“There’s nothing wrong,” Grant said. “We’re not where we’re programmed to be—or when we’re programmed to be—but there’s nothing wrong. If they can’t straighten it out, we’ll just return when the seventeen minutes are up.”
We hope, Kowacs’ mind added, but that wasn’t something even for a whisper.
“Right,” he said aloud. “I’m going to calm everybody down; but Eight-Ball Command pays, understand?”
Grant probably didn’t understand . . . yet.
Kowacs didn’t key the helmet intercom, opting for the more personal touch of his direct voice.
“All right, Marines,” he bellowed. “We’re on R&R for the next fifteen minutes or so, courtesy of the Special Projects Bureau. But you all know the Fleet—what we get’s one room and no sandy beaches.”
Sienkiewicz laughed loudly.
“Hey,” called al-Habib, “you can keep your sand if you find me a cathouse!”
Kowacs grinned broadly at the lieutenant whose quick understanding had just reinstated him in the Headhunters. “Naw, Jamal,” he said. “When you join the Marines, you get fucked over—but you don’t get laid.”
This time the laughter was general. The holographic light bathing the walls shifted slowly back to gray.
Kowacs lifted his helmet to scratch his close-cropped scalp.
“Okay, now listen up,” he resumed in a tone of command. “This is a good time for you all to go over your missions again by teams. The delay doesn’t mean that we’re off the hook. Even Special Projects—”
Kowacs waved toward Grant, bent over his workstation. “—and Eight-Ball Command are going to get things right eventually. I want us sharp when the times comes. Understood?”
“Yes sir!” came from a dozen throats, and no more eyes filled with incipient panic.
“Then get to it!” ordered Sergeant Bradley.
Helmet-projected maps began to bloom in the midst of three-Marine clusters, teams going over the routes they expected to take through the hostile base.
Kowacs leaned toward Grant again. He expected the civilian to be visibly angry at being made a laughingstock to defuse tension, but there was no expression on the big man’s face.
Which proved that Grant was a smart bastard as well as a bastard; and that wasn’t news to Kowacs.
“I’m in contact with echelon,” Grant said. “Everything is proceeding normally.”
“Except we’re not where we’re supposed to be,” Kowacs said. Bradley and Sienkiewicz were close behind him—everything was close in the module’s hold—but they were facing outward, watching the company for their major.
“They’ve refined the parameters,” Grant said. “We should be able to turn around at the end of seventeen minutes and go in immediately, without docking.”
“Fine,” said Kowacs without expression. “That’s almost as good as having the shit work right the first time.”
“Just have your troops ready to go, mister!” the civilian snapped. “Got that?”
“You bet,” said Kowacs as he straightened. “You just get us to the target; we’ll take it from there.”
And they did.
* * *
The alarm chimed, the interior lights went red, and the intrusion module was within a cylindrical bay large enough to hold a liner—or a battleship. The trio of courier vessels docked there at present were dwarfed by the volume surrounding them.
“Artificial gravity and standard atmosphere!” Kowacs shouted, relaying the information that other Headhunters might not think to check on their visors, as the hatches—only two fucking hatches, as though this were a bus and not an assault craft!—opened and the dozen Syndicate maintenance people visible in the bulkhead displays gaped at the module that had appeared in their midst.
Bradley was through the hatch first because he had the shotgun and it was the close targets who were dangerous—though none of the Syndicate personnel, all of them human, seemed to be armed. The woman a hundred meters away, running for a courier vessel, was probably the biggest problem because she’d been smart enough to react.
Kowacs shot her. He was second through the hatch because the 121st was his company, not Sie’s, however much the corporal might want to put her body out there first when the action was going to start.
The target flopped on the walkway with her limbs flailing. There were dots of blood on the back of her tunic, and a great splash of scarlet and lung tissue blown by the keyholing bullets onto the walkway where she thrashed.