The outer fence surrounding L'Escorial's gage warehouse was woven wire, five meters high and topped with a Y of razor ribbon. The forest had grown to and entwined with the wire despite evidence of desultory attempts to burn it back. The diamond teeth of Coke's powered cutting bar opened a man-sized hole with one sweep of his arm.
The vegetation in the four meters between the fence-lines was cut to knee-height scrub. There was a single row of buried toe-poppers, located so that the mower could straddle them. Daun marked a safe pathway with white tape.
The sensor-controlled directional mines placed every ten meters along the inner fence were even less of a danger. Daun turned them all off with a deactivation signal, just as the watchmen would have done while mowing or carrying out other maintenance operations.
"Who do these bozos think they're dealing with?" the sensor tech muttered disdainfully to Coke.
"Bozos like the Astras behind us," Coke replied.
Well behind them. Coke had decided he and Daun would breach the defenses alone. Vierziger wasn't happy to be a kilometer back in the forest along the road, but that was the only way Coke could be sure the Astras would stay where they belonged.
The last thing Coke wanted was a line of trucks to come driving up while he and Niko were in the middle of the wire. He'd seen relief in the sensor tech's eyes when they went over the plan the first time. Daun had more reason than most to doubt the competence of indig forces.
"Wait here, sir," Daun said crisply.
The sensor tech darted across the cleared area to the nearest directional mine, a lump against the inner fence. After a moment's manipulation there, he moved ten meters down the line to another lump. He tossed something to the ground.
"All right, sir," Daun said, this time using helmet intercom. "I've pulled the fuzes. I didn't want somebody turning them on again at a bad time. It can happen by accident, even, lightning or a plasma discharge."
"No, we wouldn't want that," Coke agreed under his breath.
He was smiling. He remembered he'd had doubts about how the lad would perform after the experience which got him transferred to a survey team. Just fine, so long as Daun could be confident of his back-up . . . and for that, so far, so good.
The warehouse was a huge hangar constructed primarily of structural plastic, but strengthened at the corners by pillars of reinforced concrete. A bank of lights on the roof was intended to flood the interval between the fence-lines. Many of the bulbs had failed without being replaced.
It didn't really matter. The guards didn't patrol the exterior, and there were no windows in the building proper from which to observe their surroundings.
The gage syndicates had achieved parity of incompetence. That was fine until somebody arrived who knew his ass from a hole in the ground.
Daun set a small transducer close to the nearest of the inner fence-poles. He stepped swiftly toward the next support, holding a similar transducer and unreeling the thin cable which tied it to the box he'd set on the ground.
"Don't touch the fence yet, sir," the tech ordered; needlessly, because they'd gone over the plan in the lobby of Hathaway House, and Matthew Coke knew better than to jump the gun in an uncleared detector field anyway.
"Right," Coke murmured. He preferred a subordinate who might irritate him with unnecessary warnings to one who let him walk into disaster because, I thought you knew!
Daun turned a switch on the control box. "There we go!" he said. "All right, sir. It'll think the circuit's complete even if you blow everything down between these two posts."
"No need for that," Coke said. He thumbed the cutting bar live and swept it up and down with his left hand in a nearly perfect catenary arc through the fencing. The blade whined and sparkled happily.
If L'Escorial's builders had used beryllium monocrystal or some other refractory material for their defenses instead of steel wire, the Frisians' task would have been more difficult. But if a frog didn't jump, it wouldn't hit its ass on the ceiling . . .
Coke crouched in the opening as Daun sprinted for the building forty meters away. If Coke had to supply covering fire—he carried a sub-machine gun, with holstered pistol and a 2-cm weapon slung just in case—he didn't want to be so close to the warehouse that he couldn't cover both ends of the building with his peripheral vision.
Daun wrenched up a lid on the ground outside the building. It wasn't locked shut. The tech stretched on the concrete pad, holding a light down in the cavity with one hand and reaching in with the other. Bob Barbour claimed this fusion bottle was the sole power source for the warehouse.
Fusion bottles didn't fail, and the output of one was more than sufficient to power the building's lights, sensors, and motor-driven trackways. Coke still found it hard to believe that there wasn't at least a battery-operated emergency radio, despite Barbour's assurances. If Bob was wrong, well, he was also ready to jam the transmission within a micro-second.
Niko Daun ran back, bent halfway over and flushing with excitement. "Okay, sir!" he said quickly. "Okay, whenever you want it."
Coke keyed his helmet to Channel One. "Go," he said. "Out."
"Roger," said Johann Vierziger's voice, a whisper like tendons rustling on dry bones. "Out."
Coke checked all his weapons. "Niko," he said, "why don't you wait here. I'm going to wait by the door in case they open it when they hear the trucks."
"No sir," said the sensor tech. "I'm part of this team." He closed the case holding his equipment and unslung his sub-machine gun.
"Glad to have you along," Coke said with a quirked smile. He started around to the front of the warehouse, walking just inside the inner fenceline.
It wasn't really true. Daun's combat skills were coming along, but firefights wouldn't ever be the boy's strong suit. On the other hand, he was probably better than most of the guards they'd be facing in a moment. And anyway, Coke wasn't about to tell the kid who'd performed splendidly that he'd be a fifth wheel in what came next.
Coke expected the first of the vehicles coming up the road to be a flatbed truck configured as a ram with a sloped steel bow and extra weight in back to add momentum. Instead he heard the hum of a jitney, one of those Sten Moden's mechanic friend had supplied to the Frisians.
Coke frowned, but then he thought about it for a moment. Vierziger had kept the Astras on their leash. If the gunman wanted to arrive before the locals now, there was no real reason he shouldn't.
Instead of coming to the first of the two gates on the approach road, the jitney bounced off the pavement and whined to the hole Coke had cut in the outer fence. Though the Astra convoy was running without lights, the twenty big flatbeds were audible by now.
Vierziger left the jitney at the gap in the fence. He jogged the rest of the way to Coke and Daun. He wore two bandoliers and a garrison belt hung with various munitions, but none of the equipment jingled or clattered as he moved.
"We were going to let the Astras take it from here," Coke commented mildly.
"No, Matthew," Vierziger said. "We were going to do it right."
"We still have to wait for the ram," Coke said.
"I can open the warehouse doors if you'd like, sir," Niko Daun said. "So long as the power's still on, like it is now."
Coke blinked. "You can?" he said.
Johann Vierziger smiled at him. The harsh illumination from the roof floodlights made the little man look like a gnome, an incredibly vicious gnome.
"Sure," Daun said.
He reslung his sub-machine gun and fumbled in the small tool pouch on his belt as he walked to the latch plate beside the sliding doors. The kit Daun had left back at the fence contained the special equipment he needed for the outer defenses, but he wore what he considered basic tools whenever he had his trousers on.
"I hope he remembered to put the curst gun on safe," Coke grumbled.
"He did, Matthew," Johann Vierziger said. He faced the door, but his eyes were far away. He flexed his empty hands twice, then readied his sub-machine gun. "He's a very careful lad. A credit to you as his commander."
