The weasel fortress was a jumble of huge flat boxes, with point-defense plasma weapons inset at each corner and heavy missile batteries buried deep in their cores. K435 was supposed to have landed on the highest of the twenty to twenty-five cast-concrete prisms, but that hadn’t worked out: a box to the west overlooked the one on which the Headhunters were deploying, and the weasel plasma guns could depress at any instant to sweep the whole company to a glowing memory.
“Delta, check 220,” Kowacs ordered his Weapons Platoon. His helmet’s artificial intelligence put him at the top of the pyramid of lieutenants assigning sectors and sergeants high-lighting specific targets for the Marines of their squad. “Clear the high—”
There was a deafening crash and a blast of static—a plasma discharge radiated all across the radio-frequency spectrum.
Corporal Sienkiewicz stood beside Kowacs because her strength and ruthlessness made her the best bodyguard he could find in a company of strong, ruthless Marines. She’d just fired her hand-carried plasma weapon, a heavy tube that looked delicate against her husky two-meter frame.
A Khalian gun position vanished; then the whole top edge of the concrete prism stuttered with dazzling plasma bursts and long tendrils of quicklime burned from the concrete and spewing away in white-hot tendrils. Delta had its own belt-fed plasma weapons set up on tripods, and they didn’t need Kowacs’ orders to tell them it was everybody’s ass if they didn’t nail the close-in defenses before some weasel brought the guns under manual control.
The noise of plasma weapons, rockets and rocket warheads made it hard for Kowacs to think, much less hear any of the message traffic on his earphones. Although Kowacs’ helmet damped the worst of the racket, shockwaves slapped the skin of his face and hands like huge, hot raindrops.
Squad leaders with echo-location gear were using the noise to map all the surfaces of the Khalian fortress. When holographic images on a sergeant’s helmet visor indicated a missile tube in his squad’s sector, he relayed the target to a Marine with a rocket launcher.
The Headhunters’ top-attack rockets ripped and snapped all across the concrete jumble. Occasionally a blast of smoky yellow flame indicated that one of the big Khalian missiles had blown up within its launcher.
But the Khalians weren’t shooting any more.
Kowacs turned around so that his unaided eyes could confirm what his visor display already insisted. Through the skeletal ribs of K435 and across the fortress, as well as on his side of the landing vessel, nobody was firing except Kowacs’ own Marines.
Missiles didn’t rise to engage the ships in orbit. Plasma weapons didn’t chew themselves new firing slits so that they could bear on the Marine landing force. . . .
Unbefuckinglievable.
There was a momentary lull in the gunfire as the rest of the Headhunters realized the same thing. Then Sergeant Bradley screamed, “Door opening!” on the primary unit push, and three rockets streaked simultaneously toward the northwest corner of the block on which the Marines had landed.
The leaves of the hidden steel trapdoor rang like bells as they flew apart under the impact of the self-forging fragments. There were swatches of fur in the blast debris also.
“Double it!” Kowacs ordered, but there were already three more rockets in the air and three more sharp explosions over the sally-port, chopping weasels into cat’s meat before their counterattack had time to get under way.
Kowacs was more agile than most of the Headhunters because he was burdened only with his personal weapons. He began running toward the shattered trapdoor, shouting, “Gas carriers to me!”
You’d’ve thought the rocket blasts would’ve kept the weasels down for at least a few minutes. More furry, yellow-fanged heads popped out of the sally-port before Kowacs got out the last syllable of his order.
He shot as he ran, spraying the area with a dozen ricochets for every bullet that counted—but ammo was cheap, and at least a dozen other Headhunters were firing along with their captain. The vivid white fireball of a plasma burst hid the target momentarily; Sie had saved back one charge for an emergency like this.
The weasels had been waving something.