by David Drake
“She’s the one who brought it up,” Moden said with a half-smile. “I suppose we’d all been thinking about it, but she said it aloud.”
“She said,” Niko amplified, “that this was sort of like wiping your ass with a broken beer bottle—sooner or later, you were going to wind up in a world of hurt. But if she survived, she didn’t want to remember that she hadn’t tried to change things on Cantilucca.”
Coke drank half his beer in a series of smooth swallows. Nobody spoke again until he stopped to breathe and brush his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll work up a plan of action,” he said. “We’ll have to wait for the cartel representative to leave, but that shouldn’t take long.”
Daun frowned. “She said she might stay here for years, sir,” he said. “We aren’t going to …?”
“No,” Coke said. “No, Madame Yarnell isn’t going to bury herself on Cantilucca for any longer than necessary. A few months at the outside. Her coming is actually better for our purposes. When she does leave, the lid’s going to come off with a bang.”
The red hovercraft Pepe Luria brought back from Delos whined slowly down the street. Its presence cleared a path through the mostly civilian traffic, even though the overt threat of guns and murder was held temporarily in abeyance. The vehicle stopped alongside the table where the three Frisians sat.
A red-veiled side window slid down. Pepe was in the driver’s seat. His father and grandfather sat in back.
Ramon leaned forward to get a better view past Raul. “Come with us, Major Coke,” he called. “We’ll ride in my Pepe’s fine new toy, shall we not? And we’ll talk.”
Sten Moden’s face was blank. Niko Daun looked questioningly from the hovercraft to his commander, taut as the hammer spring of a cocked pistol. Moden, seeing the same danger that Coke did, put his hand firmly on the sensor tech’s right wrist.
Niko was desperately eager to do the right thing, but he hadn’t a clue as to what the right thing was under these circumstances. That was a bad combination….
“Glad to learn there’s something to talk about,” Coke said easily as he got to his feet.
“He’ll be okay, then?” Daun murmured to Moden as the hovercraft drove away with the major.
“He’s got as good a chance as any of the rest of us,” the logistics officer said. He finished his beer in a single mighty draft, then banged the mug down. “Another?” he asked.
Daun shook his head with an impish smile. “I’m meeting a friend in twenty minutes,” he said. His expression segued into a frown. “Unless you think, you know, with the major and all?”
Moden shrugged. “He’ll call us if he needs us,” he said. “Don’t get yourself so fucked up you can’t function, that’s all. But you can’t be a hundred percent on all day forever.”
“Yeah, well, this is nothing serious,” the younger man said casually. “She’s a nice enough girl, but it’s just passing the time.”
He glanced at Moden from the corners of his eyes. “Suppose the major’s getting anywhere with the lady from the port office, sir?”
The logistics officer looked at Daun hard. “Do you suppose that’s any of our business?” he asked.
Daun laughed without embarrassment. So far as he was concerned, there was no rank when guys talked about women. “Not business at all, sir,” he said. “Though the Lord knows Potosi isn’t short of that kind of business establishment.”
Moden laughed also. “Yeah, well, we could ask Bob,” he said. “But I think we won’t, okay?”
The big man got to his feet. “Twenty minutes is time enough for a beer, kid. Sounds like you need to be slowed down some anyhow.”
Pepe had raised the hovercraft’s window even before Coke could open the passenger door. The youngest Luria’s feelings about Coke were a complex blend of disdain, the hostility of a dominating male for a rival, and fear. Pepe was smart enough to know that Matthew Coke was someone he should fear.
Coke’s feelings about Pepe were much simpler: Pepe was a scorpion Coke had found in his boot, to be dealt with directly—in both senses of the word.
The hovercraft wallowed into a turn and proceeded north, toward the spaceport. The chassis was a standard civilian model. With the full four passengers aboard and the armor added by some custom shop on Delos, the vehicle was seriously underpowered. It was a toy, just as Ramon had said.
“Here’s the earnest money,” Raul said abruptly. He extended a quivering hand between the front seats to pass Coke a credit chip.
