The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3 (hammer's slammers)

by David Drake

  “Stand over here,” Daun said, gesturing Suterbilt to a point near where the head of the bed would have been.

  Suterbilt frowned but obeyed.

  “I could have turned it on easier,” Daun grumbled under his breath to the other Frisian.

  “You could remove the work so that it could be reconstructed?” Vierziger murmured back.

  “Huh?” said Daun. “Course I could. Don’t be an idiot. The adhesive’ll powder at twenty-eight point nine kilohertz. Take about three seconds each. And realigning them afterward, that’s no sw—”

  The room shimmered out of the present and into a golden timelessness. Suterbilt had finally managed to trigger the ambiance with his low-powered key.

  Vierziger was in an individual paradise. Foliage waved slowly in breezes the viewer could not feel, and the air was perfumed with life itself.

  Movement was thought-swift and effortless. The trees mounted like towers holding the sky, far taller than was possible for normal vegetation which fed its branches by osmosis against the drag of gravity. The viewers’ minds could ascend the roughness of the bark, feel the single-celled microflora which gave texture and color to the trunks, or exist as the entire world—plant, animal, and the supporting soil beneath.

  The ambiance was more real than the sidereal universe to those within its pattern of impinging stimuli. Through it all, informing it all, was the single warm presence of its creator.

  “ …what remains of my wife is here …” Larrinaga had said. He was right, and he was perhaps right as well that Suzette was a saint.

  That wasn’t a subject on which Vierziger felt competent to judge.

  The glow dimmed, vanished. Physical reality reasserted itself and memory of the ambiance sucked itself down a wormhole into the unconscious of the men who had experienced it.

  Suterbilt shook himself. “I ought to come here more often,” he said. “It relaxes me.”

  Niko Daun looked at the projection heads, shaking his head in delight. “Amazing,” he said. “Absolutely amazing. I wish I could meet her.”

  “I think,” said Vierziger, “that you just did.”

  The effect was no more than a mental hologram; not life, not even something alive. But Vierziger could understand why Larrinaga believed his wife was still present in the ambiance. He supposed that was all you really had of any artist, and perhaps of any human being: the things they had done.

  “We can go now,” Vierziger said aloud. His left hand gestured Daun and Suterbilt toward the bedroom door, as if he and not the factor were the host.

  The guards had returned to the main living area of the house, an arc of floor raised three steps on one end to set off, without a vertical barrier, the kitchen/dining facilities from the relaxation area. A hologram display blared loud music to accompany a pornographic recording.

  The furniture was cheap, obviously junk brought in for the guards when Suterbilt carried off the original furnishings. It had been wrecked—shot, slashed, and broken apart. Two of the men sprawled on the floor, filthy though it was. The man with the headband got up from a legless sofa when the factor reappeared.

  “Sir?” the guard asked.

  “Keep a better lookout, for one thing!” Suterbilt snapped. He looked over at Vierziger. “Do you have anything to add?”

  “Not at the moment,” Vierziger said coolly. “I’ll make my recommendations in two days.”

  He looked around the mess and the men guarding it. “They will be expensive to carry out, that I can assure you. But necessary.”

  The three men walked outside. Suterbilt’s driver switched on the pump which powered the van’s four wheel-hub hydraulic motors.

  Vierziger swung the house door almost to, then caught the panel just before it clanged home and locked. “Blood!” he snapped. “I’ve left my briefcase.”

  He pivoted back into the house, pulling the door closed behind him. The guard wearing the headband was halfway back to the hologram. He turned, opening his mouth to speak.

  “I forgot—” Vierziger began.

  The door rang against its jamb. The Frisian drew and fired his pistol eight times in a single flowing motion.

  The man with the headband lurched backward, flinging his hands in the air. The first bolt had blown out the thin bones of his nose and emptied his eyesockets.

  The chest of a burly, blond-haired guard vanished in a red flash and a deafening roar. Vierziger hadn’t noticed the string of grenades the fellow was wearing beneath a light jumper. The bolt that should have ruptured the guard’s aorta instead set off a secondary explosion.

