My platoon was supposed to protect this one settlement on LV-832 during the swarm. No problem. We’re in a fortified position. We’ve got these fancy new Pulse Rifles. Just stupid alien animals. Nothing we can’t handle. Right?
Then we heard the thunder. It was like ten million hooves on the rock, and this . . . wave. That’s the only word. Just a wave of angry green flesh comes rolling down the mountain at us. It was far worse than the projections. Corporal Richards was our forward observer. He died horribly, trampled into bloody chunks in seconds.
We opened up with everything. Our only hope was to carve a hole in that wave of meat, to pile up enough dead to make a wall.
But then our Pulse Rifles started to choke. Only the swarm kept coming.
—1st Lieutenant Hank Reynolds, USCM
The horrific incident on LV-832 was not isolated. Wherever the improperly formulated ammunition was shipped, problems occurred. As the weapons would begin to heat up, the propellant would expand and stick, causing malfunctions. Or worse, cook off prematurely and detonate inside the conveyor magazines, often with catastrophic results.
You ever see what a 10mm explosive round does to a man? It penetrates a bit then explodes. The secondary wound channels are nasty. You can stick a softball into the hole. Yeah . . . Real nasty. Oh, we love them now. But back in ’71, imagine having that same explosive round cook off inside your rifle, right next to your face. Or worse, I heard about one dude where his Pulse Rifle cooked off, and it caused a sympathetic detonation with his grenade launcher. Marines were scared of their own rifles. Some of the guys took to carrying short-barreled shotguns on them for when things got close.
—Lance Corporal Daniel Walker, USCM
Rumors began to swirl of Colonial Marines found dead on the battlefield, with their Pulse Rifles disassembled, killed while desperately trying to clear a stoppage.
To their credit, Armat did not try to pass the buck. Instead, they sprang into action, discovered the cause, alerted Space Command, and tried to track down the bad lots of ammunition. By the time the hearings began, the M41 was working as intended. However, the bad reputation lingered in line units for quite some time, and the topic is still hotly debated among gun enthusiasts today.
Design changes were immediately instituted to make the M41 less ammunition-sensitive and more cooling vents were added to the shell. The integrated digital ammo counter was given a dimmer switch, because Marines had taken to covering the early versions with masking tape to avoid giving away their position during low light maneuvers. This variant was designated the M41A, which remains the standard issue rifle of the US Army and Colonial Marines to this day.
With the bugs worked out, the M41A began to earn a different kind of reputation.
Our Cheyenne hit the hot LZ like a meteor. There were so many missiles and so much flak that the night sky was lit up like the Fourth of July. Before the skids had touched ground we already had tracers coming in from three directions. We lost two men before we could even unass the transport. Our APC ate a rocket and we lost our lieutenant. The DeLorme rebels were ready for us, dug in, and itching for a fight.
My platoon’s orders were to take and hold the main plaza on the coastal platform. We encountered fierce resistance every step of the way. They were well funded. Most of the rebels were wearing top of the line carbon-weave armor, but our Pulse Rifles punched them anyway. Then the DeLorme Corporate Security Teams were wearing these heavy, servo assisted, armor suits. Tank boys we called them. Right hard bastards, every one of them. Except, even when our 10mm bullets failed to penetrate the plates, the impact and micro-explosions were enough to throw them off long enough for my Marines to close and finish them off through the rubberized gaps at their joints. The muzzle doesn’t climb much, and the M41 is so acute, we’d just hammer the tank boys until we pierced something vulnerable and they dropped.
It was street to street, house to house. We’d catch sniper fire from a window, launch a grenade through it, and keep moving. We reached the plaza, and found out that we were it. Nobody else had made it through the drop. We had to hold that position or the whole mission would fold.
The battle went on all night, and the rebels kept throwing everything they had at us. We shot our Pulse Rifles until the muzzles were glowing orange, and they never stopped, never jammed, not so much as a hiccup. Cheyennes were doing high-speed flybys and dropping crates of U Mags and grenades on us so we could stay in the fight.
