by David Drake
Coke aimed at Raul Luria. If he shot Ramon first, the Old Man would fall out of the sight picture as the son who supported him twisted down in death.
Moden’s third rocket hit the armored car as Coke took up the slack on his trigger. The gunner found whatever god he worshipped, and the expanding fireball engulfed the Lurias.
Something tapped Coke’s helmet. He spun, slashing empty air with the butt of his weapon. Shock from the blast had flung bits from the wall above him, nothing more.
The L’Escorial vehicles were all out of action, either hit by missiles or wrecked by the explosion of neighboring vehicles. Fuel fires spread a lurid illumination across the scene in place of the harshness of headlights a few minutes before. The wreckage of Astra headquarters was ablaze also, a pulsing, bloody glow that erupted from among the fallen walls.
Fireflies coursed the alleys, working outward from the killing ground about Astra headquarters. Occasionally the little machines dipped and stabbed the darkness with a single shot. They had been under Barbour’s direction since he broke, then changed, Pepe’s control codes.
A violet spark trundled purposefully down the street at a hundred-meter altitude, then dived to waist height directly in front of Matthew Coke. A hatch in the rear of the hovering device popped open. The firefly had expended its ammunition on L’Escorial gunmen and needed refilling.
Coke thumbed five rounds from a sub-machine gun magazine and fed them into the firefly. The hatch closed and the device curved back into action. Better machines clear the alleys like ferrets in a rabbit warren than that men should have to do so….
The fireflies weren’t armored, and their corona discharges marked them for hostile gunmen. Like tanks, however, the machines had a psychological impact on untrained troops that went far beyond the physical threat they posed. Thugs ran screaming or closed their eyes and sprayed the sky blindly.
The fireflies put their pistol bolts into the center of mass. They dropped each target with the cool precision of hunting wasps stabbing the nerve ganglia of the prey that will feed their larvae.
Coke and Margulies advanced past one another twice more. There were few targets for their guns now.
Moden put a missile into the center of the Astra courtyard, blasting a crater in the scattered rubble, and flushed several figures. One of them sent a short burst of automatic fire in the direction of the launcher’s signature. Coke, Margulies, and Vierziger all spiked the L’Escorial shooter; Niko Daun’s sub-machine gun spattered the vicinity of the target a moment later.
Coke paused just short of an alley mouth. “Cover my—” Margulies began.
“Three, this is Four,” Barbour broke in. “Don’t advance just yet, I want to run the alley. Over.”
“What do you—” Coke said.
A blast of shots and powergun bolts glanced from within the alley. A man screamed. Three gunmen—an Astra and two L’Escorials, each unaware of the others’ presence until that moment, burst onto the street. Coke cut them down arm’s length from his muzzle in a single long burst.
Two fireflies which had expended their magazines but were still lethally threatening drifted into sight above the men they had chased to their deaths. The devices’ static suspension sputtered faintly, like hot grease.
Across the street, Vierziger’s bolts lit a gunman who’d been similarly chased into sight. The fireflies turned and rose to comb the next pair of alleys in similar fashion.
“Two to One,” Sten Moden reported. “We’ve run out of missile targets, so we figured we’d work east from where you started. Is that a roger? Over.”
“One to Two,” Coke said. “Roger, but use the fireflies for the action, keep them loaded. Break. Four, put half the fireflies at Two’s disposal. One out.”
Neither Daun nor Moden was properly combat material, but Sten was right: a few L’Escorials would have kept away from the battle on their end of town. They weren’t the hardcore gunmen, obviously. Nonetheless, they couldn’t be simply ignored.
The trio on the ground were nearing what had been Astra headquarters. The stench of blood and death was overpowering. Heat from a burning vehicle—plastics and the rubber tires blazed long after the fuel had been consumed—drove Coke into the center of the street. His boots slipped on blood and flesh pureed by the explosions.
A man who breathed in rhythmic gasps tried to stuff coils of intestine back into his belly. Coke sighted on the dying man’s head, then shifted his weapon back to the search for possible threats.
