by David Drake
Esteban, holding the module as if it were his first grandchild, started to crawl under the aircar again. He stopped. “You want to rent vehicles, Master Moden? What sort of vehicles? Anything you please.”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Moden said. “Right now, I want to get my hands dirty.”
His face set, then smiled again. He took out his multitool. “I’ve been in admin too long.”
The big Frisian sat down, lay back, and slid himself under the blocked aircar with the certitude of the tide coming in.
The man guarding the garage beneath the building holding the Ortegas’ apartment wore brown trousers, a green shirt, and a carbine which fired fléchettes. He slid the gate closed as Pilar squeezed the port van into a space that was only wide enough by the thickness of the paint. Ten other vehicles, one of them a scarlet armored truck, had virtually filled the parking area.
“We’ll have to get out through the back of the van,” Pilar apologized to Matthew Coke.
Coke slipped between the seats ahead of the woman. “I’ve made low-level drops under worse conditions,” he said, forcing a chuckle. He was keyed up and working very hard to conceal the fact.
You couldn’t let your men know that you were as nervous as they were. Besides, the process of acting calm brought a degree of real relaxation.
“I appreciate you escorting me back, Matthew,” Pilar said. “It’s been …Until last night I could pretend it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, but now I’m frightened to be out alone after dark.”
“My pleasure,” Coke said. “Besides, I could use the drink you offered.”
The interior of the garage was painted half red, half blue. Both sides had staircases. Pilar walked toward the red one.
“Only a drink, you understand,” she said. She didn’t look at her companion as she spoke, and her left hand clutched her crucifix.
“I understand,” Coke said in a neutral voice.
The guard smirked at the couple. He turned away when Coke gave him a flat glance from the base of the stairs.
“L’Escorial?” Coke said mildly. There was room to walk beside Pilar. He followed two steps back in order to keep his right hand clear of her if he had to draw.
“Not exactly,” Pilar said. She paused just below the ground-floor landing to let a party of sailors exit noisily onto the street. They sounded happy, even the man who was reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a singsong.
Pilar started up again when the way was clear. “The top floors, the fifth and sixth, are a, a brothel,” she said. “They have the same— staff, I understand. But the entrances to the two floors are off different stairs so that there won’t be fights. Our suite is on this side of the building, that’s all.”
The cape she wore for concealment draped her full hips and swayed as she moved. Coke smiled at the thought of Salome and the seven veils. Far more effective than just flaunting your bare tits over a railing …though that worked too; anything at all worked when a man was going into the red zone and needed to reassure himself.
Pilar had kept her explanation flat, purely informative. She cleared her throat and added with a touch of embarrassment, “It’s actually a good location in Potosi, you realize. The security is so much better than at other buildings.”
The door at the second landing had three separate lock plates, though they seemed to work from a single electronic key. As Pilar began to open them, a L’Escorial gunman turned at the floor above and continued down the stairs.
The man was drooling and wild-eyed from gage tailings. He held a 2-cm powergun. The loading gate was open, indicating that there wasn’t a magazine in place, but Coke couldn’t be sure whether or not there was a round in the chamber.
Coke walked up two steps and stood so that he blocked the stairwell. His hands were under his cape, the left one holding a needle stunner. Unlike powergun bolts, the little charged projectiles would penetrate the light film of the gray cape. “Good evening, sir!” he called. “L’Escorial forever!”
“Fuck you,” the gunman mumbled. He braced himself against the wall and pointed his weapon at the Frisian’s face.
“Inside quickly!” Pilar screamed as she flung the door inward.
Coke shot the L’Escorial in both knees. The gunman’s legs splayed outward like those of a dancing marionette. His tailbone slammed violently down on the step behind him.
The powergun was pointing at the ceiling when it went off. Cyan light and the wham! of enclosed air superheated filled the stairwell.
The 2-cm bolt shattered the lower half of the cast-in-place concrete. It left a cloud of powder and the rusty squares of reinforcing wire across a meter-wide crater.
