Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [9]
“Hey, Chief,” said Gunner’s Mate Wilson LaRue. “If Mars has only .1 G, that means I can carry like ten times as much ammo, right?”
Ruiz shook his head in mock exasperation. “First, G-Man, it’s more like .33 G. And second, if you’re jogging along with six hundred pounds of shit on your back, it might feel like you’re only lifting two hundred. But when you dig your feet in and try to stop, it will be six hundred pounds of mass that hits you like a truck and makes sure that you keep going.”
“Oh, yeah,” LaRue replied, apparently crestfallen. “I always forget that part.”
“Tell you what,” the chief said. “You can carry an extra eight rounds for your rail gun, providing you shoot them or drop them before you try any wind sprints.”
“That’ll work,” G-Man said approvingly.
LaRue was the biggest SEALS on the Team and carried the biggest personal weapon: a recoilless rail gun that fired arrowlike depleted-uranium penetrators wrapped in a copper alloy body. Each projectile packed nearly the punch of a 120-millimeter Abrams tank gun round from forty years earlier. The high-temperature superconductor alloys, high-density energy storage capacitors, and inertial dampening technology Earth had obtained from the aliens made the new weapon possible. But even the inertial dampening coils that surrounded the barrel of the long weapon could be powered by the capacitor-filled backpack only enough to cut down on the incredible recoil. It took the old technology of a recoilless gun, the backblast of an explosive charge, to make firing the rail gun humanly possible. But it still took a big human to handle it, something LaRue did with ease.
“Maybe we’ll get to do a little sharpshooting together, eh, G?” Falco suggested. “Knock some cans off a fence post or something?”
Electrician’s Mate Derek Falco was an inveterate joker and also the Team’s best sniper, carrying the Mark 30 sniper rifle, better known as the Hammer. The long 10.2-millimeter caseless rifle had tremendous range and accuracy with its long, sharp-pointed projectiles and computer-aided laser range-finding sight. Given a stable platform and shooting through a vacuum or near vaccuum, he could hit a baseball-sized target from more than ten miles away. He had such range and accuracy that one of his few limiting factors was the curvature of the planet or moon he was shooting on. Falco often operated with LaRue during training, the bigger man acting as the spotter when they worked as a sniper Team. Their two weapons complemented each other, and the rest of the men knew that if either of the pair could see a target, almost out to the horizon, they could hit it. Falco was a chameleon who could hide on a flat plate so that no one would ever see him even after he had fired. LaRue was more of a dragon who could disappear into the brush, but when he fired “Baby,” everyone knew where he was from the big backblast.
Ruiz looked over the upturned crate where a couple of Teammates—Chief Bosun’s Mate Fred Harris and Hospital Corpsman Harry Teal—were playing blackjack. Murphy and Price were reading. “Smokey” Robinson—the nickname was a joking reference to his Minnesota-blond hair and blue eyes—was inspecting the breather pack on his pressure suit. Dobson, who concealed his intellectual acumen behind an “aw-shucks” Alabama accent, was tinkering with the battery pack of his handheld comlink. Ruiz had been impressed to learn that the tiny radio, as long as it had direct line