He knew it would have been kinder to finish off the L’Escorial. He just didn’t have the stomach for that particular mercy on top of so much other killing.
A figure running, its limbs jerking like those of a wind-whipped scarecrow.
The man turned as Coke fired. Coke moved on. At every further step, his mind flashed the terrified visage which his bolts had lighted and blown apart.
Coke and Margulies leapfrogged again. Across the street Vierziger kept pace. Coke’s bare hands prickled. Ozone and flakes of matrix plastic, spattered molten from the guns’ ejection ports, had eaten away the outer layer of skin. Thirst was a red furnace within him, and his feet dragged with the effort of walking.
A man in a red vest with a leather fringe, kneeling and moaning a prayer at a locked doorway as a firefly made passes toward him.
Coke shot, then shot again as his bolts flung the man into the door and the corpse caromed back. Not men, not things; merely motion.
One of Coke’s sub-machine guns jammed. He’d replaced the barrel twice, but the light-metal receiver warped from the heat of continuous firing. He threw it away and picked up a similar weapon which lay beside a man Margulies had decapitated.
The weight of Coke’s ammunition had lessened. He’d emptied the pouches of two of the three bandoliers he’d belted on before the start of the action….
The three Frisians reached the western end of Potosi. There were no more targets. Coke didn’t know how much time had passed. His hands were swollen. They felt as though they were twice their normal size.
“Pretty well does it, s-s-Matthew,” Margulies croaked. “I was wrong about fireflies. They come in handy s-sometimes.”
Two of the fireflies had vanished while working the alleys ahead of Coke and his partners. Hit by lucky shots or mechanical failure, it didn’t matter; they’d served their purpose.
The remaining unit hung close above the Frisians, hissing like a restive cobra. Coke hated the fireflies even more than he had before he’d operated with them. It was as bad as being allied to people who ate the men they killed.
Cyan flashes quivered across the forest in the direction of the spaceport. A moment after the shots, the Frisians heard the blat of a diesel engine being pushed.
The port operations van, its headlight flicking up and down like a conductor’s baton as the vehicle flew over the washboard surface, raced toward Potosi. A circle of cooling metal on a quarter panel indicated that a fleeing gunman had hit the van when it failed to stop for him.
“Bloody hell!” Coke said as he lurched into the middle of the roadway. “Why did she take a chance like that? She could have been killed!”
“Sir!” Margulies warned. She dropped to a kneeling position with her back braced against the building as she aimed her 2-cm weapon. “That may not be your friend!”
Coke waved the sub-machine gun in his right hand. It felt immensely heavy, as if he were waggling a full-sized tree to get attention. The sky behind him was bright enough to cast his fuzzy shadow toward the oncoming vehicle.
The van fishtailed to a halt. The engine lugged but caught itself again without dying.
Pilar stuck her head out the side window. “Matthew!” she called. “Madame Yarnell’s back, and she’s come with a regiment of mercenaries! She says they’re going to clear the syndicates off Cantilucca and set up new factors before Marvela has time to react. Matthew, get in! They’ll kill you too, I’m sure of it!”
“Bloody hell!” Lieutenant Barbour blurted ove
r the commo net. “One, this is Four and she’s right, I wasn’t monitoring the port. Four transports have set down and there’s another requesting landing instructions. It’s the Heliodorus Regiment and I’d estimate—”
A pause for instant mental synthesis of data that a normal interpretation team would have required an hour to complete.
“—over two thousand troops. I don’t know the equipment standard; it isn’t in my data base. Over.”
“Mary, you drive,” Coke ordered as he got in on the passenger side of the van. “Pilar, get into the back, it’ll be safer. How much fuel is there in the tank?”
“Matthew, I’m really sorry,” Barbour added. The needless and unprofessional comment showed how nervous he was. “I should have been watching the port. Four over.”
Barbour had run up to six fireflies simultaneously from a console that hadn’t been built for the purpose. Who did he think he was? The Lord God Almighty, that he should be omniscient?
