by David Drake
There was a gurgling cry. When Moden withdrew the table the second time, sub-machine guns and other accoutrements clattered to the floor behind it.
Annunciata screamed. She threw herself into her father’s arms.
Moden gave a convulsive gesture that slammed the table back down on its six legs. He was trembling all over. He had to brace his hand on the scarred top in order to continue standing. Powergun bolts had blown smoldering craters in the wood.
Moden didn’t try to look over the table to see what had become of his victims, though he knew he ought to. One of the Astras might still have enough strength to pull a trigger….
But probably not.
The Rojo family spoke or cried in four vocal ranges, all of them incoherently. The Frisian closed his eyes and opened them, drawing deep breaths.
The cafe’s outer door flew open.
Mary Margulies lunged in behind a sub-machine gun. Niko Daun followed her with a set expression and another sub-machine gun.
The would-be rescuers looked at Moden, then looked at their feet. “Blood and martyrs,” Niko said.
Margulies straightened from her crouch. She put her weapon on safe and cleared her throat. “Ah,” she said. “Barbour, you know he monitors the audio from the helmets. He thought you might need a hand.”
Sten Moden looked at his palm. His adrenaline-charged grip had left white valleys where it held the corners of the table leg.
“No,” Moden said. “One was enough.”
Cantilucca: Day Three
The outer fence surrounding L’Escorial’s gage warehouse was woven wire, five meters high and topped with a Y of razor ribbon. The forest had grown to and entwined with the wire despite evidence of desultory attempts to burn it back. The diamond teeth of Coke’s powered cutting bar opened a man-sized hole with one sweep of his arm.
The vegetation in the four meters between the fencelines was cut to knee-height scrub. There was a single row of buried toe-poppers, located so that the mower could straddle them. Daun marked a safe pathway with white tape.
The sensor-controlled directional mines placed every ten meters along the inner fence were even less of a danger. Daun turned them all off with a deactivation signal, just as the watchmen would have done while mowing or carrying out other maintenance operations.
“Who do these bozos think they’re dealing with?” the sensor tech muttered disdainfully to Coke.
“Bozos like the Astras behind us,” Coke replied.
Well behind them. Coke had decided he and Daun would breach the defenses alone. Vierziger wasn’t happy to be a kilometer back in the forest along the road, but that was the only way Coke could be sure the Astras would stay where they belonged.
The last thing Coke wanted was a line of trucks to come driving up while he and Niko were in the middle of the wire. He’d seen relief in the sensor tech’s eyes when they went over the plan the first time. Daun had more reason than most to doubt the competence of indig forces.
“Wait here, sir,” Daun said crisply.
The sensor tech darted across the cleared area to the nearest directional mine, a lump against the inner fence. After a moment’s manipulation there, he moved ten meters down the line to another lump. He tossed something to the ground.
“All right, sir,” Daun said, this time using helmet intercom. “I’ve pulled the fuzes. I didn’t want somebody turning them on again at a bad time. It can happen by accident, even, lightning or a plasma discharge.”
“No, we wouldn’t want that,” Coke agreed under his breath.
He was smiling. He remembered he’d had doubts about how the kid would perform after the experience which got him transferred to a survey team. Just fine, so long as Daun could be confident of his backup …and for that, so far, so good.
The warehouse was a huge hangar constructed primarily of structural plastic, but strengthened at the corners by pillars of reinforced concrete. A bank of lights on the roof was intended to flood the interval between the fencelines. Many of the bulbs had failed without being replaced.
It didn’t really matter. The guards didn’t patrol the exterior, and there were no windows in the building proper from which to observe their surroundings.
The gage syndicates had achieved parity of incompetence. That was fine until somebody arrived who knew his ass from a hole in the ground.
Daun set a small transducer close to the nearest of the inner fencepoles. He stepped swiftly toward the next support, holding a similar transducer and unreeling the thin cable which tied it to the box he’d set on the ground.
