by David Drake
He glanced over his shoulder. Ramon looked blank. “I can bring one,” he offered.
“Here, you can use mine,” Suterbilt said. He slid a palm-sized belt unit across the table to Coke.
The businessman was stocky and probably no older than Coke, now that the Frisian had time to focus on him. At the moment, Suterbilt wore a scowl that amplified the angry appearance of his ruddy complexion.
Coke looked at the projector, then unclipped the one from his own belt instead. “That’s all right,” he said. “Mine will do.”
The Frisian unit was half the weight of the older Delian projector Suterbilt used. Coke had hoped for a console model—the equipment built into the table itself would have been perfect, if the cursed thing had worked—but it didn’t really matter. Cantiluccans probably wouldn’t feel comfortable with the sort of crystalline images which the civilized universe took for granted.
Coke dropped into the reader the chip he’d prepared. He turned up the gain. “This is why we have no deal with the Astras,” he said.
The negotiations in Astra headquarters shimmered in a hologram a meter across. The image had a gray translucence and there was considerable distortion toward the edges of the field, but it was both visible and audible.
“A company of infantry and a company of combat cars,” said Matthew Coke’s image. The scene was assembled from recordings made by the commo helmets of the three Frisians present at the meeting.
The image cut forward a few seconds. Barbour had spliced the data into the continuous form Coke wanted, but that meant the visuals were choppy. “Approximately three thousand Frisian thalers per day,” the Coke hologram said, “perhaps ten percent over.”
Raul Luria was trembling with rage. His mouth worked, but no words came out. Ramon, who had moved to the side where he was visible out of the corner of Coke’s eyes, wore a fixed smile. Suterbilt, the factor for Trans-Star Trading, simply frowned in puzzlement.
The Frisians vanished abruptly. The three Astra principals remained. Through the excellence of Barbour’s editing, Adolpho Peres’ lips moved in near synchrony with his words: “So our Frisian visitors clean up our problem. They board the ship we provide, though they don’t know the ship’s ours. And the ship never gets home.”
The bug Daun had left beneath the Astra conference table was audio only. You couldn’t have told that when Barbour had finished mixing input from the bug with images culled during the two-party conference. When the Peres image “spoke” the final words, his face froze in a grin of murderous triumph . . . which was certainly true to the spirit of the plan the gigolo had outlined to his fellows.
Coke shut off the recorder and smiled at the L’Escorial leaders. “So,” he said. “I’ve recommended to my superiors that we not do business with Astra. Shall my team and I go home, or . . . ?”
Raul Luria began to laugh. For the first moments, Coke thought the old man might be having a stroke instead. The paroxysm continued for nearly a minute.
Ramon pulled out a lace handkerchief and stepped to his father’s side. He stood there, looking worried but unable to act. Raul hacked and wheezed and drooled from the corners of his mouth.
Suterbilt swallowed. His body tilted slightly away from the L’Escorial patriarch, and he was careful not to look to the side.
The old man finally regained his composure. “You’re a right clever bastard, aren’t you, boy?” he said. “What’s your name? Coke, is it?”
Coke nodded.
“You planning to eavesdrop on us the way you did those Astra gutter-sweepings, then?” Raul demanded.
“No sir,” Coke replied. “I am not.”
Not in the same way, at any rate. The devices Daun and Margulies had emplaced all up and down Potosi’s main street would keep an eye—and ear—on both syndicates.
Raul nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “So, that’s your price for two companies of your Frisian Defense Forces?”
“That’s an estimate,” Coke said. “It’s a good estimate, but the final figure will have to be determined at Camp Able.”
Raul looked puzzled, glancing toward Suterbilt.
“FDF Command on Nieuw Friesland,” Coke clarified. “Ah—and I gather it may not be possible to bring heavy vehicles like combat cars in through the port here without getting the Marvelan Confederacy concerned. The price would be comparable for three infantry companies.”
