"Bert nodded once and retreated off the bridge.As he left Alice grimaced towards Jon, "Remind me to get something armed added to our inventory. If we ...ad a couple of fighters we could take a swipe at their freighter. I'm sure that would distract them." I'm sure it would," said Jon, "but a couple of fighters would have just been in the way for the last three years. Besides, I don't think the Navy would let you have them." You're probably right," admitted Alice sourly. "But there's got to be. I think she's probably the smartest one in the family. She reads the paper, and listens to the radio all the time. And she's the best dancer of us all."At that point, the sun was setting, and some of the family got out musical instruments, including a strange sort of guitar that the guitarist held in his lap and played with a slide. There were also ukuleles, a fiddle, a kind of flute, and drums of different sizes and tones. While the musicians played, several woman and a few men danced to the. I asked my husband to call and see if there was a time he could drop by to take a look. My husband called the number and set up a time to stop by on his way home from work. Later that day my husband called to tell me he wasn’t going to get out of work in time and wanted to know if I would go check it out. He warned me to be careful and to call him while I was there to check in and let him know I was okay. I arrived at the address he gave me and knocked. Jay answered the door. He was on the. While the Castle, Mercury and some of the other Confederacy ship classes being made available were said to have weapons, they were line-of-sight devices that had been built to destroy navigational hazards ... There was no evidence that they were part of what advanced Earth militaries considered "combat systems", with tight integration among sensors, command & control, and weapons.It was also not apparent that the Confederacy had well-developed long-range armament, presumably missiles and.