"The beer isn't any better than Hathaway's," Sten Moden said. The logistics officer watched the afternoon traffic over Coke's shoulder, as Coke did over Moden's. "But it's good to get out anyway. With Madame Yarnell in town, you could almost imagine Potosi was a normal place, couldn't you?"
Niko Daun returned from the bar, clanking three more mugs down on the sidewalk table. "They've got a dancer in the back room," he said indignantly. "They let the Johns poke at her with shock batons. I don't care if she's stoned, they shouldn't do that!"
"There's a lot of things on Cantilucca they shouldn't do," Coke said. He drained the last mouthful from his current mug and set the empty under his chair to get it out of the way. "Madame Yarnell stopped people who'd be better dead from killing each other. That's about it."
He didn't see any guns on the street. Syndicate colors were muted as well. A red beret, a blue neckerchief—rarely anything more overt. Widow Guzman and the Lurias had sent most of their gunmen back into the farming districts for the time being.
"I wonder how Esteban's father-in-law's doing," Sten Moden said. "I'm afraid that the thugs that were swaggering around Potosi'll be looking for something to keep them occupied out in the sticks."
A woman screamed in a broken voice from the cafe's back room. Shouts and laughter greeted the outburst. A pair of men wearing red armbands got up from the table beside the Frisians and walked toward the back. They were fumbling in their pockets for the cover charge.
"Sir," Niko blurted. "Are we really going to help these guys? I mean, both sides, they're—they're animals, sir! The least we ought to do is say 'no sale' and go on back to Friesland."
"That still leaves the same people here," Moden said. "It's not an answer."
He swizzled a sip of beer around his mouth. He didn't appear so much to be savoring as analyzing the fluid.
"Oh, the beer's not that bad," Coke said. Without changing his tone, he went on, "I think if we wanted to . . ."
He paused, looked at his companions in turn, and resumed, "I don't think it would require much pushing from behind the scenes to get Astra and L'Escorial to pretty well eliminate each other."
In Matthew Coke's mind, the response was:
Daun: "Sir, your proposal is clearly against the interests of Nieuw Friesland!"
Moden: "Major, I regret that, in accordance with the provisions of the Defense justice Code, I'm going to have to relieve you of command for that treasonous suggestion."
Niko Daun's face split with a wide grin. "Lord, sir!" he said. "I was afraid you were going to burn me a new asshole for saying that."
"Yeah," agreed Sten Moden, setting his mug down hard enough in his enthusiasm to slosh. "We were all afraid to discuss it with you, Matthew. But I don't care what color their money is—something has to be done about these bastards, and the six of us are the only folks around who might be able to do it."
"We all?" Coke repeated. "You two talked to the others?"
Daun nodded. "Vierziger said that was what he was here for, he guessed."
"Johann said he presumed," Sten Moden corrected. He shrugged. "I don't know exactly what he meant by that. But Johanns willingness to shoot people isn't in doubt, is it?"
"Bob, he's not real comfortable with the business," Niko resumed. "He's not afraid of Camp Able, it's not that, but . . . Well, anyway, he finally said he was in."
The sensor tech shook his head. "He's a good guy, Bob is. I don't understand what's going on under the surface, but he's a good guy. And a fucking wizard with that console!"
"Yeah, he's good all right," Coke said. All five of his people were good, were about the best he'd ever seen. And he was talking about dropping them into the gears of a very powerful machine, in hopes that the machine would break before they did.
"Mary?" he added aloud.
"She's the one who brought it up," Moden said with a half smile. "I suppose we'd all been thinking about it, but she said it aloud."
"She said," Niko amplified, "that this was sort of like wiping your ass with a broken beer bottle—sooner or later, you were going to wind up in a world of hurt. But if she survived, she didn't want to remember that she hadn't tried to change things on Cantilucca."
Coke drank half his beer in a series of smooth swallows. Nobody spoke again until he stopped to breathe and brush his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'll work up a plan of action," he said. "We'll have to wait for the cartel representative to leave, but that shouldn't take long."
Daun frowned. "She said she might stay here for years, sir," he said. "We aren't going to . . .?"
"No," Coke said "No, Madame Yarnell isn't going to bury herself on Cantilucca for any longer than necessary. A few months at the outside. Her coming is actually better for our purposes. When she does leave, the lid's going to come off with a bang."
The red hovercraft Pepe Luria brought back from Delos whined slowly down the street. Its presence cleared a path through the mostly civilian traffic, even though the overt threat of guns and murder was held temporarily in abeyance. The vehicle stopped alongside the table where the three Frisians sat.
A red-veiled side window slid down. Pepe was in the driver's seat. His father and grandfather sat in back.
Ramon leaned forward to get a better view past Raul. "Come with us, Major Coke," he called. "We'll ride in my Pepe's fine new toy, shall we not? And we'll talk."
Sten Moden's face was blank. Niko Daun looked questioningly from the hovercraft to his commander, taut as the hammer spring of a cocked pistol. Moden, seeing the same danger that Coke did, put his hand firmly on the sensor tech's right wrist.
Niko was desperately eager to do the right thing, but he hadn't a clue as to what the right thing was under these circumstances. That was a bad combination . . . .
"Glad to learn there's something to talk about," Coke said easily as he got to his feet.
"He'll be okay, then?" Daun murmured to Moden as the hovercraft drove away with the major.
"He's got as good a chance as any of the rest of us," the logistics officer said. He finished his beer in a single mighty draft, then banged the mug down. "Another?" he asked.
Daun shook his head with an impish smile. "I'm meeting a friend in twenty minutes," he said. His expression segued into a frown. "Unless you think, you know, with the major and all?"
Moden shrugged. "He'll call us if he needs us," he said. "Don't get yourself so fucked up you can't function, that's all. But you can't be a hundred percent on all day forever."
"Yeah, well, this is nothing serious," the younger man said casually. "She's a nice enough girl, but it's just passing the time."
He glanced at Moden from the corners of his eyes. "Suppose the major's getting anywhere with the lady from the port office, sir?"
The logistics officer looked at Daun hard. "Do you suppose that's any of our business?" he asked.
Daun laughed without embarrassment. So far as he was concerned, there was no rank when guys talked about women. "Not business at all, sir," he said. "Though the Lord knows Potosi isn't short of that kind of business establishment."
Moden laughed also. "Yeah, well, we could ask Bob," he said. "But I think we won't, okay?"
The big man got to his feet. "Twenty minutes is time enough for a beer, kid. Sounds like you need to be slowed down some anyhow."
Pepe had raised the hovercraft's window even before Coke could open the passenger door. The youngest Luria's feelings about Coke were a complex blend of disdain, the hostility of a dominating male for a rival, and fear. Pepe was smart enough to know that Matthew Coke was someone he should fear.
Coke's feelings about Pepe were much simpler: Pepe was a scorpion Coke had found in his boot, to be dealt with directly—in both senses of the word.
The hovercraft wallowed into a turn and proceeded north, toward the spaceport. The chassis was a standard civilian model. With the full four passengers aboard and the armor added by some custom shop on Delos, the vehicle was seriously underpowered. It was a toy, just as Ramon had said.
"Here's the earnest money," Raul said abruptly. He extended a quivering hand between the front seats to pass Coke a credit chip.
"Now, how quickly can you get your gunmen here?" Ramon asked. "Madame Yarnell will be leaving Cantilucca in six days, maybe seven."
Coke took the chip and held it in his hand.
A pair of jitneys was passing in opposite directions in the street ahead. There was room for the hovercraft to fit between them, but the vehicle's damping program hadn't been upgraded to take account of the weight of the armor.
Pepe steered left. The car had by now accelerated to 45, perhaps 50 kph. The back end swayed outward, continuing the vector of the directional change after the driver centered his wheel again.
The left-side jitney carried a farm family—two adults, four children, and a vast burden of produce piled on top. The hovercraft sideswiped it with a bang and screech of metal. Three-meter-long stalks of sugar cane slapped the car's windshield. They left syrupy blurs across the film-darkened glass.
Pepe cursed viciously. He continued to overcorrect for the next hundred meters. The car fishtailed up the street, its paint scarred beyond the capacity of anyone on Cantilucca to match.
"The times are the same they've always been," Coke said. "Seven sidereal days, plus or minus, to get the message to Nieuw Friesland. A day to load the companies. Five days to get them here since the troopship will come direct. Plus whatever time it takes Camp Able to decide whether or not to take the contract. If they take the contract."
"You'll send the message now," Pepe said in a rasping whisper. "We're carrying you to the port to do that. And you'll see to it that your mercenaries do arrive on schedule, Master Major, or it will be very unfortunate for you and your friends. You don't expect to leave before all the business with Astra is completed to our satisfaction, do you?"
