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Cantilucca: Day One

The sailor at the Norbert IV's boarding hatch pointed to a row of low prefab buildings 300 meters from where the vessel had landed. The freighter's leave party—the whole crew except for a two-man anchor watch—had already stumped most of the distance over the blasted ground. The crewmen carried only AWOL bags, while the disembarking passengers had much more substantial luggage.

"There's the terminal," the sailor said. "The left one's Marvelan entry requirements. If there's nobody home, go to passenger operations beside it. Pilar'll be there, no fear."

"Not," said Mary Margulies, surveying the lighted buildings, "the fanciest-looking place I've ever been sent."

"At the moment," Matthew Coke said, "they aren't shooting at us. That's something."

It was late evening. The sky was purple. Cantilucca was supposed to have two moons, but either they weren't up or they were so small that Coke lost them in the unfamiliar stars.

The sailor snorted. "You want shooting?" he said. "Go on into Potosi. I guarantee you'll find somebody there who'll oblige you."

Johann Vierziger looked at him. "A tough town?" he asked.

His voice was delicate, effeminate. Coke didn't know what to make of Vierziger overall, but he'd watched the sergeant run the combat course at Camp Able. Whatever else Vierziger might be, he was surely a gunman.

"Tough enough, boyo," the sailor replied, eyeing Vierziger speculatively. "But its a place a fellow can have a good time if he wants one, too."

"It appears that we're our own baggage handlers," Sten Moden said. He lifted his twin-width suitcase in his only hand. "Shall we?"

The big logistics specialist started down the ramp, drawing the others after him. Vierziger moved immediately to the front. Each member of the survey team carried a concealed pistol, but they were under Coke's strict orders not to draw their weapons unless he ordered them to.

Coke was uncomfortable. This wasn't either a combat operation or a routine change of station. He didn't know how he was supposed to feel.

Cantilucca's starport was a square kilometer bulldozed from the forest and roughly leveled. The earth had been compressed and stabilized.

There hadn't been a great deal of maintenance in the century or so since the port was cleared. Slabs of surface had tilted in a number of places, exposing untreated soil on which vegetation could sprout. The jets of starships landing and taking off limited the size of the shrubbery, at least in the portion nearer the terminal buildings.

There were twenty-three ships in port at the moment. Most of them were freighters of around 20 KT displacement, like the Norbert IV. Gage was big business, and Cantilucca grew the best gage in the universe.

Niko Daun chuckled. He was toward the rear of the straggling line—Lieutenant Margulies alone walked behind him, looking frequently over one shoulder, then the other.

"Here we all are in civilian clothes and everything," the young sensor tech said. "We look like a bunch of businessmen."

Coke glanced back at Daun. "That's right," he said wryly. "We are businessmen. Or ambulance-chasing lawyers, that might be closer."

The survey team's luggage, two pieces for every member except the one-armed Moden, had static suspension systems. When the systems were switched on, they generated opposing static charges in the bottom of each case and the surface beneath it. The cases floated just above the ground and could be pulled along without friction.

On terrain as broken as that of the untended starport, that was only half the problem. Because of their contents and their armored sidewalls, the cases were extremely heavy. They wobbled on their narrow bases of support, threatening to fall over unless the person guiding them was relentlessly vigilant. The poor illumination didn't help either.

"Not bad training for life," Coke muttered.

"Sir?" Sten Moden said, turning his head back.

"Just talking to myself," Coke explained. "Sorry."

A bus pulled away from the terminal area. Its wheels were driven by four separate electric motors. One of the drives shrieked jaggedly as the bus headed toward the gate of the port compound.

"It's a lot easier," Sten Moden said without emphasis as he watched the bus go, "to replace a bearing than it is to replace a driveshaft and a bearing."

The bus didn't have headlights. A spotlight jury-rigged to the driver's side window swept the road and a stretch of the fence surrounding the compound. The forest beyond was a black mass. The sky had some color still in the west, but it no longer illuminated the land beneath it.

"Let's hope the soldiers aren't any better than the mechanics," said Robert Barbour.

Coke didn't have any more of a handle on the intelligence specialist than he did on Vierziger. Based on Barbour's personnel file, he was an easy-going man who was brilliant in his field. He had a bright career ahead of him, despite a lack of ambition outside his professional specialty.

There was no question about Barbour's qualifications. Coke had thought he himself knew his way around a sensor console, until he saw what Barbour could do casually with one.

In the flesh, though, the young lieutenant was withdrawn and apparently miserable. The file would have indicated if Barbour had survived a close one, as had happened to Daun. Maybe he'd had trouble with a woman. The Lord knew, there was plenty of that going around.

"They don't have soldiers here, Lieutenant," Johann Vierziger said. "On Cantilucca they have thugs, gangsters."

"We're not going to prejudge the situation," Coke said sharply. "Our report on the quality of potential allies and opposition is just as important as whether we recommend Nieuw Friesland accept an offer of employment here in the first place."

"Sorry, sir," Vierziger said. He didn't sound ironic, but neither was he making any effort to appear contrite.

The sergeant had made a statement which he knew, and which Coke knew, was correct on the basis of the score or more similar planets they'd both seen. Coke didn't know what Vierziger's background was—his file began at the point he enlisted in the FDF; but he knew the little gunman had a background. Nobody got as good as Vierziger was by spending his time at the target range.

Coke laughed. "Hold up," he called to Moden and Vierziger. He stopped where he was, set down the cases he was pulling, and motioned his team closer.

Lights from the terminal brightened that side of the faces watching Coke, but even there the flesh was colorless. Opposite the terminal, the team's features lacked detail.

"Look," Coke said, "we're here now, we're on our own. From this point on, we're on first-name basis."

Nobody reacted openly. Shutters clicked across the eyes of the more experienced trio, Moden, Margulies, and Vierziger.

"I don't mean," Coke explained hastily, "that we've suddenly become a democracy. Fuck that notion. You will take my orders, or I'll have you court-martialed on return to Camp Able."

A starship across the compound tested its landing motors. Plasma flared in an iridescent shimmer above the vessels, lighting the team members and the shattered ground about them. Vierziger grinned in broad approval.

"We're all good at our jobs," Coke resumed as the jet's rumble faded away. "And we'll be living in each other's pockets while the operation goes on. I trust that we can maintain real discipline without pretending we're back in base somewhere. Okay?"

The other members of the team nodded—Margulies with obvious relief. The last thing any sensible officer wanted was to serve under a commander whose first priority was that his troops like him.

Coke smiled and nodded. "Saddle up, troopers," he said. He switched on the repulsion units of his cases and resumed the last stage of his trudge to the terminal buildings.

Vierziger fell in beside him. "I'm not used to thinking of myself as 'Johann,' " the little man said with an unreadable substrate to the comment.

"Better get used to it, Johann," Coke said.

Vierziger's eyes were always on the far distance, the shadows which might be hiding an ambush. His cases tracked as nearly straight as the ground permitted, never tilting far enough to be in danger of toppling over. The little man's peripheral vision chose the best line possible across the field.

"People generally don't trust me," Vierziger said, as if he were commenting on the magenta glow of the western horizon. "That's understandable, of course. But I want you to know that you could trust me, can if you want to."

A speck of light now at zenith had been 15° further east when Coke left the freighter. A moon, then, rather than a star; but merely a speck.

"I'll keep that in mind," he said aloud.

Vierziger laughed without malice. "The only difference between me and the pistol in your holster," he said, "is that you're more likely to hit the target if you aim me than if you aim it."

Coke looked at the little man. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

"Watch out for this," Vierziger said, gesturing toward a raw pit with the index finger of the hand gripping one of his cases.

The pit separated the two men by its width as they avoided it. "Why?" Coke asked.

"Because I think that's what I'm here to do, Matthew," Vierziger said.

He took two longer strides, then released his cases. They stood as sentinels to either side of the door as the gunman entered the terminal with his delicate hands free.

Coke walked through the doors a step behind Vierziger. Coke had been a combat soldier all his career, so he was irritated to be treated as an object for protection. Another part of him, though—

It was the job of the security element, Margulies and Vierziger, to protect the survey team's staff personnel. Coke, as team commander, couldn't object with even a frown at his people doing their jobs.

A hissing static broom shut off as the door opened. A woman, hidden until then behind the counter, stood up. Her lustrous auburn hair was caught in a braid and coiled on top of her head.

As Coke judged the mass, the hair would dangle to the floor if she removed the ornate silver combs pinning it up. Unlikely that she let it down often, though; the arrangement would take an hour to rebuild.

The woman wore black, relieved only by the massive silver crucifix hanging across her breast on a chain of the same metal. She was full-featured rather than fat and could have modeled for Rubens.

"Yes, gentlemen?" she said. Her voice held a touch of sharpness, a sign of uncertainty otherwise hidden. She appeared to be alone in the office. Two men had entered, well dressed but men and strangers, and there were further shapes looming outside the door.

"We're passengers from the Norbert, ma'am," Coke explained. "We're looking for the entry control office."

He hadn't forgotten the sailor had said that would be in the left-hand structure. The center building was the only one that was lighted, however.

"Oh, they should have told me!" the woman said with a stricken look.

Her eyes focused on the door. The panels had once been clear, but years of grit blown by nearby landings had blasted them to a pebbled surface. "How many of you are there?"

"Six," said Coke. "Is there a problem?"

"Not for six," the woman said. "I was going to take the operations van home anyway. My husband has our—"

She caught herself, flushed, and continued. "You see, the port bus just left with your ship's crew. They didn't say anything about passengers. I suppose they wanted to get into Potosi before dark."

Her skin was white, though from her dark lips Coke suspected she would tan to an umber color. She wore neither make-up nor, apart from the combs and crucifix, any jewelry.

"I'm Pilar Ortega," she said. "I'm the, well, I'm the passenger services officer, but for the past few months I've been sort of running Terminal Operations—to the extent they're being run."

"What sort of entry formalities are there?" Coke asked. "Cantilucca is part of the Marvelan Confederacy, isn't it?"

The building was none too clean. From the sound of the static broom which the team's entry had interrupted, Pilar was doing not only the terminal director's work but also that of the janitor.

"Here, I'll log you in as well," Pilar said with a grimace. She turned to a console and brought it live. "Call your friends inside, will you please?"

Coke nodded to Vierziger, who moved to the door.

"The clerks in the Commission office next door have all gone home," the woman explained as she sorted through electronic files. Her fingers were tapering. They moved a light pen with short, positive strokes to control the holographic data. "High Commissioner Merian is . . . isn't as diligent as he might be. To tell the truth, so long as the port duties are paid, the Confederacy doesn't bother much about Cantilucca."

The team entered the terminal building in a smooth movement, forming a chain to slide all the luggage inside ahead of the personnel. Pilar looked up from her console to eye the cases. "It'll be tight," she murmured, "but we'll fit."

"Is the city far?" Johann Vierziger asked. His voice was calm and melodious, but his eyes never rested more than a second in one place. Watching him was like following a tiny, ravenous insectivore as it snuffled through the leaf mold.

"Two kilometers is all," Pilar said. "The usual separation in case of a landing accident. But sometimes the road—"

She looked up again. "There are people here who inject tailings from the gage refineries. It can make them dangerous. It's better not to be on foot when you're out of town. Potosi isn't anything more than a town."

Without changing her inflection she added, "May I see your identity chips, please?"

"Gage tailings are poison," Margulies said as she gave Pilar her ID chip left-handed. She and Vierziger were both nervous, though that wouldn't have been obvious to many outsiders. "Why use them when the whole planet's full of the pure stuff?"

"Poor people, of course," Pilar said primly as she fed the chips into a slot on her console. "Gage on Cantilucca is controlled for export. If you expected"—She glanced up sidelong, then back to the console—"to find it running free for the taking in the gutters here, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed."

"That won't really affect us one way or the other, Mistress Ortega," Coke said. "Ah—are there dangerous life forms on Cantilucca?"

"Only the human beings," Pilar said. "Some of them. Many of them."

The console popped the ID chips forth one at a time at half-second intervals. Pilar scooped them into her hand and distributed them to the members of the survey team. Though she scarcely glanced at the imprinted legends, she returned each to its owner on the first try.

"There," she said as she closed down the console again. "In theory, you should come in tomorrow when the clerks are on duty and go through this again. But I can't imagine anybody will mind. Half the time nobody shows up next door at all."