That was the first time I used an M41A. It didn’t let me down then, and it has never let me down since. After DeLorme, I’ve taken a Pulse Rifle to every godforsaken planetoid, orbital, moon, backwater colony, and bug hunt you can think of. I’ve used it in zero G. I’ve used it underwater. Polar wastes to burning sands, abuse it, drop it, burn it, and the M41A won’t ever quit on you.
The Pulse Rifle is the only rifle tough enough for a Colonial Marine.
—Staff Sergeant Michael Newman, USCM
The M41A has gone on to earn the respect of every warrior who has used it . . . or faced it. This mechanical marvel has taken its place in history as one of the finest combat rifles ever fielded. The Pulse Rifle is known for going anywhere, doing anything, and accomplishing the impossible. Seldom has a weapon so encapsulated the bold, unstoppable nature of the men it is issued to, as the M41A Pulse Rifle.
This has been Saga of the Weapon.
V-WARS: ABSENCE OF LIGHT
This story first appeared in the anthology V-Wars: Night Terrors, edited by Jonathan Maberry, published by IDW Publishing in 2016.
The V-Wars series is about a virus which reappears and spreads across the world, reawakening latent DNA and turning people into vampires, and the resulting war between mankind and the vampires. It is currently being filmed for a show on Netflix. This is the second story that I wrote in that series. The first appears in Target Rich Environment Volume 1.
THE MOB PUSHED AND SCREAMED and chanted their slogans, stinking of sweat, adrenaline, and excitement. The air was moist from recent rain evaporating off of sweatshirts and hoodies, and hot from hundreds of packed-in bodies. Marko and his vampires passed between the protestors, and the hardest thing in the world was not killing them all.
These humans are nominally on our side. These are the useful idiots. Killing them—now—would be a waste of resources. Marko had ordered his men to hurt as few of the protestors during the op as possible. He’d had to beat that lesson into his soldiers. Some of his men were more feral than others, so in a few cases, the beating had been literal. Some of his recruits struggled with the concept of discipline.
The street was absolutely full of bodies. Most of them were young, impressionable and passionate. The ones who were showing their faces thought they could make a difference, naively believing their slogans, hash tags, and painted cardboard signs were going to change the world. The protestors hiding their identities were just eager to break shit. From the smell he could tell that some of their backpacks contained all the fixings to make Molotov cocktails. So far the masked hooligans were behaving themselves. The broken glass and burning cars would come later. The day belonged to the activists. The looters believed the night belonged to them . . . In reality it belonged to the vampires, and as tempting as it was to show these idiots who was really in charge, a riot made one hell of a good distraction.
The other side of the street was a sea of flashing red and blue lights. Seattle PD had learned their lesson about protests a few times over the last decade, and that was before I1V1 kicked societal order in the balls. The cops were ready behind batons and shields, tear gas launcher and pepper balls. If it weren’t for all of the news crews recording the peaceful protest the street would already be filled with gas. The cops and the looters both knew what was coming next, but there were rules to the fall of an empire. If the forces of law and order jumped the gun, morons would rant on Twitter, politicians would feign outrage, and a bureaucrat somewhere might be inconvenienced. Pretenses had to be kept up. So the street-level decision ma
kers would be forced to coddle the mob until the situation spiraled out of control, turned into a complete cluster fuck, and then overreact to contain it. That was the yin and yang of riot control.
All those years the government had spent training him how to overthrow governments, and Marko had never realized just how entertaining it would be to screw with his own. Before he had turned, Marko had been Army Special Forces. His job had been to train and lead indigenous forces behind enemy lines. Force multiplication, they called it. Now he was training vampires. He’d collected these individual predators and molded them into a real unit. Same tactics, new war.
