It cracked in a circle of spider-shattered plastisteel.
The shock of the impact killed the man, like a sledgehammer to the side of the head.
Dredda took a moment to look around the field of battle. Her sisters were acquitting themselves splendidly. Jann held a trooper overhead, a hand on his suit collar and a hand on his crotch, then dropped his back onto her upraised knee. His battlesuit didn’t protect him. The cracking of his spine resounded like a gunshot across the compound. Other sisters pounded their opponents into the beige dust, snapped their arm and leg bones and then finished them off with elbow strikes to the heart.
Only Mero seemed to be having trouble. Three troopers surrounded her, and although they couldn’t bring her down, Mere couldn’t defeat any of them, either.
It was the disease, Dredda thought as she closed the distance between them. It had to be the disease. Poor Mero had a more advanced stage.
One of the troopers turned away from the three-on-one attack in time to glimpse the battlesuited figure bearing down on him. He didn’t have time to get out of the way, or to avoid the hands that gripped his helmet. Dredda used both arms and the power in her legs to crank him off his feet, sending him spiraling sideways across the compound. His windmill flight ended at the feet of two other sisters, who immediately took charge of him.
Dredda stomped the nearest trooper’s kneecap, and despite the overlapping plates of his battlesuit, the knee crunched and bent inward in a way it was never intended to bend. The trooper fell, screaming to the dirt, and Dredda fell upon him, launching a snap-kick to the middle of his visor. Again, the helmet cracked like an eggshell thumped by the back of a spoon. Gore spewed over the inside of the visor, but not before Dredda got a good look at the dead man’s face. One eye stared up; the other stared toward the flattened ruin of his nose.
Mero caught hold of the last trooper and, as they tussled, face-to-face, knocked him down with a leg sweep. Before he could roll away from her, she jumped in the air and came down on her right knee, which landed in the middle of his chest. The battlesuit torso plates buckled with a crunch, and her knee drove deep into his chest cavity, taking with it the splintered remains of his sternum and rib cage. The trooper struggled for a moment more, then became still.
Dredda reached out a hand and helped Mero up. The compound had one-third as many standing figures as it had a few seconds before. All but one of them were sisters.
Dr. Huth, also in a battlesuit, hurriedly crossed the open space as Dredda and the others moved back into the trans-reality field. He pushed a tall, silver cylinder on wheels before him. Of all the males, Dr. Huth was the only one of any use to them; the only one worth the fuel to bring along.
Huth wheeled the tank through the shimmering curtain and set it down beside Dredda, who stood at the head of the line of sisters.
As the field built in power, a whirlwind whipped the dirt inside the marker stakes and the air was choked with a nauseating petrochemical stench. The lips of reality appeared, a seam in space and time that gaped around them like a giant, hungry mouth. Dredda took a last look around. They were leaving so much behind, so much wrecked gear, so much potential. But there were still ten sisters and they had the keys to a million other worlds.
A fraction of a second before the thunder crack that announced their departure, through the swirling eddies of space-time, Dredda saw Ryan Cawdor emerge from the big dome. He wore a battlesuit without a helmet, and next to him was his red-haired lover. Her last image of this reality was his fierce and confident smile.
Shadow Man had won.
Deathlands had won.
But Dredda was taking part of both with her. The silver cylinder by her side held Ryan’s potent seed. Let the futures tremble.