“Don’t touch the fence yet, sir,” the tech ordered; needlessly, because they’d gone over the plan in the lobby of Hathaway House, and Matthew Coke knew better than to jump the gun in an uncleared detector field anyway.
“Right,” Coke murmured. He preferred a subordinate who might irritate him with unnecessary warnings to one who let him walk into disaster because, I thought you knew!
Daun turned a switch on the control box. “There we go!” he said. “All right, sir. It’ll think the circuit’s complete even if you blow everything down between these two posts.”
“No need for that,” Coke said. He thumbed the cutting bar live and swept it up and down with his left hand in a nearly perfect catenary arc through the fencing. The blade whined and sparkled happily.
If L’Escorial’s builders had used beryllium monocrystal or some other refractory material for their defenses instead of steel wire, the Frisians’ task would have been more difficult. But if a frog didn’t jump, it wouldn’t hit its ass on the ceiling….
Coke crouched in the opening as Daun sprinted for the building forty meters away. If Coke had to supply covering fire—he carried a sub-machine gun, with holstered pistol and a 2-cm weapon slung just in case—he didn’t want to be so close to the warehouse that he couldn’t cover both ends of the building with his peripheral vision.
Daun wrenched up a lid on the ground outside the building. It wasn’t locked shut. The tech stretched on the concrete pad, holding a light down in the cavity with one hand and reaching in with the other. Bob Barbour claimed this fusion bottle was the sole power source for the warehouse.
Fusion bottles didn’t fail, and the output of one was more than sufficient to power the building’s lights, sensors, and motor-driven trackways. Coke still found it hard to believe that there wasn’t at least a battery-operated emergency radio, despite Barbour’s assurances. If Bob was wrong, well, he was also ready to jam the transmission within a microsecond.
Niko Daun ran back, bent halfway over and flushing with excitement. “Okay, sir!” he said quickly. “Okay, whenever you want it.”
Coke keyed his helmet to channel one. “Go,” he said. “Out.”
“Roger,” said Johann Vierziger’s voice, a whisper like tendons rustling on dry bones. “Out.”
Coke checked all his weapons. “Niko,” he said, “why don’t you wait here. I’m going to wait by the door in case they open it when they hear the trucks.”
“No sir,” said the sensor tech. “I’m part of this team.” He closed the case holding his equipment and unslung his sub-machine gun.
“Glad to have you along,” Coke said with a quirked smile. He started around to the front of the warehouse, walking just inside the inner fenceline.
It wasn’t really true. Daun’s combat skills were coming along, but firefights wouldn’t ever be the boy’s strong suit. On the other hand, he was probably better than most of the guards they’d be facing in a moment. And anyway, Coke wasn’t about to tell the kid who’d performed splendidly that he’d be a fifth wheel in what came next.
Coke expected the first of the vehicles coming up the road to be a flatbed truck configured as a ram with a sloped steel bow and extra weight in back to add momentum. Instead he heard the hum of a jitney, one of those Sten Moden’s mechanic friend had supplied to the Frisians.
Coke frowned, but then he thought about it for a moment. Vierziger had kept the Astras on their l
eash. If the gunman wanted to arrive before the locals now, there was no real reason he shouldn’t.
Instead of coming to the first of the two gates on the approach road, the jitney bounced off the pavement and whined to the hole Coke had cut in the outer fence. Though the Astra convoy was running without lights, the twenty big flatbeds were audible by now.
Vierziger left the jitney at the gap in the fence. He jogged the rest of the way to Coke and Daun. He wore two bandoliers and a garrison belt hung with various munitions, but none of the equipment jingled or clattered as he moved.
“We were going to let the Astras take it from here,” Coke commented mildly.
“No, Matthew,” Vierziger said. “We were going to do it right.”
“We still have to wait for the ram,” Coke said.
“I can open the warehouse doors if you’d like, sir,” Niko Daun said. “So long as the power’s still on, like it is now.”
Coke blinked. “You can?” he said.
Johann Vierziger smiled at him. The harsh illumination from the roof floodlights made the little man look like a gnome, an incredibly vicious gnome.
