Target Rich Environment 2 Page 17

  “Not a zombie,” I said chuckling. It hurt, but in a good way that reminded me I was alive. I turned my head left to look at my son’s picture.

  The frame was there, but the picture was gone.

  I jolted back up, hissing in pain, and grabbed the frame. I blinked a few times just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. There were two black marks on the front of the frame, one on each side. Fingerprints burned into the frame. I flipped the frame over and saw corresponding marks for the rest of a person’s hands. I lifted it closer to my face and sniffed the prints.

  Sulfur.

  Demon. Or someone that had summoned the demons.

  “What’s going on?” Santos asked.

  “Someone—a demon or something—stole the picture of my son,” I said. This was unbelievable. What if he was accidentally freed?

  What if that was the reason why the picture had been stolen in the first place? To free my son. How powerful would he be?

  “There was a girl who came out of your room when I was bringing you here,” Santos said. “She had a picture in her hand. Thought she was your girl or something.” He described her to me.

  Helen Collins. She must have been one of the summoners. The pregnancy had just been a cover. When I investigated some more—and I’d go room by room if needed—I was sure I’d find one or two more of the bastards. I had a sudden vision of Frank Shields lifting a gun and shooting Santos. He must have been a summoner too.

  “That was Helen Collins,” I said, shaking my head. “She was one of the summoners along with the agent who shot at you. What did you do to him?”

  Santos smiled. It was almost as frightening as the demons we’d killed. “Oh, you mean Shields? Didn’t have my rifle. Had to improvise with a demon horn. Too bad you missed it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Too bad.” Psycho.

  “I need to make a few calls,” I said trying to stand. “My bosses need to know what went down here, and that they’ve been infiltrated. Who knows what else has been compromised?” I rubbed my eyes, exhausted. “And then I need to get that picture back.” I was fuming inside. My son had been taken again. I’d failed him again.

  The people that took my son were going to die for this.

  All of them.

  “I’d like to know what went down here too. Those were the same kind of demons from my Vision. In fact, they kill me in” —he looked at his watch—“two years, fifty-five days, twelve hours, and forty-two minutes. Give me the detailed version.”

  “It will take a while, and we’ll have to talk on the move.”

  He smiled. “Tombs, for you, I have time.”

  I wanted to include this story because it was written really early in my career. Despite us both being total newbies, I think it came out pretty good. Steve and I ended up writing several Tombs and Santos stories over the next couple of years.

  Earlier I talked about collaborations and how each one is different. Steve is super easy to work with. I originally met him when all I had published was my first novel, Monster Hunter International, and he interviewed me for his site Elitist Book Reviews. Back when I still had a day job, we ended up working together as accountants at the same defense contactor. Since then Steve has written several more shorts and the YA horror novel, Residue.

  Currently, the two of us are collaborating on a new novel for Baen Books. Think WWI Eastern Front, in a world with dark fairy tale magic, so it’s sort of a Trench Warfare Fantasy, where we are telling the story of a crew who goes into battle in a suit of magical power armor made out of dead golems.

  EPISODE 22

  This story originally appeared in Aliens: Bug Hunt, edited by Jonathan Maberry, published by Titan Books, in 2017.

  This is set in the Aliens universe—which I’ve been a fan of since I was a little kid—and is about the adventures of the Colonial Marines. So in this collection I’ve already got an official story that I wrote for Predator, and now Aliens. If I ever write something for the Terminator franchise then I’ll hit the ultimate 1980s trifecta. Since becoming a writer I’ve gotten to mess around with everything I thought was awesome from my childhood.

  Considering there’s actually a GI Joe character based on me—Spreadsheet, GI Joe’s accountant—that’s probably accurate!

  I was the oddball writer in this particular anthology. Everybody else wanted to write about the Colonial Marines kicking ass and taking names, but as a gun nut I wanted to write about the real hero of the movie Aliens, every gun guy’s favorite sci-fi movie prop, the M41 Pulse Rifle. Having been a guest on a couple seasons of Joe Mantegna’s Gun Stories on the Outdoor Channel, I had the perfect idea for how to tell that story too.