“That’s a very high price,” Suterbilt said. He glared at the Frisian representative as though he’d like to throttle him. The factor’s hands, Coke noticed, remained flat on the black surface of the table, spread wide and patently innocent.
“Compared to the losses you received last night?” Coke said. “Because your present personnel and equipment are of such low quality?”
Suterbilt tightened his lips. He gave a quick toss of his head. It could have implied either assent or disdain.
“Infantry and tanks is better than just infantry?” Ramon Luria asked. “And the price is the same?”
Coke nodded to the plump man. “Roughly the same daily rate,” he agreed. “And combat cars aren’t exactly tanks, but they’re big. The folks down the street didn’t think we could ship them in. If we could, the concentrated firepower would be better.”
“We can bring in your combat cars,” Raul said, looking at the factor beside him.
“There’s excess capacity on all the TST ships that land on Cantilucca,” Ramon amplified with a giggle. “Empty coming in, but it can be full if there’s something we want to bring in.”
“Don’t talk about that!” Suterbilt snapped. He glanced from son to father, clearly angry but aware that the pair of gangsters didn’t view the situation as he—a nominally honest businessman—did.
Quite obviously the factor was cooking Trans-Star Trading’s records by showing lower cargo tonnage than the hulls’ actual capacity. By so doing, he cheated his employers of shipping charges and—more important—permitted the L’Escorials to avoid port duties which should have been paid to the Marvelan Confederacy.
The ships that carried undeclared gage off Cantilucca traveled part-empty coming in. As Ramon had said, that unlisted volume could be filled with Frisian troops and equipment.
“If it’s possible to bring in the cars, that would speed up the operation,” Coke continued smoothly, as if the byplay among the locals meant nothing to him. “I’m estimating forty days with combat cars, but using infantry alone would add considerably to the completion time.”
“A million-two in thalers,” Suterbilt said, wincing. He stared at his hands.
“Roughly,” Coke agreed. “With combat cars.”
“The deal still has to be without the Bonding Authority,” Raul said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Coke gave a nod as tight and enigmatic as that of the factor a few moments before. “That does leave a problem, doesn’t it?” he said.
Raul looked at Suterbilt. “Pay him,” the old man said. “Pay him—”
He glanced back at Coke. “Ten days, that’ll be enough, won’t it? On account, an earnest of our good faith.”
“I can’t raise that—” Suterbilt objected.
“I can’t commit my superiors,” Coke warned. “I can only recommend by message capsule. . . .”
The Old Man waved at Coke. “Yes, yes,” he said, “but with the money in hand, there won’t be any trouble about the deal.”
Ramon giggled. “‘Money talks, nobody walks,’” he said, quoting an aphorism old when Croesus struck the first coin.
“I don’t have,” Suterbilt said angrily toward Raul, “we don’t have that kind of money available now. The warehouse burned, don’t you remember?”
“It’s still collateral so far as TST is concerned,” Raul said. He waggled a wizened fist in Suterbilt’s face to emphasize the point.
“Borrow the money from the company accounts on Delos, that’s easy enough.”
“And we’ll repay it out of the Astra stockpile,” Ramon added complacently. “N
obody will know the difference.”
The factor grimaced but did not speak.
“We’ll be kings with Astra out of the way once and for all!” Raul snapped. “And there’s no choice anyway. If we don’t move now, how are we going to pay the men with the gage gone?”
Suterbilt raised his hands to his face. He gripped his cheeks with a trembling violence that Coke watched in concern, wondering what the factor was going to do next.
Suterbilt slammed his palms back down on the table. “All right,” he said. “All right! I’ll raise the money.”
He glared viciously at Coke and continued, “But it will take five days, maybe six, because of transit time to Delos. I can’t write you a valid draft out of the funds available here on Cantilucca!”
Matthew Coke nodded calmly. “I’ll inform my superiors of the pending circumstances,” he said.