She took a deep breath and shook herself. "Are you ready to go?" she added.

"You bet we are," Margulies muttered, eyeing the translucent door behind her. A starship coughed plasma again, brightening the panels into feathery iridescence.

Pilar stepped into the office on the other side of the counter and returned a moment later with a dark wrap. She opened the gate in the counter and said, "This way, then, please. The van is right outside."

Vierziger led again. He moved with serpentine grace, that one. He didn't appear to have hastened to get from one end of the room to the other ahead of his companions, but there he was.

Coke was impressed with Vierziger. Lieutenant Margulies' face was unreadable, but there was more to her expression than mere professional appreciation.

The night was as Coke remembered it, warm and muggy. He couldn't understand why the woman had bothered with an overgarment, until he noticed that it turned her into a shapeless blob without sex or individuality. He wondered whether that was more of a comment on Potosi or on Pilar's personality.

Beside the building was a four-wheeled van whose windows were broken out. Pilar got in while the team members wrestled their luggage into the back through the doors in both sides. The only seats were the pair of buckets in front.

Sten Moden opened the passenger door and swept his arm down in a courtly gesture toward Coke. "Rank hath its privileges," he said in a booming baritone.

"Bob, give me a leg up on top," Margulies called. "Its crowded inside, and I like the view from up there."

"I think perhaps I should ride there instead," Johann Vierziger said.

"I don't think so," Margulies snapped. Niko Daun chuckled.

Barbour made a stirrup of his hands. He grunted as he took the weight of the close-coupled woman, but she got a boot on the window frame and flipped herself neatly onto the vantage point.

Coke allowed himself a grin as he took his seat beside Pilar. The six of them had a lot of sorting out to do, with each other and with a job they were all new at. So far, so good.

The van was diesel powered. Pilar coaxed the engine to life with difficulty, and it ran rough after it caught.

"Are there aircars on Cantilucca?" Coke asked over the engine noise. From the amount of racket, there was no insulation in the firewall or body of the van to deaden sound.

"A few," the woman said. "Its hard to get maintenance on them. Its hard to get anyone to do anything in Potosi."

She engaged the torque converter. The van surged forward instead of picking up speed in a rising curve as Coke had expected.

"Except," Pilar added, "to swagger around with guns looking tough."

The van had a bar headlight across the upper hood. It worked, though its icteric cast suggested low voltage. The yellow light swept the gate of the starport compound, open and unguarded. Something hung from a pole just beyond the woven-wire fencing.

"Sir!" Margulies shouted.

"It's all right!" Coke called back. He'd seen the object as soon as Margulies did. "He isn't any danger, at any rate."

A corpse with its hands tied behind its back dangled by one ankle from a cross-pole. Either by chance or intention, the scene duplicated one of the arcana of a Tarot deck, The Hanged Man.

"Yes," Pilar Ortega said grimly. "That's also very popular in Potosi. Dying, I mean."

Either the breeze through the windowless van was unexpectedly cool, or the hormones flooding Coke's system were playing hell with his temperature regulation. He slid open the front seam of his dress jacket and let his index finger rest on the trigger guard of his pistol.

He began to smile. Survey work might not be as different from what he was used to as he'd feared.

Coke had decided to enter Potosi quietly and not to arouse the locals' attention until he'd been able to view the situation on the ground. Frisian commo helmets with their array of vision-enhancing capacities would have marked the team even more clearly than would entering armed to the teeth.

Being able to see into the nighted forest would have been more calming to Coke than the weight of a 2-cm weapon in his hands. He supposed he'd made the right decision at leisure aboard the Norbert IV, but it didn't feel that way just now.

The van drove past a lean-to of brushwood and scrap sheeting. An open flame glimmered through the doorway. The shadow of an occupant ducked across the light.

"We're booked into a place called the Hathaway House," Coke said. "Is that near your house, mistress?"

"My husband and I have a suite on the other side of town," Pilar snapped. "Terence is in charge of cargo operations."

"I see," Coke said in a neutral voice. He saw, or thought he did, quite a lot. "I was only concerned that we were taking you out of your way, mistress. We're perfectly capable of making our way on foot. The cases are awkward, but the suspension takes all the weight."

The van rattled along at 45 or 50 kph, about all the pavement would allow. The vehicle steered with a pair of thumbwheels set on the arms of a control yoke. Pilar looked down at her hands for a moment, then raised her eyes to the road again.

"I have to go right past the Hathaway House to get home," she said. "Potosi has only the one street fit for a full-sized vehicle. There are alleys, but they're generally blocked."

"You're going out of your way to help us," Coke said, watching the woman with his peripheral vision. "I don't want to put you to needless trouble."

"Many of the people, the men, who come to Cantilucca are a rough sort," Pilar said. She still didn't look toward Coke. "I shouldn't have reacted like that to you. I'm sorry."

"No problem," Coke said. "Were you born on Cantilucca?"

He knew what he was doing, and a part of his mind didn't like him much for it, but he was tense. This sort of game, this hunt, was a way to take his mind off wondering whether the next shadow was going to erupt in gunfire.

"Marvela," Pilar said. She wasn't a good driver; she had a tendency to overcorrect. At least she kept her eyes on the road while she talked. "We met when Terence was working in the port there. When he returned home to Cantilucca to run cargo operations, I—we married and I came with him."

From the glow in the sky ahead, the van was nearing the town proper. They passed a straggle of hovels like the first one. The dwellings weren't so much clustered as squatting in sight of one another, like a pack of vicious dogs penned together.

There was hinted motion, but no figure appeared in the open. There'd have been trouble had the team walked this way from the port. Nothing they couldn't have handled, but it would have gotten in the way of Coke's intention to start out with a low profile.

"Do you miss Marvela?" Coke asked. His eyes swept broad arcs though his head moved only slightly.

"No," Pilar said. "No."

She paused. "But I wish we hadn't come here. Cantilucca is a . . ."

She grimaced. Coke wasn't sure whether she was unable to find words to describe the planet, or if she was simply unwilling to voice them.

"There's too much nastiness here," Pilar said finally. "A man can go wrong anywhere. But on Cantilucca, it's very difficult to live decently."

Nothing wrong with my instincts, thought a part of Matthew Coke's mind; and another part scowled at the smug realization.

The van came up the far side of a dip and rounded a slight curve. Potosi lay directly ahead.

The town had no streetlights, but the ground floors and occasionally one or two of the higher stories were dazzles of direct and reflected enticement. Instead of having common walls, the buildings were set separately, sometimes behind a walled courtyard. Barkers doubling as armed guards stood outside business entrances, shouting to the traffic through bullhorns.

Pilar slowed the van to a crawl. The theoretical right-of-way was fifteen meters wide, but hawkers and shills narrowed the street, grabbing at pedestrians. Coke saw a trio of crewmen from the Norbert IV. The sailors stayed together as they crossed from one set of premises to the next. Though the men wore pistols openly they looked more apprehensive than dangerous.

There were no other vehicles on the street. A pink-haired woman with wild eyes stuck her head into the van on Coke's side. Her breath stank. She shouted something about the tray of electronic gadgets in her hand. The casings of gadgets, at any rate. Coke wouldn't have bet they had the proper contents.

He ignored the woman. She shouted a curse and spit at him. The roof post caught most of the gobbet instead.

The members of the survey team were in civilian clothing, but Margulies still wore her field boots. Her right leg described a quick arc, across the open window and up out of sight again. The hawker spun backward, tray flying as her eyes rolled up in their sockets.

It didn't seem to Coke that an action of that sort should arouse comment in Potosi; nor did it.

The ground floor of each building was walled like a pillbox, generally as a form of appliqué to the original structure. In some cases the strengthening took the form of sandbags behind a frame of timber and wire, but fancier techniques included cast concrete and plates of metal or ceramic armor.

In general, two or three upper stories were as-built. Many of the structures now had several additional stories added with flimsy materials.

Banners, lighted signs, and occasionally nude women or boys were displayed in second- and third-floor windows. There was always a screen of heavy wire mesh to prevent objects from being thrown in—or perhaps out. Music pumped from street-level doorways, different in style at every one; always distorted, always shatteringly loud.

Every major starport had a district like Potosi. The difference here was that Potosi appeared to have nothing else.

As Pilar had said, no proper streets crossed the road from the port, but the set-backs between adjacent buildings created de facto alleys. One or more gunmen stood at each intersection, strutting arms akimbo or profiling on one leg with the other boot against the wall.

The gunmen weren't in uniform, but they wore swatches of either red or blue—a cap, an armband, a jacket—and never both colors. Most of them ran to crossed bandoliers, with knives and holstered pistols in addition to a shoulder weapon.

They eyed the van as it passed. A heavy-set, balding fellow with bits of red light-stripping twisted into his beard stepped after the vehicle, then changed his mind and took his former station. Coke relaxed slightly. He heard Vierziger sigh behind him, perhaps with disappointment.

"Are those your police?" Coke asked their driver.

Pilar sniffed. "There are no police in Potosi," she said. "None that count, at any rate. Those are toughs from the gage syndicates, Astra and L'Escorial. The Astras wear blue."

A leavening of ordinary citizens shared the streets with the thugs, shills, and roisterers. Laborers; farmers in a small way, in town on business necessity but without money to spend as a few of their wealthier fellows had for the moment; clerks and office workers going home, hunched over and covered by capes like the one which concealed Pilar.

Somebody clanged a stone against the back of the van. Coke didn't react physically He wondered if he should have put two of his people on the roof, so that Margulies wouldn't be clocked from behind. Too late to change plans now without precipitating the trouble he wanted to avoid.

"It isn't always this bad," Pilar said apologetically. Her hands were stiff on the control yoke. "Both the gangs have been hiring recently and bringing men in from the fields. It's, it's worse than any time in the six years we've lived here."

Coke didn't bother to ask whether "years" meant standard or the shorter Cantiluccan rotation.

"These are farmers?" he said, frowning at two bands of a dozen each, kitty-corner from one another at an intersection and only ten meters apart. The gangs glowered at one another as they postured.

A short man with a blue beret hopped up to the side of the van. He braced himself on the window ledge and shouted, "Dog vomit!" at the red-clad gang on the opposite corner.

Niko Daun clutched beneath his tunic. Sergeant Vierziger raised his left index finger to prevent his fellows in the back of the van from moving. His eyes were on the opposite side of the vehicle, however, ready to react if a L'Escorial thug decided to shoot through the vehicle at the challenger.

None of them did. The van rumbled on.

Pilar swallowed, showing that she too recognized how dangerous the past instant had been.

"I meant guards from the fields," she said, watching the roadway. "Some of them were farmers. Some of them were sailors who jumped ship or were discharged on Cantilucca for bad behavior. Many of them are just, just badmen. They've come to Cantilucca because words out that the syndicates are willing to hire anybody who'll carry a gun and swagger."

"But there's no formed units of mercenaries on Cantilucca?" Coke asked.

"No," said Pilar. "No, we've at least been spared that."

So far, Coke thought. But only so far.

The van passed a three-story building on the right, set back in a walled courtyard. The structure was painted entirely blue, although several different shades had been mixed promiscuously. The whole facade was sheathed in concrete, and there were firing slits on each level in place of normal windows.

"Astra headquarters?" Coke asked. He thumbed toward the building, but he kept his hand below the level of the van's window so that only Pilar could see it.

"Yes," she said curtly—without looking toward the garish structure.

There were half a dozen guards at the courtyard gate, staring at everything which passed in the street. Their scrutiny drove pedestrians crowding to the left, the way a plume of cloud forms downstream of a hilltop.

Nobody looked at the guards. Nobody. Just for the hell of it, Coke turned deliberately to the right. His face wore a blank smile. The Astras glowered, but they were doing that anyway.

The guards were in full blue uniforms instead of wearing tags and scraps of the color. An elite force, then; and if those slope-browed slovens were the syndicate's elite, the Astras at least should be willing to pay for professional support.

"I'd think," Coke said in a neutral tone, "that there might be advantages to a dwelling closer to your place of work."

"Yes, I've thought of that too." Pilar said, giving Coke a brief smile. She was obviously glad of human contact. "But the part of Potosi past the two headquarter buildings is much quieter. The side toward the port is, well, you've seen it."

"Seen enough to imagine the rest," Coke agreed.

