Redliners(79)

"That's the only opening I've found," Blohm said. Their voices were barely audible. "It's eight feet long and ranges from seven inches to about thirty. The hatches are closed. From the way lichen's started to grow across the metal, they've stayed closed ever since the crash."

"And the critter inside?" Abbado asked.

Blohm shrugged. "He hasn't showed himself again. There may be more than one. It's nothing from the database."

"Naturally," Horgen muttered.

The ruptured seam was eight feet up, running parallel to the ground because of the way the ship lay. Thick vines snaked into the opening, but they didn't affect the wide point in the center. The root ends were lost in the jungle.

Spook ships generally had single-compartment decks. That meant there was plenty of room for the beast inside.

"We haven't seen many animals," Caldwell said.

"There's the wogs," said Matushek. "They're animals. Did you see what they did to the civilians when they attacked?"

"Okay, this is pretty straightforward," Abbado said. "We'll go to intercom on the squad channel. Me and Foley go forward with two fuel-air grenades each. We toss them in. When they blow, we boost Horgen and Matushek to stand at the edge of the hole with rockets. The critter'll be dead but it'll likely still be thrashing around. You guys keep hitting him as long as he's moving, four rockets apiece. Foley, you lift the rest of us to the hole, starting with me. When you've done that, you stay on the ground for rear security with Gabrilovitch and Blohm. Understood?"

Gabrilovitch grimaced. "We're scouts," he said. "You want us on point?"

"This is a standard clearance operation," Abbado said. "Nothing Three-three can't handle. You're way too important to the major for you to get your ass blown away by a ricochet."

"What if the thing sticks its head out when we throw the grenades?" Foley asked.

"Then Ace and me blow it off," said Horgen.

Abbado unhooked a grenade with either hand and thumbed the arming switches live. "Let's do it, people," he said as he rose to his feet.

As Abbado took his first step toward the Kalendru vessel, the creature's head rose snout-first through the crack. The triangular skull was too large to fit the thirty-inch opening any other way. Because the skin lay close over the bone without a layer of muscle between, the beast had the look of a reptile or insect rather than a mammal.

"It can't get—" Abbado said, trying to estimate the risk of tossing his right-hand grenade past the head and neck.

The creature licked out a twenty-foot tongue flaring at the tip into a pair of sucker-tipped mandibles. It gripped Abbado around the waist and snatched him back toward fangs as long as his forearm.

Matushek and Horgen fired rockets simultaneously. The warheads detonated deep in the creature's skull. A fireball of unexpended fuel seared Abbado's bare hands as the double shockwave snatched the grenades away from him.

"Fire in the hole!" he wheezed as he went over in a backward somersault. He'd only been ten feet from the rocket warheads when they went off. The half of the tongue clinging to him flew free and thrashed into the jungle in the same general direction as the live grenades.

What remained of the creature's head flailed the hull in a sleet of stinger pellets until another rocket severed the neck. Abbado's grenades lifted bubbles of seared foliage without harm to the strikers. An instant later, two shooting trees burst with sharp cracks. Their spikes stripped narrow cones of the jungle still farther away.

Foley stepped past the huge head. The lower jaw twitched, but it had no upper surface to close against. He tossed his grenades into the opening, then added another pair to replace Abbado's.

Abbado wobbled to his feet. Orange fire and the stench of burning meat belched from the cracked seam.

"Let's get them," Abbado croaked as he staggered forward.





Waiting for the Axe


In theory Sergeant Guilio Abbado was still in command of 3-3, but none of his strikers had paid the least attention to his wheezing demands to be the first through the opening. The only reason Foley lifted him at all was that Abbado was so obviously incapable of giving Foley a boost instead.

The headless creature thrashing inside weighed at least five tons. The fuel-air explosions hadn't disintegrated or even dismembered the corpse, but they had burned every square inch of its hide.

The stench of blackened flesh was overpowering. Abbado switched to his helmet's small air bottle as much for that reason as because the grenades had used a lot of the available oxygen.

He'd set his visor on infrared instead of enhancement, the low-light default setting. Hot gas from the bombs swirled in confusing veils but the figures of the strikers ahead of him were sufficiently sharp. The split seam let a fair amount of light into this compartment, but that wouldn't be true of those further toward the bow.