by David Drake
“I think you ought to wear it, sir,” Margulies said.
She’d completely emptied the suitcase on which she’d been working. Weapons and ammunition lay in neat stacks on the tile floor around her. She stood up and latched the case, then twisted the hand-grip 180 degrees. She slid the luggage over to him.
“I think he ought to wear armor also,” said Johann Vierziger, “though I’ll admit I wouldn’t myself if it were me.”
He smiled. His face was that of an ivory angel. “I prefer the freedom. But what I really think is that I should be the one to go outside, Matthew.”
Coke shook his head forcefully. “It’s my job,” he said. “And anyway, it’ll be all right.”
He thrust his arms through the holes of the vest he’d prepared, then mated the front closures. His outer jacket was cut to hang the same whether or not there was armor beneath it. He pulled it on.
“Helmet?” said Barbour without looking up from his console display.
Coke shook his head brusquely. “The implant will do in a pinch,” he said, tapping his jaw. The right mastoid contained a miniature bone-conduction radio transceiver. “They’d react to the helmet the same as they would if I went out in full uniform.”
Barbour nodded without concern. It was his job to offer information to the action personnel. He didn’t—couldn’t—control what they did with the information.
Vierziger slid Coke a second case, emptied and prepared as Margulies had done with hers.
Coke looked down at the luggage, then at his security detail. “One’s enough,” he said.
“Two, Matthew,” said Vierziger.
“Two,” echoed Margulies. “What do you intend to save them for, sir?”
Coke laughed harshly at himself. There was a tendency in any combat unit, particularly with those which operated beyond resupply, to fear using up munitions which they might need later. At its worst, that attitude could mean a position being overrun because the defenders were unwilling to cut loose with everything they had, lest they be out of ammo when the next attack came.
Margulies and Vierziger were right. Unless Coke made the next few minutes really memorable for the L’Escorials, ten times the hardware the team had brought to Cantilucca wouldn’t be enough.
“Right,” he said. “Two.” He took the suitcases.
Niko Daun put his hand on the door latch. Moden’s strength would have been a better match for the mass of the armored panel, but the powerful officer’s one arm carried a three-tube missile launcher. The unit was intended for vehicle mounting, but Moden held it as easily as a lesser man might have done a 2-cm powergun.
Margulies and Vierziger were in position to either side of the door, she with a sub-machine gun, he with his hands empty, though he’d slung a sub-machine gun for patrol carry along his left side. The embellishments of the pistol in the high-ride holster on Vierziger’s right hip winked in the foyer lights.
Robert Barbour sat at his console, calm or comatose. Coke supposed the former but it didn’t matter, not now, as he nodded to Daun and started toward the door, sliding the cases beside him.
Coke stepped through the doorway and shivered in the warm, muggy air. L’Escorial gunmen turned in surprise to face him.
Coke set his luggage against the front wall of Hathaway House. Each of the big cases was a meter long and sixty centimeters high. They were thirty centimeters deep as well, but the volume wasn’t important anymore. Coke left the pair in a very flat V, end to end, almost parallel to the reinforced concrete facade.
He stepped quickly toward the cordon’s leader, the blond man in vest and cutoffs. The fellow’s legs were an angry color; he’d have blisters across the whole front of them by morning, if he survived that long.
A gunman with a bayonetted grenade launcher stuck his weapon toward Coke’s face. The bayonet was a spike rather than knife-style. Coke swept it aside with his left hand.
“Excuse me, sir!” Coke called to the leader. “I believe you’re in charge here?”
“Who the fuck do you think you are, you little prick?” the L’Escorial demanded in obvious amazement. He pointed his sub-machine gun like a huge pistol. The muzzle wavered, but not so much that the 1-cm bore ever drifted away from Coke’s face.
“I’m Matthew Coke, my good fellow,” Coke said. “I’m afraid I have to complain about the behavior of yourself and your friends.”
The need to hold a persona protected Coke against his own fears. This wasn’t him facing a gang of bored, drugged-out thugs, this was a prissy off-world businessman who couldn’t imagine violence as raw as the norm of this hellhole.
