by David Drake
The Headhunters' top-attack rockets ripped and snapped all across the concrete jumble. Occasionally a blast of smoky yellow flame indicated that one of the big Khalian missiles had blown up within its launcher.
But the Khalians weren't shooting any more.
Kowacs turned around so that his unaided eyes could confirm that his visor display already insisted. Through the skeletal ribs of K435 and across the fortress, as well as on his side of the landing vessel, nobody was firing except Kowacs' own Marines.
Missiles didn't rise to engage the ships in orbit. Plasma weapons didn't chew themselves new firing slits to that they could bear on the Marine landing force . . . .
Unbefuckinglievable.
There was a momentary lull in the gunfire as the rest of the Headhunters realized the same thing. Then Sergeant Bradley screamed, "Door opening!" on the primary unit push, and three rockets streaked simultaneously toward the northwest corner of the block on which the marines had landed.
The leaves of the hidden steel trapdoor rang like bells as they flew apart under the impact of the self-forging fragments. There were swatches of fur in the blast debris also.
"Double it!" Kowacs ordered, but there were already three more rockets in the air and three more sharp explosions over the sally-port, chopping weasels into cat's meat before their counterattack had time to get under way.
Kowacs was more agile than most of the Headhunters because he was burdened only with his personal weapons. He began running toward the shattered trapdoor, shouting, "Gas carriers to me!"
"You'd've thought the rocket blasts would've kept the weasels down for at least a few minutes. More furry, yellow-fanged heads popped out of the sally-port even before Kowacs got out the last syllable of his order.
He shot as he ran, spraying the area with a dozen ricochets for every bullet that counted—but ammo was cheap, and at least a dozen other Headhunters were firing along with their captain. The vivid white fireball of a plasma burst hid the target momentarily; Sie had saved back one charge for an emergency like this.
The weasels had been waving something.
More weasels rose out of the half-molten pit where the trapdoor had been. They vanished in a maelstrom of bullets and grenade fragments.
Kowacs paused twenty meters from the sally-port to reload. A Marine with one of the green-painted gas cylinders caught up with him. Sienkiewicz was giving the fellow a hand with his load.
More weasels leaped from the fortress. Kowacs aimed but didn't fire. Other Marines ripped the fresh targets into gobbets of bloody flesh.
The weasels were waving white flags.
"Cease fire!" Kowacs shouted. Still more weasels were coming up. "Cease fire!"
There were ten or a dozen unarmed Khalians in the next group, all of them waving white flags. Some were females.
A Headhunter fired his assault rifle. One of the tripod-mounted plasma weapons vaporized the weasels with three bolts.
More weasels came up from the crater.
"Cease fire!" Kowacs screamed as he ran forward, facing his marines as he put his body between them and the Khalians.
Facing most of his Marines, because Sie was on one side of him and Sergeant Bradley was on the other. Both non-coms were cursing their captain, but not so bitterly as Kowacs cursed himself and the command responsibility that made him do this when he should've been shooting weasels.
Nobody shot. Nobody spoke. Kowacs' panting breath roared behind the constriction of his visor.
Kowacs slowly turned to face the weasels again. His lungs were burning. He flipped his visor out of the way, though that left him without the heads-up display if he needed it.
There were twelve Khalians. They stood on the lip of the crater, waving their small square flags. Each weasel had its nose pointed high in the air, baring the white fur of its throat. Their muzzles were wrinkling, but Kowacs didn't know whether that was a facial expression or just a reaction to the stench of blast residues and death.
Miklos Kowacs had killed hundreds of weasels during his Marine career. He'd never before spent this long looking at a living one.
"Helmet," he said, "translate Khalian."
He splayed the fingers of his left hand, the hand that didn't hold a fully-loaded automatic rifle, in the direction of the weasels. "You!" he said. "Which of you's the leader?" as the speaker on top of his helmet barked the question in weaseltalk.
None of the Khalians wore clothing or ornamentation. The one on the left end of the line lowered his nose so that he could see ahead of himself, stepped forward, and chattered something that the translation program in Kowacs' helmet rendered as, "Are you Fleet Marines? You are Fleet Marines."
"Answer me!" Kowacs shouted. "Are you in charge?" The concrete seemed to ripple. It was solid, but Nick Kowacs wasn't solid just now . . . .
"We wish to surrender to Fleet Marines," the weasel said. He was about a meter forty tall, mid-breastbone level to Kowacs. "Are you Fleet Marines?"
"Goddam," Bradley whispered, his scarred left hand wringing the foregrip of the shotgun he pointed.
"You bet," said Nick Kowacs. His brain was echoing with screams and other memories and screams. "We're the Headhunters, we're the best." Weasels never surrendered. "You want to surrender this whole fortress?"
"That too," said the weasel. "You are fighters whom we respect. Come below with us to receive our surrender, Fleet Marine."
Sienkiewicz laughed.
