The Story
(this starts playing) The reactor core room is coated in black inky sludge, dotted with glowing blotches of cyan, with black tendrils laced up the hydraulic shocks and all around the reactor torus. Above it hangs the red crystal, glowing idly as it syphons from the heart of the lab, like a parasite. What seem like rose buds appear embedded in the tendrils around it, opening to reveal skittish, blood red eyes. (beat drop)
Technician Kit, security guard Ash and test subject June cross the corridor, weapons ar the ready, the wall emblazon with 'Narinder Complex - Level 2', and above twin double doors 'Cargo Elevator - Ground Level Access'. As the doors slide open, one of the wolf-drones appears at the other end of the hall, followed by a pack of four more.
The reactor monitors turn from glowing blue to red, a hologram highlighting the core confinement magnets, the crystal flaring brighter. The dark, empty control room overlooking the core lay in disarray, evidence of the technicians having made a stand. And in one of the access compartments over the core, in a hefty padded case, sat a damaged thermo-fusion warhead, its control panel open and its dirty, red seven-segment display listing 4 minutes 43 seconds remaining.
The Design
If you didn't look at the links to know what I am talking about, this is the lab after the typhon, a rouge autonomous terraforming artificial life-form, has breached containment when the facility's reactor was sabotaged. To fight it, the few staff left to die by the elite research team had to get crafty with how to escape the lab, but they know the typhon's weakness, and can exploit it.
The typhon is like a computer, its a neuron-eletrical network comprised of tendrils and slime that corrupts and syphons energy from anywhere it can find it, but is vulnerable to a narrow band of directed EMF, which is effectively a tuned EMP attack. A big attack, like the thermo-fusion warhead over the crystal in the core room, which is sort of a computer, would kill the entire network and sterilize the lab.
The repair drones, the wolf-things, resembling earth wolves but huge, slimy and with blank cyan eyes, operate on the same principles and communicate with the crystal, and are just as vulnerable to EMPs, and not much else. Only electric weapons seem to do anything, like the K-10 railgun rifle or this weapon I am designing.
The Specs
I need a mechanism that a handheld weapon could use to create a directed EMP, without using nuclear explosives. Currently I am looking at using an Explosively-pumped Flux Compression Generator shell, but making more than a dozen of them very quickly, and building a gun to shoot them would be a long shot for some stranded survivors.
It needs to:
Be made of materials you'd probably find in a high-tech magnomics, physics and genetics research lab, which is basically anything reasonably related to it. What about a pre-made piece of lab equipment you could easily retrofit?
Be easily man portable, so Ash can actually use it without needing a cart to carry equipment with him, the lighter the better.
Reusability, requiring some kind of ammunition other than power cells is not ideal but doable.
Powerful enough to fry the average server rack from across a room, so not really that powerful as a weapon. (A room being maybe 30 meters or so.)
