by David Drake
He reached the bottom of the stairs. He heard the van’s diesel roar to life. Serafina turned, drawing Ortega with her back into the room. Coke ran out into the street. He was too late. The van was a block and a half away, still accelerating.
A crowd had gathered at a discreet distance, drawn by the shooting and the corpse lying half in, half out of the stairwell. The pimp’s eyes were glazed below the ruin of his forehead.
“One, this is Four,” Coke’s commo helmet announced in the voice of Lieutenant Barbour. “Something’s happened at what used to be Larrinaga’s house. I think you’d better be present when L’Escorial gets to checking. Do you have transportation? Over.”
“That’s a negative, Four,” Coke said, watching the port operations van disappear in the distance. “Over.”
“Roger, somebody’ll pick you up on the way,” Barbour said. “Four out.”
Matthew Coke stared into the night. Spectators shifted when his blank expression fell across them, but they were only blurs to his consciousness.
He tried to change the sub-machine gun’s half-expended magazine for a full one. He had to give up the attempt, because his hands were trembling too badly.
Metal scraps and pieces of broken glass hung from an ankle-height string concealed in the broad-leafed ground cover. Despite his visor’s light amplification, Vierziger would have missed the warning device if he hadn’t been looking for something of the sort. He knelt and tugged the trip-line with his left hand, making the trash rattle.
The only response was greater stillness.
“Larrinaga,” Vierziger called in a low voice.
There was a rustle from the bole of the fallen tree. “Who’s there?” Larrinaga demanded.
Larrinaga was crouched in the opening, gripping a club with metal spikes. He wouldn’t be able to make out Vierziger’s crouching form against the background of the trees between him and the rear of Potosi’s buildings.
“Vierziger,” the Frisian said. He switched on the miniflood in his left hand.
Larrinaga jumped as abruptly as if Vierziger had shot him. His head knocked against the lip of his shelter, but the punky wood cushioned the blow.
Vierziger stood up. “Don’t worry,” he said with the touch of a sneer in his voice. “I’m not here to put you out of your misery.”
The local man scrambled to his feet. The intense light made him sneeze. Vierziger slid the control down, dimming the glare to a yellow glow.
“What do you want then?” Larrinaga said. He seemed to notice the club for the first time. He dropped it at his feet.
Vierziger’s lips quirked with wry approval. He clipped the dimmed light to his belt, then slid the strap of his attaché case off his left shoulder. His right hand remained free at all times.
“Here,” Vierziger said. “Take it and get to the port. You’re booked on the Argent Server and she lifts in twenty minutes. You’d better be aboard, because I suspect it’s going to be a while before any later ship gets clearance.”
“I can’t—” Larrinaga said.
“There’s money in the case,” the Frisian snarled. “And there’s a cyclo in the alley that’ll get you there in time. Get going.”
“I—” said Larrinaga, and his face smoothed in dawning comprehension. He knelt and thumbed the latches of the reptile-skin case.
The six portions of a psychic ambiance gleamed from the bed of sprayfoam which cushioned them and held them in place.
Larrinaga carefully closed the case. He began to cry.
“You can find an expert to set it up again when you’ve settled,” Vierziger said harshly. “I’m told that anybody good enough to do the job will be honored to work on it, on a Suzette. Now get out of here before it’s too late!”
He grabbed Larrinaga by the shoulder and dragged him upright with fingers that could bend steel. “Get going!”
The local man stumbled toward the buildings of Potosi and the vehicle that would take him away from them forever. He turned at the edge of the lighted arc.
“Why are you doing this, Master Vierziger?” he asked.
“I’m damned if I know,” the Frisian said. “But then, I’m damned anyway, not so?”
Vierziger began to laugh. The sound mounted swiftly to a register suggesting bats and madness.
The laughter, if it was laughter, broke off. “Shall I shoot you now?” Vierziger shouted. “Get going!”
“Thank you, sir,” Larrinaga said. He turned and jogged off through the familiar darkness.