"Bullshit," Kowacs said flatly. "You tell your people to come on out, one at a time, and we'll see about surrender."
"Please," barked the weasel. "You must come into the Council Chamber to take our surrender."
"Bullshit!" Kowacs repeated.
He risked a glance over his shoulder. The three Marines with gas cylinders, kneeling under the weight of their loads, were in the front rank of waiting troops. "Look, get your people up here, or—"
The Khalians had no equipment, but they had been born with tusks and sharp, retractile claws. "Then I have failed," the speaker of the group said. He raised a forepaw and tore his own throat out.
"—almighty!" Bradley blurted as Kowacs choked off his own inarticulate grunt. The weasel thrashed on the seared concrete, gushing arterial blood from four deep slashes. The furry corpse was still twitching when a second Khalian stepped forward.
"Come into the Council Chamber with us, Fleet Marine," the new envoy said. "Only from there can the surrender be broadcast to all."
"No!" shouted Sergeant Bradley. The weasel raised his paw; sunlight winked on the clawtips.
"Yes!" shouted Captain Miklos Kowacs, feeling the ground shiver like the dying weasel before him.
"Ah, sir?" said one of the Marines carrying a gas cylinder. "All of us?"
Lieutenant Mandricard, the senior platoon leader, had faced his platoon around to cover the Headhunters' rear while the rest of the Marines were shooting weasel pop-ups. He glanced over his shoulder at the company commander.
Kowacs pointed a finger at Mandricard and said over the general push, "Gamma Six, you're in charge here until I get back, right? If that's not in—" how long? "—six zero minutes, finish the job."
He nodded toward the gas cylinders. And smiled like a cobra.
"Sir," said Bradley, "we can't do this."
Kowacs looked at him. "I gotta do it, Top," he said.
"Hold one," said Corporal Sienkiewicz. She'd unharnessed one of the gas carriers and was now—
Godalmighty! She was molding a wad of contact-fuzed blasting putty onto the tank of gas. If she dropped the heavy cylinder, the charge would rupture it and flood the whole area with DPD!
"Right," Sienkiewicz said as she examined her handiwork. "Now we're ready to go down."
Bradley swore coldly, checked his shotgun, and said, "Yeah, let's get this dumb-ass shit over with."
Kowacs hadn't told Sie and the sergeant to accompany him; but he knew they wouldn't accept an order to stay behind. "G—" he said to the Khalian envoy. His voice broke. "Go on,
then."
The eleven surviving weasels scrambled into the blasted entrance. Kowacs strode after them.
"I'll lead," said Sienkiewicz.
"Like hell you will," Kowacs snapped as his rigid arm blocked his bodyguard's attempt to push past.
The entrance was a stinking pit. A crowd of weasels, all of them carrying flags, filled the floor below. The metal staircase had been destroyed by the first volley of rockets; since then, the Khalians had been scrambling up wooden poles to reach the roof and their deaths.
Shattered poles, corpses, and charred white scraps of cloth covered the concrete floor on which living weasels pushed and chittered in a cacaphony that the translation program couldn't handle.
"Back!" barked the Khalian envoy, raising both his clawed forepaws in symbolic threat. "To the Council Chamber!"
The Khalian mob surged down the hallway like a shockwave travelling through a viscous fluid. There were lights some distance away, but the Headhunters' blasts had destroyed the nearest fixtures.
Kowacs looked down, grimaced, and dropped. His boots skidded on the slimy floor.
"Watch—" he said to his companions, but Sie was already swinging herself down. Her right hand gripped the edge of the roof while her left arm cradled her lethal burden like a baby.
Bradley must've thought the same thing, because he said, "Hope the little bastid don't burp," as he followed into the Khalian fortress.
"Come this way!" ordered the envoy as though he and not the Headhunters were armed. The weasels' demonstrated willingness to die made them very hard to control.
Pretty much the same was true of Marines in the reaction companies too, of course.
The ceiling was so low that Kowacs, stocky rather than tall, brushed his helmet until he hunched over. He expected to hear Sie cursing, but the big woman didn't say a word. She was probably concentrating so that she didn't drop the bomb in her arms and end all this before—
Before it was supposed to end. Not necessarily different from the way it was going to end anyway.
The hallway curved. For a moment, Kowacs' helmet picked up the crisp commands of Gamma Six as Mandricard put the Headhunters in as much of a posture of defense as the featureless roof permitted. Reception faded to static, then nothing at all.
They came to a bank of wire-fronted elevators and a crowd of waiting Khalians. "Come with me," the envoy said as he stepped into the nearest cage.
The cage was small and low; three humans in battlegear and a Khalian filled it uncomfortably. As the elevator started to descend, Kowacs saw a horde of weasels pushing into the remaining cages.
Bradley began to shake. The muzzle of his gun wobbled through tight arcs. "It stinks . . ." he mumbled. "It stinks."
He was right, of course. The air circulating in the Khalian burrow smelled of Khalians, and that was a stench worse than death to a man like Bradley, who'd seen what the weasels left of his little daughter on Tanjug . . .
