Carnifex (71 page)

Note: In the event of battery failure or weakness the magazine may be removed, the trigger depressed and the bolt jacked six to ten times to build up a firing charge.

Ammunition:

The single greatest complaint about the F-26 (called, for reasons best left to etymologists and corporals, a "Zion" in Balboa and an "Arraijan" in Zion) is its weight. Between the relatively long barrel, the batteries, the integral thermal sight and range finder, and the flywheel and generator, it is the single heaviest general issue rifle on Terra Nova today. This is made up for by the ammunition.

The 6.5mm SCC round is a high ballistic coefficient, high cross sectional density bullet of 120 grains set into a hollow cylinder of cook-off resistant propellant which is capped at the base with a very high temperature plastic semi-rimmed semi-casing, with dual electrodes, referred to as a "stub." The stub is of 10.4mm in width and 9 mm in height. The electronic primer is set into the hollow of the propellant and connected to the electrodes. The stub serves to obdurate (gain gas sealage of) the explosion of the propellant and to transmit the electrical energy that detonates the primer from electrodes in the bolt face.

The ammunition comes prepackaged in sealed, generally disposable snail drum magazines containing 93 rounds. The magazines are approximately 109mm in diameter and 42mm in depth. One fully loaded magazine weighs just under 1162 grams, or about two fifths the weight of a comparable quantity of standard brass cased ammunition of similar caliber and capability. Thus, the F-26 with 465 rounds and a spare battery weighs 10.6 Kg while, for example, the lighter and somewhat less capable Abakanov with a similar sight and 465 inferior steel-cased rounds would weigh approximately 12.3 kilograms, not including the weight of the sixteen magazines required to have each round ready to fire.

The decision to pack and issue the ammunition in drums, rather than to issue accountable magazines and loose or stripper clipped ammunition to individual soldiers was a difficult one for ZMI and BAC. The cost, even when the magazines are recoverable for reprocessing at the plant, is at least twice that of the steel cased ammunition used in the Abakanov and comparable to that of the brass cased ammunition fired by the FSC's Wakefield carbine. Testing, however, revealed that the SCC was simply not up to the rough handling and exposure to weather that the more usual system entailed.

Magazines are known to come issued in at least 8 varieties, specialized but useable by all versions:

Standard: contains standard ball and tracer in a ratio of 2:1.

CQB: composed of equal numbers (31 each) of standard ball, armor piercing (tungsten), and eccentric (a particularly unstable, once it has penetrated flesh, tumbling round) in sequence.

5x1: larger magazine (17.7 cm in diameter) containing 211-213 ball and 42-44 tracer. Generally issued to machine gun crews.

Match: contains 93 rounds of match grade, 6.5mm ball

Humanitarian: match grade frangible ammunition used to engage targets mixed in closely with non-combatants. Like Match, Humanitarian magazines are normally only issued to snipers. There has been complaint from the international humanitarian community that use of the ammunition, in the hands of both Zion's and Balboa's armed forces, has not been uniformly restricted to such circumstances.

Blank: contains 93 rounds of pure blank ammunition.

Training plastic: contains 93 rounds of plastic tipped ammunition fired by underpowered propellant which, upon hitting a human target, is extremely painful but not generally deadly except at point blank ranges.

Moral training: contains 88 rounds of plastic tipped ammunition and 5 rounds of tracer, the tracer being loaded in at random. A perusal of unclassified information on the frequency of use of this magazine indicates a frightful willingness to risk losses in training on the part of the Balboan armed forces.

The magazine rear face has a key which it turned 2.5—3 times to compress the feeder spring. As rounds are fired the rifle's retreating bolt drives a ratcheting rod into the magazine (integral to the magazine not the rifle) to maintain compression.

Further, a portion of the back plate is composed of transparent polycarbonate to allow the firer to visually check available ammunition.

