The youth's facial make-up made him look like an actor in a Noh play. His body was slim, supple, and completely hairless. The room's score of mirrors reflected all angles of his perfect beauty as he stretched.
"I'll get some more wine," he said. "The same vintage?"
Johann Vierziger turned on the blue satin bed. "Yes," he said. "It wasn't bad."
Vierziger arched his chest upward, supporting himself on toes and the tips of his fingers extended backward. The mattress's resilient underlayer undulated softly in reaction.
"But don't be long," Vierziger added with a chuckle.
The youth opened the door concealed behind one of the brothel's floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A pair of fireflies drifted in past him.
"Shall we have a friendly talk, Master Vierziger?" Pepe Luria called from the corridor. "You and me and my friends?"
The fireflies halted a meter to either side of the bed, balanced on their hissing violet spikes. Another pair followed them.
"Get out of here, boy!" Pepe snarled to the youth who'd frozen in the doorway. He struck backhanded.
The youth darted past Luria, whimpering. Blows thudded as he ran the gauntlet of Pepe's coterie further down the hallway.
"Would you mind if I relaxed, Luria?" the Frisian asked from the tight arc in which he balanced. His erection of moments before had subsided, but his voice was calm.
Pepe stepped into the room, flanked by the last pair of fireflies. He wore the belt-pack, but he held his left thumb down on a separate remote control. "Do you know what this is?" he asked in place of answering.
"A dead-man switch," Vierziger said.
Pepe giggled. "Just so you know." he said. "If I release the button, poof! My little darlings do—what I've directed them to do. Are you faster than an electronic switch, Frisian?"
"I'm faster than some of them," Vierziger said. There was no sign of strain or emotion in his voice.
"You're not faster than six at the same time!" Pepe snapped, obviously angry at the lack of response to his murderous banter. "All right, you can sit up."
Three L'Escorial gunmen followed Luria into the room. Two carried wide-mouthed mob guns, the third a sub-machine gun. They looked relieved to see the Frisian nude and unarmed.
Vierziger lowered himself flat, then turned to swing his feet onto the floor as he lifted his torso. His movement was smooth but not as quick as it would have been under normal circumstances. He didn't want to startle the L'Escorials.
"Something puzzled me when I went through Suterbilt's house," Pepe said. "The house he took from Larrinaga. The psychic ambiance was missing. And that night Larrinaga, who didn't have a pot to piss in, lifted on a starship to Mahan. Interesting coincidence, not."
Vierziger shrugged. "Maybe Larrinaga helped the Astras with their attack," he said. "You say it was his house, after all."
"I thought of that," Pepe agreed in a falsely reasonable tone. "But that didn't answer all the problems."
The Frisian's chased and carven pistol hung in its holster from a chair backed against the head of the bed. Pepe nodded toward the weapon.
The sub-machine gunner jumped as though prodded with a shock baton. He snatched the pistol away. The Frisian commo helmet continued to rest on the seat of the chair.
Johann Vierziger smiled faintly. He looked at the constellation of fireflies encircling him.
"Is that fellow Daun your gunsel?" Luria demanded sharply.
Vierziger shook his head. "Niko wouldn't be in the least interested." he said. "Even if I were a woman, I'd be too old for him."
He shrugged. "Besides," he added, "I prefer professionals."
Pepe reached into a pocket with his free hand. "But sometimes amateurs, isn't that so?" he snarled.
He held out his open right hand. On the palm was a shot-out pistol barrel. The iridium had been so hot when Vierziger dropped it inside the Larrinaga house that the cylinder had deformed when it hit the floor.
"I thought to myself," Pepe continued. "There were very few shots fired. All the guards could have been killed by a single man. But it would have had to be a particular man, isn't that so?"
He let the barrel fall toward Vierziger's shrunken genitals. Vierziger's right hand, flat on the mattress beside him, moved as a blur. When the motion ended, the iridium was a bump raising the knuckles of the Frisian's hand—palm-down again, beside him.
Vierziger's lips held the faintest quirk of a smile. He said nothing.
"Ass is cheap in Potosi!" Pepe Luria shouted angrily. "But I can't imagine why else you would have bothered to help a wretch like Larrinaga!"
Vierziger looked up at the L'Escorial leader. "No," he agreed. "You wouldn't be able to imagine it, Luria."
"Take him!" Pepe said.
The sub-machine gunner jumped as though prodded with a shock baton. He snatched the pistol away. The Frisian commo helmet continued to rest on the seat of the chair.
Johann Vierziger smiled faintly. He looked at the constellation of fireflies encircling him.
"Is that fellow Daun your gunsel?" Luria demanded sharply.
Vierziger shook his head. "Niko wouldn't be in the least interested." he said. "Even if I were a woman, I'd be too old for him."
He shrugged. "Besides," he added, "I prefer professionals."
Pepe reached into a pocket with his free hand. "But sometimes amateurs, isn't that so?" he snarled.
He held out his open right hand. On the palm was a shot-out pistol barrel. The iridium had been so hot when Vierziger dropped it inside the Larrinaga house that the cylinder had deformed when it hit the floor.
"I thought to myself," Pepe continued. "There were very few shots fired. All the guards could have been killed by a single man. But it would have had to be a particular man, isn't that so?"
He let the barrel fall toward Vierziger's shrunken genitals. Vierziger's right hand, flat on the mattress beside him, moved as a blur. When the motion ended, the iridium was a bump raising the knuckles of the Frisian's hand—palm-down again, beside him.
Vierziger's lips held the faintest quirk of a smile. He said nothing.
"Ass is cheap in Potosi!" Pepe Luria shouted angrily. "But I can't imagine why else you would have bothered to help a wretch like Larrinaga!"
Vierziger looked up at the L'Escorial leader. "No," he agreed. "You wouldn't be able to imagine it, Luria."
"Take him!" Pepe said.
Johann Vierziger didn't move or cease to smile, even as the butts of the mob guns swung toward his head from opposite sides.
"Scramble!" Bob Barbour shouted. "L'Escorial's picked up Johann!"
Margulies snatched the 2-cm weapon she'd slung from the back of the chair beside hers in the saloon alcove. She'd been ready to drive Coke on his normal evening run to the spaceport to send a message capsule.
Coke was on his way down to the lobby. He paused, midway on the stairs, and asked, "Are they coming here?"
"Not yet, the bloody fools," the intelligence officer said. "Either they're not that organized, or they don't realize that we're keeping an eye on things."
Barbour watched his console as he spoke. The main screen showed Johann Vierziger surrounded by L'Escorials and fireflies on a brothel bed, but graphic and numerical sidebars reduced the main image by sixty percent.
Barbour's shouted warning drew Georg Hathaway's head from the family apartment. Coke heard the door open beneath him.
"Hathaway!" he said, leaning over the balustrade to make eye contact. "Is anybody in the building but us, you and Evie?"
"No sir," Hathaway said, staring at Margulies by the door. The security officer was pulling her armor on one-handed while she held the shoulder weapon with the other and looked out the peephole in the front door. "No sir, there's only you two gentlemen and the lady, that's all who are present in our establishment."
The innkeeper's voice sing-songed, as if he were chanting to himself in private. He was so frightened that his hands were still rather than washing themselves.
Evie Hathaway appeared behind her husband. She laid a hand on his shoulder.
"Sten's on the way back," Barbour noted. "He's picking up Niko on the way."
"Via, they shouldn't risk it!" Margulies muttered from the doorway.
"They'll be all right," Barbour said. Tension clipped his tones, but his enunciation remained perfect. On the main screen, a pair of gunmen clubbed Vierziger unconscious. "Pepe guessed Johann sprang the ambiance for Larrinaga. There's no evidence it's occurred to him to come after the rest of us yet."
Coke walked down the stairs and turned to face the Hathaways. "Georg, Evie," he said. "If you can handle it, we'll go up to the hide on your roof now. If you can't, we'll head for the woods. Either way, tell Pepe or whoever comes looking that an Astra messenger came for us twenty minutes ago. We left with him. All right?"
"Sten and Niko're back," Margulies called. The whine of a jitney's motor came through the peephole and, faintly, through the building's thick walls. "They're going around to the lock-up."
"Go upstairs, then," Evie Hathaway said. "That's what you want, isn't it? Go!"
"Master Hathaway?" Coke said.
Georg finally met the Frisian commander's eyes. He patted his wife's hand on his shoulder. "Yes," he said. "You are our guests. We will do what we can for you, despite, despite . . ."
Hathaway's face settled into unexpectedly firm lines. "Your friend helped Pedro, returned Suzette to him and got him away from here. You'll want to do what you can for your friend. We'll hide you until you can."
"There's about forty men leaving L'Escorial HQ," Margulies warned from the peephole. "A couple armored cars are coming up from the garage, too."
"Sten and Niko have gone up the ladder to the back," Barbour said.
"Shut it down, Bob," Coke ordered, putting a hand for emphasis on the intelligence officer's arm. "Everybody up to the—"
He heard the trapdoor open. "Stay where you are!" he bawled to Moden and Daun, who'd climbed the rope ladder from the locked parking area behind Hathaway House. "We're on our way!"
Barbour blanked the console. His hesitation at abandoning his equipment was obvious in the longing glance he threw over his shoulder when Coke tugged him way.
"They're crossing the street!" Margulies warned. She hadn't moved from her position.
"Come on!" Coke shouted. He gave Barbour a push toward the stairs and skipped up after him, charging his sub-machine gun as he moved. The security lieutenant backed from the door, covering the rear.
"Twenty minutes ago!" Coke called from the top of the stairs.
The Hathaways couldn't hold out against torture—nobody could if the stress was properly applied, though Coke doubted any non-Frisian on Cantilucca was competent at that either. Whether or not the Hathaways would blurt something when L'Escorial gunmen knocked them around, as would inevitably happen, was an open ques—
"We will stand it!" Evie Hathaway called. "For your sake, and for Cantilucca!"
