The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3

by David Drake

  “Something puzzled me when I went through Suterbilt’s house,” Pepe said. “The house he took from Larrinaga. The psychic ambiance was missing. And that night Larrinaga, who didn’t have a pot to piss in, lifted on a starship to Mahan. Interesting coincidence, no?”

  Vierziger shrugged. “Maybe Larrinaga helped the Astras with their attack,” he said. “You say it was his house, after all.”

  “I thought of that,” Pepe agreed in a falsely reasonable tone. “But that didn’t answer all the problems.”

  The Frisian’s chased and carven pistol hung in its holster from a chair backed against the head of the bed. Pepe nodded toward the weapon.

  The sub-machine gunner jumped as though prodded with a shock baton. He snatched the pistol away. The Frisian commo helmet continued to rest on the seat of the chair.

  Johann Vierziger smiled faintly. He looked at the constellation of fireflies encircling him.

  “Is that fellow Daun your gunsel?” Luria demanded sharply.

  Vierziger shook his head. “Niko wouldn’t be in the least interested,” he said. “Even if I were a woman, I’d be too old for him.”

  He shrugged. “Besides,” he added, “I prefer professionals.”

  Pepe reached into a pocket with his free hand. “But sometimes amateurs, isn’t that so?” he snarled.

  He held out his open right hand. On the palm was a shot-out pistol barrel. The iridium had been so hot when Vierziger dropped it inside the Larrinaga house that the cylinder had deformed when it hit the floor.

  “I thought to myself,” Pepe continued. “There were very few shots fired. All the guards could have been killed by a single man. But it would have had to be a particular man, isn’t that so?”

  He let the barrel fall toward Vierziger’s shrunken genitals. Vierziger’s right hand, flat on the mattress beside him, moved as a blur. When the motion ended, the iridium was a bump raising the knuckles of the Frisian’s hand—palm-down again, beside him.

  Vierziger’s lips held the faintest quirk of a smile. He said nothing.

  “Ass is cheap in Potosi!” Pepe Luria shouted angrily. “But I can’t imagine why else you would have bothered to help a wretch like Larrinaga!”

  Vierziger looked up at the L’Escorial leader. “No,” he agreed. “You wouldn’t be able to imagine it, Luria.”

  “Take him!” Pepe said.

  Johann Vierziger didn’t move or cease to smile, even as the butts of the mob guns swung toward his head from opposite sides.

  “Scramble!” Bob Barbour shouted. “L’Escorial’s picked up Johann!”

  Margulies snatched the 2-cm weapon she’d slung from the back of the chair beside hers in the saloon alcove. She’d been ready to drive Coke on his normal evening run to the spaceport to send a message capsule.

  Coke was on his way down to the lobby. He paused, midway on the stairs, and asked, “Are they coming here?”

  “Not yet, the bloody fools,” the intelligence officer said. “Either they’re not that organized, or they don’t realize that we’re keeping an eye on things.”

  Barbour watched his console as he spoke. The main screen showed Johann Vierziger surrounded by L’Escorials and fireflies on a brothel bed, but graphic and numerical sidebars reduced the main image by sixty percent.

  Barbour’s shouted warning drew Georg Hathaway’s head from the family apartment. Coke heard the door open beneath him.

  “Hathaway!” he said, leaning over the balustrade to make eye contact. “Is anybody in the building but us, you, and Evie?”

  “No sir,” Hathaway said, staring at Margulies by the door. The security officer was pulling her armor on one-handed while she held the shoulder weapon with the other and looked out the peephole in the front door. “No sir, there’s only you two gentlemen and the lady, that’s all who are present in our establishment.”

  The innkeeper’s voice singsonged, as if he were chanting to himself in private. He was so frightened that his hands were still rather than washing themselves.

  Evie Hathaway appeared behind her husband. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Sten’s on the way back,” Barbour noted. “He’s picking up Niko on the way.”

  “Via, they shouldn’t risk it!” Margulies muttered from the doorway.

