Belcher

The belcher is the legions nickname for a heavy plasma weapon. They are about 5 feet long, and feel very heavy. They don't fire an actual projectile, so they are more like flamethrowers that release heat and energy. They are intended as light artillery. They have a dial that can adjust them to fire between a tight long range beam, or a wide cone of effect at short range. They have a back-blast that can kill if someone is behind the weaponeer when they fire. The weapon can overload, in which case it will take hours to fix or be permanently broken. They also have problems with overheating.

McGill suspects they were designed with larger beings in mind, due to their weight. He muses they might be hunting rifles on their planet of origin.
Turov worried at one point that belcher fire could destroy the galactic key.

## Quotes

He got up and hauled down a huge collapsed cylinder from the upper racks. It was a weapon nicknamed the “belcher”—a heavy plasma weapon that resembled a rocket tube that needed to go on a diet.

I knew that the weapon was really intended as light artillery, designed to rain down fire at range upon a distant enemy. But he’d used it like an extremely powerful rifle.

He wanted to dial the tube to a shorter burst range. Up close the belcher would be like a cannon loaded with grapeshot. Turned upon rioters it didn’t do as much damage, but it couldn’t miss and it could hit everything at once.

My new weapon wasn’t as easy to get used to, however. The old hands called it a belcher—a heavy, plasma-firing tube. It was about five feet long and felt like it weighed five tons.

Plasma cannons were—weird. They didn’t fire a pellet or an explosive. My trainers had told me to think of them as flamethrowers that launched a very brief, powerful gush of flame. They were designed to release a lot of heat and energy in a directed cone in front of the Weaponeer who wielded the system. They could be dialed for long or short range, creating a tight beam or a broad area of effect. The range of the weapon lessened if you broadened the beam, it could hit multiple targets that way and it was much easier to hit something. Deciding how to adjust your cannon was the business of the weaponeer in question.

“Firing center!” I shouted, warning the troopers around me. Plasma cannons had a serious back-blast and more than one legionnaire had been crisped by trotting behind a weaponeer at the wrong moment.

The recycle time on these units seemed like an eternity when you were about to die. Finally, a green indicator LED flickered on, and I shouldered my weapon.

I noticed that the indicator lights on mine were locked red. The unit had overloaded during that last blast and hadn’t recovered. It would take a tech hours to fix it—if it could be done at all.

The belchers were reliable most of the time, but they had notorious problems with heat. They also took powerful hands and arms to operate which was why I suspected they were originally designed for much larger beings. Maybe my belcher was nothing more than a hunting rifle on its distant world of origin.

my belcher was one of the few systems heavy enough to punch through the enemy armor.

Johnson’s weaponeer got off a burning shot, but the man had cranked his belcher for a wide-angle cone of fire. It simply wasn’t effective. To kill these aliens with a belcher took a focused, hard-hitting beam set for a full-second burn.

The trouble was that the weaponeers would have to use their belchers to penetrate my armor. And if they did that, the key might well be destroyed in the process.

I grabbed hold of Sargon’s belcher. It was like a plasma carbine, but it was much bigger and fired a single powerful bolt rather than a spray of lighter death.

1. ↑ Steel World, Ch 5
2. ↑ Steel World, Ch 6
3. ↑ Steel World, Ch 31
4. ↑ Dust World, Ch 5
5. ↑ Dust World, Ch 7
6. ↑ Dust World, Ch 29
7. ↑ Dust World, Ch 29
8. ↑ Dust World, Ch 29
9. ↑ Tech World, Ch 8
10. ↑ Machine World, Ch 7
11. ↑ Death World, Ch 12
12. ↑ Death World, Ch 46
13. ↑ Home World, Ch 37