The cheer that went up from the mob was audible across two kilometers of open ground. Warhurst felt an uneasy chill, despite the heat of the afternoon. Ibn-Khadir was bringing their fervor to a boil, and it wasn’t hard to guess what would happen next.
“They’re going to try a goddamned puppy rush,” Karelin said, echoing Warhurst’s own thoughts.
A puppy rush. Shit. Most of the people in that crowd were unarmed, as far as Warhurst could tell from the MD-30’s magnified sniperscope image, though a few Chinese and Iranian assault rifles were in evidence. Many were women, many more teenagers and younger. The KOA militia leaders might well have decided to rush the Marine perimeter with civilians, hoping that the Americans wouldn’t “kick the puppies,” that they would at least hesitate and not open fire until armed militiamen could get close enough to begin killing Marines.
The hell of it was that a civilian charge, or an assault shielded by unarmed civilians, was a lose-lose proposition for the Marine defenders. If they held their fire, the enemy would break through the perimeter and be among them; no matter how good the Americans’ mil-tech, they would be too badly outnumbered to survive a close-quarters battle.
But if the Marines opened fire, the up-close-and-personal images of unarmed Islamic civilians being slaughtered at long range would be uploaded to every e-news server on the Net, to be replayed time after time in gory and colorful detail on the viewalls and HVs of half the people on the planet. It would be a moral nightmare from which the UFR might never recover.
But maybe there was a different way.
“Downsize a click,” he told Karelin. “And fire up your see-through.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The generator in her rifle began spooling up to speed. The view of ibn-Khadir seemed to pull back twenty meters, revealing all of the truck he was standing on and more of the surrounding crowd. “Smile for the camera,” Karelin said, and she fired the X-ray scatter pulse.
The image in Warhurst’s display blanked out, showing nothing but green light. In a few seconds, however, the gun’s computer built up a composite image from the backscattered X rays, an image that turned sheet metal, plastic, cloth, and flesh into faint translucence, revealing denser structures like bone and the solid titanium steel of the hovertruck’s engine block in light green, yellow, and pale green-white.
To avoid burning people in the target area, the pulse lasted for only a handful of nanoseconds, so the initial image was frozen in time. The computer superimposed that image on the real-time view, however, animating it to match the moving reality.
“There,” Warhurst said. “See the flywheel on the drive train?”
“Roger that,” Karelin said. The targeting reticle shifted again, coming to rest over the circular mass of the hovertruck’s flywheel. Dopplered readings on the back-scatter radiation showed that it was in motion.
The Egyptian hovertruck was powered by pretty old tech, a hydrogen-burning power cell array that in turn powered the turbine compressors of two large lift fans in the vehicle’s chassis. The fans were off, the vehicle grounded on its plenum chamber skirts, but the power assembly was still running, storing energy in the massive, fast-spinning flywheel that provided both extra power on demand and gyroscopic balance.
“See if you can nick that wheel,” Warhurst said.
“Ay-firmative, Skipper!” Karelin leaned into the stock of her weapon again. There was a faint whine as its magfield generators came up to full power, and then a piercing crack as she squeezed the trigger.
Gauss rifles, rail guns, mass drivers—all terms for the same simple concept. The MD-30—MD for “mass driver”—was a sniper’s rifle, using an electromagnetic pulse to launch a 250-gram sliver of steel-jacketed depleted uranium with a muzzle velocity of approximately Mach 25.
The truck beneath ibn-Khadir’s feet jerked sharply with the impact, the engine access panels snapping open, the plastic windshield shattering. The impact smashed the engine block wide open, smashed the durasteel-armored flywheel housing, and cracked the flywheel itself. In an instant the truck’s body was flipped into the air, sending the Mullah ibn-Khadir flying in a thrashing tangle of robes and limbs. The vehicle’s steel and plastic shell absorbed most of the high-speed shrapnel from the flywheel, but torque ripped the vehicle open and bounced it onto its roof.
The crowd, cheers turned to shrieks of terror, broke and scattered in all directions. The hovertruck’s hydrogen cells, ripped open by the impact, ignited, sending a ball of orange hydrogen flame blossoming into the sky. In an instant the more or less orderly gathering was reduced to chaotic pandemonium, as civilians and militia troops fled the burning wreckage. Several dozen bodies lay around the truck, hit by shrapnel or stunned by the sonic crack of the hyperprojectile—it was impossible to tell which. Ibn-Khadir was sprawled ten meters from the wreck, weakly moving as two of his braver supporters tried to help him to his feet.