  “They’ll be all right,” Barbour said. Tension clipped his tones, but his enunciation remained perfect. On the main screen, a pair of gunmen clubbed Vierziger unconscious. “Pepe guessed Johann sprang the ambiance for Larrinaga. There’s no evidence it’s occurred to him to come after the rest of us yet.”

  Coke walked down the stairs and turned to face the Hathaways. “Georg, Evie,” he said. “If you can handle it, we’ll go up to the hide on your roof now. If you can’t, we’ll head for the woods. Either way, tell Pepe or whoever comes looking that an Astra messenger came for us twenty minutes ago. We left with him. All right?”

  “Sten and Niko’re back,” Margulies called. The whine of a jitney’s motor came through the peephole and, faintly, through the building’s thick walls. “They’re going around to the lock-up.”

  “Go upstairs, then,” Evie Hathaway said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Go!”

  “Master Hathaway?” Coke said.

  Georg finally met the Frisian commander’s eyes. He patted his wife’s hand on his shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “You are our guests. We will do what we can for you, despite, despite . . .”

  Hathaway’s face settled into unexpectedly firm lines. “Your friend helped Pedro, returned Suzette to him and got him away from here. You’ll want to do what you can for your friend. We’ll hide you until you can.”

  “There’s about forty men leaving L’Escorial HQ,” Margulies warned from the peephole. “A couple armored cars are coming up from the garage, too.”

  “Sten and Niko have gone up the ladder to the back,” Barbour said.

  “Shut it down, Bob,” Coke ordered, putting a hand for emphasis on the intelligence officer’s arm. “Everybody up to the—”

  He heard the trapdoor open. “Stay where you are!” he bawled to Moden and Daun, who’d climbed the rope ladder from the locked parking area behind Hathaway House. “We’re on our way!”

  Barbour blanked the console. His hesitation at abandoning his equipment was obvious in the longing glance he threw over his shoulder when Coke tugged him way .

  “They’re crossing the street!” Margulies warned. She hadn’t moved from her position.

  “Come on!” Coke shouted. He gave Barbour a push toward the stairs and skipped up after him, charging his sub-machine gun as he moved. The security lieutenant backed from the door, covering the rear.

  “Twenty minutes ago!” Coke called from the top of the stairs.

  The Hathaways couldn’t hold out against torture—nobody could if the stress was properly applied, though Coke doubted any non-Frisian on Cantilucca was competent at that either. Whether or not the Hathaways would blurt something when L’Escorial gunmen knocked them around, as would inevitably happen, was an open ques—

  “We will stand it!” Evie Hathaway called. “For your sake, and for Cantilucca!”

  “Blow the fucking door down!” shouted a gaunt, one-eyed L’Escorial gunman at the front of Hathaway House. Georg Hathaway was already pulling the door open as quickly as its mass would allow.

  The five Frisians waited silently beneath piled lumber and the barrels on the roof. Enough of the twilight leaked through cracks in their concealment that they could see one another as their eyes adapted.

  So long as the console in the lobby operated as a base unit, the commo helmets could access sounds and images from any of the sensors Daun had placed—including those in the hotel. There were no peepholes to look out through directly.

  Six gunmen bulled into the lobby, deliberately slamming the innkeeper against the wall. Evie Hathaway stood at the doorway to the family apartment, glaring at the L’Escorials.

  Ramon Luria entered behind his men. He looked at Evie, then Georg.
“Where are the Frisians?” he asked.

  “They’re gone—” Georg began.

  Ramon nodded. Two of the gunmen grabbed Hathaway by the wrists.

  “—twenty minutes ago when—” Georg said, his voice climbing a note with every syllable.

  Ramon punched the innkeeper in the belly with all the strength of his pudgy body. Georg’s breath whooped out; his face lost color.

  “The Astras sent for them!” Evie cried. “They went to the Astras with nothing but their guns!”

  Ramon turned from the husband and slapped the wife. It was a full-armed blow which Evie could have dodged had she wished to. Instead she accepted the whack, knowing that there was no escape but death from whatever Luria chose to do.