A gunman whacked Coke in the back with the butt of a 2-cm powergun. Coke staggered forward, almost into the muzzle of the leader’s automatic weapon. The armored vest saved his kidneys, but it did nothing to lessen the inertia of the solid blow.
Coke flailed his arms to get his balance. “Now that’s just what I mean!” he cried. “What sort of impression do you think that behavior makes on visitors? If you don’t apologize immediately, I’ll have to take action to bring this to your superiors’ attention as clearly as possible.”
“What the hell is he talking about, Blanco?” asked a gunman. He still wore a pair of lacy undergarments from Margulies’ case over his scarlet beret.
What he’s talking about, you moron, is the warning required by FDF regulations before FDF personnel use deadly force in a non-contractual context.
Blanco, the L’Escorial straw boss, stepped forward, poking his sub-machine gun toward Coke’s eyes. The iridium bore was pitted from the long burst of a few minutes before.
Coke hopped backward. Another gunman tripped him. Coke twisted like a cat as he fell, catching himself on his left hand instead of sprawling on his back. Blanco kicked him in the side with cleated boots.
Coke scuttled toward the doorway of Hathaway House, doubled over. He dabbed his left hand down like a deer running with a broken foreleg.
L’Escorials shouted and kicked. One of them swung his 2-cm weapon as a club. Because Coke was moving, the massive iridium barrel smacked him in the small of the back instead of across the shoulders. Again the vest saved him from crippling, perhaps fatal, injury, but the shock made Coke’s mind go white nonetheless. He plowed facedown on the pavement.
The plated door flew open. Johann Vierziger stepped out, grabbed Coke left-handed by the back of the collar, and half-pulled, half-flung, the major into the foyer.
Sten Moden swung the door closed. A L’Escorial stuck his foot in the crack. Margulies kicked the gunman’s knee, then shoved him clear of the opening with the sole of her boot. Several L’Escorials pushed from the other side of the panel, but Moden’s strength overmastered them.
Someone emptied the 30-round magazine of a projectile weapon against the front of the door. A L’Escorial screamed, wounded by a ricochet or at least by spatters of the bullets after they disintegrated on the armor.
The door locked on three wrist-thick bolts worked by a single handle. When the panel slammed against its jamb, Niko Daun slid the bolts home into metal tubes set deep in the concrete.
“Open this—” Blanco shouted, his voice attenuated by the massive door and wall.
Margulies touched a thumb switch, detonating the pair of directional mines in the suitcases outside.
The lobby lights went out. Emergency lighting, glow-strips powered piezoelectrically by the structure’s own flexing, drew pale yellow-green arrows down the staircase and from each doorway. Barbour’s holographic display remained a ball of sharp-edged pastels. Dust, shaken from all the surfaces of the room, filled the air chokingly.
Georg Hathaway opened his mouth as if to scream, but no sound came out. Evie put an arm around her husband’s shoulders and another on his nearer elbow.
Coke staggered to his feet. Margulies tossed him a commo helmet. The other team members were already wearing theirs. Vierziger offered Coke a 2-cm powergun, muzzle up.
The double crash of the mines had been terrible de
spite the wall’s protection. Coke heard his own voice with ringing overtones as he said, “Right, open it.”
Daun tried to obey. The blasts had warped the door and jamb together. The sensor tech braced a bootsole on the wall for a fulcrum. Despite his straining, it wasn’t until Moden slung his missile launcher and tugged the handle that the panel swung open.
The huge doughnuts of dust and smoke from the blasts had spread and dissipated by the time Coke came through the doorway— third, after Margulies and Vierziger, their guns pointing. Coke switched his visor to thermal imaging because the longer infrared waves penetrated the haze better than the normal optical range that light-amplification mode would have used.
A directional mine was built into one face of each suitcase, beneath the 40 ceramic laminae which the team had removed to use in its body armor. The outside of each mine was thousands of faceted steel barrels the size of the last joint of a man’s little finger. The inside was a layer of cast explosive.
