The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3

by David Drake

  Coke pointed Margulies in. She obeyed at a hasty rush, aware that her presence as a woman made the risk to every member of the team greater. The expression on her face was set and terrible.

  Sten Moden tossed his huge case after her, picked up both of Coke’s cases in his one hand and tossed them; and wrapped his arm around Coke’s waist. Moden swept the major with him into the lobby of Hathaway House. Coke could as well have wrestled an oak tree for the good his protests did.

  Somebody had to be last in; and yeah, that was probably a job for the security detail, for Sergeant Vierziger, but it didn’t seem right . . .

  The sixtyish woman with orange hair started to push the door closed. Daun and Barbour were already doing that. Vierziger danced backward through the opening.

  The panel clanged against its jamb. It rang again an instant later: a L’Escorial had fired a powergun into the armor as a farewell. The door’s refractory core, lime or ceramic, absorbed the discharge without damage.

  The woman swept her hair out of her eyes. She was healthy looking though on the plump side. A man of similar age with a luxuriant, obviously implanted, mane of hair stood to the side, wringing his hands.

  Several tables stood in a saloon alcove off the foyer. A few men were seated in the shadows there. They stared pointedly at their drinks rather than at the newcomers. The silence within the hotel was a balm after the noisy violence of the street.

  The woman planted her arms akimbo, fists on her hips. “Welcome to Cantilucca, mistress and sirs,” she said. “Now, if you’re smart, you’ll head right back to the port and take the next ship out of this pigsty!”

  “Oh, Evie, it’s not so bad as that,” the man said. “It’s just with the, you know, with the syndicates on edge like they are, there’s more, ah . . .”

  “More murderous bandits in town than usual?” the woman snapped. “Yes, there are, and it’s an open question whether they kill everybody else off before they kill each other or after!”

  “I’m Georg Hathaway,” the man said, bowing to Moden— probably because the logistics officer was the most imposing presence of this or most other groups. “This is my wife Evie, and I’m sorry for this trouble, usually things are better, it’s just there are so many of the patrolmen in Potosi these last few months, and you know, the boys will let off steam.”

  “Usually things are almost bearable,” Evie Hathaway said sharply. “That hasn’t been the case since the bandits began gearing up to fight—and they don’t fight, they just squeeze decent citizens harder yet. When will it stop, I’d like to know?”

  “Evie, now, don’t upset the gentlemen and lady,” Georg Hathaway said. “They’ve had a difficult time already, we mustn’t make it worse. Are you the Coke party, then, booking from Nieuw Friesland?”

  Moden gestured, palm up. “This is Master Coke,” he said. “You have rooms for us?”

  “Oh, we have rooms, all right,” Evie said. “What we don’t have is patrons who can pay us for them. Since this trouble started three months ago, nobody with money and sense comes anywhere near Potosi.”

  She stared fiercely at Coke. “And we have our standards. Are you here on behalf of the gage cartel on Delos, Master Coke?”

  “No,” Coke said, “we don’t have anything to do with gage.”

  Hathaway House was a two-story building. The lobby, saloon, and service quarters were on the ground floor, while the guest rooms were up a flight of stairs. Judged from outside, the protective concrete wall was of equal thickness all the way up, so Coke didn’t see any need for special arrangements.

  “Speaking of gage,” said Niko Daun hopefully, “I don’t suppose this would be a good time to have a cone or two?”

  Moden looked at the younger man with an icy fury that shocked Coke. “No,” the big man said in a voice as still as death, “it would not. Not so long as the operation is going on.”

  Daun blushed. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, looking toward the lower wall molding, gray against the lobby’s general peach decor. “I just thought that since we had a break after, well, after . . .”

  “There’s no breaks until we lift out of here, T-tech, Niko,” Sten Moden said more gently. “But I’m sorry, it wasn’t mine to speak—”

  He nodded formally toward Coke.

  “—and I’m sorry for my tone. I—wouldn’t care for others to make such a mistake as I made in the past, thinking I could let down.”

