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

by David Drake

  Barbour’s shouted warning drew Georg Hathaway’s head from the family apartment. Coke heard the door open beneath him.

  “Hathaway!” he said, leaning over the balustrade to make eye contact. “Is anybody in the building but us, you, and Evie?”

  “No sir,” Hathaway said, staring at Margulies by the door. The security officer was pulling her armor on one-handed while she held the shoulder weapon with the other and looked out the peephole in the front door. “No sir, there’s only you two gentlemen and the lady, that’s all who are present in our establishment.”

  The innkeeper’s voice singsonged, as if he were chanting to himself in private. He was so frightened that his hands were still rather than washing themselves.

  Evie Hathaway appeared behind her husband. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Sten’s on the way back,” Barbour noted. “He’s picking up Niko on the way.”

  “Via, they shouldn’t risk it!” Margulies muttered from the doorway.

  “They’ll be all right,” Barbour said. Tension clipped his tones, but his enunciation remained perfect. On the main screen, a pair of gunmen clubbed Vierziger unconscious. “Pepe guessed Johann sprang the ambiance for Larrinaga. There’s no evidence it’s occurred to him to come after the rest of us yet.”

  Coke walked down the stairs and turned to face the Hathaways. “Georg, Evie,” he said. “If you can handle it, we’ll go up to the hide on your roof now. If you can’t, we’ll head for the woods. Either way, tell Pepe or whoever comes looking that an Astra messenger came for us twenty minutes ago. We left with him. All right?”

  “Sten and Niko’re back,” Margulies called. The whine of a jitney’s motor came through the peephole and, faintly, through the building’s thick walls. “They’re going around to the lock-up.”

  “Go upstairs, then,” Evie Hathaway said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Go!”

  “Master Hathaway?” Coke said.

  Georg finally met the Frisian commander’s eyes. He patted his wife’s hand on his shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “You are our guests. We will do what we can for you, despite, despite …”

  Hathaway’s face settled into unexpectedly firm lines. “Your friend helped Pedro, returned Suzette to him and got him away from here. You’ll want to do what you can for your friend. We’ll hide you until you can.”

  “There’s about forty men leaving L’Escorial HQ,” Margulies warned from the peephole. “A couple armored cars are coming up from the garage, too.”

  “Sten and Niko have gone up the ladder to the back,” Barbour said.

  “Shut it down, Bob,” Coke ordered, putting a hand for emphasis on the intelligence officer’s arm. “Everybody up to the—”

  He heard the trapdoor open. “Stay where you are!” he bawled to Moden and Daun, who’d climbed the rope ladder from the locked parking area behind Hathaway House. “We’re on our way!”

  Barbour blanked the console. His hesitation at abandoning his equipment was obvious in the longing glance he threw over his shoulder when Coke tugged him way .

  “They’re crossing the street!” Margulies warned. She hadn’t moved from her position.

  “Come on!” Coke shouted. He gave Barbour a push toward the stairs and skipped up after him, charging his sub-machine gun as he moved. The security lieutenant backed from the door, covering the rear.

  “Twenty minutes ago!” Coke called from the top of the stairs.

  The Hathaways couldn’t hold out against torture—nobody could if the stress was properly applied, though Coke doubted any non-Frisian on Cantilucca was competent at that either. Whether or not the Hathaways would blurt something when L’Escorial gunmen knocked them around, as would inevitably happen, was an open ques—

  “We will stand it!” Evie Hathaway called. “For your sake, and for Cantilucca!”

  “Blow the fucking door down!” shouted a gaunt, one-eyed L’Escorial gunman at the front of Hathaway House. Georg Hathaway was already pulling the door open as quickly as its mass would allow.

  The five Frisians waited silently beneath piled lumber and the barrels on the roof. Enough of the twilight leaked through cracks in their concealment that they could see one another as their eyes adapted.

  So long as the console in the lobby operated as a base unit, the commo helmets could access sounds and images from any of the sensors Daun had placed—including those in the hotel. There were no peepholes to look out through directly.

  Six gunmen bulled into the lobby, deliberately slamming the innkeeper against the wall. Evie Hathaway stood at the doorway to the family apartment, glaring at the L’Escorials.

  Ramon Luria entered behind his men. He looked at Evie, then Georg. “Where are the Frisians?” he asked.

  “They’re gone—” Georg began.

  Ramon nodded. Two of the gunmen grabbed Hathaway by the wrists.

