The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (22 page)

As Larrinaga stepped past him, head bowed, Hathaway said, “The ambiance can only be viewed with Master Suterbilt’s permission, and that’s hard to come by. He’s aware of its value, you see. He keeps—well, there are six L’Escorial, ah, security personnel in the house at all times. Suterbilt doesn’t live there, but he visits frequently.”

“The last time I went there and asked to see Suzette,” Larrinaga said with his back to the others in the saloon, “they beat me unconscious and left me in the street.”

He drank in order to create a pause for effect. “I think,” he resumed, “I’ll go back there tonight.”

“Yes, I suspect you will do that,” Johann Vierziger said in a voice like the purr of a well-fed leopard. He set down the mug of cacao from which he’d been sipping with evident approval. “It’s the sort of thing a worthless bastard would do, after all.”

The little man’s enunciation was so precise that it was a moment before the words themselves registered on the others. Daun stifled a snort of laughter. Margulies raised an eyebrow; Sten Moden pointedly failed to react.

“Sure I am,” Larrinaga said loudly. “You bet, that’s just what I am.”

“Oh, you mustn’t say that, sir!” Georg Hathaway blurted. “Pedro isn’t that at all. You don’t know what he’s like inside!”

“Nor do you, Master Hathaway,” Vierziger said with sneering intonation. “All we know is the side he shows the world. That side is a sniveling, self-pitying bastard.”

The words wouldn’t have cut as deep if there’d been emotion behind them instead of cold disdain. Larrinaga winced as though he’d been stroked with a barbed whip. The mug trembled. He set it down and walked to the outer door.

Barbour looked at the local man, calculating the door’s opening against the movements of figures in his holographic display. There was no need to keep the armored door closed; but there might have been, and Barbour would have said so if there were.

The door closed behind Larrinaga. “Oh, I wish you hadn’t said that, good sir,” Hathaway murmured miserably, though he didn’t look directly at Vierziger as he spoke.

“Why, Georg?” Evie Hathaway demanded. “Does the truth bother you so much? Has saying, ‘Oh, Pedro just needs a little time to get straightened out,’ made things better? For anybody?”

“Well, he blames himself for having sold the house,” Georg said. “And it was Pedro’s fault, I know, partying with Master Suterbilt who’d been trying for years to buy the ambiance and Suzette wouldn’t hear of selling to him. But it’s a shame that one mistake should ruin his life.”

“The major’s coming back,” Barbour called from the foyer. He looked toward the policemen and grinned. It was the first smile any of his teammates had seen on his face. “He’s returning your shock baton, gentlemen.”

“One mistake can ruin more than a man’s life, Master Hathaway,” Vierziger said to the innkeeper. “It can ruin all eternity.”

He smiled tightly, terribly. “Of course, I’ve made many more mistakes than one.”

Coke entered the lobby. He closed the door behind him, then rested his back against the cool metal surface.

“Any excitement, sir?” Margulies asked.

“Matthew, please, Mary,” Coke said with his eyes closed. “And no, nothing to speak of. The usual run of port-city foolishness, nothing serious.”

“What’s the next order of business, Matthew?” Moden asked. “We continue to wait?”

“I could use one of those beers,” Coke said, snapping alert again. He strode into the saloon alcove. From there he continued, “Yeah, we wait. I figure it’ll be days before either side makes an approach. Two gangs may make this a tough place, but it sure isn’t an organized one.”

“Is organized better, Master Soldier?” Evie Hathaway demanded from her chair.

“Evie, please,” said Georg.

“Yes, ma’am,” Coke said, taking the mug the innkeeper had drawn him. “It is. Highly developed parasites see to it that the host body stays healthy. Less developed ones, roundworms and the like, are often fatal. Cantilucca has a bad case of roundworms, I’m afraid.”

“And your prescription?” the woman said. She’d stopped knitting so that she could turn to look directly at the Frisian leader.

Coke drank, then shrugged. “Arsenic or the equivalent, Mistress Hathaway,” he said. “The trick is to titrate the dose, of course, so that you only get the worms.”

“In the short term, Matthew,” Mary Margulies said, “would you have any objection to me doing a little sight-seeing in the countryside? Tomorrow, maybe?”

Coke shook his head “No, we need to learn as much about the place as we can,” he said. “Potosi may be the head of the planet, but it’s not the whole place. Ah—I’d rather you didn’t go any distance alone.”

