Holographic displays curtained the blank consoles, meshing unexpectedly with a kaleidoscopic fragment of Kowacs’ memory.
When he’d dived into the cockpit, aiming and firing before the hunched Khalian could respond, there’d been similar flickers of light over the plastic consoles. They’d died with the seated pilot—but they came up automatically as soon as a living intellect sat before them again.
The prisoner’s finger twitched. Six columns of red light mounted higher. The ship rocked gently, dispelling Kowacs’ doubt that an obvious civilian would be any better able to fly the damned thing that the Headhunters themselves were. The prisoner was shaking them loose from the soft surface instead of powering-up abruptly and blowing one or more of the blocked nozzles.
CLANG-CLANG-whing-spow-ow-ow!
The machinegunner had shifted to a position from which he might be able to accomplish something. Kowacs hunched lower, but the bullet ripping through the airlock buried itself in a bulkhead on the third ricochet. The sniper had moved.
Sienkiewicz was all right: her plasma weapon crashed out its last charge. The blast that followed was much too great for a belt of ammunition or a few grenades. The machinegunner must’ve taken cover in a warehouse—without considering what might be in the cases around him.
“The Weasels are going to nuke this place?” Kowacs demanded of the man beside him. His speaker’s barking translation was almost as irritating to him as the bullet impacts had been.
“Not them, you fool!” the prisoner snapped, rocking the ship up ten degrees to port. Kowacs clutched the back of the pod for support. “They don’t have brains enough to be concerned. It’s the Clan Chiefs, of course, and they’re right—” the ship rocked back to starboard, “but I don’t intend to die.”
“Sir, we’re gonna blow the hatch,” Bradley reported flatly. Sienkiewicz could back him up, now. The holographic display that took the place of cockpit windows showed one whole side of the compound mushrooming upward in multi-colored secondary explosions.
But a charge heavy enough to blow a bulkhead still wasn’t a great idea in the confined space of a ship this small.
“Hold it, Top,” Kowacs ordered. “You—prisoner. Can you open and close the door to the port cabin from here?”
“Yes,” the prisoner said, grimacing. One of the red columns abruptly turned blue. All six disappeared as the man’s finger wagged. The ship settled at a skewed angle.
“Wait!” Kowacs ordered. “Open it a crack for a grenade, then close it again?”
“Yes, yes!” the prisoner repeated, the snarling Khalian vocables seasoning the emotionless translation from Kowacs’ headset. “Look, you may want to die, but I assure you that your superiors want me alive! I’m the Riva of Riva Clan!” He made a minuscule gear-shifting motion with his left hand.
“Top! Here it comes!” Kowacs shouted.
Bradley and Sienkiewicz had already been warned by Kowacs’ side of the cockpit conversation and the clack as the hatch’s locking mechanism retracted.
The corporal cried, “Got ’em!” Her automatic rifle fired a short burst to keep Weasels clear of the gap while Bradley tossed in the grenade. The hatch hadn’t quite cycled closed again when the scattering charge momentarily preceded a quintet of sharp pings—not real explosions.
“Shit, Top!” Kowacs cried, squeezing his helmet tight to his knees and clasping his forearms above it. “Not a—”
The bunker buster went off. The starship quivered like a fish swimming; the holographic display went monochrome for a moment, and flexing bulkheads sledged the vessel’s interior like a piston rising on its compression stroke.
“Think we oughta give ’em another, Top?” joked Sienkiewicz with the laughter of relief in her voice.
They were okay, then, and both the ship and its controls seemed to have survived the blast. Kowacs could even hear the hatch start to open again, which said a lot for the solidity of the internal divisions on Weasel ships.
“Idiots!” said the prisoner—the Riva, whatever that was; “clan” might only be as close a word as Weasels had to the grouping The Riva headed. “Suicidal fools!”
Kowacs didn’t know that he could argue the point. Thing was, doing the job had always been the Headhunter priority, well above concern for side effects. Bradley’s bunker buster would sure as Hell’ve done the job.