Free Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright Page B

skillet.
    The pistol, a six-pound behemoth, was only good for one shot. Most of the mass of the gun was in the packed chaff, which consisted of hundreds of spinning, irregular bits of self-propelled interceptors. The computing technology needed to hit a bullet out of the air with a bullet had long been known; but the chaff did not need to hit a bullet straight-on to deflect it, merely to put a vortex of sufficient overpressure in the path. The Bernoulli effect, the same thing that gave curved wings lift or tennis balls backspin, would do the rest.
    To counter this, gunsmiths developed bullets as large as miniature rockets. The heavier the slug, the less partial vacuums created by counterfire could deflect it, and also a large slug could carry retrorockets and a simple calculator to correct deflection errors. Escort bullets, which were smaller and lighter, could run interference, feinting the chaff into premature discharge and clearing a path, or setting up vortices of their own to pull the main shot back onto its flightpath.
    And the inner globe of chaff which followed the outer globe corrected for feints, bringing more chaff-mass suddenly to one vector to deflect the bullet.
    And, of course, the bullet could be programmed to feint and correct, as could the escorts, to trick the chaff into mistaking one for the other; and chaff could be counterprogrammed to correct for this feint or ignore it, or …
    The chaff flight pattern and distribution was based on the microscopic differences in shape of their various lifting surfaces. Which shape of chaff went in which of the eight launchers that distributed the load was, of course, a question of pure game-theory, whose solution would maximize defensive flightpaths in minimum time, while leaving maximum correction options. It all depended on what you loaded where, how you packed your weapon.
    And then there was a simple psychological question: Was the opponent someone who programmed a dogleg feint and a straight-line correction, or a straight-line feint and a dogleg correction? If the first, you packed your gun to spread your chaff in a toroid like a smoke-ring; if the second, in a cone centered on his line of fire.
    Once the shot encountered the chaff cloud, it was all a chessgame on autopilot, with the bullet calculating the possible vortices of the chaff based on their presumed shapes, and the chaff attempting to deflect the bullet based on its presumed flightpath. The duel depended on the skill with which the chaff had been packed, the programming of the decision trees, and the intelligence of the pistol.
    Menelaus smiled. He had been packing chaff since boyhood. And his Krupp 5M could do the New New York Times sudoku puzzle.
    Menelaus was standing with his arm overhead, as if he meant to delope, and shoot in a right line into the air. It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, if Nails had been convinced he meant it. If Nails had followed suit, both men could have discharged harmlessly and, with no dishonor, walked away alive. Merely to come to this field preserved one’s name.
    Menelaus normally shot straight-line and corrected: swift, direct, bloody. This time he was not. Why did he give his opponent one last clear chance to walk away, both of them unbloodied, unashamed? Nails must have thought it was weakness.
    Thought? There was no time, really, to think through the options once the scarf dropped. These things are decided on instant and instinctive levels. Perhaps Nails sensed Menelaus had no more nerve. Perhaps he just wanted to get in the shot first.
    So Nails fired from the hip, not taking the extra eighth-second to raise his arm. Perhaps he sprained his wrist; certainly the kick threw him back, off balance, as if a hammer struck his shooting arm. His heavy armor clanged like a bell around him. Jets of black chaff erupted in eight directions from his barrel, making the man vanish in an opaque cloud, from which only radar aiming beams emerged. A smoke-ring. He had