Dredda unfastened herself from the wag umbilical and released her seat harness. She felt an incredible elation as she pushed out of her chair. Triumph was far too weak a word to describe the sensation. This, she thought, had to have been what it was like for Cortez and his men. Armed with advanced technology, facing a primitive and ignorant populace, with a world of uncountable treasure that lay waiting at their feet. And they didn’t even have to bend and scoop it up themselves. That’s what subject peoples were all about.
As Dredda moved to the rear, the male troopers stood at attention on either side of the cargo bay. For the first time, they had seen what their officers could do inside a battlesuit. She studied each of their faces in turn. Some had sober, distant expressions. Others wore frozen grins. There was fear in all their eyes. The fear of her. Of her kind. Their weakness irritated her, and she had to stifle the urge to smack them to their knees. If Dredda could have arranged it, she would have only brought sisters to the new reality, bat there hadn’t been time to complete the necessary transformations.
After the troopers peeled back the netting from the weaponry, she picked up a tribarreled laser rifle, checked its power pack, and then stepped onto the wag’s rear platform. As the back door lowered, she was the first to charge out, followed by Mero.
Automatic weapons fire chattered and muzzles flashed at them from the building’s lower story windows. Deflected by their battlesuits’ EM pulses, the sudden downpour of bullets veered wide, sparking off the already pitted concrete of the sidewalk.
Dredda ducked under the overhang of the marquee, but not before she took a second to look up at it. Incredibly, its century-old black plastic lettering was still mostly intact. It said Mount Des ret C sino Resort. Fri./S t Only. Direct f om Sparks, NV—Tony, Orlando, and Don.
Chapter Five
A severed human head tumbled down the grand staircase, bounced over the banister and landed at the feet of Baron Charlie Doyal. Wide with surprise, the dead eyes stared up at him. Its neck stump was a clean, band saw slice and absolutely bloodless. The throat’s shock contracted tendons had been fused with the spinal column, which meant the jaws would remain clenched like that, the teeth bared, until the flesh rotted from the bone.
Baron Doyal made no attempt to kick aside the hideous thing.
The ground floor lobby of the Mount Deseret Casino Resort was a scrap heap of similar horrors.
And worse—some of the scraps could still crawl.
The air inside the building vibrated with earsplitting whistles, the piercing tones accompanied pencil thin beams of emerald light that slashed through the vaulted ceiling, three stories above, angling down, drawing lines of crackling flame along the faded, red-patterned velvet wallpaper. The light beams were unstoppable. They cleaved everything they touched: metal, concrete and, of course, humanity.
Yelling at the tops of their lungs, the baron’s mutilated bodyguards dragged themselves back from the edge of the flashing buzz saw, clawing their way over the bright, razor sharp fragments of the casino’s dropped and shattered twenty foot wide crystal chandelier.
Doyal couldn’t hear their cries over his own. A passing flicker of the green light had turned the little and ring fingers of his left hand into greasy, scorched stubs. He hadn’t lost a single drop of blood, but the hand had gone rigid. It had puffed up, purple to the wrist, the surviving fingers as stiff and fat as little sausages. Excruciating pain throbbed all the way to his shoulder socket.
His weapon of choice, an autoloading 10-gauge shotgun with a sawed ff barrel and buttstock and a pistolgrip forestock, dangled in his good right hand, its magazine emptied. The Ithaca Magnum Roadblocker could blow a hole in a man big enough to stick an arm through, but in this battle its high-brass, double-aught buckshot loads had proved worthless, as had torrents of .223-, .308- and .45-caliber centerfire slags.
The attackers seemed immune to all alloys of lead. Only ten minutes had passed since the lookouts stationed on the lowest slopes of Mount Deseret, directly above the casino, had sounded an alarm. They had spotted a low dust cloud coming from the north, across the arid waste at the northernmost end of Skull Valley. The rolling wall of beige dirt had looked like the front edge of an approaching wind storm, but the sky was cloudless and the air was perfectly still. As the cloud rapidly closed on them, Doyal had put the compound on full alert. His sec men ran to take up their positions inside the wire fenced perimeter, at machine gun nests and mortar emplacements. When the cloud was within twenty yards of the main gate, it had suddenly lifted and dispersed, exposing eight on rushing wags. Wags the likes of which none of them had ever seen. The gleaming black vehicles each had six enormous, churning, lug-treaded wheels. They had no windows or ob slits; except for what looked like rotating weapon pods on the roofs and sides, their outer surfaces were perfectly smooth. The heavy wags rammed, flattened and rolled over the hurricane fence as if it were nothing.