“I don’t expect it’ll make the least difference in the long run!” Vierziger called after him. “But try to make a life for yourself this time. There’s that one chance in hell.”
In a much softer voice he added, “Even in Hell.”
One of the L’Escorial trucks mounted a bank of floodlights behind the armored cab instead of a heavy weapon. The floods weren’t well aligned, but their glare made the former Larrinaga house stand out like the lead actor during curtain call.
The gap in the front of the building was a nearly perfect circle, about two meters in diameter. The mass of ceramic casting belonging there was a heap of black grit, trailing off both inside and outside the dwelling.
Suterbilt and the three generations of Lurias stared at the hole as Margulies drove up with Coke. Daun and Moden were already present. Thirty or forty L’Escorial gunmen and four armored trucks surrounded the site, and there were more men inside.
All six of the fireflies danced a complex pattern around the Lurias. Pepe wore the controller.
“How did it happen?” Ramon Luria demanded, shaking his fist at the hole. “How did they do this?”
“Either sonics …” Coke said as he walked through the line of L’Escorial guards unchallenged. “Which I doubt, because of the time it’d take, or—”
He pinched some of the shattered ceramic between his thumb and forefinger, then sniffed the vapors still clinging to the material. “Nope, that’s what it was. A spalling charge. That’s the danger with monocastings. You really need to have spaced layers to prevent this sort of thing from happening, though that degrades projectile resistance.”
A four-wheeled L’Escorial patrol vehicle pulled up with two red-uniformed gunmen and Johann Vierziger aboard. The dapper Frisian sauntered over to the blast site.
Pepe Luria turned toward Coke. “Now tell me what spalling charge means,” he said in a deadly voice. His hands gripped the edges of his controller. “Instantly!”
“It means a quantity of inhibited plasticized explosive,” Sten Moden said calmly, “which is spread in a thin layer over the target surface by a precursor charge and detonated from the open face a microsecond later.”
Moden ran his fingers carefully across the inner surface of the hole. The ceramic was rippled in a series of surflike conchoidal fractures.
“The shock waves,” Moden continued, “reflect within the plate. A ceramic of this sort has virtually no elasticity. When the stresses peak, the material itself crumbles.”
He raised a handful of the glittering black residue and let it dribble down through his fingers.
Niko Daun eased up beside Coke and whispered directly into the major’s ear. Coke’s eyes blanked. He carefully looked away from Johann Vierziger.
“I don’t believe it,” Suterbilt said. “The house is a fortress, a fortress.”
“You should have hired the FDF sooner,” Vierziger said coolly. “Or perhaps Master Suterbilt and I should have stayed longer when we visited earlier tonight.”
“What would a few more men have mattered?” shouted Pepe Luria. “There must have been twenty Astras, more even! Look there!”
The house’s interior lights were on. The guards’ sprawled bodies looked more like cast-off clothes and lumber than they did a scene of carnage.
Pepe’s hands twitched. One of the fireflies above him suddenly pirouetted, firing its powergun as it spun. One bolt glared from the roof coping. Three more blazed out into the uncleared forest, lighting small fires.
The last round snapped back toward Potosi.
Raul put a shaky hand on his grandson’s shoulder to calm him. “Not that,” the Old Man said. “We don’t want Madame Yarnell coming down on us.”
Raul looked at Sten Moden. “If the bomb was outside the house,” he said, “why didn’t it blow the wall in instead of out?”
“It didn’t blow in either direction,” the logistics officer explained. “The structure vibrated itself apart.”
He pointed. “The fragments fell in both directions, you see?”
As Moden said, as much of the shattered wall was in the slope across the living area floor as was outside the wall.
Daun drifted away. Coke motioned Vierziger over by crooking his finger.
“Is there something you want to tell me, Johann?” Coke asked in a low voice.
“No,” said Vierziger, “there isn’t. But thank you for asking, Matthew.”
“All right, they’ve had their game,” Pepe Luria cried. “Now we shall take the set. Tijuca! Tijuca! Where’s the drunken bastard Tijuca!”
