The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The need to hold a persona protected Coke against his own fears. This wasn’t him facing a gang of bored, drugged-out thugs, this was a prissy off-world businessman who couldn’t imagine violence as raw as the norm of this hellhole.

A gunman whacked Coke in the back with the butt of a 2-cm powergun. Coke staggered forward, almost into the muzzle of the leader’s automatic weapon. The armored vest saved his kidneys, but it did nothing to lessen the inertia of the solid blow.

Coke flailed his arms to get his balance. “Now that’s just what I mean!” he cried. “What sort of impression do you think that behavior makes on visitors? If you don’t apologize immediately, I’ll have to take action to bring this to your superiors’ attention as clearly as possible.”

“What the hell is he talking about, Blanco?” asked a gunman. He still wore a pair of lacy undergarments from Margulies’ case over his scarlet beret.

What he’s talking about, you moron, is the warning required by FDF regulations before FDF personnel use deadly force in a non-contractual context.

Blanco, the L’Escorial straw boss, stepped forward, poking his sub-machine gun toward Coke’s eyes. The iridium bore was pitted from the long burst of a few minutes before.

Coke hopped backward. Another gunman tripped him. Coke twisted like a cat as he fell, catching himself on his left hand instead of sprawling on his back. Blanco kicked him in the side with cleated boots.

Coke scuttled toward the doorway of Hathaway House, doubled over. He dabbed his left hand down like a deer running with a broken foreleg.

L’Escorials shouted and kicked. One of them swung his 2-cm weapon as a club. Because Coke was moving, the massive iridium barrel smacked him in the small of the back instead of across the shoulders. Again the vest saved him from crippling, perhaps fatal, injury, but the shock made Coke’s mind go white nonetheless. He plowed facedown on the pavement.

The plated door flew open. Johann Vierziger stepped out, grabbed Coke left-handed by the back of the collar, and half-pulled, half-flung, the major into the foyer.

Sten Moden swung the door closed. A L’Escorial stuck his foot in the crack. Margulies kicked the gunman’s knee, then shoved him clear of the opening with the sole of her boot. Several L’Escorials pushed from the other side of the panel, but Moden’s strength overmastered them.

Someone emptied the 30-round magazine of a projectile weapon against the front of the door. A L’Escorial screamed, wounded by a ricochet or at least by spatters of the bullets after they disintegrated on the armor.

The door locked on three wrist-thick bolts worked by a single handle. When the panel slammed against its jamb, Niko Daun slid the bolts home into metal tubes set deep in the concrete.

“Open this—” Blanco shouted, his voice attenuated by the massive door and wall.

Margulies touched a thumb switch, detonating the pair of directional mines in the suitcases outside.

The lobby lights went out. Emergency lighting, glow-strips powered piezoelectrically by the structure’s own flexing, drew pale yellow-green arrows down the staircase and from each doorway. Barbour’s holographic display remained a ball of sharp-edged pastels. Dust, shaken from all the surfaces of the room, filled the air chokingly.

Georg Hathaway opened his mouth as if to scream, but no sound came out. Evie put an arm around her husband’s shoulders and another on his nearer elbow.

Coke staggered to his feet. Margulies tossed him a commo helmet. The other team members were already wearing theirs. Vierziger offered Coke a 2-cm powergun, muzzle up.

The double crash of the mines had been terrible despite the wall’s protection. Coke heard his own voice with ringing overtones as he said, “Right, open it.”

Daun tried to obey. The blasts had warped the door and jamb together. The sensor tech braced a bootsole on the wall for a fulcrum. Despite his straining, it wasn’t until Moden slung his missile launcher and tugged the handle that the panel swung open.

The huge doughnuts of dust and smoke from the blasts had spread and dissipated by the time Coke came through the doorway— third, after Margulies and Vierziger, their guns pointing. Coke switched his visor to thermal imaging because the longer infrared waves penetrated the haze better than the normal optical range that light-amplification mode would have used.

A directional mine was built into one face of each suitcase, beneath the 40 ceramic laminae which the team had removed to use in its body armor. The outside of each mine was thousands of faceted steel barrels the size of the last joint of a man’s little finger. The inside was a layer of cast explosive.

The mines went off like shotguns whose bore was the full plane of the cases containing them: six-tenths of a square meter. The pair, set to cross the edge of the L’Escorial cordon at a shallow angle, had swept the street like a gigantic buzzsaw.