  The blast flung the remaining guards in four separate directions, complicating the Frisian’s task. It saved the man still seated on the sofa—for the few hundredths of a second before a second bolt slapped his temple while the ceramic wall behind where his head had been glowed white from the previous round.

  Each of the men sprawled on the floor before the shooting started took a round. One of them was faceless and screaming from the grenade blast. The bolt that ruptured his skull was a mercy.

  The last guard—and it was all in a half-second punctuated by the grenade—was turning with a fully automatic shotgun. Centrifugal force made his long red hair stand out like a porcupine’s quills. The cascade of hair caught the first bolt. It vanished in a red fireball, drinking the cyan plasma and dissipating its force.

  Vierziger’s trigger twitched a last time. His bolt punched the guard’s scream back through his palate.

  The shotgun fired three times before it jammed. Aerofoil projectiles, designed to spread wider than spherical pellets, zinged from the walls and ceiling. One traced a line as thin as a razor cut across the Frisian’s right cheek.

  The living area was bloody chaos.

  A toolkit/ammo pouch on the left side of Vierziger’s belt balanced the weight of the pistol he carried on the right. He took out a spanner and turned the white, shimmering barrel off the weapon’s receiver and dropped it on the floor. Rapid fire had eroded the iridium to half its original thickness. The remainder of the refractory metal was so hot that it deformed when it bounced on the cast flooring.

  Vierziger fitted a fresh barrel—the kit held two—and reloaded the pistol, then holstered it again. The process of replacing the shot-out barrel had taken less than thirty seconds.

  The house stank of ozone and bodies ripped apart and half-burned. The plasticizer of the grenade had a pungent reek, unpleasant and probably poisonous in a confined space. Vierziger ignored it.

  Some of the men’s clothing was afire. An arc of garbage centered on the grenade explosion burned also, though all the fires seemed likely to smolder out rather than build into a major conflagration.

  Vierziger’s attaché case was just inside the living area, where he’d set it behind a pile of trash when he entered the house behind Suterbilt. He opened the case and took out a cylindrical blasting device twenty centimeters across and half that in depth. He peeled the protective layer off one end, stuck the charge on the front wall near the door, and twisted the dial of delay fuze to one hour.

  Vierziger had printed a message on a card before he left Hathaway House. He stuck that to the wall just below the explosive device, then surveyed the room for one last time.

  One of the bodies twitched like a decorticated frog. The burning clothes had smothered themselves in veils of bitter smoke. Behind the gray, the hologram danced, more enticing for the partial coverage than it had been when the performers’ tired flesh was uncompromisingly revealed.

  Vierziger opened the door. The card on the wall read:

  REMOVE THE AMBIANCE AND GET BACK ASAP

  “All right, I’ll tell him!” the Frisian called over his shoulder as he stepped outside.

  Standing with his hand on the door he held ajar, Vierziger said to the sensor tech, “Daun, they’re having problems with the hue of their hologram projector. I told them you could fix it in three minutes at the outside.”

  He gestured Niko toward the doorway. “Get
at it. I don’t want to wait longer than I have to.”

  “Say!” said the factor. “I don’t want to wait at all! I’ve already wasted half an hour.”

  Vierziger closed the door behind Daun and stood with his back to it. “Relax,” he said. “Remember, you said you needed to use the ambiance more often anyway. Besides, if those turds don’t have the projector to amuse them, who knows what they’ll get up to?”

  Suterbilt sighed. “Yes, I suppose there’s that,” he agreed.

  He grimaced. The van’s headlights were on. This far out of town, their sidescatter was the only illumination. “Do you really think expensive changes will be necessary?” the factor asked.

  Vierziger shrugged. “It’s really a pair of changes,” he said. “Part of the guard force has to be outside. Not really to do anything—just to be a tripwire so that if they’re killed, the men inside have warning of an attack. But you also have to provide firing ports for the guards inside.”

  “That’s impossible!” Suterbilt said. “You can’t cut holes in these walls!” He slapped one to underscore his point.

  “It’s not impossible,” the Frisian said. The lighted half of his face drew up in a deliberate sneer. “It’s simply very expensive— as I said. And necessary. I’ll have a detailed plan for you in two days.”