"Blow the fucking door down!" shouted a gaunt, one-eyed L'Escorial gunman at the front of Hathaway House. Georg Hathaway was already pulling the door open as quickly as its mass would allow.
The five Frisians waited silently beneath piled lumber and the barrels on the roof. Enough of the twilight leaked through cracks in their concealment that they could see one another as their eyes adapted.
So long as the console in the lobby operated as a base unit, the commo helmets could access sounds and images from any of the sensors Daun had placed—including those in the hotel. There were no peepholes to look out through directly.
Six gunmen bulled into the lobby, deliberately slamming the innkeeper against the wall. Evie Hathaway stood at the doorway to the family apartment, glaring at the L'Escorials.
Ramon Luria entered behind his men. He looked at Evie, then Georg. "Where are the Frisians?" he asked.
"They're gone—" Georg began.
Ramon nodded. Two of the gunmen grabbed Hathaway by the wrists.
"—twenty minutes ago when—" Georg said, his voice climbing a note with every syllable.
Ramon punched the innkeeper in the belly with all the strength of his pudgy body. Georg's breath whooped out; his face lost color.
"The Astras sent for them!" Evie cried. "They went to the Astras with nothing but their guns!"
Ramon turned from the husband and slapped the wife. It was a full-armed blow which Evie could have dodged had she wished to. Instead she accepted the whack, knowing that there was no escape but death from whatever Luria chose to do.
Three scarlet armored cars were in the street, their armament pointed at Hathaway House. Several score gunmen milled around the vehicles. If the tribarrels and rocket launcher ever opened up, shrapnel and fragments of the facade would kill more of the L'Escorials than the Frisians could in the first few seconds.
Evie's head rocked back. She put a hand to her cheek, then snatched it away as a sign of weakness.
"Go on," she said. "Go on! The Astras came for them twenty minutes ago. Hitting me won't change that!"
Ramon panted from his exertion. "Search the place," he ordered his men generally. "Search it all!"
Four men of the group who'd entered with him scattered. Three went upstairs while the last entered the kitchen with his sub-machine gun outstretched like a cattle prod.
More L'Escorials stamped through the outer doorway, multiplying the number of searchers without adding organization to the process. One gunman began opening the console's access panels, though only a child or a midget could have fit into the enclosed volume.
"Hey, there's a ladder up to the roof!" a man called from the top of the stairwell.
The Frisians faced the barrels that formed the side of their concealment nearest the trapdoor. Each of them but the intelligence officer held a weapon ready.
Barbour started to pick up the sub-machine gun on the floor beside him; Coke laid a hand on his and shook his head. Barbour nodded understanding and let the weapon lie. The chance that the intelligence officer would do something noisily wrong was greater than any help his unskilled shooting would provide if the situation blew up.
Sten Moden carried three shoulder weapons, two slung and the last in his hand where it looked like a pistol by comparison to his size. There wasn't room in the narrow hide for the rocket launcher he favored, and the big missiles would be useless in a point-blank shootout anyway.
Three L'Escorials came out onto the roof clumsily. Each of them climbed with one hand and waved his weapon through the trapdoor ahead of himself. The first man out shouted in alarm as the next prodded him in the back with a flechette gun.
"They been up here," a L'Escorial noted. "Hey, look at this!"
He'd found the panoramic camera Daun glued to the coping of the facade weeks before. It was a relatively large unit, about the size of a clenched fist, and Niko hadn't tried to conceal it. The camera provided a view of the entire streetscape—distorted at the edges, but correctable into normal images by the console's processing power.
"Its a bomb!" cried the man with the flechette gun. Why he thought so was beyond imagining, especially since the next thing he did was put the muzzle of his weapon against the camera and fire.
If it had been an explosive device, it would have detonated and killed all three L'Escorials. Instead, the gun's enormous muzzle blast blew the camera across the street in tiny fragments. The osmium flechette left a split and a crater in the facade of L'Escorial headquarters.
"What's that?" a gunman in the street screamed. Another man emptied an automatic shotgun upward, scarring the reinforced concrete of Hathaway House. Dust and sparks flew past the coping.
"You bloody fool!" a L'Escorial snarled—correctly—at the man with the flechette gun.
"Hey!" called a man through the trapdoor. "You dickheads up there? Come on back, we're moving!"
Two of the L'Escorials moved quickly to the trapdoor. The third demanded, "What do you mean, we're moving?"
"I mean we're going to take out the Astras once and for all!" cried the man below. "Pepe just gave the order!"
The last of the three gunmen jounced down the ladder. Coke waited another thirty seconds, then reached for the latch holding the side of the barrel closed. Bob Barbour touched his hand. "Not yet," the intelligence officer whispered. "I'll tell you when they're all clear of the building."
Barbour's face-shield would be taking the input of up to a dozen of the visual sensors in and around Hathaway House. Coke couldn't have kept that many locations straight, quite apart from needing a clear view of his immediate surroundings in event of a firefight.
Coke grinned and nodded to his intelligence officer.
"Now," Barbour murmured. "They're gone."
Margulies swung open the door; Coke was out onto the roof first. He kept his head below the level of the roof coping. The sun had fully set, but the afterglow was vivid to eyes that had been covered within the hiding place.
"They took the weapons they found," Sten Moden said. "They carried my launcher and the reloads back across the street."
"We've got what we need," said Coke. "First we'll do something about Johann."
Mary Margulies looked at him. "We're going to take them all on, then?" she said.
"Yeah," Coke said. "All that're left after they get done with each other."
Margulies shrugged. "Suits me," she said, checking with her fingers the pouches of 2-cm ammo on her crossed bandoliers.
Niko Daun slapped another panoramic camera onto the coping, a centimeter from where the previous one had been blown to atoms.
Coke stared at him. "You carried an extra one of those when you ran for cover?" Coke asked.
The sensor tech looked defensive. "I've got two of them, sir. Well, they're real handy."
"It's all right," Barbour said, responding to a threat before his fellows were aware of it. He positioned himself so that his body was between the trap door and the other members of the team. "It's Hathaway."
Georg Hathaway stuck his head up through the opening. It certainly hadn't occurred to the innkeeper that without Barbour's warning, somebody—very likely Coke himself—would have blown him away.
"Sirs," he said. His normally pudgy cheeks looked sunken, though the fact he'd climbed the ladder spoke well of his general condition. "They've gone for now, all of them. They say they're going to attack Astra. You can escape now."
"I'm checking my equipment," Bob Barbour said, the last syllable spoken as he slipped past Hathaway. He let himself drop to the corridor since the innkeeper's body blocked the ladder. Hathaway recognized the problem and scurried down also, puffing and wheezing.
Coke started for the ladder. Margulies touched his arm. "Sir?" she said. "What's the drill? Do we break Johann out now?"
"We check the situation on the big screen," Coke said. "And then we break Johann out, yes."
Wild gunfire erupted from the street.
Both syndicates had moved gunmen back into Potosi as soon as Madame Yarnell left, though the gangs kept a lower presence than before. Instead of loitering in opposing groups at every corner, men of the two sides kept generally to one end of town or the other—spaceport side for Astra, the eastern half for the L'Escorials.
Though the Lurias were acting on the spur of the moment, Pepe's sudden decision was tactically ideal. Three red-painted armored cars were already in the street. The remaining vehicles rumbled out of the garage beneath L'Escorial HQ even as the first phase of the battle began.
The gateway into the Astra compound was blocked, as usual, by the converted bulldozer. As the L'Escorials swept unexpectedly toward their rival's headquarters, the blue-clad guards started the dozer's engine.
Pepe's fireflies stooped like hawks with violet pinions. The short powergun barrel in each firefly spat cyan death at the startled guards. The side hatch to the cab of the converted bulldozer was open. A firefly slid in, lighted the vehicles interior with its five-round magazine, and curved out again.
The bulldozer stalled in a cloud of black smoke. The Astra guards sprawled on or around the vehicle, mangled by concentrated gunfire. The fireflies hissed back toward their controller. Pepe had told off a pair of his henchmen as assistants, to reload the fireflies' magazines when they returned.
Civilians vanished from sight. A few Astra gunmen opened fire on the advancing L'Escorials. The Lurias' armored cars raked the street with their tribarrels and a salvo of 10-cm bombardment rockets. The latter blew up on building fronts with huge red flashes, hurling shrapnel and broken concrete in every direction.
Astras dived for cover in doorways and alleys. Counter-fire stopped instantly though only a handful of Astras were hit by the wild volley. The sheer volume of fire which the vehicles put down was too much for undisciplined troops to face. As more armored cars joined the initial trio, the gunmen who'd been chased to cover tore off their blue accoutrements and disappeared into the night.
The only Astras still fighting after the first exchange were those in the headquarters building with their leaders—and they were trapped like mice in a bucket of water. By taking the initiative, Pepe had won the battle.
A pair of L'Escorials, stoned on gage and bold to the point of lunacy, leaped aboard the converted bulldozer. Astras fired wildly from ports in the headquarters building, but most of the shots were aimed at fireflies which existed only in the gunmen's minds.
Powergun bolts traced magenta afterimages across unprotected retinas; terror turned the shudder of color into the fireflies' static suspension system, though all the little devices were at the moment being reloaded.
The bulldozer grunted to life. One of the L'Escorials jumped from the hatch again. He was immediately shot in half by gunmen from both syndicates. The remaining man backed the converted vehicle with a skill that its regular driver couldn't have managed with leisure and full daylight.
The door to the underground garage was open; an armored truck was driving up the ramp. The bulldozer crashed into the flimsier armored vehicle, blocking the exit completely.
The L'Escorial driver jumped out and scampered away, miraculously unhurt by the sleet of bolts and bullets which pursued him. A L'Escorial armored car nosed through the opened gateway. Its three tribarrels fired point-blank at the rocket pod mounted on the converted bulldozer.
