He fired again. His charge splashed the skull of the corpse.
“—die, every fucking—”
Kowacs gripped the shotgun barrel with his left hand. The metal burned him. He couldn’t lift the muzzle against Bradley’s hysterical grip.
“Put it down, Top!” he ordered.
The moaning of the crowd was louder. Waves of Khalian musk blended sickeningly with powder smoke.
“—are your subjects, your—”
Bradley fired into the dead weasel’s groin.
“—weasel in the fucking uni—”
“Down!” Kowacs screamed and touched the muzzle of his assault rifle to Bradley’s temple where a wisp of hair grew in the midst of pink scar tissue. Kowacs’ vision tunnelled down to nothing but the hairs and the black metal and the flash that would—
There was a hollow thunk.
Bradley released the shotgun as he fell forward unconscious. Sienkiewicz looked at her captain with empty eyes. There was a splotch of blood on the green metal of the gas cylinder and a matching pressure cut on the back of Bradley’s skull, but the sergeant would be all right as soon as he came around. . . .
“On behalf of the Alliance of Planets,” Kowacs said in a quavering voice, “I accept your surrender.”
He covered his eyes with his broad left hand. He shouldn’t have done that, because that made him remember his mother and he began to vomit.
* * *
“Hey, Sergeant Bradley,” said one of the enlisted men in the Red Shift Lounge, “let me get ‘cha the next drink.”
The man in whites toyed with his stole of Khalian tails. “We shoulda kept killin’ ’em till everybody had a weasel-skin blanket!” he said. “We shoulda—”
Somebody came into the bar; somebody so big that even Sergeant Bradley looked up.
The newcomer, a woman in coveralls, squinted into the dim lounge. She glanced at the group around Bradley, then ignored them. When she saw the stocky man at the far end of the bar, she strode forward.
The sudden smile made her almost attractive.
Bradley’s hand closed on his fresh drink. “If there’s still one weasel left in the universe,” he said, “that’s too many.”
“Sar’nt?” murmured the drunken blond. “Whyn’t you’n me, we go somewhur?”
“Hey, cap’n,” said the big woman to the man at the far end of the bar. “Good t’ see you.”
“Go ‘way, Sie,” he replied, staring into his mug. “You’ll lose your rank if you miss lift.”
“Fuck my rank,” she said. Everyone in the lounge was looking at them. “Besides,” she added, “Commander Goldstein says the Dalriada’s engines ‘re broke down till we get you aboard. Sir.”
She laid the man’s right arm over her shoulders, gripped him around the back with her left hand, and lifted him in a packstrap carry. He was even bigger than he’d looked hunched over the bar, a blocky anvil of a man with no-colored eyes.
“You’re always getting me outa places I shouldn’t a got into, Sie,” the man said.
His legs moved as the woman maneuvered him toward the door, but she supported almost all of his weight. “Worse places ‘n this, sir,” she replied.
“They weren’t worse than now, Sie,” he said. “Trust me.”
As the pair of them started to shuffle past the group near the door, the woman’s eyes focused on the uniformed man. She stopped. The man she held braced himself with a lopsided grin and said, “I’m okay now, Sie.”
“Who the hell are you?” the big woman demanded of the man wearing the Headhunter uniform.
“What’s it to you?” he snarled back.
“This is Sergeant Bradley of the 121st Marine Reaction Company,” said one of the enlisted men, drunkenly pompous.
“Like hell he is,” the big woman said. Her arms were free now. “Top’s searching bars down the Strip the other direction, lookin’ for Cap’n Kowacs, here.”
Kowacs continued to grin. His face was as terrible as a hedge of bayonets.
The group around ‘Sergeant Bradley’ backed away as though he had suddenly grown an extra head.
The imposter in uniform tried to run. Sienkiewicz grabbed him by the throat from behind. “Thought you’d be a big hero, did ya? Some clerk from Personnel, gonna be a hero now it’s safe t’ be a hero?”