“I’ll go along, sir,” Robert Barbour said. “That is, if you’ll permit me. I’ll have the AI in this console dialed in to take care of ordinary business in an hour or two, now that you’re back.”

“No, that’s fine,” Coke said “Just remember, we’re in a fluid situation. Things might happen pretty fast. And I’m Matthew.”

“My old driver came back here when he got out of service,” Margulies explained. “He came from a place called Silva Blanca. It’s supposed to be fifteen klicks away.”

“Good,” said Coke. He handed his mug to Hathaway for a refill. “It’ll be good to get a professional’s viewpoint about the situation here.”

“I’m not sure there’s enough arsenic, Master Soldier,” Evie Hathaway said. She had resumed knitting. “Certainly there can’t be too much.”

Cantilucca: Day Two

The messenger at the door of Hathaway House flashed his gray cloak open toward the viewslit, displaying a blue uniform jacket with chromed buttons and frogs. By trying to look simultaneously self-important and inconspicuous, the man gave the impression of a rat tricked out in pheasant plumage.

“A lady wants to see Major Coke!” he hissed meaningfully, casting a wary glance over his shoulder toward L’Escorial headquarters.

Coke nodded toward Mistress Hathaway at the door. He was shrugging into his body armor. The location of Hathaway House wasn’t ideally neutral, but the team hadn’t been sent to Cantilucca to be fair. Just to strike a deal, and that seemed to be a practical proposition.

“A bit earlier than I’d figured,” Coke said to his three fellows. “Niko, you’re ready on your end?”

The sensor tech grinned brightly. He patted a magazine pouch on the right side of his waist belt, opposite the holster clipped for cross-draw.

“The bugs’re here,” he said, “not in my case.” He waggled the attaché case in his left hand.

“Sten, you’re comfortable with the hardware?” Coke went on, shifting his attention to the man who would remain behind in the hotel lobby.

“Quite comfortable,” the logistics officer said. His arm swept across the terminal, changing the display from streetscape to a close-up of the Astra messenger’s face, then back. “This isn’t my specialty, but I’ve probably spent as much time at consoles as you or Bob have.”

“Come on,” the messenger whined. “Do you think I like standing out here?”

“Do you think we care?” Niko Daun snapped. The suddenness with which the young technician’s smile broke and reformed indicated that he was jumpy, reasonably enough.

Johann Vierziger grinned at Coke. Neither man bothered to speak the obvious truths.

Coke settled a gray cape over his armor, his attaché case, and a slung sub-machine gun. “All right,” he said. “Then let’s do it.”

The messenger scampered ahead. He was probably afraid to be seen with the trio of Frisians. It was late morning and the sun was hot. L’Escorials had removed the wrack of bodies from against their wall, but the stench of rotting blood was fierce even against the reek of garbage and human excrement.

The gates to the L’Escorial courtyard, vertical steel bars in a wall-height framework, were closed. Half a dozen gunmen sat beneath an awning inside, playing cards. The concrete around the titular guards was littered with gage injectors and empty bottles. None of the men paid any attention to traffic from Hathaway House.

The messenger was ten strides ahead of the Frisians. He turned around and waggled his hands toward them in a pulling motion. “Come on, come along,” he urged.

“We’ll get there, little man,” Johann Vierziger said calmly. “And the more surely if we watch what we’re about, not so?”

Though the messenger wasn’t a prepossessing physical specimen, he was bigger than Vierziger. Nobody hearing the comment smiled at it, however.

A combat vehicle converted from a bulldozer was now parked in the entrance to the courtyard in front of Astra headquarters. Metal plates were welded to a framework around the bulldozer’s sides.

The add-on armor didn’t look to Coke as if it’d stop much. The earthmoving blade which protected the front would originally have been tempered soft so that it wouldn’t shatter if it hit a rock. The alloy steel could have been surface hardened during the conversion process, but he doubted that it had been.

The vehicle mounted a twelve-tube launcher for hypervelocity rockets. These could be extremely effective weapons, capable of penetrating more than a meter of ferroconcrete; but the mounting was fixed in azimuth, so that aiming a salvo required the vehicle itself be turned toward the target.

The messenger led the Frisians past the ’dozer’s worn tracks. Astras on the vehicle and around it had their guns out. None of them spoke to the Frisians, but Coke heard several deliberately loud sneers about the pansies come to call. At least the blue-clad guards seemed to be more alert than their rivals down the street.