Pepe’s expression was as furious as that of a weasel in a trap. “That’s it, I’ll—”
Mary Margulies stepped forward. “I told Angel I’d cover for him tonight,” she said calmly. “We got used to trading off like that in the old days.”
Pepe started to shout a curse in the Frisian’s face. He looked at her more closely before the words came out. He settled back on his heels, then said, “Will you? All right then. We’ll take eight men only, and two patrol cars.”
“What are you going to do, Pepe?” Ramon asked nervously. He touched his son’s wrist to draw the youth’s attention. “We daren’t anger the cartel.”
Pepe’s snarl melted into a smile even more cruel and terrifying. “In and out, gone before anyone knows there’s been an attack, hey?” he said in a husky whisper. “That’s the way the Astras do it, and they’ve had no trouble. We’ll do the same.”
“Their warehouse?” Raul asked, frowning.
“No, we’ll kidnap Peres!” his grandson said. “And the price to get him back alive will be for him and the Widow to leave Cantilucca forever!”
Cantilucca: Day Seven
A jitney filled with gunmen—Margulies thought they were L’Escorials, but the muted gang colors of the present didn’t show up at night—rolled down the nearly empty street. The vehicle swayed from side to side. The passengers cursed and flung bottles. Before Madame Yarnell arrived on Cantilucca, they would have been shooting.
The L’Escorial acting as communications officer, still holding the radio handset to his ear, turned to face Pepe in the back seat with Margulies. “They’ve taken in another case of liquor. There’s no chance she’ll be moving before noon.”
“Yarnell parties every night,” Luria muttered angrily. “Imported food, wines from Earth to drink. And we pay for it! She acts like she’s a queen.”
“On Cantilucca,” Margulies said, “she is a queen.”
A pair of jitneys drove out of the garage beneath the building opposite. The structure’s lower three stories were an Astra recreational center of varied capability. None of the men aboard noticed the pair of patrol cars in the alleys across the street.
“He’ll be coming soon,” Pepe said. He peered down at the firefly controller.
“No,” Margulies said.
Pepe reached for the power switch anyway. The Frisian caught his hand.
“No,” she said. “Fireflies are good for an area target—”
A lie as far as she was concerned, but the politic thing to say just now.
“—but this has to be precise. Let me handle the shooting.”
Pepe’s faced blanked in white fury, then relaxed again in a smile. The change was as sudden as a pair of eyeblinks. Margulies put her left hand back on the fore-end of the 2-cm weapon she’d brought for this operation.
“Area target,” Pepe said. “Yes. But I’ve set them to attack blue, you see? They’ll kill the guards, but Peres doesn’t wear blue himself!”
“Peres usually doesn’t wear blue,” Margulies corrected. “You’re betting that he won’t come out of that whorehouse with his new girlfriend’s blue bra around his neck.”
She shrugged. “Likely so. But why risk it?”
The radio set crackled. “He’s coming!” warned the commo officer.
Margulies stepped out of the car and took her position at the mouth of the alley. The wall against which she stood blurred her outline, but she had no real concealment beyond the darkness. She held her heavy shoulder weapon diagonally across the front of her body.
The garage’s automatic door rose with a series of rhythmic bangs. The gigolo’s newly repaired aircar howled up the ramp.
Peres himself was driving. He misjudged the slope and struck the street lip. The plastic landing skids flexed and bounced the nose high.
Margulies fired. Her 2-cm bolt stabbed the right front fan nacelle. The blue flash sent blades and fragments of the shorted windings in all directions, like shrapnel from a bomb burst.
The vehicle yawed right, hit the pavement at 30 kph, and cartwheeled.
The armored garage door started to close automatically. While the aircar was still spinning, flinging off bits of body panel, Margulies fired at where the edge of the door mated with the track along the jamb. The plasma bolt vaporized a section of the track and hammered the door panel like a collision with a speeding truck.
The door skewed in its frame and stuck. Nobody was going to get out of the garage to aid Peres unless they wanted to crawl through the twenty-five-centimeter gap beneath the lower edge of the jammed panel.
