The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The armored garage door started to close automatically. While the aircar was still spinning, flinging off bits of body panel, Margulies fired at where the edge of the door mated with the track along the jamb. The plasma bolt vaporized a section of the track and hammered the door panel like a collision with a speeding truck.

The door skewed in its frame and stuck. Nobody was going to get out of the garage to aid Peres unless they wanted to crawl through the twenty-five-centimeter gap beneath the lower edge of the jammed panel.

Both L’Escorial four-wheelers accelerated from their ambush positions. Pepe Luria stood, clinging to the back of the commo officer’s seat. He held an automatic carbine in his free hand.

The aircar landed upside down. It continued to rotate slowly, driven by the vibration of the two fan nacelles still spinning at full revs. The right rear installation had torn itself apart when that corner of the vehicle slammed down violently and drove the side of the housing into the blade arc.

The L’Escorial cars skidded and stopped on opposite sides of Peres’ vehicle. The roof of the aircar was compressed but not flattened to the level of the car’s body.

A youth crawled from the passenger side. He, wore a blue posing suit, blue sandals, and nothing else. He was crying and the crash had bloodied his forehead.

Pepe Luria pointed his carbine from the hip and triggered a burst. The weapon fired large-bore explosive bullets, rocket-assisted to keep the recoil manageable. The rocket exhausts were red sparks across the night. Two of the projectiles hit the boy in the chest, blowing him backward into the wrecked aircar.

The quartet of L’Escorials from the other four-wheeler dragged open the driver’s side door of the aircar. One of them smashed the warped support pillar with the butt of his 2-cm weapon to make it release.

Peres screamed in terror. Two of the men pulled him out. A third threw a restraint net over the prisoner, and the fourth L’Escorial—the man with the 2-cm weapon—swatted him with the flat of the gun butt to silence the blubbering cries. They tossed Peres facedown into the back of their vehicle and got in themselves.

Mary Margulies stood at the edge of the alley, looking down the street toward Astra headquarters and the jitneys full of gunmen who’d driven that way moments before. The only thing moving in the night was the aircar, quivering on its back like a half-crushed bug.

“Get in!” Pepe Luria called to her.

Margulies glanced aside at him. She waved. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll walk, thank you. You’ve got what you came for.”

The pair of patrol cars made tight low-speed turns and accelerated together up the street. The L’Escorial gunmen shouted to one another in glee.

There was a brief squeal of metal from the underground garage. Somebody was trying to free the door with a prybar. An argument broke out inside, identifiable from the timbre of the voices though the words were inaudible.

Margulies changed her weapon’s magazine for a fresh one. She set off toward Hathaway House, staying close to building fronts and trying to look in all directions. She was nearly home before she heard the wail of sirens from Astra headquarters.

The Roberson & Co. trading post in the hamlet of Veridad was separate from the Astra patrol base there, but loud music from the stockade housing a score of gunmen pulsed through the walls. Roberson shivered, clutched his arms around himself as if against a cold wind.

“He’s not coming,” he said to the Widow Guzman. “It’s some sort of—”

The door at the back of the trading post gave onto a fenced storage area, inaccessible from the outside. The door opened. A tall, nervous-looking Frisian soldier, not a man the Astra leaders had met before, stepped out.

“Barbour?” the Widow said in surprise.

“How did you get there?” Roberson gasped.

“I’m Barbour,” the Frisian said. “And don’t worry about how I got through your fence, I did, that’s all. Did you bring the money?”

The merchant glanced reflexively at the case on the floor beside him, behind the counter. They’d expected Barbour to arrive for the meeting he’d arranged by the post’s front door.

There was a pistol in the case as well. To Roberson’s surprise, the Frisian appeared to be unarmed.

“You claim you can free Adolpho,” said the Widow Guzman. “If you can do that, you’ll have your pay. You’ll have any pay you ask.”

“In open-remitter chips, so there’s no way they can trace back where it came from?” Barbour warned. He looked as skittish as a roach when the lights come on.

“Yes, yes, just as you said,” Roberson snapped. “Now, how are you going to release Peres?”

He couldn’t keep the distaste from his tone as he spoke the gigolo’s name, but he hadn’t even attempted to argue with the Widow when the Frisian made his offer. Barbour had called on what was supposed to be a private direct line between Roberson’s office and Astra HQ. That in itself lent credence to his proposition.