Coke should have been enthusiastic at the success of his mission. True, a survey team leader couldn’t commit the FDF; but this was a perfectly workable deal, a good deal. Cantilucca would provide live-fire experience for relatively green forces, just the thing Camp Able was looking for.
The trouble was, Coke kept seeing the red-clad thug with a powergun thrust against the cunt of the whore his fellows were beating. The gunman could have pulled the trigger as easily as not, on whim; and the next time, he or another of his sort likely would do just that.
Matthew Coke was making sure that the set of circumstances which made such behavior possible continued.
****
Angel’s private cubicle was at the end of the bunk room filling most of the L’Escorial building’s second floor. He paused with his hand on the doorknob.
“Look, El-Tee,” he said, “it’s not a palace I got here. Ah—maybe we could go somewhere else, find a bar or something.”
Margulies snorted. “It could be pretty bad, Angel,” she said, “and I’d still have lived in worse. You know that, because part of the time you were there.”
“Yeah, well, this is no great shakes,” the man repeated, but he opened the door.
She had seen worse. There’d been the militia barracks on Typer where the locals relieved themselves in one corner of the room in which they lived, slept, and ate. That was the only military installation Margulies could recall being dirtier than this room of Angel’s.
She hadn’t regarded the Typer Militia as being real soldiers. Neither, obviously, was her one-time comrade here.
No feces, and perhaps no urine. But the smell of sour vomit was overpowering, and the originally white sheets on the bed were so dirty that they had for the most part a gun-metal color. The common barracks from which Angel’s room was set off was in far better shape, though the number of troops bunking in it had been doubled or tripled in the recent past.
“Look,” Angel repeated. “We better—”
Margulies pushed him casually inside and followed. “You were going to get me a drink,” she said as she closed the door behind them. “Stop dicking around, hey?”
“Yeah, I . . .” he said. This must have been the first time in quite a long while that he’d been straight enough to appreciate the reality of his existence. His shoulders slumped as he looked at the fetid ruin around him.
The back and one leg of a chair protruded from a pile of garments. Margulies lifted the chair and shook it, then kicked the filthy clothing aside to make room for her to sit down. “When we last talked,” she said in a casual tone, “you were talking about buying a tract of land where you grew up.”
“Aw, fuck it, Missie, I’m no farmer,” Angel said. He seated himself on the edge of the bunk and met her eyes for the first time since they came upstairs. “I left here when I was fifteen. Engine wiper on a starship, then I did some soldiering on Wellbegone. Got in with the Slammers, then the FDF. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said I was going to raise gage. I think I just wanted to be fifteen again.”
He bent and groped first beneath the bunk, then within the bedding proper. He came up with a bottle. It was unlabeled. The ten centimeters’ depth of fluid within had a pinkish tinge.
“Ah . . .” Angel said. “Do you really want a drink? I don’t have glasses.”
“No problem,” Margulies said, taking the bottle from him. The liquor was harsh. The pink color suggested flavoring, but the only taste she noticed was that of raw alcohol. She returned the bottle, wiping her lips with the back of her free hand.
“Or there’s gage, of course,” Angel offered with false perkiness.
“Naw, not for me,” Margulies said. “But you used to prefer it to booze, didn’t you?”
Angel got up and rested his hands on the window ledge. The glass was painted black and reflected the light of the single fixture overhead.
“I really stepped on my dick, Mary,” he whispered to the glass. “I went out, I looked at land, and it all came back to me, starving and scrabbling and bored, bored to fucking tears all the time I was a kid. That was why I left. And it’s worse now, the syndicates take twice the bite they did when I left.”
He turned and looked at his former lieutenant again. “And I looked around the security troops and I thought, these clowns, they’re not fit to be recruits to the Slammers.”
“You got that right,” Margulies murmured. Her mouth was oily with the liquor’s aftertaste.
“So I hired on, with the Lurias because my old village, it belonged to L’Escorial,” Angel continued. “Not that it mattered. I thought I could make something out of them, give them some discipline. That’d make it better for everybody, you see that, don’t you El-Tee? The farmers too, if it was just paying for protection they had to worry about. Via, what place doesn’t have taxes?”
