by David Drake
The staircase to the flophouse Pilar entered was helical and of engineering-grade plastic extrusion. It had been salvaged from a starship. Despite hard use and lack of maintenance, the structure itself was solid and safe.
The stair’s only attachment to the building was looped wire between it and external tubing—water pipes, electrical conduits, and a downspout from the gutter. The wire was of no particular type or strength. Baling wire alternated with insulated power cable and what looked like glass-core data transmission line.
The helix wobbled at Coke’s every step and from any breeze or tremor. He didn’t suppose it was going to collapse under him—and he could probably ride it down if it did break away; the staircase itself was plenty sturdy enough.
But it put the butterflies back in the pit of Coke’s stomach.
The bum who’d been sprawled on the stairs when Pilar climbed them had vanished. Another man now lay halfway up, weeping uncontrollably and holding an almost-full bottle of clear fluid.
Coke entered clean locked beds, the building’s fifth level. The salvaged staircase rose another two meters, but there was no doorway opening onto it from the level above.
The end of a counter protected by a hundred-millimeter mesh of barbed wire narrowed the doorway to half its designed width. A bar with a barbed wire apron closed the other half to prevent anyone from bursting into or out of the flophouse, though Coke wasn’t sure why either should have been a problem.
No one was behind the counter; the gate into the flophouse proper stood open. The sign on the back wall read:
SPACE 5 BUNK 10 SOLO BUNK 25 LOCK 25
A board from which hung a dozen cheap keyed padlocks indicated the protection you got for the extra twenty-five pesos. Sten Moden could probably have twisted the barrels off their hasps …but men as fit and strong as Sten Moden didn’t spend the night in a flop like this.
Coke raised the bar carefully and walked into the establishment. He’d had full immunization treatments before he left Nieuw Friesland, but there was no point in testing Frisian medical science against the filth that lurked on those rusty barbs.
The flophouse filled the entire level, an area of about ten meters by twenty. It was lighted by glow-strips, scraped and speckled but still able to provide a reasonable amount of yellow-green illumination. The good lighting was probably a safety feature—for the building’s owners as much as for the staff and clientele.
A narrow aisle separated two banks of cubicles. Each contained a filthy mattress. Instead of solid panels, the cubicles had walls of coarse barbed wire netting.
The remainder of the flophouse was bare floor on which the lower grade of derelict sprawled and shivered and moaned. Twenty-odd were present tonight; varied in age and sex, but uniform in their utter degradation.
Something was going on toward the back of the big room. Men clustered around one of the cages, shouting and laughing in cracked voices.
Coke’s face became still. He slid the shock rod from his waistband with his left hand and strode quietly down the aisle.
About half the cubicles he passed were occupied. Some of the men—few were women—in them were lost in their own worlds. Empty stim cones or cruder injectors lay on the mattresses with them.
One man was bent in a tetanic arch. His eyes bulged and his face was purple. Coke was pretty sure the fellow was dead, broken in convulsions by the wrong dose of gage tailings, but the fact impressed him as little as it did the flop’s ordinary denizens.
Other caged occupants called or even tried to grab Coke as he strode by. None of them was coordinated enough to actually touch the Frisian. They didn’t necessarily see him. The drugs and drug impurities with which they’d injected themselves were capable of turning any movement into a wild hallucination.
Pilar Ortega was in an end stall. She stood erect with her arms clamping her overwrap to her, as if by squeezing hard enough she could make herself vanish. Her eyes were wide open, but she didn’t see Coke coming down the aisle toward her.
Seven or eight men gripped the mesh of the cubicle. One of them was the clerk who should have been behind the counter. They had all dropped their pants. They waved their penises at the woman as they jeered.
The clerk was a fat man, completely hairless. He wore a sleeveless black pullover, his overalls pooled around his ankles. As Coke approached, unnoticed in the drug-fueled hilarity, the clerk reached down into his trousers and came up with a key.
