The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (32 page)

“She’s coming!” a L’Escorial shouted from the courtyard gate. “She’s coming!”

“Everybody into the basement!” Ramon screamed. He gripped the Frisian’s arm, fiercely and apparently unaware of what he was doing. His hand bumped the muzzle of Coke’s sub-machine gun.

“Oh my Lord!” Ramon cried. “You’re carrying a gun! Are you mad? She said no weapons in sight, none! She’ll—”

Pepe joined them. Ramon turned to his son and said, “He’s carrying a gun, Pepe!”

The youngest Luria looked Coke up and down with the interest of a dog sniffing something dead. “So, you’d be the expensive Major Coke, would you?” he said. “I suppose I needed to meet you some time, since L’Escorial now employs you.”

To his father Pepe added, “It isn’t in sight. But”—Pepe’s eyes were as black as cannel coal. They focused again on Coke.—“hold it so that it’s less obvious nonetheless. I don’t care what the good madame does to you, but she might mistakenly think L’Escorial was involved in your bad manners.”

The last of the L’Escorial armored trucks collided with a wall. The vehicle stalled on the ramp into the garage. The driver tried to restart his engine.

Ramon scampered over to the vehicle. “Leave it!” he cried. “Shut it down! And get out, get out!”

A car with a slim, armored body and four metal-mesh wheels on wide-spread outriggers pulled up in front of the L’Escorial building. Coke had seen similar vehicles used for ground reconnaissance where for one reason or another hovercraft were contra-indicated.

Raul Luria reached the doorway. Pepe put an arm around the Old Man’s shoulders, more for solidarity than for physical support. Ramon skipped back to join his father and son.

Matthew Coke stepped aside, flattening himself in the shadows across the wall. He held the sub-machine gun vertically against his body, covered by the folds of the cape. He glanced at Pepe Luria, but only for an instant; and there was no expression on his face.

The door of the reconnaissance car folded down; the female passenger got out. Though the car’s interior was more luxuriously appointed than was normal for the type of vehicle, it was still cramped quarters for those within.

The woman wore a white jumpsuit trimmed with silver, and a short, lustrous cape of some natural fur. She was by no means young, but surgery and cosmetics prevented Coke from trying to guess her age within two decades. She halted in the gateway where the lights of the stalled truck lit her brilliantly.

Raul Luria began hobbling toward her with his descendants a half-pace behind to either side. “Madame Yarnell!” he wheezed. “You honor us with your presence.”

“Don’t bother, Luria,” the woman ordered sharply. “I’m going to say what I have to and then go back and repeat it to the Astras, those other childish idiots. This must stop! Do you understand?”

“Madame—” Ramon said, “we of course—”

“No, it’s not ‘of course,’” Madame Yarnell snarled. “If anything were obvious to you morons, you’d get on with business instead of ruining it. Can you imagine how much trouble you’ve caused with your fighting already?”

“It wasn’t us who—” Raul began.

“Shut up, old man!” the woman ordered. “I’m here to talk, not listen. The reason gage deliveries have dropped by thirty percent over the past two quarters, and the reason that the product my fellows and I need to fulfill contracts has burned to ash—the reason is that you and Astra are squabbling instead of doing business. That will stop, now! Do you understand?”

“Of course, we want nothing more than to do business ourselves, mistress,” Pepe said with his eyes lowered.

“That’s good,” the Delian representative said, “because if there’s any more trouble, our retailers will cancel contracts and find other sources of supply. Whereupon Cantilucca will become superfluous . . . and you gentlemen in particular will become superfluous. Do you understand me?”

Pepe’s face tightened.

Raul laid a hand heavily on the youth’s shoulder. “May we offer you the hospitality of L’Escorial during your stay on Cantilucca, madame?” the Old Man said.

“You may not,” Madame Yarnell snapped. “I’ll be staying in the cartel offices in the port reservation while I’m here. And if you’re wondering how long that will be—it will be until I’m absolutely sure that you and your imbecile compatriots have heard my message and are acting on it. I regret to say that it may be years that I’ll be stuck in this cesspool!”