Somebody had sprayed scarlet paint on the pavement four hundred meters beyond Astra HQ. On the left side of the road, a group of twenty or so thugs sauntered from a heavily fortified building, also red, and surged across the street to form a cordon. They called to one another and jeered the civilians they blocked.

Pilar touched her crucifix with the tip of her right index finger and whispered a prayer. She stopped the van and cramped her wheels for a tight turn back the way they'd come.

"What is this?" Coke said. He opened his door and stepped out onto the running board. His eyes scanned front and to both sides, looking for the glint of a pointed weapon or the flash of a shot. His being was centered in his body, ready to send it in any direction.

The van's rear doors slid back as the rest of the team readied for action. Margulies' boots thumped on the roof.

"It's nothing, it's just a game they play every once in a while," Pilar said. She tried to ease the van into a turn, but the crowd recoiling from the cordon held the vehicle fast. "We'll have to go back and try to circle off the road—oh!"

"The idea seems to have caught on with our friends in blue," Margulies called from the roof of the van. "They've got the road blocked behind us now."

"Do you have any orders, Matthew?" Johann Vierziger asked in a voice as sharp and lethal as a cat's white eyetooth.

"No!" Coke said. Not the guns, not yet. "Mistress Ortega! What's the best way through?"

A three-wheeled jitney stopped at the cordon. The driver might have turned as more distant traffic did, but a thug pointed his sub-machine gun at the little vehicle.

L'Escorial gunmen poked and prodded the passengers, a pair of sailors and their local whores. A gunman took the liquor bottle from a sailor, drank from it, and handed it back. The business wasn't a formal search, just harassment and almost good-natured—until the end.

A gunman lifted up the bandeau of one of the prostitutes to uncover her breasts. The woman's nipples were tattooed blue.

The gunman's quick feel turned into a vicious yank. The woman screamed. Another L'Escorial thug bashed her behind the ear with a pistol butt.

Half a dozen of the red-clad gunmen converged like soldier ants to the sound of an intruder. They kicked and punched, stripping the prostitute as she tried to crawl away from them. One of the men thrust the muzzle of his 2-cm powergun between the woman's legs.

Coke's vision focused into a narrow tunnel. His mouth was half open and his skin was cold.

He didn't know her. She was nothing but a whore and a stupid whore besides, a whore who took an indelible stand in favor of one gang of thugs over another.

But he was going to do it anyway, violate his own orders and he'd have had the balls of any team member who did the same—

The L'Escorial lifted his powergun, laughing, and kicked the woman instead. His nailed boots tore a double row of gashes in her buttocks; but that came with the turf. She continued to crawl, ignored now by the gunmen and other citizens alike.

The two sailors and the remaining woman slipped through the cordon during the incident. The driver left his jitney where it was. He ducked into a doorway marked DRINKS & ENTERTAINMENT.

Pilar shut off the vans engine. "There's no way through or around," she said. "No safe way. They—"

She closed her eyes and whispered something with her finger on the crucifix again.

"This doesn't happen very often," she continued in a resigned tone. "I suggest you take beds in one of these—" she grimaced "—places. That's what I'm going to do. It will be quite horrible, but . . . you can't tell what they'll take it into their heads to do. Many of them mix tailings and alcohol together. It makes them crazy. Crazier."

"This doesn't look like a great neighborhood a-tall," Niko Daun said, looking around at the dingy buildings.

He was right. The add-on levels above the original constructions were reached by rickety outside staircases. The signs reading BEDS or SLEEP or (in one case, and perhaps little more of a lie than the others) SAFE LODGINGS were always on these outside stairs.

"How far away is the Hathaway House?" Coke asked Pilar as he continued to scan.

"It's right across the street from the L'Escorial building," Pilar said, "but that's the problem. It wouldn't do you any good to walk around the, the armed children, because they're exactly where you want to go."

"Hathaway House may not be any better than these flops anyway," Sten Moden suggested. He didn't sound concerned.

"There's six of us," said Robert Barbour. "We ought to be safe enough for the night."

"The Hathaway is a decent place," said Pilar. "I mean really decent, the only one in Potosi. But you can't get there. It doesn't have any back door. That'd just be another point to guard."

"I would say," Vierziger said coolly, "that it's not too far to carry our luggage if the lady doesn't want to drive us."

"It's not want," Pilar burst out angrily. "It's not safe to cross that gauntlet, safe for you!"

People with great need or great confidence were getting past the cordon. A gunman in red cordovan boots cut a citizen's belt and sent him scampering away with his trousers around his ankles.

Women were fondled, generally roughly. A few people were relieved of small objects—a gun, a chip recorder; perhaps some money. For the most part the cordon was an irritation, not an atrocity.

But it could become an atrocity at any moment, Coke knew. The only apparent check on the gunmen's activities was their own desires. There was no sign of external control.

Coke glanced up at Margulies on the roof of the van. He'd order her into a firefight without hesitation, but this was something else again. At the start, anyway.

"Mary, it's your call," he said.

She shrugged. "I'm not thrilled either way," she said. "But we came here to get information. I guess we may as well go do that."

She hopped down, bracing her left hand on the van roof. Her toes took her weight, so that she landed as lightly as if she'd stepped from the side door.

"All right, that's what we're going to do," Coke said. "Whatever comes, we're going to take it. When we're in the hotel, we'll take stock—but not before then. Understood?"

Sten Moden shrugged. Daun said, "Yes sir," very quietly, and Robert Barbour nodded. The intel lieutenant looked nervous, which was actually good: that meant he understood what was likely to happen. Coke thought he'd be okay.

"You mustn't do this!" Pilar said. "Please, just come with me."

She started toward stairs marked CLEAN LOCKED BEDS, rising from the unpaved alley beside where the van was parked. A man—or perhaps a woman within the ragged garments—lay supine just below the first landing.

"Nothing without orders, Matthew," said Johann Vierziger. "Nothing. I understand."

Coke nodded. "Let's do it," he said, hefting his own pair of cases from the van and starting toward the cordon.

"Please!" called Pilar Ortega. "Please, Master Coke! You don't know what you're doing."

She was wrong there . . . but that didn't necessarily mean that the business was survivable.

A few additional gunmen wandered out of L'Escorial headquarters to join the cordon. One of them brought a carton from which he tossed thimble-sized stim cones to his fellows.

Other L'Escorials left, bored by the lack of activity. Three of them headed for a ground-floor establishment whose doorjamb and transom were outlined in red glow-strip.

Many of the dives in the immediate neighborhood were marked red. None of them had blue anywhere on their signs or facades.

"S'pose they'd all go home if we waited a bit?" Daun asked.

"No," said Barbour beside him. There was tension in the voices of both technical specialists, but many things need to be tight to function. Neither of the men sounded as if he was about to break.

The 400-plus meter stretch of road between the rival headquarters had largely emptied since the cordons were established. The only traffic was of pedestrians crossing from one bar to another or climbing stairs to a flophouse.

A few drivers returned to their vehicles and ran them into the alleys. The jitneys had large-diameter wheels and often studded tires (though not all of them had tires). They could probably get along well enough off the pavement, though a serious pothole would overbalance them sideways. The little vehicles had narrow tracks and a high center of gravity.

The survey team, pulling its luggage toward the L'Escorial cordon, stood out like six sore thumbs.

The gunmen quieted speculatively. They didn't break their rough spacing across the width of the street, but there was a slight edgewise movement to concentrate in Coke's line toward the doorway of Hathaway House.

The door was metal-faced. It opened a crack. An orange-haired woman in her late middle age looked out. She closed the door after surveying the situation, but a triangular viewport opened immediately toward the top of the panel.

A blond man in his mid-twenties walked from the center of the line toward the end which the team approached. The fellow wore a crimson vest and cutoff trousers, high boots with rows of spikes around the calves, and a waist belt heavy with pouches of spare magazines for his sub-machine gun. His right arm and left leg were tattooed in patterns too stretched and faded to be identified in the bad light.

Coke paused a meter short of the blond man. Vierziger was a pace behind him; the rest of the team slanted back in precise echelon. Under the present circumstances, Moden instead of Margulies brought up the rear.

"Good evening, sir," Coke said to the presumed L'Escorial leader. He let go of the hand-grips of his luggage.

The blond man pointed his sub-machine gun into the air and shot off half the magazine in a single ripping burst. A cone of cyan bolts flicked toward the stars.

As their leader fired, most of the other L'Escorials in the cordon followed suit in a ragged volley. They carried a wide variety of weapons, though high-quality powerguns predominated. The night was a bedlam of whacks, hisscracks, and propellant flashes of red, orange and yellow supplementing the powerguns' saturated blue.

Not all the gunmen aimed skyward. A burly, bare-chested man wearing garnet-studded nipple rings with a chain slung between them pointed his chemically powered flechette gun at the front of Hathaway House. He fired twice.

The crashing reports of the hypervelocity weapon rattled shutters and screens against the windows they protected. The building's facade was concrete containing very coarse aggregate. The tungsten flechettes blew out craters in sprays of yellow-green sparks. A piece of gravel the size of Coke's clenched fist flew back across the street. It smacked the wall fronting L'Escorial headquarters.

The gunman rocked with each round from his high-recoil weapon. He was lowering the muzzle for a third shot when the L'Escorial leader batted him across the temple with the sub-machine gun's barrel.

"Fuckhead!" the leader shouted as his henchman sprawled facedown on the pavement. The victim's hair, scorched by the white-hot indium, stank obscenely. "You want to kill us all?"

He'd knocked the fellow unconscious. From the eyes of the man with the flechette gun, he'd been flying so high on gage and other drugs that he probably wouldn't remember the lesson in the morning anyway, though he'd feel it.

The L'Escorial leader turned. He waggled the glowing muzzle of his powergun in Coke's face. "Where do you come from, dickhead?" he demanded.

"We're businessfolk from Nieuw Friesland," Coke said quietly. "Though the last stage of our voyage was through Delos."

"Everybody comes through Delos if they're coming here, dickhead," the leader snarled. He pointed his weapon one-handed at one of Coke's suitcases. "Open that. Now!"

"I'm sorry," Coke lied, "but they were hold baggage on shipboard, so they're time-locked. They can't be opened for another day and a half."

"Want to bet?" the gunman said. He fired.

The survey team's luggage was plated with 40-laminae ceramic armor beneath a normal-looking sheathing. The thin laminate shattered individually without transmitting much of the shock to deeper layers. A few rounds from a 2-cm weapon would have blown any of the cases apart, but the burst of 1-cm pistol charges from the sub-machine gun only pecked halfway through the plating.

Furthermore, the ceramic reflected a proportion of the plasma. The spray of sun-hot ions glazed Coke's trouser legs—the business suit was much more utilitarian than its stylish cut implied.

The L'Escorial gunman's bare knees blistered instantly, and the fringe of his shorts caught fire. He screamed, dropped his weapon, and began batting with his bare hands at the flames.

The case started to fall over. The burst of gunfire had smashed the forward static generator in a shower of sparks.

Coke grabbed the handle of the case. "Please, sirs!" he cried in a voice intended to sound terrified. "We're businessmen! Please!"

"Fuck you!" a tall man with a pair of pistols cried. "You're dancers, that's what you are!"

He fired twice into the pavement at Coke's feet. Glass and pebbles from the compressed-earth roadway spattered Coke's legs above his shoe tops. Coke staggered forward, lifting the front of the damaged case in his left hand. He squeaked in simulated terror.

The fear was real, but not terror, not anything that prevented Matthew Coke from acting in whatever fashion was necessary.

He didn't know whether or not the actions he'd set in motion were survivable. It was like a free-fall jump. Once you'd committed, you could only hope the support mechanism—static repulsion, parachute, or whatever—would work as intended. The team couldn't change its collective mind now.

A 2-cm bolt blew off the lower back corner of the damaged case and the rest of the static suspension. With the plating and the hardware inside, the case weighed nearly a hundred kilos. Coke lurched onward with it, bleating. He was through the cordon, but a bullet could flick through the back of his head and take his face off at any gunman's whim.

Mary Margulies touched the latch of her right-hand case with a finger so swift that the luggage appeared to have flown open by accident. Frilly underwear and lounging garments flew out onto the roadway.

"Hey lookee-lookee-lookee!" shouted a gunman. He grabbed a teddy and modeled it against his scarred chest.