"Now, Pepe," Ramon said nervously. "We don't want the major to think that we don't trust him."
"I trust him," Pepe sneered. "Because he knows he's a dead man if he doesn't do what he's promised to do."
"What the major has promised . . ." Coke said in a thin voice as his spirit floated out of his body to observe. "Is that he'll inform his superiors of the situation on Cantilucca. I doubt they'll act as you desire. There's every reason to expect your Delian mistress will summon a large force of her own as soon as the FDF arrives. Camp Able isn't going to send two companies into a rat-fuck."
"Madame Yarnell is going to be recalled!" Ramon said.
They were beyond the outskirts of Potosi. The hovercraft had accelerated to about 75 kph, probably its best speed with this load. The vehicle pogoed over the bad surface, but the ride was more comfortable than it would have been in a jitney or the port van.
"I heard you before," Coke said. "When she leaves, I will immediately inform Camp Able of the fact."
Pepe gave him a look of boiling hatred. The flexible skirts of the car's plenum chamber brushed a tree-bole. Contact sent the vehicle in a slow carom toward the other side of the road.
"A bomb will go off in a consignment of Astra gage after it arrives on Delos," Raul Luria said in a voice as jagged as a crosscut saw.
"Grandpapa—" Pepe said.
"I will handle this," the Old Man retorted. "There will be a fire, perhaps great destruction. It will be far more important to the cartel than anything happening on Cantilucca is. When Madame Yarnell goes to Delos to investigate, that will be the moment to sweep Astra away forever."
"And by the time she comes back," Ramon added complacently, "there will be peace all across the planet, just as we all desire."
"I see . . . ." said Coke as a placeholder while he thought. "You don't think the cartel might take a serious view of this bomb?"
The car was nearing the spaceport reservation. Warned by his previous control problems, Pepe started the braking process in good time.
The young man looked at Coke. "Do you think I'm a fool?" he said. "We have nothing to do with the business. It's Astra gage, and its not traveling on a TST hull. If they do trace the particular drum back, they'll find it was placed in the shipment by a port flunky."
"Not one of our people," Ramon chuckled. "He knows nothing about it. He thinks he's working a scam to substitute tailings for pure gage. Even the whore we're working through doesn't know more than that."
The hovercraft pulled up in front of the passenger operations building. The idled fans imparted a low-frequency wobble to the vehicle as it rested on its skirts.
"Now will you send your message?" Pepe demanded,
"You bet," Coke said. "You needn't wait around—I'll find my own way back."
Coke waited until he'd closed the car door behind him before he keyed his commo helmet. Pilar Ortega would be inside at the desk, and he didn't want her to overhear either. She'd be glad to see him, as she always was . . . .
"Two and Four," he said, alerting Moden and Barbour. "I'm going to need information on a shipment of gage that went out yesterday or today. Somebody, probably a port official, doctored a manifest, and I need to know his name soonest."
Margulies stood at the front door, looking out through the triangular view port. The evening traffic was somewhat lighter than it had been with a thousand more gunmen in town, but civilians had reappeared on the street in nearly a great enough number to balance the loss.
The two police huddled in a corner of the saloon. At another table, Georg Hathaway chatted morosely with his friend Larrinaga.
"There we go," said Sten Moden with satisfaction. He expanded the sidebar into the main screen. "There's the anomaly, sure enough."
Bob Barbour sat in a folding chair beside the console. Moden had handled the equipment enough in his presence that Barbour no longer hovered like a mother hen when the logistics officer used the console.
The intelligence officer leaned forward to check the line Moden highlighted. "Serial numbers out of sequence?" he said. His doubt was evident only in the perfect neutrality with which he stated the evidence he saw.
"Not the Astra serial number," Moden explained with satisfaction. "That wouldn't mean anything. This is the transaction number, the slug the port computer gave the drum at initial processing. That ought to be perfectly linear, but see—this one appears in a sequence of drums delivered three days later."
"I'll be hanged," Barbour said. "I didn't know there were transaction numbers different from the manifest serials."
He looked at Moden. "Sten," he said. "You just taught me something."
The big man grinned. "A lot of people think supply is boring," he said. "I didn't find it that way."
Still grinning, though the expression took on a certain stiffness, he patted the scar of his left shoulder and added, "Sometimes it's way too exciting."
"Nothing's boring if it's in your soul," the intelligence officer said. "All right, do you want to run the check on who was on duty or shall I? When we cross-check the time the drum dropped out and the time it reappeared, we ought to have our boy."
"I'm coming in," the console reported in the voice of Johann Vierziger.
Moden looked up at Margulies. "Was he out with the major?" he asked.
"Just out," Barbour murmured before the security lieutenant could respond. "The major's still at the port."
"Waiting for us to answer him," Moden realized aloud. He got up from the console. "Go ahead, Bob. Do the personnel check. Two hands'll get the data out quicker."
He grinned. "And anyway, you're going to have kittens if I don't let you play with your lady, here."
When Margulies pulled the door a crack open, Vierziger entered the lobby of Hathaway House wraith-swift. He looked at the men at the console. "You're succeeding?" he asked.
"So far, so good," Barbour murmured as his fingers danced over the keys. He didn't look up from his work, the two parallel half-screens of data which he was correlating.
"I'm glad somebody's doing something useful," Vierziger said in a voice of bridled fury. He walked into the saloon alcove.
Margulies turned so that her sergeant was within the arc of her vision, though she instinctively avoided focusing on Vierziger. Tonight he gave the impression of a door glowing white with the fire behind it, restrained until something happens to destroy the panel's integrity. After that—
"You!" Vierziger said. "Larrinaga. What are you doing here?"
The local man looked at the dapper Frisian. For a moment Mary Margulies thought Larrinaga was going to make a smart remark. She knew she wasn't fast enough to stop Vierziger if that happened, she didn't think any human being was fast enough.
Larrinaga swallowed and said, "Nothing, I suppose. That's all I've done for a long time."
"Get up," Vierziger said. Larrinaga blinked at him.
"Get up!" Vierziger repeated, his voice cutting like a bread knife honed to a wire edge. His left hand reached for Larrinaga's throat.
Georg Hathaway rose from his chair and backed away, mumbling to himself. Larrinaga jumped to his feet. "Are you going to kill me?" he shouted. "Go on! That way maybe I'll see Suzette again!"
"Johann—" Mary Margulies said. Her arms were out to her sides; her hands spread wide.
Vierziger slapped the local man, an open-handed blow only to the cheek. It cracked like a pistol shot and knocked Larrinaga to the floor.
"Vierziger, slow down," Sten Moden said, stepping from the console into the bar alcove. His manner was neither threatening nor afraid. He moved like a storm blowing off the sea.
With the same hand he'd used to slap, his left, Vierziger reached into his purse. He tossed several credit chips onto Larrinaga's chest.
"There you go!" he said. "Three hundred thalers, enough to get you off this cesspool of a world and off to somewhere that you can be a man again. Do you want to do that? Do you want to be a man?"
Larrinaga got to his feet. "I am a man, Master Vierziger," he said in a raspy voice. He met Vierziger's eyes, and that took balls even if he really wanted to die. Margulies knew there were worse things than death, and she was pretty sure that Johann Vierziger had seen some of them.
Moden stood quietly, arm's length from the pair of men. The situation was under control. He didn't want to draw attention to himself by moving again.
Larrinaga gathered the credit chips in his hand and offered them back to the Frisian. Vierziger didn't move.
Larrinaga put the money on the table at which he'd been sitting. "Thank you for the offer," he said. "I don't choose to leave Cantilucca while . . . what remains of my wife is here. But I'm not going to buy our house back by sitting here and cadging drinks, am I?"
He stepped around Vierziger because the Frisian wouldn't shift to let him by. Larrinaga nodded to Moden and to Margulies. "Thank you for your hospitality, Georg," he called to Hathaway. "I won't return until I'm able to pay down my bill, though."
He pulled open the front door and was gone. The mark of Vierziger's hand on his sallow cheek blazed like a flag.
"Oh my goodness," mumbled Georg Hathaway. He set upright the chair that had fallen over. "Oh my goodness!"
Moden sat down beside Bob Barbour. When things were serious, the big man seemed more like a force of nature than a human being.
Margulies let out a deep sigh of relief. She looked at Vierziger and shook her head ruefully. "You know," she said, "I gotta hand it to you, Johann. You may just have saved that silly bastard."
Vierziger looked at her. She remembered what she'd thought about the things he'd seen. "Nobody can save another person," he said, so quietly that Margulies thought perhaps she'd imagined the words.
