Lamb Home and Field was a secular temple dedicated to the way of the gun. Outside, it was an unassuming building of weathered brick, just another warehouse converted into a medium-sized shop. Inside, there were enough guns and blades to arm a private military. The shop stocked every popular model of street-legal hardware, and more than a few exotics. And, of course, there was plenty of ammo and spare parts to go around.
But the real magic was on the second floor.
Here was Lamb’s workshop. Precision machines lined the walls. Reloading equipment, lathe, drill, mill, 3D printers, everything the modern gunsmith needed for his trade. Racks, boxes and cabinets held an arsenal of tools, every one of them neatly labeled and organized. Workbenches dominated the center of the room. Off in a corner stood the world’s largest and strongest gun safe. The man himself stood by a worktable, powerful hands resting on his hips, an enormous grin splitting his face.
“Yuri, welcome back!”
Yuri nodded. “Thank you.”
“George, it’s been a while too.”
George Tavares smiled slightly. Tall and lean, he could have been a basketball player. Instead he joined the military, and then moved on to the STS as leader of Team Red Raven. It had been years since Yuri had last seen him. The movie-star jaw and the broad shoulders remained, but his already-pale skin had been bleached to a shade of near-white, and his face wore the lines of a much older man.
“Right back at you guys,” George said.
“Heard you’ve been busy,” Yuri said.
“Not as much as Black Watch. There’s jack-all in the countryside to do. Beyond organizing local militias and keeping a lookout for the New Gods, there wasn’t much for us to take care of.”
“That’s why you started a training company, am I right?” Daniel said.
George laughed. “Hey, a man’s gotta feed his kids, ya know?”
His was one of the rare post-STS success stories. Every former STS operator had been blacklisted from public service. The Feds wouldn’t hire them, the military didn’t want them, and most police agencies were too afraid of the New Gods to recruit them.
George and his team pooled their funds to open a firearms training center. Drawing upon their immense experience in the STS, they had quickly gained a cult following in the civilian self-defense world. It also allowed them to make connections with the kind of people who preferred to make a stand against the New Gods than to roll over and beg for mercy.
Up to this point, their guerrilla activities had been limited to training civilians, keeping their ear to the ground, and giving jobs to fellow former operators. Kayla had spent a stint there as an instructor to earn some cash. They hadn’t experienced anything like the optempo Team Black Watch had faced in the past couple of years. The New Gods had concentrated their efforts on the major population centers. The cities, the metropolises, the towns that housed critical industries.
It wasn’t that their job wasn’t important—preparing civilians for the apocalypse was necessary, as was supporting fellow operators—it was just that they never had a chance to see combat in their neck of the woods.
Now, at last, they were ready to join the fight.
“To what do I owe the honor of having two living legends in my humble workshop?” Daniel asked.
“You’re a legend yourself,” George said.
“Ah, you’re too kind. But I’m way past my prime. It’s your turn to carry the torch.”
“We’re planning a raid. Kill or capture,” Yuri said. “We’ll be running against the Sinners and the VC simultaneously.”
“Sounds tough,” Daniel said.
“And, if possible, we gotta make it look like one of the other New Gods did it,” George said.
“Oh. Now that’s easy.”
“Easy?” Yuri asked.
Daniel rubbed his hands eagerly. “I’ve got me some toys in the back that can help. But why don’t we start with the mission parameters.”
“The Sinners and the VC are holding alliance talks at the Langston Hotel. The job is to disrupt the talks and capture high value targets who may be in possession of critical intelligence.”
Daniel’s face darkened.
“Alliance, huh. Babylon Black is finally going down?”
“It appears so,” George said.
“And how will this job prevent it?”
“It can’t,” Yuri said soberly. “What we can do is to buy time, and hopefully weaken the Sinners and the VC.”
“‘Hopefully’? It doesn’t become you,” George chided.
“We don’t have what it takes to drive a wedge between them. Not at this point. But we think the HVTs have intel that may lead us to a joint VC-Sinner project. That’s the endgame.”