The cordon collapsed into a rush for loot. The clothing had no value except as a matter of amusement, but that's all the cordon was to begin with: a way for men with a childish mindset to amuse themselves.

"Hey, sweetie!" a gunman cried. He grabbed, not very seriously, for Margulies' crotch. The lieutenant weaseled past with her remaining suitcase. "Stay with me! I'll give you more dick than all five of them pussies together!"

The door of Hathaway House opened in front of Coke. His left arm felt as though the shoulder tendons would snap with the weight of the case they supported. He stepped aside to check on his team.

"Get in, curse your eyes!" Johann Vierziger shouted. "I'll handle—"

Vierziger slid one of his cases into the doorway with a sweep of his left arm.

"—this!" and he sent the second case after the first, skidding like driverless cars.

Though the static suspension balanced the weight of the luggage, its inertia was unchanged. Vierziger's movements, as smooth and practiced as those of a expert lawn-bowler, required strength that one wouldn't assume in someone as pretty as the little man.

A voice yelped from inside the hotel. The door started to close, but Barbour was there, using the mass of his cases to slam the panel fully open. He twisted aside. Niko Daun followed him in.

A pair of L'Escorial gunmen were dancing. One wore a pair of delicate panties as a crown; his partner had thrust his arms into leggings whose multiple shimmering colors shifted as they caught varied light-sources. Other L'Escorials cheered and clapped, or pawed through the open case for their own trophies.

Coke pointed Margulies in. She obeyed at a hasty rush, aware that her presence as a woman made the risk to every member of the team greater. The expression on her face was set and terrible.

Sten Moden tossed his huge case after her, picked up both of Coke's cases in his one hand and tossed them; and wrapped his arm around Coke's waist. Moden swept the major with him into the lobby of Hathaway House. Coke could as well have wrestled an oak tree for the good his protests did.

Somebody had to be last in; and yeah, that was probably a job for the security detail, for Sergeant Vierziger, but it didn't seem right . . .

The sixtyish woman with orange hair started to push the door closed. Daun and Barbour were already doing that. Vierziger danced backward through the opening.

The panel clanged against its jamb. It rang again an instant later: a L'Escorial had fired a powergun into the armor as a farewell. The door's refractory core, lime or ceramic, absorbed the discharge without damage.

The woman swept her hair out of her eyes. She was healthy-looking though on the plump side. A man of similar age with a luxuriant, obviously implanted, mane of hair stood to the side, wringing his hands.

Several tables stood in a saloon alcove off the foyer. A few men were seated in the shadows there. They stared pointedly at their drinks rather than at the newcomers. The silence within the hotel was a balm after the noisy violence of the street.

The woman planted her arms akimbo, fists on her hips. "Welcome to Cantilucca, mistress and sirs," she said. "Now, if you're smart, you'll head right back to the port and take the next ship out of this pigsty!"

"Oh, Evie, it's not so bad as that," the man said. "It's just with the, you know, with the syndicates on edge like they are, there's more, ah . . ."

"More murderous bandits in town than usual?" the woman snapped. "Yes, there are, and it's an open question whether they kill everybody else off before they kill each other or after!"

"I'm Georg Hathaway," the man said, bowing to Moden—probably because the logistics officer was the most imposing presence of this or most other groups. "This is my wife Evie, and I'm sorry for this trouble, usually things are better, it's just there are so many of the patrolmen in Potosi these last few months, and you know, the boys will let off steam."

"Usually things are almost bearable," Evie Hathaway said sharply. "That hasn't been the case since the bandits began gearing up to fight—and they don't fight, they just squeeze decent citizens harder yet. When will it stop, I'd like to know?"

"Evie, now, don't upset the gentlemen and lady," Georg Hathaway said. "They've had a difficult time already, we mustn't make it worse. Are you the Coke party, then, booking from Nieuw Friesland?"

Moden gestured, palm up. "This is Master Coke," he said. "You have rooms for us?"

"Oh, we have rooms, all right," Evie said. "What we don't have is patrons who can pay us for them. Since this trouble started three months ago, nobody with money and sense comes anywhere near Potosi."

She stared fiercely at Coke. "And we have our standards. Are you here on behalf of the gage cartel on Delos, Master Coke?"

"No," Coke said, "we don't have anything to do with Gage."

Hathaway House was a two-story building. The lobby, saloon, and service quarters were on the ground floor, while the guest rooms were up a flight of stairs. Judged from outside, the protective concrete wall was of equal thickness all the way up, so Coke didn't see any need for special arrangements.

"Speaking of gage," said Niko Daun hopefully, "I don't suppose this would be a good time to have a cone or two?"

Moden looked at the younger man with an icy fury that shocked Coke. "No," the big man said in a voice as still as death, "it would not. Not so long as the operation is going on."

Daun blushed. "I'm sorry, sir," he said, looking toward the lower wall molding, gray against the lobby's general peach decor. "I just thought that since we had a break after, well, after . . ."

"There's no breaks until we lift out of here, T-tech, Niko," Sten Moden said more gently. "But I'm sorry, it wasn't mine to speak—"

He nodded formally toward Coke.

"—and I'm sorry for my tone. I—wouldn't care for others to make such a mistake as I made in the past, thinking I could let down."

Margulies and Vierziger had conferred briefly. The lieutenant trotted upstairs to check protection and fields of fire there, while Vierziger prowled the ground floor. The Hathaways watched him askance but neither of them spoke—even when he disappeared into their own quarters.

"Bloody hell," Coke muttered. He peeked out of the door's triangular viewport.

The cordons were still in place. The L'Escorials had rolled an armored truck into the street to face the Astra line. It looked like a four-wheeled van covered with so many metal and concrete panels that it could barely move. The vehicle mounted tribarrels in a cupola and in a sponson to either side. There were firing slits as well, though Coke judged that they did little but weaken the already-doubtful protection.

Robert Barbour opened one of his cases. The interior was packed with electronics. He began to extend the case into a full-featured communications module.

"Come on, Daun," he said. "We need to get some information if we're going to do our job."

Niko Daun gave the room a bright smile. "We're going to need information if we're going to survive the tour, I'd say," he remarked cheerfully.

The sensor tech unlatched a case of his own. It too was full of gear. He took out a series of sensors, broad-band optical and radio frequency, whistling under his breath.

Clothing hadn't been a high priority for a team operating out of range of support—save for the suitcase Margulies had insisted on bringing as a decoy, and that thought had earned her a commendation if Coke lived to write it.

"Ah, would you gentlefolk not like some refreshment?" Georg Hathaway suggested. "We have what we like to think is a very good beer, I brew it on the premises myself, and there's local cacao as well, good enough to export, if it weren't that no one cares for anything but gage on Cantilucca."

"Gage and killing," his wife said bitterly. "And mostly killing. I don't think it'll stop before there's only one of the bandits left."

"About how many men do the gage syndicates employ, mistress?" Coke asked as he continued to look out the viewport. Barbour and Daun would give him much more precise data in a moment, but in some ways there was nothing to equal the naked eye.

"Too many," Evie said. "And they're hiring more every day."

Georg—eyeing the array of devices the tech specialists were assembling—said cautiously, "Sirs, I'd judge that Astra and L'Escorial have at least a thousand, ah, employees each. They aren't all in, ah, the patrol branch, but most of them are."

"Usually most of them are out in the fields, bullying the growers," Evie Hathaway said. "But they've been bringing them into Potosi since the trouble started."

She raised her arms and combed her fingers through her artificially bright hair. She looked tired and frustrated, a woman near the end of her tether. "I hope the growers are getting some benefit. Because it's hell here for decent folk."

The makeshift armored truck revved its air-cooled diesel engine. The separately bolted body panels vibrated at different frequencies, creating a grinding rattle. For the crew, it must have been like riding in a cement mixer—but maybe they were so stoned that they wouldn't feel the effects of their silliness until the next morning.

Niko darted up the stairs to arrange his equipment from high vantage points. Margulies came down, wearing a satisfied expression, and gave Coke a thumbs-up. The upper floor and roof were secure in her—expert—estimation.

"And there's no police force, I understand?" Coke said.

The tribarrel in the armored truck's cupola pointed up at 20°, probably its maximum elevation, and fired a two-round burst. The rich cyan of the high-powered 2-cm charges flashed in reflection from the facades.

"Police?" Mistress Hathaway crowed. She pointed into the saloon. "Police? Look at them there, afraid to go out without covering up so they won't be seen! Oh, we've got fine police here in Potosi!"

The two men drinking morosely at a corner table did, now that Evie called attention to the fact, wear white uniforms. Dingy white uniforms. They hunched their shoulders under the lash of her tongue. Drab capes like the one with which Pilar covered herself hung over the backs of their chairs.

"Evie, now, don't get yourself into a state," Georg murmured, wringing his hands again.

The gunman in the armored truck rotated his barrels manually, then fired another two rounds. The ill-maintained tribarrel jammed again at the third loading sequence.

One of the policemen turned and glared from deep-sunk eyes. "Look, what do you want us to do?" he demanded. He waved a shock baton, the only weapon he carried. "Go out and arrest them all, and for what?"

He made a face as if to spit, then thought the better of it. Sinking back over his mug of beer he added, "Better I should shoot myself. At least I could be sure it was quick if I did it myself."

"Find someone worth a bullet!" Evie Hathaway snapped, but she'd lost the edge of anger. Exhaustion reasserted itself.

A ripple—three pairs—of hypervelocity rockets cracked down the street in the opposite direction, well over the heads of the L'Escorial cordon. The Astras must have brought one of their own armored vehicles out, though Coke couldn't see it from his present vantage point.

The projectiles were aimed deliberately high, just as the L'Escorial tribarrel had been; but that sort of game could get out of hand as quickly as Russian roulette could. A red-clad gunman spread his fringed leather kilt and urinated in the direction of the Astra line.

"You gentlemen—and lady, of course," Georg Hathaway said cautiously, "are in the instrument business, then? You plan to sell instruments to the gage syndicates?"

"Not exactly." Coke said curtly.

"I've got a hook-up, sir," Barbour said. "Ah, Matthew. You can have a panorama here on the console or fed to your helmet."

Coke glanced briefly at the data console. A holographic globe a meter in diameter hung above the base. The image was a schematic of the center of Potosi. Buildings appeared as simplified versions of themselves, while vehicles and armed personnel were icons—red and blue, as indicated.

The L'Escorial armored car revved and backed slowly away, its tribarrels pointing toward the Astras. While turning to the courtyard, the vehicle's right rear fender bashed a gatepost. The engine stalled. The car rolled forward a meter.

Gunmen in the cordon hooted and catcalled at the vehicle's crew. The driver started his engine again with a cloud of black smoke. He advanced into the middle of the street and cramped his wheels to get a running start at the entrance. There was plenty of room, but the single side mirror wasn't adequate for backing so clumsy a vehicle.

The armored car lurched into reverse. It roared backward in a shower of sparks and concrete powdered from both the vehicle and the gatepost it scraped. The gunmen clapped and cheered ironically.

Johann Vierziger sat on a stuffed chair with his hands crossed in his lap, watching the scene in the holographic display. His face wore a grim smile.

The sensor tech had returned from upstairs. He shook his head and said, "I told them I'd never work with wogs again. Lord knows that was the right decision."

He grinned. Coke had read the kid's file. Daun was obviously as resilient as he was skilled in his specialty; but then, he was young too.

"Master Hathaway?" Coke said. "I under—"

"Georg," the host said, nodding. "Please, call me Georg."

"Georg, then," Coke said. "I understand that there are no professional military units on Cantilucca—no mercenaries, that is. Is that your understanding as well?"

"Well," Hathaway said, "both syndicates have Presidential Guards. They're mostly soldiers from off-planet."

"But not off-planet units?" Coke pressed. The guard forces in full uniform might be individually more skillful than the ruck of ex-farmers and ex-sailors carrying guns, but they obviously lacked the discipline necessary to carry out complex maneuvers.

"No, not that I've heard of," Hathaway said. "That would be much more expensive, surely?"

"That depends on what you're assigning values to," said Mary Margulies.

Coke had thought the cordons might disperse when the armored vehicles left, but a score of red-clad gunmen remained. Traffic was picking up slightly. The citizenry had decided that the gunmen didn't mean serious trouble.