“You can’t turn the lot out there into soldiers,” Margulies said. “Any more than you can build a gun out of cat turds.”
“Don’t I know it,” Angel whispered. He looked at the bottle in his hand, then drank greedily from it. His Adam’s apple throbbed with three swallows, four, before he set the liquor down again.
“I tried, El-Tee,” he whispered to the bottle. “But they wouldn’t listen. I’d have had to shoot a couple of them to get their attention and Via, the rest would’ve greased me the next night. You’ve got to sleep sometime, and there wasn’t anybody but me.”
He looked up at her. She nodded, agreement without empathy. Angel had chosen, just as surely as the constant low-level pain in Margulies’ rebuilt leg reflected choices she had made.
“The gage stopped working,” Angel said. “I was using too much. The first dose would put me to sleep. My skin was crawling, I’d scratch myself bloody.”
He swallowed. “So I switched to booze and that, you know, that helped some. And I found that mixed gage didn’t put me to sleep the way the pure stuff did, so sometimes I used that.”
“Refinery tailings are poison,” Margulies said harshly. “The best you’re going to do is grind down the nerve sheaths so that you’re a spastic for the rest of your life. Or you’ll go blind. Or you’ll fry your brain and sit around drooling. Think your new buddies are going to want to change your diapers, Angel?”
“I know all that!” he shouted. “I said it was just a time or two with tailings, didn’t I?”
He hadn’t, and if he had said that, it would have been a lie. It was amazing that Angel had managed the effort of will required to get straight when he learned that an FDF survey team was on Cantilucca, but it was vanishingly improbable that he would be able to maintain that state for more than a few hours.
Angel sat heavily on the bed, clutching the liquor bottle to him as if it were the only warmth in a world of ice. “Look, El-Tee,” he said to the wall, “I just want you to know I’ve got it under control now. I’m fine, and in a day or two I’ll have all my gear strac. I just want you to know that.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Angel,” Mary Margulies said as she rose to her feet. “I’d better check on the major. I’ll see you around.”
Twenty-odd L’Escorial gunmen
lounged in the open barracks, laughing and talking. The general volume lowered as Margulies left the cubicle, but she heard some pointed gibes.
She didn’t look to either side as she walked to the stairs at the other end of the room. If she looked at the men, she would kill them all.
It wasn’t the liquor or the stench of Angel’s room that made Margulies want to vomit. It was the vision of what her driver had become. . . .
And the warning of what might become of Mary Margulies herself, if she ever tried to reenter civilian life.
Wind kicked dust and litter down the street. The eastern horizon was a mass of cloud, though the late afternoon sun still shone onto Potosi.
Coke drove one of the rented jitneys to the street from the walled courtyard at the rear of Hathaway House. Margulies waited for him at the head of the alley. The angles of a weapon in a patrol sling distended her light cape.
Coke disengaged the torque converter and braked beside her. “I don’t need a guard, Mary,” he said. “I’m just going to run up to the port and send a capsule off.”
Margulies squatted to put her face on a level with his. Her smile was crooked; she hadn’t said much since the pair of them left the meeting in L’Escorial headquarters that morning.
“You could lower the top and squeeze your cyclo into the back of the port van,” she said. “I guess that’s what you’re planning to do. But I could also drive it back myself and save you the trouble. What do you figure?”
Coke looked at the security lieutenant. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds like a good idea. Hop in.”
The jitney had four seats in back, facing outward in pairs from the central spine. Margulies sat crossways, so that she looked forward over Coke’s right shoulder.
“I felt like getting out of Potosi for a bit,” she explained quietly. “This isn’t much out, but it’s out.”
“What the hell is that?” Coke said. He had started to reengage the drive train. Instead, he took his hand from the knob and touched the 2-cm weapon he’d thrust muzzle-down between his seat and the spine in back.