  Margulies and Vierziger had conferred briefly. The lieutenant trotted upstairs to check protection and fields of fire there, while Vierziger prowled the ground floor. The Hathaways watched him askance but neither of them spoke—even when he disappeared into their own quarters.

  “Bloody hell,” Coke muttered. He peeked out of the door’s triangular viewport.

  The cordons were still in place. The L’Escorials had rolled an armored truck into the street to face the Astra line. It looked like a four-wheeled van covered with so many metal and concrete panels that it could barely move. The vehicle mounted tribarrels in a cupola and in a sponson to either side. There were firing slits as well, though Coke judged that they did little but weaken the already-doubtful protection.

  Robert Barbour opened one of his cases. The interior was packed with electronics. He began to extend the case into a full-featured communications module.

  “Come on, Daun,” he said. “We need to get some information if we’re going to do our job.”

  Niko Daun gave the room a bright smile. “We’re going to need information if we’re going to survive the tour, I’d say,” he remarked cheerfully.

  The sensor tech unlatched a case of his own. It too was full of gear. He took out a series of sensors, broad-band optical and radio frequency, whistling under his breath.

  Clothing hadn’t been a high priority for a team operating out of range of support—save for the suitcase Margulies had insisted on bringing as a decoy, and that thought had earned her a commendation if Coke lived to write it.

  “Ah, would you gentlefolk not like some refreshment?” Georg Hathaway suggested. “We have what we like to think is a very good beer, I brew it on the premises myself, and there’s local cacao as well, good enough to export, if it weren’t that no one cares for anything but gage on Cantilucca.”

  “Gage and killing,” his wife said bitterly. “And mostly killing. I don’t think it’ll stop before there’s only one of the bandits left.”

  “About how many men do the gage syndicates employ, mistress?” Coke asked as he continued to look out the viewport. Barbour and Daun would give him much more precise data in a moment, but in some ways there was nothing to equal the naked eye.

  “Too many,” Evie said. “And they’re hiring more every day.”

  Georg—eyeing the array of devices the tech specialists were assembling—said cautiously, “Sirs, I’d judge that Astra and L’Escorial have at least a thousand, ah, employees each. They aren’t all in, ah, the patrol branch, but most of them are.”

  “Usually most of them are out in the fields, bullying the growers,” Evie Hathaway said. “But they’ve been bringing them into Potosi since the trouble started.”

  She raised her arms and combed her fingers through her artificially bright hair. She looked tired and frustrated, a woman near the end of her tether. “I hope the growers are getting some benefit. Because it’s hell here for decent folk.”

  The makeshift armored truck revved its air-cooled diesel engine. The separately bolted body panels vibrated at different frequencies, creating a grinding rattle. For the crew, it must have been like riding in a cement mixer—but maybe they were so stoned that they wouldn’t feel the effects of their silliness until the next morning.

  Niko darted up the stairs to arrange his equipment from high vantage points. Margulies came down, wearing a satisfied expression, and gave Coke a thumbs-up. The upper floor and roof were secure in her—expert—estimation.

  “And there’s no police force, I understand?” Coke said.

  The tribarrel i
n the armored truck’s cupola pointed up at twenty degrees, probably its maximum elevation, and fired a two-round burst. The rich cyan of the high-powered 2-cm charges flashed in reflection from the facades.

  “Police?” Mistress Hathaway crowed. She pointed into the saloon. “Police? Look at them there, afraid to go out without covering up so they won’t be seen! Oh, we’ve got fine police here in Potosi!”

  The two men drinking morosely at a corner table did, now that Evie called attention to the fact, wear white uniforms. Dingy white uniforms. They hunched their shoulders under the lash of her tongue. Drab capes like the one with which Pilar covered herself hung over the backs of their chairs.

  “Evie, now, don’t get yourself into a state,” Georg murmured, wringing his hands again.

  The gunman in the armored truck rotated his barrels manually, then fired another two rounds. The ill-maintained tribarrel jammed again at the third loading sequence.