Variants:

Machine Gun:

The adoption of the F-26 rifle has, for Balboa at least, led to the elimination of the belt fed General Purpose Machine Gun from the inventory of its armed forces. In lieu of the GPMG a heavier version of the F-26, called the M-26, has been developed. This weapon has both a heavier, ringed barrel and a variant on the Volgan Pecheneg forced air cooling system. Both the single shot and low rate automatic fire capabilities were eliminated in the M-26 and the burst feature program modified. Thus it fires at either 6 round burst (1975 RPM) or high rate automatic (1200 RPM) only. Though it has a 265 round magazine it will feed from the same 93 round drum magazines as the F-26 (and, uncommonly, vice versa). The M-26 with 2120 rounds weighs 34 Kg, 41 with tripod. Its effective range is 1300 meters. Grazing fire range is 705 meters. It has an automatic magazine drop feature that releases the magazine when the last round is expended.

Marksman's Rifle

Although the Balboan Armed Forces have two heavier sniper rifles, the .34-caliber LRSS and the .41-caliber VLRSS, both of which fire more conventional, brass cased, ammunition, both Zion and the Legion felt that there was a place in the rifle platoon or squad for a more than normally accurate battle rifle capable of firing the same ammunition as the F-26 and M-26. This rifle, called the F-26FT (francs tireurs) is almost exactly the same as the F-26, differing only in having a longer and heavier barrel and a better and longer ranged (and much more expensive) sight and range finder combo. This rifle weighs 5.4 Kg and has an effective range of 1300 meters. Match grade ammunition is available and issued.

Developmental History:

Although it is sometimes jokingly said that the F-26 began over drinks at the Zion Embassy in Ciudad Balboa, the better truth is that it is the result of several developments, none of them major in themselves, coming to fruition in different parts of the world at about the same time. For example, the semi-cased ammunition is a clear development of two varieties of caseless ammunition, one conventionally primed and one electronically primed, developed independently in Sachsen and Ostmark. The rammer which is so critical to the very high rate of fire and effectiveness of the burst feature is similar to, albeit simpler and sturdier than, that developed for the Volgan Abakanov. The snail drum magazine clearly owes its parentage to the sturdier but much more expensive double snail drum magazine developed for the FSC's Wakefield rifle. The miniaturized computer which controls the rate of fire was a development of Nihon Teppu Jutsu, Inc, of Yamato.

However informally the project may been initiated, very quickly a consortium between ZMI and BAC had been formed to begin development.

The 6.5mm projectile was an early, and happy, compromise between Balboa, which wanted something more in the 6mm range to suit its jungle conditions, and Zion which wanted something closer to 6.8mm in caliber but of great cross sectional density to suit its more commonly found desert and urban environments. Testing and simulation showed that the 6.5 was possibly ideal for neither but certainly more than adequate for both.

Thus, the caliber of 6.5mm was agreed upon.

Development thereafter becomes a very murky and perhaps even sordid subject, with charges of industrial espionage, pirating of personnel, and illegal reverse engineering being raised frequently. Certainly it is true that some design engineers from Volga and chemists from Ostmark and the Federated States of Columbia did emigrate to Balboa and Zion in the few years before the rifle was finally prototyped. It is also true that the magazine bears a suspicious, but apparently superficial, similarity to the double snail drum in use by the FSC (some copies of which, apparently, found their way to Zion).

International Sales:

Although acknowledged to be a superior battle implement, the F-26 and its cousins do only marginally well in international sales. This is for two reasons. The first is that the rifle is extremely expensive, at least twice the price of its next nearest competitor. The other is that both the Legion del Cid and Zion absolutely refuse to sell the rifle to Salafi and certain other states at any price, though the Legion does issue it to its Islamic mercenary battalions, the Pashtun Scouts.

La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.

—
Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de La Clos

Fernandez shook his head ruefully and placed the report from Mahamda, his chief of interrogators, down on his disk. The intelligence coming from the
von Mises
had dropped alarmingly. Mahamda's report was clear on why, too. He picked the report up again and reread the key paragraph.