"I'm ready," the tech said. He'd pressed a flat disk held by a magnet or suction cup to the latch plate. A coil of thin flex ran from the disk to the squeezer in Daun's hand.
"Just before the truck rams the first gate," Vierziger said softly. "Then cut the power when the door's half a meter open."
Vierziger hadn't said anything during the planning session when Coke proposed a battering ram to enter the warehouse after they'd shut off the building's power supply. If the sergeant had made this suggestion, Coke would have vetoed it as needlessly dangerous to members of the survey team. Now, with adrenaline surging through his blood, Coke couldn't imagine another way to have done it.
But Vierziger had known that all along.
The trucks were in sight, snorting and rumbling up the approach road. The ram plate on the lead vehicle was a V-shaped blade intended for a ground-clearing bulldozer.
"Don't the guards hear them coming?" Niko asked in a combination of wonder and nervousness. He had nothing to do but wait until Coke gave him the order.
"They're not guards," Coke murmured. He switched his visor to thermal imaging, then through light amplification and straight visual mode back to thermal again. Just to be sure. "They're employees who don't really believe there's need to guard anything. Drunken, stoned employees."
"Are we really going to put all this gage in the Astras' hands, Matthew?" Vierziger whispered.
The bastard had known all along!
"No," said Matthew Coke. "We're going to burn it here."
Daun squeezed, then dropped his clacker and grabbed the separate control clipped to his breast pocket. The double doors rumbled back. The lead truck slammed into the gate with sparks and a tortured squeal—
The lights on the warehouse roof dimmed and vanished, the doors froze the width of a man's shoulders apart—
And cyan hell broke loose as Johann dived into the building behind his blazing weapon.
Expanding echoes of Vierziger's bolts glowed in Coke's thermal optics. A man writhed on the floor, his face gone. Coke leaped the body, firing twice between his legs while he was in the air.
The warehouse offices were in three partitioned cubicles to the left of the doors. The remainder of the building's volume was a single room, ten meters high and stacked with drums of gage on pallets.
The car of the overhead rail and hoist system jogged forward on the inertia of the laden pallet slung beneath it. Because the building's power was off, circuitry hadn't shorted when Vierziger hit the control cage with a long burst. The operator lay slumped in his saddle, his clothing afire.
There was motion from the middle cubicle. A man stepped out. He lurched backward, shot simultaneously by Coke and Vierziger.
Coke dropped his sub-machine gun and aimed the 2-cm shoulder weapon instead. Vierziger ran down the center aisle. He would take any L'Escorials at the back of the building before they realized what was happening in front.
Coke fired twice through the open doorway of the center office, then twice into the door to its left. The bolts of sun-hot copper ions ignited the desk and furnishings of the first, and blew the extruded plastic door of the second into the cubicle's interior.
Coke loaded a fresh magazine. He was shifting his aim to the third office when a figure ran out of the burning center cubicle. He swung the heavy muzzle back as his finger took up slack on the powergun's trigger.
A woman, stark naked and screaming. She held a bandeau top in her left hand. No threat, no danger.
Coke aimed past her at the remaining office. He stroked his trigger twice to flush out anyone hiding there.
Niko Daun stepped alongside his commander. He fired at least half his sub-machine gun's magazine into the screaming woman. Gobbets of flesh and bone spewed away like wood chipped by the teeth of a router. She spun back into the flames of the office from which she'd fled.
"I got him!" Niko shouted. "I got him!"
The lead truck hit the opening hard enough to jounce the double doors nearly open. The driver managed not to stall his motor. He backed a few meters and accelerated again, cutting his wheels to slide the left door back against its stops.
Nobody else came out of the offices. A body lay in the corner away from the cubicles. As Vierziger entered the building, he'd dropped the fellow. Coke hadn't noticed him before.
Sprinklers opened above the burning offices. They were fed by standpipes in the roof, even though the pumped water system went off when the power did. Coke surveyed the ceiling, then put a bolt into the end of each standpipe where it joined the front wall of the warehouse. He fired until he'd emptied the 2-cm weapon's magazine, then reloaded again. Water gushed down the inner wall and splashed across the concrete floor. There it could do nothing to affect the flames.
"All clear in back!" Vierziger reported over Channel Three. Several quick bursts of sub-machine gun fire snarled from the rear of the warehouse. "All clear in back!" Vierziger repeated, simultaneous with another burst.
Steam and smoke billowed from the burning office cubicles. Another Astra truck drove into the warehouse. Its headlights brightened the gray mist but did little to illuminate the building's interior. The Astra gunmen didn't have night vision equipment. They shouted to one another in anger and confusion.
The gage was in double-walled 150-liter plastic drums. For shipment, the drug was dissolved in a matrix of ethyl alcohol. Because Coke knew what to look for, he could already see the fires started at the back of the warehouse where Vierziger had raked pallets with his sub-machine gun.
"I'm coming out!" Vierziger called over the unit push. "Do not shoot, I'm coming out!"
Coke grabbed the foregrip of Niko Daun's sub-machine gun and lifted the muzzle high. The sensor tech might not have heard the warning, might not have understood it—might have dropped his gun on the concrete and triggered a shot wholly by accident. Firefights weren't Daun's proper job, so it was the commander's duty to see that no accidents occurred.
Adolpho Peres swung down from the cab of the second truck. He wore body armor and a helmet that must have weighed nearly ten kilos. "Start loading the gage!" he bellowed. "We can't wait around here long!"
The gigolo waved his machine pistol. He turned his head as he spoke. Coke stepped toward him, releasing Daun.
Peres saw the motion past the edge of the helmet's cheek plate. He must have thought he was being attacked, because he tried to swing the gun onto the Frisian.
"I'm a friend!" Coke shouted as he lunged forward. Instead of directing the weapon upward as he'd done with his own trooper, he jerked the machine pistol out of Peres' hand. "We've killed them all for you!"
The office cubicles were fully involved by now, hammering the men in the front of the warehouse. The right side of the ram-equipped truck was only a few meters from the fire. The plastic body panels started to soften; bubbles appeared on the front fender.
"Who?" Peres shouted. "Coke, is that you? Manuel!"
The last call was for the gigolo's bodyguard, a man nearly as tall as Sten Moden and broad in proportion. Coke saw Manuel's vast, weapon-festooned bulk several meters away, groping in what was for him a gray fog. Vierziger's assessment of the big man was that a gun-jeep had more brain-cells and could carry even more weapons—but that choice was for Peres to worry about.
Johann Vierziger stepped up on the Astra leaders other side. "I'm here, Matthew," he said. "Now let's get out of these gentlemen's way, shall we?"
"Peres, we'll leave you to load the gage," Coke shouted in the gigolo's ear. "We'll meet you tomorrow morning to arrange contract terms!"
The warehouse had become a steam-bath because the heat boiled water off the concrete. The flow from the sprinklers had decayed to irregular dribbles, noticeable only if a drop happened to splash you from above.
"Yes, of course," Peres replied. He snatched his helmet off in frustration at its weight and the degree to which it limited his range of vision—not that he was going to be able to see much more without it. "Manuel! Sanjulio!"
The three Frisians broke for the door. Coke's finger on Daun's wrist gave the sensor tech guidance he might or might not have needed.
