The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [18]
"Get down off that police vehicle now," said the Major. "Or I will shoot."
Mativi licked his lips, looking up a pistol barrel for the second time that day, but this time attempting to perform complex orbital calculations in his head as he did so. Have I factored in relativity properly? It needs to travel dead over the hole —
"Shan't."
The gun fired. It made quite a satisfactory BOOM. There was a red flash in mid-air, and Mativi was still there.
The Major stared at Mativi.
"As I said," said Mativi, "I understand what is in this cargo. You do not. Do I have your full cooperation?"
The Major's eyes went even wider than his perceived Remit To Use Deadly Force. He lowered the gun, visibly shaken.
"You do," he said. "Sir," he added.
The Hyundai became bogged down by bodies - fortunately living ones - in the immediate vicinity of the Heavy Weapons Alert site. A crowd of perhaps a thousand goggling locals, all dressed in complementary rayon T-shirts handed out by various multinationals to get free airtime on Third World famine reports, were making road and roadside indistinguishable. But the big blue bull bars parted the crowd discreetly, and Mativi dawdled forward to a hastily-erected barrier of velcrowire into which several incautious onlookers had already been pushed by their neighbours. Velcrowire barbs would sink a centimetre deep into flesh, then open up into barbs that could only be removed by surgeons, provided that the owner of the flesh desired to keep it. Barbed wire was not truly barbed. Velcrowire was.
The troops at the only gap in the fence stood aside and saluted for the UN car, and Mativi pulled up next to an ancient Boeing V-22 VTOL transport, in the crew door of which a portly black man in a bad safari suit sat juggling with mobile phones. The casings of the phones, Mativi knew, were colour-coded to allow their owner to identify them. The Boeing had once been United Nations White. After too many years in the Congo, it was now Well-Used Latrine White.
Mativi examined what was being done at the far end of the containment area. The site was a mass of specialized combat engineering machinery. Mativi recognized one of the devices, a Japanese-made tractor designed for defusing unexploded nuclear munitions - or rather, for dealing with what happened when a human nuclear UXB disposal operative made a mistake. Hair trigger sensors on the tractor would detect the incipient gamma flare of a fission reaction, then fire a 120-millimetre shell into the nuke. This would kill the bomb disposal man and fill the area around the bomb with weapons-grade fallout but probably save a few million civilians in the immediate area.
Mativi walked across the compound and yelled at the man in the Boeing. "Louis, what the HELL are your UXB monkeys DOING?"
Grosjean's head whipped round.
"Oh, hello, Chet. We're following standard procedure for dealing with an unexploded weaponized gamma source."
"Well, first off, this isn't a weapon."
Grosjean's smile was contemptuous. "It's something that can annihilate the entire planet, and it isn't a weapon?"
"It's thirty-nine things that can annihilate the planet, and they're not weapons any more. Think about it. Would anyone use a weapon that would blow up the whole world?"
Grosjean actually appeared to seriously consider the possibility; then, he nodded to concede the point. "So what sort of weapon were these things part of?"
"Not weapons," corrected Mativi. "Think of them as weapons waste. They were the principal components in a Penrose Accelerator."
"You're making it up."
"You damn fool security guy, me weapons inspector. We've suspected the People's Democratic Republic of Congo used Penrose weapons in their war with the Democratic People's Republic of Congo for some time. They had guns capable of lobbing loo-tonne shells full of plague germs at Pretoria from a distance of 4,000 kilometres, for instance. When we examined those guns after UNPEFORCONG overran their positions, what we found didn't fit. They had magnetic accelerators in their barrels