firing range

As soon as HK dropped her hand, the lights dimmed, and floods splashed bright illumination onto the demonstration floor. A siren began howling, and the pulleys started moving the targets. The lights began to strobe, making it nearly impossible to understand what was happening at that end of the hall. And the digital clock began ticking down.

Instantly, the K-110 came back online, the contraption seeming to wake up around its driver. The fighting machine turned with surprising and—to Top—disheartening agility, swinging around toward the madness. The driver brought the arms up, and even under all the noise, Top could hear a faint whirring noise.

Then the back door of hell broke open.

The K-110 began stalking forward as the driver opened up with both guns. Shell casings arced through the air as hundreds of rounds chunked into the moving targets, punched holes through the metal, and tunneled through the wood and cinder block. Those rounds chewed up the rear wall of the structure. The standing targets were obliterated in moments even though the pulleys tried to yank them away at high rates of speed. Top realized that the exosuit had some kind of persistent aiming system that locked onto targets, chased them, got ahead of them, and chewed them to pieces.

Pepper-poppers sprang up from the floor, and now Top could see that some were civilians of four distinct kinds—official-looking men and women in good suits, wearing American flag pins on their lapels and broad photo-op smiles; other men and women wearing the dark suits, white shirts, dark ties of Secret Service agents, all the way down to sunglasses and wires behind their ears; people wearing T-shirts or hats with various political party slogans—both right and left wing; and more of the Fixers in the fancy body armor.

The K-110’s machine guns fired continuously, cutting every single member of the first three groups to pieces but somehow—despite noise, movement, strobes, and gun smoke—selectively ignoring the Fixers. As the field was cleared, the K-110’s left machine gun stopped firing and swung around and down on a hidden track, allowing a weapon with a bigger mouth to roll up and lock in place. A grenade launcher. It fired eight rounds, and each one struck one of the bigger target vehicles with enough destructive force to blow them to pieces. Debris filled the air and rained down, but none of it fell on the spectators.

-Relentless pg. 232-233, Kindle Edition.