What could be a problem was the way lights were going on in the three-story officers’ quarters lining the boulevard in either direction from the square. The blast had awakened a lot of people. The officers gawking out their windows couldn’t see a damn thing of the motor pool, now painting the southern horizon with a glow as red as sunrise—
But they could see Kowacs’ trucks and wonder about them.
Two marines stepped out of the building with an old man who hung as a dead weight. Bradley followed, kicking the door closed behind him. The sergeant held his shotgun in one hand and in his left arm cradled a six-year-old who was too weak with fever for his wails to be dangerous to the operation.
“Here’s the last of ’em, sir,” Bradley reported, lifting the child to one of the marines in the vehicle.
Andy looked at the sergeant, looked at Kowacs, and scrambled into the truck himself.
“Watch it!” warned Daniello’s voice without time for a call sign.
Air huffed across the parade square as the two vans speeding north braked to a halt instead of continuing on. One of the vehicles turned in the center of the square so that its cab faced the District Government Building.
“What the hell?” muttered Kowacs as he flipped his face shield down and switched on the hologram projection from his helmet sensors. His men were clumps of green dots, hanging in the air before him.
The van began to accelerate toward the government building. The driver bailed out, to Kowacs’ eyes a dark smudge on the plastic ground sheathing—
And a red dot on his helmet display.
“Weasels!” Kowacs shouted as he triggered a long burst at the driver. His tracers gouged the ground short of the rolling target, one of them spiking off at right angles in a freak ricochet.
Most of his men were within the closed trucks. Bradley’s shotgun boomed, but its airfoil loads spread to clear a room at one meter, not kill a weasel at a hundred times that range. Where the hell was—
The weasel stood in a crouch. The bullet that had waited for Kowacs to take up the last, least increment of trigger pressure cracked out, intersected the target, and crumpled it back on the ground.
—Sienkiewicz?
The square hissed with a moment of dazzling brilliance, false lightning from the plasma gun Corporal Sienkiewicz had unlimbered instead of using the automatic rifle in her hands when the trouble started. Her bolt bloomed across the surface of the van, still accelerating with a jammed throttle and twenty meters from the front door of the District Government Building.
The explosives packed onto the bed of the van went off, riddling the building’s facade with shrapnel from the cab and shattering every window within a kilometer.
Kowacs had been steadying himself against the tailgate of his truck. It knocked him down as the blast shoved the vehicle sideways, spilling Headhunters who were jumping out to get their own piece of the action.
But the explosion also threw off the weasels in the second van who were spraying bright blue tracers in the direction from which the marines’ fire had come.
Klaxons and sirens from at least a dozen locations were doing their best to stupefy anyone who might otherwise be able to respond rationally.
Kowacs lay flat and aimed at the weasels. There was a red flash from their vehicle. Something flew past like a covey of banshees, trailing smoke in multiple tracks that fanned wider as they passed. Twenty or thirty rooms exploded as the sheaf of miniature light-seeking missiles homed on the folks who were rubbernecking from their barracks windows.
It was the perfect weapon for a Khalian commando to use to spread panic and destruction as they sped away in the night in a Fleet-standard van—presumably hijacked at the motor pool, where the previous explosion didn’t look like an accident after all.
The missile cluster wasn’t a goddam bit of good against the Headhunters, blacked out and loaded for bear.
Only a handful of marines from each platoon was clear of the hampering trucks, but their fire converged on the Khalian vehicle from four directions. Tracers and sparks from bullet impacts flecked the target like a festival display—