"The Pashtun are simply too tough," Mahamda had written. "They're not like the soft city boys from Sumer and Yithrab we were used to dealing with. Oh, yes, we can break them; but it takes three times longer. That's no different, in practice, from cutting my interrogation staff by a factor of three. And when they do break, the intelligence we gain is almost always old, too old to be useful tactically, though it usually retains its strategic value. Only when we have family members to threaten do they turn quickly. Nor will simply giving me more men do much better. This is delicate work, work that requires great talent and much training. Simply inflicting duress is rarely enough."

"And I don't have a solution to that," Fernandez muttered. "Patricio is still too delicate about threatening innocents; though he has made great strides. I wonder if we spoiled ourselves a little by going for the easy route and not developing enough tactical intelligence capability. Something to think on, anyway."

Alena sat up abruptly. She'd had another of her visions, this time in a dream. It hadn't been a particularly good one, nothing like when she had seen her husband presenting the calf's carcass to her on the playing field, nothing like the vision of their first night together (though the reality of that had far surpassed the dream). In fact, it had been downright horrible, all smoke and fire and screams and struggling, dying men.

She glanced at the horses, hobbled and guarded, a hundred meters away.
No . . . it wasn't them.

Alena's eyes looked overhead.
No, no aircraft.

Alena herself wasn't sure whether her visions came from somewhere else or if they were just the result of having a mind that could take and match a great many disparate bits of information and come up with probabilities from that, probabilities that that same mind imagined into visions. It didn't really matter which it was, she supposed, since the visions turned out to be right, more often than not. Best of all, unlike most men, her husband—she looked down warmly at the sleeping form beside her—
listened
. How could she not love a man who listened?

This vision was different from most. She sensed that the action she had seen was not to be immediate, nor close by.

What could have caused it
? she wondered.

Her conscious mind was at least as good as her subconscious. She began to tally what she knew.

Point: the war is going fairly well, with new information coming in every day and deserters from the
Ikhwan
giving themselves up regularly. This will make the other side desperate. Point: I have seen my husband's higher commander. He is a tired man, breaking down and unwilling to admit it to anyone. He is desperate, too. Point: the action has mostly moved to the border, but is stuck there because we can't cross to where the enemy shelters. Point: support for this war among those who fund it is waning. They, too, are desperate for it to end.

She, too, shook her head.
No, those are not the keys. It was something else, but what?

"David," she said, nudging the sleeping form beside her. "Husband, awaken. I have a prediction. Let me see the map."

With a grunt David sat up next to her. He'd learned, over the past two years, one hundred and fifty or more firefights, several awards and decorations, and a promotion, that when Alena wanted to see the map he'd be well advised to deliver. He reached into the saddle bags beside his sleeping roll and took the map and a blue-filtered flashlight out, unfolding the map in front of her and focusing the light for her to see by.

Alena's finger began tracing the map, stopping at points and gliding right over others.

Point: a platoon from the Cazador cohort was ambushed yesterday
here
. Point: there was a report of donkeys being purchased by someone
here
. Point: there was a report of a delivery of explosives
here
, last month. Point . . . Point . . . Point . . . Point . . . 

Alena closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth. It was eerie, but Cano wasn't about to object. When she opened them she pointed to a spot on the map, a junction of backwoods trails, and said, "Bring your men
here
, before first light. Thirty to forty of the enemy, heavily armed, and leading a caravan. If you hurry . . . 

Some miles from where Alena studied her husband's map, Senior Centurion Ricardo Cruz shivered in the cold night air.

Despite almost ten years of the news networks' predictions about the "brutal Pashtian winter," it had so far failed to materialize anywhere below the high mountain passes. They were still waiting, expectantly, and devoted several hours a week to the subject.

On the other hand, while not exactly "brutal," the winter could be cold enough. Cruz thought it was "goddamned cold," for example. He thought so despite the roughly one thousand drachma worth of cold weather gear the Legion was now able to provide each man deployed.
On the other hand, it could be worse. I remember that first winter, in the hills of Yezidistan . . . . brrrr. Ah well, at least the wind blows from the other direction so we can get a little shelter from these rocks. Fortunately, too, it also keeps our scent out of the kill zone.