A third truck drove into the warehouse and collided with the second. The drivers shouted at one another, and the rest of the convoy stopped in confusion on the approach road.
Coke led his men toward the gap he'd cut in the fence. "I think we'd best stay in the woods and hump our way back," he explained. "I'm not thrilled about walking the six klicks into Potosi, but L'Escorial is going to see the flames before too long and come out with guns blazing."
"Does Peres realize that?" Niko Daun asked. The point had obviously escaped the tech himself.
"Here, wait by the jitney," Vierziger said.
"We can't drive it back through the forest," Coke objected. "It's not a skimmer. We'll just have to abandon it."
"Sten's going to pick us up in a moment," the gunman explained. He looked at the sensor tech. "Niko," he went on, "the Astras don't know the gage is burning yet. Whether they'll realize that a fire here will call the owners' attention is an open question."
An unlighted air-car slid low over the treetops. Sten Moden was at the controls. He dropped vertically to hover on fan thrust directly behind the jitney.
Coke half-climbed, half-tripped his way into the vehicle's other front seat. Vierziger and Daun got into the back.
"Is there anything else you ought to have told me?" Coke demanded in a loud, generally directed voice.
"Well, you didn't want to walk either, did you, Major?" Sten Moden said as he pulled the joystick toward him to add power. "Esteban was still doing tests on the Stellarflow, so I asked if he'd mind me putting it through its paces tonight. Does pretty well, don't you think?"
The Stellarflow was too massive to accelerate quickly, especially with a load that included the logistics officer, but it had a good deal of power. Starlit glimpses of the treetops close beneath suggested their speed was 200 kph and rising. Moden swept them in a broad arc that would approach Potosi from the north, opposite to where all the commotion was occurring.
"Look, I'm not going to argue with success," Coke said after a moment. "But the next time, don't pull this sort of thing behind my back, all right? You guys act like a team, and I'll promise not to act like a little tin god."
He realized as he spoke that something very basic had changed in the structure of this survey team; and that he was pretty sure it had changed for the better.
They were out of sight of the warehouse at this altitude, but the whole sky behind them glowed red from the swelling inferno.
Matthew Coke's bedroom had a window which opened out onto the alley beside Hathaway House. When he leaned his elbows on the ledge, he could watch the building across the street. As a result, he wasn't surprised to hear his commo helmet click, then warn in the voice of Lieutenant Barbour, "Matthew, two men are walking toward us from L'Escorial headquarters. There isn't any other exceptional behavior from that direction."
The breeze blew from the south. Even at this distance it carried with it a whiff of burned vegetation, burned plastic, and—present only if you knew it was there—burned flesh.
Coke lifted himself back from the ledge. One of the approaching visitors was garbed in an ensemble of scarlet and vermilion, a well-tailored outfit and clearly expensive. The two close hues made his plumpish figure seem to shimmer.
The other man wore a red beret, but the remainder of his clothing was khaki. The garments looked a great deal like Frisian battle dress.
"Right," Coke said as he snatched the gray cape from the hook by his bed. "Action stations, though I doubt there'll be trouble. I'm coming down."
The shooting had gone on south of town until nearly dawn. The fact that it hadn't spread to Potosi proper meant the syndicates really didn't want the lid to blow, despite all their deadly posturing. That might change when the L'Escorials realized just how badly they'd been hurt by the fire.
Margulies slammed down the stairs ahead of Coke. She slid her left hand along the balustrade against the possibility of her heel catching on a tread as she jumped the steps three at a time. Vierziger was already with Barbour in the lobby, his proper location.
Georg Hathaway stood by the door and wrung his hands. "I'm sure there won't be any trouble," he murmured. His voice sounded like that of a dying sinner claiming confidence in his salvation.
"Johann, take the upstairs today," Margulies ordered as her boots hit the tile floor.
Vierziger raised an eyebrow. He looked spruce and trim. Somehow he'd managed to scrub away all the soot and matrix residue which had settled on him during the firefight.
"This is—" he began.
"Not today, Sergeant!" Mary Margulies snapped. "We're trading today."
She flashed a near-smile of apology to her subordinate, then to Coke.
"I think I know this guy," she explained in an undertone. She pointed toward the streetscape in Barbour's display. "I think he used to drive for me."
Barbour didn't comment, but his right hand moved. Half the hologram screen became a facial close-up of the man in khaki.
"Via, that's Angel, all right," Margulies said. "Via, he looks bloody awful!"
Margulies' friend carried a sub-machine gun, but it was slung muzzle-down over his back. His cheeks were hollow and his skin looked flaky, almost mildewed.
His well-dressed companion raised his knuckles to rap on the door.
Hathaway shivered and smiled falsely. "Ramon Luria," he murmured with a nod toward the holographic display. "Raul's son, that is."
The knock was crisp and imperative—three short strokes.
"Let your guests in, Master Hathaway," Coke directed. "There won't be any trouble."
If one of L'Escorial's leaders had come personally, that was certainly true. For so long as he was here.
The door sighed open. Ramon Luria waved a hand expansively. "Hathaway!" he said. "It's been too long since I sampled your beer. And you, sir, you'd be Major Coke, I assume? The very person I've come to see."
If you watched Ramon carefully, you could tell that he was nervous. His movements had a birdlike suddenness, and there was a tic at the corner of his left eye. At a casual glance, though, the syndicate boss was utterly relaxed.
"Hello, Angel," Mary Margulies said from a corner of the lobby. She stood with the sole of her right boot against the wall behind her. "I made a trip out to Silva Blanca just to see you the other day."
"El-Tee!" the man in khaki said. "Blood and martyrs, Lieutenant! What are you doing here?"
"Same as you, Angel," Margulies said, answering a more limited question than the one Angel asked. "I'm pulling security while my boss does business."
Coke suddenly realized why Margulies leaned back against the wall. That way she had an excuse for not offering her hand or her arms to her former comrade.
Angel's skin puckered and shook because muscles were twitching randomly in response to the commands of damaged nerves. He appeared to have been pulled from his grave to come here—and from the look in his eyes, his worst problems weren't the physical ones.
"Major Coke doesn't need security, El-Tee," Angel said. "We're all friends here. I was, I was—"
His eyes darted toward Ramon. The syndicate boss pretended not to notice him, instead eyeing the lobby with an avuncular smile.
"I'd been partying a little, I mean, when you guys landed," Angel rattled out, "or I'd have been over before. I've been telling Ramori here and the Old Man, if the FDF wants in, hire them. There's no better!"
"Angel's our training officer," Ramon said, deigning to glance at his companion. "And he assists my son Pepe, our . . . shall we say 'war chief'?"
He laughed, a throaty sound and as threatening as jovial. "Angel Tijuca," he added. "Since I gather that not all of you are familiar with our boy?"
"Rather than stand in a doorway," Coke said, "why don't we adjourn to the bar."
He nodded. "I'll buy the first round."
Ramon waved the idea aside. He wore rings on all four fingers and his thumb. The bands were set with rubies, diamonds, and what Coke judged was a large amethyst.