  Saga of the Weapon, Season 1, Episode 22

  The M41A Pulse Rifle

  The M41A is one of the most successful combat rifles in history, and has become a potent symbol of American military might, not just on Earth, but into the furthest reaches of space. It has seen battle on every continent and dozens of worlds. It is beloved by those who use it, and feared by their enemies.

  However the adoption of the Pulse Rifle was controversial, and the story of its evolution is filled with tragic errors that cost many Colonial Marines their lives.

  Join us now as we discuss the history of the legendary M41A Pulse Rifle, on Saga of the Weapon.

  There’s nothing like the sound of a Pulse Rifle. It’s like a maniac is running a jackhammer on a steel drum. That’s the sound of freedom.

  —Lance Corporal Chris Johnson, USCM

  Today’s Colonial Marine takes having a reliable and potent rifle for granted, but it wasn’t always so. When the USCM was formed in 2101, their standard issue infantry weapon was the Harrington Automatic Rifle, with one Weyland Storm issued per squad.

  Marines now don’t realize how good they have it. Back in my day, you had basically two choices. Have a handy little rifle that ran slicker than snot—the HAR—but bounced its feeble little bullets off your enemies’ body armor, or have a rifle that would put them down no matter what, but only when that complex hunk of junk wasn’t broken down or hopelessly jammed because a speck of dirt got into the action. You ever pull the side plate off a Storm? It looks like an old-fashioned clock in there. When Marines talked about something working like clockwork, we sure as hell didn’t mean the Storm.

  —Staff Sergeant Mike Willis, USCM

  Personally, back in the ’60s I carried a HAR, because I’d rather know it would go bang every time I pulled the trigger, than have this super advanced killing machine that could track enemies across the battlefield from a satellite feed, but was so fickle that if you looked at it funny it would crash. Nothing sucks more than waiting for your rifle’s operating system to reboot while a thousand Swedish insurgents are shooting at you.

  —Corporal Cheryl Clark, USCM

  After the battle of Kochan and the long campaign on Miehm, there was a clear need for a next-generation infantry weapon to arm the United States Colonial Marines. It needed to be rugged enough to survive the rigors of combat in a wide variety of planetary ecosystems, and fire a potent enough round that it could defeat newer forms of advanced body armor. The 6.8mm armor piercing round of the beloved HAR was simply too anemic, and the Storm was just too fragile. After many campaigns with inadequate equipment, the USCM put their foot down. Enough was enough.

  I was there when General Phillips threw a fit in front of Space Command. He said that if his men were going to fight against the insurgents, what did he expect us to do? Tickle them to death? Watching a bunch of four stars yell at each other was way over my pay grade, but it was a hell of a show.

  —Captain Trent Miller, USASF

  The Marine 70 Program shook up everything, and small arms procurement was no exception. The commission that was created to study the need for new replacement weapon systems immediately met fierce resistance. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation filed a lawsuit, alleging that the Colonial Marines were simply misusing their Storm rifles, and it was their lack of following the prope
r maintenance guidelines that was causing the reliability issues.

  Yeah . . . Those pogues actually blamed us. Can you believe that? Abuse and neglect, they said. Guess what, you corpo-monkeys, this isn’t a clean room at your factory. Proper maintenance kind of goes out the window when you’ve flown halfway across the galaxy, to be neck deep in blood and mud and guts for weeks, and have to beat a man to death with the butt of your rifle—seriously, who puts circuitry in a stock?—and the unit armorer is a little indisposed because he stepped on a land mine that morning. Well excuse me that I didn’t have the proper factory-approved widget to fix it! At that point if a Marine can’t fix it with a hammer and duct tape, it ain’t going to get fixed.

  —Sergeant Mario Cordova, USCM

  Ultimately, amid allegations of bribery, corruption, and blackmail, Weyland-Yutani dropped the lawsuit, and the new small arms appropriation committee got to work.

