Ruined the pelt, of course.
The cockpit’s four acceleration pods were contour-to-fit units that, when activated, compressed around the form within them. Three of the pods were shrunken tight to hold Khalians like the corpse in one of them, but a side couch was still shaped for a human.
“Port cabin’s locked!” Bradley shouted, his voice from the helmet earphones a disconcerting fraction of a second earlier than the same words echoing down the passageway at merely the speed of sound. “Sir, want I should blast it? Can you back me?”
Humans could fly the damned ship.
It was just that none of the humans aboard could fly the vessel. And if Kowacs understood the implication of what that Weasel cried a moment before the plasma bolt gave him a foretaste of eternal Hell, the ship was their only prayer of surviving the next—
“Cap’n,” Sienkiewicz reported, “I got a prisoner, and he says—”
Kowacs was already moving before the radio transmission cut off in a blast of static, hugely louder than the crack of the plasma weapon that caused it.
Sergeant Bradley crouched at the corner of the stern passageway. Bradley’s shotgun was aimed at the stateroom he’d found locked, but his head craned back over his shoulder as he tried to see what was going on outside the vessel.
Kowacs skidded in the blood and film deposited on the deck of the central cabin when plasma-vaporized metal cooled. He made a three-point landing, his ass and both bootheels, but the captured sub-machine gun was pointed out the airlock where Sienkiewicz stood.
The plasma weapon was on Sienkiewicz’ shoulder; a glowing track still shimmered from its muzzle. One of the warehouses was collapsing around a fireball. A surviving local must’ve made the mistake of calling Sie’s attention to him.
“Move it! Move it, dog-brain!” she bellowed to somebody beneath Kowacs’ line of vision. “Or by god the next one’s in your face!”
As Sienkiewicz spoke, the translation program barked in Weasel through her helmet speaker. She couldn’t’ve captured a—
Kowacs stepped to the corporal’s side, then jumped so that the fat civilian scrambling up the ramp in blind panic wouldn’t bowl him over. It was the gorgeously-clad fellow who’d strode up the ramp before—and been knocked down it by the human in uniform, with a promise of death if the Headhunter attack hadn’t intervened.
“Waved his shirt from the car, Cap’n,” Sienkiewicz explained. As she spoke, her eyes searched for snipers, movement, anything potentially dangerous in the night and sullen fires. “I thought. . . . Well, I didn’t shoot him. And then he barked, you know, that the place was gonna be nuked but he could fly us out.”
“Sure, you did right,” Kowacs said without thinking it even vaguely surprising that Sienkiewicz apologized for taking a prisoner alive.
“Quickly, the cockpit!” the machine voice in Kowacs’ ear demanded while the prisoner’s mouth emitted a series of high-pitched barks. “They’ll surely destroy this base any moment. They can’t allow any sign of our installations!”
The fellow was still in a panic, but the way he brushed past Kowacs proved that he’d regained his arrogance. He looked clownishly absurd: he’d ripped a piece from his shirt-front to wave as a flag, and at some point recently he’d fouled his loose, scintillantly-blue trousers as well.
“Sir!” Bradley cried. He’d enabled his speaker along with the translation program, so barks counterpointed his words. “This cabin! We can’t leave it!”
“Watch it, then, for chrissake!” Kowacs snarled as he strode with the prisoner into the cockpit.
The prisoner slipped as he tried to hop over the Weasel in the passageway. He muttered what must have been a curse, but the words were in the unfamiliar language in which he and the uniformed man had argued before the Khalian appeared.
Somebody fired at the ship with a machinegun—from the side opposite the airlock, so there was no response from Sienkiewicz. The light bullets were no threat to hull plating, but the CLANG-CLANG-CLANG, CLANG-CLANG-CLANG, CLANG-CLANG-CLANG wound Kowacs’ mainspring a turn tighter with each short burst.
The prisoner flopped down into one of the center pods. It conformed to his body like a work-piece in a drop forge, spreading sideways and upward to support him in an upright position. Kowacs knelt on the deck beside him, holding the muzzle of the sub-machine gun near the prisoner’s ear.