Kowacs, hanging from his friends’ hands, watched the ship make its landing approach. His mind took in details of the vessel and the movement around it, considering options coolly—
Because otherwise he’d think about a crackle of energy above him and a sickening drop for the last hundred meters to the ground. Dead as sure as five kilometers could make him.
“Ready!” he called. The ship had crossed under them, then slowed to a near halt just above the ground. They were slipping over it again on the opposite vector, neither descent quite perpendicular. Steam and smoke rose from the center of the compound, swirling violently in the draft from the ship’s passage and her lift thrusters. The vapors formed a tortured screen where they were cut by the blue-white headlights of the ground vehicle that had just raced through the gate.
The ship was Khalian. Her vertical stabilizer, extended for atmosphere travel, bore the red hen-scratches that the Weasels used for writing.
“Now!” Kowacs ordered. The three Marines tucked out of the pancake posture they’d used to slow their descent, letting the ground rush up at a hell of a clip. They sailed over a metal-roofed building and hit rolling, short of a second structure—warehouses or something similar, windowless and austere.
Bradley’s line still had enough of a charge to splutter angrily when it dragged the roof and grounded. Sienkiewicz was thirty kilos heavier than the field first, even without the weight of her plasma gun and the other non-standard gear she insisted on adding to her personal load. Her line popped only a single violet spark before it went dead.
Close. Real fucking close.
And it wasn’t over yet.
Kowacs had been as prepared as you could be to hit the ground faster than humans were intended, but Bradley had released his right hand a fraction later than Sienkiewicz had dropped his left.
Kowacs twisted, hit on his left heel, and caromed like a ground-looping airplane instead of doing a neat tuck-and-roll as he’d intended. His left knee smashed him in the chest, his backpack and helmet slammed the ground—and when he caught himself, his rifle sprang back on its elastic sling to rap his hip and faceshield.
Pain made his eyes flash with tears. His hands, now freed, gripped and aimed the automatic rifle.
Pain didn’t matter. He was alive, and there were Weasels to kill.
“Helmet,” Kowacs said, “translate Khalian,” enabling the program against the chance he’d hear barked orders soon.
“Clear this way,” whispered Bradley, pointing his shotgun toward one end of the five-meter alley between warehouses in which they’d landed. He spoke over Band 3 of the radio, reserved for internal command-group discussion. The low-power transmission permitted the three of them to coordinate without trying to shout over the ambient noise.
Which, now that they were down with no wind-rush to blur other racket, seemed considerable.
“Clear mine,” echoed Sienkiewicz, covering the opposite direction with her rifle while they waited for their captain to get his bearings.
“Are there doors to these places?” Kowacs asked, pretending he didn’t feel a jabbing from his ankle up his left shin—and praying it’d go away in another couple steps. He slouched past Bradley to a back corner. The two males curved around the warehouses in opposite directions, like the hooks of a grapnel, while Sienkiewicz covered their backs.
In the other direction, the starship’s lift jets snarled and blew fragments of baked sod into the air. A siren, perhaps mounted on the vehicle the Marines had seen arriving, wound down with a querulous note of it own.
The buildings backed up to the perimeter fence. None of the inhabitants had interest to spare from the ship that had just landed in the center of the compound.
“No door here,” Bradley reported from the back of his building. He spoke with a rising inflection, nervous or just quivering with adrenalin looking for a chance to kill or run.
“We’ll go this way,” Kowacs muttered to his team as his left hand switched on the forty-centimeter cutting blade he’d unslung in anticipation. The unloaded whine changed to a howl of pure delight as its diamond teeth sliced into the corrugated metal wall of the building.