  One of the policemen turned and glared from deep-sunk eyes. “Look, what do you want us to do?” he demanded. He waved a shock baton, the only weapon he carried. “Go out and arrest them all, and for what?”

  He made a face as if to spit, then thought better of it. Sinking back over his mug of beer he added, “Better I should shoot myself. At least I could be sure it was quick if I did it myself.”

  “Find someone worth a bullet!” Evie Hathaway snapped, but she’d lost the edge of anger. Exhaustion reasserted itself.

  A ripple—three pairs—of hypervelocity rockets cracked down the street in the opposite direction, well over the heads of the L’Escorial cordon. The Astras must have brought one of their own armored vehicles out, though Coke couldn’t see it from his present vantage point.

  The projectiles were aimed deliberately high, just as the L’Escorial tribarrel had been; but that sort of game could get out of hand as quickly as Russian roulette could. A red-clad gunman spread his fringed leather kilt and urinated in the direction of the Astra line.

  “You gentlemen—and lady, of course,” Georg Hathaway said cautiously, “are in the instrument business, then? You plan to sell instruments to the gage syndicates?”

  “Not exactly,” Coke said curtly.

  “I’ve got a hook-up, sir,” Barbour said. “Ah, Matthew. You can have a panorama here on the console or fed to your helmet.”

  Coke glanced briefly at the data console. A holographic globe a meter in diameter hung above the base. The image was a schematic of the center of Potosi. Buildings appeared as simplified versions of themselves, while vehicles and armed personnel were icons—red and blue, as indicated.

  The L’Escorial armored car revved and backed slowly away, its tribarrels pointing toward the Astras. While turning to the courtyard, the vehicle’s right rear fender bashed a gatepost. The engine stalled. The car rolled forward a meter.

  Gunmen in the cordon hooted and catcalled at the vehicle’s crew. The driver started his engine again with a cloud of black smoke. He advanced into the middle of the street and cramped his wheels to get a running start at the entrance. There was plenty of room, but the single side mirror wasn’t adequate for backing so clumsy a vehicle.

  The armored car lurched into reverse. It roared backward in a shower of sparks and concrete powdered from both the vehicle and the gatepost it scraped. The gunmen clapped and cheered ironically.

  Johann Vierziger sat on a stuffed chair with his hands crossed in his lap, watching the scene in the holographic display. His face wore a grim smile.

  The sensor tech had returned from upstairs. He shook his head and said, “I told them I’d never work with wogs again. Lord knows that was the right decision.”

  He grinned. Coke had read the kid’s file. Daun was obviously as resilient as he was skilled in his specialty; but then, he was young too.

  “Master Hathaway?” Coke said. “I under—”

  “Georg,” the host said, nodding. “Please, call me Georg.”

  “Georg, then,” Coke said. “I understand that there are no professional military units on Cantilucca—no mercenaries, that is. Is that your understanding as well?”

  “Well,” Hathaway said, “both syndicates have Presidential Guards. They’re mostly soldiers from off-planet.”

  “But not off-planet units?” Coke pressed. The guard forces in full uniform might be individually more skillful than the ruck of ex-farmers and ex-sailors carrying guns, but they obviously lacked the discipline necessary to carry out complex maneuvers.

  “No, not that I’ve heard of,” Hathaway said. “That would be much more expensive, surely?”

  “That depends on what you’re assigning values to,” said Mary Margulies.

  Coke had thought the cordons might disperse when the armored vehicles left, but a score of red-clad gunmen remained. Traffic was picking up slightly. The citizenry had decided that the gunmen didn’t mean serious trouble.

  “They can’t bring mercenaries onto Cantilucca,” Evie Hathaway said unexpectedly. “Because of the Confederacy.”

  “We’d heard the Marvelans left Cantilucca pretty well alone,” Sten Moden said quietly.

  “The Confederacy doesn’t care anything about law and order here, so long as they’re paid their money,” Evie said. “Blood money, I call it. But they won’t let a proper army onto Cantilucca. For fear they’d take over and the Confederacy wouldn’t be able to drive them out.”

