by David Drake
“Do you have any orders, Matthew?” Johann Vierziger asked in a voice as sharp and lethal as a cat’s white eyetooth.
“No!” Coke said. Not the guns, not yet. “Mistress Ortega! What’s the best way through?”
A three-wheeled jitney stopped at the cordon. The driver might have turned as more distant traffic did, but a thug pointed his sub-machine gun at the little vehicle.
L’Escorial gunmen poked and prodded the passengers, a pair of sailors and their local whores. A gunman took the liquor bottle from a sailor, drank from it, and handed it back. The business wasn’t a formal search, just harassment and almost good-natured— until the end.
A gunman lifted up the bandeau of one of the prostitutes to uncover her breasts. The woman’s nipples were tattooed blue.
The gunman’s quick feel turned into a vicious yank. The woman screamed. Another L’Escorial thug bashed her behind the ear with a pistol butt.
Half a dozen of the red-clad gunmen converged like soldier ants to the sound of an intruder. They kicked and punched, stripping the prostitute as she tried to crawl away from them. One of the men thrust the muzzle of his 2-cm powergun between the woman’s legs.
Coke’s vision focused into a narrow tunnel. His mouth was half open and his skin was cold.
He didn’t know her. She was nothing but a whore and a stupid whore besides, a whore who took an indelible stand in favor of one gang of thugs over another.
But he was going to do it anyway, violate his own orders and he’d have had the balls of any team member who did the same—
The L’Escorial lifted his powergun, laughing, and kicked the woman instead. His nailed boots tore a double row of gashes in her buttocks; but that came with the turf. She continued to crawl, ignored now by the gunman and other citizens alike.
The two sailors and the remaining woman slipped through the cordon during the incident. The driver left the jitney where it was. He ducked into a doorway marked DRINKS & ENTERTAINMENT.
Pilar shut off the van’s engine. “There’s no way through or around,” she said. “No safe way. They—”
She closed her eyes and whispered something with her finger on the crucifix again.
“This doesn’t happen very often,” she continued in a resigned tone. “I suggest you take beds in one of these—” she grimaced “— places. That’s what I’m going to do. It will be quite horrible, but …you can’t tell what they’ll take it into their heads to do. Many of them mix tailings and alcohol together. It makes them crazy. Crazier.”
“This doesn’t look like a great neighborhood a-tall,” Niko Daun said, looking around at the dingy buildings.
He was right. The add-on levels above the original constructions were reached by rickety outside staircases. The signs reading BEDS or SLEEP or (in one case, and perhaps little more of a lie than the others) SAFE LODGINGS were always on these outside stairs.
“How far away is the Hathaway House?” Coke asked Pilar as he continued to scan.
“It’s right across the street from the L’Escorial building,” Pilar said, “but that’s the problem. It wouldn’t do you any good to walk around the, the armed children, because they’re exactly where you want to go.”
“Hathaway House may not be any better than these flops anyway,” Sten Moden suggested. He didn’t sound concerned.
“There’s six of us,” said Robert Barbour. “We ought to be safe enough for the night.”
“The Hathaway is a decent place,” said Pilar. “I mean really decent, the only one in Potosi. But you can’t get there. It doesn’t have any back door. That’d just be another point to guard.”
“I would say,” Vierziger said coolly, “that it’s not too far to carry our luggage if the lady doesn’t want to drive us.”
“It’s not want,” Pilar burst out angrily. “It’s not safe to cross that gauntlet, safe for you!”
People with great need or great confidence were getting past the cordon. A gunman in red cordovan boots cut a citizen’s belt and sent him scampering away with his trousers around his ankles.
Women were fondled, generally roughly. A few people were relieved of small objects—a gun, a chip recorder; perhaps some money. For the most part the cordon was an irritation, not an atrocity.
But it could become an atrocity at any moment, Coke knew. The only apparent check on the gunmen’s activities was their own desires. There was no sign of external control.
Coke glanced up at Margulies on the roof of the van. He’d order her into a firefight without hesitation, but this was something else again. At the start, anyway.