“The Heliodorus Regiment’s light infantry,” Johann Vierziger said as he swung open the van’s rear door and sat, cradling his 2-cm weapon. The van now had a sting in its tail. “Wheeled transport, no fighting vehicles; coil guns with explosive bullets.”
“The tank’s about half full,” Pilar said. Instead of getting into the back as ordered, she slid to the middle of the front seat where her thigh pressed Coke’s. “The gauge doesn’t work, but there should be enough fuel to go a hundred kilometers or more.”
“And there’re about three thousand bodies on the TO and E,” Coke said to Vierziger as Margulies gunned the van forward. Data that hadn’t been downloaded into the intelligence officer’s console for lack of need bubbled to the surface of the combat veterans’ minds. “Not that anybody ever landed with his complete table of organization strength.”
Verbally keying the AI in his helmet, he continued, “Four, this is One. We’ll pick up you and the eastern element, then keep going as far as we’ve got fuel for. Which apparently isn’t very fucking far, the roads being what they are, but maybe we can improve our transport on the way. Break. Two and Five, do you copy? One over.”
“One, this is Two,” Sten Moden replied. His voice was breathy. “We’ll join you at L’Escorial HQ. We left the launcher there, and we may need the rounds we’ve got left. Over.”
“One, this is Four,” Barbour said. “I’m packing the console for travel now. Out.”
The intelligence officer shouldn’t have been able to override his commanding officer’s transmission—which is what he’d done, stepping on Coke’s attempt to protest about Moden’s plan. On the other hand, if Barbour couldn’t control the net, he wouldn’t have been as good as he’d repeatedly proved himself.
Coke sighed. “Roger both of you,” he said. “One out.”
He’d intended to run with a minimum of equipment. They would hide in the forest—if possible—until the situation changed or at least became more clear. If the survey team dropped off the map, Camp Able would send a follow-up mission.
In three weeks or a month, the FDF would send a follow-up mission. And while the Heliodorus Regiment was an organization of professionals, they were low-end professionals and the Cantilucca operation had to be handled without Bonding Authority oversight.
The Heliodorans just might carry out an order to execute captured Frisians. And there was no question in Coke’s mind that Madame Yarnell would give such an order.
Pilar’s hand lay beside his on their joined thighs. Coke squeezed it, then resumed compulsively counting the loaded magazines in his remaining bandolier. A moment before the van came in sight, Coke had wanted to find a hole and curl up in it for a week of sleep. Now he had a second wind, but he felt as though something could snap at any moment and leave him a pile of constituent atoms….
Margulies stopped in front of the L’Escorial building without killing the van’s engine. Daun and Barbour ran from Hathaway House across the street. Both men were heavily laden. The intelligence officer carried his console, packed again into its integral case, while Niko staggered along ahead of the lieutenant with a wicker hamper.
“Daun, we don’t have room for your …” Coke called. Clothing? Housewares? What in hell did the kid have in the basket?
“Beer!” Niko shouted as he slammed the hamper down in back of the van. “Master Hathaway’s best! And if you’re as dry as I am, it’s better than ammo!”
Sten Moden, carrying so much equipment that he looked like a forklift, waddled from what had been L’Escorial’s courtyard. Besides the launcher with two tubes ready, his hand gripped a pair of ammunition boxes. He’d slung additional weapons from his shoulder.
Coke jumped out to help his logistics officer. The team was going to need all the munitions, all Barbour’s electronics, and mere thought of the beer was a cleansing shower for Coke’s mind. But they were going to need a hundred times anything they could bring, so loading the van to the point of breakdown was bad tactics.
Particularly they were going to need troops. And the troops didn’t exist on Cantilucca.
The beer was in earthenware bottles. Daun handed Coke one which he’d opened by digging the wax stopper out with a screwdriver blade. The cool lager slipped through the major’s being like a blessing from the Lord.
“Let’s get going,” Coke said as he seated himself again beside the white-faced Pilar. He dropped the empty bottle out the window and took the fresh one Daun offered.
Margulies accelerated with care, but the vehicle wallowed anyway. It would be worse when they reached what passed for rural roads on Cantilucca.
