Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

Mingo might have, but he couldn't be sure. "I mean, what would it look like? A sci-fi raygun or what?"

"What did you see?"

"Like an old-fashioned tommy gun, with the round clip, only it was way deeper, like this." He held up his hands to draw it in midair. "And the barrel came out of the middle of it. No sights, tripod mounted."

"Sounds likely," said Cole. "The cylinder would be the array of batteries."

Mingo took over. "That's why it only made us reboot and didn't kill our electronics. Even if they've got batteries as good as ours, and even if they've got some brilliant way to discharge all the power at once, there's just not enough electricity in Bangui to do a real EMP. The ones that brought down those jets in New York caused a citywide brownout. A really portable aimable EMP device is just not possible."

"But they came close," said Cole. "What if we hadn't read the manual? What if we'd just shed the Bones and gone in without them?"

"Almost did," said Arty. "I was about to push the escape bar when I heard you shout to reboot."

"So what do we know?" asked Cole.

"Best guess," said Cat, "is this was a setup from the start. This Idi Amin de Gaulle clown was the front. Somebody wanted to try out his little EMP device on our electronics, so they got de Gaulle to take over the embassy. They probably promised him that their device would make us sitting ducks so he couldn't lose."

"Whoever it was," said Mingo, "they were able to clear the streets of the rival bandit gangs."

"They probably paid them to come and pretend to be besieging the place," said Babe. "Then told them when to go home."

"The thing is," said Benny, "it worked. They brought down the suits. If you weren't all such amazingly strong, agile, and intelligent human beings, you really would have been sitting ducks. And if they'd had the brains to deploy properly, they could have killed you all as you crawled across open ground to the embassy, or else during the reboot."

"Couldn't deploy like that," said Drew. "They had to stay out of sight of the Preds. Everybody knows we've got eyes in the sky wherever we go. No place to set up a killing ground without us spotting them in advance."

"But the manual EMP-shooters, where did they have those?" asked Arty.

"Inside the building," said Mingo. "It can shoot its pulse through a window without damaging it. Nothing we could have seen."

"Wish we could have taken one home with us," said Cole.

"Not our mission," said Mingo. "Want to go back for it?"

"By now the EMP-shooters are long gone," said Cole. "The real owners of them had to be waiting in hiding somewhere to grab their toys and take them back to wherever they're from in order to report on how they worked."

"It's no secret that we were electronically enhanced," said Babe. "We were demonstrating our Bones all over Nigeria. But am I right in thinking that this handheld EMP thing is designed specifically to counter our Bones and Noodles? I mean, soldiers use a lot of electronics in the field, but nothing they couldn't work around and keep going if it got trashed."

"How many weeks we been showing our stuff?" asked Benny. "You can't tell me they invented that peashooter in three or four weeks."

"They knew what was being developed," said Drew. "And when we demonstrated the goods in Nigeria, they set up the ambush."

"Were they trying to capture the Bones?" asked Arty. "Maybe they were deliberately trying not to destroy our stuff, because they wanted to study and copy it."

"Maybe," said Cole. "Makes sense."

"So the EMP might really be stronger," said Arty. "Might really be able to kill our Bones."

"I don't think so," said Mingo. "Unless they've got a way better battery than we have, and can drain it all in a microsecond, what we saw was already at the cutting edge of what's possible in something that size."

"But they might have that better battery," said Cole. "I can't help thinking. Whoever made the big device the rebels had in New York City, it's got to be the same people who came up with the handheld version. And it's worth remembering that up till the moment the nictovirus emerged, the Chinese were all over Africa."

Everybody nodded.

"We Asians are naturally good with electronic toys," said Arty. "And all those machines the Progressive Restoration had must have been built somewhere, too."

"Time to go have a talk with Aldo Verus," said Cole.

"Why? He won't tell us the truth," said Cat.