“How much energy?” the NSA asked. “Electrical or what?”
“Well, bigajoules, actually,” Weaver replied. “Like, a nuke.”
“You want another one?” the SECDEF asked, angrily. “At the wormhole? A ground burst? Do you know what sort of fallout that will cause?”
“Yes, sir,” Bill replied. “But I’m not planning on detonating it on this side.”
“Oh.”
“And I think we should send an assessment team in after the explosion, maybe before as well.”
“You can’t get an armored vehicle through the gate,” the SECDEF pointed out. “And people outside of vehicles will be at risk from residual radiation.”
“Not if they’re in a Wyvern they won’t.”
“Oh. My. God.” Chief Miller said in a voice of awe.
The suit was crouched on its knees, multijointed metal fingers splayed out on the recently laid gravel. Its “chest” was open and a seat and arm-holds were clearly displayed along with a complicated control panel. It was vaguely humanoid, like an artist’s rendition of a robot, with an idealized human face on the “helmet.”
“The original design came from a gaming company of all things,” Bill said, walking around the suit. It gleamed silver in the overhead lights, a titanium shell laid on a Kevlar underlayer. “The first ones were unpowered and the best aerobic workout you’ll ever have. But they were designed for a later powered version. We just tuned the design up, put in piezoelectric motivators, sealing, environmental systems and improved the electronic suite. Oh, and a little radioactive shielding.”
“Why?” the SEAL asked.
“See the big box over the butt?” Bill asked. “Americium power generator.”
“So I’m going to get irradiated when I use it?” the SEAL asked.
“I’ve got over a hundred hours in one.” The physicist sighed. “You wear a radiation counter back by the reactor. So far I’ve picked up about as much radiation as you would at a day on the beach in Florida. Don’t even get me started on flying; I took a radiation counter on a flight one time and it raised my hair.”
“Really?” the SEAL asked. “I’ve flown in a lot of planes.”
“Really,” Bill replied. “Besides, it’s the only power source we have that can run one of these things for more than a couple of hours. It’s got some bugs, it tends to want to disco occasionally, but you get past it. This is just a prototype, you understand.”
“How hard is it to learn to use?” the SEAL asked.
“Pretty easy,” the physicist said. “The electronics suite takes some getting used to. Oh, it walks like Frankenstein and it feels as if you’re on ice all the time, but you don’t fall down.”
“I don’t like the idea of standing up all the time,” the chief noted. “That just makes you a big damned target.”
“Notice the wheels on the elbows, knees and, if you look, under the belly on there,” Bill said. “It’s actually easier to low crawl over a flat surface than to walk. You can’t see unless you activate the camera on top of the helmet.”
“I want,” Miller said. “Oh, man, do I want. Screw the bugs.”
“Good,” the physicist replied. “This one’s yours. As soon as we get you fitted.”
“Why?” the SEAL said, suddenly suspicious.
“We’re going to take a little stroll,” Bill replied.
“Where?”
“Eustis.”
“Oh, shit.”
They rode on the front glacis of an M-1 Abrams, their armor-clad feet dangling over the front, one hand hooked over the barrel of the main-gun the other clutching their weapon.
The “accessories” for the Wyvern had included a shipping container filled with appropriate weapons. These ranged from .50 caliber machine guns, the venerable M-2 or Ma Deuce that dated to WWII, through the more recently designed “Dover Devil” to a new Czech 12.7mm, then onwards and upwards culminating in a massive cannon that dominated one of the walls of the shipping container.
“What’s that?” Chief Miller had asked. He was clearly a man who had never seen a bigger gun he didn’t like.
“It’s a South African one-hundred-thirty-millimeter recoilless rifle,” the armorer said, proudly. He was a heavyset gentleman in his fifties, gray haired where there was any left, with a pocket protector containing five colors of pens and an HP calculator dangling from his belt. But he was clearly inordinately fond of his weapons. “It was one of the guns they were looking at for the Stryker Armored Gun System but they turned it down. It had been sitting around in a depot for a couple of years when we picked it up.”
“Can you use it with a Wyvern?” the chief said, stroking the two-and-a-half-meter barrel. It had a big shoulder mount about a third of the way back from the end and an oversized grip and trigger.
“Oh, yes,” the armorer said. “Reloading, of course, is slow.”
“I’ll take it,” the chief said. “And one of those Gatling guns. And you got any pistols? How about swords?”
“Chief,” Bill said, chuckling. “Even with the Wyverns there’s only so much you can carry. Why don’t you take the 30mm?”
“What 30mm?” the SEAL asked. “Besides, if I’ve got a choice of thirty or a hundred and thirty, I’ll take a hundred and thirty any day. I’ll just reload fast.”
“This 30mm,” the physicist replied, pointing to a weapon hanging on the left wall.
It looked… odd. It had clearly been modified for use by the mecha-suits but beyond that the barrel looked oddly… truncated. “What the hell is it?” Miller asked.
“Well, you know those guns the A-10s use…” Bill said, smiling.
“No shit!” the SEAL replied, clearly delighted. “Besides, there’s no way you could fire one of those things off-hand in a Wyvern. The recoil would kill you.”
“Oh, we had to modify the ammo a little bit,” Bill admitted. “Just like the 25mm Bushmaster I’m going to haul. But it’s still got depleted uranium penetrators and I think you’d be surprised at what you can do in a Wyvern. Just remember to lean into the shot.”
So lying beside the chief was the 30mm chain gun and lying beside Bill was a modified 25mm Bushmaster, the same gun carried by the Bradley Fighting Vehicles. On their backs were integral ammunition packs but they’d been warned that the ammunition would not last long at full rate of fire. They had external radiation counters, which were running right up into the bottom of redline, internal radiation counters that were down in the bottom of yellow and riding behind them in pride of place a large sack.
The ordnance technician who had assembled the special satchel charge had explained it as carefully as he could.
“The material in the device is an expansion-form explosive,” the tech said. “Instead of just exploding in one place the material continues to explode on the wavefront and expands through any open space. They tested it on an old mine back before the Afghanistan war and it blew out a steel door at the back side of three hundred meters of tunnel. The thing is, it will do a number on anything but, probably, those centipede tanks. But it’s going to probably explode out of the gate as well. It’s not as effective in an open area as enclosed, but it’s going to be a hell of a blast in the local area. So you’d better run like hell.”
“How long do we have?” the SEAL asked.