“Lookie what I got, Miz Fancypants!” he cried in a voice pitched higher than the size of his gross body suggested. “You think you rented the only key to your lock, did you?”
“Yeah, I wanna see them pants!” the man beside him cried. “I’ll bite them—”
Coke whipped his shock rod across the bare buttocks of the four men directly before him.
The men screamed as they leaped convulsively into the wire. The cubicle swayed, but its steel-tube frame was strong enough to withstand the impacts. The men at either end of the cage, untouched by Coke’s quick sweep, looked around in surprise, all but one fellow crooning and drooling in his own private dreamworld.
The clerk turned. He bled from a score of fresh punctures and gashes scattered from forehead to mid-thigh. “You—” he shouted.
Coke flicked the clerk with the baton, this time on the lower belly just above his genitals. Flailing limbs hurled the clerk against Pilar’s cage a second time. The structure’s resilience threw him facedown on the floor. Coke stepped aside to let him fall.
A derelict raised the jagged top of a bottle. Coke held his right arm crooked to the side. His hand hovered over the butt of his holstered pistol. To draw, he would shift his hips left while his hand swept aside the tail of his jacket. He wasn’t Johann Vierziger, but it was a maneuver he’d made many times before….
“Try me,” he offered in a trembling voice.
The derelict dropped the bottle. He backed into the wall and pushed himself flat against it.
“All of you,” Coke said. “Out ahead of me.” He eased into an empty cubicle, permitting the men to pass without touching him. “Pilar, open your door and come out. It’s all right now.”
The clerk was whimpering. He paused on hands and knees to draw up his overalls.
“Did I tell you to do that?” Coke screamed. He lashed the clerk’s buttocks again, reaching from the cage to take a full swing with the shock baton. The whack! and blue spark flashed terror across the derelicts’ countenances.
“Go on! Move!”
The group shuffled and stumbled out, fettered as Coke intended by their dragging trousers; all but the wide-eyed fellow mumbling in his reverie about Maureen. Coke let him be.
Pilar came out of the cubicle. Her face was as still as that of a woman in shock, but her eyes moved febrilely.
“It’s all right,” Coke repeated. He touched Pilar’s shoulder to guide her down the aisle. “Ahead of me,” he said.
He walked in lock-step behind the woman, reaching past her with the shock baton. Someone groped from a cage despite the warning. The baton’s charge snapped him like the popper on a bullwhip into his cubicle’s walls.
The clerk and the gang behind him had shuffled to the counter at the front of the room. “Stop!” Coke ordered.
The men cringed as they obeyed. The features of most of them would have looked leprous even under better lighting than that of the glow-strips.
“Now,” Coke said. “Return the lady’s money.” In a gentler voice he added, “You paid fifty pesos?”
“Please God the money doesn’t matter!” Pilar said, clutching the crucifix beneath her cape.
“That’s not the point,” Coke said. “You bastards! Make it a hundred pesos. Now!”
“But I can’t,” the clerk wheezed. His tears diluted the line of blood trickling down his cheek from the gouge in his forehead. “I can’t get into the cashbox, only Master Delzine can open it!”
The box was a massive canister—too massive for a support structure as flimsy as the uppe
r floors of this building—strapped beneath the counter. The inlet was a doubly-kinked tube with one-way gates, proof against any but the most sophisticated methods of drawing coins back along it. The clerk could hold out the clientele’s fees, if he wanted to risk the owner’s spot checks; but he couldn’t retrieve money once dropped into the box.
“All right,” Coke said. “Make it up yourselves. A hundred pesos.”
“The money doesn’t—” Pilar repeated.
“Shut up!” Coke snarled. “They’re paying for what they did. Or else they’ll do it again!”
The men squatted to rummage in their fallen trousers. Coke drew a figure-8 with his shock baton, touching the tip to cage supports on both sides of the motion. The sparks snapped loudly in the nervous silence.
Two of the men took off their shoes. The clerk, who’d found only ten pesos thus far, came up with an additional fifty-peso coin.