The dozer was armed with hypervelocity rockets which didn't have explosive warheads. The rocket fuel deflagrated with what was only technically a fire rather than an explosion.
A ball of yellow light enveloped the front of Astra headquarters and the vehicles in the garage beneath the building. More fuel and munitions went off in a second blast a heartbeat after the first. The building's protective facade lifted as a piece, then settled again in slabs and pieces that crumbled away.
A L'Escorial armored car raked the courtyard wall with flechette rockets. Almost all the hundreds of osmium penetrators punched through the cast concrete, each drilling a finger-sized hole on entry and blowing a divot the size of a soup plate from the inner face as the projectile keyholed out. Backblast from the powerful rockets incinerated dozens of L'Escorials who had sheltered behind the launcher.
Wreathed in smoke from its rocket exhausts, the vehicle that fired the salvo drove into the weakened portion of concrete. Metal shrieked, but a ten-meter stretch of wall collapsed inward.
A cloud of white dust enveloped Astra headquarters. Scores of L'Escorial guns fired with no target beyond the silent building itself. Another armored car rumbled through the gap. Its sole functioning tribarrel ripped a rich cyan line across and through the building's inner fabric. There was no return fire, but ricocheting projectiles spun several of the red-clad gunmen.
"About now, I'd say," Mary Margulies prompted. She gripped the large hasp to open the unlocked front door.
"Not yet!" Coke ordered. His mind tried to fill the immediate future, encompassing every possible event and side effect. The task was beyond his conscious intellect, but instinct told him that the moment was not—
A white flag—a scrap of sheet—waved from a hole on the ground floor of Astra headquarters. Bob Barbour gestured minusculy to the keyboard of the console at which he sat.
The holographic screen split. The lower half showed the interior of the building. Audio was from one of the laminar bugs Daun set during the initial visit to Astra HQ. Visuals came through miniature cameras at roof level across the street, processed to an illusory slickness by the console's artificial intelligence.
"Luria!" the Widow Guzman shouted through a bullhorn, toward a hole torn into the wall by powergun bolts. "We surrender! We're coming out!"
Three Astra gunmen and Adolpho Peres crouched with the Widow in what had been her private office. In the outer area, another gunman stood behind the thickest remaining portion of the building's facade, waving the white flag. There were dozens of bodies around him, most of them mangled beyond recognition of their species.
The fireflies, their magazines reloaded, curved toward the riddled building like swarming hornets.
"Bob, you're control," said Matthew Coke as he stepped to the door of Hathaway House. "The rest of us—now!"
Margulies put her weight against the inertia of the door, then stepped out behind her commander.
The Lurias had left a six-man guard at the gate to their headquarters. By this stage in the fighting the gunmen stood in the middle of the street to watch the battle in the near distance.
Coke didn't make the mistake of using his sub-machine gun as an area weapon when he had individual targets. Three-round bursts spun two of the L'Escorials an instant before Margulies blew a third nearly in half with her 2-cm weapon. The last three syndicate gunmen went down in a ripple of cyan as all four Frisians fired simultaneously.
The brief fusillade didn't arouse the attention of the fighters half a kilometer away, locked in the death throes of the Astra syndicate. Coke and his team sprinted across the street and through the open door into L'Escorial headquarters.
The smoldering body of Angel Tijuca lay faceup in the center of the entryway. He'd been shot in the chest, twenty or thirty times at close range. The 1-cm powergun bolts had burned most of his torso away. He still held the pistol he'd managed to draw in the last instants of his life.
"Fireflies," Margulies said softly. "He wouldn't have liked it when Pepe brought Johann in."
"I'm sorry, Mary," Coke said.
She looked at him. Her face was freckled by the overlay in one quadrant of her visor, echoing the image from Barbour's console. "Don't be," she said. "We all die. He didn't—die a bad way after all."
Coke nodded. "Sten," he said, "Niko—check the barracks upstairs and rejoin when it's clear. Mary, Johann ought to be—"
Margulies had already swung herself into position beside the heavy door to the right of the anteroom. It was ajar, though it had a lock.
"Go," said Coke. He had the automatic weapon, so he would be first through.
Margulies pulled the door open. The room beyond was the armory. Weapons lockers lined the walls, most of them emptied or nearly so for the sudden attack. The cases of Frisian equipment that Ramon's men had taken from Hathaway House lay on the floor among the remains of the L'Escorial hardware.
A restraint cage stood against the far wall. Johann Vierziger was in it. The probes touched his nude body at a dozen points including his genitals, sending fluctuating currents through his nerve pathways.
A fat man, naked to the waist, sat on an ammunition case beside the prisoner. He was mopping sweat from his face with the red bandanna tied around his throat. He jumped halfway to his feet between the time the door opened and the moment Coke's long burst disemboweled him.
Margulies fired into the control box at the top of the cage. The electronics disintegrated under the jolt of plasma. Droplets of metal and silicon shards sprayed a wide area. Some splashed on Vierziger as the cage released him to topple forward, but the prickles were nothing to the pain from which he'd been freed.
Coke started toward Vierziger. A young L'Escorial, scarcely a boy, stepped into the room behind the Frisians. He was buttoning his trousers. "Wha—" he cried as Margulies turned, bringing her heavy weapon to bear less than arm's length from the gunman's breastbone.
He didn't have a gun. That wouldn't matter, but as her finger took up slack on the trigger she recognized—
"Emilio!" she said. "Your name's Emilio and you come from Silva Blanca."
The muzzle of the 2-cm weapon shimmered yellow. The iridium was cooling slowly from the five rounds she'd put through it in the street a moment ago. Coke glanced back at the lieutenant, but his real attention was on Vierziger. Margulies' situation was under control, though he wasn't sure what she meant to do.
The young L'Escorial swallowed. He leaned back, afraid to move his feet and unable to take his eyes from the 2-cm mouth that would swallow his life with another millimeter of trigger travel. "How did you know?" he whispered. "How did you know me?"
An automatic carbine leaned against the wall by the doorway, probably Emilio's weapon. Margulies doubted the boy would have been able to grip it if she picked it up and put it in his hands.
"Go home to your parents, Emilio," Margulies said. The boy wore a red armband. She ripped it off while her right hand continued to steady her weapon on the youth's chest. "Farming's better than dying. You've got no talent for this business."
"You'll shoot me if I turn," Emilio whimpered. Tears dribbled down his cheeks. "Oh, Mama, Mama . . ."
Margulies thrust the 2-cm weapon toward Emilio's face. The heat of the muzzle made him flinch away. He turned and ran into the night, still crying.
Moden and Daun strode into the armory. "All clear," Niko called. He was bright, spiky with hormones and eagerness.
The logistics officer lifted the triple rocket launcher and checked it with a critical eye. "Who was that?" he asked Margulies in a low voice.
Margulies grimaced. "A civilian," she said. "Somebody who didn't have any business here."
Coke helped Vierziger rise cautiously from the floor where he'd fallen. The little gunman waved him away.
"Find me some clothes," Vierziger said. His eyes were open. He looked straight ahead and held himself stiffly. "They cut mine off me when they put me in there."
Niko Daun turned and sprinted up the stairs to the barracks without formal orders from anyone. The dead torturer's pants wouldn't have fit, even if they'd been in better condition than the corpse which wore them.
"They had the cage's power turned all the way up." Coke said in a quiet voice. "They put him through hell."
Vierziger looked at Coke and managed a shaky smile. "No, Matthew," he said. The lilting insouciance was back in his tone. "That was somebody else entirely. And it can't have been Hell, can it? Because I still have a chance to do penance."
He flexed his hands with apparent approval.
"Here you go!" Niko Daun called as he returned with boots, a pair of gray trousers and a camouflaged tunic. The items were all small enough to fit Vierziger. If they weren't particularly clean, they at least offered the spiritual protection which clothing gives a civilized man.
Coke frowned as Vierziger drew the garments on. "I don't understand, Johann," he said.
Vierziger chuckled. "Neither do I, Matthew," he replied. "But we're not required to understand, you realize."
Heavy fire roared from down the street. Coke switched his visor to give him a quarter overlay view of the console display. He chose another sub-machine gun from the selection available in the armory.
The three Astra gunmen in the office with the Widow and Peres stumbled out through a hole torn in the facade by L'Escorial fire. They'd thrown away their weapons. One of the Astras had even stripped so that he didn't show any blue garments in the lights bathing the battered headquarters.
Fireflies dropped from the night sky, circled the men, and stabbed them with multiple cyan bolts. The Astras screamed and died in the rubble of their fortress. One man flung out his arm to fend death away. Bolts blew the limb off at the shoulder before another round finished him.
"Come out, Widow!" Pepe Luria called. His father and grandfather crouched behind the courtyard wall, but Pepe stood in the gap between two L'Escorial armored vehicles. "We'll treat you with full honors!"
"I'll take the roof." Sten Moden said, hefting his launcher and a case holding three additional missiles. "Niko, will you load for me?"
"The roof?" Coke said. "That's not great if you've got to displace."
Moden shrugged despite the enormous weight he carried on his one arm. "A good vantage point," he said. "And the back-blast of these—it'd be almost as bad in an alley as inside. The cost of power, you know."
"Go on," Coke said. "But be careful."
L'Escorials had refilled the tubes of the car mounting flechette rockets. Pepe stepped to the side. This time his henchmen were careful to avoid the lethal wedge of exhaust behind the vehicle.
The gunner inside closed the firing contacts. The twelve rockets rippled off in four nearly simultaneous trios. A fraction of a second after they left the launching tubes, the casings split open and unleashed hundreds of dense arrows, finned to spread slightly along their trajectory.
The flechettes hit the facade of Astra headquarters like osmium sleet. The pillar sheltering the flag-waving gunman disintegrated, as did what remained of the wall of the office beyond. Dust rose, dazzlingly white in the lights of L'Escorial vehicles.
