More weasels rose out of the half-molten pit where the trapdoor had been. They vanished in a maelstrom of bullets and grenade fragments.
Kowacs paused twenty meters from the sally-port to reload. A Marine with one of the green-painted gas cylinders caught up with him. Sienkiewicz was giving the fellow a hand with his load.
More weasels leaped from the fortress. Kowacs aimed but didn’t fire. Other Marines ripped the fresh targets into gobbets of bloody flesh.
The weasels were waving white flags.
“Cease fire!” Kowacs shouted. Still more weasels were coming up. “Cease fire!”
There were ten or a dozen unarmed Khalians in the next group, all of them waving white flags. Some were females.
A Headhunter fired his assault rifle. One of the tripod-mounted plasma weapons vaporized the weasels with three bolts.
More weasels came up from the crater.
“Cease fire!” Kowacs screamed as he ran forward, facing his Marines as he put his body between them and the Khalians.
Facing most of his Marines, because Sie was on one side of him and Sergeant Bradley was on the other. Both non-coms were cursing their captain, but not so bitterly as Kowacs cursed himself and the command responsibility that made him do this when he should’ve been shooting weasels.
Nobody shot. Nobody spoke. Kowacs’ panting breath roared behind the constriction of his visor.
Kowacs slowly turned to face the weasels again. His lungs were burning. He flipped his visor out of the way, though that left him without the heads-up display if he needed it.
There were twelve Khalians. They stood on the lip of the crater, waving their small square flags. Each weasel had its nose pointed high in the air, baring the white fur of its throat. Their muzzles were wrinkling, but Kowacs didn’t know whether that was a facial expression or just a reaction to the stench of blast residues and death.
Miklos Kowacs had killed hundreds of weasels during his Marine career. He’d never before spent this long looking at a living one.
“Helmet,” he said, “translate Khalian.”
He splayed the fingers of his left hand, the hand that didn’t hold a fully-loaded automatic rifle, in the direction of the weasels. “You!” he said. “Which of you’s the leader?” as the speaker on the top of his helmet barked the question in weaseltalk.
None of the Khalians wore clothing or ornamentation. The one on the left end of the line lowered his nose so that he could see ahead of himself, stepped forward, and chattered something that the translation program in Kowacs’ helmet rendered as, “Are you Fleet Marines? You are Fleet Marines.”
“Answer me!” Kowacs shouted. “Are you in charge?” The concrete seemed to ripple. It was solid, but Nick Kowacs wasn’t solid just now. . . .
“We wish to surrender to Fleet Marines,” the weasel said. He was about a meter forty tall, mid-breastbone level to Kowacs. “Are you Fleet Marines?”
“Goddam,” Bradley whispered, his scarred left hand wringing the foregrip of the shotgun he pointed.
“You bet,” said Nick Kowacs. His brain was echoing with screams and other memories and screams. “We’re the Headhunters, we’re the best.” Weasels never surrendered. “You want to surrender this whole fortress?”
“That too,” said the weasel. “You are fighters whom we respect. Come below with us to receive our surrender, Fleet Marine.”
Sienkiewicz laughed.
“Bullshit,” Kowacs said flatly. “You tell your people to come on out, one at a time, and we’ll see about surrender.”
“Please,” barked the weasel. “You must come into the Council Chamber to take our surrender.”
“Bullshit!” Kowacs repeated.
He risked a glance over his shoulder. The three Marines with gas cylinders, kneeling under the weight of their loads, were in the front rank of waiting troops. “Look, get your people up here, or—”
The Khalians had no equipment, but they had been born with tusks and sharp, retractile claws. “Then I have failed,” he speaker of the group said. He raised a forepaw and tore his own throat out.
“—almighty!” Bradley blurted as Kowacs choked off his own inarticulate grunt. The weasel thrashed on the seared concrete, gushing arterial blood from four deep slashes. The furry corpse was still twitching when a second Khalian stepped forward.