The mines went off like shotguns whose bore was the full plane of the cases containing them: six-tenths of a square meter. The pair, set to cross the edge of the L’Escorial cordon at a shallow angle, had swept the street like a gigantic buzzsaw.
All that was visible of Blanco was a left foot and left boot—from the ankle down. The mines’ steel sleet hadn’t had time to spread when it hit the L’Escorial officer. Blanco’s torso must have been above the plane of the projectiles, but the shock wave had flung it indistinguishably into the bloody ruck.
Someone’s right arm lay a few meters farther on. The radius and ulna were fleshless, but the hand and upper arm remained unmarked as a freak of the explosion.
Another gunman, still clutching a sub-machine gun, gasped on his belly in the middle of the street. He’d been at the edge of the area the projectiles cleared. Blood from a dozen pellet wounds pooled the pavement around him. The blast had stripped his clothes off. There was a ragged wound where his penis and scrotum should have been.
Vierziger glanced at Coke. Coke nodded. Vierziger shot the L’Escorial behind the ear, then reholstered his pistol. Coke blinked at the speed and smoothness of the motion.
Most of the gunmen’s bodies lay against the wall fronting the L’Escorial compound. A L’Escorial wearing oil-stained coveralls and a short helmet—one of the armored truck’s crew—ran out the open gateway. He gaped at the carnage.
Coke pointed his powergun at the L’Escorial and shouted, “Hold it!”
The L’Escorial carried a pistol in a shoulder holster where it would be out of the way aboard his vehicle, but he seemed to have forgotten he was armed. He didn’t look so much frightened as dumbfounded, like a man who’d met a talking dog.
Holding his weapon with the muzzle pointed but the stock in the crook of his arm, Coke walked over to the L’Escorial. More gunmen scampered into and out of sight through the gateway. Nobody else left the courtyard. The armored vehicle’s engine roared to life, then stalled with a clang as an inexperienced driver tried to operate it.
Coke lifted the muzzle of his 2-cm weapon. He reached into his purse with his left hand and removed a business card, which he stuck between the L’Escorial’s pistol and its holster.
The card read:
MAJOR MATTHEW COKE Frisian Defense Forces Representative
The chip embedded within the card would project his image and description through a hologram reader.
“Go on back inside,” Coke ordered. “Tell your leaders that we didn’t come here to have a problem. We’re here to do business on behalf of our principals, and that’ll be very good business for the side that strikes the deal. Do you understand?”
The L’Escorial stared at the shoulder weapon, not at the man holding it. His eyes were wild, and he gave no indication of having heard a thing Coke had said.
Coke sighed. There was such a thing as making a demonstration too effective.
He put his left hand on the gunman’s shoulder and rotated the fellow to face L’Escorial headquarters. “Go on,” he said. “Tell your bosses that this just involved a few individuals—it wasn’t important.”
Coke pushed the man gently. The L’Escorial stumbled, then broke into a shambling run around the gatepost and out of sight.
Coke turned, though it made his skin crawl to do so. Backing away from the red-painted structure would have sent a signal of weakness to the gunmen certainly watching through firing slits in the upper floor of the building.
The street was a smear of blood and pulped organs. It reflected the light of advertising signs. Coke’s bootheels shimmied as he stepped. He felt dizzy, and the stench of disemboweled corpses made him want to vomit.
A few of the bodies which the mines slammed against the courtyard wall were still alive, at least technically. Coke didn’t want to think about that. There was nothing he could do now if he wanted to. He wasn’t a medic.
He was a killer, no more and surely no less.
May the Lord give them rest; and may there be rest for the slayer, in his time.
The team, all but Barbour—visible through the open door at his console—waited outside Hathaway House for Coke’s return. Daun blinked in amazement and a certain distaste. Moden and Margulies,
the combat veterans, were grimly silent.
Johann Vierziger smiled.
