The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

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 sprayfoam 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 monocastings. 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 surflike 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.