James followed the Captain, not to the bridge but down to the engineering compartment.  It was heartening to see the confident looks many of the crew had as their commander passed, even though James knew just how close the Captain had come to betraying their trust.  Maybe he should have chewed the Captain out more, James told himself, even if it cost him his career.  But at least the Captain had an idea ...

They stepped into Main Engineering, then straight into one of the side compartments.  Anderson was sitting on a stool in front of a table, slowly dismantling one of the alien plasma guns.  James wondered, angrily, why the Chief Engineer wasn't working on the drives or replacing destroyed weapons, then realised that those tasks could be passed to subordinates while unlocking the mysteries of alien tech was something for an older man.

“Interesting piece of technology,” Anderson said, as the hatch closed behind them.  “Do you realise that an EMP-bomb wouldn't just disarm the aliens, it would cause their weapons to blow up in their faces?”

James smiled at the mental image.  “Seems like an odd choice of weapons, then.”

“Not too odd, unfortunately,” Anderson said.  “The Yanks issued a laser rifle for their troops a couple of decades ago.  It turned out that the power packs couldn't hold a charge for longer than a few days, while localised interference and jammers could interfere with the weapon’s subsystems.  Nor could they really be repaired in the field.  Luckily, they didn't have to take them into combat before the weapons were withdrawn from service.”

He shrugged.  “In this case, the weapons are devastating while they work,” he added.  “Their plasma pulses can and do burn through our best personal armour.  They could probably shoot through anything short of starship or tank armour.  I wouldn't care to take a tank up against an infantry platoon armed with these weapons.  But I suspect they have a very real danger of overheating if fired for more than a few minutes.”

“Good,” the Captain said.  “What progress have you made with the rest of the recovered alien technology?”

“Most of it isn't that different from ours,” Anderson said.  “I've got one of our supercomputers trying to hack the recovered alien computer, but all its producing is gibberish.  We will need to ship it to a proper geek on Earth, sir, although in all honesty I think the aliens corrupted the files before we captured the system.”

James nodded.  Standard human precautions called for wiping the files, then destroying the computers physically to render the date hopelessly beyond recovery.  There was no reason to assume the aliens couldn’t or wouldn't do the same themselves.  Indeed, he was mildly surprised that the Marines had managed to take the computer at all.  Had the aliens been careless ... or had the Marines captured alien civilians rather than military personnel?