“Sure,” Daun said.
He reslung his sub-machine gun and fumbled in the small tool pouch on his belt as he walked to the latch plate beside the sliding doors. The kit Daun had left back at the fence contained the special equipment he needed for the outer defenses, but he wore what he considered basic tools whenever he had his trousers on.
“I hope he remembered to put the curst gun on safe,” Coke grumbled.
“He did, Matthew,” Johann Vierziger said. He faced the door, but his eyes were far away. He flexed his empty hands twice, then readied his sub-machine gun. “He’s a very careful lad. A credit to you as his commander.”
“I’m ready,” the tech said. He’d pressed a flat disk held by a magnet or suction cup to the latch plate. A coil of thin flex ran from the disk to the squeezer in Daun’s hand.
“Just before the truck rams the first gate,” Vierziger said softly. “Then cut the power when the door’s half a meter open.”
Vierziger hadn’t said anything during the planning session when Coke proposed a battering ram to enter the warehouse after they’d shut off the building’s power supply. If the sergeant had made this suggestion, Coke would have vetoed it as needlessly dangerous to members of the survey team. Now, with adrenaline surging through his blood, Coke couldn’t imagine another way to have done it.
But Vierziger had known that all along.
The trucks were in sight, snorting and rumbling up the approach road. The ram plate on the lead vehicle was a V-shaped blade intended for a ground-clearing bulldozer.
“Don’t the guards hear them coming?” Niko asked in a combination of wonder and nervousness. He had nothing to do but wait until Coke gave him the order.
“They’re not guards,” Coke murmured. He switched his visor to thermal imaging, then through light amplification and straight visual mode back to thermal again. Just to be sure. “They’re employees who don’t really believe there’s need to guard anything. Drunken, stoned employees.”
“Are we really going to put all this gage in the Astras’ hands, Matthew?” Vierziger whispered.
The bastard had known all along!
“No,” said Matthew Coke. “We’re going to burn it here.”
Daun squeezed, then dropped his clacker and grabbed the separate control clipped to his breast pocket. The double doors rumbled back. The lead truck slammed into the gate with sparks and a tortured squeal—
The lights on the warehouse roof dimmed and vanished, the doors froze the width of a man’s shoulders apart—
And cyan hell broke loose as Johann dived into the building behind his blazing weapon.
Expanding echoes of Vierziger’s bolts glowed in Coke’s thermal optics. A man writhed on the floor, his face gone. Coke leaped the body, firing twice between his legs while he was in the air.
The warehouse offices were in three partitioned cubicles to the left of the doors. The remainder of the building’s volume was a single room, ten meters high and stacked with drums of gage on pallets.
The car of the overhead rail and hoist system jogged forward on the inertia of the laden pallet slung beneath it. Because the building’s power was off, circuitry hadn’t shorted when Vierziger hit the control cage with a long burst. The operator lay slumped in his saddle, his clothing afire.
There was motion from the middle cubicle. A man stepped out. He lurched backward, shot simultaneously by Coke and Vierziger.
Coke dropped his sub-machine gun and aimed the 2-cm shoulder weapon instead. Vierziger ran down the center aisle. He would take any L’Escorials at the back of the building before they realized what was happening in front.
Coke fired twice through the open doorway of the center office, then twice into the door to its left. The bolts of sun-hot copper ions ignited the desk and furnishings of the first, and blew the extruded plastic door of the second into the cubicle’s interior.
Coke loaded a fresh magazine. He was shifting his aim to the third office when a figure ran out of the burning center cubicle. He swung the heavy muzzle back as his finger took up slack on the powergun’s trigger.
A woman, stark naked and screaming. She held a bandeau top in her left hand. No threat, no danger.
Coke aimed past her at the remaining office. He stroked his trigger twice to flush out anyone hiding there.
Niko Daun stepped alongside his commander. He fired at least half his sub-machine gun’s magazine into the screaming woman. Gobbets of flesh and bone spewed away like wood chipped by the teeth of a router. She spun back into the flames of the office from which she’d fled.