Coke lunged into Pilar’s suite and slammed the metal door behind him. He held the panel shut while the woman reset the triple locks.
“Well!” Coke said, expelling a deep breath. He stripped off his cape and threw it down. He felt hot and trembly.
The floor was carpeted. Coke put the needle stunner on safe and dropped it onto the cape. His grip had been so fierce that his hand hurt. He’d trained himself to shoot ambidextrously, but using his left added a level of stress—
Necessary here so that he could have drawn the powergun with his master hand.
Pilar removed her own cape. Her face was calm until the composure crumbled like ice in a spring freshet. She threw herself sobbing into Coke’s arms.
“I hate this place!” she cried. “This house and this town and this planet! Oh Lord, I wish I were dead!”
Coke stroked the back of her neck with his left hand. With his right he tilted her face and kissed her. Her lips were wet with tears.
“Don’t wish that,” he whispered. “It’s not as bad as that.”
“This place is Hell and I’m in Hell,” Pilar moaned. “Oh, if only we had never left Marvela….”
Coke kissed her again. He lifted her breast against his broad chest with his left hand.
“Please,” she said. She put her hand to his and twisted her torso away. “Please.”
The room was lighted by three globes, weaving a simple pattern as they hung unsupported in the air. The furnishings were of handmade wood rather than the plastic extrusions that Coke had seen everywhere else in Potosi. The syndicates preferred to import goods and even food rather than to turn the labor force into production of anything except gage.
Coke held Pilar by waist and shoulder. He kissed her again. “Your husband isn’t here,” he said. “You know he isn’t going to be back tonight.”
He thought of adding that Terence Ortega had gone to an apartment at the other end of town at midday. Barbour would warn them if Ortega left.
Coke decided not to explain that. Telling Pilar there was an electronic tag on her husband would have indicated the degree of preparation that Coke had made for this moment.
Coke was romantic—you didn’t stay a soldier because of the pay and benefits. But you didn’t survive as a soldier if you didn’t plan each possible step, and that carried over to the rest of Coke’s life as well. Women tended not to see things the same way.
Pilar snatched herself out of his grip again. “Terry’s behavior doesn’t affect my vows!” she said angrily to the far wall.
“Pilar,” Coke said softly, “I’m—not real settled just now. Forgive me if I misspoke.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and guided her around to kiss him again.
“Oh, Matthew,” she said, “you could have been killed, I know. Because of me. But …”
Her fingers brushed his cheek, dusted by tiny fragments of the concrete ceiling. He kissed her, pulling her toward him without resistance.
“Matthew,” she said desperately. She caught his hands as they rose again toward her breasts. “Matthew, I’m so sorry, please.”
She stepped away, still holding his hands. “Let me get you that drink, but then I’m afraid you’d better go.”
He lifted his chin and dipped it again. His face was as placid as that of a saint’s statue. He lowered h
is hands to his sides. “That’s all right,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ll have the drink.”
Pilar began crying again. She swallowed the sobs, but the tears pulsed down her glistening cheeks. She held her crucifix with both hands. “I’m sorry, I just can’t,” she whispered. “I want to, but I can’t.”
An internally lighted button controlled each lock-plate from the inner face of the door. Coke thumbed the buttons in turn, switching them from green to red.
“No problem,” he said without emphasis. He donned the cape again. His hands and the needle stunner vanished beneath the gray shimmer.
“Matthew?” Pilar said. “Please? Call me when you’ve gotten back to Hathaway House safely.”
Coke looked over his shoulder at her. “I’ve got various business tonight,” he said. “If it goes well, I’ll probably see you tomorrow when I send another message capsule off from the port.”
Pilar caught the door behind him and kept it from swinging to. She watched through the crack.
Instead of going down to the street, Coke started up the stairs toward the brothel.
Moden and Esteban Rojo could have finished the job in an hour and a half, if they’d had good luck and the right tools. They had neither.