“Which means you need to take the bad guys alive,” Daniel said. “Kinda hard to do that when the VC can teleport and the cyborgs can self-destruct.”
“I can take care of the teleporting problem,” Yuri said.
Daniel laughed. “Goes without saying, Samurai.”
“Wait a second. Cyborgs can self-destruct now?” George asked.
“The New Gods have been upping their game over the past few years. I’ve read reports that some cyborgs have been found with their brains and neural implants vaporized. Coroner suspects they used a small explosive charge to destroy everything inside the cranial cavity.”
“Which keeps their enemies from recovering useful data,” Yuri said.
“You got that right. Fortunately, I’ve got something you could use.”
“Let’s see it.”
Daniel strode to the gun safe. He brought his eyes to the iris scanner and pressed his fingers against the fingerprint reader. The locks released with heavy clunks. He swung the doors open on silent hinges and rummaged around inside. Moments later, he returned to the table, cradling the strangest weapon Yuri had ever seen yet.
Its body was an enormous straight tube the length of a man’s leg. The muzzle was a gaping maw. Below that was a smaller, secondary lens. At the other end was a stiff rubber buttstock. A narrow shaft served as the optic. Mounted on the forearm was a thick, round plate. The pistol grip was simple but sturdy, fitted with an oversized trigger guard. Behind it was a cylindrical fuel tank.
Daniel placed it upright on the table. It balanced perfectly on the handle, the tank and the round plate.
“What is that?” George asked.
Daniel chuffed.
“This here is a particle beam weapon. Reverse-engineered from Guild tech, originally captured from the kill teams at Moreno Island. No other faction has a weapon like it.”
“Particle beam?!” Yuri goggled.
“You heard that right. This baby runs off a hydrogen fuel cell. Maximum effective range of five hundred meters. At low power, it’s a guided lightning strike. It can harm soft targets, but its best use is frying unshielded electronics. At medium power, it will burn through most shielded electronics and vaporize flesh. At high power… it’s a death ray. Anything it hits will be disintegrated.”
George whistled. “Godtech. Damn.”
“You said particle beam,” Yuri said. “Doesn’t that mean it’s a radiation hazard?”
Daniel exhaled softly.
“Well, yes. Not going to lie to you about that. It’s actually a two-shot weapon. When you press the trigger, the weapon first fires a high-powered laser pulse to ionize the air between the weapon and the target. Then comes the actual particle beam. It will ride the ionized channel to damage the target.
“The eggheads say that the majority of the radiation will be directed forward. Once the particle strikes the target, it will produce brah… breh…”
“Bremsstrahlung,” Yuri said.
“Braking radiation. You know what I mean. It dumps energy into the target and heats it up. That’s how it fries electronics. The problem is that there will be backscatter radiation. Some of that ionizing radiation is going to come back at you.”
“Godtech always comes with a price,” George grumbled.
Daniel patted the round plate. “That’s what the shield is for. When you fire this thing, stay behind the shield. The shield should soak up most of the rads coming back at you.”
“‘Most’,” George said.
Daniel shrugged. “Better than all, right? And at least you won’t take rads to anything too important.”
“The shield not going to do much for people outside its shadow,” Yuri said.
“Yeah. Normally it’s meant to be used as a crew support weapon out in the open. If you want to use it in close quarters battle, I’d recommend sticking to medium power. Preferably low. That’ll reduce the amount of rads coming your way.”
“We should get dosimeters,” George said.
“Better yet, not shoot the damn things at all. Or, at least, not to the point where you rad yourselves beyond safe limits,” Daniel said.
“How many shots does it have?” Yuri asked.
“Three shots at full power. Ten at medium power. Twenty on low,” Daniel said.
“And why the hell do we need it in the first place?”
“You’re facing Sinners. That means total body conversion cyborgs. Hit them with one of these on medium power and they’ll go down for the count.”
“The beam will fry their circuits,” Yuri said.