"I'm just the messenger, really," Ramon said. "I came to invite you back to our house to discuss future affairs with my father, Raul. I aid him, and Pepe even more so when he's home. But the Old Man still makes the final decisions."
"Your son Pepe isn't here, then?" Coke said with a bland smile.
"That's correct," Ramon answered with no smile at all. "But he'll be back soon, Major. And you will want to have come to a decision with my father before that time, do you see?"
He bent his lips up at the corners. The warning couldn't have been more explicit if he'd drawn and charged a pistol.
"I don't mind discussing my employer's business at any good location, Master Luria—" Coke said.
"Ramon, please, just Ramon," Luria said with another glittering arc of his hand.
"—but when we arrived, there was some difficulty with your men," Coke continued. "And since from the sound of matters last night, people are pretty worked up still, I don't know that your home would be the best place to talk business. For me, that is."
"Don't think anything of it!" Ramon ordered. "Those imbeciles you killed, you did me a favor. With so many in Potosi all together, the men need disciplining or they'll get completely out of hand."
"I'm not sure they feel that way," Margulies remarked from where she stood against the wall.
The veneer of bonhomie slipped from Ramon's face. "They feel whatever way the Lurias tell them to feel!" he said. "If I, Ramon Luria, tell you that you can visit my home without concern, that is so. Will you doubt my honor?"
"The Old Man doesn't think its a good idea for him to show himself with things like they are, Major," Angel Tijuca explained with desperate sincerity. "Out in the street, I mean. Like you said, things got pretty excited last night. You'll be all right, truly."
Coke shrugged. There wasn't really a choice about going. He just hadn't wanted to appear too eager. "All right," he said. "Mary, you want to tag along?"
"You bet," Margulies said as she shifted herself onto both feet. "Maybe Angel and I can catch up on things while you talk business with the important gentlemen."
Niko Daun stepped into the doorway from the kitchen. His action station was first floor, rear; Vierziger and Moden guarded the upper story for now.
"I wonder if I could go, sir?" the sensor tech asked. He already wore the ammo pouch filled with bugging devices. "I'd sort of like to see the place."
"No, stick around," Coke ordered. He didn't want to try planting hardware in L'Escorial HQ while Tijuca was there. Margulies' friend might recognize Frisian equipment, which could be embarrassing—or worse. "I won't need a gofer, since we're just across the street."
He grinned at the syndicate boss to draw attention away from the exchange which had just taken place. "You know," he said, "you could have just phoned yourself."
Ramon waved his hand. "Would you have accepted the invitation had I not shown myself willing to visit you?" he said.
"You've got a point," Coke said. He deliberately checked that his sub-machine gun was on safe. Slinging the weapon muzzle-down across his back, he added, "Let's go talk to the Old Man, sir."
Ramon Luria ushered Coke ahead of him through the door marked BOARD ROOM. An old man in red and a middle-aged one wearing a business suit of Delian cut were already seated within.
Instead of wood paneling, the walls of the sanctum in the basement of L'Escorial headquarters were covered with holographic screens. If the equipment had been perfectly tuned, an observer would almost think he was standing at ground level and the building didn't exist.
In fact, the hardware had all been installed at stock brightness and coverage settings, which varied from unit to unit. One of the thirty-odd screens was dead and three others operated at less than half their proper resolution. The set-up made Coke think of a diorama viewed through distorting mirrors.
Ramon waved proudly at the walls and said, "My son Pepe brought these back with him from Delos on his last trip. Pepe is very up to date, very civilized."
There was no sign on the streets of the gunmen who had been omnipresent throughout Potosi since the survey team arrived. Civilians moved in nervous spurts, like birds on the verge of a violent storm.
The table in the center of the room was a black synthetic oval. There were thumb controls at eight points around its circumference. Each was a shallow dome paired with a shallow depression.
Coke casually fingered the bump nearest him. Nothing happened. If the system had been operating, his touch would have brought live a workstation linked to the data bank within the table.
"I am Raul Luria," the old man at the head of the table said without rising or preamble. "Potosi is mine, Cantilucca is mine. For too long I have allowed the Guzman syndicate to exist—out of affection for the late Pablo, so close a friend of mine. But after last night—"
Raul Luria rose with the staggering difficulty of a ship's mast being stepped by amateurs. The man seated to Rani's left looked alternately bored and disquieted by the rhetoric.
"—after last night, I have no more compassion. They must be crushed!"
The old man—the Old Man—pointed a crooked index finger at Coke. "Where do you stand in that, foreigner? Shall we crush you too?"
"I represent a business firm, sir," Coke said mildly. "We can supply personnel and equipment that will permit you to achieve your stated goal faster and more cheaply than you could in any other manner. I don't see why we can't strike a deal that will benefit both parties."
"One of the possible problems, Major," Ramon Luria said with his back to the door behind Coke, "is the sort of arrangement Friesland has already made with the Astras."
"And what you had to do with the raid last night," Raul Luria grunted as he bent, joint by joint, back into his chair. "If you're working with those pigs, I'll see to it that you're slaughtered with them. I swear it!"
"Father, we agreed there's no profit in discussing the past," Ramon said, his voice quivering between fear and contempt. "Isn't that so, Master Suterbilt?"
The businessman grimaced. "There'll be no profit in anything for the best part of a year," he said. "It'll take at least that long to rebuild gage stocks. And what is the Delos cartel going to say?"
"There's no arrangement between Astra and the FDF," Coke said. "Zip. Nada. Do you have a chip projector here?"
He glanced over his shoulder. Ramon looked blank. "I can bring one," he offered.
"Here, you can use mine," Suterbilt said. He slid a palm-sized belt unit across the table to Coke.
The businessman was stocky and probably no older than Coke, now that the Frisian had time to focus on him. At the moment, Suterbilt wore a scowl that amplified the angry appearance of his ruddy complexion.
Coke looked at the projector, then unclipped the one from his own belt instead. "That's all right," he said. "Mine will do."
The Frisian unit was half the weight of the older Delian projector Suterbilt used. Coke had hoped for a console model—the equipment built into the table itself would have been perfect, if the cursed thing had worked—but it didn't really matter. Cantiluccans probably wouldn't feel comfortable with the sort of crystalline images which the civilized universe took for granted.
Coke dropped into the reader the chip he'd prepared. He turned up the gain. "This is why we have no deal with the Astras," he said.
The negotiations in Astra headquarters shimmered in a hologram a meter across. The image had a gray translucence and there was considerable distortion toward the edges of the field, but it was both visible and audible.
"A company of infantry and a company of combat cars," said Matthew Coke's image. The scene was assembled from recordings made by the commo helmets of the three Frisians present at the meeting.
The image cut forward a few seconds. Barbour had spliced the data into the continuous form Coke wanted, but that meant the visuals were choppy. "Approximately three thousand Frisian thalers per day," the Coke hologram said, "perhaps ten percent over."
Raul Luria was trembling with rage. His mouth worked, but no words came out. Ramon, who had moved to the side where he was visible out of the corner of Coke's eyes, wore a fixed smile. Suterbilt, the factor for Trans-Star Trading, simply frowned in puzzlement.
