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

by David Drake

The four armored vehicles roared and staggered forward in clouds of black smoke. The men behind them followed, squinting through the dust and exhaust fumes. Overhead, the fireflies sailed in a figure-eight formation that advanced just ahead of the armored cars.

  The breeze had died. The Astras moved up also, in a pall of their own raising.

  Roberson clung to himself and shivered at the gates to Astra headquarters. The Widow Guzman walked behind the snorting armored vehicles. Kuklar was beside her, wearing a blank expression and carrying a drawstring sack. The bag held the data base looted from Suterbilt’s private office.

  Vierziger laughed. He leaned his chair back against the building wall. “What do you suppose they’d do if Madame Yarnell returned to town just now?” he asked.

  “Both sides are watching her,” Coke said. “They’d scurry to their holes like mice when the cat comes home. There’d be enough time.”

  The L’Escorial radioman kept the armored cupola between him and Astra guns while he watched Pepe. When the lines of opposing vehicles had advanced to within fifty meters of one another, Pepe pointed his index finger.

  The radioman spoke into his mouthpiece, turned, and closed his eyes. He jumped upright in plain view of the Astras, waving his arms like a semaphore.

  The armored lines halted. The radioman lurched forward. He almost slipped off the side of his mount. He caught himself to crouch again in the shelter of the cupola.

  Pepe gestured forward the men holding Peres. They worked their way carefully between the flanks of two of the armored cars, paying more attention to the hot exhaust louvers than they did to the man whom they were escorting. The wire twitched and quivered, drawing drops of fresh blood at every motion. The gigolo was crying.

  Kuklar stepped in front of the armored bulldozer. The vehicle’s rocket launcher was depressed to sweep the street ahead. If Kuklar realized that, he didn’t seem to care. He walked forward stolidly, the sheath of his hook-bladed knife swinging in synchrony with his right leg.

  “You know?” said Vierziger idly. “If something went wrong right now, they might all kill each other.”

  Coke shook his head. “Not all of them,” he said. “Besides, we’d likely catch something ourselves, you and me.”

  “There’s that,” his companion agreed.

  Suterbilt got out of the armored car and scuttled forward behind Peres and his escort. The factor was terrified, but he was the only one who could identify the stolen data bank so that the exchange could be completed.

  The banks of lights on the opposing vehicles cast multiple faint shadows from the men converging between the armored lines. The Widow Guzman stood with her left hand on the blade of the bulldozer. Her right was extended toward Peres as the gigolo approached haltingly. Her visage trembled between fear and longing.

  The engine of an Astra vehicle stalled. The driver restarted with a roar. Men on both sides jumped. Pepe Luria raised his face to the sky and laughed.

  When Kuklar was almost halfway between the lines, Suterbilt ran to him. The TST factor tugged open the bag holding the computer core while Kuklar continued to grip one of the drawstrings. Suterbilt nodded his head furiously toward the L’Escorial line, invisible behind the blaze of headlights.

  Kuklar looked at the Widow. She waved. Kuklar let go of the drawstring.

  Peres’ escorts dropped their batons and ran to the armored vehicles. The gigolo, weeping with pain, staggered toward Widow Guzman. The ends of the wire trailed from his face like the barbels of a catfish.

  The exchange was complete. Either side’s gunmen on foot— Coke was unwilling to think of them as infantry—streamed toward the safety of their headquarters.

  The armored cars backed with greater difficulty. Two of the L’Escorial vehicles crunched, fender to fender, as they swerved in opposite directions at the start of the maneuver. The drivers rose from their cabs and screamed curses at one another. In ten minutes, even the vehicles had vanished from the street, however …

  “Show’s over, I suppose,” Vierziger said. He let his chair drop onto its front legs. “No excitement at all.” He giggled. “Nobody killed.”

  Coke looked at the little man curiously. “Is that the only kind of excitement?” he asked.

  Vierziger stood up. “Well, there’s sex, I suppose,” he said. “But that’s a bad second for me.” He smiled. “What do you think about that, Matthew?”

  Coke rose to his feet. Backblast from the directional mines the day the team arrived had left black starbursts across the reinforced concrete. He opened his mouth to speak.

  The door of Hathaway House opened. Georg peeked out, then stepped into full view. “Major Coke,” he said. He cleared his throat. “There was just a message for you, a Mistress Ortega. She’d like you to call on her at your earliest convenience. She, ah, she said she was at home.”

