“Careful,” added Grant as he grinned. “There’s one up the spout.”
“I . . . ,” said Fleur
If Fleur’s trigger finger tightened, Kowacs would get between the private and Grant . . . but he’d have to be quick, since Sie would be going for him and Bradley was a toss-up, Kowacs or Grant or Fleur, the only thing sure being that the sergeant would do something besides try to save his own hide.
“My cleaning kit’s back at the billet,” Fleur said. He swallowed. “Sir.”
“Then you’d better return the gun, boy,” said Grant. “Hadn’t you?”
Fleur grimaced. For a moment he looked as though he were going to toss the weapon; then he stepped forward and presented the pistol butt-first to its owner. Fleur’s hand was dwarfed by that of the civilian.
The laser started cutting again. Grant aimed his pistol at the open hatch. Marines ducked, though nobody was in the direct line of fire.
Grant pulled the trigger. The flashcrack and the answering crack of the explosive bullet detonating somewhere out in the hanger removed any possibility that the weapon had been doctored to make it harmless.
The cutter shut down. Technicians shouted in surprise, but nobody stuck his head in through the hatch.
Grant put the pistol away under his lab coat. “All right, Fleur,” he said. “You’re relieved. Go back to your quarters and pack your kit. Your orders are waiting for you there.”
Kowacs felt exhausted, drained. Sienkiewicz gripped his shoulder for the contact they both needed.
“Your new assignment’s on an intra-system tug,” Grant added. Then, as harshly as the pistol shot of a moment before, “Get moving, mister!”
Fleur stumbled out of the hold—and the Headhunters. A few of the Marines flicked a glance at his back; but only a glance.
Grant exhaled heavily.
“Right,” he said. “This is going to be a piece of cake, troops. The bastards won’t know what hit them. There’s just one thing I want to emphasize before your major here gets on with his briefing.”
He grinned around the bay. Sphincter muscles tightened.
“The module will be on-site for seventeen minutes,” Grant went on. “That’s not eighteen minutes, it’s not seventeen minutes, one second. Anybody who isn’t aboard on time spends the rest of his life in Syndicate hands.”
“You see,” the smiling civilian concluded, “I couldn’t change the extraction parameters. Even if I wanted to.”
* * *
An electronic chime warned that the Headhunters were three minutes from insertion.
The hatches were still open. The intrusion module’s bulkheads were hidden by images, but the hologram was not a simulation this time. The present view was of the hangar in which the vehicle had been constructed and the twelve sealed black towers surrounding the module at the points of a compass rose. The towers would presumably launch the module . . . somehow.
“Everybody’s aboard,” prompted Sergeant Bradley, stating what the green bar in Kowacs’ visor display already told him.
“Grant isn’t aboard,” Kowacs said, finger-checking the grenades which hung from his equipment belt.
“I don’t get this,” complained a Marine to no one in particular. “We can’t ride all the way from Port Tau Ceti packed in like canned meat. Can we?”
“Fuck Grant,” said Sienkiewicz.
The eighteen members of Weapons Platoon carried the tubes, tripods and ammunition of their belt-loaded plasma weapons. Their rigid hardsuits of black ceramic stood out from the remaining, lightly-equipped Marines like raisins in a pound cake.
Kowacs saw Grant’s image coming across the hangar floor with long strides. The civilian wore fatigues, but he carried what looked like a briefcase. His commo helmet was non-standard.
Grant’s pistol hung muzzle-up in a harness beneath his left armpit.
“Right,” said Kowacs. “Six to all team leaders—” his helmet’s AI switched him automatically from the private channel he shared with Bradley and Sie to the general command frequency “—administer the gas antidote to your teams, then dose yourselves.”
Grant entered the module. The hatches closed.
There was barely enough room for equipment and the ninety-three personnel aboard the spherical vessel; if the Headhunters’ line establishment had been at full Table of Organization strength, Kowacs would have had to cut some people from the operation.