Vierziger walked to the staircase. "Niko!" he called. "Come down here, please, with your kit. We have work to do."
Sten Moden glanced at the security lieutenant. He raised an eyebrow. Margulies shrugged.
Daun appeared at the top of the stairs, trying to buckle his equipment belt one-handed. The other hand held his larger equipment case and the sling of his sub-machine gun.
"What's up?" he asked, jouncing down the steps.
"We're going to check out security for our new employers," Vierziger said. He opened the coat closet beside the front door and took out the attaché case he'd put there. The case was made of—at least covered with—reptile hide of some sort, black and shiny and as exquisite as every other part of Vierziger's ensemble.
The only weapon he carried was the pistol over his right hip.
"Driving or walking?" the sensor tech asked. He stopped in the lobby and fastened the belt properly.
"You're driving us," Vierziger answered. "I'll give you directions."
He nodded goodbye to the others as he closed the door behind him.
"Doesn't handle himself much like a sergeant, does he?" Sten Moden said to nobody in particular after the door closed.
"Yeah, I noticed that too," Margulies said dryly. "Sten, did you know Joachim Steuben? Colonel Hammer's hit man?"
Moden shrugged. "Saw him once, a long way away. I'd heard he was dead."
"He is dead," Margulies said. "I saw the incident report. Took a 2-cm bolt slap between the shoulder-blades. No trouble with the identification—head and limbs weren't touched. But there's no curst doubt he was dead."
The two officers looked at the armored door without speaking further.
"Bingo!" said Barbour. He'd gone on with his search while everyone else was focused on Johann Vierziger. "I've got what the major's looking for!"
"Well, call it in to him," Sten Moden said. "Sounded like he meant it when he said ASAP."
Barbour touched the Channel 1 button on the console.
Mary Margulies leaned over the intelligence officer's shoulder to see the highlighted name. "Cargo Supervisor Terence Ortega," she read aloud. She frowned. "The name's familiar for some reason."
"Now," said Johann Vierziger as the door to the underground garage quivered. Daun ran the jitney forward five meters, across the head of the ramp.
Suterbilt's armored four-wheeled van pulled halfway through the doorway. The driver slammed on his brakes in a panic when he realized the lighter vehicle was halted across his passage.
Vierziger stepped off the back of the jitney with the attaché case in his left hand and a bright smile on his face. The vans headlights fell across him. "Master Suterbilt!" he called in a cheerful voice. "Just the man we're looking for! We've identified a security problem."
The van's driver opened the door and stepped out onto his running board. He pointed a bell-mouthed mob gun through the crack at the Frisian. Vierziger walked over and extended his right hand to the driver. The local man aimed the mob gun skyward and shook hands, looking confused.
"Who are you?" Suterbilt called from inside the vehicle. After a moment, he got out and walked a step up the ramp.
"Johann Vierziger of the Frisian Defense Forces," Vierziger answered enthusiastically. "We've run a security check on L'Escorial—and yourself, of course, since you're really the most important—"
"I'm not a member of any local organization!" Suterbilt interrupted hastily. "I work for Trans-Star Trading."
"Of course you do," Vierziger agreed with a patently oily smile. "Of course. But—you can see how significant you are to us, to the FDF, surely?"
He waved his hand toward the street traffic. "That other lot, they're boobs with guns. They don't matter to professionals like ourselves, whatever color they happen to be wearing when we go to work. But you, Master Suterbilt . . . Anything that could affect our payment is a matter of serious concern."
The TST offices were on the second floor of the building Suterbilt was leaving on his way home. He glanced up at the block of lighted windows.
"We have a security system as well as guards," he said in dawning nervousness. "Do you think . . .?"
"It's not here that we foresee a problem," Vierziger explained. "After all, an attack on TST doesn't affect you personally. We're more concerned that the work of art you have in an outlying dwelling would be targeted. You have a Suzette, do you not? A psychic ambiance that's probably worth close to the value of the warehouse which Astra has already destroyed."
Except for the pistol on his hip, Vierziger looked like an unusually well-dressed businessman from a highly developed world. The reptile-skin case caught the light of passing vehicles as he gestured with it. The shimmer drew attention away from his right hand—gun hand—which moved scarcely at all.
"What could they possibly gain by damaging the ambiance?" the factor asked in amazement. "Anyway, I've thought of that. There's six guards in the house at all times. As thick as the walls are, they could hold out for days if there was trouble."
Suterbilt's driver settled back into his seat. He shifted his gaze between his principal, standing beside the van, and Niko Daun seated in the saddle of the jitney with a vaguely positive expression.
"Precisely!" Vierziger said, leaving Suterbilt even more puzzled. "And what would you give to prevent the destruction of that valuable work of art, Master Suterbilt? Would you cancel the FDF's contract?"
"Well, I wouldn't—" the factor began.
"And more to the point," Vierziger said, steamrollering the reply "does Astra think you might do that? They've struck unexpectedly once, you remember. That success will encourage them to choose the next weak point."
"There's nothing weak about it!" Suterbilt insisted. "I have guards and—"
"And an alarm system, just as the L'Escorial warehouse had!" Vierziger snapped. "If you don't mind, sir, why don't we finish this discussion in place—at the threatened location. I can point out the problems to you as well as the steps we'll take to solve them."
"I wasn't planning—"
Vierziger turned and gestured imperiously with the attaché case. "Specialist Daun!" he ordered. "Back up your cyclo, please. When the car pulls out of the drive, you'll be able to park in the garage and get in with us. I want you along."
He looked at Suterbilt again. "That is all right, isn't it?" he said. "I'm concerned that Astra sympathizers or even mere vandals will deface the vehicle if it's not protected. Specialist Daun's expertise is quite important for our assessment."
Suterbilt swallowed. "Well, I—" he said. "Yes, of course, park your car in space twelve. I'll drop you off here again when we're done."
He frowned. "This isn't going to take very long, is it?"
"Tsk!" Vierziger said. "Ten minutes, fifteen at most. But if it's not done, the damage could be irreparable."
He slipped past Suterbilt and into the back of the van as though he'd been formally invited to do so. After a moment, Suterbilt sighed and got in beside the Frisian.
It would be simpler to carry out the inspection than to continue the discussion. Besides, Suterbilt got an uncomfortable feeling when he argued with the dapper stranger. It was as though he was eye to eye with a cobra, or perhaps a shark.
"Roger," Coke said, looking over the counter at Pilar Ortega as he spoke into the pickup of his commo helmet. "One out."
The artificial intelligence in the helmet disconnected the circuit at the word "out."
Pilar glanced up with a smile that faded when she saw the set of Matthew Coke's face. They'd spent long enough together during the time the Frisian had been on Cantilucca that she was beginning to read even expressions meant to be noncommittal.
"Bad news?" she asked. Her voice quivered on the second word. No one else was present in the passenger services building; Pilar had been in the process of shutting up for the evening.
Coke looked around, more to provide a moment to think than because he expected there would be anything to see. A freighter well across the field lifted in a rainbow of ionized atoms. Pilar had processed the two passengers, salesmen traveling in irrigation and cultivating machinery, through the boarding checks an hour before.
"Expected news," Coke said. He met the woman's eyes. "Bad news, yeah."
He took a deep breath. "Pilar," he said, "you've got to get off Cantilucca immediately. Pack a bag with enough clothes to wear, take any—"
She was staring at him in horror. Her right hand clasped the crucifix.
"—knick-knacks that you absolutely have to have," Coke continued, plowing forward even though the woman looked as if he'd started to disrobe in the middle of the office. "You can go anywhere, except not Delos, and you've got to—"
"Matthew! Stop this!" Pilar said.
"—go now," Coke blurted. "Pilar, please, I don't want to say this—"
"Stop, Matthew!" she cried.
The rainbow curtain of light lifted rapidly. It raced across the terrazzo floor as the freighter climbed vertically from the port. The deep thrum of the starship's engines made the prefabricated building shudder with familiar vibrations.
Coke leaned across the counter. He hugged Pilar tightly to him so that he couldn't look at her face.
"Pilar," he said quickly, crisply. "Terry, your husband Terry, has screwed up really badly. He's done something that'll cost the Delos cartel millions of pesos, maybe tens of millions. When they investigate they'll spot him, just as my people did. They'll kill him and everybody close to him as slowly as they can make it happen. You've got to get out of the way now, before it happens."
He thought that Pilar would push him away, though they'd held each other past evenings in the privacy of her suite. Instead she pressed her hands against his shoulder blades. "Matthew," she said, "why are you saying this?"
