Heartburn
MOST PYROMAGNETIC LANCERS are single-shot breech-loading carbines.
They have a range of approximately one hundred and twenty yards and can fire almost fifteen shots a minute.
This design is dictated by the limitations of the magnetic magma cartridge.
When fired, powerful shaped explosives inside the cartridge’s duranium shell liquefy the magnetic alloy core.
Overcharged electromagnets shape the blob of ferrous magma, spinning off a tiny spur to contact the disruptor generator and pressing the rest into the barrel, where the bolt is squeezed into an incredibly fine stream and accelerated to mind-boggling velocities.
If the molten stream contacts a shield before losing integrity, the disruptor will discharge and hopefully overload the shield, sending the hypersonic bolt of superheated alloy into the soft target beyond.
If the bolt separates from the continuous line back to the disruptor charge, the magma will splash harmlessly off the target’s shield.
Then the empty shell is ejected, and complicated cooling systems vent heat from the barrel in slightly over two seconds.
Multiple barrels can cool separately to increase the rate of fire, and longer barrels focus finer bolts for increased range.
However, barrels are heavy, lined with magnetic accelerator coils and liquid cooling systems, so any weapon light enough for a soldier to reasonably use must trade range for rate of fire.
Most armies prefer the simplicity of a single-shot carbine.
The Empire had a different approach. Their demons arranged ten short barrels in a radial pan with a large drum magazine feeding shells into the rotating disk of barrels, and mounted the entire assembly on a stock and foregrip, creating a rotary repeating lancer capable of firing nearly three hundred rounds a minute.
It was too heavy for an unaugmented human, but not for a large demon.
Its range was barely thirty meters, similar to a decent lancer pistol, but that was enough for the melee-focused demons.
They loved to charge in, rake a formation with a drum of magma shells, then draw their great battle-axes and wade into the fray.
I’d seen it many times on the battlefield. It was why I was ready when the demon outside the window opened fire.
White-hot lancer bolts shattered the crystal window and tore into the room.
The bed burst into flames, followed by the walls and the rest of the furniture.
The heat of the beams streaking overhead, effortlessly piercing through the meager cover behind which Astrid and I cowered, was immense.
My skin blistered under the assault, but the inexperienced demon fired high.
There was a pause in the assassin’s attack. Astrid popped up to take a look, and I pulled her back down. “He’s reloading,” she shouted.
“Get me a lancer,” I yelled back. Astrid reached her hand out towards the ruin of a dresser, and a silvery object streaked into her hand, smashing through the cooling threads of pyromagnetic alloy.
I briefly reflected that Astrid must be more cybered than I’d imagined to have a beck-and-call installed in her hand.
She tossed the lancer, augmented with a bulky hovermotor under its barrel, to me.
Two barrels, two shots, versus the assassin’s next thirty-round drum. Uneven odds, to say the least.
I leapt, flying across the empty space between the burning bed and the divider to the next room.
Searing lancer bolts followed, tracing out the arc of my flight, but too slow.
I landed behind cover, rolled onto my belly, and leveled the pistol.
The demon’s rapid fire flashed an angle back to the muzzle of his weapon as he blasted through the wall, blindly trying to hit me through the inadequate concealment. I aimed low, hoped, and fired.
With my first shot, the demon stopped shooting.
I emptied the second barrel, but simultaneously a heavier high-pitched clash sounded on the other side of the wall.
Neither the assassin’s repeater nor my borrowed pistol had the power to make such a sound.
I leaned out of cover to see the demon spin out of sight, its hoversteed burning in midair. I couldn’t believe that I’d hit it.
Astrid came charging from the bedchamber holding a hefty three-barrel lancer carbine.
“Thanks for the distraction. I got him in the engine block.” She pressed a handful of shells into my hand, and I broke the pistol open, pushing two fresh rounds into the breech as the empty casings fell smoking on the floor.
“Who the Fall was that?” I asked.
“I’m more interested to know who turned off the palace shields,” Astrid growled.
I stopped. She was right. The palace umbrella shields could stop a planetary bombardment.
You’d need a Fall device to get through them.
How on old Earth could a rotary get through unless somebody on the inside had lowered them?
Who else was on the inside with them?
Astrid headed for the door to the corridor. “Wait,” I called, then fired my lancer at the door latch.
A spray of lancer fire came flying back through the door at us. Astrid hit the floor with me, then scrabbled to her knees. “Back, back to the parlor!”
“It’s an inferno,” I shouted.
“It’s our way out,” she yelled back.
I didn’t see how that could be. We were hundreds of feet up without hovermotors. The little device in my pistol could not possibly hold the weight of two grown adults. Still, I followed her. She at least had an idea, which was better than me.
I stumbled into the burning room to see Astrid shoot out the remaining window.
It shattered, tumbling in jagged shards to the ground.
Expertly, Astrid slung her lancer behind her back, then she gestured to me.
“Put your arms around my neck.” She crouched so I could do so, then wrapped one arm around my waist. “Hold on.”
“Wait, what are we going to—” Before I could finish my question, Astrid leapt out the window, taking me with her.
Before I could scream, Astrid’s free, ungloved hand bit into the palace’s crystal wall.
Digging shimmering furrows into the smooth surface, Astrid rode the wall down the side of the tower.
