by David Drake
The bulldozer grunted to life. One of the L’Escorials jumped from the hatch again. He was immediately shot in half by gunmen from both syndicates. The remaining man backed the converted vehicle with a skill that its regular driver couldn’t have managed with leisure and full daylight.
The door to the underground garage was open; an armored truck was driving up the ramp. The bulldozer crashed into the flimsier armored vehicle, blocking the exit completely.
The L’Escorial driver jumped out and scampered away, miraculously unhurt by the sleet of bolts and bullets which pursued him. A L’Escorial armored car nosed through the opened gateway. Its three tribarrels fired point-blank at the rocket pod mounted on the converted bulldozer.
The dozer was armed with hypervelocity rockets which didn’t have explosive warheads. The rocket fuel deflagrated with what was only technically a fire rather than an explosion.
A ball of yellow light enveloped the front of Astra headquarters and the vehicles in the garage beneath the building. More fuel and munitions went off in a second blast a heartbeat after the first. The building’s protective facade lifted as a piece, then settled again in slabs and pieces that crumbled away.
A L’Escorial armored car raked the courtyard wall with fléchette rockets. Almost all the hundreds of osmium penetrators punched through the cast concrete, each drilling a finger-sized hole on entry and blowing a divot the size of a soup plate from the inner face as the projectile keyholed out. Backblast from the powerful rockets incinerated dozens of L’Escorials who had sheltered behind the launcher.
Wreathed in smoke from its rocket exhausts, the vehicle that fired the salvo drove into the weakened portion of concrete. Metal shrieked, but a ten-meter stretch of wall collapsed inward.
A cloud of white dust enveloped Astra headquarters. Scores of L’Escorial guns fired with no target beyond the silent building itself. Another armored car rumbled through the gap. Its sole functioning tribarrel ripped a rich cyan line across and through the building’s inner fabric. There was no return fire, but ricocheting projectiles spun several of the red-clad gunmen.
“About now, I’d say,” Mary Margulies prompted. She gripped the large hasp to open the unlocked front door.
“Not yet!” Coke ordered. His mind tried to fill the immediate future, encompassing every possible event and side effect. The task was beyond his conscious intellect, but instinct told him that the moment was not—
A white flag—a scrap of sheet—waved from a hole on the ground floor of Astra headquarters. Bob Barbour gestured minusculely to the keyboard of the console at which he sat.
The holographic screen split. The lower half showed the interior of the building. Audio was from one of the laminar bugs Daun set during the initial visit to Astra HQ. Visuals came through miniature cameras at roof level across the street, processed to an illusory slickness by the console’s artificial intelligence.
“Luria!” the Widow Guzman shouted through a bullhorn, toward a hole torn into the wall by powergun bolts. “We surrender! We’re coming out!”
Three Astra gunmen and Adolpho Peres crouched with the Widow in what had been her private office. In the outer area, another gunman stood behind the thickest remaining portion of the building’s facade, waving the white flag. There were dozens of bodies around him, most of them mangled beyond recognition of their species.
The fireflies, their magazines reloaded, curved toward the riddled building like swarming hornets.
“Bob, you’re control,” said Matthew Coke as he stepped to the door of Hathaway House. “The rest of us—now!”
Margulies put her weight against the inertia of the door, then stepped out behind her commander.
The Lurias had left a six-man guard at the gate to their headquarters. By this stage in the fighting the gunmen stood in the middle of the street to watch the battle in the near distance.
Coke didn’t make the mistake of using his sub-machine gun as an area weapon when he had individual targets. Three-round bursts spun two of the L’Escorials an instant before Margulies blew a third nearly in half with her 2-cm weapon. The last three syndicate gunmen went down in a ripple of cyan as all four Frisians fired simultaneously.
The brief fusillade didn’t arouse the attention of the fighters half a kilometer away, locked in the death throes of the Astra syndicate. Coke and his team sprinted across the street and through the open door into L’Escorial headquarters.
The smoldering body of Angel Tijuca lay faceup in the center of the entryway. He’d been shot in the chest, twenty or thirty times at close range. The 1-cm powergun bolts had burned most of his torso away. He still held the pistol he’d managed to draw in the last instants of his life.