“Now, how quickly can you get your gunmen here?” Ramon asked. “Madame Yarnell will be leaving Cantilucca in six days, maybe seven.”
Coke took the chip and held it in his hand.
A pair of jitneys was passing in opposite directions in the street ahead. There was room for the hovercraft to fit between them, but the vehicle’s damping program hadn’t been upgraded to take account of the weight of the armor.
Pepe steered left. The car had by now accelerated to 45, perhaps 50 kph. The back end swayed outward, continuing the vector of the directional change after the driver centered his wheel again.
The left-side jitney carried a farm family—two adults, four children, and a vast burden of produce piled on top. The hovercraft sideswiped it with a bang and screech of metal. Three-meter-long stalks of sugar cane slapped the car’s windshield. They left syrupy blurs across the film-darkened glass.
Pepe cursed viciously. He continued to overcorrect for the next hundred meters. The car fishtailed up the street, its paint scarred beyond the capacity of anyone on Cantilucca to match.
“The times are the same they’ve always been,” Coke said. “Seven sidereal days, plus or minus, to get the message to Nieuw Friesland. A day to load the companies. Five days to get them here since the troopship will come direct. Plus whatever time it takes Camp Able to decide whether or not to take the contract. If they take the contract.”
“You’ll send the message now,” Pepe said in a rasping whisper. “We’re carrying you to the port to do that. And you’ll see to it that your mercenaries do arrive on schedule, Master Major, or it will be very unfortunate for you and your friends. You don’t expect to leave before all the business with Astra is completed to our satisfaction, do you?”
“Now, Pepe,” Ramon said nervously. “We don’t want the major to think that we don’t trust him.”
“I trust him,” Pepe sneered. “Because he knows he’s a dead man if he doesn’t do what he’s promised to do.”
“What the major has promised …” Coke said in a thin voice as his spirit floated out of his body to observe. “Is that he’ll inform his superiors of the situation on Cantilucca. I doubt they’ll act as you desire. There’s every reason to expect your Delian mistress will summon a large force of her own as soon as the FDF arrives. Camp Able isn’t going to send two companies into a ratfuck.”
“Madame Yarnell is going to be recalled!” Ramon said.
They were beyond the outskirts of Potosi. The hovercraft had accelerated to about 75 kph, probably its best speed with this load. The vehicle pogoed over the bad surface, but the ride was more comfortable than it would have been in a jitney or the port van.
“I heard you before,” Coke said. “When she leaves, I will immediately inform Camp Able of the fact.”
Pepe gave him a look of boiling hatred. The flexible skirts of the car’s plenum chamber brushed a treebole. Contact sent the vehicle in a slow carom toward the other side of the road.
“A bomb will go off in a consignment of Astra gage after it arrives on Delos,” Raul Luria said in a voice as jagged as a crosscut saw.
“Grandpapa—” Pepe said.
“I will handle this,” the Old Man retorted. “There will be a fire, perhaps great destruction. It will be far more important to the cartel than anything happening on Cantilucca is. When Madame Yarnell goes to Delos to investigate, that will be the moment to sweep Astra away forever.”
“And by the time she comes back,” Ramon added complacently, “there will
be peace all across the planet, just as we all desire.”
“I see….” said Coke as a placeholder while he thought. “You don’t think the cartel might take a serious view of this bomb?”
The car was nearing the spaceport reservation. Warned by his previous control problems, Pepe started the braking process in good time.
The young man looked at Coke. “Do you think I’m a fool?” he said. “We have nothing to do with the business. It’s Astra gage, and its not traveling on a TST hull. If they do trace the particular drum back, they’ll find it was placed in the shipment by a port flunky.”
“Not one of our people,” Ramon chuckled. “He knows nothing about it. He thinks he’s working a scam to substitute tailings for pure gage. Even the whore we’re working through doesn’t know more than that.”
The hovercraft pulled up in front of the passenger operations building. The idled fans imparted a low-frequency wobble to the vehicle as it rested on its skirts.
“Now will you send your message?” Pepe demanded.
