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.
An instant later, the rocket projectile smacked the wall and ricocheted, a dud because Wade had removed the base fuze. The wet slap of plastic explosive deforming was lost in the snap of Belgeddes's next two shots and the roar of Holly's submachine gun as she entered Corridor 7 from the bow side.
The bomb skittered a further moment until its motor burned out. The case had burst open. Volatiles from the explosive added their sharpness to the residues of rocket fuel, gunpowder, and the blood mingled with feces that was the smell of violent death.
"No time to lose," Wade warned crisply as he stepped out behind Holly. He had reloaded his projector with a live bomb, just in case. A submachine gun was slung across his back.
"Right," Wanda said in a cold, dry voice. "We'll take the Embarkation Hall next."
"There's always time to reload, Dickie," Belgeddes said with arch disapproval. He thumbed loose rounds into the magazine to replace the three he'd fired.
The bridge of the nose, the left earhole, and the point where the spine of the flattened woman entered the back of her skull.
The bitter gases poisoning the air made Wanda cough as she swapped magazines. That could have been responsible for the way her eyes were watering also.
* * *
Ran Colville hummed "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey?" as he got out of the drop shaft, pushing the food cart before him. He moved at a deliberate pace, like a steward who wanted to avoid a rocket from his superiors but wasn't trying to set any speed records.
Moving, basically, at the pace of a steward who doesn't expect much of a tip at the end of his journey no matter how quickly he reaches it
The Engineering Deck was laid out for cargo operations, besides being narrower than all but one of those above it. The single corridor, 15, kinked around bays intended for passengers' hold luggage. There was no point, as there was on the passenger decks, where a three-man team could dominate four hundred meters of straight corridor with their weapons.
Ran couldn't be sure where he was going to meet Grantholm troops, or even whether he would meet them. It was unlikely that there was no one guarding engineering control, however; and the Empress's Cold Crew would be a special problem for the hijackers.
"I'll do the cooking, honey," Ran whistled. "I'll pay the rent. . . ."
The Grantholm team, all three of them male, stood in front of the open corridor hatch giving onto the engineering control room. When Ran appeared a moment behind his off-key whistle, the soldiers tensed as cats do when starting their stalk.
One man faced sternward, though so far as Ran knew there was nothing but long-term cargo stowage in that direction, and no way to enter those bays except through the hull while docked. Maybe the Grantholmers thought somebody was going to come out of a bulkhead to get them.