Track of the Apocalypse Ch5 Ficbit – Ammo

~ crossovercreativechaos

“You think if O’Neill’s forces come here, they would find Hunter bullets more useful?”

“They might,” Ikoma stepped in. “We’ll have to check their guns. Caliber makes a difference. But if they’re used to machining to deal with propellant blowback instead of steam – that’s a tricky thing to get right. If they want to avoid weeks of testing and bad designs-”

“Months,” Suzuki put in. “Maybe a year.”

Ikoma shot him a disbelieving look. “It didn’t take us a year to make the bullets.”

“Didn’t take the best steamsmiths on the Koutetsujou a year.” Suzuki smirked. “Knew what we were doing.”

From that glint of light off Ikoma’s glasses, he still didn’t buy that. “Anyway. It’d take time. They’d be better off sticking to steam and jet bullets, or gunpowder and Hunter bullets.”

“Unless we can come up with something better.” Kajika took a deep breath. “I have asked Hunter Uryuu to trade details of Hunter bullet construction with our steamsmiths, so we have a chance to see if designs can be improved, and also to consider including his own trade offers under the auspices of the Koutetsujou’s Lady, so we may all present a united front in the face of a foreign general.”

Ayame sent up a silent prayer to whatever kami were watching over them, thanking them for the bravery and tenacity of her people. She tried, but she couldn’t think of everything – and when she hadn’t, the Koutetsujou’s crew had still seen an opportunity and moved. “Hunter Uryuu. Would you be willing to do that?”

Half-gloved fingers tapped bare arms. “I’m thinking about it,” Uryuu grumped. “You probably want Eishun for the tricky details, but I know enough about our bullets to get started… little lady makes a good argument that we shouldn’t give stuff away, and Ikoma thinks she’ll get us all a better deal than I could.” He side-eyed Kajika in all her feisty hope, and glanced back at Ikoma. “Did she really beat down station markets to half price?”

26 thoughts on “Track of the Apocalypse Ch5 Ficbit – Ammo”

    1. There used to be a Toastmasters type of college club organization, that was meant for engineers and science types. The idea was that they would learn to make business presentations and gain business survival skills.

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    1. This must be one of those things where I lack the experience to understand. Why is a good negotiator scary?

      (I mean, sure, Tattletale in Worm could break people by cold-reading-verging-on-mind-reading their personal issues, but she herself was controlled at gunpoint for a while by a more ruthless villain.)

      -Albert

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      1. It’s at least partly the “this person is able to just run over everyone, even when being nice and polite, just by force of personality”. Sure, she doesn’t fit the Yamato Nadeshiko pattern, but similar to them she shows “force of arms isn’t the only type of strength”. And a culture that values warriors is potentially more prone to recognizing non-standard types of warriors for their deeds and skill, even if only subconsciously. And when you get down to it, Kajika stands beside the other main characters in her own right, not just as “friend” or “sidekick”, even if it is for things other than “taking a gun/sword/etc and killing kabane”.

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      3. Remember in Embers where Zuko thinks it’s weird that the Ba Sing Se refugees who have chosen him as their lord are scared of his armed troops? (They’re still on the ships at that point and haven’t gotten to the caldera yet.)

        I still wouldn’t be afraid of her. Might refuse to negotiate with her if we were opposed, but if I was of Aragane the scary thought would be losing her as our quartermaster.

        I’ll admit, if she was like that Littlefinger prick from Game of Bewbs, _that_ would be scary.

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      6. Or worth her weight in (extremely valuable trade material). Hopefully Kurusu understands that keeping her alive is only slightly less important than keeping Ayame alive.

        Heh. I’ll bet that one of her techniques is to figure out exactly what someone needs and arrange to trade that, bypassing the need for a medium of exchange.

        -Albert

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    1. Actually, Hammond as a station-lord is rather accurate, or at least close enough. The major difference is that the people don’t know of the threats he’s holding off. Now, if they can clear Keishi to at least a greenish yellow, that gets a bit more accurate. If they can do that, they have a well defended fall back point, but nobody sane is going to want to use it before they have too. The locals are highly Not Interested in it, and it would be a good location to get trade going, particularly if they can have an in with a hayajiro.

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      3. Sure, but wouldn’t that effectively be clearing all of Hi-no-Moto itself down to . . .

        Well, honestly, given that these are to the rabies!zombies from Black Tide Rising what those are in turn to the slow shamblers of Night of the Living Dead or Resident Evil, I’m not sure that clearing not!Japan down to anything but ‘the last of them is dead and gone’ is acceptable, if the local Stargate is going to be put into regular use.

        John Ringo had Papa Wolf experiment with various automated zed-killers. Can Sam see how Kabane nerves react to various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum? If they’re vulnerable to x-rays or gamma-rays (the real stuff, not the comic book ‘science’), rigging up a radiological device would be tricky, but maybe there are fusion byproducts – the McRucky looks like it uses at least some shielding – that would serve for something high-intensity and thus with a short half-life?

        -Albert

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  5. >>Is it even possible to clear Keishi like that?

    I’d imagine it’d end up like Atlantis, which aside from the Wraith, is a city of Ancient technology. Forget outside factors, the city can kill you on accident. I’m frankly disappointed they didn’t have more episodes where they had to deal with those with the Ancient gene accidentally activating tech, because the Ancients really felt that a psychic/telepathic interface was more convenient then using buttons. Yes, I’m serious, a person with the right gene sequence and a curious mindset could set off Ancient tech, and they didn’t appear to believe in something so banal as a hard copy of their inventory.

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      1. Bunnies: ‘Oooh.’

        Atlantis could have been sanitized of a lot of Ancient booby traps with that time travel thing with Weir. Those eps might have just been the things she wasn’t able to fix, or was not aware of. If the aging wasn’t an artifact of the stasis, she had something like 40 or 60 years to do things.

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      2. That Weir didn’t know about any of that stuff, unless Janus gave her a list of stuff to turn off, and she wouldn’t have been able to do anything about stuff that needed the ATA gene to put into safe mode, since she didn’t have it. In her timeline, the city shield failed in a rapid cascade shortly after the expedition arrived and the city DID NOT rise to the surface automatically. Weir and one or two others who made it into a Puddle Jumper that Janus had retrofitted with his prototype time drive were the only ones who didn’t drown. While trying to find the garage door button, they accidentally activated the time drive and wound up thousands of years in the past, at the tail end of the siege of Atlantis and were promptly shot down by the Wraith. Weir was the only one the Ancients were able to save.

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      3. The city could be running in idiot mode – Janus certainly can change whatever protocols he wanted given his rank amongst the ancients and his plans include 7 ZPMs being held in trust for the expedition? There has to be far more we never got to see.

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      4. Yeah, I’m assuming that Janus could’ve given her an inventory. And without an ATA gene, she could have dumped dangerous on activation objects out the bottom of the city.

        Imagine she has done this with canon Atlantis, then imagine an Ancient city where this was not done. Then perhaps imagine a city that was used to study dangerous objects.

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