Kowacs hit the ramp first and jumped it in a single stride despite the weight of his gear. His team faced around reflexively—just as he would have done if one of the others had been in the lead. Bradley fired at the backs of the survivors to keep them moving in the right direction. It was long range for the airfoil loads in his weapon, but one of the targets flung up his hands and dropped a meter short of shelter.
Sienkiewicz put surgical bursts into the windscreen, then the engine compartment of the ground vehicle. The idling turbine screamed, then the fans died and let the skirt flatten. Yellow flames started to flicker through the intake gratings.
A solenoid clacked behind Kowacs as a survivor in the starship’s cockpit tried desperately to close the airlock, but the jet of plasma had welded something or fried part of the circuitry.
Kowacs rolled into the ship-center room the plasma bolt had cleansed. A meter-broad circle’d been gouged from the hull metal opposite the lock. Anything flammable at sun-core temperatures was burning or had burned—including a corpse too shrunken to be identified by species. Open hatches lead sternward, toward two cabins and the sealed engineering spaces, and to the left—forward, to the cockpit.
Kowacs fired right and jumped left, triggering a short burst that sparked off the ceiling and bulkheads of the passageway it was supposed to clear.
None of the bullets hit the Khalian running from the cockpit with a sub-machine gun in one hand.
Kowacs hadn’t expected a real target. He tried to swing the nuzzle on, but his right side slammed the deck so his shots sprayed beneath the leaping Khalian. The only mercy was that his opponent seemed equally surprised and tried clubbing the Marine with its sub-machine gun. The Weasel had sprung instinctively on its victim instead of shooting as reason would have told it to do.
“Nest-fouling ape!” shouted the translation program as the sub-machine gun’s steel receiver crashed on the dense plastic of Kowacs’ helmet. The creature’s free hand tore the Marine’s left forearm as Kowacs tried to keep the claws from reaching beneath his chin and—
Bradley fired with his shotgun against the Weasel’s temple.
Kowacs couldn’t hear for a moment. He couldn’t see until he flipped up the visor that’d been splashed opaque by the contents of the Khalian’s skull.
The hatch at the other end of the short passageway was cycling closed. Kowacs slid his rifle into the gap. Its plastic grip cracked, but the beryllium receiver held even though the pressure deformed it.
Bradley cleared a grenade stick.
“No!” Kowacs shouted. He aimed the Weasel sub-machine gun at the plate in the center of the cockpit hatch and squeezed the trigger. Nothing.
“Sir, they’ll be protected by acceleration pods!” Bradley cried. “This’ll cure ’em!”
The grenade stick was marked with three parallel red lines: a bunker buster.
There was a lever just above the sub-machine gun’s trigger, too close for a human to use it easily but just right for a short-thumbed Weasel. Kowacs flipped it and crashed out a pair of shots.
“We need the ship flying!” he cried as his left hand reached for one of his own grenade sticks and the hatch began to open. He tossed the stick through the widening gap and leaped through behind them.
The bundle wasn’t armed. The Khalian pilot was gripping a machinepistol in the shelter of his acceleration pod, waiting to rise and shoot as soon as the grenades went off. He didn’t realize his mistake until Kowacs’ slugs ripped across his face.
“Get the stern cabins,” Kowacs ordered. “The cockpit’s clear.”
Kowacs glanced behind him at the control panel. Undamaged: no bullet holes or melted cavities, no bitter haze of burning insulation.
No obvious controls either.
“Fire in the hole!” Bradley’s voice warned over the helmet link.
Kowacs stiffened. Grenades stuttered off in a chain of muffled explosions; then, as he started to relax, another stick detonated.
“Starboard cabin clear,” Bradley reported laconically. He’d tossed in a pair of sticks with a two-second variation in delay. A Weasel leaping from cover after the first blast would be just in time for the follow-up.