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No, you are still not ready to make a decision yet. There is simply too much at stake to just ... make some snap decision. After all, your life, your future - it is all on the line here.Thinking about it, even sleeping on it, that is the right decision, so long as you don't leave it too long, and you end up getting your decision made for you. Your mind resolved, you turn your attention to your work of cracking open the dummy filters that have been hidden throughout the desalinator to conceal the secret cargo of the <span class="mu-i">Highest Heaven</span>. They are pretty easy to open up, once you get them off of their feed line, and doing this now will make it easier to work through the nest of conduit later. Most of the fake ones that you have found were towards the top of the 'hedge' - out of reach and mostly out of sight for anyone on the floor of the bulkhead. So far, you have cracked open exactly thirty of the fake filters. Twelve of them have been completely empty. Seven of them have had complete but disassembled hand-lances in them. Seven more have had a variety of capacitors, in all manner of makes, configurations and conditions. The last four were a real mixed bag. There were two that were full of cleaning kits that were ruined when the fluid that they were packed with burst from its container in the cold vacuum of space, there was another one that had a single encrypted hard drive on it, with no indication as to what might be on it, and there was one that was absolute stuffed with rounds for a conventional rifle - dome caliber that you didn't recognize.
When you get number thirty-one open, you are pleased to see that it is ...
> Please choose ONE of the following:
> A Organ Grinder hand-lance with four 33-repeating capacitor banks. While many hand-lances can be reconfigured with 'repeating' capacitors, switching them over from long-duration scything beams to split-second bolts, the organ grinder is designed with repeating capacitors in mind, and therefore is able to squeeze as many ignitions as possible out its integrated capacitors - in the case of this particular side-arm, 132 ignitions with penetration roughly equivalent to that of a 7.62x39 round. The downside of organ grinders is that their capacitors are integrated, and cannot be swapped out - meaning that once the lance has expended those 132 ignitions is it a paperweight until recharged ... typically after the fighting is done.
> A Hydra hand-lance with seven battery sockets. While most hand-lances are built with integrated capacitors, some are designed to be used with either disposable batteries or detachable capacitors, allowing the 'dead heads' as they are colloquially called, to be replaced quickly. Hence the name, hydra. While it is rare for a hand-lance to come in a seven-seater configuration, unfortunately, this unit was designed to be used with proprietary batteries. At the moment, you have a little less than three dozen of these batteries. Once they are gone the weapon is unusable.