The Frisians vanished abruptly. The three Astra principals remained. Through the excellence of Barbours editing, Adolpho Peres' lips moved in near synchrony with his words: "So our Frisian visitors clean up our problem. They board the ship we provide, though they don't know the ship's ours. And the ship never gets home."
The bug Daun had left beneath the Astra conference table was audio only. You couldn't have told that when Barbour had finished mixing input from the bug with images culled during the two-party conference. When the Peres image "spoke" the final words, his face froze in a grin of murderous triumph . . . which was certainly true to the spirit of the plan the gigolo had outlined to his fellows.
Coke shut off the recorder and smiled at the L'Escorial leaders. "So," he said. "I've recommended to my superiors that we not do business with Astra. Shall my team and I go home, or . . . ?"
Raul Luria began to laugh. For the first moments, Coke thought the old man might be having a stroke instead. The paroxysm continued for nearly a minute.
Ramon pulled out a lace handkerchief and stepped to his father's side. He stood there, looking worried but unable to act. Raul hacked and wheezed and drooled from the corners of his mouth.
Suterbilt swallowed. His body tilted slightly away from the L'Escorial patriarch, and he was careful not to look to the side.
The old man finally regained his composure. "You're a right clever bastard, aren't you, boy?" he said. "What's your name? Coke, is it?"
Coke nodded.
"You planning to eavesdrop on us the way you did those Astra gutter-sweepings, then?" Raul demanded.
"No sir," Coke replied. "I am not."
Not in the same way, at any rate. The devices Daun and Margulies had emplaced all up and down Potosi's main street would keep an eye—and ear—on both syndicates.
Raul nodded. "That's good." he said. "So, that's your price for two companies of your Frisian Defense Forces?"
"That's an estimate," Coke said. "It's a good estimate, but the final figure will have to be determined at Camp Able."
Raul looked puzzled, glancing toward Suterbilt.
"FDF Command on Nieuw Friesland," Coke clarified. "Ah—and I gather it may not be possible to bring heavy vehicles like combat cars in through the port here without getting the Marvelan Confederacy concerned. The price would be comparable for three infantry companies."
"That's a very high price," Suterbilt said. He glared at the Frisian representative as though he'd like to throttle him. The factor's hands, Coke noticed, remained flat on the black surface of the table, spread wide and patently innocent.
"Compared to the losses you received last night?" Coke said. "Because your present personnel and equipment are of such low quality?"
Suterbilt tightened his lips. He gave a quick toss of his head. It could have implied either assent or disdain.
"Infantry and tanks is better than just infantry?" Ramon Luria asked. "And the price is the same?"
Coke nodded to the plump man. "Roughly the same daily rate," he agreed. "And combat cars aren't exactly tanks, but they're big. The folks down the street didn't think we could ship them in. If we could, the concentrated firepower would be better."
"We can bring in your combat cars," Raul said, looking at the factor beside him.
"There's excess capacity on all the TST ships that land on Cantilucca," Ramon amplified with a giggle. "Empty coming in, but it can be full if there's something we want to bring in."
"Don't talk about that!" Suterbilt snapped. He glanced from son to father, clearly angry but aware that the pair of gangsters didn't view the situation as he—a nominally honest businessman—did.
Quite obviously the factor was cooking Trans-Star Trading's records by showing lower cargo tonnage than the hulls' actual capacity. By so doing, he cheated his employers of shipping charges and—more important—permitted the L'Escorials to avoid port duties which should have been paid to the Marvelan Confederacy.
The ships that carried undeclared gage off Cantilucca traveled part-empty coming in. As Ramon had said, that unlisted volume could be filled with Frisian troops and equipment.
"If it's possible to bring in the cars, that would speed up the operation," Coke continued smoothly, as if the byplay among the locals meant nothing to him. "I'm estimating forty days with combat cars, but using infantry alone would add considerably to the completion time."
"A million-two in thalers," Suterbilt said, wincing. He stared at his hands.
"Roughly," Coke agreed. "With combat cars."
"The deal still has to be without the Bonding Authority," Raul said. "You know that, don't you?"
Coke gave a nod as tight and enigmatic as that of the factor a few moments before. "That does leave a problem, doesn't it?" he said.
Raul looked at Suterbilt. "Pay him," the old man said. "Pay him—"
He glanced back at Coke. "Ten days, that'll be enough, won't it? On account, an earnest of our good faith."
"I can't raise that—" Suterbilt objected.
"I can't commit my superiors," Coke warned. "I can only recommend by message capsule . . . ."
The Old Man waved at Coke. "Yes, yes," he said, "but with the money in hand, there won't be any trouble about the deal."
Ramon giggled. "Money talks, nobody walks." he said, quoting an aphorism old when Croesus struck the first coin.
"I don't have," Suterbilt said angrily toward Raul, "we don't have that kind of money available now. The warehouse burned, don't you remember?"
"It's still collateral so far as TST is concerned," Raul said. He waggled a wizened fist in Suterbilt's face to emphasize the point. "Borrow the money from the company accounts on Delos, that's easy enough."
"And we'll repay it out of the Astra stockpile," Ramon added complacently. "Nobody will know the difference."
The factor grimaced but did not speak.
"We'll be kings with Astra out of the way once and for all!" Raul snapped. "And there's no choice anyway. If we don't move now, how are we going to pay the men with the gage gone?"
Suterbilt raised his hands to his face. He gripped his cheeks with a trembling violence that Coke watched in concern, wondering what the factor was going to do next.
Suterbilt slammed his palms back down on the table. "All right," he said. "All right! I'll raise the money."
He glared viciously at Coke and continued, "But it will take five days, maybe six, because of transit time to Delos. I can't write you a valid draft out of the funds available here on Cantilucca!"
Matthew Coke nodded calmly. "I'll inform my superiors of the pending circumstances," he said.
Coke should have been enthusiastic at the success of his mission. True, a survey team leader couldn't commit the FDF; but this was a perfectly workable deal, a good deal. Cantilucca would provide live-fire experience for relatively green forces, just the thing Camp Able was looking for.
The trouble was, Coke kept seeing the red-clad thug with a powergun thrust against the cunt of the whore his fellows were beating. The gunman could have pulled the trigger as easily as not, on whim; and the next time, he or another of his sort likely would do just that.
Matthew Coke was making sure that the set of circumstances which made such behavior possible continued.
Angel's private cubicle was at the end of the bunk room filling most of the L'Escorial buildings second floor. He paused with his hand on the doorknob.
"Look, El-Tee," he said, "it's not a palace I got here. Ah—maybe we could go somewhere else, find a bar or something."
Margulies snorted. "It could be pretty bad, Angel," she said, "and I'd still have lived in worse. You know that, because part of the time you were there."
"Yeah, well, this is no great shakes," the man repeated, but he opened the door.
She had seen worse. There'd been the militia barracks on Typer where the locals relieved themselves in one corner of the room in which they lived, slept and ate. That was the only military installation Margulies could recall being dirtier than this room of Angel's.
She hadn't regarded the Typer militia as being real soldiers. Neither, obviously, was her one-time comrade here.