Or to a man like Nick Kowacs, whose family had been on Gravely when the weasels landed there.
Kowacs shivered. "Top!" he said harshly. "Snap out of it. You're not going claustrophobic on me now."
Bradley took off his helmet and squeezed his bald, scarred scalp with his left hand. His eyes were shut. "It's not the fuckin' tunnels," he said. "Not the tunnels. All these weasels . . . I just, I wanna—"
Bradley's fingertips left broad white dimples on his skin when he took his hand away. The weasel envoy watched the sergeant with bright black eyes.
No one spoke again until the cage stopped and the Khalian repeated, "Come with me," as his paw clashed the door open.
Kowacs couldn't guess how deep in the earth they were now. There was a sea of fur and tusks and chittering weasel voices outside the elevator. Many of this crowd wore ornaments of brass and leather, but Kowacs didn't see any weapons.
He stepped out behind the envoy, watching the passageway clear before them and wondering if the Khalians would close in again behind the three humans.
It didn't matter. They were in this, he and Top and Sie, as far as they could get already. At least the tunnel ceiling was high enough for humans, even the corporal with her burden of death.
The envoy led through an arched doorway. The chamber within was huge even by human standards.
The chamber was full of Khalians.
The smell and sound and visual impact stopped Kowacs in his tracks. One of his men bumped him from behind.
Kowacs closed his eyes and rubbed them hard with the back of his left wrist. That made it worse. When he didn't see the room filled with weasels, his mind quivered over the memory of his mother, her gnawed corpse thick with the musk of the furry monsters that had—
"No!" Kowacs screamed. The distant walls gave back the echo, cushioned by the soft susurrus of breathing mammals. There was no other sound.
He opened his eyes.
A group of Khalians was coming forward from the crowd. There were twenty or more of them. They wore jewelry and robes patterned with soft, natural colors.
They were very old. Some hobbled, and even those weasels who were able to walk erect had grizzled fur and noticeably worn tusks.
Weasels don't wear clothing . . . .
There was a great sigh from the assembled company. The aged Khalians gripped their robes and tore them apart in ragged, ritual motions. Some of them were mewling; their facial fur was wet with tears. They fell to the floor and began writhing forward, their throats and bellies bared to the Marines.
The weasel in the center of the groveling line gave a series of broken, high-pitched barks. The voice of Kowacs' helmet translated, "Khalia surrenders to you, warriors of the Fleet Marines. We are your subjects, your slaves, to use as you wish."
Come to the Council Chamber, the weasel envoy had said. The High Council of Khalia. They weren't surrendering this fortress—
"Khalia surrenders—"
They were surrendering the whole Khalian race!
"—to you, warriors of the—"
Bradley's shotgun crashed. Its airfoil charge was designed to spread widely, even at point-blank range. The load sawed through the chest of the Khalian speaker like so many miniature razors. The weasel's tusked jaws continued to open and close, but nothing came out except drops of bloody spittle.
The aged Khalian nearest the dead one began to chant, "We are your slaves, warriors of the Fleet Marines. Use us as you will. We—"
Sergeant Bradley's face was that of a grinning skull. He'd dropped his helmet in the elevator cage. There was no reason left behind his glazing eyes. "You'll die," he said in a sing-song voice, "you'll all—"
He fired again. His charge splashed the skull of the corpse.
"—die, every fucking—"
Kowacs gripped the shotgun barrel with his left hand. The metal burned him. He couldn't lift the muzzle against Bradley's hysterical grip.
"Put it down, Top!" he ordered.
The moaning of the crowd was louder. Waves of Khalian musk blended sickeningly with powder smoke.
"—are your subjects, your—"
Bradley fired into the dead weasel's groin.
"—weasel in the fucking uni—"
"Down!" Kowacs screamed and touched the muzzle of his assault rifle to Bradley's temple where a wisp of hair grew in the midst of pink scar tissue. Kowacs' vision tunnelled down to nothing but the hairs and the black metal and the flash that would—
There was a hollow thunk.
Bradley released the shotgun as he fell forward unconscious. Sienkiewicz looked at her captain with empty eyes. There was a splotch of blood on the green metal of the gas cylinder and a matching pressure cut on the back of Bradley's skull, but the sergeant would be all right as soon as he came around . . . .
"On behalf of the Alliance of Planets," Kowacs said in a quavering voice, "I accept your surrender."
He covered his eyes with his broad left hand. He shouldn't have done that, because that made him remember his mother and he began to vomit.
&n
bsp; "Hey, Sergeant Bradley," said one of the enlisted men in the Red Shift Lounge, "let me get 'cha the next drink."
The man in whites toyed with his stole of Khalian tails. "We shoulda kept killin' 'em till everybody had a weasel-skin blanket!" he said. "We shoulda—"
Somebody came into the bar; somebody so big that even Sergeant Bradley looked up.
