When she activated the wag’s weapons pods, which were located on either side of the roof, two joysticks popped out of dashboard in front of her. As her gauntleted hands closed on the no-slip grips, a ring and crosshair sight appeared in the center of her helmet visor. Her targets, human shaped figures in lime green, scattered to either side as the wag continued to rumble up the slope. Dredda flipped off the grip safeties with her thumbs.
Each of the joysticks operated its own cannon pod. As she moved her hands apart, the lone crosshair ring blurred, divided and became two. She simultaneously tracked a pair of men running in opposite directions. One was scrambling out of a foxhole hacked in the asphalt on her left; the other high-kicked to the right as he abandoned a sandbagged, burned out hulk of a vehicle. When the computer target locks engaged, the sprinting figures turned red, and she jiggled the firing buttons.
Green lances of light stabbed through both runners. Neither completed another step.
Foxhole Man fell in four pieces, sliced cleanly through the chest and both arms above the elbow by a single burst of pure energy. His transected parts landed in a jumbled heap. The other man took the laser slash at waist height. The emerald light separated his torso from everything below his hips. It was a grievous mortal wound, but not immediately so. Though the man had been chopped in half, there was no blood—the laser sliced and cauterized at the same time. Rearing up from the pavement with undamaged arms, he seemed to recognize the severed legs under his chin as his own. His mouth opened wide in a scream that Dredda couldn’t hear. Frantically clawing, he tried to drag himself away.
He was all in red.
The target lock had him.
She tapped the right firing button again and sawed him neatly lengthwise, from the top of his head to his torso stomp. The smoking halves of him flopped apart, like a cleaver-struck apple.
All around, the gunners in the other wags were likewise selecting individual running targets and chopping them to pieces. Dredda’s visor compensated for the interlacing, intense bursts of light. In the real world, those flashes of green were blinding. They cooked the very air, as they cooked human flesh and bone. The attack was intended to produce maximum terror, and it was having the desired effect. Instead of holding their ground, the Shadow Worlders were already starting to fall back, allowing themselves to be herded toward the main building.
Her body in perfect sync with the wag’s fire control system, Dredda unleashed a furious two-handed attack. Tickling the firing buttons, she struck red targets not with one pulse, but with twenty, sectioning the human forms in as many pieces. To her, it seemed as if the running figures were moving in slow motion. To the troopers in the jump seats behind her, it was just the opposite. Everything was free spooling at triple speed, and the pulses of laser cannon weren’t pulses at all, but sustained blasts. They watched sprinting targets in a 360-degree radius of their wag disintegrate like blades of grass before a grass trimmer. Maybe four highly trained troopers manning the vehicle’s weapons pods could have had the same effect. Four men at the peak of their prime. Maybe.
As the wags roared up the grade, Dredda called off the slaughter. Because the lives of the opposition had value, the idea was to kill as few as possible, but to do it in a way that demoralized and absolutely terrified the survivors. That part of the mission was accomplished. The enemy was in full scale retreat. She and the other gunners began firing over the heads of the withdrawing forces, driving them across the parking lot and into the main complex.
As the wags closed on the three-story building’s entrance, the squadron of gyroplanes swept in and like huge black hornets hovered above the roof. They sent intermittent beams of emerald green light spearing down through its walls and into the forces now trapped inside.
Mero stopped the wag in front of the complex’s double doorway, beneath the big crumbling marquee. Thick black smoke was already starting to coil out of the upper story windows.