"I'll give you money, money's not a problem," he said. "Time is a problem. If you're still around when the cartel comes looking, I don't know what, what your chances'll be no matter how I try."
"Please," Pilar said in a subdued tone. She straightened against his pull. He let her go.
"Matthew," she said. "Even if what you say is true, I can't abandon Terry. You know—"
"Pilar, he's abandoned you!" Coke shouted. "He hasn't been home to sleep for a week! Three days ago he picked up some of his clothes while you were—"
"Matthew! How did you know that?"
"While you were at work, curse it, and I know it because I'm having him watched, that's how I bloody know it!"
She turned her back. Her shoulders hunched over her sobs. "You don't understand," she cried. "What Terry does is between him and the Lord. I won't abandon him."
Coke threw open the gate in the counter and stepped inside. Pilar flinched away, but he grabbed her by the upper arms. "All right, Pilar," he said. "You won't go without your husband, so let's get him."
She didn't resist as the Frisian walked her toward the side door where the van was parked. The door opened ahead of them. A Marvelan, one of the clerks from the office next door, stuck his head in. "Hey, Pilar," he said. "Tomorrow will you cover for—"
He finally noticed Coke and Ortega in an apparent embrace. "Oh," he concluded.
Coke cleared the Marvelan out of their way by pointing a finger like a lance tip. "Go do your own job for a change!" the Frisian shouted. "Pretend you're good for something!"
He handed Pilar into the van and stepped around to the driver's side. The key was already in his pocket. He'd driven the pair of them ever since the first night he escorted Pilar home.
The freighter had vanished into orbit, preparatory to entering Transit space. The two moons were chips on the eastern horizon.
"Where are we going, Matthew?" the woman asked softly.
"I told you," he said. The diesel spun thirty seconds before it caught. He'd meant to have Sten's mechanic friend work the cursed thing over, but he didn't suppose it mattered any longer. "We're going to get your husband and I'll put both of you on the next ship out of here."
He revved the engine to keep it well above its lumpy idle while he dropped the transmission into gear. The van lurched forward. Only when they were twenty meters along the driveway did Coke add the load of the headlight to his demands on the stumbling engine.
"I hope the two of you will find a happy life in your new home," he added bitterly.
Suterbilt got out of the van in front of a one-story free-standing structure on the northern outskirts of Potosi. The walls were sheer and windowless, and the door would have done for a bank vault.
"You see?" the factor said with a sweep of his arm. "No common walls or floors to break in through. This is probably the safest place in the whole town. A fortress!"
"If it were a fortress," Johann Vierziger said as he followed Suterbilt from the vehicle, "it would have firing ports. That's the obvious first problem here."
He sauntered toward the door. Behind him, Suterbilt wore a look of dawning concern.
"Larrinaga must really have been in the money to afford this," Niko Daun observed as he brought up the rear. "You wouldn't guess that to see him now, would you?"
"What?" said Suterbilt. "Well, yes, I suppose he was doing rather well. It was Larrinaga's competition that drove that old fool Roberson to tie in with Astra, to tell the truth."
The factor laughed with cruel humor. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire, that was," he added. "If I'm feeling kindly after we've cleaned out the Astras, I'll let Roberson go off-planet alive."
He pressed the call button beside the door. A melodious chime sounded, blurred by the thickness of the walls. Nothing else happened for a moment.
"And," Vierziger noted aloud, "none of the so-called guards are keeping a watch on the exterior display."
He nodded upward toward the miniature lens array above the door. The camera fed a surveillance display inside.
Suterbilt pursed his lips.
Locks within the panel chuckled liquidly as the mechanism drew them back. A man inside grunted and pushed the heavy door open. He wore a red headband and tried to stand at attention when he'd accomplished his task. Three other men stumbled into the entryway behind him, tucking in their clothes and checking weapons that they'd obviously just grabbed.
"Ah, g'day, sir," the guard with the headband said. "I, ah, we weren't expecting you tonight."
The last two guards appeared from the living area beyond. One of them was holding the other upright. The front of the latter man's tunic was stiff with dried vomit. His eyes were open, but they didn't focus.
"You normally call ahead, I gather," Vierziger said to the factor. A sneer was implicit in his dry tone.
"These gentlemen are security specialists," Suterbilt said harshly. "They're here to view the premises."
Vierziger walked into the house. "And to look at the ambiance itself," he said coolly.
He raised his attaché case, holding it between himself and the guard. The gesture was similar to that of a woman whisking her long skirt away as she passes dog droppings on the sidewalk. When he was clear, he set the case down beside the wall.
The interior of the house was pretty much of a pig sty. Liquor bottles and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of empty stim cones littered the floors. The building had a sophisticated environmental system to exchange outside air, but the filters had been unable to control the stench of human wastes, vomit, and unwashed bodies.
There was no sign of women, though. Apparently Suterbilt's orders that no outsiders should be admitted had been obeyed to the letter.
The factor rapped his knuckles on a wall to direct attention away from the state of housekeeping which he'd permitted. "See these?" he said. "The whole place is a ceramic mono-casting, 20 centimeters thick on the outside. You could shoot straight into a wall and not so much as scar it!"
Vierziger sniffed. "Ceramics are all very well so long as you don't exceed their strength moduli," he said. He walked down the hall, deliberately shuffling his feet sideways to sweep litter out of his path. "One additional straw beyond that and you've got sand, not armor."
"Well, yes, but . . ." Suterbilt said. "Ah—the ambiance is at the end of the hall. It was the master bedroom."
"I assumed that," Vierziger sneered. "I'm glad you had sense enough to lock your guard slugs away from it. Otherwise there wouldn't be anything left for Astra to threaten, would there?"
Niko sniffed. "Not much of a lock," he said. It was an add-on, cemented to the panel and jamb. "I guess it's good enough, though."
The guards were restive and concerned. One of them had drunk enough to be obviously angry, but a pair of his fellows gripped his wrists. The group was armed with the assortment of shoulder weapons, pistols and knives that had been typical street wear for the gangsters before Madame Yarnell arrived.
"I'll open it for you," Suterbilt said, stepping forward with an electronic key. Vierziger's sneering superiority had reduced the factor to nervous acquiescence with every demand, spoken or not.
The room illuminated itself softly when the door opened. The fixtures in the portion of the house which the guards occupied had been dimmed over the months by a grimy miasma. Here the light, though subdued, had the purity of evening over a meadow.
"Nice installation work," Niko said as he surveyed the bare room. "Some artists, they think the hardware is beneath them. Not her."
"What?" Suterbilt said. "Are you joking? I had the furniture removed. Quite a nice bed. I'm using it myself."
"No, no," the sensor tech said. "The ambiance, of course. Look at these heads."
Daun walked into the center of the room. His focus on the psychic ambiance burned through the layers of good humor which made him easy to get along with. Niko Daun liked to be alone when he was working . . . and people who'd been around him while he was in work mode didn't care to repeat the experience.
"There," he said, pointing to a glint in the ceiling, a rubidium-plated bead the size of a man's thumbnail. "There, there, there, there"—the sidewalls—"and the main board here"—he pointed to the shimmering 15-centimeter disk in the center of the floor—"where the bed would keep people from walking on it. Though I doubt that would have hurt the resolution, the way she's got the projectors bedded. Just look at the way she faired them into the matrix!"
"Yes, it can't be removed without destroying the whole thing," Suterbilt said. "And probably the house as well."
Daun turned on him with the casual prickliness of a cat. "Don't talk nonsense!" the technician snapped.
"Specialist Daun," Vierziger said smoothly "we're here to—"
"Look," Daun said, the first time anybody who knew Johann Vierziger had interrupted him in a long while. "Since we're here, I'm going to try the ambiance. This is probably the only time I'll be around a genuine Suzette."
Nothing in the sensor tech's tone suggested he was willing to discuss the matter further. As he spoke, he took a flat, palm-sized device from his smaller toolkit and opened its keyboard.
Vierziger laid the tips of his left index and middle fingers on Daun's wrist. "Master Suterbilt will switch on the ambiance for us, I'm sure," Vierziger said.
"Yes, yes, but I'm in a hurry," the factor grumbled. He took another key from his wallet. He flicked the on switch in the air without result. "Let's see . . ."
"Stand over here," Daun said, gesturing Suterbilt to a point near where the head of the bed would have been.
Suterbilt frowned but obeyed.
"I could have turned it on easier," Daun grumbled under his breath to the other Frisian.
"You could remove the work so that it could be reconstructed?" Vierziger murmured back.