In seconds, her feet hit the ground, and she let me put my feet under me.
My bare feet scrunched on a pearlescent gravel pathway.
A line of manicured poplar trees separated us from the rest of the palace gardens.
“There,” she said, “we should be safe for a moment…”
A motion behind her caught my attention. The assassin from above rose from the burning wreck of his hoversteed, dirt and soot smudging his grey hide. He was huge, larger than even the Emperor’s guards. He dragged his burned, lancer-ruined leg behind him as he raised his undamaged rotary repeater.
“Look out!” I brought my pistol to bear and fired.
I hit him, but the distance was too great and his shield deflected the disconnected magma stream.
Fortunately for us, his deadly spray of lancer bolts bounced harmlessly off our shields as well.
The effect was blinding, and when the barrage ceased, I blinked away dark spots in my vision to see the demon advancing as he slotted another drum into the bottom of his gun.
I readied my weapon, prepared to wait until the last moment before firing, hoping to get a clean shot before he could.
“That little fucker,” Astrid said, swinging her tri-barrel carbine off her back, up to her shoulder and into shooting position. As the assassin worked his repeater’s charging handle and swung it around to point at us, Astrid calmly shot him through the head.
We did not have time to celebrate our victory as a lancer bolt blew a half-meter crater in the gravel path beside us.
I looked up to see, high above, a human hanging out the window from which we’d descended, reloading a long-barreled marksman lancer.
I couldn’t make out what uniform they wore, if any.
“Move,” I said. “Into the trees.”
“They won’t stop a lancer bolt,” Astrid protested, staring up at the tower as if itching to climb back up and claw the offending bastard’s face off.
I grabbed her wrist. “They can’t shoot us if they can’t see us.”
Reluctantly, Astrid allowed me to pull her across the open lawn and into the trees, dodging two more shots before we were safely concealed under the leaves.
I took a moment to rest, but Astrid tapped her temple and began speaking.
“Guards, there are assassins in the Imperial suite. Do your fucking job! Get a squad to me right fucking now, or I’m going to rip your tongues out through your throat and listen to your sputtering excuses as you choke on your own blood. ”
Inter-cranial communicators as well? “I guess it takes a lot of cyber to run an empire.”
Astrid seemed to notice me for the first time, as though she’d forgotten I was there.
“Not really, but it helps. I need every advantage I can get, what with my impure bloodline and all. I can’t grow another three feet or develop additional musculature overnight, so I make do with cyber implants.
” Astrid considered her bare body with a sigh.
“I wish I had scales or dermal plates, or at least a tough outer hide instead of this useless smooth skin.”
“I don’t mind it,” I said with a smirk.
“Of course you don’t mind. On you, it looks good. On me, it looks fragile.”
“No one in the Alliance would ever claim you look fragile,” I commented, observing the corded muscles running the length of her four-foot-long legs, the sheer power of her towering form.
Instead of pleasing her, my comment seemed to increase her dissatisfaction with her body. “I know. I’m the perfect compromise, too huge and hideous for Alliance humans, too puny and pathetic for Imperial demons. Attractive to none.”
I think you’re beautiful beyond measure, I thought, but a warning voice inside my head told me Astrid was not ready to hear such calming words at this moment.
Angrily, Astrid scanned the sky. “Where are they? Damn them all, I thought my idiot guards were better than this. I haven’t had a call this close since the war started.”
“You’ve had many assassination attempts?” I asked, latching onto the new topic.
“They were nearly constant during the coup and right after.” She sighed. “I guess the guards have gotten lazy. Or turned against me.”
Just then, a flight of hoversteeds whined over the treetops. Several soared up the tower to the broken level where the sniper had been, disembarking the dragoons riding double behind the saddle. The rest landed in the clearing, their riders jumping off and fanning out, weapons raised.
I stood straight. “Right then. Shall we go scream their faces off?”
Astrid’s face grew even more clouded. “I just might.”
I emerged from the trees, pistol held loosely in my hand. “Hello, boys. Took your sweet time…”
Lancers are less reliable than zeroblades.
It takes nearly three milliseconds of uninterrupted contact to ensure a zero-blade will cut through a shield, while lancers have only a fraction of that time for a disruptor to work.
They worked fine nine times out of ten, but the tenth time, the shield won instead.
The results were unpredictable. Sometimes they deflected the bolt entirely.
Sometimes they let the magma through but slowed it down enough so it hit like a blob of superheated wax.
In this case, my shield cooled the magma into a thin spike of metal, which pierced straight through my chest.
“NO!” I heard Astrid scream, but the shout came from far away.
I was too absorbed by the strange sensation of my heart thumping around a sliver of metal, my heartbeats breaking the spike into splinters, pushing them around, shredding my organs, but I was helpless to stop it.
I looked up at the guard who’d shot me as the Emperor shot him for his mistake.
Then she had me, was guiding me down towards the ground.
“Lieutenant, get the healers here, now, or you’ll follow your soldier’s fate,” she ordered, then looked at me with worrying eyes.
Her gloved hand cradled my head as the edges of my vision blurred, and her face looked so beautiful above me. Why couldn’t I lift my arm to touch it?
“Stay with me, Levar,” I heard her say as my mind went to black. “I don’t want to lose you again.”