"Just a minute, I'll go into that later. While your premises were correct, your conclusion is not. You graduated No. 1, and in every respect, save experience, you are as well qualified to command as is any captain of the fleet; and since the Brittania is such a radical departure from any conventional type, battle experience is not a prerequisite. Therefore, if she holds together through one engagement she is yours for good. In other words, to make up for the possibility of having yourself scattered all over space, you have a chance to win that ten years' rating you mentioned a minute ago, all in one trip. Fair enough?"
"Fair? It's fine—wonderful! And thanks a——"
"Never mind the thanks until you get back. You were about to comment, I believe, upon the impossibility of using explosives against a free opponent?"
"It can't be impossible, of course, since the Brittania has been built. I just don't quite see how it could have been made effective."
"You lock to the pirate with tractors, screen to screen—dex about ten kilometers. You blast a hole through his screens to his wall shield. The muzzle of the Q-gun mounts an annular multiplex projector which puts out a Q-type tube of force—Q47SM9, to be exact. As you can see from the type formula, this helix extends the gun barrel from ship to ship and confines the propellent gases behind the projectile, where they belong. When the shell strikes the wall shield of the pirate and detonates, something will have to give way.
"The tube and tractors, being pure force and computed for this particular combination of explosions, will hold; and our physicists have calculated that the ten-kilometer column of inert propellent gases will offer so much inertia and resistance that any possible wall shield will have to go down. That is the point that cannot be tried out experimentally. It is quite within the bounds of possibility that the pirates may have been able to develop wall screens as powerful as our Q-type helices.
"It should not be necessary to point out to you that if they have been able to develop a wall shield that will stand up under detonating duodecaplylatomate, the back blast through the breech of the Q-gun will blow the Brittania apart as though she were made of matchwood. That is only one of the chances—and perhaps not the greatest one—that you and your crew will have to take. They are all volunteers, by the way, and will get plenty of extra rating if they come through alive. Do you want the job?"
"You don't have to ask me that, chief—you know I want it!"
"Of course, but I had to go through the formality of asking, sometime. But to get on with the discussion. This pirate situation is entirely out of control, as you already know. We don't even know whether Boskone is a reality, a figurehead, a symbol, or simply a figment of somebody's imagination. But whoever or whatever Boskone really is, some being or some group of beings has perfected a mighty efficient organization of outlaws; so efficient that we haven't been able to locate their main base.