The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (21 page)

“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 sub-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.

“My name’s Larrinaga,” he said. He was younger than he looked; thirty years standard at the most. “And I’m nothing, that’s who I am.”

“Pedro’s had a difficult time this past year,” Georg said; half-confiding, half in an attempt to forestall the wrath of the little stranger who made him very uncomfortable to watch. “His wife died. She was an artist in psychic ambiances, a very fine one, known all across the galaxy.”

“Really?” said Niko Daun. “I’ve worked in PAs myself. Who was she? The wife.”

His tone wasn’t precisely dismissive, but there was a challenge in it. Daun didn’t regard himself as a top PA artist, but he didn’t expect to find a better one on this wretched planet.

Hathaway drew drinks. Larrinaga looked up and said, “My wife was Suzette. That was her working name. She was a saint. And there’ll never be an artist like her. Never in all time!”

“Suzette was from here?” Daun blurted. “Blood and martyrs!”

Margulies raised an eyebrow in the direction of the sensor tech.

Daun turned his palms up. “She’s—” he said. “Well there’s taste.

But the best PA artist in the galaxy, yeah, you can make a case for it. I’m amazed. . . . Well, I didn’t think she’d have come from a place so . . .”

He looked at Larrinaga, who was staring morosely into his beer mug. “Suzette’s work is so tranquil, you see,” Daun said. “It’s not what I’d expect coming from Cantilucca. From Potosi, anyhow.”

Georg handed out beverages in rough-glazed ceramic mugs of local manufacture. The beer, for all his praises of it, had an oily undertaste that Moden found unpleasant. He’d drunk worse in the field, wine that had rotted rather than fermenting properly . . . and there were worse things in life than bad booze.

Daun sipped his mug of frothy, bitter, cacao drink with approval. His lips pursed as he considered Larrinaga and the situation. A Tech 4’s pay didn’t run to art the like of Suzette’s, but there was always the chance . . .

“I wonder,” he said, “if there’s any of your wife’s work still on Cantilucca? Some minor pieces, perhaps, that—”

The local man clutched his empty mug with both hands. He began to cry. He made a convulsive gesture that would have swept the mug against the wall to shatter.

Vierziger, who was standing arm’s length away and didn’t seem to be watching, caught the mug in the air. He set it on the serving counter.

Larrinaga lurched up from his seat. “I’m going to go piss,” he said. He angrily wiped his eyes with his forearm. “That’s fair, isn’t it? I’ve pissed my life away!”

“Pedro?” Hathaway said. “Can I show them the draft? It’s not the same, but they’ll get the idea.”

“Do what you please,” Larrinaga called as he left the alcove.

“He leaves it here,” the innkeeper explained as he opened a cabinet beneath the serving counter. “He doesn’t have a place of his own anymore.”

Margulies returned to the saloon alcove. She’d taken a beer to Barbour at his console. “Trouble with the gangs?” she guessed aloud. “They robbed him?”

“Well, not quite that,” Georg said. “You see, when Suzette died, Pedro sold his house to the factor of Trans-Star Trading on Cantilucca. His name’s Suterbilt.”

“Suterbilt is a criminal,” Evie said from the lobby. She sat in an upholstered chair, knitting as her eyes stared into time. “He’s no better than the thugs he bankrolls.”

“Now, Evie, you know we shouldn’t say things like that,” Georg said. “But Suterbilt has, well, a financial stake in L’Escorial. That’s personal, not TST.”

The innkeeper was setting up a table-model hologram projector. Niko moved to help him. The unit had a lot of flash and glitter, but it looked clumsy compared to the trim projectors in use on Nieuw Friesland.

“So a shotgun sale?” Margulies pressed. The story would probably come out, from Mistress Hathaway if not from her husband, but Margulies didn’t want to wait.

“Not that either,” Georg said. He obviously felt uncomfortable speaking about the gunmen and their masters, though the chance to gossip with these folk had attraction as well.

“Not really, at least,” he continued. “Pedro had been taking a lot of gage, mostly gage, because he’d loved Suzette so much. He wouldn’t have sold at all if he hadn’t been, well, if he’d been in better condition. Because Suzette’s greatest masterpiece is a part of the home where they’d lived, you see.”

“And then he lost the money,” Evie added harshly. “He was drugged silly, and he gambled, and he lost every peso of the price.”

“The price had been a good one, though,” her husband said quickly. “Master Suterbilt didn’t cheat him, not really, since the art can’t be moved and its value’s only what it’s worth on Cantilucca.”

“Suterbilt didn’t cheat him in the notary’s office, you mean,” Evie said. “He left that job for his friends at the roulette table.”

Her fingers clicked the needles with mechanical precision. Moden thought of the old women watching the guillotine; and realized for the first time how much, and how rightly, they had hated the aristocrats being beheaded.

“Why can’t the PA be moved?” Daun asked in surprise.

“What?” said Georg. “Because it’s built into the fabric of the room, sir. You’d destroy the whole thing to try to move it.”

The technician frowned. He didn’t argue, but it was obvious that he couldn’t understand the problem.

“There,” said Hathaway. “Watch this. It’s the holographic draft Suzette did before she created the ambiance itself.”

He dimmed the alcove lights. The policemen were watching from their table. Larrinaga reappeared from the rest room. He stood in the archway instead of reentering the saloon.

A psychic ambiance was just that, a recorded vision—a waking dream—capable of being transferred to recipients in the focal area. It couldn’t be copied, because it depended on inputs too subtle to survive the duplication process. Though the PA was immaterial, the artist normally started with a visual or auditory sketch, just as medieval fresco artists drew cartoons on the wall before applying a coat of fresh plaster on which to fix the paint.

Suzette worked visually. The holographic sketch was of a verdant paradise, a mythic place in which fountains played and the geologic features seemed themselves alive though immobile.

No animals could be glimpsed, though the movement of plants hinted their presence. Above all, the shifting holographic image was suffused by light and a warmth for which the objects described could not themselves account.

The sketch began to repeat itself. The second time through, individual facets merged into a whole greater and quite different from its parts.

Daun frowned. He could almost grasp the unity to which the intersections of light beams were building in this holographic shorthand.

“It’s her, you know,” Larrinaga said abruptly. “It’s Suzette. She did a self-portrait, she built it into our house so that I’d never have had to be without her. And I threw it away!”

He began to weep openly. Georg Hathaway shut off the chip projector; Margulies brought the lights back up. Though Hathaway House was a fortress, the bright internal illumination prevented the weight of the protective walls from crushing the souls of those within it.

“There, there, Pedro,” Georg said awkwardly. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I know it bothers you.”

“Everything bothers him,” Evie said, knitting with tiny clicks unaffected by her words. “It’s Pedro’s life now, being bothered.”

“It’s still possible to see the PA, isn’t it?” Niko asked, looking from Georg to Larrinaga and quickly away again.

Hathaway pursed his lips. He started to say something, then glanced toward the archway.

“Can I have another beer, Georg?” Larrinaga asked. “It’ll have to be on credit, of course.”

“Why of course, Pedro,” Hathaway said enthusiastically. “You’re not a patron here, you’re our friend.”

He gestured Larrinaga toward the serving counter instead of drawing the mug himself. A transaction had taken place, and everyone within earshot knew it.