moral nightmare from which the UFR might never recover.
But maybe there was a different way.
âDownsize a click,â he told Karelin. âAnd fire up your see-through.â
âAye aye, sir.â
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. âSmile for the camera,â Karelin said, and she fired the X-ray scatter pulse.
The image in Warhurstâs display blanked out, showing nothing but green light. In a few seconds, however, the gunâs 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 hovertruckâs 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.
âThere,â Warhurst said. âSee the flywheel on the drive train?â
âRoger that,â Karelin said. The targeting reticle shifted again, coming to rest over the circular mass of the hovertruckâs 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 vehicleâs chassis. The fans were off, the vehicle grounded on itsplenum 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.
âSee if you can nick that wheel,â Warhurst said.
âAy-firmative, Skipper!â 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 driversâall terms for the same simple concept. The MD-30âMD for âmass driverââwas a sniperâs 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-Khadirâs 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 truckâs body was flipped into the air, sending the Mullah ibn-Khadir flying in a thrashing tangle of robes and limbs. The vehicleâs 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 hovertruckâs 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 hyperprojectileâit 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.
âTaking kind of a chance, arenât you, Skipper?â Lambeskiasked with a matter-of-fact expression. âBurning civilians like thatâ¦â
âBurning hydrogen rises,â Warhurst replied. âThatâs why only thirty-some people died on the Hindenburg