that a sneak attack’s comin’. But we gots ta be formals.”
“Right,” Marcelle reached out one long arm and rested it atop the strange, metal contraption taking up most of the countertop. It looked vaguely like a cross between a robot spider and a coffin, roughly octagonal in cross section, something like four meters long, and nearly a meter across. “So what’s all this for?”
Moirrey’s smile lit up the room again.
“We throws the pilum as a formal declaration,” she chirped. “Then we attacks. But Jessica wants a big, grand gesture fer th’historical folks. So we’s gonne throws this thing from orbit, and it carries the pilum down close ’nuff that it can drop the thing unto enemie soil. Boom. War is begun. All formal-like.”
It made a bizarre sort of sense, when you considered that Jessica had asked Moirrey to top 2218 Svati Prime. This thing would probably be a lovely shooting star crossing a night sky, which primitive cultures had usually considered a sign of impending bad luck.
And Jessica Keller declaring war on your poor planet was going to be the ultimate bad day for somebody.