The trouble was, they weren’t a team. The planners had allowed for fifty percent casualties as the commando crossed from Attack Transport Vice-Admiral Adler to their target vessel, the Empress of Earth. The planners couldn’t determine which soldiers would be lost, however; which would disappear as twists of light into a universe of twisting light, with no boundaries and no hope.
Rather than the team he had trained with for this operation, Buecher commanded troopers whose teammates, like his own, were running out of air in an alien spacetime. Teammates closer than lovers, closer than blood kin. Teammates who no longer existed when Buecher’s magnetic boots suddenly clanged and bit on the hull of a starliner which had been a warp of infolded shadow until the moment Buecher touched it Buecher understood how Weik could be unhinged by the experience. She was a woman, without the strength of will that stiffened Buecher. The will that prevented Buecher from killing these sniveling rabbits, Weik and Magnin, who reached the starliner while Buecher’s proper teammates did not. . . .
“I didn’t hear shots,” said Magnin. “It’s a big ship. Noise is funny. The Colonel will tell us if there’s anything we ought to know.”
Magnin faced the stern with his doorknocker. The planners had allowed for the possibility that the commando would have to fight its way through a series of firedoors lowered across the corridors. The squash-head bombs of the 15-cm assault weapons had shown in tests on Grantholm that they would wreck the locking mechanisms of the firedoors and spall a sleet of fragments into defenders on the opposite side.
The reasoning was good, but the crew of the Empress of Earth were cowards who used the presence of civilians as an excuse not to oppose the commando. The doorknocker was of limited use in a normal firefight, because the thin-cased missiles had no direct fragmentation effect: only concussion and, perhaps, bits of fittings and furniture flying about as secondary projectiles.
If opponents attacked from the stern end of the corridor, Magnin’s weapon could not give as satisfactory a response as a submachine gun would; but the concern that roiled Buecher’s mind was a false one, he realized, because the cowards who would not defend themselves weren’t going to attack either.
They weren’t going to give Buecher an opportunity to avenge his teammates.
There were no civilians in wartime, and no neutrals either. The only immoral act in wartime was to fail, and Grantholm would not fail.
“. . . Sweet Betsy from Pike,” warbled a thin, cracked voice from a cross-corridor joining 7 twenty meters astern of the shaft foyer. “She went to Wyoming with—”
“Magnin, watch the shafts!” Buecher ordered—
—though the bombs had a five-meter arming range and wouldn’t go off if somebody did pop from a shaft opening while the singer distracted his team—
—and spun to cover the corridor sternward with his submachine gun.
“—her husband Ike,” the singer caroled as he staggered around the corner, a fat old man with drink stains down the front of his plush jacket
He stared owlishly at the muzzle of Buecher’s submachine gun.
“I’m so very sorry,” the passenger said. He attempted a bow and had to catch himself on the bulkhead to keep from falling. “I mus’ be in the wrong room.”
As he spoke, he did topple back around the corner.
“Bomb!” Weik shouted.
Buecher flattened, sweeping both ends of the corridor with his peripheral vision. His weapon pointed sternward, because there would be a rush from that side, but a 15-cm projectile sailed on its spluttering rocket motor in a flat arc from the cross-corridor toward the bow.
The projectile was almost as slow as a lobbed grenade. Because the shooter had been afraid to expose himself, the bomb would hit the wall opposite the shaft openings. The concussion would be heavy but survivable, and when the attackers rushed in behind their bomb—
Buecher hugged himself to the deck, his trigger finger poised to begin shooting at the instant the bomb went off.
The fat passenger stepped into Corridor 7. He aimed a pistol in either hand, though only one was firing.
The muzzle flash of the first shot was all that Buecher’s disbelieving eyes saw. The bullet punched through the bridge of his nose. Belgeddes had learned to correct for the pistol’s slight tendency to throw left.