One of his vampires appeared at his side. Even with the bandanna covering his face, he could tell it was Basco just from how smoothly he moved between the humans. Basco had been a tough bastard when he was still human. Making him bloodthirsty and fast as lightning had only made him an even better soldier. “In my country, we’d run a belt-fed across a mob like this. A hundred rounds and problem solved.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
His vampires were wired, tense and ready. They were hungry. Not just for blood—he’d kept their feeding to a minimum so as to not tip off the local authorities—but for action. They’d been planning this op for weeks, ever since word of the vaccine experiments had leaked. The news conference this morning had simply bumped up their timeline. The protestors had already been here anyway. His men had already been working the locals and stirring up the radical elements, so it hadn’t taken much of a push to get the riot kiddies fired up. His people had been bussing them in all day.
Marko was wearing a black hoodie and a plastic Guy Fawkes mask. The irony of a bunch of lefty atheists using a Catholic fanatic as their symbol caused him no end of amusement, but he was guessing there weren’t a lot of War College grads in this bunch. He needed the mask because the NSA was certain to be running facial recognition programs against the footage. As a bonus the hood hid his radio headset. “Target is in sight.”
The Iwashiro building didn’t look that impressive. It was just another plain old office cube. The real prize was inside. There were a hundred medical research companies looking for the Holy Grail but if the rumors were true, Iwashiro Biomedical had been making real progress on understanding the vampire virus—mostly because they had zero ethics—and according to this morning’s press conference, they’d made a real breakthrough.
“Sniper is in position.”
“Breaching team is in position.”
Every mutation was different. Some of his best soldiers couldn’t operate well in the sunlight, so they’d move once the sun was safely behind the buildings to the west. At the same time his kill teams would start taking out vital employees who hadn’t come to work today because of the protests. If everything went according to plan, by the end of the night the technology to produce a screener would be in vampire hands, and every human who understood how to make more would be dead. “Assault team, blend in and wait for my signal. We’ve got sundown in thirty.”
The angry mob was here because Iwashiro had been caught doing illegal experiments on vampire volunteers. Some girls wearing duct tape over their mouths—symbolic of who knew what—went marching past, waving signs that declared vampires are people too.
Marko smiled behind his mask. No . . . We’re so much better.
“Look at all those hippies.”
“Just try not to run any of them over, Solo,” Matt Kovac told their driver.
“General May hates when I run over civilians. Look at all that flannel. I can’t tell if they’re homeless or college students.” He honked the horn as twenty people jaywalked in front of them. Somebody threw a beer can at their car and it bounced off the hood. “You little son of a bitch!”
“Be cool, man. It’s a rental. It’s on the company card.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Solo muttered as the kids flipped them the bird, but eventually they meandered out of the way so he could keep driving. “Big Dog’s team gets to pop tangos while we have to grade rent-a-cops. Fantastic. Hang on, police checkpoint ahead.”
Toolbox was in the backseat. He leaned forward to see better. “Cops are diverting traffic like it’s a parade or something. Can you believe this nonsense, Show?”
Kovac didn’t like his call sign, but Showdown had stuck. Get in one Mexican standoff with a crazy vampire, and pretty soon everybody in V-8 was telling exaggerated stories about it, but as a new team leader, it had helped establish cred with the vets. It usually got shortened to Show for brevity’s sake.
V-8 was the military’s elite special response unit for vampire problems. Their personnel were some of the finest operators available, recruited from every branch of the service. Kovac had been Army SF himself, following in his deceased father’s footprints. It wasn’t until after he’d been with V-8 for a while that he’d learned his father wasn’t exactly deceased.
“Pull over there.”
The four of them were out of uniform—rocking the business casual as Solo put it—and driving a Honda. Normally when V-8 rolled up on a site, they were hard to miss—what with the armored vehicles and top-end military gear—but the General had told them to be discreet today. If Kovac had realized that the streets were going to be filled with cops in helmets, face shields, and vests, they’d have brought their fun stuff. It was a sad comment on the state of the world that they wouldn’t have stuck out that much.