“You got it. A TBC’s central processor in the thoracic cavity, right in the A zone. It’s the computer that runs the entire body. It’s also the most heavily armored section of the torso. But with this baby, a single shot will slag the processor.”
“You’ve tested it?”
“In the lab. Against simulated targets.”
“‘Simulated’,” Yuri repeated.
“Hey, it’s not like we could go around shooting live TBCs, you know? Not until now, at least.”
“Better than mag-dumping them and praying they’ll go down,” George said.
“Not only that, but it should also disable the self-destruct mechanism too,” Daniel said.
“How so?” Yuri asked.
“The explosive charge is wired up to detonate when it receives a signal from the central processor. Kill the processor and the charge won’t blow.” Daniel licked his lips. “Or, at least, that’s as far as the coroner could tell. He didn’t exactly have a chance to examine an intact TBC.”
“Better a chance at taking a TBC alive than risk a self-destructing prisoner,” George said. “But a TBC is basically a brain in a box, right? What’s going to happen to the brain after we slag the processor?”
Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody ever tried before.”
“The brain box has an emergency power supply and enough nutrients and oxygen to sustain the brain for twenty-four hours,” Yuri said. “In theory, it’s long enough to move the brain to a fresh body.”
“Doesn’t that mean if we fry a TBC, we’re turning off his body, but he’ll still be conscious?”
Daniel pursed his lips. “I don’t know.”
George shuddered. “He won’t be able to see, hear, speak, smell… but he’ll still be awake. My God. I don’t want to know what that’ll be like.”
“They chose to play the game. They got to live by the rules,” Daniel said.
“Hold up,” Yuri said. “An A zone hit with the particle beam won’t affect the head, right? That means the Mindgem neural implant will remain intact. The target or his buddies might still be able to trigger the self-destruct charge.”
“There’s that risk, yeah. As I said, there’s a lot we don’t know. We don’t know until you try it in the field.”
“We get to be the guinea pigs,” George groused.
“Which is why I’m not charging you for the PBW. Not in cash. I just want real-world combat data.”
Yuri frowned. “Assuming we survive.”
“You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket and run a PBW-only loadout. You can’t anyway; I only have two of them. For the rest of your team, I’ve got something even better.”
“Which is?”
Daniel’s grin grew even wider.
He returned to his gun safe and withdrew a second weapon. This one had stepped out of a science fiction film. Neat and compact, it was roughly the size of a standard M83 carbine. Like the PBW, its fuel cell was mounted behind the pistol grip. Unlike the PBW, the long, blocky magazine was positioned forward of the trigger guard. Past the magazine well, accessory rails ran down the length of the weapon.
“What are we looking at?” George asked.
Daniel cleared his throat.
“This here is Project Arcflash. A military-grade coilgun, based on reverse-engineered Guild and Sinner tech. An improvement of the electromagnetic grenade launcher, it incorporates room-temperature superconductors, graphene ultracapacitors and precision power switching technology to produce the premium anti-personnel weapon of the future.
“The railgun tech you may be familiar with has multiple drawbacks. It is long and bulky, the rails and smuzzle require regular replacement, and most importantly, its rate of fire is exceedingly poor. As a sniper weapon it is acceptable. In close quarters battle it is suboptimal. Arcflash seeks to address this gap.
“The eggheads crammed a whole lotta ultracapacitors into the coilgun, and I’ve been told it’s an inherently more efficient design than the railgun. Plus, the superconductors cut resistive losses to a minimum. As a result, you have a rate of fire comparable to an M83 carbine. No more waiting for the capacitors to recharge before you can fire a second shot. It even has a full auto mode.”
“Finally!” Yuri exclaimed.
“That’s not all. The fuel cartridge is good for six hundred full-power shots. It can use standard twenty-round railgun mags, but just for you guys, I’ve created sixty-round magazines.”
“Sixty!” Yuri exclaimed.
“Advantages of working with such tiny rounds. The sixty-rounder is about the size and bulk of your standard M83 carbine mag. You can carry a lot of firepower in a basic loadout.”
“Much obliged,” George said.