"Huh?" said Daun. "Course I could. Don't be an idiot. The adhesive'll powder at twenty-eight point nine kilohertz. Take about three seconds each. And realigning them afterward, that's no sw—"
The room shimmered out of the present and into a golden timelessness. Suterbilt had finally managed to trigger the ambiance with his low-powered key.
Vierziger was in an individual paradise. Foliage waved slowly in breezes the viewer could not feel, and the air was perfumed with life itself.
Movement was thought-swift and effortless. The trees mounted like towers holding the sky, far taller than was possible for normal vegetation which fed its branches by osmosis against the drag of gravity. The viewers' minds could ascend the roughness of the bark, feel the single-celled micro-flora which gave texture and color to the trunks, or exist as the entire world—plant, animal, and the supporting soil beneath.
The ambiance was more real than the sidereal universe to those within its pattern of impinging stimuli. Through it all, informing it all, was the single warm presence of its creator.
". . . all that remains of my wife . . ." Larrinaga had said. He was right, and he was perhaps right as well that Suzette was a saint.
That wasn't a subject on which Vierziger felt competent to judge.
The glow dimmed, vanished. Physical reality reasserted itself and memory of the ambiance sucked itself down a wormhole into the unconscious of the men who had experienced it.
Suterbilt shook himself. "I ought to come here more often," he said. "It relaxes me."
Niko Daun looked at the projection heads, shaking his head in delight. "Amazing," he said. "Absolutely amazing. I wish I could meet her."
"I think," said Vierziger, "that you just did."
The effect was no more than a mental hologram; not life, not even something alive. But Vierziger could understand why Larrinaga believed his wife was still present in the ambiance. He supposed that was all you really had of any artist, and perhaps of any human being: the things they had done.
"We can go now," Vierziger said aloud. His left hand gestured Daun and Suterbilt toward the bedroom door, as if he and not the factor were the host.
The guards had returned to the main living area of the house, an arc of floor raised three steps on one end to set off, without a vertical barrier, the kitchen/dining facilities from the relaxation area. A hologram display blared loud music to accompany a pornographic recording.
The furniture was cheap, obviously junk brought in for the guards when Suterbilt carried off the original furnishings. It had been wrecked—shot, slashed, and broken apart. Two of the men sprawled on the floor, filthy though it was. The man with the headband got up from a legless sofa when the factor reappeared.
"Sir?" the guard asked.
"Keep a better lookout, for one thing!" Suterbilt snapped. He looked over at Vierziger. "Do you have anything to add?"
"Not at the moment," Vierziger said coolly. "I'll make my recommendations in two days."
He looked around the mess and the men guarding it. "They will be expensive to carry out, that I can assure you. But necessary."
The three men walked outside. Suterbilt's driver switched on the pump which powered the van's four wheel-hub hydraulic motors.
Vierziger swung the house door almost to, then caught the panel just before it clanged home and locked. "Blood!" he snapped. "I've left my briefcase."
He pivoted back into the house, pulling the door closed behind him. The guard wearing the headband was halfway back to the hologram. He turned, opening his mouth to speak.
"I forgot—" Vierziger began.
The door rang against its jamb. The Frisian drew and fired his pistol eight times in a single flowing motion.
The man with the headband lurched backward, flinging his hands in the air. The first bolt had blown out the thin bones of his nose and emptied his eye-sockets.
The chest of a burly, blond-haired guard vanished in a red flash and a deafening roar. Vierziger hadn't noticed the string of grenades the fellow was wearing beneath a light jumper. The bolt that should have ruptured the guard's aorta instead set off a secondary explosion.
The blast flung the remaining guards in four separate directions, complicating the Frisian's task. It saved the man still seated on the sofa—for the few hundredths of a second before a second bolt slapped his temple while the ceramic wall behind where his head had been glowed white from the previous round.
Each of the men sprawled on the floor before the shooting started took a round. One of them was faceless and screaming from the grenade blast. The bolt that ruptured his skull was a mercy.
The last guard—and it was all in a half second punctuated by the grenade—was turning with a fully-automatic shotgun. Centrifugal force made his long red hair stand out like a porcupine's quills. The cascade of hair caught the first bolt. It vanished in a red fireball, drinking the cyan plasma and dissipating its force.
Vierziger's trigger twitched a last time. His bolt punched the guard's scream back through his palate.
The shotgun fired three times before it jammed. Aerofoil projectiles, designed to spread wider than spherical pellets, zinged from the walls and ceiling. One traced a line as thin as a razor cut across the Frisian's right cheek.
The living area was bloody chaos.
A toolkit ammo pouch on the left side of Vierziger's belt balanced the weight of the pistol he carried on the right. He took out a spanner and turned the white, shimmering barrel off the weapon's receiver and dropped it on the floor. Rapid fire had eroded the iridium to half its original thickness. The remainder of the refractory metal was so hot that it deformed when it bounced on the cast flooring.
Vierziger fitted a fresh barrel—the kit held two—and reloaded the pistol, then holstered it again. The process of replacing the shot-out barrel had taken less than thirty seconds.
The house stank of ozone and bodies ripped apart and half burned. The plasticizer of the grenade had a pungent reek, unpleasant and probably poisonous in a confined space. Vierziger ignored it.
Some of the men's clothing was afire. An arc of garbage centered on the grenade explosion burned also, though all the fires seemed likely to smolder out rather than build into a major conflagration.
Vierziger's attaché case was just inside the living area, where he'd set it behind a pile of trash when he entered the house behind Suterbilt. He opened the case and took out a cylindrical blasting device 20 centimeters across and half that in depth. He peeled the protective layer off one end, stuck the charge on the front wall near the door, and twisted the dial of delay fuze to one hour.
Vierziger had printed a message on a card before he left Hathaway House. He stuck that to the wall just below the explosive device, then surveyed the room for one last time.
One of the bodies twitched like a decorticated frog. The burning clothes had smothered themselves in veils of bitter smoke. Behind the gray, the hologram danced, more enticing for the partial coverage than it had been when the performers' tired flesh was uncompromisingly revealed.
Vierziger opened the door. The card on the wall read:
REMOVE THE AMBIANCE AND GET BACK ASAP
"All right, I'll tell him!" the Frisian called over his shoulder as he stepped outside.
Standing with his hand on the door he held ajar, Vierziger said to the sensor tech, "Daun, they're having problems with the hue of their hologram projector. I told them you could fix it in three minutes at the outside."
He gestured Niko toward the doorway. "Get at it. I don't want to wait longer than I have to."
"Say!" said the factor. "I don't want to wait at all! I've already wasted half an hour."
Vierziger closed the door behind Daun and stood with his back to it. "Relax," he said. "Remember, you said you needed to use the ambiance more often anyway. Besides, if those turds don't have the projector to amuse them, who knows what they'll get up to?"
Suterbilt sighed. "Yes, I suppose there's that," he agreed.
He grimaced. The van's headlights were on. This far out of town, their side-scatter was the only illumination. "Do you really think expensive changes will be necessary?" the factor asked.
Vierziger shrugged. "It's really a pair of changes," he said. "Part of the guard force has to be outside. Not really to do anything—just to be a tripwire so that if they're killed, the men inside have warning of an attack. But you also have to provide firing ports for the guards inside."
"That's impossible!" Suterbilt said. "You can't cut holes in these walls!" He slapped one to underscore his point.
"It's not impossible," the Frisian said. The lighted half of his face drew up in a deliberate sneer. "It's simply very expensive—as I said. And necessary. I'll have a detailed plan for you in two days."
The door began to swing open. Vierziger stepped forward, moving Suterbilt back a pace. "Any trouble, Daun?" Vierziger asked over his shoulder.
Niko looked at his fellow Frisian. "No," he said. "No, I took care of my end."
He didn't say anything more during the drive back to the TST offices, and he only once looked directly at Johann Vierziger.
Vierziger smiled at him.
"Stay in the car," Coke ordered harshly. He thrust his sub-machine gun at Pilar. Her hands wouldn't close on the dense metal and plastic. The weapon slipped into her lap. "If anybody gives you trouble, shoot them. It's off safe and there's one up the spout. Just fucking use it."
He'd stopped the port operations van in front of a six-story structure on the spaceport end of Potosi. Except for the location, the building was very similar to the one which held the Ortegas'—which held Pilar's—apartment. The ground floor was a club, The Red Rooster, which was beginning to get underway for the evening.
The doorman bouncer realized that Coke intended to leave the vehicle parked in front while he went up the stairs beside the club's entrance. The doorman stepped toward Coke and shouted, "Hey dickhead!"
Coke pointed his left index finger at the man's face. His right hand hung out at his side. The hand was crooked on a level with the butt of his pistol.
"Don't even think about it," the Frisian warned. The flat assurance of his voice was more threatening than a snarl.