“You bet,” Coke said. “You needn’t wait around—I’ll find my own way back.”
Coke waited until he’d closed the car door behind him before he keyed his commo helmet. Pilar Ortega would be inside at the desk, and he didn’t want her to overhear either. She’d be glad to see him, as she always was….
“Two and Four,” he said, alerting Moden and Barbour. “I’m going to need information on a shipment of gage that went out yesterday or today. Somebody, probably a port official, doctored a manifest, and I need to know his name soonest.”
Margulies stood at the front door, looking out through the triangular viewport. The evening traffic was somewhat lighter than it had been with a thousand more gunmen in town, but civilians had reappeared on the street in nearly a great enough number to balance the loss.
The two police huddled in a corner of the saloon. At another table, Georg Hathaway chatted morosely with his friend Larrinaga.
“There we go,” said Sten Moden with satisfaction. He expanded the sidebar into the main screen. “There’s the anomaly, sure enough.”
Bob Barbour sat in a folding chair beside the console. Moden had handled the equipment enough in his presence that Barbour no longer hovered like a mother hen when the logistics officer used the console.
The intelligence officer leaned forward to check the line Moden highlighted. “Serial numbers out of sequence?” he said. His doubt was evident only in the perfect neutrality with which he stated the evidence he saw.
“Not the Astra serial number,” Moden explained with satisfaction. “That wouldn’t mean anything. This is the transaction number, the slug the port computer gave the drum at initial processing. That ought to be perfectly linear, but see—this one appears in a sequence of drums delivered three days later.”
“I’ll be hanged,” Barbour said. “I didn’t know there were transaction numbers different from the manifest serials.”
He looked at Moden. “Sten,” he said. “You just taught me something.”
The big man grinned. “A lot of people think supply is boring,” he said. “I didn’t find it that way.”
Still grinning, though the expression took on a certain stiffness, he patted the scar of his left shoulder and added, “Sometimes it’s way too exciting.”
“Nothing’s boring if it’s in your soul,” the intelligence officer said. “All right, do you want to run the check on who was on duty or shall I? When we cross-check the time the drum dropped out and the time it reappeared, we ought to have our boy.”
“I’m coming in,” the console reported in the voice of Johann Vierziger.
Moden looked up at Margulies. “Was he out with the major?” he asked.
“Just out,” Barbour murmured before the security lieutenant could respond. “The major’s still at the port.”
“Waiting for us to answer him,” Moden realized aloud. He got up from the console. “Go ahead, Bob. Do the personnel check. Two hands’ll get the data out quicker.”
He grinned. “And anyway, you’re going to have kittens if I don’t let you play with your lady, here.”
When Margulies pulled the door a crack open, Vierziger entered the lobby of Hathaway House wraith-swift. He looked at the men at the console. “You’re succeeding?” he asked.
“So far, so good,” Barbour murmured as his fingers danced over the keys. He didn’t look up from his work, the two parallel half-screens of data which he was correlating.
“I’m glad somebody’s doing something useful,” Vierziger said in a voice of bridled fury. He walked into the saloon alcove.
Margulies turned so that her sergeant was within the arc of her vision, though she instinctively avoided focusing on Vierziger. Tonight he gave the impression of a door glowing white with the fire behind it, restrained until something happens to destroy the panel’s integrity. After that—
“You!” Vierziger said. “Larrinaga. What are you doing here?”
The local man looked at the dapper Frisian. For a moment Mary Margulies thought Larrinaga was going to make a smart remark. She knew she wasn’t fast enough to stop Vierziger if that happened, she didn’t think any human being was fast enough.
Larrinaga swallowed and said, “Nothing, I suppose. That’s all I’ve done for a long time.”
“Get up,” Vierziger said. Larrinaga blinked at him.
“Get up!” Vierziger repeated, his voice cutting like a bread knife honed to a wire edge. His left hand reached for Larrinaga’s throat.
Georg Hathaway rose from his chair and backed away, mumbling to himself. Larrinaga jumped to his feet. “Are you going to kill me?” he shouted. “Go on! That way maybe I’ll see Suzette again!”
