— 3 —
Blohm lay in the crawlspace beneath a warehouse, ten feet back from the wall. He could see wedges of the port through half a dozen of the open ventilators, but he was practically invisible from the outside.
A pair of Kalendru crouched at the base of a freighter in the middle of the field. They held shoulder-stocked lasers. Blohm aimed his stinger and squeezed twice: separate short bursts rather than a single long one. The projectiles’ vaporized driving bands fluoresced in the dimness.
Pellets that missed sparkled like fairy dust against the starship’s hull. The Spooks toppled. Blohm scrambled a few feet sideways. Somebody might have noticed the vague flicker from his stinger’s muzzle.
You’ve got to be fast. You’ve got to act without thinking. Otherwise you’re as dead as a child in a fuel-air blast.
On a corner of Blohm’s visor was a remote image from Sergeant Gabrilovitch. Gabe had retreated with most of C41 behind the line of warehouses. The lot there was half the size of the huge landing field. It held thousands of vehicles and pieces of heavy equipment in open storage ready for transshipment, but even that quantity of matériel didn’t fill the space. The pickup ship could land without scratching its paint on the Spook hardware.
If a ship arrived. If anybody in C41 was alive when it arrived. But worrying about that was somebody else’s job.
A vehicle drove through one of the smashed doors of the huge maintenance hangar across the port. Blohm aimed, dialing up the magnification of the stinger’s holographic sight while keeping his visor at 1:1 for breadth of field.
No target. It was a Spook truck, all right, but there were three strikers in the battered cab and others clinging to the back. Abbado was bringing his people back, most of them at least. A pair of missiles hit close enough to stagger the vehicle, but it continued to accelerate. Two of the left-side tires were flat, giving the truck a shimmy.
Blohm wished he was alone on a planet. No decisions to make, no responsibilities. Nobody to worry about but himself.
Something rustled; the local equivalent of a rat, or perhaps just leaves blowing. Blohm didn’t look away from the ventilators, his firing slits. His helmet would warn him of any infrared source corresponding to a human or a Kalender. Even a Kalender child.
Three Kalendru ran out of the distant hangar. Two had lasers; the Spook in the middle lifted a long launching tube to his shoulder.
Blohm shot the rocketeer first. The Spook dropped his tube and staggered backward, but he stayed on his feet.
This was long range for a stinger. The pellets depended on kinetic energy for their effect, and air resistance scrubbed off velocity. Kalendru lasers had better performance than stingers at ranges of three hundred yards and beyond, but it wasn’t often you had to worry about shooting the breadth of a starport.
Blohm raised his point of aim slightly for the second target. The burst hit the Spook in the face and throat. He flung up his hands and fell backward.
The third Spook looked around wildly. Blohm nailed him in the upper chest, then gave him a second burst when he didn’t go down. That Spook and the rocketeer collapsed together in a tangle of spindly limbs.
Blohm hoped Abbado made it clear. Well, he’d done what he could.
There was lots of room in the crawlspace. The extruded-metal joists were several feet off the ground across most of the building. A guy could live in a space like this if he had food and everybody left him alone. He’d have no decisions to make at all.
The truck went over a sunken tramline at forty miles an hour. They must have crossed the same trench headed for the hangar, but Abbado didn’t remember the jolt being so bad. The present condition of the truck’s running gear probably had something to do with it.
Glasebrook bounced high enough to dent the cab roof with his helmet. He shouted a curse.
“Quit bitching, Flea,” Abbado said. “There’s people who’d pay good money for a ride like this!”
A shell landed where the truck had crossed the tramline seconds before. Horgen dragged the steering yoke to the right, fighting the vehicle’s tendency to drift left because of the flat tires on that side.