"Don't worry about it, Prefect," Bernstein said.
"Then why do you want to be certain you won't get help?"
I spread my hands. "It's just that if they do decide to, say, fire off a few rounds in order to get us trembling, we don't want to have to worry about a flying squad of proctors crashing through, and getting them all nervous." I smiled. "I'm a staff officer, myself, and I don't like having any armed man nervous."
"Well . . ." he tsked a couple of times. "It's against my better judgment. You could get hurt. But it is your choice. . . ." The prefect took out his phone and snapped it open, then issued a few blunt orders. "Yes, that's for the next hour. After that, I'll call you and advise. Dunfey out."
His phone snapped shut just as Imran's hypo hissed against his upper arm; Dunfey started to struggle, but the medician tripped him into the Sergeant's waiting arms, the two of them lowering him efficiently to the floor as the drug took effect.
Imran quickly searched the prefect, coming up with a compact wiregun and two spare clips. "Colt WireKing," he said, tucking it into his belt, quirking his lips for a moment before he stowed the clips in his right rear pocket. "Not a bad little wiregun," he said as he smiled down at the unconscious policeman. "Going to be a hero, you are."
The Sergeant shook his head. "Not if somebody notices that gas-hypo bruise on his upper arm."
"What bruise? I don't see any bruise. All I see is a heroic wound." Imran had already unrolled his medikit and selected a scalpel. "The hero got injured, that's all."
The Sergeant nodded judiciously. "Not enough, though. Give him a wound in the belly, too. Make sure the hole goes all the way through; wouldn't want them to find the wrong bullet inside."
"Aw, Tzvi, that's—"
"—how we're going to do it."
I straightened myself. "I'd better go speak to the ambassador. Take care of things here."
Ambassador Gianpaulo Adazzi was not happy as he paced back and forth in the other room we'd rented, on the floor below. "I don't understand what I'm doing here. Major Stuarti practically forced me into the skimmer, and . . ."
"And brought you here to see a demonstration," I said. "The word is you're thinking of hiring some private company, instead of Metzada." I shrugged. "Makes no difference to me, personally, which side of the war we come down on," I lied. "But I thought you might want to watch a little demonstration."
I jerked my thumb at the window. "Across the street and down the block is the headquarters of a youth gang called the Vators. There are about twenty, thirty of them in there right now, many of them armed. One of the reasons they're in ascendancy over the other local gangs is that they've managed to get some guns."
"Oh?" He was starting to get interested, despite himself. "Just one of the reasons?"
"Yeah. It's the secondary one, matter of fact." I made him wait while I pulled out a tabstick and fired it up. "Also in there is an exiled Metzadan citizen, name of Shimon Bar-El. You may have heard the name. Seems that he took on a job as a tactical adviser to the Vators, and they're not eager to let him go."
The ambassador shrugged. "Why not make them an offer for him? I'm sure they could use money."
There wasn't any threat in Dov's voice as he said, "We don't do that. We don't buy our people back with money." If I hadn't known him better, I would have been worried by his flat tone, by the blank way he looked at the ambassador, as though ticking off kill-points on an anatomy chart.
But I did know him better. Shimon wasn't interested in Dov taking offense at mere words.
Adazzi raised an eyebrow. "It can't be that policy dating back to the twentieth century, can it?"
"Thirteenth," I said. "Agree with it, disagree with it, but get your centuries right. In 1286, the German emperor imprisoned Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg—for trying to emigrate to Eretz Yisrael, by the way. Rabbi Meir died in prison seven years later, not allowing his people to ransom him, for fear of setting the wrong kind of precedent. Rabbi Meir's precedent has been broken too often since. It won't be broken here and now."
Adazzi nodded. "So you're going to break out Shimon Bar-El. Where's the rest of your force?"
I smiled. "He's upstairs, probably putting his medician's kit back together. No, Ambassador, it's just us. One good master private, a staff officer, and five old, retired soldiers are going to walk in, and take him out."
He smiled at that. "What's the trick?"
