Blohm didn’t bother. He had four rounds left in the magazine of his short-barreled grenade launcher. He ran down the hall, firing one round into each room as he passed. Because the fuze required impact to arm it, Blohm shot through the wall if the door was already open. He had to hope that the internal partitions would be thin enough for the grenade to penetrate.
Blohm compensated reflexively when explosions rocked him from side to side. He wasn’t thinking or seeing as a human does. He’d programmed himself like a machine to accomplish a particular task as fast as possible.
“Coming through!” Gabrilovitch shouted. The hall darkened as the sergeant’s armored body filled the window sash.
Blohm crouched against the wall as he reloaded. The launcher wasn’t a weapon he particularly liked, but he’d spent the voyage out practicing with it until he could perform all the necessary operations instinctively. It was hard to breathe. His helmet filtered toxins, but the fuel-air grenades had used up a lot of the available oxygen.
There were three rooms left on the corridor. The Spook troops in them could have used the pause to ready their own weapons, but there was no time to worry. Just to act.
Blohm straightened. Gabrilovitch’s stinger rasped behind him as the sergeant shot a body that was still twitching after the grenade went off.
Blohm lunged forward, firing three times in a single flowing motion. Between the first shot and the second he heard Gabrilovitch scream, “Cease fire! Cease—”
But the words didn’t penetrate until Caius Blohm had completed his mission.
“—fire! They’re not soldiers, they’re kids!”
—2—
Meyer’s helmet highlighted movement on the panorama display at the lower edge of her visor. Three Spooks were running toward the rear of the gun position.
She turned, bouncing her armored hip against the transformer as she raised her stinger. Her burst went wildly high. The Spooks dropped into a sunken track twenty feet from the transformer pit. It held one of the cogged tramlines that spiderwebbed the port to haul ships after landing.
Meyer should have been watching the south. The cataclysmic destruction of the tank had drawn her attention three miles down the road in the wrong direction. She didn’t know where the Spooks had come—
Two more Spooks ran from the underside of a starship a hundred yards away. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but one had a laser, and the bag the other carried probably wasn’t full of apples. Their long legs covered ground as fast as a shadow spreads when the sun goes behind a cloud.
Meyer shot the leader with the satchel. The second Spook fired as he ran, but his laser threw up chunks of concrete nearer his own feet than his target. Meyer sighted and sawed the slim body nearly in half. The Spook’s corpse hit face down, but his toes pointed in the air.
A 50-pound rocket lit, blasted from its launcher, and banked in a screaming turn that took it southward out of the port area. Meyer could see the target only as a series of dots low in the distant sky. A dot and the missile’s tracking flare merged. A flash that grew into a fireball filled several degrees of horizon.
The target was probably a personnel carrier, armored against small-arms fire but still light enough—unlike the hundred-ton tanks—to fly. All the dots vanished. Only one had been destroyed, but the others would have to slow down and hug the ground during the remainder of their approach to the battle.
The visor would magnify by up to a thousand times, but Meyer needed as broad a range of vision as possible to do her own job. She’d almost gotten herself and the rest of the crew killed by looking in the wrong direction.
A Spook threw a grenade out of the tramline. It landed short and went off in a yellow flash. The shock buffeted Meyer; a few fragments cracked against her armor. She fired at the top of the trench, blasting powdered concrete from both sides without harming the Spooks below. One of them popped up ten feet from where Meyer was aiming and fired his laser. If he hadn’t been more concerned to duck back to safety than to aim, he’d have burned her head off.