“A disabled safety is a loan against future function. Know the interest rate before you sign.”— Tinkerer DB, #field-modificationsSeven point two kilojoules.That was MAX.That was everything the coilgun could currently deliver, the ceiling of its performance envelope as designed, rated, and intended by the engineers at whatever facility had built it before it ended up in Eddy’s possession and subsequently in mine.Through the seam on the smaller creatures, MAX had been definitive. Clean entry, structural collapse, dissolution before the echo finished traveling. There had been no ambiguity. No second guessing.One shot, done.The boss was not a smaller creature.The boss was what happened when you took the design brief for those creatures and handed it to a contractor who had misunderstood the specifications and dramatically exceeded them in every dimension.Seven point two kilojoules into this seam might be a wound.I looked at the coilgun in my hands.The modification had been sitting in the back of my mind since I’d found it mid-fight on the ninth group, tucked away under the label interesting but not currently relevant and quietly reclassifying itself as relevant with each pass of the boss’s slow, impossible breathing.Two bridges, two cuts.Four connections.The first capacitors in the bank joined in parallel rather than series, drawing and discharging simultaneously instead of in relay, doubling the current through the initial acceleration stage and pushing the round out of the barrel with energy the coilgun had never been designed to deliver.More than MAX. Enough more that the question of penetration became substantially less interesting because the answer became substantially more certain.I thought it would work.The problem was that “thought” and “tested” were different (...)