The money lay in a ragged pile between Pilar and the men. Coke couldn’t tell exactly how much there was; and anyway, the amount didn’t really matter, Pilar was right there, though the principle mattered.
“All right,” Coke ordered. “Head down to the street, all of you. Get going!”
He wasn’t going to leave any of this lot ten meters above him. Maybe none of them could throw straight, but all they needed to do was get lucky with one brick or bottle. They shambled and crab-walked out the doorway.
Pilar relaxed so completely that Coke was afraid she’d fainted. He caught her. Her body was warm and trembling.
“I’m all right,” she murmured, but it was a moment before she stepped forward. She bent, scooped the money into a pocket of her cape, and edged past the counter.
The men were partway down the staircase. The clerk had hiked up his overalls. When he saw Coke appear at the doorway above him, he dropped the garment again and hopped downward, holding the railing with both hands. The structure jounced violently. Several of the derelicts lost their footing. Half sliding, half stumbling, they made their way to the street.
Five steps up, Coke shut off the baton and slid it beneath his waistband again. When he moved, the men watching could see his holster, not that any of them had doubted it.
“I didn’t bring you here to shoot you,” Coke said in harsh, ringing tones. “But if I can see any of you thirty seconds from now, I will shoot him. Go!”
The clerk and derelicts stumbled into the traffic, pedestrians, and jitneys that had resumed when the syndicate cordons terminated at the mine blast. Coke took a deep breath. His knees wobbled. He held the rail firmly in his left hand as he followed Pilar down the remaining steps.
“You wouldn’t really shoot them, would you?” she asked.
“They’re gone,” Coke said, avoiding the question. “It doesn’t matter now.”
He massaged his left forearm with the fingers of his right hand. He’d been gripping the shock baton hard, harder than he’d realized until just now when he suddenly felt the ache.
“Look,” he said, “is your husband at home? I can take you there. Or we can get you a room in the Hathaway House; it seems to be a nice place. Like you said, a decent place.”
Pilar shook her head. “I’ll go home,” she said. “I’ll be all right, now.”
She looked toward her van. She noticed the heads of bums silhouetted against the unglazed windows. Coke offered his left arm to her right hand.
“No problem,” he said, whisking his tongue across the syllables like a blade over a whetstone. He walked beside Pilar toward the vehicle, flexing his left hand to be sure that it would obey his needs.
“Terry won’t be home,” the woman said stiffly. Her fingers lay in the crook of his elbow, light contact but warm nonetheless. “He’s found quite a number of friends here since he learned to shake the money tree.”
“He’s smuggling, you mean?” Coke said. His tone counterfeited the sort of polite interest that he thought was appropriate to the statement. Below the surface, his mind considered alternatives with the icy logic of a bridge player assessing his hand.
Pilar stopped. A sailor walking behind them cursed as she blocked his path. Coke drew his pistol and pointed it without a word. The sailor started back and jogged across the street.
Coke reholstered the weapon. “Sorry,” he murmured to Pilar.
“You work for the Confederacy?” she said tightly. She stood as though her feet had grown through the cracked pavement. “You’re investigating port duties?”
“Not us,” Coke said easily. “From what I’ve heard thus far, we’re out of business if the Marvelan Confederacy learns that we’re here.”
By taking Pilar’s hand in his, he made her meet his eyes. In a more sober tone than before he added, “We’re with the Frisian Defense Forces.”
“Oh,” the woman said. The datum fell into place. “Oh!”
“We’re not maybe the best thing that could happen to Cantilucca,” Coke said, still looking directly at her though her eyes had lifted away. “But we’re better than what I’ve seen here so far.”
Pilar gave him a bitter smile. “Sometimes I think the best thing that could happen to Potosi, at least, would be a fusion bomb,” she said.
Coke squeezed her hand. He stepped to the van, reached in through the window, and dragged one of the occupants out by the throat. The local squawked after Coke flung him on the pavement. He didn’t say anything before he hit the ground, because the Frisian’s fingers gripped too tightly to pass the sound.