  The door began to swing open. Vierziger stepped forward, moving Suterbilt back a pace. “Any trouble, Daun?” Vierziger asked over his shoulder.

  Niko looked at his fellow Frisian. “No,” he said. “No, I took care of my end.”

  He didn’t say anything more during the drive back to the TST offices, and he only once looked directly at Johann Vierziger.

  Vierziger smiled at him.

  “Stay in the car,” Coke ordered harshly. He thrust his sub-machine gun at Pilar. Her hands wouldn’t close on the dense metal and plastic. The weapon slipped into her lap. “If anybody gives you trouble, shoot them. It’s off safe and there’s one up the spout. Just fucking use it.”

  He’d stopped the port operations van in front of a six-story structure on the spaceport end of Potosi. Except for the location, the building was very similar to the one which held the Ortegas’— which held Pilar’s—apartment. The ground floor was a club, The Red Rooster, which was beginning to get under way for the evening.

  The doorman/bouncer realized that Coke intended to leave the vehicle parked in front while he went up the stairs beside the club’s entrance. The doorman stepped toward Coke and shouted, “Hey dickhead!”

  Coke pointed his left index finger at the man’s face. His right hand hung out at his side. The hand was crooked on a level with the butt of his pistol.

  “Don’t even think about it,” the Frisian warned. The flat assurance of his voice was more threatening than a snarl.

  The doorman backed inside the club. Coke went up the stairs two at a time.

  The door off the second-floor landing was metal-faced. The jamb was wood, however, and the interior wall didn’t look particularly sturdy either.

  Coke hammered on the panel with his knuckles. “Ortega!” he called. “Front and center! This is an emergency!”

  “Hey bud!” somebody called from below. Coke looked down.

  A man close to two meters tall, wearing an electric-green jumpsuit, had swung out of the club entrance. He held a combination weapon, a pneumatic gun firing explosive projectiles through a 30-cm long barrel with a shock baton of twice that length mounted beneath the muzzle like a bayonet.

  “Serafina’s busy!” he shouted as he pounded up the stairs toward Coke. “Now, buddy, you can wait or I can line you up with somebody just as sweet. But don’t you go—”

  Coke judged his moment. He kicked when the pimp was three steps below him. The gun was pointed up and to the left in rhythm with the tall man’s strides. Coke’s boot caught the pimp’s jaw and flung him down the stairs, limbs flailing.

  Coke turned to the door. Instead of knocking again, he took a flat ring charge from a pouch on his equipment belt, peeled off the protective layer, and pasted the charge around the door latch.

  He pulled the igniter wire and jumped several steps down the stairs to get clear of the blast. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted from reflex.

  The charge went off with a flat whack! A fragment of metal whined off the opposite wall. The door jounced on its hinges and stood ajar in a haze of gray smoke.

  Coke pulled the panel fully open but kept his body behind the wall. A stunner needle snapped through the dissipating smoke. It sparkled minusculely against the opposite side of the stairwell.

  “Ortega!” Coke shouted. “The drum you substituted in the gage going off yesterday on the Tellurian Queen—there’s a bomb in it. The cartel’s stocks on Delos are going up in smoke three days from now, and when they do people are going to be looking for you. You’ve got to get off-planet now!”

  “Get out of here,” a man called. “Get out of here! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  A burst of a dozen stun needles hissed and popped through the opening.

  Coke fumbled at his equipment belt, feeling for a smoke grenade. He’d go in with his visor on thermal—

  “Matthew!” Pilar screamed. Her sub-machine gun ripped cyan runs in the night.

  Coke drew as he turned. The street door’s jamb and lintel were a shower of shattered concrete from the cyan bolts. The tall pimp had gotten safe to the shelter of the stairwell before Pilar fired.

  The pimp aimed his weapon. Coke shot him in the chest and face.

  The pimp jerked his trigger. The pneumatic gun coughed, recoiling out of the dying man’s grip. The heavy shell hit three steps above the landing and burst, showering the stairwell with shrapnel and orange light.