"They can't bring mercenaries onto Cantilucca," Evie Hathaway said unexpectedly. "Because of the Confederacy."

"We'd heard the Marvelans left Cantilucca pretty well alone," Sten Moden said quietly.

"The Confederacy doesn't care anything about law and order here, so long as they're paid their money," Evie said. "Blood money, I call it. But they won't let a proper army onto Cantilucca. For fear they'd take over and the Confederacy wouldn't be able to drive them out."

Georg Hathaway looked at his wife in surprise. "What's that, Evie?" he said. "I hadn't heard that."

She turned slightly away. In a less forceful voice she said, "When the Marvelan delegation was on Cantilucca a year and a half ago, the overflow from the High Commissioner's residence stayed here. One of the aides explained that to me when, when I was complaining to him."

"Aides . . ." Georg repeated in a flat tone. "That would be young Garcia-Medina, I suppose you mean?"

"It might have been!" said Evie. "I was complaining about the horrible situation, that was all!"

"We have," Johann Vierziger said, "a war of sorts outside. I don't think adding one inside is necessary at the moment."

"No, no," Georg said. The innkeeper's forced smile quickly asserted its own reality over his personality. "That's old business and nothing to it, not really, not even then. Pardon me, mistress and masters, for letting the stress of the moment get the better of me."

The whole team was assembled in the lobby of the hotel. Coke grinned wryly at his people. With the corner of his eye still tracking developments in the street peripherally, he said, "Well, what do the rest of you think? Niko?"

The sensor tech grinned and flipped his hands palms-up in a non-committal gesture. "I can set you up to count the change in the pocket of anybody in town, sir. Just tell me what you want."

Coke nodded. "Bob?"

Barbour looked through the space occupied by his holographic display. His hands hovered over the console keyboard, not quite touching it.

"There's something over six hundred powerguns live in the three-klick radius," he said. "Given the ratio of powerguns to other weapons outside, that roughs in well with a total of a thousand shooters in town at present."

He looked at Coke; his eyes focused again. "What else would you like to know, Matthew?"

"That'll do," Coke said. He'd deliberately kept the parameters of his question vague. The team members were answering each to his own specialty, just as they should. "Sten?"

The logistics officer nodded twice before he spoke, as though his mind were a pump and he was priming it. "Yes," he said. "What Mistress Hathaway says rings true. If so, we'll either have to infiltrate the personnel or arrange a combat landing. I doubt we'll be able to get the Bonding Authority to cover either option."

"Is that a deal-breaker, then?" Coke asked. "Shall we just pack up and go home?"

Moden shook his head. "There've been precedents," he said. "They aren't talked about officially, but you hear about them in the bars around Camp Able. It affects the price and the size of the force to be risked, however."

"I don't like the idea of going in on a non-bonded operation," Margulies said with a frown.

"We won't be going in anywhere," Coke said. "And the decision isn't ours. We're just here to assess possibilities."

The Bonding Authority on Terra guaranteed that both parties to a hiring of mercenaries would perform according to the terms of the contract. That is, the troops would obey the orders of the contracting local party—whether the latter was a recognized government, a rebel movement, or an interstellar business conglomerate extending its holdings by force. And the troops would be paid, even if that meant the contracting local parties starved, or starved every civilian on the planet, in order to meet their obligations to the mercenaries.

The Bonding Authority didn't take a moral stand: money has no smell. Though one could argue that forcing adults to keep their word was itself a way of instilling morality on human weakness.

Margulies grimaced and nodded.

"Johann?" Coke said.

Vierziger sniffed. "A company of infantry, backed up by a company of combat cars," he said. He snapped the fingers of his left hand dismissively. "It could be done with less. These people are hopeless, quite hopeless."

"How about panzers instead of cars?" Margulies suggested. "This is a city of bunkers."

Vierziger shook his head. "There's too many hiding places for buzz-bomb teams," he said. "Tribarrels can break up the facades almost as fast as a twenty-centimeter main gun could, and a car has twice as many eyes as a tank to watch for launchers. Even that's risky, but the infantry needs the firepower support."

Margulies pursed her lips. "We could use the local allies, whichever side, to unmask ambushes?" she said, the question implicit in her tone.

"Dream on," Vierziger said scornfully. Margulies shrugged and nodded agreement with her nominal underling's judgment.

"May I ask just what business you goodfolk deal in, please?" Georg Hathaway said in a cautiously distant voice.

Vierziger raised an eyebrow at Coke. Coke scratched the side of his neck. No point in trying to conceal matters. Theirs was, after all, a legitimate commercial operation.

"We're representatives of the Frisian Defense Forces," he said, nodding toward Mistress Hathaway to include her in the explanation. "Our superiors had been told that one or both gage syndicates here on Cantilucca might be interested in hiring high-quality mercenaries. The FDF are the best, period. We're here to assess prospects for doing business and to report back to our superiors."

Evie Hathaway's face hardened by increments as Coke spoke. When he finished, she said harshly, "I don't think you made a very positive impression when you arrived, gentlefolk. I doubt either the Widow Guzman or the Lurias will be interested in paying for the services of more like yourselves."

"Evie, now, don't be that way," her husband begged. "I'm sure these—"

"No, no," Coke said. "Mistress Hathaway is right. I suppose we need to do something to correct the situation immediately."

"People are drifting away from the roadblocks, sir," Barbour commented.

Coke had seen as much through the viewport, but there were still twelve or fourteen L'Escorials in position. About right for the purpose.

Margulies raised an eyebrow. Coke nodded. Margulies and Vierziger unlatched another pair of cases.

"How thick are the walls?" Coke asked.

"You won't start a fight in here!" Evie Hathaway shouted. "You have to kill me first! This is a place of peace!"

"Ma'am, I wouldn't think of it," Coke said truthfully. "Anything that happens will be out on the street. I just want to be sure that none of the—side effects—will be dangerous to your structure."

Barbour adjusted a set of controls. A ghost of Hathaway House glowed as a sidebar to the schematic of the immediate streetscape.

He looked up at Coke. "The front wall is nearly a meter thick," he said. "Glass-reinforced concrete, and well shaken down. There's a slight batter, but nothing that should matter."

"Well, that's right," Georg said in surprise. "I thought, Evie thought, really, that we shouldn't spare expense on protection if we were going to get the kind of guests we wanted."

The innkeeper looked at the cases the security detail had opened. Like those of Barbour and Daun, they were filled with equipment. This time, all the equipment was lethal.

Margulies and Vierziger began handing out weapons to the rest of the team.

Vierziger handed each member of the survey team a vest woven from beryllium monocrystal. Moden and Daun had carefully lifted the segments of ceramic plate from the exterior walls of the luggage. The plates fitted into pockets in the vests, forming body armor almost as resistant as the clamshell hard-suits which the FDF issued for normal field operations.

Coke took off his loose outer jacket and paused. "I don't think I want armor for this," he said. He was—

Well, of course he was frightened, a turtle would be frightened if it was about to walk into this one. It was his job, and anyway it'd be all right.

"I think you ought to wear it, sir," Margulies said.

She'd completely emptied the suitcase on which she'd been working. Weapons and ammunition lay in neat stacks on the tile floor around her. She stood up and latched the case, then twisted the hand-grip 180°. She slid the luggage over to him.

"I think he ought to wear armor also," said Johann Vierziger, "though I'll admit I wouldn't myself if it were me."

He smiled. His face was that of an ivory angel. "I prefer the freedom. But what I really think is that I should be the one to go outside, Matthew."

Coke shook his head forcefully. "It's my job," he said. "And anyway, it'll be all right."

He thrust his arms through the holes of the vest he'd prepared, then mated the front closures. His outer jacket was cut to hang the same whether or not there was armor beneath it. He pulled it on.

"Helmet?" said Barbour without looking up from his console display.

Coke shook his head brusquely. "The implant will do in a pinch," he said, tapping his jaw. The right mastoid contained a miniature bone-conduction radio transceiver. "They'd react to the helmet the same as they would if I went out in full uniform."

Barbour nodded without concern. It was his job to offer information to the action personnel. He didn't—couldn't—control what they did with the information.

Vierziger slid Coke a second case, emptied and prepared as Margulies had done with hers.

Coke looked down at the luggage, then at his security detail. "One's enough," he said.

"Two, Matthew," said Vierziger.

"Two," echoed Margulies. "What do you intend to save them for, sir?"

Coke laughed harshly at himself. There was a tendency in any combat unit, particularly with those which operated beyond resupply, to fear using up munitions which they might need later. At its worst, that attitude could mean a position being overrun because the defenders were unwilling to cut loose with everything they had, lest they be out of ammo when the next attack came.

Margulies and Vierziger were right. Unless Coke made the few next minutes really memorable for the L'Escorials, ten times the hardware the team had brought to Cantilucca wouldn't be enough.

"Right," he said. "Two." He took the suitcases.

Niko Daun put his hand on the door latch. Moden's strength would have been a better match for the mass of the armored panel, but the powerful officer's one arm carried a three-tube missile launcher. The unit was intended for vehicle mounting, but Moden held it as easily as a lesser man might have done a 2-cm powergun.

Margulies and Vierziger were in position to either side of the door, she with a sub-machine gun, he with his hands empty, though he'd slung a sub-machine gun for patrol carry along his left side. The embellishments of the pistol in the high-ride holster on Vierziger's right hip winked in the foyer lights.

Robert Barbour sat at his console, calm or comatose. Coke supposed the former but it didn't matter, not now, as he nodded to Daun and started toward the door, sliding the cases beside him.

Coke stepped through the doorway and shivered in the warm, muggy air. L'Escorial gunmen turned in surprise to face him.

Coke set his luggage against the front wall of Hathaway House. Each of the big cases was a meter long and sixty centimeters high. They were thirty centimeters deep as well, but the volume wasn't important any more. Coke left the pair in a very flat V, end to end, almost parallel to the reinforced concrete facade.

He stepped quickly toward the cordon's leader, the blond man in vest and cutoffs. The fellow's legs were an angry color; he'd have blisters across the whole front of them by morning, if he survived that long.

A gunman with a bayoneted grenade launcher stuck his weapon toward Coke's face. The bayonet was a spike rather than knife-style. Coke swept it aside with his left hand.

"Excuse me, sir!" Coke called to the leader. "I believe you're in charge here?"

"Who the fuck do you think you are, you little prick?" the L'Escorial demanded in obvious amazement. He pointed his sub-machine gun like a huge pistol. The muzzle wavered, but not so much that the 1-cm bore ever drifted away from Coke's face.

"I'm Matthew Coke, my good fellow," Coke said. "I'm afraid I have to complain about the behavior of yourself and your friends."

The need to hold a persona protected Coke against his own fears. This wasn't him facing a gang of bored, drugged-out thugs, this was a prissy off-world businessman who couldn't imagine violence as raw as the norm of this hellhole.

A gunman whacked Coke in the back with the butt of a 2-cm powergun. Coke staggered forward, almost into the muzzle of the leader's automatic weapon. The armored vest saved his kidneys, but it did nothing to lessen the inertia of the solid blow.

Coke flailed his arms to get his balance. "Now that's just what I mean!" he cried. "What sort of impression do you think that behavior makes on visitors? If you don't apologize immediately, I'll have to take action to bring this to your superiors' attention as clearly as possible."

"What the hell is he talking about, Blanco?" asked a gunman. He still wore a pair of lacy undergarments from Margulies' case over his scarlet beret.

What he's talking about, you moron, is the warning required by FDF regulations before FDF personnel use deadly force in a non-contractual context.

Blanco, the L'Escorial straw boss, stepped forward, poking his sub-machine gun toward Coke's eyes. The iridium bore was pitted from the long burst of a few minutes before.

Coke hopped backwards. Another gunman tripped him. Coke twisted like a cat as he fell, catching himself on his left hand instead of sprawling on his back. Blanco kicked him in the side with cleated boots.

Coke scuttled toward the doorway of Hathaway House, doubled over. He dabbed his left hand down like a deer running with a broken foreleg.

L'Escorials shouted and kicked. One of them swung his 2-cm weapon as a club. Because Coke was moving, the massive iridium barrel smacked him in the small of the back instead of across the shoulders. Again the vest saved him from crippling, perhaps fatal, injury, but the shock made Coke's mind go white nonetheless. He plowed facedown on the pavement.