Kovac rolled his window down and showed his ID to the police officers on the corner. “How’s it going, Officer?”
“Mostly vandalism and graffiti so far but they’re just getting warmed up,” the cop said as he read the card. Behind him, a stoned white guy dressed in tie-dyed clothing and sporting dreadlocks was trying to put a peace sign bumper sticker on the cop car’s windshield. “Aw, stop that! You guys go through. My boss said to expect you. Head that way.”
The cops moved a wooden barricade and waved them through. Solo drove between a SWAT van and an MRAP, honking so that the riot squad would get out of his way. They got some surly glances from the other side of those Lexan face shields. They could see a lot more of the protestors now, and Kovac was surprised to see how damned many of them there were.
“Glad that’s not our problem,” Kovac muttered.
People were milling around in groups and the atmosphere was charged. The rumble of crowd noise was overwhelming. Iwashiro Biomedical had been working on a vaccine for I1V1, which just about every sane person would agree was a good thing, but if people could throw a fit about animal testing, they got downright pissed when a company got caught illegally testing drugs on vampires.
“Today’s lesson is if you’re going to do stupid shit, don’t get caught!” Solo exclaimed.
“Like these assholes care about the civil rights of vampires. Okay, maybe the chicks do, but there are two kinds of guys who come to things like this,” Toolbox explained. “The ones who are trying to impress the activist girls so they can get laid, and the ones who want to break a window and get a free TV . . . Mute here was an observer in Libya with me. Those protests were sure different than this, huh?”
Mute spoke for the first time since they’d left the airport. “More AK-47s.”
“Yeah, and not so many pussies sporting anarchy symbols.”
Since it was the focal point of the protestors’ outrage, the cops had formed around the front of the Iwashiro building. The police here didn’t know who they were, but their car had been let through, so that was good enough to make a hole for them to pass.
“Weak-ass metal fence around the perimeter. Couple of decorative concrete planters would stop a car bomb from getting right under the facing,” Solo said as he gave the place the once-over. “Not exactly impressed on first glance. A little bit of creative landscaping would make this place a lot harder to crash . . . and make it look nicer too. My dad’s a landscaper. I should give them his card.”
Inside the visitor parking lot was a little guard shack manned by rent-a-cops. The glass wasn
’t even thick enough to be bullet resistant. The guards inside looked nervous and distracted, which was understandable since there were a few thousand people a couple hundred yards away who thought their employer was the capitalist antichrist. “What’s your business here?”
He held up his ID. “Captain Matthew Kovac, Vampire Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism Field Team. You should be expecting us.”
“The Army guys?”
“I’m Navy, but I let them hang out with me,” Toolbox said quietly enough the guard wouldn’t hear.
“That’s us.”
The guard pushed a button and the flimsy bar lifted. It was the kind of thing kids could push out of the way when they didn’t want to pay for parking. Solo drove up to the front of the building and parked. “Can you believe that? A laminated ID card I could make at Kinko’s gets us right in without question. The General was smart to send us to review their security, because this place sucks.”
“Be diplomatic,” Kovac warned as he stepped out of the car. The four of them started toward the entrance. “It’s their invention. We just need to make sure they’re smart about keeping it safe until it’s ready for release. The military isn’t officially here. This is a completely civil matter. We’re only supposed to assess.”
“If they’ve actually got a working V screener somebody should declare the whole place a national security risk and take it over,” Toolbox suggested. “Nobody else has gotten a test to work yet. Can’t we just say it’s a public health emergency or something?”
“That’s over my pay grade. Once the government gets its shit together I’m sure they’ll buy the thing, and if not, it’ll go to court and the lawyers can fight. General May told me these guys are big donors with lots of Congress friends, so play it cool. He offered to protect it, but the best he could talk them into without a court order was allowing some advisors.”
Target Rich Environment 2 Page 18