“I got him!” Niko shouted. “I got him!”
The lead truck hit the opening hard enough to jounce the double doors nearly open. The driver managed not to stall his motor. He backed a few meters and accelerated again, cutting his wheels to slide the left door back against its stops.
Nobody else came out of the offices. A body lay in the corner away from the cubicles. As Vierziger entered the building, he’d dropped the fellow. Coke hadn’t noticed him before.
Sprinklers opened above the burning offices. They were fed by standpipes in the roof, even though the pumped water system went off when the power did. Coke surveyed the ceiling, then put a bolt into the end of each standpipe where it joined the front wall of the warehouse. He fired until he’d emptied the 2-cm weapon’s magazine, then reloaded again. Water gushed down the inner wall and splashed across the concrete floor. There it could do nothing to affect the flames.
“All clear in back!” Vierziger reported over channel three. Several quick bursts of sub-machine gun fire snarled from the rear of the warehouse. “All clear in back!” Vierziger repeated, simultaneous with another burst.
Steam and smoke billowed from the burning office cubicles. Another Astra truck drove into the warehouse. Its headlights brightened the gray mist but did little to illuminate the building’s interior. The Astra gunmen didn’t have night vision equipment. They shouted to one another in anger and confusion.
The gage was in double-walled 150-liter plastic drums. For shipment, the drug was dissolved in a matrix of ethyl alcohol. Because Coke knew what to look for, he could already see the fires started at the back of the warehouse where Vierziger had raked pallets with his sub-machine gun.
“I’m coming out!” Vierziger called over the unit push. “Do not shoot, I’m coming out!”
Coke grabbed the foregrip of Niko Daun’s sub-machine gun and lifted the muzzle high. The sensor tech might not have heard the warning, might not have understood it—might have dropped his gun on the concrete and triggered a shot wholly by accident. Firefights weren’t Daun’s proper job, so it was the commander’s duty to see that no accidents occurred.
Adolpho Peres swung down from the cab of the second truck. He wore body armor and a helmet that must have weighed nearly ten kilos. “Start loading the gage!” he bellowed. �
��We can’t wait around here long!”
The gigolo waved his machine pistol. He turned his head as he spoke. Coke stepped toward him, releasing Daun.
Peres saw the motion past the edge of the helmet’s cheek plate. He must have thought he was being attacked, because he tried to swing the gun onto the Frisian.
“I’m a friend!” Coke shouted as he lunged forward. Instead of directing the weapon upward as he’d done with his own trooper, he jerked the machine pistol out of Peres’ hand. “We’ve killed them all for you!”
The office cubicles were fully involved by now, hammering the men in the front of the warehouse. The right side of the ram-equipped truck was only a few meters from the fire. The plastic body panels started to soften; bubbles appeared on the front fender.
“Who?” Peres shouted. “Coke, is that you? Manuel!”
The last call was for the gigolo’s bodyguard, a man nearly as tall as Sten Moden and broad in proportion. Coke saw Manuel’s vast, weapon-festooned bulk several meters away, groping in what was for him a gray fog. Vierziger’s assessment of the big man was that a gun-jeep had more brain cells and could carry even more weapons—but that choice was for Peres to worry about.
Johann Vierziger stepped up on the Astra leader’s other side. “I’m here, Matthew,” he said. “Now let’s get out of these gentlemen’s way, shall we?”
“Peres, we’ll leave you to load the gage,” Coke shouted in the gigolo’s ear. “We’ll meet you tomorrow morning to arrange contract terms!”
The warehouse had become a steambath because the heat boiled water off the concrete. The flow from the sprinklers had decayed to irregular dribbles, noticeable only if a drop happened to splash you from above.
“Yes, of course,” Peres replied. He snatched his helmet off in frustration at its weight and the degree to which it limited his range of vision—not that he was going to be able to see much more without it. “Manuel! Sanjulio!”
The three Frisians broke for the door. Coke’s finger on Daun’s wrist gave the sensor tech guidance he might or might not have needed.
