Rank hath its privileges. For twelve years, the only privilege Kowacs had asked for was the chance to be where he had the most opportunity to kill weasels.
The stairs were almost ladder-steep and the treads were set for the Khalians’ short legs. One of the clumsily armored Marines ahead of Kowacs sprawled onto all fours in the corridor, but there were no living weasels in sight to take advantage of the situation.
Half a dozen of them were dead, ripped by the rifle fire that caught them with no cover and no hope. One furry body still squirmed. Reflex or intent caused the creature to clash its teeth vainly against the boot of the leading Marine as he crushed its skull in passing.
The area at the bottom of the short staircase was broken into a corridor with a wire-mesh cage to either side. The cage material was nothing fancier than hog-fencing—these were very short-term facilities. The one on the left was empty.
The cage on the right had room for forty humans and held maybe half a dozen, all of them squeezed into a puling mass in one corner from fear of gunfire and the immediate future.
The prisoners were naked except for a coating of filth so thick that their sexes were uncertain even after they crawled apart to greet the Marines. There was a drain in one corner of the cage, but many of the human slaves received here in past years had been too terrified to use it. The weasels didn’t care.
Neither did Kowacs just now.
“Find the stairs down—” he was shouting when something plucked his arm and he spun, his rifle-stock lifting to smash the weasel away before worrying about how he’d kill it, they were death if you let ’em touch you—
And it wasn’t a Khalian but a woman with auburn hair. She’d reached through the fencing that saved her life when it absorbed the reflexive buttstroke that would have crushed her sternum and flung her backwards.
“Bitch!” Kowacs snarled, more jarred by his mistake than by the shock through his weapon that made his hands tingle.
“Please,” the woman insisted with a throaty determination that over-rode all the levels of fear that she must be feeling. “My brother, Alton Dinneen—don’t trust him. On your lives, don’t trust him!”
“Weasel bunkroom!” called one of the armored Marines who’d clumped down the corridor to the doorways beyond the cages. “Empty, though.”
“Watch for—” Kowacs said as he jogged toward them. Bradley and Sienkiewicz were to either side and a half step behind him.
The Khalian that leaped from the ’empty’ room was exactly what he’d meant to watch for.
A marine screamed instinctively. There were four of them, all members of the assault squad burdened by their armor. The weasel had no gun, just a pair of knives in his forepaws. Their edges sparkled against the ceramic armor—and bit through the joints.
Two of the Marines were down in seconds that blurred into eternity before Sergeant Bradley settled matters with a blast from his shotgun. The Marines’ armor glittered like starlit snow under the impact of Bradley’s airfoil charge. The Khalian, his knives lifted to scissor through a third victim, collapsed instead as a rug of blood-matted fur.
Cursing because it was his fault, he shouldn’t have let Marines manacled by twenty kilos of armor lead after the initial entry, Kowacs ran to the room in which the weasel had hidden.
It was a typical Khalian nest. There was a false ceiling to lower the dimensions to weasel comfort and a heap of bedding which his sensors, like those of the first Marine, indicated were still warm with the body heat of the Khalians who’d rushed into the corridor to be cut down in the first exchange of fire.
Except that one of the cunning little bastards had hidden under the bedding and waited. . . .
You couldn’t trust your sensors, and you couldn’t trust your eyes—but you could usually trust a long burst of fire like the one with which Sienkiewicz now hosed the bedding. Fluff and wood chips fountained away from the bullets.
“Hey!” cried one of the assault squad who was still standing. Kowacs spun.