"Come out, Widow!" Pepe shouted gleefully as he stepped into view again.
Johann Vierziger draped himself with bandoliers and two slung weapons, a sub-machine gun and a 2-cm powergun. He slid a pistol into the pocket of the tunic he wore.
"Pepe must have kept my rig," he said wryly. "Well, it's only a tool. Like the flesh itself. The tools aren't what matter."
"You and Margulies stick together," Coke ordered. "I'll take the opposite side of the street myself."
Vierziger shook his head and smiled. "The two of you take the other side," he said ordered. "I prefer to work alone."
Vierziger began dropping grenade clusters into various pockets of his garments. His body armor lay where it had been dumped with the other Frisian suits.
Coke looked at the little man, then said, "Okay, Mary, let's get into position. It'll be party time any moment now."
They stepped from the building and crossed the courtyard, covering one another's movements alternately. Fires lighted the interior of a dust pall to mark Astra headquarters and the street before it. Hundreds of L'Escorial gunmen capered about the site, silhouetted like insects by a lamp.
Adolpho Peres, an overlay on one corner of Coke's visor, bawled, "I surrender! I surrender! I'm coming out!"
The gigolo staggered through the curtain of dust and smoke. Debris fouled his outfit, a ruffed doublet and tights of black velvet. His eyes were slitted.
Peres negotiated the rubble of the protective facade without falling, only to trip over the riddled bodies of the gunmen who'd preceded him from the building. He tumbled to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. "Oh, dear Lord in heaven Luria I'm your friend you mustn't—"
The fireflies drifted within a meter of Peres before they one at a time emptied their magazines into him. When the last unit fired, only scraps of bone remained of what had been the gigolo's muscular torso.
"Four to team," Lieutenant Barbour said through the silence on the scene his console projected. "Are any of you wearing visible red garments? Report ASAP, repeat ASAP! Over."
Coke sprinted across the street under cover of Margulies' shoulder weapon. He took cover at the corner of the next building up from Hathaway House to avoid involving Barbour and the Hathaways themselves. "One negative," he called.
"Two negative," from the logistics officer, breathing heavily with the exertion of his climb to the roof of the L'Escorial building.
"Three nega—Five negative," Niko Daun stepping on Margulies' report, but they were both clear and that was what mattered.
"Six negative," said Sergeant Johann Vierziger, by pay grade the lowest-ranking member of the survey team. "And it is time that we act, Matthew. Out."
"Negative!" Bob Barbour snapped. The command was as unexpected as seeing a nun aim a rocket launcher. "This is Four. I'll tell you when I'm ready, but do nothing till then. Four out."
"Roger that," Coke said, crouching at the corner of the building. He wasn't sure what the intelligence officer had in mind, but he knew Bob well enough now to trust his judgment. Hell, he trusted every member of his team. "One out."
The town of Potosi was locked and unlighted. Civilians huddled beneath furniture, praying that their homes would be spared by the heavy weapons that could shatter walls and bring down upper stories in an avalanche of brick and timber.
On Coke's faceshield, the image of Stella Guzman stepped through the curtain of dust. Her combs gleamed in the glaring lights. She stood like a wraith. The ruin of her fortress wound a shroud about her.
"Luria!" she cried. Her eyes stared straight before her, as though she were unaware of her lover's corpse at her feet. "I will wait for you in Hell, Luria. You'll join me this night! Do you hear me? You'll join me this night!"
Pepe's assistants were still reloading the fireflies' magazines. The youngest Luria let his controller hang at his belt and rose to face the Widow. "Why, Stella!" he called. "How shameless! Making an assignation and your lover's body still—"
He drew a pistol and pointed it. From the purple highlights it was indeed Vierziger's weapon.
—warm!
"I'll wait for you in—"
Pepe shot her in the face. The Widow turned. Luria continued shooting as the body spun onto the rubble and bounced. The Widow's hand was outstretched toward Peres, but their dead fingers did not touch.
The last of the fireflies rose from the hands of the attendant servicing it. The six deadly constructs wove a violet corona above the L'Escorial leadership.
"Now," the intelligence officer said. "But don't harm the fireflies, they're mine. Four out."
Pepe Luria noticed that his constellation of fireflies moved without his ordering them to do so. He reacted instantly, diving to cover under one of the armored cars flanking him.
"Take them!" said Major Matthew Coke, and the darkness ignited.
Vierziger fired his 2-cm weapon into the side of the vehicle. Even at a range of nearly 500 meters, the powerful charge turned a chunk of steel armor into vapor and white flame rupturing outward.
Molten and gaseous metal sprayed Pepe beneath the opposite car. Luria jumped up screaming, his hair and clothing afire. Vierziger's second bolt blew his head off in a cyan flash.
Sten Moden launched a missile. The roof of L'Escorial headquarters reflected some of the backblast straight up, so the building itself appeared to have exploded in red flames.
Before the launcher operator fired, he locked a missile on by snapping an image with his guidance laser, then designated it as a point or object target. In the latter case—a maneuvering armored vehicle, for example—the missile guided itself to the target without updates from the operator.
The missiles had a ten-kilometer range, or even farther if they were launched from a level higher than the chosen target. Here, at half a klick, unburned rocket fuel added to the already cataclysmic effect of the powerful warhead.
An armored car disintegrated in a flash so bright that it seemed to shine through the steel. A red-orange mushroom mounted a hundred meters in the air, raining debris. The blast stove in the side of the car nearest the target vehicle and set it afire. The spray of fragments killed scores of L'Escorial gunmen, shredding some of them from knee height upward.
Matthew Coke chose targets—anybody moving on the street this night—and spun them down with short bursts. Margulies fired her 2-cm weapon from a door alcove five meters ahead of Coke, and Vierziger's weapons slapped with mechanical precision from the alley west of L'Escorial headquarters.
On targets so distant, a sub-machine gun's 1-cm bolts were near the low end of their effectiveness. Coke preferred an automatic weapon to the wallop of a 2-cm powergun, particularly at the short ranges he expected before this night was over. He could have carried weapons of both styles, as Vierziger did, but when he got tired he might have grabbed the wrong ammo for the gun he was trying to reload. Even the most experienced veteran could screw up that way . . .
Part of Coke's mind wondered if Johann Vierziger ever screwed up. Not when it involved killing something, he supposed.
The second missile hit. The launcher was intended for vehicular use. The thrust of exhaust against the sides of a launching tube pushed even a man as big and strong as Sten Moden a pace backward, so it took a moment to recenter the sights between rounds.
This time the target was the vehicle which carried bombardment rockets. The launching rack was empty, but Moden guessed there might be reloads within the armored hull. He must have been right, because the secondary explosion shattered the concrete facade protecting the building across the street and swept away all the external staircases.
The carnage among L'Escorials still stunned by the first blast was immense. The gunmen literally didn't know what had hit them.
Coke changed magazines, then slung the first sub-machine gun to cool while he fired the back-up weapon. Anything moving was a target. They weren't human, they weren't even alive; they were merely motions in his holographic gunsights. He supposed a few of his bursts missed, but he was carrying over 2,000 rounds of ammunition . . . .
"Three, cover my advance!" he ordered. He sprinted past Margulies to the alcove that had served a ground-floor brothel at the west end of the building. The strapped and plated door was firmly closed.
Gunmen—L'Escorials now, like the Astras before them—would be seeking shelter in the buildings. There was none. Those inside would not open their doors to the violence beyond, and the lawlessness of Potosi in past days meant the locked portals would withstand the efforts of panicked thugs to break in.
There was only the forest; and, for those who stayed in Potosi, death.
Two figures—a pudgy man and the aged one clinging to his arm—staggered toward the armored cars straddling the hole in the wall before the Astra compound. A tribarrel on one vehicle raked the night, but its bolts slashed at mid-height across the facades across the street.
The gunner didn't have a target despite the flaring back-blast of Moden's launcher, which Coke thought would have fingered the rocket team across a five-kilometer radius. The fellow was blind with fear, shooting the way a devotee of Krishna might have chanted to bring himself closer to God in a crisis.
Coke aimed at Raul Luria. If he shot Ramon first, the Old Man would fall out of the sight picture as the son who supported him twisted down in death.
Moden's third rocket hit the armored car as Coke took up the slack on his trigger. The gunner found whatever god he worshipped, and the expanding fireball engulfed the Lurias.
Something tapped Coke's helmet. He spun, slashing empty air with the butt of his weapon. Shock from the blast had flung bits from the wall above him, nothing more.
The L'Escorial vehicles were all out of action, either hit by missiles or wrecked by the explosion of neighboring vehicles. Fuel fires spread a lurid illumination across the scene in place of the harshness of headlights a few minutes before. The wreckage of Astra headquarters was ablaze also, a pulsing, bloody glow that erupted from among the fallen walls.
Fireflies coursed the alleys, working outward from the killing ground about Astra headquarters. Occasionally the little machines dipped and stabbed the darkness with a single shot. They had been under Barbour's direction since he broke, then changed, Pepe's control codes.
A violet spark trundled purposefully down the street at a hundred-meter altitude, then dived to waist height directly in front of Matthew Coke. A hatch in the rear of the hovering device popped open. The firefly had expended its ammunition on L'Escorial gunmen and needed refilling.
Coke thumbed five rounds from a sub-machine gun magazine and fed them into the firefly. The hatch closed and the device curved back into action. Better machines clear the alleys like ferrets in a rabbit warren than that men should have to do so . . . .
The fireflies weren't armored, and their corona discharges marked them for hostile gunmen. Like tanks, however, the machines had a psychological impact on untrained troops that went far beyond the physical threat they posed. Thugs ran screaming or closed their eyes and sprayed the sky blindly.
The fireflies put their pistol bolts into the center of mass. They dropped each target with the cool precision of hunting wasps stabbing the nerve ganglia of the prey that will feed their larvae.
