by David Drake
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 words 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.
“I didn’t say I’d get him out,” Barbour said defensively. His gaze shifted quickly around the big room, but he didn’t make eye contact with the Astra leaders. “I said you could get him with what I’d give you.”
“Well go on, then, man!” the Widow said. “How? Tell us!”
She stepped close to the Frisian and caught his chin between her right thumb and forefinger. He jerked his face away. Her ornate silver rings traced glittering arcs as she slapped him hard.
“Tell us!” she shouted.
Barbour turned his head away. “Look, they’d kill me if they knew I was doing this,” he whined. “The major would say it was treason!”
“Via, boy!” Roberson cried. “Where—”
“It’s the TST offices, you see?” the Frisian blurted. “They aren’t guarded like L’Escorial bases are. You go in there and pull the core from Suterbilt’s private data bank, you see?”
They didn’t see. Guzman and the merchant looked blankly from Barbour to one another, then back.
Barbour shook his head in disgust. “Don’t you see?” he repeated. “Suterbilt’s cheating both TST and the Confederacy, faking the amount of gage that goes out of here. If the Confederacy learns they’re being done out of port duties, they’ll clean L’Escorial out of here, right? And it’s all there in Suterbilt’s private data bank, it’s got to be!”
The music from the patrol stockade paused. For a moment, the only sound within the trading post was the breathing of the three occupants.
Barbour had chosen the meeting place, an Astra-controlled village twelve klicks from Potosi. He’d demanded that no one be inside the post save himself and the two principals. The Widow agreed and held to her agreement, overruling Roberson on the point. It was now evident to the merchant also that the Frisian would have noticed guards, no matter how well concealed.
“He’ll have the information coded,” Roberson said cautiously. “We won’t be able to read it, will we?”
“What does that matter, you fool?” Barbour snarled. He appeared to be a man clinging to the ragged edge of his sanity. “The Marvelans can decrypt it, can’t they? And anyway, it doesn’t matter—Suterbilt won’t dare take the chance.”
“We’re not using the information,” the Widow Guzman agreed in a distant voice. “We’re trading the information for Adolpho. But if Adolpho’s been harmed or they won’t give him up—”
Her voice had been bleak. Now it became as cold as the heart of a comet.
“—then I will give it all to the Marvelans. And they will gut this planet when they learn how they’ve been cheated.”
“Now, Stella,” Roberson said nervously. “We don’t want that to happen. If the Confederacy really takes direct control here, it’ll put a crimp in our operations too. Or worse.”
The Widow looked at him. “Do you think I care?” she whispered.
“Look, that won’t be necessary,” Barbour said. “Look, I’ve got to get out of here. I’ll give you the codes to get through the TST security system and you give me the money.”
His moods appeared to change as abruptly as a rat’s did. He was whining again.
“No,” said the Widow.
Roberson looked at her in surprise.
“What do you mean?” the Frisian said. “You need the codes or you won’t be able to get into the offices without setting off alarms. If L’Escorial comes in, you’ve got a war!”
“You’ll come with us,” the woman said. Her combs shimmered. Glow-strips covering most of the ceiling illuminated the post’s interior. The light was diffuse but considerable in total, like that of a clear sky as the sun sets.
“I can’t!” Barbour whined. “Via, you’ll have me killed to save the money!”
“We’ll messenger the payment to Hathaway House in your name,” the Widow continued in icy determination. “You understand the security system better than we do. You’ll get us through it with less chance of a mistake.”
“We?” Roberson said, hugging himself. “I’m not going on a raid.”
“I am,” said the Widow. She gestured in the direction of the music coming from the patrol stockade. “We’ll take those men. Twenty should be sufficient. And we’ll go now.”
Barbour covered his face with his hands. “Oh Lord, oh Lord,” he whimpered.
He looked up. “All right,” he said. “Let’s do it quickly before, before . . .”
He covered his face again. “Oh Lord, don’t let the major learn about this!”
In the lobby of Hathaway House, Sten Moden looked up from the console. “Do you think Bob’s going to need help, Matthew?” he asked.
Major Matthew Coke looked at the four soldiers waiting with him. All were fully kitted out with weapons and extra ammunition.
“If he does,” Coke said, “then we’re ready to give it to him.”