  Three scarlet armored cars were in the street, their armament pointed at Hathaway House. Several score gunmen milled around the vehicles. If the tribarrels and rocket launcher ever opened up, shrapnel and fragments of the facade would kill more of the L’Escorials than the Frisians could in the first few seconds.

  Evie’s head rocked back. She put a hand to her cheek, then snatched it away as a sign of weakness.

  “Go on,” she said. “Go on! The Astras came for them twenty minutes ago. Hitting me won’t change that!”

  Ramon panted from his exertion. “Search the place,” he ordered his men generally. “Search it all!”

  Four men of the group who’d entered with him scattered. Three went upstairs while the last entered the kitchen with his sub-machine gun outstretched like a cattle prod.

  More L’Escorials stamped through the outer doorway, multiplying the number of searchers without adding organization to the process. One gunman began opening the console’s access panels, though only a child or a midget could have fit into the enclosed volume.

  “Hey, there’s a ladder up to the roof!” a man called from the top of the stairwell.

  The Frisians faced the barrels that formed the side of their concealment nearest the trapdoor. Each of them but the intelligence officer held a weapon ready.

  Barbour started to pick up the sub-machine gun on the floor beside him; Coke laid a hand on his and shook his head. Barbour nodded understanding and let the weapon lie. The chance that the intelligence officer would do something noisily wrong was greater than any help his unskilled shooting would provide if the situation blew up.

  Sten Moden carried three shoulder weapons, two slung and the last in his hand where it looked like a pistol by comparison to his size. There wasn’t room in the narrow hide for the rocket launcher he favored, and the big missiles would be useless in a point-blank shootout anyway.

  Three L’Escorials came out onto the roof clumsily. Each of them climbed with one hand and waved his weapon through the trapdoor ahead of himself. The first man out shouted in alarm as the next prodded him in the back with a fléchette gun.

  “They been up here,” a L’Escorial noted. “Hey, look at this!”

  He’d found the panoramic camera Daun glued to the coping of the facade weeks before. It was a relatively large unit, about the size of a clenched fist, and Niko hadn’t tried to conceal it. The camera provided a view of the entire streetscape—distorted at the edges, but correctable into normal images by the console’s processing power.

  “It’s a bomb!” cried the man with the fléchette gun. Why he thought so was beyond imagining, especially since the next thing he did was put the muzzle of his weapon against the camera and fire.

  If it had been an explosive device, it would have detonated and killed all three L’Escorials. Instead, the gun’s enormous muzzle blast blew the camera across the street in tiny fragments. The osmium fléchette left a split and a crater in the facade of L’Escorial headquarters.

  “What’s that?” a gunman in the street screamed. Another man emptied an automatic shotgun upward, scarring the reinforced concrete of Hathaway House. Dust and sparks flew past the coping.

  “You bloody fool!” a L’Escorial snarled—correctly—at the man with the fléchette gun.

  “Hey!” called a man through the trapdoor. “You dickheads up there? Come on back, we’re moving!”

  Two of the L’Escorials moved quickly to the trapdoor. The third demanded, “What do you mean, we’re moving?”

  “I mean we’re going to take out the Astras once and for all!” cried the man below. “Pepe just gave the order!”

  The last of the three gunmen jounced down the ladder. Coke waited another thirty seconds, then reached for the latch holding the side of the barrel closed. Bob Barbour touched his hand. “Not yet,” the intelligence officer whispered. “I’ll tell you when they’re all clear of the building.”

  Barbour’s faceshield would be taking the input of up to a dozen of the visual sensors in and around Hathaway House. Coke couldn’t have kept that many locations straight, quite apart from needing a clear view of his immediate surroundings in the event of a firefight.

  Coke grinned and nodded to his intelligence officer.

  “Now,” Barbour murmured. “They’re gone.”

  Margulies swung open the door; Coke was out onto the roof first. He kept his head below the level of the roof coping. The sun had fully set, but the afterglow was vivid to eyes that had been covered within the hiding place.

  “They took the weapons they found,” Sten Moden said. “They carried my launcher and the reloads back across the street.”

  “We’ve got what we need,” said Coke. “First we’ll do something about Johann.”

