“Ah,” English continued, looking away again. “I guess you’d’ve checked if there was any bunkers under the Terminal Building? I thought there might’ve been.”
“No bunkers,” Kowacs said, keeping the frown off his forehead but not quite out of his voice.
“That was downwind of one of the destroyers that cooked off,” he continued carefully. “The fission triggers of her torpedo warheads, they burned instead of blowing. But it was hot enough that our suits are still in there—” he pointed toward the plastic dome of the decontamination building, “and they thought we ought to shower off pretty good ourselves.”
English smiled falsely. “Yeah,” he said. “Look, lift-off was twenty minutes ago, and—”
Kowacs put a hand on the other Marine’s arm to stop him. As gently as he could, he said, “There were a lot of bodies inside, but only indigs and weasels. No Marine equipment. What happened out there?”
English shrugged and said, “Don’t matter a lot. I told you, the indigs got us through the perimeter. I think most of ’em got out again before things started to pop, but—the On-the-Spot agent running the unit, Milius . . . She was keeping the weasels occupied inside the Terminal Building.”
He met Kowacs’ gaze with clear, pale eyes of his own. “She had balls, that one.”
“Trouble with sticking your neck out . . .” said Kowacs softly, looking toward a distance much farther in time than the horizon on which his eyes were fixed. “Is sooner or later, somebody chops it off.”
“Don’t I know it,” English agreed bitterly. His voice and expression changed, became milder. “Don’t we all. Look, I gotta run.”
He paused, then added, “Hey. If it can’t be the Ninety-Second gets those weasel hold-outs, I hope it’s you guys.”
“I hope it’s us lifts-off tomorrow,” Kowacs called to the taller officer’s back; but English was already busy talking to a truck driver, bumming a ride to the spaceport and a no-doubt-pissed naval officer.
The Ninety-Second was one of the half-companies shoe-horned into Fleet combat units instead of being carried in a purpose-built landing craft the way the Headhunters were. People whose proper business was starships generally didn’t have much use for the ground-specialty Marines . . . but at least the destroyer Haig hadn’t lifted off while the Ninety-Second’s commander did his personal business.
Most of Kowacs’ marines were done showering and had filed back into the changing room. They’d have to don the same sweaty uniforms they’d worn for six hours under their hard suits while searching the shattered port, but the shower had raised their spirits.
Bradley was still waiting behind the canvas. So was Sienkiewicz, who looked as tough when naked as she did with her clothes on—and who was just as tough as she looked.
The twenty nozzles down either side of the canvas enclosure were still roaring happily, spewing out water that had been brought twenty kilometers through huge plastic aqueducts. The drains that were supposed to carry it away were less satisfactory. At least half the water spilled out of the enclosure and found its own way slowly toward the lowest point in Base Forberry.
In an unusual twist of justice, that point was the parade ground surrounded by base headquarters and the offices of the military government, located in a valley where they couldn’t be sniped at by the few Khalia still alive on Bethesda.
“Everything copacetic, sir?” Bradley asked with a smile to suggest that he hadn’t been listening through the canvas while the officers talked.
“No problem,” Kowacs grunted. And there wasn’t, not one you could do anything about. Couldn’t help the dead, like English had said. “Let’s get back to barracks and find fresh uniforms.”
“Ah—we were wondering about that, sir,” the field first sergeant said. “The trucks are still pretty hot, even after we hosed ’em off.”
Kowacs shrugged as he strode toward the changing room. “It’s that or walk,” he said. “I’ll get ’em into a drydock over at the naval base as soon as I can, but Marine ground equipment is pretty low priority over there.
“And this place—” he waved toward the closed chamber in which robot arms were scrubbing the hard suits, “isn’t big enough to hold trucks.”