  Georg Hathaway looked at his wife in surprise. “What’s that, Evie?” he said. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  She turned slightly away. In a less forceful voice she said, “When the Marvelan delegation was on Cantilucca a year and a half ago, the overflow from the High Commissioner’s residence stayed here. One of the aides explained that to me when, when I was complaining to him.”

  “Aides . . .” Georg repeated in a flat tone. “That would be young Garcia-Medina, I suppose you mean?”

  “It might have been!” said Evie. “I was complaining about the horrible situation, that was all!”

  “We have,” Johann Vierziger said, “a war of sorts outside. I don’t think adding one inside is necessary at the moment.”

  “No, no,” Georg said. The innkeeper’s forced smile quickly asserted its own reality over his personality. “That’s old business and nothing to it, not really, not even then. Pardon me, mistress and masters, for letting the stress of the moment get the better of me.”

  The whole team was assembled in the lobby of the hotel. Coke grinned wryly at his people. With the corner of his eye still tracking developments in the street peripherally, he said, “Well, what do the rest of you think? Niko?”

  The sensor tech grinned and flipped his hands palms-up in a noncommittal gesture. “I can set you up to count the change in the pocket of anybody in town, sir. Just tell me what you want.”

  Coke nodded. “Bob?”

  Barbour looked through the space occupied by his holographic display. His hands hovered over the console keyboard, not quite touching it.

  “There’s something over six hundred powerguns live in the three-klick radius,” he said. “Given the ratio of powerguns to other weapons outside, that roughs in well with a total of a thousand shooters in town at present.”

  He looked at Coke; his eyes focused again. “What else would you like to know, Matthew?”

  “That’ll do,” Coke said. He’d deliberately kept the parameters of his question vague. The team members were answering each to his own specialty, just as they should. “Sten?”

  The logistics officer nodded twice before he spoke, as though his mind were a pump and he was priming it. “Yes,” he said. “What Mistress Hathaway says rings true. If so, we’ll either have to infiltrate the personnel or arrange a combat landing. I doubt we’ll be able to get the Bonding Authority to cover either option.”

  “Is that a deal-breaker, then?” Coke asked. “Shall we just pack up and go home?”

  Moden shook his head. “There’ve been precedents,” he said. “They aren’t talked about officially, but you h
ear about them in the bars around Camp Able. It affects the price and the size of the force to be risked, however.”

  “I don’t like the idea of going in on a non-bonded operation,” Margulies said with a frown.

  “We won’t be going in anywhere,” Coke said. “And the decision isn’t ours. We’re just here to assess possibilities.”

  The Bonding Authority on Terra guaranteed that both parties to a hiring of mercenaries would perform according to the terms of the contract. That is, the troops would obey the orders of the contracting local party—whether the latter was a recognized government, a rebel movement, or an interstellar business conglomerate extending its holdings by force. And the troops would be paid even if that meant the contracting local parties starved or starved every civilian on the planet, in order to meet their obligations to the mercenaries.

  The Bonding Authority didn’t take a moral stand: money has no smell. Though one could argue that forcing adults to keep their word was itself a way of instilling morality on human weakness.

  Margulies grimaced and nodded.

  “Johann?” Coke said.

  Vierziger sniffed. “A company of infantry, backed up by a company of combat cars,” he said. He snapped the fingers of his left hand dismissively. “It could be done with less. These people are hopeless, quite hopeless.”

  “How about panzers instead of cars?” Margulies suggested. “This is a city of bunkers.”

  Vierziger shook his head. “There’s too many hiding places for buzzbomb teams,” he said. “Tribarrels can break up the facades almost as fast as a twenty-centimeter main gun could, and a car has twice as many eyes as a tank to watch for launchers. Even that’s risky, but the infantry needs the firepower support.”

  Margulies pursed her lips. “We could use the local allies, whichever side, to unmask ambushes?” she said, the question implicit in her tone.

  “Dream on,” Vierziger said scornfully. Margulies shrugged and nodded agreement with her nominal underling’s judgment.