  “—twenty minutes ago when—” Georg said, his voice climbing a note with every syllable.

  Ramon punched the innkeeper in the belly with all the strength of his pudgy body. Georg’s breath whooped out; his face lost color.

  “The Astras sent for them!” Evie cried. “They went to the Astras with nothing but their guns!”

  Ramon turned from the husband and slapped the wife. It was a full-armed blow which Evie could have dodged had she wished to. Instead she accepted the whack, knowing that there was no escape but death from whatever Luria chose to do.

  Three scarlet armored cars were in the street, their armament pointed at Hathaway House. Several score gunmen milled around the vehicles. If the tribarrels and rocket launcher ever opened up, shrapnel and fragments of the facade would kill more of the L’Escorials than the Frisians could in the first few seconds.

  Evie’s head rocked back. She put a hand to her cheek, then snatched it away as a sign of weakness.

  “Go on,” she said. “Go on! The Astras came for them twenty minutes ago. Hitting me won’t change that!”

  Ramon panted from his exertion. “Search the place,” he ordered his men generally. “Search it all!”

  Four men of the group who’d entered with him scattered. Three went upstairs while the last entered the kitchen with his sub-machine gun outstretched like a cattle prod.

  More L’Escorials stamped through the outer doorway, multiplying the number of searchers without adding organization to the process. One gunman began opening the console’s access panels, though only a child or a midget could have fit into the enclosed volume.

  “Hey, there’s a ladder up to the roof!” a man called from the top of the stairwell.

  The Frisians faced the barrels that formed the side of their concealment nearest the trapdoor. Each of them but the intelligence officer held a weapon ready.

  Barbour started to pick up the sub-machine gun on the floor beside him; Coke laid a hand on his and shook his head. Barbour nodded understanding and let the weapon lie. The chance that the intelligence officer would do something noisily wrong was greater than any help his unskilled shooting would provide if the situation blew up.

  Sten Moden carried three shoulder weapons, two slung and the last in his hand where it looked like a pistol by comparison to his size. There wasn’t room in the narrow hide for the rocket launcher he favored, and the big missiles would be useless in a point-blank shootout anyway.

  Three L’Escorials came out onto the roof clumsily. Each of them climbed with one hand and waved his weapon through the trapdoor ahead of himself. The first man out shouted in alarm as the next prodded him in the back with a fléchette gun.

  “They been up here,” a L’Escorial noted. “Hey, look at this!”

  He’d found the panoramic camera Daun glued to the coping of the facade weeks before. It was a relatively large unit, about the size of a clenched fist, and Niko hadn’t tried to conceal it. The camera provided a view of the entire streetscape—distorted at the edges, but correctable into normal images by the console’s processing power.

  “It’s a bomb!”
cried the man with the fléchette gun. Why he thought so was beyond imagining, especially since the next thing he did was put the muzzle of his weapon against the camera and fire.

  If it had been an explosive device, it would have detonated and killed all three L’Escorials. Instead, the gun’s enormous muzzle blast blew the camera across the street in tiny fragments. The osmium fléchette left a split and a crater in the facade of L’Escorial headquarters.

  “What’s that?” a gunman in the street screamed. Another man emptied an automatic shotgun upward, scarring the reinforced concrete of Hathaway House. Dust and sparks flew past the coping.

  “You bloody fool!” a L’Escorial snarled—correctly—at the man with the fléchette gun.

  “Hey!” called a man through the trapdoor. “You dickheads up there? Come on back, we’re moving!”

  Two of the L’Escorials moved quickly to the trapdoor. The third demanded, “What do you mean, we’re moving?”

  “I mean we’re going to take out the Astras once and for all!” cried the man below. “Pepe just gave the order!”

  The last of the three gunmen jounced down the ladder. Coke waited another thirty seconds, then reached for the latch holding the side of the barrel closed. Bob Barbour touched his hand. “Not yet,” the intelligence officer whispered. “I’ll tell you when they’re all clear of the building.”

  Barbour’s faceshield would be taking the input of up to a dozen of the visual sensors in and around Hathaway House. Coke couldn’t have kept that many locations straight, quite apart from needing a clear view of his immediate surroundings in the event of a firefight.

  Coke grinned and nodded to his intelligence officer.

  “Now,” Barbour murmured. “They’re gone.”

