The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

There was hinted motion, but no figure appeared in the open. There’d have been trouble had the team walked this way from the port. Nothing they couldn’t have handled, but it would have gotten in the way of Coke’s intention to start out with a low profile.

“Do you miss Marvela?” Coke asked. His eyes swept broad arcs though his head moved only slightly.

“No,” Pilar said. “No.”

She paused. “But I wish we hadn’t come here. Cantilucca is a …”

She grimaced. Coke wasn’t sure whether she was unable to find words to describe the planet, or if she was simply unwilling to voice them.

“There’s too much nastiness here,” Pilar said finally. “A man can go wrong anywhere. But on Cantilucca, it’s very difficult to live decently.”

Nothing wrong with my instincts, thought a part of Matthew Coke’s mind; and another part scowled at the smug realization.

The van came up the far side of a dip and rounded a slight curve. Potosi lay directly ahead.

The town had no streetlights, but the ground floors and occasionally one or two of the higher stories were dazzles of direct and reflected enticement. Instead of having common walls, the buildings were set separately, sometimes behind a walled courtyard. Barkers doubling as armed guards stood outside business entrances, shouting to the traffic through bullhorns.

Pilar slowed the van to a crawl. The theoretical right-of-way was fifteen meters wide, but hawkers and shills narrowed the street, grabbing at pedestrians. Coke saw a trio of crewmen from the Norbert IV. The sailors stayed together as they crossed from one set of premises to the next. Though the men wore pistols openly, they looked more apprehensive than dangerous.

There were no other vehicles on the street. A pink-haired woman with wild eyes stuck her head into the van on Coke’s side. Her breath stank. She shouted something about the tray of electronic gadgets in her hand. The casings of gadgets, at any rate. Coke wouldn’t have bet they had the proper contents.

He ignored the woman. She shouted a curse and spat at him. The roof post caught most of the gobbet instead.

The members of the survey team were in civilian clothing, but Margulies still wore her field boots. Her right leg described a quick arc, across the open window and up out of sight again. The hawker spun backward, tray flying as her eyes rolled up in their sockets.

It didn’t seem to Coke that an action of that sort should arouse comment in Potosi; nor did it.

The ground floor of each building was walled like a pillbox, generally as a form of appliqué to the original structure. In some cases the strengthening took the form of sandbags behind a frame of timber and wire, but fancier techniques included cast concrete and plates of metal or ceramic armor.

In general, two or three upper stories were as-built. Many of the structures now had several additional stories added with flimsy materials.

Banners, lighted signs, and occasionally nude women or boys were displayed in second- and third-floor windows. There was always a screen of heavy wire mesh to prevent objects from being thrown in—or perhaps out. Music pumped from street-level doorways, different in style at every one; always distorted, always shatteringly loud.

Every major starport had a district like Potosi. The difference here was that Potosi appeared to have nothing else.

As Pilar had said, no proper streets crossed the road from the port, but the set-backs between adjacent buildings created de facto alleys. One or more gunmen stood at each intersection, strutting arms akimbo or profiling on one leg with the other boot against the wall.

The gunmen weren’t in uniform, but they wore swatches of either red or blue—a cap, an armband, a jacket—and never both colors. Most of them ran to crossed bandoliers, with knives and holstered pistols in addition to a shoulder weapon.

They eyed the van as it passed. A heavy-set, balding fellow with bits of red light-stripping twisted into his beard stepped after the vehicle, then changed his mind and took his former station. Coke relaxed slightly. He heard Vierziger sigh behind him, perhaps with disappointment.

“Are those your police?” Coke asked their driver.

Pilar sniffed. “There are no police in Potosi,” she said. “None that count, at any rate. Those are toughs from the gage syndicates, Astra and L’Escorial. The Astras wear blue.”

A leavening of ordinary citizens shared the streets with the thugs, shills, and roisterers. Laborers; farmers in a small way, in town on business necessity but without money to spend as a few of their wealthier fellows had for the moment; clerks and office workers going home, hunched over and covered by capes like the one which concealed Pilar.

Somebody clanged a stone against the back of the van. Coke didn’t react physically. He wondered if he should have put two of his people on the roof, so that Margulies wouldn’t be clocked from behind. Too late to change plans now without precipitating the trouble he wanted to avoid.