  Johann Vierziger chuckled. “I’ll give you a night to consider your answer, Matthew,” he said.

  * * * *

  Pilar’s door opened as soon as Coke reached the landing. That meant not only that she’d been watching the surveillance screen for his arrival, but that she’d kept the door unlocked.

  She shouldn’t take chances like that. Coke didn’t think she had a gun in the suite, not even a needle stunner like the one her husband carried.

  He stepped inside. Pilar was wearing a strapless black dress with a mantilla of white lace over her bare shoulders. She closed the door without looking at him and began setting the multiple locks.

  “You shouldn’t take chances like that,” Coke said. She turned and threw herself into his arms.

  “Terry’s gone,” she said against Coke’s shoulder. “He went off on the ND Maru this evening. I guess he listened to you after all. Or she did.”

  Coke tried to kiss her. She wouldn’t lift her lips to him. Her arms clamped him fiercely.

  “He came to see you before he left?” Coke asked. He stroked her auburn hair with his right hand; she’d let it down for the first time since he’d met her. It was amazingly thick and fell below the pinch of her waist.

  “No,” she whispered. “I—I recognized the number of the account to which the passage was charged. It was one of Terry’s, I suppose one I wasn’t supposed to know about.”

  She nuzzled Coke’s shoulder for a moment before she added, “They traveled under the name Sanchez. Master and Mistress Sanchez.”

  “I’m sorry,” Coke said softly. He was sorry. It surprised him. Sorry for her pain, though his body was very well aware of the implications of the new state of affairs.

  “I need somebody to hold me, Matthew,” Pilar said. As she drew him toward the bedroom, he noticed that tonight she was not wearing her crucifix.

  Cantilucca: Day Ten

  Dawn was red with a promise of storm. The sky was bright enough to mute the lighted advertising signs, but too dim to bring out the color of paint.

  At night Potosi looked tawdry. This morning the city was a dull waste; steel rusting on dirty sand.

  Hundreds of men, all the members of both gage syndicates who remained in Potosi, lined opposite sides of the street. The gunmen looked sleepy, sickly, and sullen. Most of them would barely have gotten to bed when Madame Yarnell called, demanding that they be assembled to hear her.

  The leaders of Astra and L’Escorial faced each other with only the width of the right-of-way between them. Both groups were nervous. Coke’s magnified view of their faces suggested that while the Widow Guzman and her companions felt uncertain, an air of monstrous glee underlay the Lurias’ twitchiness. The L’Escorial leaders knew, or they thought they knew….

  The sound of Madame Yarnell’s reconnaissance vehicle preceded the car itself. The driver was winding out his motors, and the active suspension set up an audible keening as it smoothed the high-speed ride over the spaceport highway.

  “As pissed as she was to come to Cantilucca,” Margulies said, squatting on the roof of Hathaway House beside the major, “you’d think she’d be happy to be going back
to Delos. Doesn’t seem like she is, though.”

  “There’s folks that’d bitch if you hanged them with a golden rope,” Coke said. He kept his tone light, but he knew that very shortly the survey team would have to fish or cut bait.

  The Hathaways stored building materials on their roof. The team had converted the crates, lumber, and barrels into a temporary refuge against need, but it couldn’t hide them for long.

  Madame Yarnell’s car didn’t slow until it reached the center of town. It skidded to a halt from a hundred, hundred-and-ten, kph. Pebbles and a stoneware bottle, miraculously unshattered by the poot! the tire gave it, flew out like langrage from a cannon.

  The charge pelted the gunmen who hadn’t ducked away when they realized what was about to happen. The bottle dished in the sloped forehead of a L’Escorial gunman; two Astras leaped back with their hands to their faces, screaming that they’d been blinded.

  The car’s passenger door lifted while gravel from the crash stop still clicked and pattered. Madame Yarnell got out. Her headgear was similar in design and purpose to a Frisian commo helmet. She surveyed the crowd that had gathered at her orders.

  “You filth!” she said at last. Her voice boomed from the omnidirectional speaker on top of her helmet. “You cretins, you hog feces!”

  The cartel representative turned as she spoke, so that all those present could receive her direct contempt. Lightning traced the eastern clouds. A gunman injured by the gravel whimpered brokenly.

  “I’m going off-planet now,” Madame Yarnell announced abruptly.

  Peres seemed alternately frightened and exultant. The face of the Widow Guzman didn’t change, but she wrapped her arm around the gigolo’s waist and held him tightly. Roberson simply looked terrified, as he had since he appeared in obedience to the summons.