Cantilucca: Day Eight
Robert Barbour projected a hologram for Kuklar, the Astra chosen to remove the guard. The monochrome display was a schematic of the back of the building which held the TST offices. The building itself was a dark blob fifty meters away. Stella Guzman watched over his shoulder.
The night sandwiched them with human sounds from Potosi and, behind the Astra force, forest noises. Despite Barbour’s desperate orders for them to keep silent, the gunmen talked, cursed the scrub they’d tramped through from where they left the vehicles, and injected stim cones.
The Frisian gestured with his light pen. “You see, there’s only one guard at the back staircase,” he whispered. His pen dabbed twice again. “There’s two more inside, but they’re asleep on the couches in the waiting room.”
“Where?” demanded Kuklar. He looked from the display toward Barbour, then the Widow. “I don’t see nobody.”
Kuklar didn’t understand that the icon Barbour pointed out on the display, a jagged lightning bolt that slowly pulsed, indicated an armed man. It wasn’t certain that he understood what a map was. Barbour took a deep breath.
Somebody on the top floor tugged open a window.
“Hey!” shouted a voice from ground level. “Don’t you—”
A bucket of waste slurped its way down anyway.
“Fucker!” the L’Escorial guard bawled. He fired his sub-machine gun upward.
A few of the bolts slapped the back of the building; most of them vanished as quivering sparks among the stars. The burst didn’t hit whoever’d thrown the slops, because the window closed again a moment later.
“Oh, there he is,” Kuklar muttered. “Why din’t you say he was down there? I thought you said he was here.”
Kuklar started to crawl forward. He unlimbered a weapon from his belt as he moved through the garbage and scrub. Barbour couldn’t be sure of the sort of weapon, even with his visor amplifying the ambient light to daytime levels.
“Get a fucking move on, won’t you?” a gunman said at nearly normal volume. “I’m supposed to be off duty tonight.”
Barbour winced.
“They were the first men available!” the Widow Guzman said. “You were the one who chose Veridad!”
“I didn’t say anything,” the Frisian muttered.
“Hey?” called the L’Escorial guard.
There was a sound like a melon hitting from a height. Somebody squealed. Violent thrashing punctuated Kuklar’s shout, “I got— come on—I got—”
Astras ran toward the building, jostling one another and cursing as they stumbled over garbage in the darkness. None of them had night viewing equipment, even though they were supposed to be a patrol unit.
Barbour shut off his projector and jogged along behind. He noticed that about half the score of gunmen didn’t move forward until others had reached the scene of the fighting.
Guzman kept up with him, though she wore a dress and was as blind as her troops in this starlight. “Leave most of them down here to cover our retreat,” the Frisian ordered her. At this stage in the proceedings, the task overrode his desire to appear a cowardly buffoon. “I’ll take three with me. That’ll be plenty. The guards upstairs probably won’t wake up till long after we’re gone.”
Kuklar had used a brush knife with a hooked blade as long as his forearm. He was levering the hilt back and forth. The heavy blade was buried in the guard’s skull, as deep as the orbit of his right eye.
Barbour swallowed as he started up the stairs. The staircase actually served the building’s upper three floors, but it angled past a window at the back of the TST offices. Barbour felt the treads flex as Astra gunmen followed him.
It would have been easier simply to walk up to the L’Escorial guard and shoot him. The burst of shots the man had fired didn’t arouse any attention.
Barbour was used to Frisian standards. He began to appreciate Niko Daun’s bitter scorn of “indigs.”
The window was locked, barred, and in the beam of a microlaser across the room. If the glass pane stopped reflecting a calibrated amount of laser light to the receptor above the tiny emitter, alarms would go off here, in Suterbilt’s apartment, and in L’Escorial HQ. The system had a lifetime charge so that it remained independent of the building’s power supply.
Barbour knelt, placed the drill, and felt the diamond bit whine happily as it spun a one-centimeter disk out of the pane. Hands-on work wouldn’t usually have been an intelligence officer’s task, but the team had thought it might come to this. Daun had trained Barbour patiently until they were both convinced he could use the equipment successfully.
He replaced the drill in his borrowed belt kit and fitted the mimicking emitter to the hole. It was self-adjusting: when Barbour switched it on, the microlaser aimed and brought itself into sequence with the security sensor. The telltale at the back of the little unit glowed red, then amber as the Frisian bent over it.
