“Sir, what the Hell is going on?” Bradley whispered. “These aren’t—I mean, they’re. . . .”
“Sie,” Kowacs said in a calm, soft voice, “fire directly into the airlock, then flatten yourself. Top, you and I will throw grenades with three-second—” his own thumb armed a bundle of mini-grenades just as he knew Bradley was doing with his own “—delay, air burst.”
“And duck out the back, cap’n?” asked the field first.
“And rush the ship, Top,” Kowacs corrected with no more emotion than he’d shown when going over the munitions manifest three weeks earlier in Port Tau Ceti. “There won’t be time for anybody aboard to close the lock. Not after Sie lights ’em up.”
The man from the car strode up the ramp. The rest of the crowd—all males, so far as Kowacs could tell—jumped out of his way as if he were still driving his vehicle. The starship’s inner lock had opened, because when the fellow reached the top of the ramp, a human in a black-and-silver uniform appeared from inside the vessel and blocked his way.
For a moment the two men shouted at one another in a language Kowacs didn’t recognize. The man in uniform unexpectedly punched the civilian in the stomach, rolling him back down the three-meter ramp. The crowd’s collective gasp was audible even over the hiss and pinging of the ship’s idling systems.
“Sir,” begged Sienkiewicz, staring at the blank panel before her. “Sir! When?”
The plump man got to his feet, shouting in fury. A figure stepped from the ship and stood next to the man in uniform.
The newcomer was a Weasel. As it barked to the man in uniform, the translation program in Kowacs’ helmet rasped, “What are we waiting for? Don’t you realize, even now a missile may be on the way.”
“Ready,” said Kowacs, his rifle verticle, gripped in his left hand, and the stick of grenades ready in his right.
The uniformed human turned to the Khalian and barked.
“Shoot that one,” the helmet translated, “and we’ll cram the rest aboard somehow.”
The Weasel raised a sub-machine gun. The plump man leaped back into his car with a scream.
“Go,” whispered Kowacs.
Sienkiewicz kicked the warehouse door thunderously open an instant before the lightning flash of her plasma bolt lit the night.
The jet of plasma spat between the two figures in the airlock, struck a bulkhead inside the ship, and converted the entrance chamber into a fireball. The blast blew the Weasel and the uniformed human ten meters from the lock, their fur and hair alight.
Anybody inside the starship had burns unless they were separated from the entry chamber by a sealed door. As for the crowd outside—
Kowacs’ and Bradley’s grenade sticks arced high over the crowd before the dispersion charges popped and scattered the units into five bomblets apiece. The bomblets went off an instant later with the noise of tree-limbs breaking under the weight of ice.
Shrapnel ripped and rang on the front of the warehouse; the crowd flattened like scythed wheat.
Kowacs was up and moving as soon as the last bomblet went off. There was a spot of blood and a numb patch on the back of his right wrist, but nothing that’d keep him from functioning. The grenades spewed glass-fiber shrapnel that lost velocity fast in an atmosphere, but it wasn’t completely safe even at twenty meters. Closer up, it—
Sienkiewicz slipped on bloody flesh as she tried to fire a burst from her rifle into the men at the fringe of the grenade explosions. Her shots went off into the night sky, but that didn’t matter. The survivors that could move were running away, screaming; some of them blinded; some scattering drops of gore as they waved their arms in terror. . . .
The dispersion charges had spread the bombs well enough that most of the crowd wasn’t running.
The Khalian from the ship thrashed in its death agonies on a sprawl of humans. Kowacs’ rifle burped three rounds into it anyway as he passed and Bradley—half a step behind—blew off the creature’s tusked face with his shotgun.
They weren’t so short on ammo that they couldn’t make sure of a Weasel.