  You know what they say about things designed by committees, right? Well, that’s where we were heading. You should have seen the original list of requirements. It was ridiculous. The specs weren’t written by combatants. They were mostly wish lists from staff officers who’d never seen the inside of a drop ship unless it was parked at an air show, and specs inserted by lobbyists requiring gizmos that only their company happened to make. There were so many suggested bells and whistles screwed on that you’d need a wheelbarrow to carry the rifle.

  —Construction Mechanic 1st Class Mike Raulston, USASF

  It was a time for bold concepts. Many of the more advanced technological aspects proposed by the committee would later be incorporated into other weapon systems, such as the stabilization mechanism of the M56 Smart Gun, but it threatened to bog down the current rifle project in red tape.

  However, there was a ray of hope. While various mega corporations were preparing their new weapon systems for trials, a retired Colonial Marine, Jonathan LaForce, was working on the prototype of the rifle that would become the legendary M41. By day he made ends meet running a food truck, but his nights were spent in his humble workshop. A distant cousin of legendary gun designer John Moses Browning (see Saga of the Weapon, episodes one, four, fifteen, and twenty) Corporal LaForce had served with distinction at Miehm, and knew firsthand the needs of the modern warfighter.

  If you’re a Marine, when you’re saying your prayers, you better tell whoever it is you’re talking to that you’re thankful for LaForce. That man was a mechanical genius. We’re lucky he was a gun nut, and not into space ships or something. Sure . . . We’d have some awesome space ships, but my Pulse Rifle has saved my life more times than I can count. Thank Odin for Corporal LaForce.

  —Gunnery Sergeant Aimee Morgan, USCM

  LaForce started with the familiar layout of the HAR, utilizing an integrated pump-action grenade launcher, but the similarities end there. The sonic “shaker” burst weapons used by the rebels on Miehm to disable the Marines’ HARs had shown the need for a firing mechanism that couldn’t be disrupted by outside sources. So his new design started with a unique electronic pulse ignition.

  This feature would go on to cause the M41As infamous nickname.

  Pulse rifle isn’t in the official designation, we all know that, but since it was a pulse that ignited the primer, the name just kind of stuck. Marines do that kind of thing. My great-great-whatever grandfather carried a Pig and his dad carried a Tommy Gun. It sounds cool, it works, it sticks. The problem with calling the M41 that name though is always some dumb boot hears we get issued pulse rifles and gets all excited thinking it’s going to be shooting laser beams or something. What do they think this is? Sci-fi?

  —Lance Corporal Tripp Dorsett, USCM

  The specifications required the new weapon to use caseless ammunition, but this presented several challenges. LaForce believed that standard ammunition was a better choice, because sustained fire of caseless ammunition causes a rapid buildup of heat, which could cause stoppages or even premature parts breakage. In a rifle using standard brass-cased ammunition, the ejecting cartridge case serves as a heat sink, and some heat escapes through the ejection port. However, the committee specified all submissions had to be totally sealed from the elements. LaForce’s solution to the overheating problem was using advanced materials for the internal mechanism, and ultramodern, cooler burning propellants for the ammunition.

  LaForce was issued several new patents. Among them was the visionary rotating breach design, which not only cut felt recoil in half, but allowed the use of his new U Bend Conveyor magazines. This brilliant system made his weapon far more controllable than competing designs, even while using more powerful ammunition.

  We had the best engineers in the business all competing to come up with a new gun, and some retired Marine, who doesn’t even have an engineering degree, shows up to the trials with this cobbled-together piece of junk that looked like it got built in his garage. I found out later it literally was built in his garage. Here we were, the sharpest designers in the military industrial complex, all representing corporations with millions budgeted for R&D and marketing, and he walks up to the line like he belongs there, and pulls this ugly thing out of a case, and goes to town.

  Phase one was just a demo shoot for some of the officers. No big deal. Until LaForce opens up with that beast. Everybody knows what a pulse rifle sounds like now, but this was new back then and we’d never heard anything like it before. Nothing gets your attention like the noise a pulse rifle makes. Every head on the range swiveled in that direction.