  Mary Margulies looked at him. “We’re going to take them all on, then?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Coke said. “All that’re left after they get done with each other.”

  Margulies shrugged. “Suits me,” she said, checking with her fingers the pouches of 2-cm ammo on her crossed bandoliers.

  Niko Daun slapped another panoramic camera onto the coping, a centimeter from where the previous one had been blown to atoms.

  Coke stared at him. “You carried an extra one of those when you ran for cover?” Coke asked.

  The sensor tech looked defensive. “I’ve got two of them, sir. Well, they’re real handy.”

  “It’s all right,” Barbour said, responding to a threat before his fellows were aware of it. He positioned himself so that his body was between the trap door and the other members of the team. “It’s Hathaway.”

  Georg Hathaway stuck his head up through the opening. It certainly hadn’t occurred to the innkeeper that without Barbour’s warning, somebody—very likely Coke himself—would have blown him away.

  “Sirs,” he said. His normally pudgy cheeks looked sunken, though the fact he’d climbed the ladder spoke well of his general condition. “They’ve gone for now, all of them. They say they’re going to attack Astra. You can escape now.”

  “I’m checking my equipment,” Bob Barbour said, the last syllable spoken as he slipped past Hathaway. He let himself drop to the corridor since the innkeeper’s body blocked the ladder. Hathaway recognized the problem and scurried down also, puffing and wheezing.

  Coke started for the ladder. Margulies touched his arm. “Sir?” she said. “What’s the drill? Do we break Johann out now?”

  “We check the situation on the big screen,” Coke said. “And then we break Johann out, yes.”

  Wild gunfire erupted from the street.

  Both syndicates had moved gunmen back into Potosi as soon as Madame Yarnell left, though the gangs kept a lower presence than before. Instead of loitering in opposing groups at every corner, men of the two sides kept generally to one end of town or the other— spaceport side for Astra, the eastern half for the L’Escorials.

  Though the Lurias were acting on the spur of the moment, Pepe’s sudden decision was tactically ideal. Three red-painted armored cars were already in the street. The remaining vehicles rumbled out of the garage beneath L’Escorial HQ even as the first phase of the battle began.

  The gateway into the Astra compound was blocked, as usual, by the converted bulldozer. As the L’Escorial
s swept unexpectedly toward their rival’s headquarters, the blue-clad guards started the dozer’s engine.

  Pepe’s fireflies stooped like hawks with violet pinions. The short powergun barrel in each firefly spat cyan death at the startled guards. The side hatch to the cab of the converted bulldozer was open. A firefly slid in, lighted the vehicle’s interior with its five-round magazine, and curved out again.

  The bulldozer stalled in a cloud of black smoke. The Astra guards sprawled on or around the vehicle, mangled by concentrated gunfire. The fireflies hissed back toward their controller. Pepe had told off a pair of his henchmen as assistants to reload the fireflies’ magazines when they returned.

  Civilians vanished from sight. A few Astra gunmen opened fire on the advancing L’Escorials. The Lurias’ armored cars raked the street with their tribarrels and a salvo of 10-cm bombardment rockets. The latter blew up on building fronts with huge red flashes, hurling shrapnel and broken concrete in every direction.

  Astras dived for cover in doorways and alleys. Counterfire stopped instantly, though only a handful of Astras were hit by the wild volley. The sheer volume of fire which the vehicles put down was too much for undisciplined troops to face. As more armored cars joined the initial trio, the gunmen who’d been chased to cover tore off their blue accoutrements and disappeared into the night.

  The only Astras still fighting after the first exchange were those in the headquarters building with their leaders—and they were trapped like mice in a bucket of water. By taking the initiative, Pepe had won the battle.

  A pair of L’Escorials, stoned on gage and bold to the point of lunacy, leaped aboard the converted bulldozer. Astras fired wildly from ports in the headquarters building, but most of the shots were aimed at fireflies which existed only in the gunmen’s minds.

  Powergun bolts traced magenta afterimages across unprotected retinas; terror turned the shudder of color into the fireflies’ static suspension system, though all the little devices were at the moment being reloaded.