The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

“I think perhaps I should ride there instead,” Johann Vierziger said.

“I don’t think so,” Margulies snapped. Niko Daun chuckled.

Barbour made a stirrup of his hands. He grunted as he took the weight of the close-coupled woman, but she got a boot on the window frame and flipped herself neatly onto the vantage point.

Coke allowed himself a grin as he took his seat beside Pilar. The six of them had a lot of sorting out to do, with each other and with a job they were all new at. So far, so good.

The van was diesel powered. Pilar coaxed the engine to life with difficulty, and it ran rough after it caught.

“Are there aircars on Cantilucca?” Coke asked over the engine noise. From the amount of racket, there was no insulation in the firewall or body of the van to deaden sound.

“A few,” the woman said. “It’s hard to get maintenance on them. It’s hard to get anyone to do anything in Potosi.”

She engaged the torque converter. The van surged forward instead of picking up speed in a rising curve as Coke had expected.

“Except,” Pilar added, “to swagger around with guns looking tough.”

The van had a bar headlight across the upper hood. It worked, though its icteric cast suggested low voltage. The yellow light swept the gate of the starport compound, open and unguarded. Something hung from a pole just beyond the woven-wire fencing.

“Sir!” Margulies shouted.

“It’s all right!” Coke called back. He’d seen the object as soon as Margulies did. “He isn’t any danger, at any rate.”

A corpse with its hands tied behind its back dangled by one ankle from a cross-pole. Either by chance or intention, the scene duplicated one of the Arcana of a Tarot deck, The Hanged Man.

“Yes,” Pilar Ortega said grimly. “That’s also very popular in Potosi. Dying, I mean.”

Either the breeze through the windowless van was unexpectedly cool, or the hormones flooding Coke’s system were playing hell with his temperature regulation. He slid open the front seam of his dress jacket and let his index finger rest on the trigger guard of his pistol.

He began to smile. Survey work might not be as different from what he was used to as he’d feared.

Coke had decided to enter Potosi quietly and not to arouse the locals’ attention until he’d been able to view the situation on the ground. Frisian commo helmets with their array of vision-enhancing capacities would have marked the team even more clearly than would entering armed to the teeth.

Being able to see into the nighted forest would have been more calming to Coke than the weight of a 2-cm weapon in his hands. He supposed he’d made the right decision at leisure aboard the Norbert IV, but it didn’t feel that way just now.

The van drove past a lean-to of brushwood and scrap sheeting. An open flame glimmered through the doorway. The shadow of an occupant ducked across the light.

“We’re booked into a place called the Hathaway House,” Coke said. “Is that near your house, mistress?”

“My husband and I have a suite on the other side of town,” Pilar snapped. “Terence is in charge of cargo operations.”

“I see,” Coke said in a neutral voice. He saw, or thought he did, quite a lot. “I was only concerned that we were taking you out of your way, mistress. We’re perfectly capable of making our way on foot. The cases are awkward, but the suspension takes all the weight.”

The van rattled along at 45 or 50 kph, about all the pavement would allow. The vehicle steered with a pair of thumbwheels set on the arms of a control yoke. Pilar looked down at her hands for a moment, then raised her eyes to the road again.

“I have to go right past the Hathaway House to get home,” she said. “Potosi has only the one street fit for a full-sized vehicle. There are alleys, but they’re generally blocked.”

“You’re going out of your way to help us,” Coke said, watching the woman with his peripheral vision. “I don’t want to put you to needless trouble.”

“Many of the people, the men, who come to Cantilucca are a rough sort,” Pilar said. She still didn’t look toward Coke. “I shouldn’t have reacted like that to you. I’m sorry.”

“No problem,” Coke said. “Were you born on Cantilucca?”

He knew what he was doing, and a part of his mind didn’t like him much for it, but he was tense. This sort of game, this hunt, was a way to take his mind off wondering whether the next shadow was going to erupt in gunfire.

“Marvela,” Pilar said. She wasn’t a good driver; she had a tendency to overcorrect. At least she kept her eyes on the road while she talked. “We met when Terence was working in the port there. When he returned home to Cantilucca to run cargo operations, I—we married and I came with him.”

From the glow in the sky ahead, the van was nearing the town proper. They passed a straggle of hovels like the first one. The dwellings weren’t so much clustered as squatting in sight of one another, like a pack of vicious dogs penned together.