Before anyone in Heavy Weapons, Delta Platoon, could respond to the order with their tripod-mounted guns, Corporal Sienkiewicz leaned over the coping and triggered her own shoulder-carried plasma weapon.
The weapon was a meter-long tube holding a three-round magazine of miniature thermonuclear devices. The deuterium pellets were set off and directed by a laser array, part of the ammunition and consumed by the blast it contained.
The crack of the out-going plasma jet was sharp and loud even to ears stunned by the bolts that had struck nearby. Downrange, all the ready munitions in the guard tower blew up simultaneously. The blast across the dull beige roofs of the slave barracks was earth-shaking.
“Assigned positions,” Kowacs ordered, looking around desperately to make sure that his troops weren’t bunching, huddling. Because of the Bonnie Parker, he had only half a field of view. Maybe all the Marines who’d jumped from the port side were dead and—
“Move it, Marines! Move it!” he shouted, finding the stairhead that was the only normal entrance on the building’s roof.
“Fire in the hole!” warned the First Platoon demo team that had laid a rectangle of strip charges near one end of the flat expanse. The nearest Marines—except the assault squad in full battle suits—hunched away. Everyone else at least turned their faces.
“Fire in the hole!” echoed Third Platoon at the opposite side of the roof—so much for everybody being dead, not that—
The entry charges detonated with snaps that were more jarring to the optic nerves than to the ears. Each was a strip of adhesive containing a filament of PDM explosive—which propagated at a measurable fraction of light speed. The filament charges were too minute to have significant effect even a meter or two from the strip, but the shattering force they imparted on contact was immense.
A door-sized rectangle of the roof dropped into the building interior. Marines in battle suits, their armor protecting them against the glassy needles of polyborate shrieking and spinning from the blast, criss-crossed the opened room with fire from their automatic rifles. Their helmet sensors gave them targets—or their nervousness squeezed the triggers without targets, and either way it gave the weasels more to think about.
Similar bursts crackled from the other end of the roof, hidden by the Bonnie Parker and attenuated by the howl of her lift engines.
“Alpha ready!” on the command channel, First Platoon reporting. Kowacs could see the Marines poised to enter the hole they’d just blown in the roof.
“Beta ready!” The two squads of Second Platoon under their lieutenant, detailed to rappel down the sides of the windowless building and secure the exits so that the weasels couldn’t get out among the helpless slaves in a last orgy of destruction.
“Kappa ready!” Third Platoon, whose strip charges had blown them an entrance like the one Kowacs could see First clustered around.
“Delta ready!” Heavy Weapons, now with a tripod-mounted plasma gun on each side of the roof. One of the weapons was crashing out bolts to support the units securing the perimeter.
“Gamma ready!” said Sergeant Bradley with a skull-faced grin at Kowacs from the stairhead where he waited with Sienkiewicz and the two remaining squads of Second Platoon.
“All units, go!” Kowacs ordered as he jogged toward the stairhead and Bradley blew its door with the strip charges placed but not detonated until this moment.
Three of Second’s assault squad hosed the opening. Return fire or a ricochet blasted sparks from the center Marine’s ceramic armor. He staggered but didn’t go down, and his two fellows lurched in sequence down the stairs their bulky gear filled.
“Ditch that!” Kowacs snarled to Sienkiewicz as she slung the plasma gun and cocked her automatic rifle.
“It’s my back,” she said with a nonchalance that was no way to refuse a direct order—
But which would do for now, because Kowacs was already hunching through the doorway, and she was right behind him. The air was bitter with residues of the explosive, but that was only spice for the stench of musk and human filth within.
You could make a case for the company commander staying on the roof instead of ducking into a building where he’d lose contact with supporting units and the high command in orbit.