The plated door flew open. Johann Vierziger stepped out, grabbed Coke left-handed by the back of the collar, and half-pulled, half-flung, the major into the foyer.

Sten Moden swung the door closed. A L'Escorial stuck his foot in the crack. Margulies kicked the gunman's knee, then shoved him clear of the opening with the sole of her boot. Several L'Escorials pushed from the other side of the panel, but Moden's strength overmastered them.

Someone emptied the 30-round magazine of a projectile weapon against the front of the door. A L'Escorial screamed, wounded by a ricochet or at least by spatters of the bullets after they disintegrated on the armor.

The door locked on three wrist-thick bolts worked by a single handle. When the panel slammed against its jamb, Niko Daun slid the bolts home into metal tubes set deep in the concrete.

"Open this—" Blanco shouted, his voice attenuated by the massive door and wall.

Margulies touched a thumb switch, detonating the pair of directional mines in the suitcases outside.

The lobby lights went out. Emergency lighting, glow-strips powered piezoelectrically by the structure's own flexing, drew pale yellow-green arrows down the staircase and from each doorway. Barbour's holographic display remained a ball of sharp-edged pastels. Dust, shaken from all the surfaces of the room, filled the air chokingly.

Georg Hathaway opened his mouth as if to scream, but no sound came out. Evie put an arm around her husband's shoulders and another on his nearer elbow.

Coke staggered to his feet. Margulies tossed him a commo helmet. The other team members were already wearing theirs. Vierziger offered Coke a 2-cm powergun, muzzle up.

The double crash of the mines had been terrible despite the wall's protection. Coke heard his own voice with ringing overtones as he said, "Right, open it."

Daun tried to obey. The blasts had warped the door and jamb together. The sensor tech braced a boot-sole on the wall for a fulcrum. Despite his straining, it wasn't until Moden slung his missile launcher and tugged the handle that the panel swung open.

The huge doughnuts of dust and smoke from the blasts had spread and dissipated by the time Coke came through the doorway—third, after Margulies and Vierziger, their guns pointing. Coke switched his visor to thermal imaging because the longer infrared waves penetrated the haze better than the normal optical range that light-amplification mode would have used.

A directional mine was built into one face of each suitcase, beneath the 40 ceramic laminate which the team had removed to use in its body armor. The outside of each mine was thousands of faceted steel barrels the size of the last joint of a man's little finger. The inside was a layer of cast explosive.

The mines went off like shotguns whose bore was the full plane of the cases containing them: six-tenths of a square meter. The pair, set to cross the edge of the L'Escorial cordon at a shallow angle, had swept the street like a gigantic buzz-saw.

All that was visible of Blanco was a left foot and left boot—from the ankle down. The mines' steel sleet hadn't had time to spread when it hit the L'Escorial officer. Blanco's torso must have been above the plane of the projectiles, but the shock wave had flung it indistinguishably into the bloody ruck.

Someone's right arm lay a few meters farther on. The radius and ulna were fleshless, but the hand and upper arm remained unmarked as a freak of the explosion.

Another gunman, still clutching a sub-machine gun, gasped on his belly in the middle of the street. He'd been at the edge of the area the projectiles cleared. Blood from a dozen pellet wounds pooled the pavement around him. The blast had stripped his clothes off. There was a ragged wound where his penis and scrotum should have been.

Vierziger glanced at Coke. Coke nodded. Vierziger shot the L'Escorial behind the ear, then reholstered his pistol. Coke blinked at the speed and smoothness of the motion.

Most of the gunmen's bodies lay against the wall fronting the L'Escorial compound. A L'Escorial wearing oil-stained coveralls and a short helmet—one of the armored truck's crew—ran out the open gateway. He gaped at the carnage.

Coke pointed his powergun at the L'Escorial and shouted, "Hold it!"

The L'Escorial carried a pistol in a shoulder holster where it would be out of the way aboard his vehicle, but he seemed to have forgotten he was armed. He didn't look so much frightened as dumbfounded, like a man who'd met a talking dog.

Holding his weapon with the muzzle pointed but the stock in the crook of his arm, Coke walked over to the L'Escorial. More gunmen scampered into and out of sight through the gateway. Nobody else left the courtyard. The armored vehicle's engine roared to life, then stalled with a clang as an inexperienced driver tried to operate it.

Coke lifted the muzzle of his 2-cm weapon. He reached into his purse with his left hand and removed a business card, which he stuck between the L'Escorial's pistol and its holster.

The card read:

MAJOR MATTHEW COKE
Frisian Defense Forces

Representative

The chip embedded within the card would project his image and description through a hologram reader.

"Go on back inside," Coke ordered. "Tell your leaders that we didn't come here to have a problem. We're here to do business on behalf of our principals, and that'll be very good business for the side that strikes the deal. Do you understand?"

The L'Escorial stared at the shoulder weapon, not at the man holding it. His eyes were wild, and he gave no indication of having heard a thing Coke had said.

Coke sighed. There was such a thing as making a demonstration too effective.

He put his left hand on the gunman's shoulder and rotated the fellow to face L'Escorial headquarters. "Go on," he said. "Tell your bosses that this just involved a few individuals—it wasn't important."

Coke pushed the man gently. The L'Escorial stumbled, then broke into a shambling run around the gatepost and out of sight.

Coke turned, though it made his skin crawl to do so. Backing away from the red-painted structure would have sent a signal of weakness to the gunmen certainly watching through firing slits in the upper floor of the building.

The street was a smear of blood and pulped organs. It reflected the light of advertising signs. Coke's boot-heels shimmied as he stepped. He felt dizzy, and the stench of disemboweled corpses made him want to vomit.

A few of the bodies which the mines slammed against the courtyard wall were still alive, at least technically. Coke didn't want to think about that. There was nothing he could do now if he wanted to. He wasn't a medic.

He was a killer, no more and surely no less.

May the Lord give them rest; and may there be rest for the slayer, in his time.

The team, all but Barbour—visible through the open door at his console—waited outside Hathaway House for Coke's return. Daun blinked in amazement and a certain distaste. Moden and Margulies, the combat veterans, were grimly silent.

Johann Vierziger smiled.

"I gave a card to a citizen to deliver up the street, Matthew," Vierziger said in his liquid voice. He gestured with an open hand toward where the Astra cordon had been. The mine blasts brought the blue-clad gunmen running a few steps toward the scene, then scurrying back into their compound to take stock. "Now what?"

"Now," said Matthew Coke, "you await developments here, and I take care of some personal business."

Coke stepped into the lobby of Hathaway House. He was shaking. He hadn't done anything to burn off the adrenaline with which his body had pumped itself in preparation for fight or flight.

The Hathaways stood with arms entwined about one another's shoulders and their other hands linked at waist level. Georg was blank-faced. Evie's expression was one of slowly dawning joy.

The three men from the saloon now stood in the broad archway where the alcove joined the lobby. One of the policemen opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping silently on the dock. The third man, a civilian whose ragged clothing had once been of good quality, still carried his drink. He didn't look particularly interested, in the carnage or in anything else.

Coke tossed the 2-cm weapon to Margulies. She caught it at the balance. He still had a pistol in a belt holster beneath his jacket.

He thought of taking off the armored vest, but after a moment he decided not to waste the time. "You," he said to a policeman. "Does that shock baton work? Give it to me."

"Huh?"

Vierziger stepped behind the man and slid the 50-centimeter rod from its sheath.

"Hey!" the policeman cried. He and his partner jumped in opposite directions sideways, as though the little killer's presence were a bomb going off between them. "Look, what are you—"

Vierziger switched the baton's power on. He touched the tip of the slim rod to the inside of his own left forearm. The powerful fluctuating current crossed nerve pathways and flung his arm violently out to the side.

He smiled again, turned off the power, and tossed the baton to Coke. "Fully charged," he said.

Coke slid the baton beneath his waistband. "You'll get it back," he said to the policeman. Half his face grinned. "Or somebody will pay you for it."

He looked at Moden. "Sten, you're in charge till I return," Coke said. "I don't expect potential employers to react that quickly, but if they do, set up a meeting for tomorrow."

He touched his brow with one finger in a wry salute. "See you soon," he said and started for the door.

Margulies fell into step with him. "I'm coming," she said.

Johann Vierziger shook his head. "Three can be a crowd, Mary," he said in his cultured, mocking voice. "Matthew will probably be all right . . . and besides, as he says, it's a personal matter."

"Three?" said Niko Daun. Margulies nodded, turned, and leaned the extra shoulder weapon against the wall beside the door.

Barbour looked up from his console. "I'll be tracking," he said. If there had been any more emotion in the statement, it would have been a challenge.

Coke laughed out loud. The whole team thought he was behaving like an idiot—but he'd earned the right a few minutes before to do that. The whole team, himself included.

"See you soon," he repeated, and he stepped out into night fetid with death.

Scores, perhaps as many as two hundred, L'Escorial gunmen clustered around the windrow of bodies in front of their compound. An armored truck—not the one that had appeared before, but a similar design—illuminated the scene with its quartet of bumper-mounted headlights. One man sat cross-legged on the top of the wall, holding a liquid-fueled lamp, and other gunmen waved a variety of electrical hand-lights.

There wasn't much effort spent on caring for the wounded, assuming some of the victims were still alive. For the most part the L'Escorials stared, sometimes calling in wonderment. The sight appeared to touch them no more than a particularly vivid traffic accident would have done.

Coke expected the L'Escorials to react to him, perhaps to try to stop him. None of them seemed to notice that he'd left Hathaway House. The pool of light over the bodies acted as a curtain shrouding everything beyond the direct illumination.

A crowd of spectators aggregated quickly now that civilians realized the syndicate gunmen would pay them little attention. Coke noticed that a number of the onlookers covered blue garb with cloaks of neutral gray: Astras who wanted to see what was going on without themselves becoming causes of war.

Coke walked quickly up the street to where Pilar Ortega had abandoned the port operations van. Three filthy locals were in the vehicle now. One of them was trying to shoot something into his thigh with a homemade hypodermic. The injector's barrel was a hundred-centimeter length of hose.

The staircase to the flophouse Pilar entered was helical and of engineering-grade plastic extrusion. It had been salvaged from a starship. Despite hard use and lack of maintenance, the structure itself was solid and safe.

The stair's only attachment to the building was looped wire between it and external tubing—water pipes, electrical conduits, and a downspout from the gutter. The wire was of no particular type or strength. Baling wire alternated with insulated power cable and what looked like glass-core data transmission line.

The helix wobbled at Coke's every step and from any breeze or tremor. He didn't suppose it was going to collapse under him—and he could probably ride it down if it did break away; the staircase itself was plenty sturdy enough.

But it put the butterflies back in the pit of Coke's stomach.

The bum who'd been sprawled on the stairs when Pilar climbed them had vanished. Another man now lay halfway up, weeping uncontrollably and holding an almost-full bottle of clear fluid.

Coke entered clean locked beds, the building's fifth level. The salvaged staircase rose another two meters, but there was no doorway opening onto it from the level above.

The end of a counter protected by a hundred-millimeter mesh of barbed wire narrowed the doorway to half its designed width. A bar with a barbed wire apron closed the other half to prevent anyone from bursting into or out of the flophouse, though Coke wasn't sure why either should have been a problem.

No one was behind the counter; the gate into the flophouse proper stood open. The sign on the back wall read:

SPACE 5

BUNK 10

SOLO BUNK 25

LOCK 25

A board from which hung a dozen cheap keyed padlocks indicated the protection you got for the extra 25 pesos. Sten Moden could probably have twisted the barrels off their hasps . . . but men as fit and strong as Sten Moden didn't spend the night in a flop like this.

Coke raised the bar carefully and walked into the establishment. He'd had full immunization treatments before he left Nieuw Friesland, but there was no point in testing Frisian medical science against the filth that lurked on those rusty barbs.

The flophouse filled the entire level, an area of about ten meters by twenty. It was lighted by glow-strips, scraped and speckled but still able to provide a reasonable amount of yellow-green illumination. The good lighting was probably a safety feature—for the building's owners as much as for the staff and clientele.

A narrow aisle separated two banks of cubicles. Each contained a filthy mattress. Instead of solid panels, the cubicles had walls of coarse barbed wire netting.

The remainder of the flophouse was bare floor on which the lower grade of derelict sprawled and shivered and moaned. Twenty-odd were present tonight; varied in age and sex, but uniform in their utter degradation.

