The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The three men from the saloon now stood in the broad archway where the alcove joined the lobby. One of the policemen opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping silently on the dock. The third man, a civilian whose ragged clothing had once been of good quality, still carried his drink. He didn’t look particularly interested, in the carnage or in anything else.

Coke tossed the 2-cm weapon to Margulies. She caught it at the balance. He still had a pistol in a belt holster beneath his jacket.

He thought of taking off the armored vest, but after a moment he decided not to waste the time. “You,” he said to a policeman. “Does that shock baton work? Give it to me.”

“Huh?”

Vierziger stepped behind the man and slid the fifty-centimeter rod from its sheath.

“Hey!” the policeman cried. He and his partner jumped in opposite directions sideways, as though the little killer’s presence were a bomb going off between them. “Look, what are you—”

Vierziger switched the baton’s power on. He touched the tip of the slim rod to the inside of his own left forearm. The powerful fluctuating current crossed nerve pathways and flung his arm violently out to the side.

He smiled again, turned off the power, and tossed the baton to Coke. “Fully charged,” he said.

Coke slid the baton beneath his waistband. “You’ll get it back,” he said to the policeman. Half his face grinned. “Or somebody will pay you for it.”

He looked at Moden. “Sten, you’re in charge till I return,” Coke said. “I don’t expect potential employers to react that quickly, but if they do, set up a meeting for tomorrow.”

He touched his brow with one finger in a wry salute. “See you soon,” he said, and started for the door.

Margulies fell into step with him. “I’m coming,” she said.

Johann Vierziger shook his head. “Three can be a crowd, Mary,” he said in his cultured, mocking voice. “Matthew will probably be all right…and besides, as he says, it’s a personal matter.”

“Three?” said Niko Daun. Margulies nodded, turned, and leaned the extra shoulder weapon against the wall beside the door.

Barbour looked up from his console. “I’ll be tracking,” he said. If there had been any more emotion in the statement, it would have been a challenge.

Coke laughed out loud. The whole team thought he was behaving like an idiot—but he’d earned the right a few minutes before to do that. The whole team, himself included.

“See you soon,” he repeated, and he stepped out into night fetid with death.

Scores, perhaps as many as two hundred, L’Escorial gunmen clustered around the windrow of bodies in front of their compound. An armored truck—not the one that had appeared before, but a similar design—illuminated the scene with its quartet of bumper-mounted headlights. One man sat cross-legged on the top of the wall, holding a liquid-fueled lamp, and other gunmen waved a variety of electrical handlights.

There wasn’t much effort spent on caring for the wounded, assuming some of the victims were still alive. For the most part the L’Escorials stared, sometimes calling in wonderment. The sight appeared to touch them no more than a particularly vivid traffic accident would have done.

Coke expected the L’Escorials to react to him, perhaps to try to stop him. None of them seemed to notice that he’d left Hathaway House. The pool of light over the bodies acted as a curtain shrouding everything beyond the direct illumination.

A crowd of spectators aggregated quickly now that civilians realized the syndicate gunmen would pay them little attention. Coke noticed that a number of the onlookers covered blue garb with cloaks of neutral gray: Astras who wanted to see what was going on without themselves becoming causes of war.

Coke walked quickly up the street to where Pilar Ortega had abandoned the port operations van. Three filthy locals were in the vehicle now. One of them was trying to shoot something into his thigh with a homemade hypodermic. The injector’s barrel was a hundred-centimeter length of hose.

The staircase to the flophouse Pilar entered was helical and of engineering-grade plastic extrusion. It had been salvaged from a starship. Despite hard use and lack of maintenance, the structure itself was solid and safe.

The stair’s only attachment to the building was looped wire between it and external tubing—water pipes, electrical conduits, and a downspout from the gutter. The wire was of no particular type or strength. Baling wire alternated with insulated power cable and what looked like glass-core data transmission line.

The helix wobbled at Coke’s every step and from any breeze or tremor. He didn’t suppose it was going to collapse under him—and he could probably ride it down if it did break away; the staircase itself was plenty sturdy enough.

But it put the butterflies back in the pit of Coke’s stomach.

The bum who’d been sprawled on the stairs when Pilar climbed them had vanished. Another man now lay halfway up, weeping uncontrollably and holding an almost-full bottle of clear fluid.