No feces, and perhaps no urine. But the smell of sour vomit was overpowering, and the originally white sheets on the bed were so dirty that they had for the most part a gun-metal color. The common barracks from which Angel's room was set off was in far better shape, though the number of troops bunking in it had been doubled or tripled in the recent past.
"Look," Angel repeated. "We better—"
Margulies pushed him casually inside and followed. "You were going to get me a drink," she said as she closed the door behind them. "Stop dicking around, hey?"
"Yeah, I . . ." he said. This must have been the first time in quite a long while that he'd been straight enough to appreciate the reality of his existence. His shoulders slumped as he looked at the fetid ruin around him.
The back and one leg of a chair protruded from a pile of garments. Margulies lifted the chair and shook it, then kicked the filthy clothing aside to make room for her to sit down. "When we last talked," she said in a casual tone, "you were talking about buying a tract of land where you grew up."
"Aw, fuck it, Missie, I'm no farmer," Angel said. He seated himself on the edge of the bunk and met her eyes for the first time since they came upstairs. "I left here when I was fifteen. Engine wiper on a starship, then I did some soldiering on Wellbegone. Got in with the Slammers, then the FDF. I don't know what I was thinking when I said I was going to raise gage. I think I just wanted to be fifteen again."
He bent and groped first beneath the bunk, then within the bedding proper. He came up with a bottle. It was unlabeled. The ten centimeters' depth of fluid within had a pinkish tinge.
"Ah . . ." Angel said. "Do you really want a drink? I don't have glasses."
"No problem," Margulies said, taking the bottle from him. The liquor was harsh. The pink color suggested flavoring, but the only taste she noticed was that of raw alcohol. She returned the bottle, wiping her lips with the back of her free hand.
"Or there's gage, of course," Angel offered with false perkiness.
"Naw, not for me," Margulies said. "But you used to prefer it to booze, didn't you?"
Angel got up and rested his hands on the window ledge. The glass was painted black and reflected the light of the single fixture overhead.
"I really stepped on my dick, Mary," he whispered to the glass. "I went out, I looked at land, and it all came back to me, starving and scrabbling and bored, bored to fucking tears all the time I was a kid. That was why I left. And it's worse now, the syndicates take twice the bite they did when I left."
He turned and looked at his former lieutenant again. "And I looked around the security troops and I thought, these clowns, they're not fit to be recruits to the Slammers."
"You got that right," Margulies murmured. Her mouth was oily with the liquor's aftertaste.
"So I hired on, with the Lurias because my old village, it belonged to L'Escorial," Angel continued. "Not that it mattered. I thought I could make something out of them, give them some discipline. That'd make it better for everybody, you see that, don't you El-Tee? The farmers too, if it was just paying for protection they had to worry about. Via, what place doesn't have taxes?"
"You can't turn the lot out there into soldiers," Margulies said. "Any more than you can build a gun out of cat turds."
"Don't I know it," Angel whispered. He looked at the bottle in his hand, then drank greedily from it. His Adam's apple throbbed with three swallows, four, before he set the liquor down again.
"I tried, El-Tee," he whispered to the bottle. "But they wouldn't listen. I'd have had to shoot a couple of them to get their attention and Via, the rest would've greased me the next night. You've got to sleep sometime, and there wasn't anybody but me."
He looked up at her. She nodded, agreement without empathy. Angel had chosen, just as surely as the constant low-level pain in Margulies' rebuilt leg reflected choices she had made.
"The gage stopped working," Angel said. "I was using too much. The first dose would put me to sleep. My skin was crawling, I'd scratch myself bloody."
He swallowed. "So I switched to booze and that, you know, that helped some. And I found that mixed gage didn't put me to sleep the way the pure stuff did, so sometimes I used that."
"Refinery tailings are poison," Margulies said harshly "The best you're going to do is grind down the nerve sheaths so that you're a spastic for the rest of your life. Or you'll go blind. Or you'll fry your brain and sit around drooling. Think your new buddies are going to want to change your diapers, Angel?"
"I know all that!" he shouted. "I said it was just a time or two with tailings, didn't I?"
He hadn't, and if he had said that, it would have been a lie. It was amazing that Angel had managed the effort of will required to get straight when he learned that an FDF survey team was on Cantilucca, but it was vanishingly improbable that he would be able to maintain that state for more than a few hours.
Angel sat heavily on the bed, clutching the liquor bottle to him as if it were the only warmth in a world of ice. "Look, El-Tee," he said to the wall, "I just want you to know I've got it under control now. I'm fine, and in a day or two I'll have all my gear strack. I just want you to know that."
"I'm glad to hear that, Angel," Mary Margulies said as she rose to her feet. "I'd better check on the major. I'll see you around."
Twenty-odd L'Escorial gunmen lounged in the open barracks, laughing and talking. The general volume lowered as Margulies left the cubicle, but she heard some pointed gibes.
She didn't look to either side as she walked to the stairs at the other end of the room. If she looked at the men, she would kill them all.
It wasn't the liquor or the stench of Angel's room that made Margulies want to vomit. It was the vision of what her driver had become . . . .
And the warning of what might become of Mary Margulies herself, if she ever tried to reenter civilian life.
Wind kicked dust and litter down the street. The eastern horizon was a mass of cloud, though the late afternoon sun still shone onto Potosi.
Coke drove one of the rented jitneys to the street from the walled courtyard at the rear of Hathaway House. Margulies waited for him at the head of the alley. The angles of a weapon in a patrol sling distended her light cape.
Coke disengaged the torque converter and braked beside her. "I don't need a guard, Mary." he said. "I'm just going to run up to the port and send a capsule off."
Margulies squatted to put her face on a level with his. Her smile was crooked; she hadn't said much since the pair of them left the meeting in L'Escorial headquarters that morning.
"You could lower the top and squeeze your cyclo into the back of the port van," she said. "I guess that's what you're planning to do. But I could also drive it back myself and save you the trouble. What do you figure?"
Coke looked at the security lieutenant. "Yeah." he said. "That sounds like a good idea. Hop in."
The jitney had four seats in back, facing outward in pairs from the central spine. Margulies sat crossways, so that she looked forward over Coke's right shoulder.
"I felt like getting out of Potosi for a bit." she explained quietly. "This isn't much out, but it's out."
"What the hell is that?" Coke said. He had started to reengage the drive train. Instead, he took his hand from the knob and touched the 2-cm weapon he'd thrust muzzle-down between his seat and the spine in back.
Three red-painted vehicles drove down the road from the spaceport at 30 kph, their sirens blowing. The first and last were armored trucks of the sort the team had seen before. The convoy's pace was probably governed to their best speed.
An air-cushion limousine drove between the two escorts. The vehicle was fitted with appliqué armor—which couldn't have been very heavy or the battery-powered drive fans wouldn't have been able to keep the car floating on a bubble of air. A scarlet film darkened the windows so that they were nearly opaque from the outside, but Coke thought the driver was the only occupant.
Coke switched his commo helmet to Channel One, the command push. "Stand by," he ordered. "Over."
He didn't know what was happening. He didn't think it was an immediate problem, but by definition he couldn't be sure of that. There was a tiny click behind him as Margulies took her sub-machine gun off safe.