“Johann—” Mary Margulies said. Her arms were out to her sides; her hands spread wide.
Vierziger slapped the local man, an open-handed blow only to the cheek. It cracked like a pistol shot and knocked Larrinaga to the floor.
“Vierziger, slow down,” Sten Moden said, stepping from the console into the bar alcove. His manner was neither threatening nor afraid. He moved like a storm blowing off the sea.
With the same hand he’d used to slap, his left, Vierziger reached into his purse. He tossed several credit chips onto Larrinaga’s chest.
“There you go!” he said. “Three hundred thalers, enough to get you off this cesspool of a world and off to somewhere that you can be a man again. Do you want to do that? Do you want to be a man?”
Larrinaga got to his feet. “I am a man, Master Vierziger,” he said in a raspy voice. He met Vierziger’s eyes, and that took balls even if he really wanted to die. Margulies knew there were worse things than death, and she was pretty sure that Johann Vierziger had seen some of them.
Moden stood quietly, arm’s length from the pair of men. The situation was under control. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself by moving again.
Larrinaga gathered the credit chips in his hand and offered them back to the Frisian. Vierziger didn’t move.
Larrinaga put the money on the table at which he’d been sitting. “Thank you for the offer,” he said. “I don’t choose to leave Cantilucca while …what remains of my wife is here. But I’m not going to buy our house back by sitting here and cadging drinks, am I?”
He stepped around Vierziger because the Frisian wouldn’t shift to let him by. Larrinaga nodded to Moden and to Margulies. “Thank you for your hospitality, Georg,” he called to Hathaway. “I won’t return until I’m able to pay down my bill, though.”
He pulled open the front door and was gone. The mark of Vierziger’s hand on his sallow cheek blazed like a flag.
“Oh my goodness,” mumbled Georg Hathaway. He set upright the chair that had fallen over. “Oh my goodness!”
Moden sat down beside Bob Barbour. When things were serious, the big man seemed more like a force of nature than a human being.
Margulies let out a deep sigh of relief. She looked at Vierziger and shook her head ruefully. “You kno
w,” she said, “I gotta hand it to you, Johann. You may just have saved that silly bastard.”
Vierziger looked at her. She remembered what she’d thought about the things he’d seen. “Nobody can save another person,” he said, so quietly that Margulies thought perhaps she’d imagined the words.
Vierziger walked to the staircase. “Niko!” he called. “Come down here, please, with your kit. We have work to do.”
Sten Moden glanced at the security lieutenant. He raised an eyebrow. Margulies shrugged.
Daun appeared at the top of the stairs, trying to buckle his equipment belt one-handed. The other hand held his larger equipment case and the sling of his sub-machine gun.
“What’s up?” he asked, jouncing down the steps.
“We’re going to check out security for our new employers,” Vierziger said. He opened the coat closet beside the front door and took out the attaché case he’d put there. The case was made of—at least covered with—reptile hide of some sort, black and shiny and as exquisite as every other part of Vierziger’s ensemble.
The only weapon he carried was the pistol over his right hip.
“Driving or walking?” the sensor tech asked. He stopped in the lobby and fastened the belt properly.
“You’re driving us,” Vierziger answered. “I’ll give you directions.”
He nodded goodbye to the others as he closed the door behind him.
“Doesn’t handle himself much like a sergeant, does he?” Sten Moden said to nobody in particular after the door closed.
“Yeah, I noticed that too,” Margulies said dryly. “Sten, did you know Joachim Steuben? Colonel Hammer’s hit man?”
Moden shrugged. “Saw him once, a long way away. I’d heard he was dead.”
“He is dead,” Margulies said. “I saw the incident report. Took a 2-cm bolt slap between the shoulder-blades. No trouble with the identification—head and limbs weren’t touched. But there’s no curst doubt he was dead—”
The two officers looked at the armored door without speaking further.
“Bingo!” said Barbour. He’d gone on with his search while everyone else was focused on Johann Vierziger. “I’ve got what the major’s looking for!”