The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (36 page)

“Ortega!” Coke shouted. “The drum you substituted in the gage going off yesterday on the Tellurian Queen—there’s a bomb in it. The cartel’s stocks on Delos are going up in smoke three days from now, and when they do people are going to be looking for you. You’ve got to get off-planet now!”

“Get out of here,” a man called. “Get out of here! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

A burst of a dozen stun needles hissed and popped through the opening.

Coke fumbled at his equipment belt, feeling for a smoke grenade. He’d go in with his visor on thermal—

“Matthew!” Pilar screamed. Her sub-machine gun ripped cyan runs in the night.

Coke drew as he turned. The street door’s jamb and lintel were a shower of shattered concrete from the cyan bolts. The tall pimp had gotten safe to the shelter of the stairwell before Pilar fired.

The pimp aimed his weapon. Coke shot him in the chest and face.

The pimp jerked his trigger. The pneumatic gun coughed, recoiling out of the dying man’s grip. The heavy shell hit three steps above the landing and burst, showering the stairwell with shrapnel and orange light.

Coke, startled by the blast and prickles from the shell, sprayed three more bolts. He hit the pimp only once—in the ankle as he fell backward. The fellow was dead already, or at least he would be in the next minute or two.

“Ortega!” Coke repeated. His ears were ringing. “Come on out. I won’t hurt you, and you don’t have a lot of time.”

“Matthew, you mustn’t kill him!” Pilar called. She was at the bottom of the staircase. She tried to step past the tall man. His thrashing arm struck her calf. She came up anyway, her face pale and her sub-machine gun’s muzzle shimmering brighter than the stairwell glow-strip.

“Go back!” Coke ordered. She climbed toward him anyway.

The explosive shell had flung the room door shut again. Coke reached for it with his left hand. The panel opened from the inside. A naked woman stepped out onto the landing.

Her name—the name she went by, anyway—was Serafina Amoretta. Coke had seen her image, but that hadn’t prepared him for her youth. She couldn’t be more than fourteen standard years, though her breasts and hips were full.

“Who do you think you are?” she shouted in bright-eyed fury. Perhaps she was on gage or other drugs, though she seemed alert enough. “Do you think you’ll get me by coming here like this? Well, you won’t!”

Serafina stood with her fists on her hips, glaring at Coke on the step below her. There was no sign that the corpse of her pimp or the gun in the hand of his killer affected her in any way. She didn’t shave or pluck her body, but there was only a halo of hair surrounding the lips of her vulva.

“I don’t want you,” Coke said. “I’m here for Terence Ortega, to keep him from being killed by your little game.”

The pistol in his hand embarrassed him. He tried to holster it again. He was awkward now in the aftermath of the shooting. He managed to sear the side of his rib cage with the hot muzzle.

“You want Terry?” Serafina caroled in raucous delight. “So that’s it, is it? His frigid wife sent you to get him back? Terry, come out here. Now!”

Coke risked a look over his shoulder. He prayed that Pilar would have returned to the van, but she hadn’t, she was just below him. Her lips trembled, and her face had no expression.

The door behind Serafina moved. A man looked out nervously, then stepped the rest of the way. He carried a needle stunner in one hand and held his trousers before him as a veil. He hadn’t managed to get his legs into the openings.

“See who’s here, Terry?” Serafina said, cocking her head so that she could watch the man out of the corner of her eyes. “She’s here to take you back with a gun!”

“That’s nothing to do with it!” Coke said. “I tell you, there was a bomb in the drum you thought was refinery tailings. You’ve got to disappear before the folks on Delos learn what I already know.”

“Lies!” Serafina cried. “All lies!”

Her gaze slipped past Coke to Pilar. “Do you want to shoot me, bitch? It won’t get you Terry back, you know. He’ll never go back to you now that he knows what it’s like to fuck a real woman!”

Ortega had been a good-looking man once. He still had the face, but standing nude on the landing made his paunch and generally run-down appearance painfully evident. Part of Coke’s mind found time to wonder at what Serafina Amoretta saw in the fellow.

“Look,” the Frisian said desperately. “You can lie to me, but it won’t do you a bit of good with the enforcers from Delos, you know that. And L’Escorial, it’s L’Escorial that planned this, they’ll be curst sure Delos learns who planted the bomb because they don’t want suspicion falling on them.”

“You can’t have Terry and you can’t have me!” Serafina cried. She groped behind her and caught the hand with which Ortega held up his trousers. She jerked the garment from him, tossed it down the steps, and then drew his hand forward to cup her breast. “Do you see! Your lies get you nothing. Nothing!”

There was a clatter behind Coke. He glanced back. Pilar had dropped the sub-machine gun. She was stumbling down the stairs.

“Wait!” he called.

“You see!” Serafina said. She jutted her hips backward against Ortega’s groin and wriggled. “You see!”

Coke backed down the stairs. He didn’t dare turn away from the needle stunner.

His boot jarred the sub-machine gun. He snatched the weapon up. For a moment he imagined blasting the couple on the landing to doll rags. No, the cartel would take care of that. . . .

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.”