Something was going on toward the back of the big room. Men clustered around one of the cages, shouting and laughing in cracked voices.

Coke's face became still. He slid the shock rod from his waistband with his left hand and strode quietly down the aisle.

About half the cubicles he passed were occupied. Some of the men—few were women—in them were lost in their own worlds. Empty stim cones or cruder injectors lay on the mattresses with them.

One man was bent in a tetanic arch. His eyes bulged and his face was purple. Coke was pretty sure the fellow was dead, broken in convulsions by the wrong dose of gage tailings, but the fact impressed him as little as it did the flop's ordinary denizens.

Other caged occupants called or even tried to grab Coke as he strode by. None of them was coordinated enough to actually touch the Frisian. They didn't necessarily see him. The drugs and drug impurities with which they'd injected themselves were capable of turning any movement into a wild hallucination.

Pilar Ortega was in an end stall. She stood erect with her arms clamping her over-wrap to her, as if by squeezing hard enough she could make herself vanish. Her eyes were wide open, but she didn't see Coke coming down the aisle toward her.

Seven or eight men gripped the mesh of the cubicle. One of them was the clerk who should have been behind the counter. They had all dropped their pants. They waved their penises at the woman as they jeered.

The clerk was a fat man, completely hairless. He wore a sleeveless black pullover; his overalls pooled around his ankles. As Coke approached, unnoticed in the drug-fueled hilarity, the clerk reached down into his trousers and came up with a key.

"Lookie what I got, Miz Fancypants!" he cried in a voice pitched higher than the size of his gross body suggested. "You think you rented the only key to your lock, did you?"

"Yeah, I wanna see them pants!" the man beside him cried. "I'll bite them—"

Coke whipped his shock rod across the bare buttocks of the four men directly before him.

The men screamed as they leaped convulsively into the wire. The cubicle swayed, but its steel-tube frame was strong enough to withstand the impacts. The men at either end of the cage, untouched by Coke's quick sweep, looked around in surprise, all but one fellow crooning and drooling in his own private dream-world.

The clerk turned. He bled from a score of fresh punctures and gashes scattered from forehead to mid-thigh. "You—" he shouted.

Coke flicked the clerk with the baton, this time on the lower belly just above his genitals. Flailing limbs hurled the clerk against Pilar's cage a second time. The structure's resilience threw him facedown on the floor. Coke stepped aside to let him fall.

A derelict raised the jagged top of a bottle. Coke held his right arm crooked to the side. His hand hovered over the butt of his holstered pistol. To draw, he would shift his hips left while his hand swept aside the tail of his jacket. He wasn't Johann Vierziger, but it was a maneuver he'd made many times before . . . .

"Try me," he offered in a trembling voice.

The derelict dropped the bottle. He backed into the wall and pushed himself flat against it.

"All of you," Coke said. "Out ahead of me." He eased into an empty cubicle, permitting the men to pass without touching him. "Pilar, open your door and come out. It's all right now."

The clerk was whimpering. He paused on hands and knees to draw up his overalls.

"Did I tell you to do that?" Coke screamed. He lashed the clerk's buttocks again, reaching from the cage to take a full swing with the shock baton. The whack! and blue spark flashed terror across the derelicts' countenances.

"Go on! Move!"

The group shuffled and stumbled out, fettered as Coke intended by their dragging trousers; all but the wide-eyed fellow mumbling in his reverie about Maureen. Coke let him be.

Pilar came out of the cubicle. Her face was as still as that of a woman in shock, but her eyes moved febrily.

"It's all right," Coke repeated. He touched Pilar's shoulder to guide her down the aisle. "Ahead of me," he said.

He walked in lock-step behind the woman, reaching past her with the shock baton. Someone groped from a cage despite the warning. The baton's charge snapped him like the popper on a bullwhip into his cubicle's walls.

The clerk and the gang behind him had shuffled to the counter at the front of the room. "Stop!" Coke ordered.

The men cringed as they obeyed. The features of most of them would have looked leprous even under better lighting than that of the glow-strips.

"Now," Coke said. "Return the lady's money." In a gentler voice he added, "You paid fifty pesos?"

"Please God the money doesn't matter!" Pilar said, clutching the crucifix beneath her cape.

"That's not the point," Coke said. "You bastards! Make it a hundred pesos. Now!"

"But I can't," the clerk wheezed. His tears diluted the line of blood trickling down his cheek from the gouge in his forehead. "I can't get into the cashbox, only Master Delzine can open it!"

The box was a massive canister—too massive for a support structure as flimsy as the upper floors of this building—strapped beneath the counter. The inlet was a doubly-kinked tube with one-way gates, proof against any but the most sophisticated methods of drawing coins back along it. The clerk could hold out the clientele's fees, if he wanted to risk the owner's spot checks; but he couldn't retrieve money once dropped into the box.

"All right," Coke said. "Make it up yourselves. A hundred pesos."

"The money doesn't—" Pilar repeated.

"Shut up!" Coke snarled. "They're paying for what they did. Or else they'll do it again!"

The men squatted to rummage in their fallen trousers. Coke drew a figure-8 with his shock baton, touching the tip to cage supports on both sides of the motion. The sparks snapped loudly in the nervous silence.

Two of the men took off their shoes. The clerk, who'd found only ten pesos thus far, came up with an additional 50-peso coin.

The money lay in a ragged pile between Pilar and the men. Coke couldn't tell exactly how much there was; and anyway, the amount didn't really matter, Pilar was right there, though the principle mattered.

"All right," Coke ordered. "Head down to the street, all of you. Get going!"

He wasn't going to leave any of this lot ten meters above him. Maybe none of them could throw straight, but all they needed to do was get lucky with one brick or bottle. They shambled and crab-walked out the doorway.

Pilar relaxed so completely that Coke was afraid she'd fainted. He caught her. Her body was warm and trembling.

"I'm all right," she murmured, but it was a moment before she stepped forward. She bent, scooped the money into a pocket of her cape, and edged past the counter.

The men were partway down the staircase. The clerk had hiked up his overalls. When he saw Coke appear at the doorway above him, he dropped the garment again and hopped downward, holding the railing with both hands. The structure jounced violently. Several of the derelicts lost their footing. Half sliding, half stumbling, they made their way to the street.

Five steps up, Coke shut off the baton and slid it beneath his waistband again. When he moved, the men watching could see his holster, not that any of them had doubted it.

"I didn't bring you here to shoot you," Coke said in harsh, ringing tones. "But if I can see any of you thirty seconds from now, I will shoot him. Go!"

The clerk and derelicts stumbled into the traffic, pedestrians, and jitneys, that had resumed when the syndicate cordons terminated at the mine blast. Coke took a deep breath. His knees wobbled. He held the rail firmly in his left hand as he followed Pilar down the remaining steps.

"You wouldn't really shoot them, would you?" she asked.

"They're gone," Coke said, avoiding the question. "It doesn't matter now."

He massaged his left forearm with the fingers of his right hand. He'd been gripping the shock baton hard, harder than he'd realized until just now when he suddenly felt the ache.

"Look," he said, "is your husband at home? I can take you there. Or we can get you a room in the Hathaway House; it seems to be a nice place. Like you said, a decent place."

Pilar shook her head. "I'll go home." she said. "I'll be all right, now."

She looked toward her van. She noticed the heads of bums silhouetted against the unglazed windows. Coke offered his left arm to her right hand.

"No problem," he said, whisking his tongue across the syllables like a blade over a whetstone. He walked beside Pilar toward the vehicle, flexing his left hand to be sure that it would obey his needs.

"Terry won't be home," the woman said stiffly. Her fingers lay in the crook of his elbow, light contact but warm nonetheless. "He's found quite a number of friends here since he learned to shake the money tree."

"He's smuggling, you mean?" Coke said. His tone counterfeited the sort of polite interest that he thought was appropriate to the statement. Below the surface, his mind considered alternatives with the icy logic of a bridge player assessing his hand.

Pilar stopped. A sailor walking behind them cursed as she blocked his path. Coke drew his pistol and pointed it without a word. The sailor started back and jogged across the street.

Coke reholstered the weapon. "Sorry," he murmured to Pilar.

"You work for the Confederacy?" she said tightly. She stood as though her feet had grown through the cracked pavement. "You're investigating port duties?"

"Not us," Coke said easily. "From what I've heard thus far, we're out of business if the Marvelan Confederacy learns that we're here."

By taking Pilar's hand in his, he made her meet his eyes. In a more sober tone than before he added, "We're with the Frisian Defense Forces."

"Oh," the woman said. The datum fell into place. "Oh!"

"We're not maybe the best thing that could happen to Cantilucca," Coke said, still looking directly at her though her eyes had lifted away. "But we're better than what I've seen here so far."

Pilar gave him a bitter smile. "Sometimes I think the best thing that could happen to Potosi, at least, would be a fusion bomb," she said.

Coke squeezed her hand. He stepped to the van, reached in through the window, and dragged one of the occupants out by the throat. The local squawked after Coke flung him on the pavement. He didn't say anything before he hit the ground, because the Frisian's fingers gripped too tightly to pass the sound.

The remaining two bums bleated. They slid to the other side of the open compartment. Instead of reaching for them, Coke pointed his pistol at the left member of the pair.

"You have five seconds," Coke said. "One. Two."

The local jumped up and stuck his head and torso out of the far window. Coke shifted his weapon's centimeter bore toward the other derelict. "Three. Four."

The local tried unsuccessfully to rise. His limbs were spastic with fear. He seemed afraid to turn and face the opening.

Coke pointed the gun muzzle sideways and said, "Go on, you're all right, I'll give you the time."

The local thumped out into the street and began crawling after his fellow. He was moaning about his bottle, but the only bottle the trio had left in the van was empty.

Pilar stood close beside Coke. "You're very direct," she said in a voice too neutral to be disinterested.

"Yeah," Coke said. He looked at her again. "What you see is what you get."

Pilar smiled wistfully. "No," she said, "I'm afraid that what I get is something else again. Perhaps I should have seen it, but I was younger then."

She opened the door of the van. The ignition card clinked against the handle. "Thank you very much, Master Coke. I—I appreciate what you've done. I'd invite you home for a drink, but people might get the wrong impression."

Her face hardened. "And it would be the wrong impression."

Coke bowed formally. He wore a half smile.

Pilar suddenly leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. Then she was in the van, shutting the door needlessly hard.

Coke watched her drive away. He was smiling more broadly now. Someone watching him might have noticed the similarity of the expression to that which Johann Vierziger wore after killing.

The remaining five members of the survey team waited for a moment after Major Matthew Coke walked out of Hathaway House with a pistol and a commandeered shock baton. Georg Hathaway started to close the heavy front door. Margulies touched the innkeeper's arm to stop him.

Hathaway glanced around. The four Frisians besides Barbour stood in a concave arc, facing out the doorway so that among them they watched a hundred meters of the streetscape. All of them held weapons.

"Oh," Hathaway said. "Oh. I wasn't thinking of that."

Margulies nodded without replying, and without ever taking her eyes off the amazed clot of L'Escorials across the street. Her left hand returned to rest lightly on the foregrip of her sub-machine gun.

"There," Vierziger said with a slight relaxation of the drumhead tautness beneath his insouciant exterior. "He's clear of anything we can do—unless we want to follow him."

"Which we do not," Moden said. He set down the missile launcher with care. The weapon he carried comfortably was so heavy that if it dropped, the shock would seriously damage it.

"There's no organization," Barbour offered. He had directional audio from the spectators across the street, as well as a holographic view sharper than that of the others' naked eyes. "People run inside saying they're going to report to Raul or to the Old Man, but they don't come back with any orders."

"Raul Luria is head of L'Escorial," said Georg Hathaway. "With his son Ramon, and Ramon's son Pepe."

"Pepe is a weasel," Evie said in clipped tones. She looked at the Frisians and added, "We have rooms prepared for you. You'll share baths; I hope that's all right. But surely you'd like something to eat or drink?"

It was hard to read her expression. The sudden destruction of a dozen gunmen had opened a window on the woman's mind, but its interior was still thick with the dust of long depression.

"I wouldn't mind something to drink," Niko Daun said clearly. "You say you've got local cacao?"

"And I think I'll have a beer or two," Sten Moden added, quirking the younger man a smile. "It's been a long day. Not that it's over yet."