The doorman backed inside the club. Coke went up the stairs two at a time.
The door off the second-floor landing was metal-faced. The jamb was wood, however, and the interior wall didn't look particularly sturdy either.
Coke hammered on the panel with his knuckles. "Ortega!" he called. "Front and center! This is an emergency!"
"Hey bud!" somebody called from below. Coke looked down.
A man close to two meters tall, wearing an electric-green jumpsuit, had swung out of the club entrance. He held a combination weapon, a pneumatic gun firing explosive projectiles through a 30-cm long barrel with a shock baton of twice that length mounted beneath the muzzle like a bayonet.
"Serafina's busy!" he shouted as he pounded up the stairs toward Coke. "Now, buddy, you can wait or I can line you up with somebody just as sweet. But don't you go—"
Coke judged his moment. He kicked when the pimp was three steps below him. The gun was pointed up and to the left in rhythm with the tall man's strides. Coke's boot caught the pimp's jaw and flung him down the stairs, limbs flailing.
Coke turned to the door. Instead of knocking again, he took a flat ring charge from a pouch on his equipment belt, peeled off the protective layer, and pasted the charge around the door latch.
He pulled the igniter wire and jumped several steps down the stairs to get clear of the blast. "Fire in the hole!" he shouted from reflex.
The charge went off with a flat whack! A fragment of metal whined off the opposite wall. The door jounced on its hinges and stood ajar in a haze of gray smoke.
Coke pulled the panel fully open but kept his body behind the wall. A stunner needle snapped through the dissipating smoke. It sparkled minusculy against the opposite side of the stairwell.
"Ortega!" Coke shouted. "The drum you substituted in the gage going off yesterday on the Tellurian Queen—there's a bomb in it. The cartel's stocks on Delos are going up in smoke three days from now, and when they do people are going to be looking for you. You've got to get off-planet now!"
"Get out of here," a man called. "Get out of here! I don't know what you're talking about!"
A burst of a dozen stun needles hissed and popped through the opening.
Coke fumbled at his equipment belt, feeling for a smoke grenade. He'd go in with his visor on thermal—
"Matthew!" Pilar screamed. Her sub-machine gun ripped cyan runs in the night.
Coke drew as he turned. The street door's jamb and lintel were a shower of shattered concrete from the cyan bolts. The tall pimp had gotten safe to the shelter of the stairwell before Pilar fired.
The pimp aimed his weapon. Coke shot him in the chest and face.
The pimp jerked his trigger. The pneumatic gun coughed, recoiling out of the dying man's grip. The heavy shell hit three steps above the landing and burst, showering the stairwell with shrapnel and orange light.
Coke, startled by the blast and prickles from the shell, sprayed three more bolts. He hit the pimp only once—in the ankle as he fell backward. The fellow was dead already, or at least he would be in the next minute or two.
"Ortega!" Coke repeated. His ears were ringing. "Come on out. I won't hurt you, and you don't have a lot of time."
"Matthew, you mustn't kill him!" Pilar called. She was at the bottom of the staircase. She tried to step past the tall man. His thrashing arm struck her calf. She came up anyway, her face pale and her sub-machine gun's muzzle shimmering brighter than the stairwell glowstrip.
"Go back!" Coke ordered. She climbed toward him anyway.
The explosive shell had flung the room door shut again. Coke reached for it with his left hand. The panel opened from the inside. A naked woman stepped out onto the landing.
Her name—the name she went by, anyway—was Serafina Amoretta. Coke had seen her image, but that hadn't prepared him for her youth. She couldn't be more than 14 standard years, though her breasts and hips were full.
"Who do you think you are?" she shouted in bright-eyed fury. Perhaps she was on gage or other drugs, though she seemed alert enough. "Do you think you'll get me by coming here like this? Well, you won't!"
Serafina stood with her fists on her hips, glaring at Coke on the step below her. There was no sign that the corpse of her pimp or the gun in the hand of his killer affected her in any way. She didn't shave or pluck her body, but there was only a halo of hair surrounding the lips of her vulva.
"I don't want you," Coke said. "I'm here for Terence Ortega, to keep him from being killed by your little game."
The pistol in his hand embarrassed him. He tried to holster it again. He was awkward now in the aftermath of the shooting. He managed to sear the side of his rib cage with the hot muzzle.
"You want Terry?" Serafina caroled in raucous delight. "So that's it, is it? His frigid wife sent you to get him back? Terry, come out here. Now!"
Coke risked a look over his shoulder. He prayed that Pilar would have returned to the van, but she hadn't, she was just below him. Her lips trembled, and her face had no expression.
The door behind Serafina moved. A man looked out nervously, then stepped the rest of the way. He carried a needle stunner in one hand and held his trousers before him as a veil. He hadn't managed to get his legs into the openings.
"See who's here, Terry?" Serafina said, cocking her head so that she could watch the man out of the corner of her eyes. "She's here to take you back with a gun!"
"That's nothing to do with it!" Coke said. "I tell you, there was a bomb in the drum you thought was refinery tailings. You've got to disappear before the folks on Delos learn what I already know."
"Lies!" Serafina cried. "All lies!"
Her gaze slipped past Coke to Pilar. "Do you want to shoot me, bitch? It won't get you Terry back, you know. He'll never go back to you now that he knows what it's like to fuck a real woman!"
Ortega had been a good-looking man once. He still had the face, but standing nude on the landing made his paunch and generally run-down appearance painfully evident. Part of Coke's mind found time to wonder at what Serafina Amoretta saw in the fellow.
"Look," the Frisian said desperately. "You can lie to me, but it won't do you a bit of good with the enforcers from Delos, you know that. And L'Escorial, its L'Escorial that planned this, they'll be curst sure Delos learns who planted the bomb because they don't want suspicion falling on them."
"You can't have Terry and you can't have me!" Serafina cried. She groped behind her and caught the hand with which Ortega held up his trousers. She jerked the garment from him, tossed it down the steps, and then drew his hand forward to cup her breast. "Do you see! Your lies get you nothing. Nothing!"
There was a clatter behind Coke. He glanced back. Pilar had dropped the sub-machine gun. She was stumbling down the stairs.
"Wait!" he called.
"You see!" Serafina said. She jutted her hips backward against Ortega's groin and wriggled. "You see!"
Coke backed down the stairs. He didn't dare turn away from the needle stunner.
His boot jarred the sub-machine gun. He snatched the weapon up. For a moment he imagined blasting the couple on the landing to doll rags. No, the cartel would take care of that . . .
He reached the bottom of the stairs. He heard the van's diesel roar to life. Serafina turned, drawing Ortega with her back into the room. Coke ran out into the street. He was too late. The van was a block and a half away, still accelerating.
A crowd had gathered at a discreet distance, drawn by the shooting and the corpse lying half in, half out of the stairwell. The pimp's eyes were glazed below the ruin of his forehead.
"One, this is Four," Coke's commo helmet announced in the voice of Lieutenant Barbour. "Something's happened at what used to be Larrinaga's house. I think you'd better be present when L'Escorial gets to checking. Do you have transportation? Over."
"That's a negative, Four," Coke said, watching the port operations van disappear in the distance. "Over."
"Roger, somebody'll pick you up on the way," Barbour said. "Four out."
Matthew Coke stared into the night. Spectators shifted when his blank expression fell across them, but they were only blurs to his consciousness.
He tried to change the sub-machine gun's half-expended magazine for a full one. He had to give up the attempt, because his hands were trembling too badly.
Metal scraps and pieces of broken glass hung from an ankle-height string concealed in the broad-leafed ground cover. Despite his visor's light amplification, Vierziger would have missed the warning device if he hadn't been looking for something of the sort. He knelt and tugged the trip-line with his left hand, making the trash rattle.
The only response was greater stillness.
"Larrinaga," Vierziger called in a low voice.
There was a rustle from the bole of the fallen tree. "Who's there?" Larrinaga demanded.
Larrinaga was crouched in the opening, gripping a club with metal spikes. He wouldn't be able to make out Vierziger's crouching form against the background of the trees between him and the rear of Potosi's buildings.
"Vierziger," the Frisian said. He switched on the mini-flood in his left hand.
Larrinaga jumped as abruptly as if Vierziger had shot him. His head knocked against the lip of his shelter, but the punky wood cushioned the blow.
Vierziger stood up. "Don't worry," he said with the touch of a sneer in his voice. "I'm not here to put you out of your misery."
The local man scrambled to his feet. The intense light made him sneeze. Vierziger slid the control down, dimming the glare to a yellow glow.
