Savant by Rex Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

He pointed. "You understand what a capacitor is?" Shooter nodded, but the old man ignored him. "Umm. No matter. You couldn't move this, much less carry it. You need conducting rails for the projectile to ride, and this is where you shoot your current, which creates a magnetic field. It travels along here, and BANG! Fires your weapon. Not practical. Too big. Wears out quickly." The old man turned to another cutaway in color.
    "In a conventional firing device you need three things to operate: a furnace, a projectile, and a pipe. You burn something or create heat, expanding gases blow your projectile out your pipe. BANG! How fast the projectile comes out—that's your bullet velocity.
    "The coil is good, see, because it isn't limited by the same laws that govern velocities in conventional furnaces. We go now from one mile a second to two miles, three, maybe four miles a second! We call that hypervelocity.
    "Energy waves travel through here." He pointed to the drawing of the coil gun. "And the force of the magnetic field propels the projectile at hypervelocities of such speeds you can penetrate anything.
    "You ever heard how a hurricane drives pieces of straw through boards?"
    "Yes, sir." Price hadn't but he wanted to show he was paying attention.
    "Same deal." The man shook his head and long gray hairs misbehaved. "Hypervelocity. It makes the projectile penetrate the target according to a different set of physical laws.
    "In theory, if your bullet was dense enough, you could put a coil gun on a satellite, send it in orbit around the earth, and you could fire a projectile that would penetrate the globe and come out the other side of the planet! In theory, that is. If it didn't burn up on the way—and so on…" The old man trailed off, mesmerized by his own ideas.
    "This is the polarizer. Magnetic field. Super velocity. More durable than a rail gun. Smaller than a coil gun. Only problem is the energy eats the bullet. It gets the furnace so hot—so to speak—that when it pushes the projectile out the pipe the projectile itself disintegrates because the air becomes the target." He'd completely lost Shooter.
    "So here was where a light bulb lit over my head. Look at the projectile the light bulb said to me, not the delivery method. Put something that makes its own little furnace out there on the tip of the bullet, see? When the hyperspeeds heat up the projectile, BANG! —the combustible material fires! Now you got your furnace here, and here—burning up the air on the way to the target. Excelsior! " The old man gestured wildly in the air, looking like a mad scientist in a comic book.
    "SHARP-HEX! Stands for S uper- H ardened Ar mor-penetrating P rojectile— H igh EX plosive. Tungsten-carbide kinetic energy penetrator with an incendiary detonator on the tip." He showed a large-scale cutaway of two cartridges. "APEX! A nti- P ersonnel Projectile. EX tended Range. This one'll go through anything. This one not only explodes what it strikes, it destroys itself in the process. Amazing projectiles," he said with undisguised pride.
    "Only problem is in the delivery system." He turned to his final schematic. "It's like the old story about the electric car. They cost a cent and a half per ten thousand miles. The only trouble is the extension cord costs fifty thousand dollars. Same deal. The furnace and the pipe cost the U.S. government a quarter of a million dollars. Only one field model has been produced. Nothing else like it exists anywhere on earth. The U.S. M-3000 .50-caliber single-shot, hypervelocity, extended-range, flashless, Silent Anti- V ehicle/ AN ti- T errorist Weapon System. SAVANT for short. The death ray!"

    At a location known officially as Fire Support Base King, a sprawling hilltop jump-off point just south of "the Zone," SAUCOG's sniper, Bobby Price, was given his first secret mission in which the SAVANT weapon system would be utilized.
    A spike team of mercenaries and other headhunters drawn from the Combined Forces