Kowacs and his team fanned through the door, looking for targets. Nothing was moving except smoke and platters jouncing to the floor from the pegs on which they’d been hanging. In the center of the floor was a range. There were ovens and cold-lockers along three of the walls.
Well, there’d had to be a kitchen, now that Kowacs thought about it.
The man hidden there picked the right time to wave his hand from behind the range that sheltered him—a moment after the Marines swung in, ready to blast anything that moved, but before a quick search found him and made him a certain enemy.
“Up!” Kowacs ordered. “Now!”
He was plump and terrified and hairless except for a wispy white brush of a moustache that he stroked with both hands despite obvious attempts to control the gesture.
“The rest of ’em, damn you!” roared Bradley, aiming his shotgun at the corner of the range from which he expected fresh targets to creep.
“It’s only me!” the bald man blubbered through his hands. “I swear to God, only me, only Charlie the Cook.”
Sienkiewicz stepped—she didn’t have to jump—to the range top. Her rifle was pointed down and the plasma gun, its barrel still quivering with heat, jounced against her belt gear.
“Clear!” she reported crisply. Charlie relaxed visibly, until he saw that Kowacs was reaching for the handle of the nearest cold-locker.
“Not me!” the civilian cried. “Charlie only does what he’s told, I swear to God, not—”
Sienkiewicz saw what was in the locker and saved Charlie’s life by kicking him in the teeth an instant before Bradley’s shotgun would have dealt with the matter in a more permanent way.
Heads, arms, and lower legs had been removed in the course of butchering, but there was no doubt that the hanging carcasses were human.
Kowacs stepped over to the sprawling prisoner and cradled his rifle muzzle at the base of the man’s throat. “Tell me you cooked for the weasels,” he said quietly. “Just say the fucking words.”
“No-no-no,” Charlie said, crying and trying to spit up fragments of his broken mouth before he choked on them. “Not the Masters, never the Masters—they don’t need cooks. And never for me, never for Charlie, Charlie just—”
“Cap’n?” Bradley said with the hint of a frown now that he’d had time to think through his impulse of a moment before. Shooting a clearly unarmed captive. . . . “The, ah—”
He tapped the side of his helmet, where the recorder was taking down everything he said or did for after-action review by the brass.
Kowacs grabbed the prisoner by the throat and lifted him to his feet. Charlie was gagging, but the Marine’s blunt fingers weren’t stranglingly tight. Kowacs shoved the man hard, back into the open locker.
“We’ll be back for you!” he said as he slammed the door.
Some day, maybe.
Kowacs was shuddering as he ejected the partially-fired magazine from his rifle and slammed in a fresh one. “Told a guy yesterday I’d seen everything the weasels could do to human beings,” he muttered to his companions. “Guess I was wrong.”
Though he didn’t suppose he ought to blame this on the Khalians. They just happened to have been around as role models.
“One more!” Sienkiewicz said with false brightness as her boots crashed to the floor and she followed Bradley into the hallway again.
The squad from Second Platoon had been busy enough to leave a sharp fog of propellant and explosive residues as they shot their way into the sleeping rooms on the opposite side of the corridor. They hadn’t turned up any additional kills, but they were covering Kowacs’ back as he’d ordered, so he didn’t have any complaints.
He and his non-coms poised at the third door in this section. It jerked open from the inside while he and Sienkiewicz took up the slack on their triggers.
Neither of the rifles fired. Bradley, startled, blasted a round from his shotgun into the opening and the edge of the door.
“Don’t shoot!” screamed a voice from behind the doorframe, safe from the accidental shot. “I’m unarmed! I’m a prisoner!”
Kowacs kicked the door hard as he went in, slamming it back against the man speaking and throwing off his aim if he were lying about being unarmed. The room was an office, almost as large as the kitchen, with wooden filing cabinets and a desk—