  Coke, startled by the blast and prickles from the shell, sprayed three more bolts. He hit the pimp only once—in the ankle as he fell backward. The fellow was dead already, or at least he would be in the next minute or two.

  “Ortega!” Coke repeated. His ears were ringing. “Come on out. I won’t hurt you, and you don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Matthew, you mustn’t kill him!” Pilar called. She was at the bottom of the staircase. She tried to step past the tall man. His thrashing arm struck her calf. She came up anyway, her face pale and her sub-machine gun’s muzzle shimmering brighter than the stairwell glow-strip.

  “Go back!” Coke ordered. She climbed toward him anyway.

  The explosive shell had flung the room door shut again. Coke reached for it with his left hand. The panel opened from the inside. A naked woman stepped out onto the landing.

  Her name—the name she went by, anyway—was Serafina Amoretta. Coke had seen her image, but that hadn’t prepared him for her youth. She couldn’t be more than fourteen standard years, though her breasts and hips were full.

  “Who do you think you are?” she shouted in bright-eyed fury. Perhaps she was on gage or other drugs, though she seemed alert enough. “Do you think you’ll get me by coming here like this? Well, you won’t!”

  Serafina stood with her fists on her hips, glaring at Coke on the step below her. There was no sign that the corpse of her pimp or the gun in the hand of his killer affected her in any way. She didn’t shave or pluck her body, but there was only a halo of hair surrounding the lips of her vulva.

  “I don’t want you,” Coke said. “I’m here for Terence Ortega, to keep him from being killed by your little game.”

  The pistol in his hand embarrassed him. He tried to holster it again. He was awkward now in the aftermath of the shooting. He managed to sear the side of his rib cage with the hot muzzle.

  “You want Terry?” Serafina caroled in raucous delight. “So that’s it, is it? His frigid wife sent you to get him back? Terry, come out here. Now!”

  Coke risked a look over his shoulder. He prayed that Pilar would have returned to the van, but she hadn’t, she was just below him. Her lips trembled, and her face had no expression.

  The door behind Serafina moved. A man looke
d out nervously, then stepped the rest of the way. He carried a needle stunner in one hand and held his trousers before him as a veil. He hadn’t managed to get his legs into the openings.

  “See who’s here, Terry?” Serafina said, cocking her head so that she could watch the man out of the corner of her eyes. “She’s here to take you back with a gun!”

  “That’s nothing to do with it!” Coke said. “I tell you, there was a bomb in the drum you thought was refinery tailings. You’ve got to disappear before the folks on Delos learn what I already know.”

  “Lies!” Serafina cried. “All lies!”

  Her gaze slipped past Coke to Pilar. “Do you want to shoot me, bitch? It won’t get you Terry back, you know. He’ll never go back to you now that he knows what it’s like to fuck a real woman!”

  Ortega had been a good-looking man once. He still had the face, but standing nude on the landing made his paunch and generally run-down appearance painfully evident. Part of Coke’s mind found time to wonder at what Serafina Amoretta saw in the fellow.

  “Look,” the Frisian said desperately. “You can lie to me, but it won’t do you a bit of good with the enforcers from Delos, you know that. And L’Escorial, it’s L’Escorial that planned this, they’ll be curst sure Delos learns who planted the bomb because they don’t want suspicion falling on them.”

  “You can’t have Terry and you can’t have me!” Serafina cried. She groped behind her and caught the hand with which Ortega held up his trousers. She jerked the garment from him, tossed it down the steps, and then drew his hand forward to cup her breast. “Do you see! Your lies get you nothing. Nothing!”

  There was a clatter behind Coke. He glanced back. Pilar had dropped the sub-machine gun. She was stumbling down the stairs.

  “Wait!” he called.

  “You see!” Serafina said. She jutted her hips backward against Ortega’s groin and wriggled. “You see!”

  Coke backed down the stairs. He didn’t dare turn away from the needle stunner.

  His boot jarred the sub-machine gun. He snatched the weapon up. For a moment he imagined blasting the couple on the landing to doll rags. No, the cartel would take care of that….