An elevator door was opening across the hall.
The startled figure in the elevator car was bare chested but wore a red sleeve that covered his right arm wrist to shoulder. The Khalian machine-pistol he pointed might not penetrate assault-squad armor, but it would have stitched through Kowacs’ chest with lethal certainty if the captain hadn’t fired first. Kowacs’ bullets flung his target backward into the bloody elevator.
“Sir!” cried the Marine who hadn’t fired. “That was a friendly! A man!”
“Nobody’s friendly when they point a gun at you!” Kowacs said. “Demo team! Blow me a hole in this fucking floor!”
Two Marines sprinted over, holding out the partial spools of strip-charge that remained after they blew down the door.
“How big—” one started to ask, but Kowacs was already anticipating the question with, “One by two—no, two by two!”
Kowacs needed a hole that wasn’t a suicidally-small choke point when he and his troops jumped through it—but the floor here had been cast in the same operation as the roof and exterior walls. He was uneasily aware that the battering which gunfire and explosives were giving the structure would eventually disturb its integrity to the point that the whole thing collapsed.
Still, he needed a hole in the floor, because the only way down from here seemed to be the elevator which—
“Should I take the elevator, sir?” asked an armored Marine, anonymous behind his airfoil-scarred face shield.
“No, dammit!” Kowacs said, half inclined to let the damn fool get killed making a diversion for the rest of them. But the kid was his damn fool, and—
“Only young once,” muttered Sergeant Bradley in a mixture of wonder and disdain.
“Fire in the hole!” cried one of the Demolition Team.
Kowacs squeezed back from the doorway to give the demo team room to jump clear, but the pair were too blasé about their duties to bother. They twisted around and knelt with their hands over their ears before the strips blew and four square meters of flooring shuddered, tilted down—
And stuck. The area below was divided into rooms off-set from those of the upper floor. The thick slab of polyborate caught at a skewed angle, half in place and half in the room beneath.
An automatic weapon in that room fired two short bursts. A bullet richocheted harmlessly up between the slab and the floor from which it had been blasted.
“Watch it!” said Sienkiewicz, unlimbering the plasma gun again. She aimed toward the narrow wedge that was all the opening there was into the lower room.
It was damned dangerous. If she missed, the bolt would liberate all its energy in the nest room, and the interior walls might not be refractory enough to protect Gamma.
But Sienkiewicz was good; and among other things, this would be a real fast way to silence the guns beneath before the Marines followed the plasma bolt.
The demo team sprinted into the corridor; Kowacs flattened himself against the wall he hoped would hold for the next microsecond; and the big weapon crashed a dazzling line through the hole and into the building’s lower story.
Air fluoresced at the point of impact and lifted the slab before dropping it as a load of rubble. Kowacs and Bradley shouldered one another in their mutual haste to be first through the opening. Sienkiewicz used their collision to lead them both by a half step, the plasma gun for the moment cradled in her capable arms.
It wasn’t the weapon for a point-blank firefight; but nothing close to where the bolt struck was going to be alive, much less dangerous.
Kowacs dropped through the haze and hit in a crouch on something that squashed under this boots. The atmosphere was so foul in the bolt’s aftermath that the helmet filters slapped across his mouth and nose in a hard wedge.
The Marines were in a good-sized—human-scale—room with a cavity in the floor. There was nothing beneath the cavity except earth glazed by the plasma bolt that had excavated it.
This was a briefing room or something of the sort; but it was a recreation room as well, for the chairs had been stacked along the walls before the blast disarrayed them, and two humans were being tortured on a vertical grid. The victims had been naked before the gush of sun-hot ions scoured the room, flensing to heat-cracked bones the side of their bodies turned toward the blast.