“Mary, it’s your call,” he said.
She shrugged. “I’m not thrilled either way,” she said. “But we came here to get information. I guess we may as well go do that.”
She hopped down, bracing her left hand on the van roof. Her toes took her weight, so that she landed as lightly as if she’d stepped from the side door.
“All right, that’s what we’re going to do,” Coke said. “Whatever comes, we’re going to take it. When we’re in the hotel, we’ll take stock—but not before then. Understood?”
Sten Moden shrugged. Daun said, “Yessir,” very quietly, and Robert Barbour nodded. The intel lieutenant looked nervous, which was actually good: that meant he understood what was likely to happen. Coke thought he’d be okay.
“You mustn’t do this!” Pilar said. “Please, just come with me.”
She started toward stairs marked CLEAN LOCKED BEDS, rising from the unpaved alley beside where the van was parked. A man—or perhaps a woman within the ragged garments—lay supine just below the first landing.
“Nothing without orders, Matthew,” said Johann Vierziger. “Nothing. I understand.”
Coke nodded. “Let’s do it,” he said, hefting his own pair of cases from the van and starting toward the cordon.
“Please!” called Pilar Ortega. “Please, Master Coke! You don’t know what you’re doing.”
She was wrong there …but that didn’t necessarily mean that the business was survivable.
A few additional gunmen wandered out of L’Escorial headquarters to join the cordon. One of them brought a carton from which he tossed thimble-sized stim cones to his fellows.
Other L’Escorials left, bored by the lack of activity. Three of them headed for a ground-floor establishment whose doorjamb and transom were outlined in red glow-strip.
Many of the dives in the immediate neighborhood were marked red. None of them had blue anywhere on their signs or facades.
“S’pose they’d all go home if we waited a bit?” Daun asked.
“No,” said Barbour beside him. There was tension in the voices of both technical specialists, but many things need to be tight to function. Neither of the men sounded as if he was about to break.
The 400-plus meter stretch of road between the rival headquarters had largely emptied since the cordons were established. The only traffic was of pedestrians crossing from one bar to another or climbing stairs to a flophouse.
A few drivers returned to their vehicles and ran them into the alleys. The jitneys had large-diameter wheels and often studded tires (though not all of them had tires). They could probably get along well enough off the pavement, though a serious pothole would overbalance them sideways. The little vehicles had narrow tracks and a high center of gravity.
The survey team, pulling its luggage toward the L’Escorial cordon, stood out like six sore thumbs.
The gunmen quieted speculatively. They didn’t break their rough spacing across the width of the street, but there was a slight edgewise movement to concentrate in Coke’s line toward the doorway of Hathaway House.
The door was metal-faced. It opened a crack. An orange-haired woman in her late middle age looked out. She closed the door after surveying the situation, but a triangular viewport opened immediately toward the top of the panel.
A blond man in his mid-twenties walked from the center of the line toward the end which the team approached. T
he fellow wore a crimson vest and cutoff trousers, high boots with rows of spikes around the calves, and a waist belt heavy with pouches of spare magazines for his sub-machine gun. His right arm and left leg were tattooed in patterns too stretched and faded to be identified in the bad light.
Coke paused a meter short of the blond man. Vierziger was a pace behind him; the rest of the team slanted back in precise echelon. Under the present circumstances, Moden instead of Margulies brought up the rear.
“Good evening, sir,” Coke said to the presumed L’Escorial leader. He let go of the hand-grips of his luggage.
The blond man pointed his sub-machine gun into the air and shot off half the magazine in a single ripping burst. A cone of cyan bolts flicked toward the stars.
As their leader fired, most of the other L’Escorials in the cordon followed suit in a ragged volley. They carried a wide variety of weapons, though high-quality powerguns predominated. The night was a bedlam of whacks, hisscracks, and propellant flashes of red, orange, and yellow supplementing the powerguns’ saturated blue.