  Margulies swung open the door; Coke was out onto the roof first. He kept his head below the level of the roof coping. The sun had fully set, but the afterglow was vivid to eyes that had been covered within the hiding place.

  “They took the weapons they found,” Sten Moden said. “They carried my launcher and the reloads back across the street.”

  “We’ve got what we need,” said Coke. “First we’ll do something about Johann.”

  Mary Margulies looked at him. “We’re going to take them all on, then?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Coke said. “All that’re left after they get done with each other.”

  Margulies shrugged. “Suits me,” she said, checking with her fingers the pouches of 2-cm ammo on her crossed bandoliers.

  Niko Daun slapped another panoramic camera onto the coping, a centimeter from where the previous one had been blown to atoms.

  Coke stared at him. “You carried an extra one of those when you ran for cover?” Coke asked.

  The sensor tech looked defensive. “I’ve got two of them, sir. Well, they’re real handy.”

  “It’s all right,” Barbour said, responding to a threat before his fellows were aware of it. He positioned himself so that his body was between the trap door and the other members of the team. “It’s Hathaway.”

  Georg Hathaway stuck his head up through the opening. It certainly hadn’t occurred to the innkeeper that without Barbour’s warning, somebody—very likely Coke himself—would have blown him away.

  “Sirs,” he said. His normally pudgy cheeks looked sunken, though the fact he’d climbed the ladder spoke well of his general condition. “They’ve gone for now, all of them. They say they’re going to attack Astra. You can escape now.”

  “I’m checking my equipment,” Bob Barbour said, the last syllable spoken as he slipped past Hathaway. He let himself drop to the corridor since the innkeeper’s body blocked the ladder. Hathaway recognized the problem and scurried down also, puffing and wheezing.

  Coke started for the ladder. Margulies touched his arm. “Sir?” she said. “What’s the drill? Do we break Johann out now?”

  “We check the situation on the big screen,” Coke said. “And then we break Johann out, yes.”

  Wild gunfire erupted from the street.

  Both syndicates had moved gunmen back into Potosi as soon as Madame Yarnell left, though the gangs kept a lower presence than before. Instead of loitering in opposing groups at every corner, men of the two sides kept generally to one end of town or the other— spaceport side for Astra, the eastern half for the L’Escorials.

  Though the Lurias were acting on the spur of the moment, Pepe’s sudden decision was tactically ideal. Three red-painted armored cars were already in the street. The remaining vehicles rumbled out of the garage beneath L’Escorial HQ even as the first phase of the battle began.

  The gateway into the Astra compound was blocked, as usual, by the converted bulldozer. As the L’Escorials swept unexpectedly toward their rival’s headquarters, the blue-clad guards started the dozer’s engine.

  Pepe’s fireflies stooped like hawks with violet pinions. The short powergun barrel in each firefly spat cyan death at the startled guards. The side hatch to the cab of the converted bulldozer was open. A firefly slid in, lighted the vehicle’s interior with its five-round magazine, and curved out again.

  The bulldozer stalled in a cloud of black smoke. The Astra guards sprawled on or around the vehicle, mangled by concentrated gunfire. The fireflies hissed back toward their controller. Pepe had told off a pair of his henchmen as assistants to reload the fireflies’ magazines when they returned.

  Civilians vanished from sight. A few Astra gunmen opened fire on the advancing L’Escorials. The Lurias’ armored cars raked the street with their tribarrels and a salvo of 10-cm bombardment rockets. The latter blew up on building fronts with huge red flashes, hurling shrapnel and broken concrete in every direction.

  Astras dived for cover in doorways and alleys. Counterfire stopped instantly, though only a handful of Astras were hit by the wild volley. The sheer volume of fire which the vehicles put down was too much for undisciplined troops to face. As more armored cars joined the initial trio, the gunmen who’d been chased to cover tore off their blue accoutrements and disappeared into the night.

  The only Astras still fighting after the first exchange were those in the headquarters building with their leaders—and they were trapped like mice in a bucket of water. By taking the initiative, Pepe had won the battle.

  A pair of L’Escorials, stoned on gage and bold to the point of lunacy, leaped aboard the converted bulldozer. Astras fired wildly from ports in the headquarters building, but most of the shots were aimed at fireflies which existed only in the gunmen’s minds.

  Powergun bolts traced magenta afterimages across unprotected retinas; terror turned the shudder of color into the fireflies’ static suspension system, though all the little devices were at the moment being reloaded.

  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.