  The Lurias’ suppressed glee suggested—correctly—that they knew more about Madame Yarnell’s recall than she did herself. Coke guessed that the cartel representative was too furious at this moment to take much notice of the gangsters’ expressions; but she wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t the type to limit the basis of her judgments to hard facts.

  When Madame Yarnell returned to Cantilucca it would be obvious who had gained by her absence. Coke believed it would be very, very bad for those same parties.

  “You will keep the peace,” Madame Yarnell said. “While I’m gone, when I return—forever! All of you!”

  She looked around the segregated assembly. “If there’s any problem, any problem with the supply of gage from Cantilucca, may the Lord have mercy on you! For I will have none.”

  “I wonder how much she knows about what’s been going on while she’s here?” Margulies said.

  Coke shrugged. “Not a lot,” he said. “She doesn’t have any local sources she could trust, and she didn’t bring the sort of hardware Barbour and Daun deployed for us. She’s probably pretty frustrated with what she must guess.”

  Madame Yarnell threw herself into the reconnaissance vehicle. The driver began his hard turn before the passenger door had finished closing.

  “How do you feel, boss?” Margulies asked. She lifted her eyebrow.

  Coke smiled grimly. “A little antsy,” he said. “Not frustrated, though. We may or may not be able to pull this off, but we sure as hell know what we’re doing.”

  The Delian vehicle screamed up the street, shimmying as hard acceleration unloaded the front wheels. One of the electric drive motors sent occasional sparks quivering out into the night.

  “Ramon Luria’s coming this way,” Margulies said as she peered over the roof coping.

  “Yeah, he’s probably wondering when the FDF is going to arrive on Cantilucca,” Coke said.

  “And?” Margulies asked.

  “And the answer’s, ‘Never, if Camp Able takes my recommendation,’” Coke replied. “But I’ll say something more neutral than that to hold him for the time being. Sooner or later, though …”

  He started for the trap door and the ladder down into Hathaway House.

  “Sooner or later,” Mary Margulies said, “everybody dies. When that happens, I wouldn’t want to remember that I helped keep either group of these bastards in power.”

  Cantilucca: Day Seventeen

  The youth’s facial make-up made him look like an actor in a Noh play. His body was slim, supple, and completely hairless. The room’s score of mirrors reflected all angles of his perfect beauty as he stretched.

  “I’ll get some more wine,” he said. “The same vintage?”

  Johann Vierziger turned on the blue satin bed. “Yes,” he said. “It wasn’t bad.”

  Vierziger arched his chest upward, supporting himself on toes and the tips of his fingers extended backward. The mattress’ resilient underlayer undulated softly in reaction.

  “But don’t be long,” Vierziger added with a chuckle. .

  The youth opened the door concealed behind one of the brothel’s floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A pair of fireflies drifted in past him.

  “Shall we have a friendly talk, Master Vierziger?” Pepe Luria called from the corridor. “You and me and my friends?”

  The fireflies halted a meter to either side of the bed, balanced on their hissing violet spikes. Another pair followed them.

  “Get out of here, boy!” Pepe snarled to the youth who’d frozen in the doorway. He struck backhanded.

  The youth darted past Luria, whimpering. Blows thudded as he ran the gauntlet of Pepe’s coterie further down the hallway.

  “Would you mind if I relaxed, Luria?” the Frisian asked from the tight arc in which he balanced. His erection of moments before had subsided, but his voice was calm.

  Pepe stepped into the room, flanked by the last pair of fireflies. He wore the belt-pack, but he held his left thumb down on a separate remote control. “Do you know what this is?” he asked in place of answering.

  “A dead-man switch,” Vierziger said.

  Pepe giggled. “Just so you know,” he said. “If I release the button, poof! My little darlings do—what I’ve directed them to do. Are you faster than an electronic switch, Frisian?”

  “I’m faster than some of them,” Vierziger said. There was no sign of strain or emotion in his voice.

  “You’re not faster than six at the same time!” Pepe snapped, obviously angry at the lack of response to his murderous banter. “All right, you can sit up.”

  Three L’Escorial gunmen followed Luria into the room. Two carried wide-mouthed mob guns, the third a sub-machine gun. They looked relieved to see the Frisian nude and unarmed.

  Vierziger lowered himself flat, then turned to swing his feet onto the floor as he lifted his torso. His movement was smooth but not as quick as it would have been under normal circumstances. He didn’t want to startle the L’Escorials.

  “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.