Not all the gunmen aimed skyward. A burly, bare-chested man wearing garnet-studded nipple rings with a chain slung between them pointed his chemically powered fléchette gun at the front of Hathaway House. He fired twice.
The crashing reports of the hypervelocity weapon rattled shutters and screens against the windows they protected. The building’s facade was concrete containing very coarse aggregate. The tungsten fléchettes blew out craters in sprays of yellow-green sparks. A piece of gravel the size of Coke’s clenched fist flew back across the street. It smacked the wall fronting L’Escorial headquarters.
The gunman rocked with each round from his high-recoil weapon. He was lowering the muzzle for a third shot when the L’Escorial leader batted him across the temple with the sub-machine gun’s barrel.
“Fuckhead!” the leader shouted as his henchman sprawled facedown on the pavement. The victim’s hair, scorched by the white-hot iridium, stank obscenely. “You want to kill us all?”
He’d knocked the fellow unconscious. From the eyes of the man with the fléchette gun, he’d been flying so high on gage and other drugs that he probably wouldn’t remember the lesson in the morning anyway, though he’d feel it.
The L’Escorial leader turned. He waggled the glowing muzzle of his powergun in Coke’s face. “Where do you come from, dickhead?” he demanded.
“We’re businessfolk from Nieuw Friesland,” Coke said quietly. “Though the last stage of our voyage was through Delos.”
“Everybody comes through Delos if they’re coming here, dickhead,” the leader snarled. He pointed his weapon one-handed at one of Coke’s suitcases. “Open that. Now!”
“I’m sorry,” Coke lied, “but they were hold baggage on shipboard, so they’re time-locked. They can’t be opened for another day and a half.”
“Want to bet?” the gunman said. He fired.
The survey team’s luggage was plated with 40-laminae ceramic armor beneath a normal-looking sheathing. The thin laminae shattered individually without transmitting much of the shock to deeper layers. A few rounds from a 2-cm weapon would have blown any of the cases apart, but the burst of 1-cm pistol charges from the sub-machine gun only pecked halfway through the plating.
Furthermore, the ceramic reflected a proportion of the plasma. The spray of sun-hot ions glazed Coke’s trouser legs—the business suit was much more utilitarian than its stylish cut implied.
The L’Escorial gunman’s bare knees blistered instantly, and the fringe of his shorts caught fire. He screamed, dropped his weapon, and began batting with his bare hands at the flames.
The case started to fall over. The burst of gunfire had smashed the forward static generator in a shower of sparks.
Coke grabbed the handle of the case. “Please, sirs!” he cried in a voice intended to sound terrified. “We’re businessmen! Please!”
“Fuck you!” a tall man with a pair of pistols cried. “You’re dancers, that’s what you are!”
He fired twice into the pavement at Coke’s feet. Glass and pebbles from the compressed-earth roadway spattered Coke’s legs above his shoe tops. Coke staggered forward, lifting the front of the damaged case in his left hand. He squeaked in simulated terror.
The fear was real, but not terror, not anything that prevented Matthew Coke from acting in whatever fashion was necessary.
He didn’t know whether or not the actions he’d set in motion were survivable. It was like a free-fall jump. Once you’d committed, you could only hope the support mechanism—static repulsion, parachute, or whatever—would work as intended. The team couldn’t change its collective mind now.
A 2-cm bolt blew off the lower back corner of the damaged case and the rest of the static suspension. With the plating and the hardware inside, the case weighed nearly a hundred kilos. Coke lurched onward with it, bleating. He was through the cordon, but a bullet could flick through the back of his head and take his face off at any gunman’s whim.
Mary Margulies touched the latch of her tight-band case with a finger so swift that the luggage appeared to have flown open by accident. Frilly underwear and lounging garments flew out onto the roadway.
“Hey lookee-lookee-lookee!” shouted a gunman. He grabbed a teddy and modeled it against his scarred chest.
The cordon collapsed into a rush for loot. The clothing had no value except as a matter of amusement, but that’s all the cordon was to begin with: a way for men with a childish mindset to amuse themselves.