Coke and Margulies advanced past one another twice more. There were few targets for their guns now.
Moden put a missile into the center of the Astra courtyard, blasting a crater in the scattered rubble and flushed several figures. One of them sent a short burst of automatic fire in the direction of the launcher's signature. Coke, Margulies, and Vierziger all spiked the L'Escorial shooter; Niko Daun's submachine gun spattered the vicinity of the target a moment later.
Coke paused just short of an alley mouth. "Cover my—" Margulies began.
"Three, this is Four," Barbour broke in. "Don't advance just yet, I want to run the alley. Over."
"What do you—" Coke said.
A blast of shots and powergun bolts glanced from within the alley. A man screamed. Three gunmen—an Astra and two L'Escorials, each unaware of the others' presence until that moment, burst onto the street. Coke cut them down arm's length from his muzzle in a single long burst.
Two fireflies which had expended their magazines but were still lethally threatening drifted into sight above the men they had chased to their deaths. The devices' static suspension sputtered faintly, like hot grease.
Across the street, Vierziger's bolts lit a gunman who'd been similarly chased into sight. The fireflies turned and rose to comb the next pair of alleys in similar fashion.
"Two to One," Sten Moden reported. "We've run out of missile targets, so we figured we'd work east from where you started. Is that a roger? Over."
"One to two," Coke said. "Roger, but use the fireflies for the action, keep them loaded. Break. Four, put half the fireflies at Two's disposal. One out."
Neither Daun nor Moden was properly combat material, but Sten was right: a few L'Escorials would have kept away from the battle on their end of town. They weren't the hardcore gunmen, obviously. Nonetheless, they couldn't be simply ignored.
The trio on the ground were nearing what had been Astra headquarters. The stench of blood and death was overpowering. Heat from a burning vehicle—plastics and the rubber tires blazed long after the fuel had been consumed—drove Coke into the center of the street. His boots slipped on blood and flesh pureed by the explosions.
A man who breathed in rhythmic gasps tried to stuff coils of intestine back into his belly. Coke sighted on the dying man's head, then shifted his weapon back to the search for possible threats.
He knew it would have been kinder to finish off the L'Escorial. He just didn't have the stomach for that particular mercy on top of so much other killing.
A figure running, its limbs jerking like those of a wind-whipped scarecrow.
The man turned as Coke fired. Coke moved on. At every further step, his mind flashed the terrified visage which his bolts had lighted and blown apart.
Coke and Margulies leapfrogged again. Across the street Vierziger kept pace. Coke's bare hands prickled. Ozone and flakes of matrix plastic, spattered molten from the guns' ejection ports, had eaten away the outer layer of skin. Thirst was a red furnace within him, and his feet dragged with the effort of walking.
A man in a red vest with a leather fringe, kneeling and moaning a prayer at a locked doorway as a firefly made passes toward him.
Coke shot, then shot again as his bolts flung the man into the door and the corpse caromed back. Not men, not things; merely motion.
One of Coke's sub-machine guns jammed. He'd replaced the barrel twice, but the light-metal receiver warped from the heat of continuous firing. He threw it away and picked up a similar weapon which lay beside a man Margulies had decapitated.
The weight of Coke's ammunition had lessened. He'd emptied the pouches of two of the three bandoliers he'd belted on before the start of the action . . . .
The three Frisians reached the western end of Potosi. There were no more targets. Coke didn't know how much time had passed. His hands were swollen. They felt as though they were twice their normal size.
"Pretty well does it, s-s-Matthew," Margulies croaked. "I was wrong about fireflies. They come in handy s-sometimes."
Two of the fireflies had vanished while working the alleys ahead of Coke and his partners. Hit by lucky shots or mechanical failure, it didn't matter; they'd served their purpose.
The remaining unit hung close above the Frisians, hissing like a restive cobra. Coke hated the fireflies even more than he had before he'd operated with them. It was as bad as being allied to people who ate the men they killed.
Cyan flashes quivered across the forest in the direction of the spaceport. A moment after the shots, the Frisians heard the blat of a diesel engine being pushed.
The port operations van, its headlight flicking up and down like a conductor's baton as the vehicle flew over the washboard surface, raced toward Potosi. A circle of cooling metal on a quarter panel indicated that a fleeing gunman had hit the van when it failed to stop for him.
"Bloody hell!" Coke said as he lurched into the middle of the roadway. "Why did she take a chance like that? She could have been killed!"
"Sir!" Margulies warned. She dropped to a kneeling position with her back braced against the building as she aimed her 2-cm weapon. "That may not be your friend!"
Coke waved the sub-machine gun in his right hand. It felt immensely heavy, as if he were waggling a full-sized tree to get attention. The sky behind him was bright enough to cast his fuzzy shadow toward the oncoming vehicle.
The van fishtailed to a halt. The engine lugged but caught itself again without dying.
Pilar stuck her head out the side window. "Matthew!" she called. "Madame Yarnell's back, and she's come with a regiment of mercenaries! She says they're going to clear the syndicates off Cantilucca and set up new factors before Marvela has time to react. Matthew, get in! They'll kill you too, I'm sure of it!"
"Bloody hell!" Lieutenant Barbour blurted over the commo net. "One, this is Four and she's right, I wasn't monitoring the port. Four transports have set down and there's another requesting landing instructions. It's the Heliodorus Regiment and I'd estimate—"
A pause for instant mental synthesis of data that a normal interpretation team would have required an hour to complete.
"—over two thousand troops. I don't know the equipment standard; it isn't in my data base. Over."
"Mary, you drive," Coke ordered as he got in on the passenger side of the van. "Pilar, get into the back, it'll be safer. How much fuel is there in the tank?"
"Matthew, I'm really sorry," Barbour added. The needless and unprofessional comment showed how nervous he was. "I should have been watching the port. Four over."
Barbour had run up to six fireflies simultaneously from a console that hadn't been built for the purpose. Who did he think he was? The Lord God Almighty, that he should be omniscient?
"The Heliodorus Regiment's light infantry." Johann Vierziger said as he swung open the van's rear door and sat, cradling his 2-cm weapon. The van now had a sting in its tail. '"Wheeled transport, no fighting vehicles; coil guns with explosive bullets."
"The tank's about half full," Pilar said. Instead of getting into the back as ordered, she slid to the middle of the front seat where her thigh pressed Coke's. "The gauge doesn't work, but there should be enough fuel to go a hundred kilometers or more."
"And there're about three thousand bodies on the TO and E," Coke said to Vierziger as Margulies gunned the van forward. Data that hadn't been downloaded into the intelligence officer's console for lack of need bubbled to the surface of the combat veterans' minds. "Not that anybody ever landed with his complete table of organization strength."
Verbally keying the AI in his helmet, he continued, "Four, this is One. We'll pick up you and the eastern element, then keep going as far as we've got fuel for. Which apparently isn't very fucking far, the roads being what they are, but maybe we can improve our transport on the way. Break. Two and Five, do you copy? One over."
"One, this is Two," Sten Moden replied. His voice was breathy "We'll join you at L'Escorial HQ. We left the launcher there, and we may need the rounds we've got left. Over."
"One, this is Four," Barbour said. "I'm packing the console for travel now. Out."
The intelligence officer shouldn't have been able to override his commanding officer's transmission—which is what he'd done, stepping on Coke's attempt to protest about Moden's plan. On the other hand, if Barbour couldn't control the net, he wouldn't have been as good as he'd repeatedly proved himself.
Coke sighed. "Roger both of you," he said. "One out."
He'd intended to run with a minimum of equipment. They would hide in the forest—if possible—until the situation changed or at least became more clear. If the survey team dropped off the map, Camp Able would send a follow-up mission.
In three weeks or a month, the FDF would send a follow-up mission. And while the Heliodorus Regiment was an organization of professionals, they were low-end professionals and the Cantilucca operation had to be handled without Bonding Authority oversight.
The Heliodorans just might carry out an order to execute captured Frisians. And there was no question in Coke's mind that Madame Yarnell would give such an order.
Pilar's hand lay beside his on their joined thighs. Coke squeezed it, then resumed compulsively counting the loaded magazines in his remaining bandolier. A moment before the van came in sight, Coke had wanted to find a hole and curl up in it for a week of sleep. Now he had a second wind, but he felt as though something could snap at any moment and leave him a pile of constituent atoms . . .
Margulies stopped in front of the L'Escorial building without killing the van's engine. Daun and Barbour ran from Hathaway House across the street. Both men were heavily laden. The intelligence officer carried his console, packed again into its integral case, while Niko staggered along ahead of the lieutenant with a wicker hamper.
"Daun, we don't have room for your . . ." Coke called. Clothing? House-wares? What in hell did the kid have in the basket?
"Beer!" Niko shouted as he slammed the hamper down in back of the van. "Master Hathaway's best! And if you're as dry as I am, it's better than ammo!"
Sten Moden, carrying so much equipment that he looked like a forklift, waddled from what had been L'Escorial's courtyard. Besides the launcher with two tubes ready, his hand gripped a pair of ammunition boxes. He'd slung additional weapons from his shoulder.
Coke jumped out to help his logistics officer. The team was going to need all the munitions, all Barbour's electronics, and mere thought of the beer was a cleansing shower for Coke's mind. But they were going to need a hundred times anything they could bring, so loading the van to the point of breakdown was bad tactics.
Particularly they were going to need troops. And the troops didn't exist on Cantilucca.
The beer was in earthenware bottles. Daun handed Coke one which he'd opened by digging the wax stopper out with a screwdriver blade. The cool lager slipped through the major's being like a blessing from the Lord.
"Let's get going," Coke said as he seated himself again beside the white-faced Pilar. He dropped the empty bottle out the window and took the fresh one Daun offered.
Margulies accelerated with care, but the vehicle wallowed anyway. It would be worse when they reached what passed for rural roads on Cantilucca.
