But the plasma gun hadn’t killed them. The victims’ skulls had been shattered by bullets, the bursts the Marines had heard the moment before Sienkiewicz blew them entry.
Several of the chairs were burning. They were wooden, hand-made, and intended for humans. On the wall behind the grid was a name list on polished wood, protected from the plasma flux by the torture victims and a cover sheet of now-bubbled glassine. The list was headed duty roster.
In English, not the tooth-mark wedges of Khalian script.
Each of the six other bodies the blast had caught wore a red right sleeve—or traces of red fabric where it had been shielded from the plasma. They had all been humans, including the female Kowacs was standing on. She still held the Khalian machine-pistol she had used to silence the torture victims.
“Renegades,” Sergeant Bradley snarled. He would have spat on a body, but his filters were in place.
“Trustees,” Kowacs said in something approaching calm. “The weasels don’t run the interior of the compound. They pick slaves of the right sort to do it. Let’s—”
He was looking at the door and about to point to it. More Marines were tumbling through the hole in the ceiling, searching for targets. The air had cleared enough now that Kowacs noticed details of the body flung into the doorway by the blast. Its arms and legs had been charred to stumps, and its neck was seared through to the point that its head flopped loose.
But the face was unmarked, and the features were recognizable in their family relationship to those of the woman caged upstairs.
Nobody had to worry about treachery by Alton Dinneen any more.
“—go, Marines!” Kowacs completed. Because he’d hesitated momentarily, Bradley and Sienkiewicz were already ahead of him.
They were in a long hallway whose opposite wall was broken with doorways at short intervals. Somebody ducked out of one, saw the Marines, and ducked back in.
Bradley and Sienkiewicz flanked the panel in a practiced maneuver while Kowacs aimed down the corridor in case another target appeared. He hoped their backs were being covered by the Second Platoon Marines who’d been able to follow him. The survivors of the assault squad couldn’t jump through the ceiling unless they stripped off their battle suits first.
“Go!”
Sienkiewicz fired her rifle through the doorpanel and kicked the latch plate. As the door bounced open, Bradley tossed in a grenade with his left hand.
The man inside jumped out screaming an instant before the grenade exploded; Bradley’s shotgun disembowelled him.
They’d all seen the flash of a red sleeve when the target first appeared.
The trustee’s room had space for a chair, a desk, and a bed whose mattress had ignited into smoldering fire when the explosion lifted it.
He’d also had a collection of sorts hanging from cords above the bed. Human skin is hard to flay neatly, especially when it’s already been stretched by the weight of mammary glands, so the grenade fragments had only finished what ineptitude had begun.
Short bursts of rifle fire and the thump of grenades echoed up the corridor from where it kinked toward Third Platoon’s end of the building. Nobody’d had to draw those Marines a picture either.
First and Third would work in from the ends, but Kowacs didn’t have enough men under his direct command to clear many of the small individual rooms. He’d expected weasel nests. . . .
But there were only two more doors, spaced wide apart, beside the briefing room in the visible portion of the hall.
“Cover us!” Kowacs ordered the squad leader from Second Platoon. “Both ways, and don’t shoot any Marines.”
In another setting, he’d have said ‘friendlies’. Here it might have been misconstrued.
His non-coms had already figured this one, flattening themselves to either side of the next door down from the briefing room. Kowacs’ fire and Sienkiewicz’ criss-crossed, stitching bright yellow splinters from the soft wood of the panel. Bradley kicked, and all three of them tossed grenades as the door swung.
There was no latch. The panel’s sprung hinges let the explosions bounce it open into the corridor with its inner face scarred by the shrapnel.