Removing the Stellarflow’s lower electronics module required either special equipment or great care. Moden was careful, but years of vibration had crystallized a plastic bearing. The joint snapped, and then they had to cut the other three straps as well because the clamps had frozen.
Four hours after they’d started—straps replaced with pieces cut from sheet stock, bearing freed in a sonic bath from the multitool, and journals cannibalized from one of the pair of redundant trunk-lid cantilevers—Esteban ran the fans up and down in perfect unison before shutting off the power.
“As good as new!” he announced.
Moden stretched mightily. “Which means,” he said, “it’s almost as good as a Frisian aircar that would have cost half as much free-onboard …but Via, some people have to have their Terran technology.”
He’d acted in place of a hydraulic jack when the bow of the car had to come up twenty centimeters. Judging from the weight, Stellarflow had used iridium for the frame. Moden ached, but it felt good to have been doing physical labor again.
“Will you eat with us, Sten?” Esteban asked. He tossed a rag to Moden so that the big man could wipe his—hand. Esteban’s mouth opened in embarrassment
Moden pinned the rag between his knees and dragged his hand through it determinedly. “Got the big chunks off,” he said.
He looked at the mechanic. “At your apartment, you mean, Esteban? I don’t want to be in the way.”
“We have a cafe,” Esteban said with dignity. The Frisian had skirted as delicately as possible the question of whether Esteban could afford to feed guests, but the well-meant concern still rankled. “My wife and children run it, Pito and our daughter Annunciata; and I help when there’s time. But I ask you there as a guest, not a customer, please?”
“Then I’d be honored,” Moden said. He flicked the rag through the air, caught it in a fold; and folded it a second time, into a square, against his thigh.
Rojo’s cafe was on the building’s second floor, with the entrance and sign—The Sacred Heart—near the mouth of the alley down which Moden had walked to reach the garage behind. A dozen locals were present in the single small room, two families with children as well as individual adults. The food odors were piquant and wonderful.
The girl who shuttled plates from the serving window was in her early teens and strikingly beautiful. “My daughter, Annunciata,” Esteban said proudly. “Nunci, I want you to meet Master Sten Moden!”
The girl dropped into a curtsy, though she carried a serving plate in either hand and there wasn’t, Moden would have thought, space enough for her knees to dip as they did.
The patrons of The Sacred Heart sat at a single table supported on six pillarlike legs. The table was of native wood with a subtle grain, polished by use into an attractive brazen patina. Seating was on the pair of full-length benches. There was barely enough room between the cafe’s walls and the ends of the table for patrons to edge by to the side away from the door—the side from which Nunci served.
“Rosaria!” Esteban called. A woman, older and much fatter than Annunciata, stuck her head out of the serving window.
The mechanic gestured to the cafe’s patrons, all of whom were staring at him and his huge companion already. “Everyone! This is our great good friend, who repaired the aircar which had me tearing out my few remaining hairs. Rosa, your special chicken and rice for our guest—and plenty, he has the strength of ten men and no doubt he eats like ten!”
“Well, I’ll be able to do justice to the meal,” Moden said. The undoubted virtues of Hathaway House didn’t include the cooking of Master Hathaway, who attempted that task.
Esteban led the Frisian to the open seat in the center of the table, facing the door. Moden’s knees straddled the table’s central leg. There was a general shifting and good-humored discussion to create a second place into which Esteban squeezed himself.
Pito popped out of the door to the kitchen and presumed living quarters, carrying a basket into which he dropped dirty dishes. They were plastic and crude, locally pressed from exterior sheeting.
Esteban whispered in his daughter’s ear. She passed the message to her mother at the window and received two small glasses with a bottle of ruby liqueur, three-quarters full.
“From my father-in-law’s farm,” Esteban said as he poured. “That’s where we get the food as well.”
Annunciata reached past to put a serving platter, not a normal dish, of chicken with rice and a variety of heavily processed vegetables on the table before Moden. “Grandpa Mordechai won’t grow gage,” she said. “He says people must eat, mustn’t they?”