Both L’Escorial four-wheelers accelerated from their ambush positions. Pepe Luria stood, clinging to the back of the commo officer’s seat. He held an automatic carbine in his free hand.
The aircar landed upside down. It continued to rotate slowly, driven by the vibration of the two fan nacelles still spinning at full revs. The right rear installation had torn itself apart when that corner of the vehicle slammed down violently and drove the side of the housing into the blade arc.
The L’Escorial cars skidded and stopped on opposite sides of Peres’ vehicle. The roof of the aircar was compressed but not flattened to the level of the car’s body.
A youth crawled from the passenger side. He, wore a blue posing suit, blue sandals, and nothing else. He was crying and the crash had bloodied his forehead.
Pepe Luria pointed his carbine from the hip and triggered a burst. The weapon fired large-bore explosive bullets, rocket-assisted to keep the recoil manageable. The rocket exhausts were red sparks across the night. Two of the projectiles hit the boy in the chest, blowing him backward into the wrecked aircar.
The quartet of L’Escorials from the other four-wheeler dragged open the driver’s side door of the aircar. One of them smashed the warped support pillar with the butt of his 2-cm weapon to make it release.
Peres screamed in terror. Two of the men pulled him out. A third threw a restraint net over the prisoner, and the fourth L’Escorial—the man with the 2-cm weapon—swatted him with the flat of the gun butt to silence the blubbering cries. They tossed Peres facedown into the back of their vehicle and got in themselves.
Mary Margulies stood at the edge of the alley, looking down the street toward Astra headquarters and the jitneys full of gunmen who’d driven that way moments before. The only thing moving in the night was the aircar, quivering on its back like a half-crushed bug.
“Get in!” Pepe Luria called to her.
Margulies glanced aside at him. She waved. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll walk, thank you. You’ve got what you came for.”
The pair of patrol cars made tight low-speed turns and accelerated together up the street. The L’Escorial gunmen shouted to one another in glee.
There was a brief squeal of metal from the underground garage. Somebody was trying to free the door with a prybar. An argument broke out inside, identifiable from the timbre of the voices though the wor
ds were inaudible.
Margulies changed her weapon’s magazine for a fresh one. She set off toward Hathaway House, staying close to building fronts and trying to look in all directions. She was nearly home before she heard the wail of sirens from Astra headquarters.
The Roberson & Co. trading post in the hamlet of Veridad was separate from the Astra patrol base there, but loud music from the stockade housing a score of gunmen pulsed through the walls. Roberson shivered, clutched his arms around himself as if against a cold wind.
“He’s not coming,” he said to the Widow Guzman. “It’s some sort of—”
The door at the back of the trading post gave onto a fenced storage area, inaccessible from the outside. The door opened. A tall, nervous-looking Frisian soldier, not a man the Astra leaders had met before, stepped out.
“Barbour?” the Widow said in surprise.
“How did you get there?” Roberson gasped.
“I’m Barbour,” the Frisian said. “And don’t worry about how I got through your fence, I did, that’s all. Did you bring the money?”
The merchant glanced reflexively at the case on the floor beside him, behind the counter. They’d expected Barbour to arrive for the meeting he’d arranged by the post’s front door.
There was a pistol in the case as well. To Roberson’s surprise, the Frisian appeared to be unarmed.
“You claim you can free Adolpho,” said the Widow Guzman. “If you can do that, you’ll have your pay. You’ll have any pay you ask.”
“In open-remitter chips, so there’s no way they can trace back where it came from?” Barbour warned. He looked as skittish as a roach when the lights come on.
“Yes, yes, just as you said,” Roberson snapped. “Now, how are you going to release Peres?”
He couldn’t keep the distaste from his tone as he spoke the gigolo’s name, but he hadn’t even attempted to argue with the Widow when the Frisian made his offer. Barbour had called on what was supposed to be a private direct line between Roberson’s office and Astra HQ. That in itself lent credence to his proposition.