Or you could watch the landing vessel’s wiring and structural panels quiver centimeters under the stress—far beyond their designed limits—and wonder whether this time the old girl was going to come apart with no help from the weasel defense batteries at all.
A shock lifted all the Marines squatting on the deck.
Kowacs, gripping a stanchion with one hand and his rifle with the other, swore; but the word caught in his throat and it wasn’t a missile, just the shock wave of the ground-attack ship that had plunged down ahead of them in a shallow dive that would carry it clear of the landing zone—
If its ordnance had taken out the missile batteries as planned.
Kowacs wanted to piss. He did what he had learned to do in the moments before hitting hot LZs in the past.
Pissed down his trouser leg.
Three plasma bolts hit the Bonnie Parker with the soggy impact of medicine balls against the hull. The ship rocked. The magnetic screens spread the bursts of charged particles, but the bay lights went off momentarily and the center bank stayed dark even after the rest had flickered into life again.
“About now—” said Corporal Sienkiewicz, two meters tall and beside Kowacs in the bay because so far as the Table of Organization was concerned, she was his clerk.
Kowacs and Bradley could file their own data. There was no one in the company they thought could do a better job of covering their asses in a firefight.
Sienkiewicz’ timing was flawless, as usual. The Bonnie Parker’s five-g braking drove the squatting Marines hard against the deck plates.
Automatic weapons, unaffected by the screens, played against the hull like sleet. The landing vessel’s own suppression clusters deployed with a whoompwhoompwhoompwhoomp noticeable over the general stress and racket only by those who knew it was coming.
The Bonnie Parker was small for a starship but impressive by comparison with most other engines of human transportation. She slowed to a halt, then lurched upward minusculely before her artificial intelligence pilot caught her and brought her to hover. The landing bay doors began to lift on both sides of the hull while the last bomblets of the suppression clusters were still exploding with the snarl and glare of a titanic arclight.
“Get ’em!” Kowacs roared needlessly over his helmet’s clear channel as he and the rest of the company leaped under the rising doors in two lines, one to either side of the landing vessel.
Thrust vectored from the Bonnie Parker’s lift engines punched their legs, spilling some of the Marines on the roof’s smooth surface. Normally the vessel would have grounded, but the weight of a starship was almost certain to collapse a pad intended for surface-effect trucks. The old girl’s power supply would allow her to hover all day.
Unless the weasels managed to shoot her down, in which case she’d crumple the building on top of the Marines she’d just delivered.
Well, nobody in the One-Twenty-first was likely to die of ulcers from worry.
There were half a dozen dead Khalians sprawled on the part of the roof Kowacs could see. Their teeth were bared, and all of them clutched the weapons they’d been firing at the landing vessel when the suppression clusters had flayed everything living into bloody ruin.
There was a sharp bang and a scream. Halfway down the line on Kowacs’ side of the vessel, Corporal Dodd up-ended. One of his feet was high and the other was missing, blown off by the bomblet unexploded until he’d managed to step on it.
“Watch the—” one of the platoon leaders called on the command channel.
At least one plasma gun on the perimeter had survived the ground attack ship. The weasel crew turned their weapon inward and ripped a three-round burst into the Bonnie Parker and the deploying Marines.
One bolt hit the waist-high roof coping—Intelligence was right; the polyborate shattered like a bomb, gouging a two-meter scallop from the building. Kowacs was pushed backwards by the blast, and half a dozen of the Marines near him went down.
The other bolts skimmed the coping and diffused against the landing vessel’s screen with whip-lash cracks and a coruscance that threw hard shadows across the roof. Kowacs’ faceshield saved his eyes, but ozone burned the back of his throat and he wasn’t sure that anyone could hear him order, “Delta Six, get that f—”