Free Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) by C.J. Carella Page B

keep up with him.
    Meanwhile, the enemy had arrived. He could hear them screaming all around the compound. Someone was beating on the metal gate. They’d better get a move on or they’d be overrun.
    A dash up the stairs led them to a narrow corridor and two closed doors. Fromm heard a fusillade of gunshots and beamer discharges, which increased his sense of urgency. He kicked down another door and found the window he’d seen from outside.
    Two cowering Ruddies were inside the room, hiding behind a desk. He watched them over the barrel of his Colt, his imp painting targeting carats over their centers of mass. An old male and a young female, looking absurdly cute with their oversized eyes and narrow chins. Seemingly unarmed.
    “Go!” he shouted at them in American, gesturing with his head for them to get out. They got the idea and scrammed. Leaving two potential hostiles loose behind him was not a great idea, but there was no time to do anything other than shoot them dead or let them go, and he needed to save his last fourteen rounds for confirmed hostiles. At least, that was what he told himself as he and the Oval headed for the window.
    The view was terrible.
    The street outside was jammed with ETs. At the moment, most of them were beating ineffectually at the walls and gates. One body was draped over the razor wire on top of a wall, leaking blood and pureed tissues from a through-and-through wound. That death wouldn’t deter them for long, however.
    The Oval knew what to do. “Do I kill them now?” he asked.
    “Yeah.”
    The laser weapon usually fired micro-second pulses, each packing about half as much energy as a blaster round, with a cyclic rate of six hundred pulses a minute. Against the massed crowd, the ET switched to a continuous beam setting, and swung the long line of coherent light like a giant industrial cutter, tilting the weapon so the energy stream cleared the wall and slashed into the rioters at a shallow angle.
    The Ruddies protected by their proximity to the wall were unharmed as the beam passed over their heads. Those further back were sliced in two by the one-millimeter coherent-light weapon. The laser went through a hundred feet of cloth, flesh and bone like piano wire driven into a block of soft cheese. The beam wasn’t hot enough to cauterize the wounds, so Ruddy blood spurted freely from severed limbs and torsos as dozens bodies fell in two pieces; variations in biochemistry gave the fluids that spattered everywhere an orange coloration and a greasy quality. The ones closest to the laser had the tops of their heads loped off; the ones further out, their necks or faces. Dozens of rioters were bisected at the chest or waist, some of them still alive as their upper torsos slid off the convulsing lower halves of their bodies. As the beam angled down, it severed hips, thighs, knees.
    Three seconds. A hundred dead. Another hundred maimed and dying.
    Fromm watched the massacre without reacting; he might or might not feel something later, but at the moment all he cared about was the tactical situation. The untouched members of the mob – eight-tenths of them or more – recoiled from the horror show the laser had created. A few leaders tried to rally them, noticeable by the wood and paper banners propped up behind their backs.
    Fromm picked them off one by one.
    The little rounds of his pistol had an effective range of a hundred and fifty yards, and his imp made aiming ridiculously easy, estimating range, windage and bullet trajectory in the time it took Fromm to level his weapon, and painting a red dot on the estimated landing point of his shot. Crack , and a sword-wielding warrior’s head vanished in a cloud of plasma and vaporized brain matter, his audience screaming as pieces of his skull tore into them. Crack , and a woman who’d clambered over the abandoned car bent sideways as her hip bone exploded. Crack. Crack. Crack . Five shots, five dead leaders.
    “Do it again?” the Oval asked