“Fireflies,” Margulies said softly. “He wouldn’t have liked it when Pepe brought Johann in.”
“I’m sorry, Mary,” Coke said.
She looked at him. Her face was freckled by the overlay in one quadrant of her visor, echoing the image from Barbour’s console. “Don’t be,” she said. “We all die. He didn’t—die a bad way after all.”
Coke nodded. “Sten,” he said, “Niko—check the barracks upstairs and rejoin when it’s clear. Mary, Johann ought to be—”
Margulies had already swung herself into position beside the heavy door to the right of the anteroom. It was ajar, though it had a lock.
“Go,” said Coke. He had the automatic weapon, so he would be first through.
Margulies pulled the door open. The room beyond was the armory. Weapons lockers lined the walls, most of them emptied or nearly so for the sudden attack. The cases of Frisian equipment that Ramon’s men had taken from Hathaway House lay on the floor among the remains of the L’Escorial hardware.
A restraint cage stood against the far wall. Johann Vierziger was in it. The probes touched his nude body at a dozen points including his genitals, sending fluctuating currents through his nerve pathways.
A fat man, naked to the waist, sat on an ammunition case beside the prisoner. He was mopping sweat from his face with the red bandanna tied around his throat. He jumped halfway to his feet between the time the door opened and the moment Coke’s long burst disemboweled him.
Margulies fired into the control box at the top of the cage. The electronics disintegrated under the jolt of plasma. Droplets of metal and silicon shards sprayed a wide area. Some splashed on Vierziger as the cage released him to topple forward, but the prickles were nothing to the pain from which he’d been freed.
Coke started toward Vierziger. A young L’Escorial, scarcely a boy, stepped into the room behind the Frisians. He was buttoning his trousers. “Wha—” he cried as Margulies turned, bringing her heavy weapon to bear less than arm’s length from the gunman’s breastbone.
He didn’t have a gun. That wouldn’t matter, but as her finger took up slack on the trigger she recognized—
“Emilio!” she said. “Your name’s Emilio and you come from Silva Blanca.”
The muzzle of the 2-cm weapon shimmered yellow. The iridium was cooling slowly from the five rounds she’d put through it in the street a moment ago. Coke glanced back at the lieutenant, but his real attention was on Vierziger. Margulies’ situation was under control, though he wasn’t sure what she meant to do.
The young L’Escorial swallowed. He leaned back, afraid to move his feet and unable to take his eyes from the 2-cm mouth that would swallow his life with another millimeter of trigger travel. “How did you know?” he whispered. “How did you know me?”
An automatic carbine leaned against the wall by the doorway, probably Emilio’s weapon. Margulies doubted the boy would have been able to grip it if she picked it up and put it in his hands.
“Go home to your parents, Emilio,” Margulies said. The boy wore a red armband. She ripped it off while her right hand continued to steady her weapon on the youth’s chest. “Farming’s better than dying. You’ve got no talent for this business.”
“You’ll shoot me if I turn,” Emilio whimpered. Tears dribbled down his cheeks. “Oh,
Mama, Mama . . .”
Margulies thrust the 2-cm weapon toward Emilio’s face. The heat of the muzzle made him flinch away. He turned and ran into the night, still crying.
Moden and Daun strode into the armory. “All clear,” Niko called. He was bright, spiky with hormones and eagerness.
The logistics officer lifted the triple rocket launcher and checked it with a critical eye. “Who was that?” he asked Margulies in a low voice.
Margulies grimaced. “A civilian,” she said. “Somebody who didn’t have any business here.”
Coke helped Vierziger rise cautiously from the floor where he’d fallen. The little gunman waved him away.
“Find me some clothes,” Vierziger said. His eyes were open. He looked straight ahead and held himself stiffly. “They cut mine off me when they put me in there.”
Niko Daun turned and sprinted up the stairs to the barracks without formal orders from anyone. The dead torturer’s pants wouldn’t have fit, even if they’d been in better condition than the corpse which wore them.