I smiled back at him. "There isn't one."
The outer room had been a shop of some kind, once; against the gray wall, empty, dusty cases stood, displaying their invisible wares to ghosts.
Four of the Vators stood the six of us against a wall. They frisked us thoroughly, professionally, a sharp-eyed fifteen-year-old going through our overcoats inch by inch. Beyond them, a steel door stood shut, grillework about eye-level, ragged weapons ports quite probably concealing pistol barrels.
There was a metallic taste at the back of my mouth; I swallowed to get rid of it, but it didn't go away.
"They're clean, Michael," the boy said, turning his head to the grille.
"Well, then, let them wait for a while," sounded from beyond the grillework. "We're doing some business here."
In the distance, I could hear a familiar voice. "The thing you're going to have to learn, Michael, is that justice isn't done in the dark. That's part of the difference between becoming a government and remaining a gang."
None of us looked at each other, but Yehoshua Bernstein leaned against the wall, and was immediately prodded to up-lightness by the pistol-barrel of the weasel-faced teenager at his right.
There was a long pause. "Well, search them again, and then let them in."
The room was larger than I'd expected; they'd cut through the wall between two buildings and made one large assembly hall, a hundred yards across and twenty deep.
Over against the far wall, a haphazard pile of mattresses was stacked alongside neat pyramids of water bottles and food tins. The Vators didn't look like they were planning for a siege, but it looked like they were ready for it, with troops as well as provisions: there were thirty-seven Vators in the room, split about three-to-one male, with a few cases in doubt.
Including the guards keeping an eye on us, I could count eleven guns: ten slugthrowers, only one wiregun. Except for our guards, all the weapons were tucked in belts or holsters, which was good. The gunmen were pretty much randomly scattered about the room, some sitting in stolen chairs, others sprawled on mattresses.
Three of the gunmen were girls, or female at least. They had that hard, I'll-slice-the-skin-off-your-face expression that offworld women get when they spend too much time around violence.
It looked like the Vators were holding a trial. It was easy to figure out who the accused was: he was tied to a chair. He sat halfway across the room, one of four people in a row of chairs next to a battered gunmetal-gray desk. Behind the desk was a vicious-looking boy of maybe eighteen, holding a Webster Multi wiregun pistol by the barrel, using it like a gavel. His face was thin and pocked, but his eyes moved slowly across us, as if he could see all the way through to what we really were.
For a moment, his eyes rested on mine. A hero would have returned his stare, would have manfully looked him in the eye, but I was just a cowardly gun-merchant, hoping to leave this room with both a deal and my skin, so I swallowed and looked away.
"All right, all right, shut up, everyone." He gestured toward us with the butt of the gun. "We'll be done with this in a few minutes. Until then, you just stay lined up and out of trouble—then we can talk some business." He turned to glare at the old man sitting in the middle of the group in front of him. "That good enough for you, Shimon?"
Shimon Bar-El smiled casually. "You're the boss, Michael. But it's fine with me." He looked a bit thinner, a bit paler, a bit older since the last time I'd seen him, but he hadn't changed much.
Of the four sitting next to the desk, Shimon was the only unworried one. At Shimon's left were a fiftyish, red-head
ed, red-faced man and a red-headed, teen-aged girl who might have been pretty if the right side of her face weren't black and blue, her right eye swollen almost totally closed. There was a long scratch on her neck that ran down from just below her ear and into the gray blanket she huddled in.
The man had a protective arm around her, although what good that would do escaped me.
A hero would have made a mental note to himself to drag them to safety when all hell broke loose, or at least to shout a warning, but I'm just a butcher.
On Shimon's right, the accused sat, bound efficiently to a chair, his ankles drawn back and tied to the rear legs, his hands bound forward. As he shook his head to clear the stringy blond hair out of his eyes, he looked more defiant than scared—but it was a close call.
Michael turned to us. "We're having a bit of a trial here. Although I'm not really sure why we're just trying Kevin, here."
There were nods and grunts of agreement from around the room.
"Excuse me," I said.
