Starcross

Chapter Seventeen

The tech smiled again, sheepishly this time. “Yes Sir.”

Lovett replaced the gel sample on the table as he saw who he was here for step into view from the makeshift firing range. “Doctor Holdern, a moment?”

Laurie Holdern, who came over from DARPA just before the siege began, looked up and saw Lovett standing there. She excused herself from the group of researchers and approached him, wearing a professional smile. “Yes, Mr. Director. How can I help you today?”

“Just came down to see what headway you were making in the reflective armor.”

“Refractive not reflective. The difference being that refractive skews off. As for the headway, we’ve made none,” She said matter of factly. “We’re still trying to figure out how their plasma rifles work.”

“You still don’t know?” Lovett asked, his voice stern.

“Sir, we’re trying to figure out their power source. We think it might me a type of fusion, not radioactive, maybe ion.” She tucked a stray strand of hair back behind her ear. “So far all we know is that it burns at twenty- five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Oh and that water disperses it, cooling it and turning it into glass.”

“Well where does the glass come from?”

Laurie perked up and stepped over to a table, coming back with a handful of pills. “These,” She said as she tossed one to him. Lovett caught the object and held it up to the light to examine it. “It’s a viscous gel, and no we don’t know what it’s made of, encased in a capsule similar to fast release medicine. Think Tylenol Liquid Gels. Now, the rifle energy pack superheats the round then fires it via Mag-Lev — all in the span of a few milliseconds. The now fragile round then travels downrange at subsonic speeds and breaks apart on impact and spreads across the target.”

“Is there any way you can counter it?”

Laurie shook her head. “Unfortunately everything we’ve tried has met with failure.” To punctuate her sentence the backwards echo of the plasma rifle sounded from the firing range and the mannequin doubled over at the waist amidst a chorus of cheers and laughter. Lovett stated the doctor down and Laurie turned her head to avoid his gaze.

“What else can you tell me?” He asked, changing the subject.

Thankful, Laurie seemed to hop and led him over to another table with more weapons on it. He recognized most — pistols, rifles, grenades, knives — but one of them stood out. Longer than the typical rifle by half this one had a large drum hanging off the back and a longer barrel. Resembling the German MG-42 very closely, the only difference being the material and a narrow trench running down the length of the weapon starting from the receiver and ending just over the muzzle. Tiny crystals filled the trench.

“This is something we rarely encounter,” She began with a flourish. “It’s a Druidth machine gun. Mostly the ground troops use the standard rifle, which we’ve taken to call the DA-5, but every now and then one of these is brought to the front.”

“I imagine quite a few are being brought forward around D.C.,” Lovett said.