"Here, I'll serve you gentlemen," Georg said. "And lady of course. Evie, I wish you wouldn't say things like that, you know, in public. Though Pepe's off Cantilucca now, I believe."

The local patrons had returned to the alcove in which they'd been drinking. Vierziger walked to the table of the third man, the civilian, and said, "Good day, sir. My name is Johann Vierziger, and I'm a sergeant with the Frisian Defense Forces. May I ask who you are?"

The fellow looked up. His face was handsome in a hollow-cheeked fashion, but there was a gray glaze over him that was more an aura than skin tone.

"My name's Larrinaga," he said. He was younger than he'd looked; thirty years standard at the most. "And I'm nothing, that's who I am."

"Pedro's had a difficult time this past year," Georg said; half-confiding, half in an attempt to forestall the wrath of the little stranger who made him very uncomfortable to watch. "His wife died. She was an artist in psychic ambiances, a very fine one, known all across the galaxy."

"Really?" said Niko Daun. "I've worked in PAs myself. Who was she? The wife."

His tone wasn't precisely dismissive, but there was a challenge in it. Daun didn't regard himself as a top PA artist, but he didn't expect to find a better one on this wretched planet.

Hathaway drew drinks. Larrinaga looked up and said, "My wife was Suzette. That was her working name. She was a saint. And there'll never be an artist like her. Never in all time!"

"Suzette was from here?" Daun blurted. "Blood and martyrs!"

Margulies raised an eyebrow in the direction of the sensor tech.

Daun turned his palms up. "She's—" he said. "Well there's taste. But the best PA artist in the galaxy, yeah, you can make a case for it. I'm amazed . . . . Well, I didn't think she'd have come from a place so . . ."

He looked at Larrinaga, who was staring morosely into his beer mug. "Suzette's work is so tranquil, you see," Daun said. "It's not what I'd expect coming from Cantilucca. From Potosi, anyhow."

Georg handed out beverages in rough-glazed ceramic mugs of local manufacture. The beer, for all his praises of it, had an oily undertaste that Moden found unpleasant. He'd drunk worse in the field, wine that had rotted rather than fermenting properly . . . and there were worse things in life than bad booze.

Daun sipped his mug of frothy, bitter, cacao drink with approval. His lips pursed as he considered Larrinaga and the situation. A Tech 4's pay didn't run to art the like of Suzette's, but there was always the chance . . .

"I wonder," he said, "if there's any of your wife's work still on Cantilucca? Some minor pieces, perhaps, that—"

The local man clutched his empty mug with both hands. He began to cry. He made a convulsive gesture that would have swept the mug against the wall to shatter.

Vierziger, who was standing arm's length away and didn't seem to be watching, caught the mug in the air. He set it on the serving counter.

Larrinaga lurched up from his seat. "I'm going to go piss," he said. He angrily wiped his eyes with his forearm. "That's fair, isn't it? I've pissed my life away!"

"Pedro?" Hathaway said. "Can I show them the draft? It's not the same, but they'll get the idea."

"Do what you please," Larrinaga called as he left the alcove.

"He leaves it here," the innkeeper explained as he opened a cabinet beneath the serving counter. "He doesn't have a place of his own any more."

Margulies returned to the saloon alcove. She'd taken a beer to Barbour at his console. "Trouble with the gangs?" she guessed aloud. "They robbed him?"

"Well, not quite that," Georg said. "You see, when Suzette died, Pedro sold his house to the factor of Trans-Star Trading on Cantilucca. His name's Suterbilt."

"Suterbilt is a criminal," Evie said from the lobby. She sat in an upholstered chair, knitting as her eyes stared into time. "He's no better than the thugs he bankrolls."

"Now, Evie, you know we shouldn't say things like that," Georg said. "But Suterbilt has, well, a financial stake in L'Escorial. That's personal, not TST."

The innkeeper was setting up a table-model hologram projector. Niko moved to help him. The unit had a lot of flash and glitter, but it looked clumsy compared to the trim projectors in use on Nieuw Friesland.

"So a shotgun sale?" Margulies pressed. The story would probably come out, from Mistress Hathaway if not from her husband, but Margulies didn't want to wait.

"Not that either," Georg said. He obviously felt uncomfortable speaking about the gunmen and their masters, though the chance to gossip with these folk had attraction as well.

"Not really, at least," he continued. "Pedro had been taking a lot of gage, mostly gage, because he'd loved Suzette so much. He wouldn't have sold at all if he hadn't been, well, if he'd been in better condition. Because Suzette's greatest masterpiece is a part of the home where they'd lived, you see."

"And then he lost the money," Evie added harshly. "He was drugged silly, and he gambled, and he lost every peso of the price."

"The price had been a good one, though," her husband said quickly. "Master Suterbilt didn't cheat him, not really, since the art can't be moved and its value's only what it's worth on Cantilucca."

"Suterbilt didn't cheat him in the notary's office, you mean," Evie said. "He left that job for his friends at the roulette table."

Her fingers clicked the needles with mechanical precision. Moden thought of the old women watching the guillotine; and realized for the first time how much, and how rightly, they had hated the aristocrats being beheaded.

"Why can't the PA be moved?" Daun asked in surprise.

"What?" said Georg. "Because it's built into the fabric of the room, sir. You'd destroy the whole thing to try to move it."

The technician frowned. He didn't argue, but it was obvious that he couldn't understand the problem.

"There," said Hathaway. "Watch this. It's the holographic draft Suzette did before she created the ambiance itself."

He dimmed the alcove lights. The policemen were watching from their table. Larrinaga reappeared from the rest room. He stood in the archway instead of reentering the saloon.

A psychic ambiance was just that, a recorded vision—a waking dream—capable of being transferred to recipients in the focal area. It couldn't be copied, because it depended on inputs too subtle to survive the duplication process. Though the PA was immaterial, the artist normally started with a visual or auditory sketch, just as medieval fresco artists drew cartoons on the wall before applying a coat of fresh plaster on which to fix the paint.

Suzette worked visually. The holographic sketch was of a verdant paradise, a mythic place in which fountains played and the geologic features seemed themselves alive though immobile.

No animals could be glimpsed, though the movement of plants hinted their presence. Above all, the shifting holographic image was suffused by light and a warmth for which the objects described could not themselves account.

The sketch began to repeat itself. The second time through, individual facets merged into a whole greater and quite different from its parts.

Daun frowned. He could almost grasp the unity to which the intersections of light beams were building in this holographic shorthand.

"It's her, you know," Larrinaga said abruptly. "It's Suzette. She did a self-portrait, she built it into our house so that I'd never have had to be without her. And I threw it away!"

He began to weep openly. Georg Hathaway shut off the chip projector; Margulies brought the lights back up. Though Hathaway House was a fortress, the bright internal illumination prevented the weight of the protective walls from crushing the souls of those within it.

"There, there, Pedro," Georg said awkwardly. "Maybe I shouldn't have done that. I know it bothers you."

"Everything bothers him," Evie said, knitting with tiny clicks unaffected by her words. "It's Pedro's life now, being bothered."

"It's still possible to see the PA, isn't it?" Niko asked, looking from Georg to Larrinaga and quickly away again.

Hathaway pursed his lips. He started to say something, then glanced toward the archway.

"Can I have another beer, Georg?" Larrinaga asked. "It'll have to be on credit, of course."

"Why of course, Pedro," Hathaway said enthusiastically. "You're not a patron here, you're our friend."

He gestured Larrinaga toward the serving counter instead of drawing the mug himself. A transaction had taken place, and everyone within earshot knew it.

As Larrinaga stepped past him, head bowed, Hathaway said, "The ambiance can only be viewed with Master Suterbilt's permission, and that's hard to come by. He's aware of its value, you see. He keeps—well, there are six L'Escorial, ah, security personnel in the house at all times. Suterbilt doesn't live there, but he visits frequently."

"The last time I went there and asked to see Suzette," Larrinaga said with his back to the others in the saloon, "they beat me unconscious and left me in the street."

He drank in order to create a pause for effect. "I think," he resumed, "I'll go back there tonight."

"Yes, I suspect you will do that," Johann Vierziger said in a voice like the purr of a well-fed leopard. He set down the mug of cacao from which he'd been sipping with evident approval. "It's the sort of thing a worthless bastard would do, after all."

The little man's enunciation was so precise that it was a moment before the words themselves registered on the others. Daun stifled a snort of laughter.

Margulies raised an eyebrow; Sten Moden pointedly failed to react.

"Sure I am," Larrinaga said loudly "You bet, that's just what I am."

"Oh, you mustn't say that, sir!" Georg Hathaway blurted. "Pedro isn't that at all. You don't know what he's like inside!"

"Nor do you, Master Hathaway," Vierziger said with sneering intonation. "All we know is the side he shows the world. That side is a sniveling, self-pitying bastard."

The words wouldn't have cut as deep if there'd been emotion behind them instead of cold disdain. Larrinaga winced as though he'd been stroked with a barbed whip. The mug trembled. He set it down and walked to the outer door.

Barbour looked at the local man, calculating the door's opening against the movements of figures in his holographic display. There was no need to keep the armored door closed; but there might have been, and Barbour would have said so if there were.

The door closed behind Larrinaga. "Oh, I wish you hadn't said that, good sir," Hathaway murmured miserably, though he didn't look directly at Vierziger as he spoke.

"Why, Georg?" Evie Hathaway demanded. "Does the truth bother you so much? Has saying, 'Oh, Pedro just needs a little time to get straightened out,' made things better? For anybody?"

"Well, he blames himself for having sold the house," Georg said. "And it was Pedro's fault, I know, partying with Master Suterbilt who'd been trying for years to buy the ambiance and Suzette wouldn't hear of selling to him. But it's a shame that one mistake should ruin his life."

"The major's coming back," Barbour called from the foyer. He looked toward the policemen and grinned. It was the first smile any of his teammates had seen on his face. "He's returning your shock baton, gentlemen."

"One mistake can ruin more than a man's life, Master Hathaway," Vierziger said to the innkeeper. "It can ruin all eternity."

He smiled tightly terribly. "Of course, I've made many more mistakes than one."

Coke entered the lobby. He closed the door behind him, then rested his back against the cool metal surface.

"Any excitement, sir?" Margulies asked.

"Matthew, please, Mary," Coke said with his eyes closed. "And no, nothing to speak of. The usual run of port-city foolishness, nothing serious."

"What's the next order of business, Matthew?" Moden asked. "We continue to wait?"

"I could use one of those beers," Coke said, snapping alert again. He strode into the saloon alcove. From there he continued, "Yeah, we wait. I figure it'll be days before either side makes an approach. Two gangs may make this a tough place, but it sure isn't an organized one."

"Is organized better, Master Soldier?" Evie Hathaway demanded from her chair.

"Evie, please," said Georg.

"Yes, ma'am," Coke said, taking the mug the innkeeper had drawn him. "It is. Highly developed parasites see to it that the host body stays healthy. Less developed ones, roundworms and the like, are often fatal. Cantilucca has a bad case of roundworms, I'm afraid."

"And your prescription?" the woman said. She'd stopped knitting so that she could turn to look directly at the Frisian leader.

Coke drank, then shrugged. "Arsenic or the equivalent, Mistress Hathaway," he said. "The trick is to titrate the dose, of course, so that you only get the worms."

"In the short term, Matthew," Mary Margulies said, "would you have any objection to me doing a little sight-seeing in the countryside? Tomorrow, maybe?"

Coke shook his head. "No, we need to learn as much about the place as we can," he said. "Potosi may be the head of the planet, but it's not the whole place. Ah—I'd rather you didn't go any distance alone."

"I'll go along, sir," Robert Barbour said. "That is, if you'll permit me. I'll have the AI in this console dialed in to take care of ordinary business in an hour or two, now that you're back."

"No, that's fine," Coke said. "Just remember, we're in a fluid situation. Things might happen pretty fast. And I'm Matthew."

"My old driver came back here when he got out of service," Margulies explained. "He came from a place called Silva Blanca. It's supposed to be fifteen klicks away."

"Good," said Coke. He handed his mug to Hathaway for a refill. "It'll be good to get a professional's viewpoint about the situation here."

"I'm not sure there's enough arsenic, Master Soldier," Evie Hathaway said. She had resumed knitting. "Certainly there can't be too much."

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