Its bomblets sprayed fuel, atomized to mix completely with the surrounding air. When the igniter went off, the blast was somewhere between a fire and a nuclear explosion. If the hatch hadn’t resealed the moment before ignition, the pressure wave could’ve pulverized more than the contents of one cabin.
The Riva’s hands wriggled. Four of the flatlined red holograms blipped upward as he fed thrust to selected jets. The starship lifted a trifle, though not as much as it had when the bunker buster went off.
Sergeant Bradley stepped into the cockpit. Kowacs turned with a smile to greet him. They’d survived thus far, and they were about to shake clear of ground zero as the prisoner played the ship with the skill of a concert pianist on a familiar scherzo.
The ship wasn’t going anywhere serious with the airlock jammed open, but they could shift a couple kilometers and start hollering for recovery. A captured ship and a human prisoner who’d thought he could give orders to Weasels—that was enough for anybody, even the Headhunters.
Bradley was a man of average size who looked now like a giant as his left hand lifted The Riva from his seat and jerked his face into the muzzle of the shotgun. Bradley had killed often and expertly. There was utter cold fury in his face and voice as he whispered, “You son of a bitch. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t—”
“Top,” said Kowacs, rising to his feet and making very sure that his own weapon pointed to the ceiling. He’d seen Bradley like this before, but never about another human being. . . .
“—you tell me?” Bradley shouted as his gun rapped the prisoner’s mouth to emphasize each syllable.
Sienkiewicz had followed the sergeant; her face bore a look of blank distaste that Kowacs couldn’t fathom either.
The ship poised for a moment with no hand at its controls. When it lurched heavily to the ground, Bradley swayed and Kowacs managed to get between the field first and the prisoner who was the only chance any of them had of surviving more than the next few minutes.
“I got ‘im, Top,” Kowacs said in a tone of careless command, grabbing The Riva by the neck and detaching Bradley by virtue of his greater size and strength. “Let’s go take a look, you.”
He dragged the prisoner with him into the passageway, making sure without being obvious about it that his body was between the fellow and Bradley’s shotgun.
Didn’t guarantee the sergeant wouldn’t shoot, of course; but there were damn few guarantees in this life.
The cabin door opened inward, which might’ve been how it withstood the explosion without being ripped off its hinges. Smoke and grit still roiled in the aftermath of the explosion.
Kowacs flipped down his visor and used its sonic imaging; the ultrasonic projection sources were on either side, and the read-out was on the inner surface of the faceshield. Neither was affected by the fact he’d forgotten to wipe the remains of the Weasel off the outside of the visor.
The cabin’d been occupied when the grenade went off, but Kowacs’ nose had already told him that.
Five bodies, all human. They’d been huddled together under the bedding. That didn’t save them, but it meant they were more or less recognizable after the blast. Two women—young, but adults; and three children, the youngest an infant.
Weapons would have survived the explosion—stood out against the background of shattered plastic and smoldering cloth. There hadn’t been any weapons in the cabin.
“You son of bitch,” Kowacs said in a soft, wondering voice, unaware that he was repeating Bradley’s words. “Why did you do that? You knew, didn’t you. . . .” The sentence trailed off without a question, and the sub-machine gun was pointing almost of its own accord.
“Why should I save the heir of Kavir bab-Wellin?” blurted the prisoner, spraying blood from lips broken by the sergeant’s blows. “Kavir would have killed me! Didn’t you see that? Just because I became The Riva over his father, he would have killed me!”
Somebody shot at the hull again. Either they were using a lighter weapon, or anything seemed mild after the bunker buster had crashed like a train wreck. Sienkiewicz eased to the airlock with her rifle ready, but she wouldn’t fire until she had a real target.