She spun on her heel, whirling the cape out from her shoulders, and walked back to the recon car. As soon as the door latched, the driver slammed into a tight turn and headed back toward Astra HQ. Coke suspected that the cartel representative had bypassed the Astras initially because she feared that L’Escorial, as the more seriously aggrieved party, was likely to take the next escalating step.

The Lurias bent their heads together, all talking at once. Coke looked at them, pursed his lips, and sauntered across the street to Hathaway House.

He supposed he should have been pleased that peace might come to Cantilucca. The trouble was, he kept thinking that with the syndicates in unbroken control, the best ordinary citizens could hope for was the peace of the grave.

Cantilucca: Day Six

“The beer isn’t any better than Hathaways,” Sten Moden said. The logistics officer watched the afternoon traffic over Coke’s shoulder, as Coke did over Moden’s. “But it’s good to get out anyway. With Madame Yarnell in town, you could almost imagine Potosi was a normal place, couldn’t you?”

Niko Daun returned from the bar, clanking three more mugs down on the sidewalk table. “They’ve got a dancer in the back room,” he said indignantly. “They let the johns poke at her with shock batons. I don’t care if she’s stoned, they shouldn’t do that!”

“There’s a lot of things on Cantilucca they shouldn’t do,” Coke said. He drained the last mouthful from his current mug and set the empty under his chair to get it out of the way. “Madame Yarnell stopped people who’d be better dead from killing each other. That’s about it.”

He didn’t see any guns on the street. Syndicate colors were muted as well. A red beret, a blue neckerchief—rarely anything more overt. Widow Guzman and the Lurias had sent most of their gunmen back into the farming districts for the time being.

“I wonder how Esteban’s father-in-law’s doing,” Sten Moden said. “I’m afraid that the thugs that were swaggering around Potosi’ll be looking for something to keep them occupied out in the sticks.”

A woman screamed in a broken voice from the cafe’s back room. Shouts and laughter greeted the outburst. A pair of men wearing red armbands got up from the table beside the Frisians and walked toward the back. They were fumbling in their pockets for the cover charge.

“Sir,” Niko blurted. “Are we really going to help these guys? I mean, both sides, they’re—they’re animals, sir! The least we ought to do is say ‘no sale’ and go on back to Friesland.”

“That still leaves the same people here,” Moden said. “It’s not an answer.”

He swizzled a sip of beer around his mouth. He didn’t appear so much to be savoring as analyzing the fluid.

“Oh, the beer’s not that bad,” Coke said. Without changing his tone, he went on, “I think if we wanted to . . .”

He paused, looked at his companions in turn, and resumed: “I don’t think it would require much pushing from behind the scenes to get Astra and L’Escorial to pretty well eliminate each other.”

In Matthew Coke’s mind, the response was:

Daun: “Sir, your proposal is clearly against the interests of Nieuw Friesland!”

Moden: “Major, I regret that, in accordance with the provisions of the Defense Justice Code, I’m going to have to relieve you of command for that treasonous suggestion.”

Niko Daun’s face split with a wide grin. “Lord, sir!” he said. “I was afraid you were going to burn me a new asshole for saying that.”

“Yeah,” agreed Sten Moden, setting his mug down hard enough in his enthusiasm to slosh. “We were all afraid to discuss it with you, Matthew. But I don’t care what color their money is—something has to be done about these bastards, and the six of us are the only folks around who might be able to do it.”

“We all?” Coke repeated. “You two talked to the others?”

Daun nodded. “Vierziger said that was what he was here for, he guessed.”

“Johann said he presumed.” Sten Moden corrected. He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. But Johann’s willingness to shoot people isn’t in doubt, is it?”

“Bob, he’s not real comfortable with the business,” Niko resumed. “He’s not afraid of Camp Able, it’s not that, but . . . Well, anyway, he finally said he was in.”

The sensor tech shook his head. “He’s a good guy, Bob is. I don’t understand what’s going on under the surface, but he’s a good guy. And a fucking wizard with that console!”

“Yeah, he’s good all right,” Coke said. All five of his people were good, were about the best he’d ever seen. And he was talking about dropping them into the gears of a very powerful machine, in hopes that the machine would break before they did.

“Mary?” he added aloud.

“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.