The guards started; Michael stilled them with a wave of his hand. "Go ahead."
"If you want us to come back later, we're at your disposal."
He gave a grin that he probably thought was wolfish. "You don't want to be around for this?"
I shook my head. "I don't mind, either way. But if you want us to stay, then you probably should let us know what this is all about."
He thought it over for a moment, then nodded. "Kevin was—is one of my squad leaders. We're discussing a complaint here that his squad dragged Fiona here off the street to pull the train."
He looked at the girl; she hid her face in the blanket and huddled closer to her father.
"And a fun little train-pull it must have been. That's not the problem."
He paused for a moment to stare at a group of six boys and three girls who were off by themselves in the corner of the room, away from the rest. None of them were armed, and at least two of the boys were a little wild-eyed, but the other four boys and all three of the girls had gotten the point that only Kevin was on trial.
"Fiona," he went on, "is the daughter of old man Foster, here, who has a tucker shop just inside of Vator territory. You pay your taxes regular, Foster?"
The red-headed man nodded, once, quickly. "Yes, yes, I do, I do—"
"Shut up."
The red-headed man shut up.
"Now," Michael went on, "Shimon here says that since we Vators are on our way to becoming a government, we're supposed to give something for the taxes we collect." He rose and walked over to Fiona and her father, putting a hand under her chin and looking her face over very carefully. She stared back at him, a rabbit looking at a snake. "I sort of like being a government, if I'm going to have to live the rest of my life in this shithole of a neighborhood."
"You can be what you want to be. Governments have started the way you are." Shimon Bar-El spread his hands. "But if you are a government, then you have to protect your peasants. It would be one thing if they'd snatched a girl from off-turf. But she's a local, and they knew it."
Michael laughed as he let the girl's head drop. She huddled even closer to her father.
"Fair enough. But then why don't I put all the squad in the dock?"
"Because you can't." Shimon smiled. "Because you can't afford to lose ten of your people in the first place. In the second, it wouldn't be just ten, because Kevin's squad won't hold still for you cutting all of their throats—you'd lose some from your other squads, too. In the third place, it wasn't their fault. It was Kevin's job to keep them off local girls, not theirs. They were under his authority; it was his responsibility."
Michael smiled again. I was beginning to dislike that smile. "So it's his neck. You got anything to say for yourself, Kevin?"
"Mike, Mike. You can't I'm your friend, dammit I'm your—"
"Shhh . . ." Michael said. Steel flickered in his hands.
"C'mon, Michael, you can't do this to me, dammit you can't do this you can't—"
Michael shut him off with a backhanded slap to the face. He rubbed at his knuckles. "You stupid shit. Told you to keep off of the local girls."
"M-Mister Michael," the shopkeeper stuttered, "can we go now?"
Michael smiled again. "No, no. It was your daughter Kevin raped. You get to cut his throat." He picked up the shopkeeper's right hand and placed the knife in it. "Right, Shimon?"
My uncle shrugged. "It's safer for all. Makes him a participant, instead of just a witness. Not that anybody'll care, one way or the other. It's the advantage of disciplining your own people: outsiders don't care what you do to each other."
"Then it would make sense to have these others help, too."
"Eh?"
"Make them participants, too." Michael said. "Instead of witnesses."
Bar-El smiled. "It would, at that. Although I don't see the need. Once you and they finish doing business, they're likely to be long gone." Shimon jerked his head at Dov. "You. The big one. You mind helping in a bit of butchery?"
Dov shrugged. "Sure."
Michael shook his head. "Nah. Not him. One of the old ones—you," he said, beckoning to Yehoshua Bernstein. "You come over here and help. And then we can all sit down and talk some business."
Like an old man on the verge of fainting, Yehoshua started to sway. One of the guards prodded him with his gun. That was his last mistake.
Everything flew apart at once.
Without warning, without any preliminary, Yehoshua turned, reached out a finger and stuck it in the boy's eye, bursting it like a grape.