"What do you want then?" Larrinaga said. He seemed to notice the club for the first time. He dropped it at his feet.
Vierziger's lips quirked with wry approval. He clipped the dimmed light to his belt, then slid the strap of his attaché case off his left shoulder. His right hand remained free at all times.
"Here," Vierziger said. "Take it and get to the port. You're booked on the Argent Server and she lifts in twenty minutes. You'd better be aboard, because I suspect it's going to be a while before any later ship gets clearance."
"I can't—" Larrinaga said.
"There's money in the case," the Frisian snarled. "And there's a cyclo in the alley that'll get you there in time. Get going."
"I—" said Larrinaga, and his face smoothed in dawning comprehension. He knelt and thumbed the latches of the reptile-skin case.
The six portions of a psychic ambiance gleamed from the bed of spray-foam which cushioned them and held them in place.
Larrinaga carefully closed the case. He began to cry.
"You can find an expert to set it up again when you've settled," Vierziger said harshly. "I'm told that anybody good enough to do the job will be honored to work on it, on a Suzette. Now get out of here before it's too late!"
He grabbed Larrinaga by the shoulder and dragged him upright with fingers that could bend steel. "Get going!"
The local man stumbled toward the buildings of Potosi and the vehicle that would take him away from them forever. He turned at the edge of the lighted arc.
"Why are you doing this, Master Vierziger?" he asked.
"I'm damned if I know," the Frisian said. "But then, I'm damned anyway, not so?"
Vierziger began to laugh. The sound mounted swiftly to a register suggesting bats and madness.
The laughter, if it was laughter, broke off. "Shall I shoot you now?" Vierziger shouted. "Get going!"
"Thank you, sir," Larrinaga said. He turned and jogged off through the familiar darkness.
"I don't expect it'll make the least difference in the long run!" Vierziger called after him. "But try to make a life for yourself this time. There's that one chance in hell."
In a much softer voice he added, "Even in Hell."
One of the L'Escorial trucks mounted a bank of floodlights behind the armored cab instead of a heavy weapon. The floods weren't well aligned, but their glare made the former Larrinaga house stand out like the lead actor during curtain call.
The gap in the front of the building was a nearly perfect circle, about two meters in diameter. The mass of ceramic casting belonging there was a heap of black grit, trailing off both inside and outside the dwelling.
Suterbilt and the three generations of Lurias stared at the hole as Margulies drove up with Coke. Daun and Moden were already present. Thirty or forty L'Escorial gunmen and four armored trucks surrounded the site, and there were more men inside.
All six of the fireflies danced a complex pattern around the Lurias. Pepe wore the controller.
"How did it happen?" Ramon Luria demanded, shaking his fist at the hole. "How did they do this?"
"Either sonics . . ." Coke said as he walked through the line of L'Escorial guards unchallenged. "Which I doubt, because of the time it'd take, or—"
He pinched some of the shattered ceramic between his thumb and forefinger, then sniffed the vapors still clinging to the material. "Nope, that's what it was. A spalling charge. That's the danger with mono-castings. You really need to have spaced layers to prevent this sort of thing from happening, though that degrades projectile resistance."
A four-wheeled L'Escorial patrol vehicle pulled up with two red-uniformed gunmen and Johann Vierziger aboard. The dapper Frisian sauntered over to the blast site.
Pepe Luria turned toward Coke. "Now tell me what spalling charge means," he said in a deadly voice. His hands gripped the edges of his controller. "Instantly!"
"It means a quantity of inhibited plasticized explosive," Sten Moden said calmly, "which is spread in a thin layer over the target surface by a precursor charge and detonated from the open face a microsecond later."
Moden ran his fingers carefully across the inner surface of the hole. The ceramic was rippled in a series of surf-like conchoidal fractures.
"The shock waves," Moden continued, "reflect within the plate. A ceramic of this sort has virtually no elasticity. When the stresses peak, the material itself crumbles."
He raised a handful of the glittering black residue and let it dribble down through his fingers.
Niko Daun eased up beside Coke and whispered directly into the major's ear. Coke's eyes blanked. He carefully looked away from Johann Vierziger.
"I don't believe it," Suterbilt said. "The house is a fortress, a fortress."
"You should have hired the FDF sooner," Vierziger said coolly. "Or perhaps Master Suterbilt and I should have stayed longer when we visited earlier tonight."
"What would a few more men have mattered?" shouted Pepe Luria. "There must have been twenty Astras, more even! Look there!"
The house's interior lights were on. The guards' sprawled bodies looked more like cast-off clothes and lumber than they did a scene of carnage.
Pepe's hands twitched. One of the fireflies above him suddenly pirouetted, firing its powergun as it spun. One bolt glared from the roof coping. Three more blazed out into the uncleared forest, lighting small fires. The last round snapped back toward Potosi.
Raul put a shaky hand on his grandson's shoulder to calm him. "Not that," the Old Man said. "We don't want Madame Yarnell coming down on us."
Raul looked at Sten Moden. "If the bomb was outside the house," he said, "why didn't it blow the wall in instead of out?"
"It didn't blow in either direction," the logistics officer explained. "The structure vibrated itself apart."
He pointed. "The fragments fell in both directions, you see?"
As Moden said, as much of the shattered wall was in the slope across the living area floor as was outside the wall.
Daun drifted away. Coke motioned Vierziger over by crooking his finger.
"Is there something you want to tell me, Johann?" Coke asked in a low voice.
"No," said Vierziger, "there isn't. But thank you for asking, Matthew."
"All right, they've had their game," Pepe Luria cried. "Now we shall take the set. Tijuca! Tijuca! Where's the drunken bastard Tijuca!"
Pepe's expression was as furious as that of a weasel in a trap. "That's it, I'll—"
Mary Margulies stepped forward. "I told Angel I'd cover for him tonight," she said calmly. "We got used to trading off like that in the old days."
Pepe started to shout a curse in the Frisian's face. He looked at her more closely before the words came out. He settled back on his heels, then said, "Will you? All right then. We'll take eight men only, and two patrol cars."
"What are you going to do, Pepe?" Ramon asked nervously. He touched his son's wrist to draw the youth's attention. "We daren't anger the cartel."
Pepe's snarl melted into a smile even more cruel and terrifying. "In and out, gone before anyone knows there's been an attack, hey?" he said in a husky whisper. "That's the way the Astras do it, and they've had no trouble. We'll do the same."
"Their warehouse?" Raul asked, frowning.
"No, we'll kidnap Peres!" his grandson said. "And the price to get him back alive will be for him and the Widow to leave Cantilucca forever!"
CANTILUCCA: DAY SEVEN
A jitney filled with gunmen—Margulies thought they were L'Escorials, but the muted gang colors of the present didn't show up at night—rolled down the nearly empty street. The vehicle swayed from side to side. The passengers cursed and flung bottles. Before Madame Yarnell arrived on Cantilucca, they would have been shooting.
The L'Escorial acting as communications officer, still holding the radio handset to his ear, turned to face Pepe in the back seat with Margulies. "They've taken in another case of liquor. There's no chance she'll be moving before noon."
"Yarnell parties every night," Luria muttered angrily "Imported food, wines from Earth to drink. And we pay for it! She acts like she's a queen."
"On Cantilucca," Margulies said, "she is a queen."
A pair of jitneys drove out of the garage beneath the building opposite. The structures lower three stories were an Astra recreational center of varied capability. None of the men aboard noticed the pair of patrol cars in the alleys across the street.
"He'll be coming soon," Pepe said. He peered down at the firefly controller.
"No," Margulies said.
Pepe reached for the power switch anyway. The Frisian caught his hand.
"No," she said. "Fireflies are good for an area target—"
A lie as far as she was concerned, but the politic thing to say just now.
"—but this has to be precise. Let me handle the shooting."
Pepe's faced blanked in white fury, then relaxed again in a smile. The change was as sudden as a pair of eye-blinks. Margulies put her left hand back on the fore-end of the 2-cm weapon she'd brought for this operation.
"Area target," Pepe said. "Yes. But I've set them to attack blue, you see? They'll kill the guards, but Peres doesn't wear blue himself!"
"Peres usually doesn't wear blue," Margulies corrected. "You're betting that he won't come out of that whorehouse with his new girlfriend's blue bra around his neck."
She shrugged. "Likely so. But why risk it?"
The radio set crackled. "He's coming!" warned the commo officer.
Margulies stepped out of the car and took her position at the mouth of the alley. The wall against which she stood blurred her outline, but she had no real concealment beyond the darkness. She held her heavy shoulder weapon diagonally across the front of her body.
The garage's automatic door rose with a series of rhythmic bangs. The gigolo's newly repaired air-car howled up the ramp.