L'Escorial gunmen spilled out of the gateway, thronging the street from which the sirens had driven all civilian traffic. Engines started up in the courtyard of Astra headquarters, but none of the Guzman personnel showed themselves.
The wind gusted again, promising the storm would sweep over Potosi in a few minutes. The open-sided jitney wasn't much protection, but it wouldn't be the first time Coke got soaked in the line of duty.
He keyed the command channel again. "Bob," he ordered, sure that Barbour would be at the console. "Upper right quadrant, feed me a composite of what's going on across the street. Over."
"Roger," the intelligence officer replied. A quarter of Coke's face-shield brightened with the scene in front of L'Escorial HQ, viewed by miniature cameras Daun had emplaced on the other side of the convoy. "Audio?"
"Negative," said Coke, "but maybe later. Out."
The Lurias, father and son, walked stiffly through the gateway. Raul leaned on Ramon's arm and used a cane with his other hand.
The sirens wound down to silence. The leading armored car fired a warning burst up the street past Astra headquarters. The tribarrel functioned properly, chugging out twenty bolts of deep cyan before the gunner took his thumbs off the butterfly trigger.
The limousine's doors lifted simultaneously like gull wings. A slim man got out on the other side of the vehicle. Without being ordered to, Barbour manipulated the camera view to give Coke a close-up of the newcomer's face. The man was young and handsome, with features as fine-boned as those of a bird of prey.
"Pepe!" Ramon Luria called.
Raul walked staggered two steps forward and embraced his grandson. "You've come at a good time, my boy," the Old Man said.
The sound of the wind rasped syllables away from the words the men across the street spoke. Lightning flashed behind the cloudbank, but there was as yet no audible thunder.
"Bob, patch in the audio," Coke directed in a whisper. "Out."
"Trouble with our neighbors?" said Pepe Luria with liltingly ironic tones that now came through Coke's helmet. "Well, it had to come sometime, didn't it? I brought some toys that may come in useful."
Pepe reached back inside the limousine. When he straightened again, the camera showed that he had buckled on a belly-pack controller. He was holding a sphere some twenty centimeters in diameter in his hands.
"Bloody hell," Margulies whispered. "That's a firefly. All we need is a few of those things flying around."
"Watch!" Pepe commanded triumphantly.
The sphere floated out of his hands. A corona of purple sparks bathed its lower surfaces. Coke's commo helmet crackled minusculy in response to the discharge. The crowd of gunmen let out a collective wheeze of surprise.
"They won't last long," Coke muttered. "Who are you going to get to maintain fireflies on Cantilucca?"
"They're six to a set," Margulies said. "Do you suppose he'd have brought more than one set?"
"I can direct them . . . ." Pepe continued. He worked one of the tiny joysticks on his belly pack. The firefly danced and staggered nervously.
"He's not very good at it," Margulies said.
"Nobody can use those stock control sets," Coke said. "Not even one bird at a time."
"Bet Barbour could thread needles with it if he had to," Margulies replied.
"Or I can let them act for themselves on programmed instructions!" Pepe said.
He took his hands away from the controls. The firefly sailed up the street at a smooth walking pace, two meters in the air. The sphere kept the same face forward at all times. It only appeared to rotate because of the spinning static discharge which supported it.
"I hate those bastards," Coke murmured. "With a man, you can watch his eyes or his hands. I always refused to serve around the fireflies in the field."
The device was now a hundred meters up the street. It stopped and began to turn very slowly on its axis.
Pepe's belly pack projected a holographic view of what the firefly "saw." "I can watch things with them," he announced. He poised his finger on the control lever.
"And I can do more than watch!"
He pressed the lever in. The firefly lighted the facades around it with the rapid-fire flashes of five pistol-caliber powergun bolts. The bar adjacent to where the device hovered was The Blue Ox, an Astra hangout. The sign over its armored door disintegrated in flame and molten plastic.
The firefly turned another 90° and drifted purposefully back. A man stuck his head out of The Blue Ox, gaped up at the blasted sign, and ducked inside again.
Pepe Luria stood arms akimbo, facing up the street toward the returning firefly. "Widow Guzman!" he cried. "I have six of them, Widow! And I can tell them to attack men wearing any color I choose, just the color! Do you hear me, Widow?"
Only the wind answered.
Pepe linked arms with his father and grandfather. He walked with them into the L'Escorial courtyard, laughing with bubbling promise. A red-clad subordinate jumped into the limousine to drive it and its cargo within.
The firefly's ammunition was expended. It trailed along behind its master. The glow of its iridium barrel faded.
"Let's get to the port," Coke said, but he stepped off the driver's saddle and motioned Margulies to take his place. "You drive. I've got to make some additions in the message I'm sending home."
The first drops of the storm hit, cratering the dust. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, but Coke felt colder than the weather justified.
CANTILUCCA: DAY FIVE
The telephone in the Hathaways' private quarters rang. Coke, lying in a haze of almost-sleep directly above the sound, snapped awake.
Moments later someone hammered on the hotel's front door. "Quick, open up!" a man called from the street. "I have to see the Frisian major at once! The Old Man needs him!"
It was three hours before dawn. Coke pulled on his commo helmet and switched it to the command channel. "Stand to," he ordered, probably needlessly, as he slid his feet into his boots. "Out."
He keyed Channel Five, the push Barbour chose as a patch to Cantilucca's land-line communications. The transceiver Niko Daun had placed in the Hathaways' handset was the size of a match-head and far more reliable than the phone to which it was attached.
Coke already wore his trousers and tunic. The night before was the first time on Cantilucca he'd taken his boots off to sleep. He guessed he'd return to field SOP from here on out.
"Hello?" Georg Hathaway croaked into the phone receiver. The innkeeper sounded both nervous and disoriented.
"Quick, you old fool and don't start arguing about it!" ordered the voice on the other end of the line. "Tell that hireling Coke that he's to come at once to Astra headquarters. At once! This is Adolpho Peres. And I warn you, little man, if there's any delay in Coke arriving, I'll take it out of your hide!"
"But—" Hathaway gasped.
"At once!" Peres shouted. He broke the connection with a bang.
Barbour had been sleeping beside his console in the lobby. Coke met the rest of the team, armed and ready, in the upstairs corridor. Below, Mistress Hathaway was talking to the L'Escorial messenger through the viewport in the door.
"I'll take care of the Astras," Johann Vierziger volunteered. Like Coke, he wore a cape over his weapons. "Peres feels we're soul-mates, after all."
His smile was as thin as the corona of a collapsed star.
Evie Hathaway ran up the stairs. "Major Coke!" she called. "Major Coke!"
"Right," said Coke. I'll take L'Escorial. "Sten, you're in charge here—"
He flicked a quick finger at Margulies, forestalling the comment poised between her open lips.
"—and no, I don't want company, I want a reaction force. If both sides are calling us, there's probably no immediate danger, but I want all of you ready to move as needed."
The Hathaways had stopped at the head of the stairs as they saw the Frisians were up and alert.
"Please, Major—" Georg began.
