“A presumably hostile fleet is approaching Khalia,” Kowacs resumed aloud.
“Weasels!” a nearby Marine snarled. The AI blocked radio chatter, but it couldn’t prevent people from interrupting with unaided voice.
“The enemy is human,” Kowacs said firmly. “Any of you replacements doubt that, just talk to a veteran. This outfit has met them before.”
That ought to shut up the troops who were convinced the Khalians had broken their surrender terms. Kowacs’ words told the Headhunter veterans they knew better, so they’d hold to the CO’s line as a matter of status. And no replacement, even a Marine with years of service, would dare doubt the word of a full-fledged Headhunter.
It was only Nick Kowacs who still had to fear that the incoming warships were crewed by Khalians like the hundreds of millions of other bloodthirsty Weasels all around him on this planet. He looked around him.
The fast-moving convoy was three klicks out of the Fleet Logistics Base Ladybird—one of hundreds of depots which had sprung up within hours of the successful invasion of Khalia. The countryside was a wasteland.
The local foliage was brown and dun and maroon, never green. Even granting the difference in color, the vegetation was sparse and signs of habitation were limited to an occasional hut shaped like an oversized beehive.
How could the Alliance ever have believed a race as primitive as the Khalians was capable of sustaining an interstellar war—without someone else behind them, arming the Weasels and pointing them like a sword at the heart of the Alliance?
“FleetComSeventeen believes that the human enemy, the Syndicate . . . ,” Kowacs said as his eyes searched terrain that was already being scanned to the millimeter from orbit, ” . . . has used its past association with the Weasels to plant a chain of thermonuclear devices at the planet’s crustal discontinuity. If the weapons go off together, they’ll crack Khalia like an egg and destroy everything and everyone the Fleet has landed here.”
Corporal Sienkiewicz chuckled and said to Bradley in a barely-audible rumble, “Including us.”
The convoy was rolling at over 100 kph. The lowboys accelerated slowly, but they could maintain a higher speed than Kowacs had expected. The Marine trucks had their side armor lowered so that the outward-facing troops could shoot or deploy instantly, but the wind buffeting was getting severe.
“We’re not aboard a ship because we’d be as useless as tits on a boar in a space battle,” Kowacs continued. “Anyway, the naval boys don’t have near the lift capacity to get even Fleet personnel clear in the time available. Our engineering personnel are going to destroy the Syndicate mines instead.”
Destroy the mines—or detonate them out of sequence, making the result a number of explosions rather than a single, crust-splitting surge. Asequential detonation was a perfectly satisfactory solution—for everyone except those directly on top of the bang.
“We’re just along to protect the hardware,” Kowacs concluded. “It’s a milk run, but keep your eyes open.”
A yellow light winked on Kowacs’ raised visor, a glow at the frontier of his vision. One of his platoon leaders had a question, and the major’s AI thought he ought to listen to it.
“Go ahead, Gamma Six,” Kowacs said.
“Nick . . . ?” said Horstmann of 3rd Platoon, aboard the last vehicle in the convoy. “What are we s’posed to be protecting against?”
“Right, fair question,” Kowacs agreed.
He’d asked the same thing when the orders came over the squawk box in the Headhunters’ temporary barracks. The voice on the other end of the line said, “Any fucking thing! Get your asses moving!” and rang off.
Which was pretty standard for headquarters staff scrambling line marines; but not the way Nick Kowacs liked to run his own outfit.
“I presume—”
“I guess,” spoken with an air of calm authority that implied the CO knew what was going on, there was no need to panic.
“—that headquarters is concerned about Weasels who haven’t gotten the word that they’ve surrendered. And maybe there’s some locals who think we’re planting mines instead of deactivating them. You know how rumors start.”
Bradley laughed. Kowacs laughed also.
Another light winked: Sergeant Bynum, who was running Weapons Platoon until another lieutenant transferred in to replace Woking. Woking had died of anaphylactic shock on a Syndicate base that Fleet HQ swore the Headhunters had never seen.