The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The night sandwiched them with human sounds from Potosi and, behind the Astra force, forest noises. Despite Barbour’s desperate orders for them to keep silent, the gunmen talked, cursed the scrub they’d tramped through from where they left the vehicles, and injected stim cones.

The Frisian gestured with his light pen. “You see, there’s only one guard at the back staircase,” he whispered. His pen dabbed twice again. “There’s two more inside, but they’re asleep on the couches in the waiting room.”

“Where?” demanded Kuklar. He looked from the display toward Barbour, then the Widow. “I don’t see nobody.”

Kuklar didn’t understand that the icon Barbour pointed out on the display, a jagged lightning bolt that slowly pulsed, indicated an armed man. It wasn’t certain that he understood what a map was. Barbour took a deep breath.

Somebody on the top floor tugged open a window.

“Hey!” shouted a voice from ground level. “Don’t you—”

A bucket of waste slurped its way down anyway.

“Fucker!” the L’Escorial guard bawled. He fired his sub-machine gun upward.

A few of the bolts slapped the back of the building; most of them vanished as quivering sparks among the stars. The burst didn’t hit whoever’d thrown the slops, because the window closed again a moment later.

“Oh, there he is,” Kuklar muttered. “Why din’t you say he was down there? I thought you said he was here.”

Kuklar started to crawl forward. He unlimbered a weapon from his belt as he moved through the garbage and scrub. Barbour couldn’t be sure of the sort of weapon, even with his visor amplifying the ambient light to daytime levels.

“Get a fucking move on, won’t you?” a gunman said at nearly normal volume. “I’m supposed to be off duty tonight.”

Barbour winced.

“They were the first men available!” the Widow Guzman said. “You were the one who chose Veridad!”

“I didn’t say anything,” the Frisian muttered.

“Hey?” called the L’Escorial guard.

There was a sound like a melon hitting from a height. Somebody squealed. Violent thrashing punctuated Kuklar’s shout, “I got— come on—I got—”

Astras ran toward the building, jostling one another and cursing as they stumbled over garbage in the darkness. None of them had night viewing equipment, even though they were supposed to be a patrol unit.

Barbour shut off his projector and jogged along behind. He noticed that about half the score of gunmen didn’t move forward until others had reached the scene of the fighting.

Guzman kept up with him, though she wore a dress and was as blind as her troops in this starlight. “Leave most of them down here to cover our retreat,” the Frisian ordered her. At this stage in the proceedings, the task overrode his desire to appear a cowardly buffoon. “I’ll take three with me. That’ll be plenty. The guards upstairs probably won’t wake up till long after we’re gone.”

Kuklar had used a brush knife with a hooked blade as long as his forearm. He was levering the hilt back and forth. The heavy blade was buried in the guard’s skull, as deep as the orbit of his right eye.

Barbour swallowed as he started up the stairs. The staircase actually served the building’s upper three floors, but it angled past a window at the back of the TST offices. Barbour felt the treads flex as Astra gunmen followed him.

It would have been easier simply to walk up to the L’Escorial guard and shoot him. The burst of shots the man had fired didn’t arouse any attention.

Barbour was used to Frisian standards. He began to appreciate Niko Daun’s bitter scorn of “indigs.”

The window was locked, barred, and in the beam of a microlaser across the room. If the glass pane stopped reflecting a calibrated amount of laser light to the receptor above the tiny emitter, alarms would go off here, in Suterbilt’s apartment, and in L’Escorial HQ. The system had a lifetime charge so that it remained independent of the building’s power supply.

Barbour knelt, placed the drill, and felt the diamond bit whine happily as it spun a one-centimeter disk out of the pane. Hands-on work wouldn’t usually have been an intelligence officer’s task, but the team had thought it might come to this. Daun had trained Barbour patiently until they were both convinced he could use the equipment successfully.

He replaced the drill in his borrowed belt kit and fitted the mimicking emitter to the hole. It was self-adjusting: when Barbour switched it on, the microlaser aimed and brought itself into sequence with the security sensor. The telltale at the back of the little unit glowed red, then amber as the Frisian bent over it.

Somebody’s chin bumped Barbour’s shoulder. Barbour whirled around, poising the laser’s carrying case to strike. “Fucking fool!” he snarled. “Do you—”

The Widow Guzman started away from him. Kuklar stood behind her, idly wiping the hook of his knife with his shirt-tail.

Barbour swallowed. “Don’t do that,” he muttered. He set the case down and smoothed the top of it with his fingertips. “Please, you’ll get us all killed.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I see.”

The telltale was green.