The team couldn't run far enough on a planet where it had no friends, any more than the six of them could successfully fight a regiment. But they would run as far as they could; and then they would fight, because sometimes a bad choice is the only choice there is.
Coke reached an arm around Pilar. His hands were black with smoke, ammunition matrix, and iridium redeposited when plasma charges sublimed it from the bores of his weapons. Pilar snuggled close anyway.
Coke started to laugh. Margulies glanced over, and he felt Pilar stiffen. "It's not over yet, friends," Coke said in partial explanation.
Dawn was beginning to break over Potosi. The intelligence officer switched channels on his commo helmet intently, using its limited resources while his console was in traveling mode. He saw Coke looking back at him and flashed his commander a tight smile.
It was a hell of a thing to think under the circumstances, but Major Matthew Coke was glad to be alive.
The van rumbled eastward out of Potosi. According to the map Coke momentarily overlaid on his visor, the nearest hamlet had been owned by L'Escorial. The Lord only knew what the situation in the sticks was now, since both syndicates had lost their command groups and much of their rank and file.
Coke took only a glimpse at the map overlay, because he still had to watch for possible ambushers. Most of the gunmen who'd escaped Potosi alive would hide in panic when they heard a vehicle approaching, but a few might take potshots at strangers lucky enough to have transport.
Of course, bushwhackers would probably wait for the van to pass. That meant they'd be trying conclusions with Johann Vierziger.
"Heliodorus is just now putting out patrols," Bob Barbour reported. Niko had placed a variety of sensors throughout the spaceport one evening after driving Coke to the terminal. "Madame Yarnell is furious. She's told Colonel Shirazi that they should have been moving an hour ago."
"If she wanted professionals . . ." said Sten Moden. He was picking with a knifepoint at matrix congealed around the ejection port of a 2-cm weapon. ". . . she should have hired us."
"Direct rule by the Delos cartel's probably more efficient than leaving it to local thugs," Margulies said. "More of the locals might starve to death, but they wouldn't be as likely to be shot for the hell of it by some yo-yo having a night on the town."
"Frisian Vessel Obadiah to FDF commander Cantilucca," crackled an unfamiliar voice through Coke's commo helmet. "Come in FDF Cantilucca. Over."
The members of the survey team stared at one another in surprise. Pilar didn't have a commo helmet. She clutched Coke fiercely, then snatched her hand away lest she interfere with his movements. She knew something had happened to startle her companions, but she couldn't imagine what it might be.
"It's coming from orbit," Barbour reported.
"Frisian vesselIObadiah to FDF commander—" the voice repeated. Coke cut the signal off so that it didn't interfere with his thinking.
"The Heliodorans?" Niko Daun suggested.
"Negative, they couldn't crash our frequencies," Barbour insisted. "This is on a general purpose push, but it's encrypted normally."
"The Heliodorans are trying to get us to give away our position," Margulies insisted stubbornly. "They'll home on the transmission if we respond."
"There is an Obadiah," said Johann Vierziger as he watched the rear and sides of the van for possible dangers, "on the FDF naval list. She's a Class III combat transport."
Coke stared at the back of Vierziger's neck. The information Vierziger just stated wasn't secret—but it wasn't something Coke knew, or that a newbie sergeant was likely to have known. Coke didn't doubt that the statement was true, however.
Sten Moden released the blade catch and slid his knife back into the sheath on his belt. "I don't see that there's a downside to responding, Matthew," he said. "If the Heliodorans are good enough to mimic our codes, then they've got us anyway."
"The Heliodorans," Johann Vierziger said toward the landscape rumbling past the back of the van, "aren't good enough to hit the floor with their hats. Though numbers count for something."
Coke grimaced. "Bob," he said, "will my helmet raise them, or do we need to put up a beam?"
"You'll do better if you're out of the van," replied the intelligence officer. "But if they've got their antenna array extended, and I'm sure they do, they'll pick it up anyway."
"Pull off—" Coke began. Margulies swung the wheel and braked before he got to, "—the road, Mary."
Coke was out the door before the vehicle had come to a complete halt. The immediate area had been cleared around a shack now tumbled to moss and ruin. The van's other doors opened as suddenly as Coke's, the guns of his team facing the chance of attack. Even Margulies was scarcely a heartbeat slower than her commander in jumping from the vehicle she drove.
"—FDF Cantilucca. Over," as Coke switched on the transmission from orbit again.
"Survey team commander to FDF vessel Obadiah," Coke said. "We're glad to hear from you, boys, because we've got the Heliodorus Regiment looking for our scalps. Can you drop a boat to pick us up? The Heliodorans have secured the spaceport. Over."
Margulies had shut down the diesel when she stopped. Either she didn't choose to run further, or she was more optimistic about chances of restarting the beast in a hurry than Coke was. Metal pinged as the engine cooled.
"Obadiah to FDF Cantilucca," the helmet responded. "You bet we'll drop a boat. Hold what you've got, troopers. Help is coming in figures one-five minutes. Obadiah out."
"Well I'll be hanged!" Niko Daun said in pleased amazement.
"That depends on whether the extraction boat reaches us before Madame Yarnell does, kid," Moden said, but the big logistics officer was smiling also as he pointed his missile launcher back down the road toward dawn and the Heliodorus Regiment.
"Thirteen point six," Bob Barbour said with satisfaction. "Minutes, that is."
The intelligence officer's hearing must have been that much better than that of his commander, because it was another five or six seconds before Coke heard the first whisper of the vessel's landing motors.
Pilar stood beside him, a hand on his hip beneath the edge of his body armor. She didn't have armor of her own. Via, he should have grabbed Vierziger's suit for her since the sergeant wasn't using it. They brought every other cursed thing from Hathaway House when they—
Niko Daun looked up, toward the sound of the incoming boat. Coke, suddenly fearful that Pilar would follow the direction of Daun's gaze, shot his hand over her unprotected eyes. "His visor will darken automatically," Coke said.
Pilar pulled his hand down with a firm motion. "I've worked in spaceports for twelve years, Matthew," she said. "I know that plasma exhausts can be dangerous to my eyesight."
In a slightly sharper tone she added, "And I'm not fragile."
She squeezed him to take the edge off the rebuke. He remembered that in previous times of crisis she clutched her crucifix. She no longer wore that symbol.
"Sorry," he muttered, meaning more than his conscious mind really wanted to dwell on.
"Blood and martyrs, sir!" Niko said. "It's not a boat, it's the whole ship! They're coming straight in and there's no port here!"
"Class III?" Coke snapped to Vierziger as the penny dropped.
The little gunman smiled, though his eyes continued their ceaseless quest for a threat—or a target, it was all the same thing. He was holding a sub-machine gun now.
"That's right, Matthew," Vierziger agreed. "The Obadiah's a battalion-capacity combat lander. She's got pontoon outriggers, so she doesn't require a stabilized surface to set down. And armor, in case the landing zone's hot."
The transport swept overhead at a steep angle. The roar and glare of her engines were mind-numbing. Foliage at the tips of trees beneath her track curled and yellowed.
The vessel's exhaust was a rainbow flag waved at Madame Yarnell and the Heliodorans, some ten klicks to the west. Either the Obadiah's commander expected to lift again before anyone could react, or—
Or the commander didn't care what a regiment of light infantry might attempt. The Obadiah was coming in with her landing doors open. The troops she carried were ready to un-ass the vessel as soon as the skids touched, or maybe a hair sooner.
"Bloody hell!" Mary Margulies shouted over the landing roar. "She's coming in loaded! She's coming in with troops!"
The Obadiah landed a hundred meters away, like a bomb going off in the forest. Her exhaust and armored belly plates cleared their own LZ. Dirt and shattered trees flew away from the shock. Coke caressed Pilar's head closer to his chest to protect her from the falling debris.
Lift fans howled through the shutdown sizzle of the landing engines. The rounded prow of a combat car burst through the fringe of forest which remained between the survey team and the LZ. The vehicle's wing tribarrels covered the sides, but the commander's weapon forward pointed straight at the van.
Coke stepped clear of the others, waving his sub-machine gun butt-upward. The combat car dropped to idle a meter from his feet. The legend on its scarred bow read Cutting Edge.
More vehicles deployed through the forest to either side. They were accompanied by squads of infantry riding one-man skimmers.
The commander of the leading car tilted up his tribarrel and raised his visor so that he could face Coke directly. "I'm Captain Garmin," he announced, "with my C Troop, First of the First and L Troop, Third of the First for infantry. I'm in acting command, but I'm supposed to turn the force over to Major Coke if he hasn't been incapacitated when we land. Are you Coke?"
You're supposed to fucking what?
Aloud Coke said, "I'm Coke, but what are you doing here?" With a company of combat cars and a company of FDF infantry!
Garmin grinned broadly. Coke remembered him vaguely from back in the days of the Slammers, a non-com who'd gotten a field commission.
"The Colonel took your initial reports and cut a deal with the Marvelan Confederacy," Garmin explained. "We're to clean a couple gangs off Cantilucca for them. Orders didn't say anything about the Heliodorus Regiment, but I don't guess that'll change anything important."
"I'll be . . ." Coke muttered. He didn't finish the thought because he didn't know what the finish should be. "You've got just the two companies?"
"Yessir, but we're not cadre and trainees," Garmin said. "Most everybody in both troops wears the pin."
The captain tapped the left side of his breast with an index finger. His clamshell armor didn't show citations, but his meaning was clear: the expeditionary force was made up of Slammers veterans and soldiers with whom the veterans felt comfortable to serve. That was still true for much of the 1st Brigade of the Frisian Defense Forces.
"Right," said Coke as the next sequence of actions cascaded through his mind. "Your troopers are ready to go, Captain?"
"My troopers are gone, Major," Garmin corrected with justifiable pride. "Both troops have completed disembarking."
