“Because it’s our job, Sie!” Bradley snapped, his anger a sign that the big corporal spoke for at least part of his own mind as well.
“Two karda to your goal,” whispered Kowacs’ earphones, transforming The Riva’s nervous chirps without translating the Khalian units into human ones.
“No,” said Kowacs. “A job’s not enough to die for.”
He pulled the sub-machine gun from the grip of the Weasel he’d killed in the next pod. They’d need everything they had to give covering fire while the Jeffersonians scrambled aboard.
Bradley took the weapon from his captain. “Better range to the wall than a scattergun,” he said.
“I want you to watch our pilot,” Kowacs said.
Bradley dropped his shotgun into a patrol sling with its muzzle forward beneath his right arm. He smiled. “Naw, our buddy here knows what I’ll toss into the cockpit if the ship starts acting funny before you tell ‘im to move out. A bunker buster’ll work just as good on his type as it does on little kids.”
“Right,” Kowacs said without emotion. “Let’s move.”
“We’re Alliance troops,” he went on as they filed down the passageway to their positions at the airlock. “So’re the Jeffersonians, whatever they think about it. Maybe if we get this crew out, they’ll tell their buddies back home that it’s a big universe.”
He took a deep breath, “If the Alliance don’t stick together,” he said, “somebody sure God’s going to stick it to all of us. One at a time.”
Deceleration stresses made the Headhunters sway. A stream of red tracers—Fleet standard, not Khalian—flicked from the ground and rang on the starship’s hull.
Their target’s broad concrete rampart slid beneath the airlock.
What Kowacs didn’t say—what he didn’t have to say—was that there’d always be men who acted for safety or comfort or personal pique, rather than for their society as a whole. The five burned corpses in the cabin behind them showed where that led.
It wasn’t anywhere Miklos Kowacs and his troops were willing to go.
Not if it killed them.
THE END
A Story of The Fleet
The Red Shift Lounge was the sort of bar where people left their uniforms back in their billet, so the sergeant who entered wearing dress whites and a chest full of medal ribbons attracted the instant attention of the bartender and the half dozen customers.
The unit patch on the sergeant’s left shoulder was a black shrunken head on a white field, encircled by the words 121st marine reaction company. The patch peeped out beneath a stole of weasel tails, trophies of ten or a dozen Khalians.
The Red Shift was part of the huge complex of Artificial Staging Area Zebra, where if you weren’t military or a military dependant, you were worse. Everybody in the lounge this evening, including the bartender, was military: the two men in a booth were clearly officers; the two men and the woman drinking beer at a table were just as clearly enlisted; and the stocky fellow at the far end of bar could have been anything except a civilian.
But no uniforms meant no insignia, no questions about who had the right to go find a mattress with who . . . no salutes.
And none of the problems that occurred when somebody figured a couple hot landings gave him the right not to salute some rear-echelon officer.
But down-time etiquette didn’t matter when the guy in uniform was a sergeant from the Headhunters, the unit that had ended the war between the Alliance of Planets and the Khalia.
The War between Civilization and Weasels.
“Whiskey,” ordered the sergeant in a raspy, angry voice.
“I thought,” said one of the officers in diffident but nonetheless clearly audible tones, “that the One-Twenty-First shipped out today on the Dalriada at eighteen hundred hours.”
The clock behind the bartender showed 1837 in tasteful blue numerals that blended with the dado lighting.
“For debriefing on Earth,” the officer continued.
“And the parades, of course,” his companion added.
The sergeant leaned his back against the bar. Something metallic in his sleeve rang when his left arm touched the dense, walnut-grained plastic. “I couldn’t stomach that,” he said. “Wanna make something of it?”