Coke waved his hand. "It'll be taken care of," he said. "We're on our way." He slid between the locals with more haste than courtesy, though that would have been the Hathaways' choice had they been asked.
"There's an envoy from Delos," Bob Barbour called as Coke and Vierziger passed him. "A Madame Yarnell, from the gage cartel on Delos, and she is not amused. From the way the Astra leaders talk, she's the cartel's troubleshooter—with the emphasis on 'shooter.' "
"Why can't they do this stuff at a decent time of day?" Coke muttered as he helped the sergeant pull open the heavy door.
"Because they're not decent people, Matthew," Vierziger said. "Of course, neither are we."
"You're the major?" the L'Escorial messenger said as Vierziger pushed past him. Then to Coke, "You're the major."
"Right," Coke agreed, striding across the street. Vierziger headed for Astra HQ at a gliding pace, not quite a jog.
"What's he doing?" the L'Escorial bleated, running to catch up with Coke but glancing toward Vierziger.
"Minding his own business," Coke said. "Pray to the Lord that you never find yourself his business."
He'd expected to find the L'Escorial courtyard full of armed men. Instead, half-dressed L'Escorials were trying to back their armored trucks into the garage beneath the headquarters building. The second-floor barracks was lighted. Coke could hear Pepe Luria shouting for his gunmen to get out by the back way at once.
Ramon Luria stood in the building's doorway, looking alternately inside and out toward the courtyard. The messenger scampered up to him.
Ramon raised his hand to strike. "You idiot, Pierro!" he shouted. "I told you to bring the Frisian major!"
"He's—" Pierro shrieked.
"I'm here," Coke said. The courtyard was indifferently lighted, primarily by the headlights of the armored vehicles. The Frisian in his gray cape was a moving shadow.
"Coke!" Luria cried. "Thank the Lord you're here! Look, you have to stop your troops coming. At once! You have to hold them back until Madame Yarnell has left Cantilucca!"
"Nobody at Camp Able's going to make a decision until they have your money in hand, Luria," Coke said harshly. "According to your paymaster, Suterbilt, that's still several days. You needn't have kittens."
Despite his aggressive tone, Coke felt cold inside. His daily message capsules were shipped by first available transport to Nieuw Friesland, but there was at least a week between sending and receipt. Coke wondered what the Lurias would do to him if they knew he had recommended against taking the proffered contract, whether or not Suterbilt came through with the earnest money.
The Old Man lurched along the hallway toward his son. Gunmen, groggy with drink and gage, were being hastened onto the back stairs by their more alert fellows. Pepe Luria fought his way down the stairwell through them. He wore the firefly controller, but none of the spheres were themselves in evidence.
"She's coming!" a L'Escorial shouted from the courtyard gate. "She's coming!"
"Everybody into the basement!" Ramon screamed. He gripped the Frisian's arm, fiercely and apparently unaware of what he was doing. His hand bumped the muzzle of Coke's sub-machine gun.
"Oh my Lord!" Ramon cried. "You're carrying a gun! Are you mad? She said no weapons in sight, none! She'll—"
Pepe joined them. Ramon turned to his son and said, "He's carrying a gun, Pepe!"
The youngest Luria looked Coke up and down with the interest of a dog sniffing something dead. "So, you'd be the expensive Major Coke, would you?" he said. "I suppose I needed to meet you some time, since L'Escorial now employs you."
To his father Pepe added, "It isn't in sight. But"—Pepe's eyes were as back as cannel coal. They focused again on Coke.—"hold it so that it's less obvious nonetheless. I don't care what the good Madame does to you, but she might mistakenly think L'Escorial was involved in your bad manners."
The last of the L'Escorial armored trucks collided with a wall. The vehicle stalled on the ramp into the garage. The driver tried to restart his engine.
Ramon scampered over to the vehicle. "Leave it!" he cried. "Shut it down! And get out, get out!"
A car with a slim, armored body and four metal-mesh wheels on wide-spread outriggers pulled up in front of the L'Escorial building. Coke had seen similar vehicles used for ground reconnaissance where for one reason or another hovercraft were contra-indicated.
Raul Luria reached the doorway. Pepe put an arm around the Old Mans shoulders, more for solidarity than for physical support. Ramon skipped back to join his father and son.
Matthew Coke stepped aside, flattening himself in the shadows across the wall. He held the sub-machine gun vertically against his body, covered by the folds of the cape. He glanced at Pepe Luria, but only for an instant; and there was no expression on his face.
The door of the reconnaissance car folded down; the female passenger got out. Though the car's interior was more luxuriously appointed than was normal for the type of vehicle, it was still cramped quarters for those within.
The woman wore a white jumpsuit trimmed with silver, and a short, lustrous cape of some natural fur. She was by no means young, but surgery and cosmetics prevented Coke from trying to guess her age within two decades. She halted in the gateway where the lights of the stalled truck lit her brilliantly.
Raul Luria began hobbling toward her with his descendants a half pace behind to either side. "Madame Yarnell!" he wheezed. "You honor us with your presence."
"Don't bother, Luria," the woman ordered sharply. "I'm going to say what I have to and then go back and repeat it to the Astras, those other childish idiots. This must stop! Do you understand?"
"Madame—" Ramon said, "we of course—"
"No, it's not 'of course,' " Madame Yarnell snarled. "If anything were obvious to you morons, you'd get on with business instead of ruining it. Can you imagine how much trouble you've caused with your fighting already?"
"It wasn't us who—" Raul began.
"Shut up, old man!" the woman ordered. "I'm here to talk, not listen. The reason gage deliveries have dropped by thirty percent over the past two quarters, and the reason that the product my fellows and I need to fulfill contracts has burned to ash—the reason is that you and Astra are squabbling instead of doing business. That will stop, now! Do you understand?"
"Of course, we want nothing more than to do business ourselves, mistress," Pepe said with his eyes lowered.
"That's good," the Delian representative said, "because if there's any more trouble, our retailers will cancel contracts and find other sources of supply Whereupon Cantilucca will become superfluous . . . and you gentlemen in particular will become superfluous. Do you understand me?"
Pepe's face tightened.
Raul laid a hand heavily on the youth's shoulder. "May we offer you the hospitality of L'Escorial during your stay on Cantilucca, Madame?" the Old Man said.
"You may not," Madame Yarnell snapped. "I'll be staying in the cartel offices in the port reservation while I'm here. And if you're wondering how long that will be—it will be until I'm absolutely sure that you and your imbecile compatriots have heard my message and are acting on it. I regret to say that it may be years that I'll be stuck in this cesspool!"
She spun on her heel, whirling the cape out from her shoulders, and walked back to the recon car. As soon as the door latched, the driver slammed into a tight turn and headed back toward Astra HQ. Coke suspected that the cartel representative had bypassed the Astras initially because she feared that L'Escorial, as the more seriously aggrieved party, was likely to take the next escalating step.
The Lurias bent their heads together, all talking at once. Coke looked at them, pursed his lips, and sauntered across the street to Hathaway House.
He supposed he should have been pleased that peace might come to Cantilucca. The trouble was, he kept thinking that with the syndicates in unbroken control, the best ordinary citizens could hope for was the peace of the grave.