He coughed and added, "The Obadiah is armed and has her own security element, sir. I'd figured to get to work with my entire force—if you hadn't been around."
"Right, hit them before they get organized," Coke agreed. "Bob, set up in—"
He looked to his side. The intelligence officer had already re-erected his console, backing it against the parked van.
Barbour glanced up from a display of the Potosi area including the spaceport. Mauve icons denoted the Heliodoran forces. A platoon-sized Heliodoran detachment was probing Potosi, but the bulk of the regiment milled around the vessels on which it had landed.
"This'll do, sir," Barbour said. "I'm already patching data to the main com room of the ship. You can access it from there."
He nodded up to Captain Garmin. "We've got sensors throughout the area of operations," Barbour explained to the newcomer. "I'll hand you targets on a plate."
Garmin blinked in surprise. The officer who'd unloaded two troops inside of three minutes could appreciate professionalism in another man too.
"Niko, stay with Bob as security and a gofer," Coke ordered. "The rest of us'll need a car."
Who ever heard of running central intel from a shade tree? But Barbour was right, so long as he had a link to the nearby ship, it was as good a place as the next. "You others—"
"I'll drive," said Johann Vierziger. "It's not my favorite slot, but I'm good enough at it."
"I'll give you my XO's command car," Captain Garmin said. "It's—"
"Negative, Captain," Coke interrupted. "You will give me a combat car. The one you're in will do fine. If you want to ride into a firefight closed up in a can, be my guest—but I don't."
Coke hopped onto the skirts of Cutting Edge. "ASAP, Captain!" he prodded. Moden and Margulies were beside him—the logistics officer still shouldering his brace of heavy missiles. Vierziger mounted the bow slope and thumbed out the car's surprised driver.
"I—" Garmin began, then swallowed a protest that he knew wasn't going to do the least bit of good. "Yes sir," he said as he swung over the far side of the fighting compartment. He took with him only his personal weapon—a grenade launcher—and an AWOL bag of possessions.
A good man. And willing to be a good subordinate.
Niko Daun looked up in disappointment as the team's combat veterans crewed their new vehicle. Somebody had to keep an eye on the immediate surroundings while Barbour concentrated on his console. The sensor tech was the right person for the job . . . but he'd rather have been going along.
Coke checked the action of his tribarrel. It moved slickly on its gimbals, and the multifunction display beside it already glowed with enemy dispositions as reported by the survey team's sensor array. The Heliodorans flat wouldn't know what hit them.
Coke used the attached light pen to sketch the plan of action onto the display screen, from which it was echoed to every vehicle and helmet visor in his command. "C Troop, First and Second Platoons, north of Potosi. Flank speed, you'll hit the port from the east. Third Platoon and HQ element, south of the town to the south side of the port. Bypass the town! We don't want fighting there."
He was setting up a dynamic version of an L-shaped ambush, in which the attacking elements moved against a static target. Fields of fire shouldn't endanger friendly troops . . . much.
Coke rubbed his forehead before he continued. The only way to do this was headlong. If the Heliodorans had time to spread, it'd be the devil's own job winkling out each squad with their buzz-bombs and explosive bullets. He was afraid to think beyond the level of reflex, so he'd go with reflex.
"Infantry commander"—Coke didn't even know that officer's name—"leave a squad in blocking position at either end of town on the east-west road. Remainder of your forces, conform to the movements of their opposite numbers in C Troop. Captain Garmin, take operational control of the eastern element. I'll handle the south."
Via, he didn't even have a call sign!
"Team One, that's Tony One, over."
"Charlie One, confirm, out," said Garmin's voice. Coke wondered where the cars' CO had taken himself. Another combat car, he supposed.
"Lima One, confirm," said a female stranger. "Do you want the mortars here, where the ship provides a base of fire, or shall I put them on line? Over."
Bloody good question.
"Bring them along, Lima," Coke decided aloud. Ten klicks was within the effective range of the troop's pair of 10-cm automatic mortars, but he might want to use shellfire to prevent the Heliodorans from displacing west when the nutcracker of powergun bolts started to close. He'd best keep them near the target area. "Team out."
He looked around at the vehicles and mounted infantry already in line with his car. "Let's roll!" he ordered—
And noticed that Pilar Ortega squatted against the bulkhead of the fighting compartment, between Coke and Moden who manned the starboard tribarrel.
Vierziger poured power to the fans. He had as certain a touch with the fifty-tonne combat car as he did with a pistol's trigger.
"Not you, Pilar!" Coke said. "Blood and martyrs, not you!"
"Me," the auburn-haired woman said coolly. "I won't stay behind, Matthew."
She was holding a sub-machine gun, one of those Moden had brought aboard. She'd proved in Potosi that she could use one, would pull the trigger at least . . .
C Troop's Headquarters Squad—Cutting Edge and the XO's enclosed command car which carried additional commo in place of weapons and munitions—fell into line behind the five cars of 3d Platoon. Ten-man squads of infantry, each accompanied by a two-place gun jeep mounting a tribarrel, followed as the armor blazed a path through the scrub forest. Map data downloaded from the orbital scans provided a course for the lead driver, and the sensors Barbour monitored kept close watch on the Heliodorans.
"Bloody hell," Coke repeated. He couldn't very well throw her over the side of the car, could he?
Garmin's crew had left two suits of back-and-breast armor behind when they evacuated the car so suddenly. Coke sighed.
"Sten, show her how to get into her armor," he said, and he went back to planning the imminent battle.
The port's facilities—maintenance sheds and the terminal buildings; thank the Lord Pilar had gotten herself clear—were on the north side of the fenced reservation. The south was unobstructed, though there were twelve ships scattered over the ground in addition to the five from which the Heliodorus Regiment was slowly disembarking.
Coke had put the weight of his main thrust on the side toward which the newly landed regiment was moving, but the shock of ten combat cars and two infantry platoons was likely to drive the Heliodorans back. When they realized their south flank was being raked by a lesser force, they'd fight like raging hell to blow a way clear.
It was going to be interesting.
Coke's helmet AI filtered out all but Priority 1 messages. Margulies leaned close to him and said, loudly enough to be heard if her commander wanted to, "Barbour's told Madame Yarnell that the Obadiah's a freighter that lost gyro control during normal set-down."
"She's not going to believe that, is she?" Coke said in surprise.
"Via, no!" Margulies agreed. Overlays projected across the inner surface of the security lieutenant's visor distorted her hard smile. "From what they're saying through the bugs in the terminal building, they're sure we're smugglers who picked a bad time to land and try to undercut the Delos cartel. Yarnell figures to take care of us smugglers just as soon as she's got Potosi secured."
Matthew Coke's mind flamed with blood and cyan light. He laughed. The sound made Pilar's face go blank in an expression closely akin to fear.
The south column burst from scrub into bottom land planted with gage. The leading car boosted its speed to 60 kph, three times the rate at which it had picked its way through the heavy growth. The combat cars were capable of doubling that in open terrain, but the infantry wouldn't have been able to keep up.
The gage crop was a month or so short of harvest. The reedy stems were a full meter tall, but the heads where the drug concentrated hadn't taken on the orangeish tinge of full ripeness.
At Captain Garmin's orders, the cars spread from line-ahead formation to line abreast. As directed, Vierziger placed Cutting Edge on the left of the formation while the platoon leader took the right.
There was an officer in position if the force had to displace suddenly toward either flank, and Coke was at the hinge of the attack.
"There's shooting in town," Margulies murmured, relaying data from the intelligence officer. "The Heliodorans ran into a couple dozen Astras who'd gone to ground and came out as the patrol arrived. The Astras just want to surrender to somebody, but the patrol leader's calling for heavy backup."
"I'd as soon," Sten Moden said, "if there wasn't fighting in Potosi. Civilians are bound to get hurt."
"When we take the main force," Coke said, "the rest—Heliodorans and syndicate both, the rest'll die on the vine."
Civilians weren't his concern at the moment. His task was to defeat hostile troops . . . .
The column blasted by a dozen farmers' huts in fenced courtyards. Occasionally a shiver of movement indicated someone watching through the palings or from a shuttered window.
A squad of infantry dropped off to cover the community until the force was safely clear, but there was no real threat. A syndicate garrison might still occupy the loop-holed stone building, but the flag was gone from the pole on the roof peak. Surviving gunmen didn't want to be identified with either of the losing parties.
"If there's ever to be peace on Cantilucca," said Pilar Ortega with a harshness at variance with the soldiers' professional calm, "it'll come the way you're bringing it. No other way."
Coke's eyes danced from the actual terrain to dots crawling across the combiner screen of his multifunction display. "Team One to Team elements," he ordered. "Take preliminary attack positions with at least five meters of screening between you and the perimeter fence. Out."
The south column was back in brush again, uncultivated country that was too dry to raise healthy gage. Vierziger slowed their car and pulled it off the general line of advance. The spaceport perimeter and all the structures within it were directly north of them but out of sight.
The local vegetation averaged three meters tall. A few trees rose half again as high before they flared out like golf tees. The trees had whippy, thin trunks, but their crowns were of straw-colored foliage which provided a complete visual screen. Someone in the spaceport tower could conceivably notice that the vegetation waved with the passage of the armored vehicles, but the chance of anybody being that alert was vanishingly slight.
Besides, the Frisians weren't going to be waiting very long.
A squad of infantry dropped off its skimmers and wormed its individual way into the scrub. The infantry could get much closer to the start line than the combat cars without risk of being observed. The squad's air-cushion gun jeep halted back with the cars.
The mortars were jeep-mounted also. By themselves they could keep up with the infantry easily, but the jeeps carried only two 4-round ammo chargers. The remainder of the ammunition supply rode in a wheeled caisson behind each jeep.