“Hey, sweetie!” a gunman cried. He grabbed, not very seriously, for Margulies’ crotch. The lieutenant weaseled past with her remaining suitcase. “Stay with me! I’ll give you more dick than all five of them pussies together!”
The door of Hathaway House opened in front of Coke. His left arm felt as though the shoulder tendons would snap with the weight of the case they supported. He stepped aside to check on his team.
“Get in, curse your eyes!” Johann Vierziger shouted. “I’ll handle—”
Vierziger slid one of his cases into the doorway with a sweep of his left arm.
“—this!” and he sent the second case after the first, skidding like driverless cars.
Though the static suspension balanced the weight of the luggage, its inertia was unchanged. Vierziger’s movements, as smooth and practiced as those of an expert lawn-bowler, required strength that one wouldn’t assume in someone as pretty as the little man.
A voice yelped from inside the hotel. The door started to close, but Barbour was there, using the mass of his cases to slam the panel fully open. He twisted aside. Niko Daun followed him in.
A pair of L’Escorial gunmen were dancing. One wore a pair of delicate panties as a crown; his partner had thrust his arms into leggings whose multiple shimmering colors shifted as they caught varied light-sources. Other L’Escorials cheered and clapped, or pawed through the open case for their own trophies.
Coke pointed Margulies in. She obeyed at a hasty rush, aware that her presence as a woman made the risk to every member of the team greater. The expression on her face was set and terrible.
Sten Moden tossed his huge case after her, picked up both of Coke’s cases in his one hand and tossed them; and wrapped his arm around Coke’s waist. Moden swept the major with him into the lobby of Hathaway House. Coke could as well have wrestled an oak tree for the good his protests did.
Somebody had to be last in; and yeah, that was probably a job for the security detail, for Sergeant Vierziger, but it didn’t seem right …
The sixtyish woman with orange hair started to push the door closed. Daun and Barbour were already doing that. Vierziger danced backward through the opening.
The panel clanged against its jamb. It rang again an instant later: a L’Escorial had fired a powergun into the armor as a farewell. The door’s refractory core, lime or ceramic, absorbed the discharge without damage.
The woman swept her hair out of her eyes. She was healthy looking though on the pl
ump side. A man of similar age with a luxuriant, obviously implanted, mane of hair stood to the side, wringing his hands.
Several tables stood in a saloon alcove off the foyer. A few men were seated in the shadows there. They stared pointedly at their drinks rather than at the newcomers. The silence within the hotel was a balm after the noisy violence of the street.
The woman planted her arms akimbo, fists on her hips. “Welcome to Cantilucca, mistress and sirs,” she said. “Now, if you’re smart, you’ll head right back to the port and take the next ship out of this pigsty!”
“Oh, Evie, it’s not so bad as that,” the man said. “It’s just with the, you know, with the syndicates on edge like they are, there’s more, ah …”
“More murderous bandits in town than usual?” the woman snapped. “Yes, there are, and it’s an open question whether they kill everybody else off before they kill each other or after!”
“I’m Georg Hathaway,” the man said, bowing to Moden— probably because the logistics officer was the most imposing presence of this or most other groups. “This is my wife Evie, and I’m sorry for this trouble, usually things are better, it’s just there are so many of the patrolmen in Potosi these last few months, and you know, the boys will let off steam.”
“Usually things are almost bearable,” Evie Hathaway said sharply. “That hasn’t been the case since the bandits began gearing up to fight—and they don’t fight, they just squeeze decent citizens harder yet. When will it stop, I’d like to know?”
“Evie, now, don’t upset the gentlemen and lady,” Georg Hathaway said. “They’ve had a difficult time already, we mustn’t make it worse. Are you the Coke party, then, booking from Nieuw Friesland?”
Moden gestured, palm up. “This is Master Coke,” he said. “You have rooms for us?”
“Oh, we have rooms, all right,” Evie said. “What we don’t have is patrons who can pay us for them. Since this trouble started three months ago, nobody with money and sense comes anywhere near Potosi.”
