“Good. Maybe my engineers have some sense of discretion. No, it’s not really stealth, or shields either. It’s more like displacement technology. Countermeasures. Basically the enemy sensors get baffled and think you’re several degrees away from your actual position. Radiation signatures, engine exhaust, sonar, it tricks everything. So when the enemy fires, their missiles blow right past you. The technology even affects direct visual observation.”

“How? I can see tricking sensors, but how do you trick an eye?”

“Remember that R-and-D boondoggle you were part of, with the active camouflage?”

Callie nodded. She still owned the only working prototype suit from that project, because it had been custom made to fit her. “Sure. But it was too expensive to put on a space suit, how is it cost-effective to put it on a ship?”

Warwick shrugged. “Ask the Liars we bought it from. They miniaturized, they mass-produced, they figured out how to make a fabricator spit the components out without breaking half of them in the process. Who knows? We cover your ship with little cameras and projectors the size of pinheads, totally unobtrusive, and they can project an image of your ship elsewhere, while making your actual shape invisible.”

“You’re getting me excited, Warwick. How about guns? There are also guns?”

“Various new and interesting guns, yes. For a non-violent species, the Liars sure do a lot of interesting things with antimatter and sound waves and focused light. I can send you the specs for available weaponry, if I decide to give you this commission.”

“I thought the commission was mine for the asking?”

Warwick rubbed a hand across the maze on her skull. “Yes, but that was before you asked to borrow my new ordnance. We were going to do a lot of testing, to see if we wanted to invest in upgrades for the main security force. Sending you out there is tempting, though. Glauketas has been trouble for a long time. Plus, taking over their base would be nice – give that asteroid a little push more firmly into our space, and it would make an excellent border outpost…”

Callie watched the calculations in her eyes. No matter how well armed, there was a chance the Raven might be captured or destroyed, and maybe the new weaponry was too valuable to risk falling into the hands of pirates. There was clearly a complex cost-benefit analysis going on. After a moment Warwick nodded. “All right. I’ll have your ship outfitted. I’m going to fit the new equipment with failsafes, though, so your computer can decommission them completely if the Raven gets captured. No way I’m letting pirates get their hands on this kind of materiel.” She sighed. “Until they can afford to buy it from the Liars themselves, anyway. All the equipment comes back to me when you’re done, too, understood?”