The team couldn’t run far enough on a planet where it had no friends, any more than the six of them could successfully fight a regiment. But they would run as far as they could; and then they would fight, because sometimes a bad choice is the only choice there is.
Coke reached an arm around Pilar. His hands were black with smoke, ammunition matrix, and iridium redeposited when plasma charges sublimed it from the bores of his weapons. Pilar snuggled close anyway.
Coke started to laugh. Margulies glanced over, and he felt Pilar stiffen. “It’s not over yet, friends,” Coke said in partial explanation.
Dawn was beginning to break over Potosi. The intelligence officer switched channels on his commo helmet intently, using its limited resources while his console was in traveling mode. He saw Coke looking back at him and flashed his commander a tight smile.
It was a hell of a thing to think under the circumstances, but Major Matthew Coke was glad to be alive.
The van rumbled eastward out of Potosi. According to the map Coke momentarily overlaid on his visor, the nearest hamlet had been owned by L’Escorial. The Lord only knew what the situation in the sticks was now, since both syndicates had lost their command groups and much of their rank and file.
Coke took only a glimpse at the map overlay, because he still had to watch for possible ambushers. Most of the gunmen who’d escaped Potosi alive would hide in panic when they heard a vehicle approaching, but a few might take potshots at strangers lucky enough to have transport.
Of course, bushwhackers would probably wait for the van to pass. That meant they’d be trying conclusions with Johann Vierziger.
“Heliodorus is just now putting out patrols,” Bob Barbour reported. Niko had placed a variety of sensors throughout the spaceport one evening after driving Coke to the terminal. “Madame Yarnell is furious. She’s told Colonel Shirazi that they should have been moving an hour ago.”
“If she wanted professionals …” said Sten Moden. He was picking with a knifepoint at matrix congealed around the ejection port of a 2-cm weapon. “…she should have hired us.”
“Direct rule by the Delos cartel’s probably more efficient than leaving it to local thugs,” Margulies said. “More of the locals might starve to death, but they wouldn’t be as likely to be shot for the hell of it by some yo-yo having a night on the town.”
“Frisian Vessel Obadiah to FDF commander Cantilucca,” crackled an unfam
iliar voice through Coke’s commo helmet. “Come in FDF Cantilucca. Over.”
The members of the survey team stared at one another in surprise. Pilar didn’t have a commo helmet. She clutched Coke fiercely, then snatched her hand away lest she interfere with his movements. She knew something had happened to startle her companions, but she couldn’t imagine what it might be.
“It’s coming from orbit,” Barbour reported.
“Frisian vessel Obadiah to FDF commander—” the voice repeated. Coke cut the signal off so that it didn’t interfere with his thinking.
“The Heliodorans?” Niko Daun suggested.
“Negative, they couldn’t crash our frequencies,” Barbour insisted. “This is on a general purpose push, but it’s encrypted normally.”
“The Heliodorans are trying to get us to give away our position,” Margulies insisted stubbornly. “They’ll home on the transmission if we respond.”
“There is an Obadiah,” said Johann Vierziger as he watched the rear and sides of the van for possible dangers, “on the FDF naval list. She’s a Class III combat transport.”
Coke stared at the back of Vierziger’s neck. The information Vierziger just stated wasn’t secret—but it wasn’t something Coke knew, or that a newbie sergeant was likely to have known. Coke didn’t doubt that the statement was true, however.
Sten Moden released the blade catch and slid his knife back into the sheath on his belt. “I don’t see that there’s a downside to responding, Matthew,” he said. “If the Heliodorans are good enough to mimic our codes, then they’ve got us anyway.”
“The Heliodorans,” Johann Vierziger said toward the landscape rumbling past the back of the van, “aren’t good enough to hit the floor with their hats. Though numbers count for something.”
Coke grimaced. “Bob,” he said, “will my helmet raise them, or do we need to put up a beam?”
“You’ll do better if you’re out of the van,” replied the intelligence officer. “But if they’ve got their antenna array extended, and I’m sure they do, they’ll pick it up anyway.”
