Excerpt: When Philosophers Become Kings

“The destructor ray isn’t meant to kill its target, and what I mean by that is that there’s no good reason to kill someone, for the sake of killing him, with a destructor ray.”
“That’s…insane. You’ve seen what…”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say that it won’t kill it’s target; it’ll sure as fuck kill its target, overkill its target, but it’s purpose is the ‘over,’ not the ‘kill.’ In other words, lethal as it may well be, its primary purpose is intimidation. It’s not meant to finish off the guy who gets hit. It’s meant for the guy next to him, the guy who watches his buddy disappear without a trace. Really, the one who actually gets hit by the damn thing doesn’t give an orbital fuck, and you’re just being a wasteful prick.”
“Wasteful prick?”
“You have to understand, the thing is a miracle of today’s engineering. The way it works is to cause a chain reaction converting the molecules in the body to various gases and airborne particles, and it does that negligibly above the theoretical minimum. It flash-boils all the water in the body…poof! But at body temperature, which the gun marks as low as 305 just to be safe, you’ve got as much as a hundred kilos to bring up to the magic number 375. I’m told the things use about seventy or eighty megajoules per shot, and in a combat situation, that’s a bit more than I want to spend.”
“You have a point, Nate.”
“On the other hand, you can kill someone just as dead with a hundred little grams of tin and bismuth…”
A shot rang out, whizzing just a few cents from Daisuke’s ear. It took a moment to register with him that the shot had been fired by Nate.
“…at the speed of sound…about six kilojoules.”
Daisuke turned to the bullet in the wall. “You make a very stong argument, Nate.”
"Thank you."