“They had the cage’s power turned all the way up,” Coke said in a quiet voice. “They put him through hell.”
Vierziger looked at Coke and managed a shaky smile. “No, Matthew,” he said. The lilting insouciance was back in his tone. “That was somebody else entirely. And it can’t have been Hell, can it? Because I still have a chance to do penance.”
He flexed his hands with apparent approval.
“Here you go!” Niko Daun called as he returned with boots, a pair of gray trousers, and a camouflaged tunic. The items were all small enough to fit Vierziger. If they weren’t particularly clean, they at least offered the spiritual protection which clothing gives a civilized man.
Coke frowned as Vierziger drew the garments on. “I don’t understand, Johann,” he said.
Vierziger chuckled. “Neither do I, Matthew,” he replied. “But we’re not required to understand, you realize.”
Heavy fire roared from down the street. Coke switched his visor to give him a quarter overlay view of the console display. He chose another sub-machine gun from the selection available in the armory.
The three Astra gunmen in the office with the Widow and Peres stumbled out through a hole torn in the facade by L’Escorial fire. They’d thrown away their weapons. One of the Astras had even stripped so that he didn’t show any blue garments in the lights bathing the battered headquarters.
Fireflies dropped from the night sky, circled the men, and stabbed them with multiple cyan bolts. The Astras screamed and died in the rubble of their fortress. One man flung out his arm to fend death away. Bolts blew the limb off at the shoulder before another round finished him.
“Come out, Widow!” Pepe Luria called. His father and grandfather crouched behind the courtyard wall, but Pepe stood in the gap between two L’Escorial armored vehicles. “We’ll treat you with full honors!”
“I’ll take the roof,” Sten Moden said, hefting his launcher and a case holding three additional missiles. “Niko, will you load for me?”
“The roof?” Coke said. “That’s not great if you’ve got to displace.”
Moden shrugged despite the enormous weight he carried on his one arm. “A good vantage point,” he said. “And the backblast of these—it’d be almost as bad in an alley as inside. The cost of power, you know.”
“Go on,” Coke said. “But be careful.”
L’Escorials had refilled the tubes of the car mounting fléchette rockets. Pepe stepped to the side. This time his henchmen were careful to avoid the lethal wedge of exhaust behind the vehicle.
The gunner inside closed the firing contacts. The twelve rockets rippled off in four nearly simultaneous trios. A fraction of a second after they left the launching tubes, the casings split open and unleashed hundreds of dense arrows, finned to spread slightly along their trajectory.
The fléchettes hit the facade of Astra headquarters like osmium sleet. The pillar sheltering the flag-waving gunman disintegrated, as did what remained of the wall of the office beyond. Dust rose, dazzlingly white in the lights of L’Escorial vehicles.
“Come out, Widow!” Pepe shouted gleefully as he stepped into view again.
Johann Vierziger draped himself with bandoliers and two slung weapons, a sub-machine gun and a 2-cm powergun. He slid a pistol into the pocket of the tunic he wore.
“Pepe must have kept my rig,” he said wryly. “Well, it’s only a tool. Like the flesh itself. The tools aren’t what matter.”
“You and Margulies stick together,” Coke ordered. “I’ll take the opposite side of the street myself.”
Vierziger shook his head and smiled. “The two of you take the other side,” he said/ordered. “I prefer to work alone.”
Vierziger began dropping grenade clusters into various pockets of his garments. His body armor lay where it had been dumped with the other Frisian suits.
Coke looked at the little man, then said, “Okay, Mary, let’s get into position. It’ll be party time any moment now.”
They stepped from the building and crossed the courtyard, covering one another’s movements alternately. Fires lighted the interior of a dust pall to mark Astra headquarters and the street before it. Hundreds of L’Escorial gunmen capered about the site, silhouetted like insects by a lamp.
Adolpho Peres, an overlay on one corner of Coke’s visor, bawled, “I surrender! I surrender! I’m coming out!”
The gigolo staggered through the curtain of dust and smoke. Debris fouled his outfit, a ruffed doublet and tights of black velvet. His eyes were slitted.