The remaining two bums bleated. They slid to the other side of the open compartment. Instead of reaching for them, Coke pointed his pistol at the left member of the pair.
“You have five seconds,” Coke said. “One. Two.”
The local jumped up and stuck his head and torso out of the far window. Coke shifted his weapon’s centimeter bore toward the other derelict. “Three. Four.”
The local tried unsuccessfully to rise. His limbs were spastic with fear. He seemed afraid to turn and face the opening.
Coke pointed the gun muzzle sideways and said, “Go on, you’re all right, I’ll give you the time.”
The local thumped out into the street and began crawling after his fellow. He was moaning about his bottle, but the only bottle the trio had left in the van was empty.
Pilar stood close beside Coke. “You’re very direct,” she said in a voice too neutral to be disinterested.
“Yeah,” Coke said. He looked at her again. “What you see is what you get.”
Pilar smiled wistfully. “No,” she said, “I’m afraid that what I get is something else again. Perhaps I should have seen it, but I was younger then.”
She opened the door of the van. The ignition card clinked against the handle. “Thank you very much, Master Coke. I—I appreciate what you’ve done. I’d invite you home for a drink, but people might get the wrong impression.”
Her face hardened. “And it would be the wrong impression.”
Coke bowed formally. He wore a half smile.
Pilar suddenly leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. Then she was in the van, shutting the door needlessly hard.
Coke watched her drive away. He was smiling more broadly now. Someone watching him might have noticed the similarity of the expression to that which Johann Vierziger wore after killing.
The remaining five members of the survey team waited for a moment after Major Matthew Coke walked out of Hathaway House with a pistol and a commandeered shock baton. Georg Hathaway started to close the heavy front door. Margulies touched the innkeeper’s arm to stop him.
Hathaway glanced around. The four Frisians besides Barbour stood in a concave arc, facing out the doorway so that among them they watched a hundred meters of the streetscape. All of them held weapons.
“Oh,” Hathaway said. “Oh. I wasn’t thinking of that.”
Margulies nodded without replying, and without ever taking her eyes off the amazed clot of L’Escorials across the street. Her left hand returned to rest lightly on the foregrip of her s
ub-machine gun.
“There,” Vierziger said with a slight relaxation of the drumhead tautness beneath his insouciant exterior. “He’s clear of anything we can do—unless we want to follow him.”
“Which we do not,” Moden said. He set down the missile launcher with care. The weapon he carried comfortably was so heavy that if it dropped, the shock would seriously damage it.
“There’s no organization,” Barbour offered. He had directional audio from the spectators across the street, as well as a holographic view sharper than that of the others’ naked eyes. “People run inside saying they’re going to report to Raul or to the Old Man, but they don’t come back with any orders.”
“Raul Luria is head of L’Escorial,” said Georg Hathaway. “With his son Ramon, and Ramon’s son Pepe.”
“Pepe is a weasel,” Evie said in clipped tones. She looked at the Frisians and added, “We have rooms prepared for you. You’ll share baths; I hope that’s all right. But surely you’d like something to eat or drink?”
It was hard to read her expression. The sudden destruction of a dozen gunmen had opened a window on the woman’s mind, but its interior was still thick with the dust of long depression.
“I wouldn’t mind something to drink,” Niko Daun said clearly. “You say you’ve got local cacao?”
“And I think I’ll have a beer or two,” Sten Moden added, quirking the younger man a smile. “It’s been a long day. Not that it’s over yet.”
“Here, I’ll serve you gentlemen,” Georg said. “And lady of course. Evie, I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, you know, in public. Though Pepe’s off Cantilucca now, I believe.”
The local patrons had returned to the alcove in which they’d been drinking. Vierziger walked to the table of the third man, the civilian, and said, “Good day, sir. My name is Johann Vierziger, and I’m a sergeant with the Frisian Defense Forces. May I ask who you are?”
The fellow looked up. His face was handsome in a hollow-cheeked fashion, but there was a gray glaze over him that was more an aura than skin tone.