“To your health!” Esteban said, raising his glass.
“And yours,” the Frisian responded. He jostled the neighbor on his right in grabbing his glass. The liqueur was thick, almost a syrup, with a fruity flavor. Not unpleasant, and there was enough alcohol to bite the back of Moden’s tongue.
“Both syndicates have been after Mordechai,” Esteban said with a frown. “L’Escorial pushed him off his old farm, so he terraced a hillside that nobody claimed. I helped, the whole family helped, and his neighbors too. He’s stubborn. I agree with him, but I worry.”
The food was delicious. “Have things gotten worse recently with the sides arming?” Moden asked through a bite.
“No, no,” Esteban said. “Since so many of the gunmen came here to Potosi, there’s fewer left to bother the farmers. Most of the farms grow food for themselves, but they grow gage too for one syndicate or the other. So that they’ll be protected.”
A family got up to leave. The wife paid Rosaria with three separate credit chips. From the prices chalked beside the serving window, the five dinners totaled less than ten pesos—one and a half Frisian thalers. The citizens of Potosi didn’t have easy access to credit terminals which could have combined the small amounts into a single chip for convenience.
The outer door opened. The chatter stilled. Three men wearing blue shouldered in. All carried powerguns: a pair of sub-machine guns and the third man festooned with four separate holstered pistols as well as a selection of knives.
Esteban stood up, awkwardly since he had to step over the bench to do so. Citizens—his neighbors—slid to either side, half-crouching toward the ends of the room.
“Gentlemen,” Esteban said, “this is not a bar. I’m sure you’ll find better entertainment elsewhere.”
The leader of the Astra gunmen appeared to be the man with the pistols. “You got a red sign downstairs,” he said. “We thought we’d check the place out.”
“The sign is the sacred heart of our lord Jesus Christ!” Rosaria blurted from the serving window. “We have nothing to do with L’Escorial here!”
“Nunci,” Esteban said in a low voice. “Go he
lp your mother in the kitchen.”
“She stays,” ordered an Astra. He wagged the muzzle of his sub-machine gun to emphasize the point.
“They used to have a red sign,” the gunman to the leader’s other side tittered. “It had a little accident when we come by it.”
The trio moved further into the cafe. The local patrons flowed behind them on both sides and out the door, like damping fluid when a shock absorber compresses.
Moden wore a pistol in a belt holster. He wasn’t a particularly good shot. He certainly wasn’t good enough to drop three men in the fraction of a second he’d have before the sub-machine gun aimed at him blew his head off.
“Please,” Esteban said. “This is just a cafe. We have no sides, we are poor people.”
The leader took the bottle of liqueur and drank directly from it, eyeing Moden past the plane of sluggish red fluid. He handed the bottle to the man aiming at Moden. “Who’s the crip?” he asked.
“My name’s Sten Moden,” the Frisian answered calmly. His hand lay on his lap. The closed flap of his holster was in sight of the gunmen. “I’m from Nieuw Friesland, a businessman.”
“He’s a leftie!” said the Astra who’d warned Nunci not to leave. “Get it? A leftie!”
Without warning he triggered a single shot. The cyan bolt struck near the top of the kitchen door. Wood blew outward in blazing splinters, leaving a hole the size of a soup plate in the thin panel.
Rosaria screamed. Nunci stood transfixed, and Esteban’s fists balled.
Sten Moden gripped the table’s central leg. He lifted and hurled forward the massive piece of furniture with all his strength. Both sub-machine guns fired, into the tabletop and ceiling as the huge club pistoned toward the three Astras. Moden felt the shock of the bolts through his hand, but the table was too solid for the light charges of a pistol or sub-machine gun to tear it apart.
The tabletop hit the far wall, or almost, with a soggy thump. Moden pulled back, then slammed his weapon toward the wall again with his shoulder behind it.