Peres himself was driving. He misjudged the slope and struck the street lip. The plastic landing skids flexed and bounced the nose high.
Margulies fired. Her 2-cm bolt stabbed the right front fan nacelle. The blue flash sent blades and fragments of the shorted windings in all directions, like shrapnel from a bomb burst.
The vehicle yawed right, hit the pavement at 30 kph, and cart-wheeled.
The armored garage door started to close automatically. While the air-car was still spinning, flinging off bits of body panel, Margulies fired at where the edge of the door mated with the track along the jamb. The plasma bolt vaporized a section of the track and hammered the door panel like a collision with a speeding truck.
The door skewed in its frame and stuck. Nobody was going to get out of the garage to aid Peres unless they wanted to crawl through the 25-centimeter gap beneath the lower edge of the jammed panel.
Both L'Escorial four-wheelers accelerated from their ambush positions. Pepe Luria stood, clinging to the back of the commo officer's seat. He held an automatic carbine in his free hand.
The air-car landed upside down. It continued to rotate slowly, driven by the vibration of the two fan nacelles still spinning at full revs. The right rear installation had torn itself apart when that corner of the vehicle slammed down violently and drove the side of the housing into the blade arc.
The L'Escorial cars skidded and stopped on opposite sides of Peres' vehicle. The roof of the air-car was compressed but not flattened to the level of the car's body.
A youth crawled from the passenger side. He wore a blue posing suit, blue sandals, and nothing else. He was crying and the crash had bloodied his forehead.
Pepe Luria pointed his carbine from the hip and triggered a burst. The weapon fired large-bore explosive bullets, rocket-assisted to keep the recoil manageable. The rocket exhausts were red sparks across the night. Two of the projectiles hit the boy in the chest, blowing him backward into the wrecked air-car.
The quartet of L'Escorials from the other four-wheeler dragged open the driver's side door of the air-car. One of them smashed the warped support pillar with the butt of his 2-cm weapon to make it release.
Peres screamed in terror. Two of the men pulled him out. A third threw a restraint net over the prisoner, and the fourth L'Escorial—the man with the 2-cm weapon—swatted him with the flat of the gun butt to silence the blubbering cries. They tossed Peres facedown into the back of their vehicle and got in themselves.
Mary Margulies stood at the edge of the alley, looking down the street toward Astra headquarters and the jitneys full of gunmen who'd driven that way moments before. The only thing moving in the night was the air-car, quivering on its back like a half-crushed bug.
"Get in!" Pepe Luria called to her.
Margulies glanced aside at him. She waved. "Go on," she said. "I'll walk, thank you. You've got what you came for."
The pair of patrol cars made tight low-speed turns and accelerated together up the street. The L'Escorial gunmen shouted to one another in glee.
There was a brief squeal of metal from the underground garage. Somebody was trying to free the door with a prybar. An argument broke out inside, identifiable from the timbre of the voices though the words were inaudible.
Margulies changed her magazine's weapon for a fresh one. She set off toward Hathaway House, staying close to building fronts and trying to look in all directions. She was nearly home before she heard the wail of sirens from Astra headquarters.
The Roberson & Co. trading post in the hamlet of Veridad was separate from the Astra patrol base there, but loud music from the stockade housing a score of gunmen pulsed through the walls. Roberson shivered, clutched his arms around himself as if against a cold wind.
"He's not coming," he said to the Widow Guzman. "It's some sort of—"
The door at the back of the trading post gave onto a fenced storage area, inaccessible from the outside. The door opened. A tall, nervous-looking Frisian soldier, not a man the Astra leaders had met before, stepped out.
"Barbour?" the Widow said in surprise.
"How did you get there?" Roberson gasped.
"I'm Barbour," the Frisian said. "And don't worry about how I got through your fence, I did, that's all. Did you bring the money?"
The merchant glanced reflexively at the case on the floor beside him, behind the counter. They'd expected Barbour to arrive for the meeting he'd arranged by the post's front door.
There was a pistol in the case as well. To Roberson's surprise, the Frisian appeared to be unarmed.
"You claim you can free Adolpho," said the Widow Guzman. "If you can do that, you'll have your pay. You'll have any pay you ask."
"In open-remitter chips, so there's no way they can trace back where it came from?" Barbour warned. He looked as skittish as a roach when the lights come on.
"Yes, yes, just as you said," Roberson snapped. "Now, how are you going to release Peres?"
He couldn't keep the distaste from his tone as he spoke the gigolo's name, but he hadn't even attempted to argue with the Widow when the Frisian made his offer. Barbour had called on what was supposed to be a private direct line between Roberson's office and Astra HQ. That in itself lent credence to his proposition.
"I didn't say I'd get him out," Barbour said defensively. His gaze shifted quickly around the big room, but he didn't make eye contact with the Astra leaders. "I said you could get him with what I'd give you."
"Well go on, then, man!" the Widow said. "How? Tell us!"
She stepped close to the Frisian and caught his chin between her right thumb and forefinger. He jerked his face away. Her ornate silver rings traced glittering arcs as she slapped him hard.
"Tell us!" she shouted.
Barbour turned his head away. "Look, they'd kill me if they knew I was doing this," he whined. "The major would say it was treason!"
"Via, boy!" Roberson cried. "Where—"
"Its the TST offices, you see?" the Frisian blurted. "They aren't guarded like L'Escorial bases are. You go in there and pull the core from Suterbilt's private data bank, you see?"
They didn't see. Guzman and the merchant looked blankly from Barbour to one another, then back.
Barbour shook his head in disgust. "Don't you see?" he repeated. "Suterbilt's cheating both TST and the Confederacy, faking the amount of gage that goes out of here. If the Confederacy learns they're being done out of port duties, they'll clean L'Escorial out of here, right? And it's all there in Suterbilt's private data bank, it's got to be!"
The music from the patrol stockade paused. For a moment, the only sound within the trading post was the breathing of the three occupants.
Barbour had chosen the meeting place, an Astra-controlled village twelve klicks from Potosi. He'd demanded that no one be inside the post save himself and the two principals. The Widow agreed and held to her agreement, overruling Roberson on the point. It was now evident to the merchant also that the Frisian would have noticed guards, no matter how well concealed.
"He'll have the information coded," Roberson said cautiously. "We won't be able to read it, will we?"
"What does that matter, you fool?" Barbour snarled. He appeared to be a man clinging to the ragged edge of his sanity. "The Marvelans can decrypt it, can't they? And anyway, it doesn't matter—Suterbilt won't dare take the chance."
"We're not using the information," the Widow Guzman agreed in a distant voice. "We're trading the information for Adolpho. But if Adolpho's been harmed or they won't give him up—"
Her voice had been bleak. Now it became as cold as the heart of a comet.
"—then I will give it all to the Marvelans. And they will gut this planet when they learn how they've been cheated."
"Now, Stella," Roberson said nervously. "We don't want that to happen. If the Confederacy really takes direct control here, it'll put a crimp in our operations too. Or worse."
The Widow looked at him. "Do you think I care?" she whispered.
"Look, that won't be necessary," Barbour said. "Look, I've got to get out of here. I'll give you the codes to get through the TST security system and you give me the money."
His moods appeared to change as abruptly as a rat's did. He was whining again.
"No," said the Widow.
Roberson looked at her in surprise.
"What do you mean?" the Frisian said. "You need the codes or you won't be able to get into the offices without setting off alarms. If L'Escorial comes in, you've got a war!"
"You'll come with us," the woman said. Her combs shimmered. Glowstrips covering most of the ceiling illuminated the post's interior. The light was diffuse but considerable in total, like that of a clear sky as the sun sets.
"I can't!" Barbour whined. "Via, you'll have me killed to save the money!"
"We'll messenger the payment to Hathaway House in your name," the Widow continued in icy determination. "You understand the security system better than we do. You'll get us through it with less chance of a mistake."
"We?" Roberson said, hugging himself. "I'm not going on a raid."
"I am," said the Widow. She gestured in the direction of the music coming from the patrol stockade. "We'll take those men. Twenty should be sufficient. And we'll go now."
Barbour covered his face with his hands. "Oh Lord, oh Lord," he whimpered.
He looked up. "All right," he said. "Let's do it quickly before, before . . ."
He covered his face again. "Oh Lord, don't let the major learn about this!"
In the lobby of Hathaway House, Sten Moden looked up from the console. "Do you think Bob's going to need help, Matthew?" he asked.
Major Matthew Coke looked at the four soldiers waiting with him. All were fully kitted out with weapons and extra ammunition.
"If he does," Coke said, "then we're ready to give it to him."