“The Widow’s waiting for you, gentlemen,” the messenger called, several strides ahead again. “Do come along.”

Niko Daun stumbled twice while easing past the converted bulldozer. The first time he slapped his hand against the armor covering the commander’s station on the right side of the vehicle; the next time he caught himself on the gatepost. He’d touched his belt pouch before either slip, but there was nothing noteworthy in that.

The sensor tech patted the jamb of the doorway into the headquarters building as well. Each time his hand touched, he left behind an irregular disk of self-adhering material, as unremarkable as a splash of clear lacquer. Each palm-sized swatch contained an audio pick-up and transmitter, powered by micro-flexions in the crystalline structure of its matrix material.

Though not precisely invisible, the bugs appeared to be merely areas of random gloss to anyone but an expert looking for them. Cantilucca wasn’t a place where the survey team expected to find expert sensor technicians.

The front half of the ground floor was a single room, thronged now by fifty or sixty blue-clad gunmen. Men in full uniform formed a corridor, not quite a gauntlet, between the outer door and the inner one in the partition wall at the back. Astras in less formal attire were relegated to stand behind the elite.

Vierziger led. Daun, with another bug palmed and waiting, walked behind him, and Coke brought up the rear. The air stank of nervous sweat.

“These are the tough guys?” sneered a man as big as Sten Moden. A scar twisted up his cheek and forehead, filling one eyesocket with a mass of pink tissue. “Don’t look much to me!”

“Now, boys, the Widow wants to see them,” the messenger pleaded.

“This one looks like a fairy!” cried a man carrying a sub-machine gun and a slung grenade launcher. He reached out to pinch Vierziger’s cheek.

Coke lifted his hand into the air, visible to everyone in the big room. Simultaneously, Vierziger’s light cape ballooned as his arm moved.

The muzzle of Vierziger’s chased and carven pistol bloodied the Astra’s lips. The fellow yelped in surprise and would have lurched backward. The men behind hemmed him in too straitly to move.

“Does he indeed, my friend?” Vierziger said in a lilting whisper. “That’s not surprising, is it? Since he is a fairy. Do you have a problem with that?”

The little killer punctuated each sentence by tapping his pistol forward, hard enough to chip the Astra’s teeth. Blood smeared the iridium barrel.

Coke said nothing. His hand held the fat tube of a bunker buster. The grenade’s red safety tab was lifted, and only the Frisian’s index finger held down the arming spoon.

“Do you?” Vierziger’s pistol lifted so that the muzzle centered on the Astra’s right eye.

“No sir. No sir!”

“Just as well, isn’t it?” Vierziger said conversationally. He tugged out the Astra’s shirt with his left hand and wiped the pistol clean with it. The weapon vanished as suddenly as it had been drawn.

Coke put the live grenade back under his cape. Vierziger walked to the inner door. The corridor between the Astra lines was half again as wide as it had been before.

Nobody spoke for a moment, but pandemonium broke out in the anteroom when Coke closed the door behind him. Most of the noise seemed to be laughter, directed at Vierziger’s battered victim.

Dark wood paneled and furnished the inner room. There were no windows, and the several lights were point sources which accentuated the darkness beyond the surfaces from which they glared.

An old man, a lushly attractive young man, and a woman in late middle age sat on the other side of a heavy table. The woman rose to meet the Frisian delegation. She had strong, handsome features, but she was trussed into clothing a size or more too tight for her soft weight.

“I am Stella Guzman,” she said, extending her hand to Coke’s touch. “The Widow, you may call me. I’ve been president of Astra since my husband passed on three years ago.”

The woman’s male companions stood up as she identified herself. The younger one put his hand on Widow Guzman’s shoulder in a gesture of ownership. He smiled: appraisingly at Coke, disdainfully at Daun, and at Johann Vierziger with a spark of different interest

Coke found the young man’s warm glance at Vierziger to be utterly disorienting. Presumably wolverines can be considered sex objects also . . . but this Cantiluccan gigolo wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination of the same species as Johann Vierziger.

“This is my friend and advisor Adolpho Peres,” the Widow said, covering with her own hand that of the man’s on her shoulder. She patted it affectionately. Either she didn’t see the look Peres gave Vierziger, or she was very complaisant.