Projectile weapons: the old guns of the Imperium

Projectile weapons were the ranged arms of the Known Universe, weapons that hurled physical ammunition at their targets rather than beams of light. Loaded with miniaturized poisoned needles, bolts and darts, they formed part of the standard armament of the House Troopers and the other military forces of the Imperium. The technical revolution brought on by the Holtzman shield made most of them obsolete on the battlefield, since a shield turned aside any object moving fast enough to kill. Yet the old guns never vanished. Soldiers trusted them over the far more dangerous lasgun, automated heavy projectile weaponry remained mounted on military vehicles, and on Arrakis, where a shield's pulse drove sandworms into killing rage, the Fremen kept the spring-loaded maula pistol alive as a weapon of the open desert.

Standard armament of the Imperium#

Long before the age of shields, the projectile weapon was the common instrument of war. Its principle was ancient and simple: a mechanism, whether spring, charge or rocket, threw a solid missile at the enemy. In the Imperium the form was refined toward miniaturization and poison. The needles, bolts and darts issued to House Troopers were small, and their killing power came less from impact than from the toxins they carried. The Assassin's Handbook, the manual of the professional killers who served the Houses Major, detailed the exact use of such poisons, which could be delivered in food or drink or applied to blades and projectile ammunition alike, though most known agents could be detected by a poison snooper.

The family of projectile arms ranged from the smallest concealable devices to true artillery. At the light end stood dartguns and tiny projectors of poisoned needles, the tools of assassins. Between them lay handguns, grenades and pistols of many patterns. At the heavy end were cannons, the artillery pieces favored by House Harkonnen, and rocket launchers, which served both the Sardaukar and the Fremen as heavy support weapons.

The Holtzman revolution#

The introduction of the defensive shield derived from the Holtzman Effect overturned this entire arsenal. A personal shield could be calibrated to admit only objects moving below a set speed, a crawl of a few centimeters per second, fast enough to let a wearer breathe but far too slow for any bullet, dart or shell. Conventional projectile weapons became mostly useless against a shielded opponent. The alternative was no better: when a lasgun beam touched a Holtzman field, the contact produced subatomic fusion and a nuclear explosion whose center might erupt in the target, in the weapon, or in both.

Warfare therefore turned backward. The militaries of the Imperium returned to hand weapons, and new styles of fencing and knife fighting grew up around the shield's single weakness, the slow thrust that could slip beneath the barrier. The crysknife, the kindjal and the slip-tip displaced the gun as the decisive weapons of shield combat. Even so, projectile arms such as dartguns and needle projectors remained in common use, for not every target wore a shield, and not every killing was done on a battlefield.

Weapons that outlived the shield#

Obsolescence was never extinction. Among soldiers the projectile weapon kept a stubborn following, favored over the lasgun precisely because the lasgun was more dangerous to its user and less reliable in the field. Automated heavy projectile weaponry continued to be installed on military groundcars, thopters and flyers, and even on spacecraft, where massed fire against unshielded targets still had its place. Harkonnen forces retained their cannons, and both the Sardaukar and the Fremen fielded rocket launchers when heavy destruction was wanted.

The desert war on Arrakis showed how deliberately such choices could be made. When House Harkonnen fell upon House Atreides in Arrakeen, the Sardaukar who spearheaded the assault carried kindjals and stunners, weapons chosen so that they could kill without the risk of calling up a sandworm.

Slipping beneath the barrier#

One projectile weapon was engineered for the shield age rather than against it. The stunner, sometimes called a slammer to distinguish it from sonic firearms, was a refined descendant of the pneumatic speargun of Old Terra. It threw a poison-tipped or drug-tipped dart at low velocity, slow enough to penetrate a shield's barrier and put the target down. Its use demanded judgment, for its effectiveness was limited by variations in shield settings and by the relative motion between the projectile and its mark. In skilled hands it was the rare gun that could reach a shielded man, which made it a weapon of ambush and abduction as much as of war.

The maula pistol and the open desert#

The most famous survivor of the family was the maula pistol, a hand weapon with a spring-loaded mechanism that fired poison darts to a range of about forty meters. Maula pistols were popular during the Wars of Assassins in the days of the Faufreluches, when the ability to strike quietly at short and medium range was worth more than volume of fire.

On Arrakis the maula pistol found its true home. Shields were rarely used in the deep desert, since a shield's harmonic vibrations drew a sandworm from afar and drove it insane with rage, and against an unshielded enemy the old spring pistol was as lethal as it had ever been. The Fremen carried it widely, and it sat alongside the tools of desert survival in their kit. It should not be confused with the baradye pistol of the fremkit, a static-charge device that fired dye markers to stake out ground for a worm capture or to signal spice craft, a tool of the desert rather than a weapon.

The assassin's dart#

In the corridors of the Great Houses, the projectile weapon lived on as an instrument of murder. Dartguns were small arms suited to the assassin's trade, and their place in Imperial history was sealed on Arrakis, where the traitor Wellington Yueh used a dartgun to paralyse Duke Leto Atreides I and deliver him to his enemies. Tiny projectors of poison darts, small enough to hide in a palm or a sleeve, served the same trade. Even the archaic handgun retained its users: the shapeshifting Face Dancers were known to carry such weapons long after the rest of the Imperium had set them aside.

The maula pistol, too, belonged to this hidden world. During the suboid revolt on Ix in 10,153 AG, Lady Shando Vernius was wounded by a maula pistol while trying to protect her daughter Kailea. Years later, when Leto Atreides faced his Trial by Forfeiture on Kaitain, the Mentat Thufir Hawat slipped a smuggled maula pistol into a desk drawer of his Duke's quarters, insurance against the next assassin whom a dagger might not stop.

Echoes of older ages#

The lineage of the projectile weapon reached back to the wars against the thinking machines. Chandler pistols, which shot crystal fragments and needles, were used throughout the League Worlds, and the Dragoons of Poritrin were armed with them. The robot guards of the machine empire carried heavy, bulky disrupter guns and projectile launchers during the Great Revolt, while the League of Nobles answered with cellguns built to kill cymeks. In later centuries the trade continued in specialist forms: House Richese produced heavy dart launchers, and the Ixians manufactured needleguns as light hand weapons. During the upheavals that followed the Butlerian wars, the maula pistol was still doing an assassin's work; in Arrakis City the Fremen desert man Taref used one to shoot down the Butlerian leader Manford Torondo before the eyes of his followers, though the man he killed proved to be only a body double.

From the machine wars to the reign of Muad'Dib, the projectile weapon traced a long decline without ever reaching an end. The shield took its battlefields, the lasgun took its prestige, and the blade took its glory, but wherever a shield could not be worn, on the open sands of Arrakis, in a palace corridor, in the hand of a traitor doctor, the old guns kept killing.