The guard screamed. Reflexively, he reached both hands to his face, his grip on his pistol loosened; Yehoshua wrestled it away from him.
He brought it up and started firing.
Neither of the guards near me had a pistol, but one had raised a stick; I ducked underneath and slammed the edge of my hand into his windpipe, crushing it as shots began to echo hollowly throughout the hall.
The hoodlums were tough, and their reflexes were those of youth, but they never had a chance.
They were used to set-piece battles, where everyone knew a fight was about to happen, and to jumping unsuspecting victims. They weren't ready for the old wolves. A wolf attacks the enemy that's the most dangerous to the pack, not to himself.
As red flowers burst from his belly and chest, Yehoshua was already emptying the pistol, not at those who were shooting at him, but at the armed hoodlums nearest to Yabotinsky and Stern.
Moshe Stern was already in a flat dive; rolling, he picked up the gun of an injured boy, half rose, and started picking out targets, stomping once on the boy's face to quiet him.
The Sergeant had spun around to grapple with the hoodlum behind him. He smashed his forehead into the boy's nose, then twisted the gun out of the hoodlum's hands, sliding it across the floor toward Menachem Yabotinsky as three shots shook his body. He crept across the floor toward the barred door, leaving a red trail behind him.
Michael jerked the wiregun from his waistband, but Shimon tripped him and then Dov was on him, moving faster than anybody has a right to. He slapped Michael across the throat, once, and yanked the wiregun from the boy's hand. Michael staggered to the side, clutching at his crushed trachea, gasping, trying to get some sound, some word out, but he was dying as he fell to his knees.
Dov scooped Shimon up and half-carried, half-threw him under the desk, out of the line of fire, and turned to face two of the young hoods, who were already upon him, each with a knife in hand.
He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and shrugged past their lunges, moving fluidly, gracefully, like a dancer, as he smashed one in the face with his left elbow, then reached for the other one with his right hand. He barely seemed to touch the other, but the boy spun away, spitting blood and teeth, jerking spasmodically until he collapsed a few meters away.
Dov was bringing up the wiregun when a half-dozen gunshots caught him, one smashing his jaw into a red pulp, another knocking his knee out from under him, yet another
slamming into his chest, bringing him down.
A hero would have done something about the girl and her father, but I was fighting for my own life when one shot splashed her blood and brains across her father's chest and face, followed by a flurry that cut off his anguished screams.
Yehuda Nakamura was using his second captured gun, carefully taking aim at each of the young gunners in turn. There had been three of them in the far corner; by the time Menachem Yabotinsky and Stem had reached them, all three were down, one dead, the other only wounded.
Yabotinsky and Stern had retrieved the captured firearms and begun shooting, but it was almost all over. All of the gunmen had been taken down, and Menachem Yabotinsky and Stern simply blew away anyone who made a motion toward any of the half-dozen guns lying on the bloody floor.
"Stay the fuck away from the guns or you're dead. Hands up, assholes. Get your fucking hands up," Menachem Yabotinsky shouted, his shouts cutting through their screams and whimpers. It was the voice of a man decades younger—strong, uncompromising.
Three of our dead and easily four times that many of their dead and dying littered the floor; it was almost over.
The Sergeant lay near the door, now unbarred.
It had started, and it was over, in seconds.
Firefights are like that; even the most active of elite troopers spends less than one percent of their active duty time near shots fired in anger.
The room stank. All of the dead and most of the dying had voided themselves, in the mindless reflex that all animals use to leave themselves unappetizing to their predators.
"Get your fucking hands up, and get over against the wall," Menachem Yabotinsky called out again.
There were only ten or so uninjured; Vators shouted incoherent surrenders, moving quickly, faces pale.
As he worked his way across the blood-and shit-slickened floor, Moshe Stern carefully shot through the head a boy whose outstretched hand was too close to a loose pistol; the shot echoed loudly through the hall, but the cries of the surviving Vators almost drowned it out.
Stern stooped to pick up the pistol. A dark stain spread across his belly as he crouched.
Not For Glory Page 14