CHAPTER TEN
Green’s Creek, NC, United States of America, Sol III
1648 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
“Lord it’s nice to shoot light stuff again.” Specialist Cindy Glenn was a female, like her commander. Unlike her commander, she did not consider anything about the Army to be a career, especially not in this job.
The basic theory of the MetalStorm system was conceived shortly before First Contact. The idea was simplicity in itself, like most interesting inventions. Instead of putting bullets in a complicated feeding system, load them all into the barrel, one stacked on top of another, with the propellant packed in between. Detonated electronically the device produced an awesome amount of firepower as literally hundreds of bullets spewed out of the barrel in bare seconds; one device had shown a theoretical rate of one million rounds per minute.
It was the “theoretical” part that was the sticking point. Since the barrel was also the bullet supply, “reloading” involved replacing the entire barrel. Furthermore, the “bullet to weight” ratio of the system was just astronomical; it could never be considered a reasonable system for infantrymen who were always overloaded anyway.
But it had certain benefits. After the coming of the Posleen, MetalStorm was used widely as an “area denial” system, laying down masses of bullets that could best be described as a “rain of lead.” When stopping Posleen wave assaults, more was always better when it came to firepower. And there wasn’t much “more” than MetalStorm.
It was also used for some specialty systems, one of which was the “MetalStorm Anti-Lander Enhanced Firepower Armor Combination.” The weapons system consisted of an Abrams tank chassis with a twelve-barrel MetalStorm pack mounted on top. The caliber of the barrels was 105mm and each had one hundred rounds of anti-armor discarding sabot loaded into it. At the touch of a button the system could spew out twelve hundred rounds in under a minute. It was hoped that this storm of depleted uranium, the same type and caliber of round that had originally been designed for the Abrams to defeat Soviet armor, would be capable of penetrating and destroying the Posleen landers that often played havoc on defenses. Unfortunately, it did not quite live up to its design potential.
The designers had been trying to get everyone to call it “Malefic” but they failed miserably. The system was malefic, but only to its crew. The Abrams had been designed with the 105 round in mind. And it had successfully upgraded to the 120mm round, a significant increase in firepower that it nonetheless managed smoothly. However, firing twelve hundred 105mm anti-armor discarding sabot rounds in less than a minute turned out to be… one of the few situations where “more power” was not necessarily the best thing. Crews normally screamed as they fired. Many crew members deserted or deliberately maimed themselves to avoid duty in MetalStorm tracks. Because when those twelve barrels began spewing depleted uranium, the sixty-ton tanks would shake like an out-of-balance blender. Broken bones were commonplace as the crews were slammed from side to side in the vehicles. Most of them likened it to being rolled in a barrel of gravel.
Despite the firepower, however, Malefic turned out to be unsuited to its primary role. The armor on Posleen landers was thick, the ships were large and they did not, unfortunately, approach on the ground. While the MetalStorm tracks could get penetration at short ranges, say down to fifteen hundred meters or so, they seemed unable to do any significant damage at anything other than point-blank range. And at that range, attempting to kill a lander was suicidal.
However, the military had designed the weapons at enormous cost and even fielded a few companies of them. So rather than simply take the turrets off and use the chassis for replacement parts, the powers-that-be decided to use them at the few things they were good at. Notably, area denial.
However, to do that required different weapons systems. The 105mm “twelve-pack” was poorly suited to killing vast numbers of Posleen. The rounds overkilled rather excessively but there were, for a MetalStorm system, relatively few of them.
But since the MetalStorm system replaced not just the ammunition in firing, but the barrel as well, there was no reason that the track was locked in to using 105mm. And a similar pack, even larger, was designed and fielded in 40mm.
The design used the basic 40mm grenade, the same projectile as was found in the venerable Mk-19 Mod 4. It fired a “bullet”-shaped projectile with a three-thousand-meter range that was just under a pound and a half of wrapped explosives and wire. On contact the projectile exploded, sending out a hail of notched wire that killed or injured anything in a five-meter radius.
Each of the MetalStorm “40 Packs” contained twenty thousand projectiles.
Instead of twelve barrels there were one hundred, ten across and ten down in a square block of metal that actually weighed more than the “heavy” pack. And instead of one hundred rounds packed into each barrel, there were two hundred.
A mass of Posleen were visible trying to push through the gap against the heavy fire of the human infantry. They were getting slaughtered, to the point that the following ranks were having to scramble over the bodies of the slain, but they were still inching down the road.
That was about to stop.
Glenn laid her targeting reticle on the front of the column and opened fire.
What spewed from the rectangular packet on a U-shaped mount on the tank looked like nothing so much as a continuous vomit of fire. One in five rounds was a tracer and with the rounds hammering out at such a high rate the tracers were not only continuous but overlapping. It was a wall of fire a meter and a half wide which, when it touched anything, exploded.
The Posleen touched by the wall of flame literally disappeared as dozens of rounds hit each individual centaur. As soon as it was clear the advance had stopped, Glenn started to walk the rounds up the road, toggling the gun from side to side to ensure she got all of the oncoming horde. It was less like a weapon than some flaming broom, that both killed the Posleen and ripped them into nothing larger than hand-sized chunks until what was left behind looked as if some angry god had put it through a meat-grinder.
Unfortunately, even two hundred thousand rounds could be expended in a short period of time. Which was why after only four seconds Turret One fell silent. After a moment Glenn hit the eject button and the massive steel firing pod was ejected backwards to lie on top of the SheVa.
“I’m out, ma’am,” the gunner said, flipping on the reload winch. “I’ll be up shortly, though.”
Chan had seen the effect of the 40 packs often enough, but never in such a concentrated location and it took her a moment to react. “That’s fine. Not a problem. Turret Two?”