Somebody’s chin bumped Barbour’s shoulder. Barbour whirled around, poising the laser’s carrying case to strike. “Fucking fool!” he snarled. “Do you—”
The Widow Guzman started away from him. Kuklar stood behind her, idly wiping the hook of his knife with his shirt-tail.
Barbour swallowed. “Don’t do that,” he muttered. He set the case down and smoothed the top of it with his fingertips. “Please, you’ll get us all killed.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I see.”
The telltale was green.
Barbour took the cutting bar out of his toolkit. Unlike that of a standard brush-clearing blade, this one was only ten centimeters long and a millimeter thick. The diamond teeth sang through each of the four vertical bars in a few seconds. When Barbour had the top severed, he cut the bottom of the first bar, holding the shaft as he did so.
“Here,” he said, handing the bar to Guzman. She took it, then yipped as the friction-heated end touched the inside of her wrist.
Barbour ignored her. The powered blade gave a high-pitched whine as it spun into the steel. It was a tortured sound, certainly loud enough for the guards to hear through the closed door to the lobby. They must be in the throes of gage comas. Why did Suterbilt even bother having such people present?
The Frisian handed the last bar behind him. He hadn’t been able to practice the next part, but Daun assured him it would work.
Barbour set the end of the cutting bar’s blade at an upper corner of the window and pressed inward. There were sparks and an angry sputter from the wire-cored glass; then the blade was through. Barbour drew the bar across, shearing the reinforced pane like tissue paper. Flakes of glass pattered against his wrists and visor.
He cut the other three edges of the pane as easily. When he made the final cut, on the left side, he remembered to angle the cutting bar. The blade levered the glass out where the Frisian could catch it, rather than letting it drop onto the floor. He wasn’t worried about the sound, particularly, but the glass would interrupt the mimicking laser if it fell across the beam.
“There,” he said. He set the pane down. “There!”
As Barbour climbed through the opening, he happened to look over his shoulder. The Widow stared at him with a puzzled expression. He supposed his obvious competence had surprised her.
If it came to that, he’d surprised himself. Barbour had always been somebody who helped people who did things.
The locks on Suterbilt’s desk were electronic biosensors. Rather than try to duplicate the patterns of the factor’s brain activity, Barbour zeroed the settings, then changed the combination to his own patterns. It was childishly simple.
The owner was supposed to scramble the access codes after he or she set the locks. If Suterbilt had done that, even the computing power Barbour could call in through his commo helmet would have required ten m
inutes to get to this point. Most people, Suterbilt included, didn’t bother to proof their locks properly. It was as if the equipment were a magic talisman which need only exist to be effective.
The desk popped open. Barbour leaned under it and began unhooking the computer itself.
Several Astras entered the office behind him. “Keep quiet,” he whispered, “and keep away from the waiting room. Let them sl—”
He heard the anteroom door open quietly.
“Don’t—” he rasped.
A sub-machine gun lighted the office cyan with reflected light. The gunman emptied his entire magazine into the sleeping L’Escorials. The air roiled with ozone, hot matrix from expended powergun ammunition, and fires the bolts started in the upholstery.
“Shut the door,” the Widow Guzman ordered. “Keep the smoke out.”
Barbour closed his eyes and whispered a prayer. Then he got back to work. He had the computer out in three minutes, but by then the stench of feces from the men disemboweled in the anteroom had oozed under the door to bathe him.
He sat up and handed the fist-sized unit to the Widow. “There,” he said hoarsely. “They’ll trade your friend back to you for this, never fear.”
She nodded her head crisply. “Yes,” she said. “The chips are waiting in your name at your hotel.”
Gunmen were leaving the office through the window, as they’d come. The waiting room door was beginning to glow from the heat of the fire enclosed behind it.
Barbour looked at the door. Unwilling to speak but unable to help himself, he said, “Did you have to do that? They were asleep!”
The Widow frowned at him. “What does that matter?” she said. “It’s better that they’re dead, surely?”
Robert Barbour looked at her in a sudden epiphany. For the first time in his life he realized that there really were people who should better be dead.
It gave meaning to his life.
Cantilucca: Day Nine
Matthew Coke and Johann Vierziger watched from chairs set on the sidewalk in front of Hathaway House. The breeze followed Madame Yarnell’s reconnaissance vehicle up the street and out of Potosi. Bits of trash lifted as if waving goodbye for the evening.