Pulling a trailer with an air-cushion vehicle wasn't a great deal of fun on surfaced roads. Dragging wheels through brush and plowed fields, as this crew had been doing, was like trying to swim with a boat anchor. The company commander had wisely unloaded the pair of mortars as soon as she could.
"Charlie element in position," Captain Garmin reported. His platoons had a shorter route than Coke's, though there'd been a delay as many of the troops and cars crossed the road cautiously to reach their attack positions. "Charlie out."
Coke frowned at his display. Eight Heliodoran vehicles were moving away from the terminal building. Twelve more were in the final stages of loading soldiers from an early-landed transport. A battalion headed toward Potosi to reinforce the patrol engaged there. The squad of infantry he'd left in a blocking position could at best slow them with a hit-and-run ambush, and that would be extremely risky.
On the southern perimeter, three of the combat cars and their associated infantry were short of where he'd wanted them to be able to enfilade the westernmost of the Heliodoran transports. Coke gave the order anyway: "All Team elements. Move into final attack positions."
Johann Vierziger eased Cutting Edge forward. His seat was raised so that he looked out of the hatch in the bow slope instead of through the vision displays within the driver's compartment.
"Wait for my command to fire," Coke continued, "unless the enemy engages you first. In the latter case, fire at will. Mortars, when the shooting starts, drop your rounds on concentrations shielded from direct fire. Team One out."
Some troopers felt claustrophobic when they were buttoned up in a vehicle. Coke was pretty sure that Vierziger just wanted to be able to add his own increment to the skein of fire which would shortly enwrap the Heliodorus Regiment.
The bow of Cutting Edge nosed up to the perimeter fence. Beside the vehicle, an infantryman was slicing a hole in the fence so that the wire didn't obstruct his line of fire.
The nearest starship—a freighter in the gage trade—was 200 meters away, northward and to the right. The terminal buildings were almost 800 meters distant.
The column of Heliodoran transport, lightly armored ten-wheeled trucks, drove toward the gate and Potosi beyond. Soldiers leaned on the waist-height panels of the cargo boxes, looking like sightseers rather than combat troops.
"Barbour says we've been seen!" Margulies shouted.
"Fire at will!" Coke ordered. He squeezed his thumb trigger as three red flares lifted from the terminal building.
Coke aimed at a detail of soldiers horsing crates from the cargo bay of a Heliodoran transport. The figures went down like bowling pins. A case ruptured, spewing out multicolored smoke from the marking grenades within.
Sten Moden launched one, then the other, of his missiles from the starboard wing of the fighting compartment toward targets far to the left. The backblast cleared swathes of empty scrub.
Coke needn't have worried about the most distant transports. A missile detonated on the boarding ramp of each.
Coke shifted his point of aim to the cargo hold of his chosen freighter. The inertia of the spinning iridium barrels fought the weapon's powered traverse, giving the motion a greasy dynamism.
The open hatch was a foreshortened trapezoid in his sight picture. Coke squeezed the butterfly again. The stream of 2-cm bolts reflected within the starship's dark interior like the pulses of a short circuit.
Ammunition detonated in a series of quivering yellow puffs. The orange flash that followed ripped the vessel apart, blowing the middle third across the port as jagged shrapnel.
The blast hurled Coke back from his tribarrel. The concussion set off stacked munitions previously unloaded from other ships. The shock wave skidded the eight Heliodoran trucks, already raked and burning from the eastern element's gunfire, into a single piled inferno.
Coke got up. He'd lost his helmet. Pilar, white and as stiff-featured as a skull, handed it to him.
A black mushroom mounted a thousand meters from the crater where the center of the starship had been. The two ends of the vessel lay crumpled, thirty meters from where they rested before the explosion.
Gunfire ceased for an instant. The shock had flattened potential targets as well as stunned the FDF gunners.
The initial eight-round salvo of mortar shells landed amidst the unloaded cargo. The white flashes and blasts would have seemed devastating had they not just followed a cataclysm.
Loudspeakers throughout the terminal buildings blared, "Invading forces, you have been surrounded by soldiers of the Marvelan Confederacy. Throw down your arms and surrender. You are surrounded by troops of the Marvelan Confederacy. There is no escape but surrender!"
Bob Barbour again, using the patches into the PA system he'd prepared weeks earlier. Coke had never doubted the value of intelligence and electronic warfare, but Barbour would make a believer of the most hardened grunt.
A Heliodoran crew-served weapon raked the southern perimeter from a position far enough to the west to have been shielded from the exploding starship. They were using a coil gun, a scaled-up version of the Heliodorans' personal weapons. The gun managed to cough out a dozen half-kg shells. One round lifted a Frisian infantryman twenty meters in the air, shedding limbs as he tumbled.
A storm of fire erased the weapon and its crew. Some of the shots came from nearby Heliodorans who knew their best chance of survival lay in surrender.
Partial silence returned, striated by the crackle of flames and the screams of those injured too badly to crawl from the spreading fires. Bits of cloth fluttered above whatever sparse cover the Heliodoran survivors had found. Some of the makeshift flags were white, but the intention was clear regardless.
"Colonel Shirazi to Maruelan Command!" a voice cried over one of the commo helmet's open channels. "We're laying down our arms! I repeat, we're laying down our arms! We claim the right of exchange under Bonding Authority regulations! We're laying d—"
Coke cut away from the Heliodoran commander's bleating. "Team One to all Team elements," he ordered. His throat felt as though somebody'd scaled it with a wood rasp. "Cease fire, but hold your positions. When the other side's sorted itself out a little better, I'll have them leave their weapons in place and march to the west end of the port reservation. Cease fire unless you're in danger. One out."
Coke switched to a general push to contact Colonel Shirazi. Sudden dizziness made him sag against the receiver of his tribarrel. The air above the glowing iridium shimmered. Through the heatwaves, Coke saw Johann Vierziger looking back at him anxiously.
Pilar gripped Coke's shoulder, trying to keep him from falling. Silent tears cleared tracks across the grime on her face.
Sten Moden stared out at the barren killing field. There was no telling how many people had died. There would never be a certain figure: the secondary explosions had been too general and too powerful. Hundreds, perhaps over a thousand; in as little time as it takes to open a poached egg . . .
"It could have been worse," the logistics officer said. "It could have been us."
Niko Daun was talking sixteen to the dozen in the light of a lantern hanging over the nearby mess table. He wasn't bragging. In fact, he didn't seem to be aware of the presence of the members of the expeditionary force seated with him.
Many of the ex-Slammers were veterans of a score of incidents as hot as the one the young technician had just survived. They listened tolerantly as they ate.
"He's coming along, Matthew," Johann Vierziger said with mild amusement. "And the next time he won't make the mistake of pointing his gun at a pair of thugs and telling them to surrender."
The lantern illuminated only half of Vierziger's face. Shadows hollowed the killer's perfect features into the agony of a 14th century "Pieta."
"Is mercy a mistake, Johann?" Coke asked. They sat on an empty mortar case near the edge of the expeditionary force's Night Defensive Position.
"I used to think so," Vierziger said. He smiled. "Thinking a gun's a magic wand that you wave—that is a mistake. When those Astra stragglers stumbled onto the van, he should have cut them down immediately."
The wired-in southwest corner of the port reservation was ablaze with floodlights. The Heliodorus Regiment, disarmed and under the guard of four combat cars, would be repatriated as soon as possible.
One of the transports the regiment landed in was still operable. Several days of work were necessary to repair two more, however.
Three transports would suffice to carry all the survivors comfortably.
"Niko did all right," Coke said. "A lot of veterans would have frozen when somebody shot them square in the chest. Thank the Lord for body armor."
Vierziger stretched his slim, hard form, still smiling. "It has its uses," he said, rather than agreeing.
Coke turned toward the eastern horizon, though there was nothing immediately visible save dark forest which had so recently flamed with the directed lightning of powerguns. "Thanks for taking over organizing a citizen's watch in Potosi," he said. "I've got a platoon backing them up as a reaction force, but the gunmen seem pretty much willing to come in peacefully."
Vierziger nodded. "Sten had some friends in town," he said. "Solid people, for civilians. It's not hard to set a structure up if you've got good material. And the locals want a structure."
Matthew Coke's spirit osmosed through the flesh and hovered above the scene. He was aware of sensory stimuli—the laughter of troops relaxing after an action of exceptionally concentrated violence; long-molecule soot from smoldering plastic, masking but not completely hiding the stench of burned flesh; the touch of a breeze on a night that was beginning to turn cool—the way he would have been aware of readings on a console display.
"The Marvelans should've sent along a civil administration unit with the troops," his voice said.
"They didn't have time," Vierziger said. "Alois wasn't going to wait for civilians to get their end together when he already had clearance to deal with the military side."
Vierziger spoke with almost proprietary satisfaction; the tone of a long-time veteran or even friend of President Alois Hammer. Coke looked at the sergeant and said nothing.
"I think, Matthew," Vierziger added mildly, "that you have a visitor coming."
Coke's mind was one again with his body, aches and stresses complete. Pilar's solid figure walked toward the NDP from the terminal building. She'd insisted on trying to put the facilities to rights immediately. It was hard to see that being possible, given the disruption the Heliodorans had caused and the damage from the exploding starship.
They had decisions to make in the near future, both of them.
Coke stood up. "Johann?" he said. "It's quiet now, but the Marvelans will pull us out of here in a few weeks at the longest. Do you think the civilians here will do any better the next time?"
"That's up to them, Matthew," Vierziger said. "The only thing that matters to our souls is what we've done ourselves."
"You believe in souls, then?" Coke snapped.
Vierziger nodded. His smile reminded Coke that Lucifer was a fallen angel. "Oh, yes," the little killer said. "I believe in souls."
Matthew Coke turned and walked to meet Pilar at the guard post. By his own orders as Commanding Officer, troops of the Cantilucca Expedition were required to carry weapons with them at all times.
Coke's sub-machine gun and holstered pistol remained on the crate where he'd been sitting.