Peres negotiated the rubble of the protective facade without falling, only to trip over the riddled bodies of the gunmen who’d preceded him from the building. He tumbled to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. “Oh, dear Lord in heaven Luria I’m your friend you mustn’t—”
The fireflies drifted within a meter of Peres before they one at a time emptied their magazines into him. When the last unit fired, only scraps of bone remained of what had been the gigolo’s muscular torso.
“Four to team,” Lieutenant Barbour said through the silence on the scene his console projected. “Are any of you wearing visible red garments? Report ASAP, repeat ASAP! Over.”
Coke sprinted across the street under cover of Margulies’ shoulder weapon. He took cover at the corner of the next building up from Hathaway House to avoid involving Barbour and the Hathaways themselves. “One negative,” he called.
“Two negative,” from the logistics officer, breathing heavily with the exertion of his climb to the roof of the L’Escorial building.
“Three nega—Five negative,” Niko Daun stepping on Margulies’ report, but they were both clear and that was what mattered.
“Six negative,” said Sergeant Johann Vierziger, by pay grade the lowest-ranking member of the survey team. “And it is time that we act, Matthew. Out.”
“Negative!” Bob Barbour snapped. The command was as unexpected as seeing a nun aim a rocket launcher. “This is Four. I’ll tell you when I’m ready, but do nothing till then. Four out.”
“Roger that,” Coke said, crouching at the corner of the building. He wasn’t sure what the intelligence officer had in mind, but he knew Bob well enough now to trust his judgment. Hell, he trusted every member of his team. “One out.”
The town of Potosi was locked and unlighted. Civilians huddled beneath furniture, praying that their homes would be spared by the heavy weapons that could shatter walls and bring down upper stories in an avalanche of brick and timber.
On Coke’s faceshield, the image of Stella Guzman stepped through the curtain of dust. Her combs gleamed in the glaring lights. She stood like a wraith. The ruin of her fortress wound a shroud about her.
“Luria!” she cried. Her eyes stared straight before her, as though she were unaware of her lover’s corpse at her feet. “I will wait for you in Hell, Luria. You’ll join me this night! Do you hear me? You’ll join me this night!”
Pepe’s assistants w
ere still reloading the fireflies’ magazines. The youngest Luria let his controller hang at his belt and rose to face the Widow. “Why, Stella!” he called. “How shameless! Making an assignation and your lover’s body still—”
He drew a pistol and pointed it. From the purple highlights it was indeed Vierziger’s weapon.
“—warm!”
“I’ll wait for you in—”
Pepe shot her in the face. The Widow turned. Luria continued shooting as the body spun onto the rubble and bounced. The Widow’s hand was outstretched toward Peres, but their dead fingers did not touch.
The last of the fireflies rose from the hands of the attendant servicing it. The six deadly constructs wove a violet corona above the L’Escorial leadership.
“Now,” the intelligence officer said. “But don’t harm the fireflies, they’re mine. Four out.”
Pepe Luria noticed that his constellation of fireflies moved without his ordering them to do so. He reacted instantly, diving to cover under one of the armored cars flanking him.
“Take them!” said Major Matthew Coke, and the darkness ignited.
Vierziger fired his 2-cm weapon into the side of the vehicle. Even at a range of nearly 500 meters, the powerful charge turned a chunk of steel armor into vapor and white flame rupturing outward.
Molten and gaseous metal sprayed Pepe beneath the opposite car. Luria jumped up screaming, his hair and clothing afire. Vierziger’s second bolt blew his head off in a cyan flash.
Sten Moden launched a missile. The roof of L’Escorial headquarters reflected some of the backblast straight up, so the building itself appeared to have exploded in red flames.
Before the launcher operator fired, he locked a missile on by snapping an image with his guidance laser, then designated it as a point or object target. In the latter case—a maneuvering armored vehicle, for example—the missile guided itself to the target without updates from the operator.
The missiles had a ten-kilometer range, or even farther if they were launched from a level higher than the chosen target. Here, at half a klick, unburned rocket fuel added to the already cataclysmic effect of the powerful warhead.