  He’d chambered it in 12mm Darnall, a monster of an old caseless hunting round that can shoot through a genetically modified rhino, just to prove that he could. Show-off. This thing was shooting bigger bullets and more of them, with less recoil and still shooting better groups than every million dollar prototype on the line . . . It blew our socks off.

  The competitors found out later that LaForce hadn’t been invited by the committee at all, but had snuck into the initial test firing. He’d saved the life of one of the Marine testers during the battle of Kochan and had called in a favor to get onto the range as an “observer.” I had gone to MIT and spent thirty years designing firearms on the most advanced CAD programs in the Solar System, and there were twenty others like me there, but we all got our butts kicked by a hobbyist whose day job was selling barbeque.

  —Michael Ankenbrandt, Daihotai Engineering

  LaForce had the clearly superior design, but no ability to manufacture it. After a demonstration where the prototype was frozen in mud, and then fired six thousand rounds without a single malfunction, LaForce received an official invitation to the competition. He was also approached by several of the competing arms manufacturers and offered huge sums of money for his patents. Surprisingly, he refused them all, declaring at the time that he was in it to help his brother Marines, not to get rich. At the time there were even rumors of an attempted break-in at LaForce’s workshop to steal the prototype, followed by an attempt at deliberate sabotage, all of which was blamed on—and vehemently denied by—Weyland-Yutani.

  With a working prototype in hand, and USCM interest in his design, LaForce approached Armat. The once-respected company had fallen on hard financial times, yet retained a reputation for never skimping on quality, and always doing its best to support the soldiers it supplied. Luckily for LaForce, Armat, and America, this would prove to be a match made in heaven.

  If you look at the history of small arms development, what came first, cartridge or rifle, is usually a chicken or the egg kind of proposal. Sometimes you design a platform to fire an existing cartridge to spec, other times you have the weapon system and you shoehorn in the best round you can fit. This time we got lucky. As LaForce was designing his Pulse Rifle, Armat had been making some real breakthroughs in chemical engineering and projectile materials. This allowed us to really push the boundaries of terminal ballistics.

  Our new experimental 10mm x 24 caseless approximated the ballistics of the old .300 Winchester Magnum sniper round in a far sho
rter and lighter package, with a bullet that could penetrate most modern body armor, and an explosive payload inside that would absolutely wreck whatever was hit. The issue was that it produced too much recoil energy to control on full auto in an assault weapon-sized package, so we were primarily marketing it for crew-served weaponry. When LaForce came to us with a light rifle platform that could easily handle the recoil of our new experimental 10mm round, our executives bet the future of the company on manufacturing the Pulse Rifle. The rest is history.

  —Mordechai Yitzhak, Armat Technician

  Armat was able to utilize more advanced materials for the next prototypes, which drastically lowered the weight, while also increasing the already impressive durability. Their new propellant compounds were able to decisively solve the LaForce prototype’s greatest weakness—heat dissipation. The Armat rifle easily won the rest of the competition, passing all tests with flying colors. The newly designated M41 was put into production, and entered service with the Colonial Marines in 2171.

  However, all was not well. Some of the early batches of 10mm ammunition were subcontracted out to other manufacturers. It is unknown who changed the propellant design, and later congressional inquiries never discovered the culprit, but regardless of who was at fault, this mistake cost Colonial Marines their lives, and gave the early production M41s a bad reputation.

  (Warning, the following footage from LV-832 is intended for mature audiences only. Viewer discretion is advised.)

  It was a nightmare. All of the wild life on LV-832 is gross, mean, and cranky, but the colonists there were hard as nails. You had to be to survive that shit hole. There is only one thing they ever needed to call in Marine support to deal with, and that was a swarm. There’s this one species, imagine a carnivorous moose-sized critter with tentacles instead of antlers. Individually, not so dangerous. Only it turns out that every seven years they have a population explosion, swarm, and eat everything like locusts.