“I gave a card to a citizen to deliver up the street, Matthew,” Vierziger said in his liquid voice. He gestured with an open hand toward where the Astra cordon had been. The mine blasts brought the blue-clad gunmen running a few steps toward the scene, then scurrying back into their compound to take stock. “Now what?”
“Now,” said Matthew Coke, “you await developments here, and I take care of some personal business.”
Coke stepped into the lobby of Hathaway House. He was shaking. He hadn’t done anything to burn off the adrenaline with which his body had pumped itself in preparation for fight or flight.
The Hathaways stood with arms entwined about one another’s shoulders and their other hands linked at waist level. Georg was blank-faced. Evie’s expression was one of slowly dawning joy.
The three men from the saloon now stood in the broad archway where the alcove joined the lobby. One of the policemen opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping silently on the dock. The third man, a civilian whose ragged clothing had once been of good quality, still carried his drink. He didn’t look particularly interested, in the carnage or in anything else.
Coke tossed the 2-cm weapon to Margulies. She caught it at the balance. He still had a pistol in a belt holster beneath his jacket.
He thought of taking off the armored vest, but after a moment he decided not to waste the time. “You,” he said to a policeman. “Does that shock baton work? Give it to me.”
“Huh?”
Vierziger stepped behind the man and slid the fifty-centimeter rod from its sheath.
“Hey!” the policeman cried. He and his partner jumped in opposite directions sideways, as though the little killer’s presence were a bomb going off between them. “Look, what are you—”
Vierziger switched the baton’s power on. He touched the tip of the slim rod to the inside of his own left forearm. The powerful fluctuating current crossed nerve pathways and flung his arm violently out to the side.
He smiled again, turned off the power, and tossed the baton to Coke. “Fully charged,” he said.
Coke slid the baton beneath his waistband. “You’ll get it back,” he said to the policeman. Half his face grinned. “Or somebody will pay you for it.”
He looked at Moden. “Sten, you’re in charge till I return,” Coke said. “I don’t expect potential employers to react that quickly, but if they do, set up a meeting for tomorrow.”
He touched his brow with one finger in a wry salute. “See you soon,” he said, and started for the door.
Margulies fell into step with him. “I’m coming,” she said.
Johann Vierziger shook his head. “Three can be a crowd, Mary,” he said in his cu
ltured, mocking voice. “Matthew will probably be all right…and besides, as he says, it’s a personal matter.”
“Three?” said Niko Daun. Margulies nodded, turned, and leaned the extra shoulder weapon against the wall beside the door.
Barbour looked up from his console. “I’ll be tracking,” he said. If there had been any more emotion in the statement, it would have been a challenge.
Coke laughed out loud. The whole team thought he was behaving like an idiot—but he’d earned the right a few minutes before to do that. The whole team, himself included.
“See you soon,” he repeated, and he stepped out into night fetid with death.
Scores, perhaps as many as two hundred, L’Escorial gunmen clustered around the windrow of bodies in front of their compound. An armored truck—not the one that had appeared before, but a similar design—illuminated the scene with its quartet of bumper-mounted headlights. One man sat cross-legged on the top of the wall, holding a liquid-fueled lamp, and other gunmen waved a variety of electrical handlights.
There wasn’t much effort spent on caring for the wounded, assuming some of the victims were still alive. For the most part the L’Escorials stared, sometimes calling in wonderment. The sight appeared to touch them no more than a particularly vivid traffic accident would have done.
Coke expected the L’Escorials to react to him, perhaps to try to stop him. None of them seemed to notice that he’d left Hathaway House. The pool of light over the bodies acted as a curtain shrouding everything beyond the direct illumination.
A crowd of spectators aggregated quickly now that civilians realized the syndicate gunmen would pay them little attention. Coke noticed that a number of the onlookers covered blue garb with cloaks of neutral gray: Astras who wanted to see what was going on without themselves becoming causes of war.
Coke walked quickly up the street to where Pilar Ortega had abandoned the port operations van. Three filthy locals were in the vehicle now. One of them was trying to shoot something into his thigh with a homemade hypodermic. The injector’s barrel was a hundred-centimeter length of hose.