“Come into the Council Chamber with us, Fleet Marine,” the new envoy said. “Only from there can the surrender be broadcast to all.”
“No!” shouted Sergeant Bradley. The weasel raised his paw; sunlight winked on the clawtips.
“Yes!” shouted Captain Miklos Kowacs, feeling the ground shiver like the dying weasel before him.
“Ah, sir?” said one of the Marines carrying a gas cylinder. “All of us?”
Lieutenant Mandricard, the senior platoon leader, had faced his platoon around to cover the Headhunters’ rear while the rest of the Marines were shooting weasel pop-ups. He glanced over his shoulder at the company commander.
Kowacs pointed a finger at Mandricard and said over the general push, “Gamma Six, you’re in charge here until I get back, right? If that’s not in—” how long? “—six zero minutes, finish the job.”
He nodded toward the gas cylinders. And smiled like a cobra.
“Sir,” said Bradley, “we can’t do this.”
Kowacs looked at him. “I gotta do it, Top,” he said.
“Hold one,” said Corporal Sienkiewicz. She’d unharnessed one of the gas carriers and was now—
Godalmighty! She was molding a wad of contact-fuzed blasting putty onto the tank of gas. If she dropped the heavy cylinder, the charge would rupture it and flood the whole area with DPD!
“Right,” Sienkiewicz said as she examined her handiwork. “Now we’re ready to go down.”
Bradley swore coldly, checked his shotgun, and said, “Yeah, let’s get this dumb-ass shit over with.”
Kowacs hadn’t told Sie and the sergeant to accompany him; but he knew they wouldn’t accept an order to stay behind. “G—” he said to the Khalian envoy. His voice broke. “Go on, then.”
The eleven surviving weasels scrambled into the blasted entrance. Kowacs strode after them.
“I’ll lead,” said Sienkiewicz.
“Like hell you will,” Kowacs snapped as his rigid arm blocked his bodyguard’s attempt to push past.
The entrance was a stinking pit. A crowd of weasels, all of the carrying flags, filled the floor below. The metal staircase had been destroyed by the first volley of rockets; since then, the Khalians had been scrambling up wooden poles to reach the roof and their deaths.
Shattered poles, corpses, and charred white scraps of cloth covered the concrete floor on which living weasels pushed and chittered in a cacaphony that the translation program couldn’t handle.
“Back!” barked the Khalian envoy, raising both his clawed forepaws in symbolic threat. “To the Council Chamber!”
The Khalian mob surged down the hallway like a shockwave travelling through a viscous fluid. There were lights some distance away, but the Headhunters’ blasts had destroyed the nearest fixtures.
Kowacs looked down, grimaced, and dropped. His boots skidded on the slimy floor.
“Watch—” he said to his companions, but Sie was already swinging herself down. Her right hand gripped the edge of the roof while her left arm cradled her lethal burden like a baby.
Bradley must’ve thought the same thing, because he said, “Hope the little bastid don’t burp,” as he followed into the Khalian fortress.
“Come this way!” ordered the envoy as though he and not the Headhunters were armed. The weasels’ demonstrated willingness to die made them very hard to control.
Pretty much the same was true of Marines in the reaction companies too, of course.
The ceiling was so low that Kowacs, stocky rather than tall, brushed his helmet until he hunched over. He expected to hear Sie cursing, but the big woman didn’t say a word. She was probably concentrating so that she didn’t drop the bomb in her arms and end all this before—
Before it was supposed to end. Not necessarily different from the way it was going to end anyway.
The hallway curved. For a moment, Kowacs’ helmet picked up the crisp commands of Gamma Six as Mandricard put the Headhunters in as much of a posture of defense as the featureless roof permitted. Reception faded to static, then nothing at all.
They came to a bank of wire-fronted elevators and a crowd of waiting Khalians. “Come with me,” the envoy said as he stepped into the nearest cage.
The cage was small and low; three humans in battlegear and a Khalian filled it uncomfortably. As the elevator started the descend, Kowacs saw a horde of weasels pushing into the remaining cages.