“No problem, but there’s more. In subsonic mode, the weapon is completely silent. All you’ll hear is the impact of rounds on target. You don’t need a suppressor. When set to full power… it has a muzzle velocity of one point seven kilometers per second.”
Yuri raised an eyebrow. “One point seven, huh. More powerful than the assault railgun, but less than a full-length railgun.”
“Yup. Two klicks per second is overkill for close quarters battle. A flechette at one point seven kips will rip through any kind of man-portable armor out there, including TBCs. Only tank armor can stop it. When it strikes soft tissue, the flechette will yaw and fragment so violently, it’s like a hand grenade went off in there.”
“Now _that’s _firepower,” George said.
“And that’s a recipe for collateral damage,” Yuri said. “A missed shot is going to punch through multiple rooms.”
“Aim carefully,” Daniel advised.
“What about subsonic mode?” George asked.
Daniel shook his head. “The flechette is just five millimeters in diameter. At that velocity, the flechette will just poke tiny holes in a target. Either you place a round in the brain box or you shoot him lots of times. And it won’t work on hard targets.”
“Guess we better aim carefully,” Yuri said.
“Always a good idea.”
“Any drawbacks to the coilgun we need to know about?” George asked.
“Well… the weapon is a tad delicate. The electromagnets need to be switched on and off with split-second timing. Too much shock could disturb the internal components and reduce its efficiency.”
“We’ll have to baby it as though it were a sniper rifle,” Yuri said.
“Also, whatever you do, try not to take any fire to the ultracaps. They are housed in the handguard. If damaged or destroyed, they might release all their stored energy in a violent discharge.”
“You’re saying the coilgun will explode.”
“Yes.”
“If that happens, we’ll lose our hands?” George asked.
“If you’re lucky. If you’re not, you take frag to your face and throat too.”
“Better run these with face shields,” Yuri said.
“Yup.”
“Does the Guild run coilguns like these?” George asked.
“Nope. But everybody knows the Guild pursues research into electromagnetic weapons tech. They see flechette frag in a body, they’re going to assume the Guild did him. Of course, it’d be best not to let a coilgun fall into enemy hands either.”
“Have the coilguns been tested?” Yuri asked.
“At the proving grounds, yeah.”
“But not in combat.”
“Nope. This is the virgin combat deployment for the PBW and Project Arcflash.”
“So if either of them breaks down in a firefight, can we send a complaint to the manufacturer?” George asked.
“Hey, you should call them for tech support first. Don’t trash it if you can fix it.”
The men laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
Finally, dabbing at his eyes, Daniel said, “Good luck out there. If I were ten years younger, I’d be running alongside you, but…”
“But your highest and best place is here, giving us what we need to face down eldritch abominations,” Yuri said.
“You’re no less a man for that,” George said.
Daniel nodded, his face suddenly becoming as unreadable as a Sphinx.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” George said lightly.
“We’re going to need two PBWs, twelve coilguns, and a basic load of ammunition,” Yuri said. “Plus this.”
Yuri held up a piece of paper. Daniel squinted at it.
“You’re planning a party?”
“Yeah. We’re bringing in more reinforcements for this job, and Boomer wants to top off his stock.”
“You’re lucky. I’ve got barely enough to kit out everyone.”
“Barely? I’m disappointed,” George said with a smile.
Daniel waved his hand. “I don’t keep machine guns just lying around, you know. I’ve got to assemble most of this hardware by hand. When do you need it by?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight?!” Daniel shook his head. “And you need this gear dead dropped too? You sure don’t make things easy for an old man.”
“We appreciate your hard work.”
Daniel shook his head again. “Appreciation only goes so far.”
“How much do we owe you?”
Daniel glanced at the list again. Frowned. Looked away.
“Twenty grand in total.”
It was a huge bite. But it was right around the price Yuri had estimated. At least everyone on the team had pooled their funds for this purchase.
“And one more thing,” Daniel said.
“Yeah?” Yuri asked.
“Save the world.”
