The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

“There’s a lot of things on Cantilucca they shouldn’t do,” Coke said. He drained the last mouthful from his current mug and set the empty under his chair to get it out of the way. “Madame Yarnell stopped people who’d be better dead from killing each other. That’s about it.”

He didn’t see any guns on the street. Syndicate colors were muted as well. A red beret, a blue neckerchief—rarely anything more overt. Widow Guzman and the Lurias had sent most of their gunmen back into the farming districts for the time being.

“I wonder how Esteban’s father-in-law’s doing,” Sten Moden said. “I’m afraid that the thugs that were swaggering around Potosi’ll be looking for something to keep them occupied out in the sticks.”

A woman screamed in a broken voice from the cafe’s back room. Shouts and laughter greeted the outburst. A pair of men wearing red armbands got up from the table beside the Frisians and walked toward the back. They were fumbling in their pockets for the cover charge.

“Sir,” Niko blurted. “Are we really going to help these guys? I mean, both sides, they’re—they’re animals, sir! The least we ought to do is say ‘no sale’ and go on back to Friesland.”

“That still leaves the same people here,” Moden said. “It’s not an answer.”

He swizzled a sip of beer around his mouth. He didn’t appear so much to be savoring as analyzing the fluid.

“Oh, the beer’s not that bad,” Coke said. Without changing his tone, he went on, “I think if we wanted to …”

He paused, looked at his companions in turn, and resumed: “I don’t think it would require much pushing from behind the scenes to get Astra and L’Escorial to pretty well eliminate each other.”

In Matthew Coke’s mind, the response was:

Daun: “Sir, your proposal is clearly against the interests of Nieuw Friesland!”

Moden: “Major, I regret that, in accordance with the provisions of the Defense Justice Code, I’m going to have to relieve you of command for that treasonous suggestion.”

Niko Daun’s face split with a wide grin. “Lord, sir!” he said. “I was afraid you were going to burn me a new asshole for saying that.”

“Yeah,” agreed Sten Moden, setting his mug down hard enough in his enthusiasm to slosh. “We were all afraid to discuss it with you, Matthew. But I don’t care what color their money is—something has to be done about these bastards, and the six of us are the only folks around who might be able to do it.”

“We all?” Coke repeated. “You two talked to the others?”

Daun nodded. “Vierziger said that was what he was here for, he guessed.”

“Johann said he presumed.” Sten Moden corrected. He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. But Johann’s willingness to shoot people isn’t in doubt, is it?”

“Bob, he’s not real comfortable with the business,” Niko resumed. “He’s not afraid of Camp Able, it’s not that, but …Well, anyway, he finally said he was in.”

The sensor tech shook his head. “He’s a good guy, Bob is. I don’t understand what’s going on under the surface, but he’s a good guy. And a fucking wizard with that console!”

“Yeah, he’s good all right,” Coke said. All five of his people were good, were about the best he’d ever seen. And he was talking about dropping them into the gears of a very powerful machine, in hopes that the machine would break before they did.

“Mary?” he added aloud.

“She’s the one who brought it up,” Moden said with a half-smile. “I suppose we’d all been thinking about it, but she said it aloud.”

“She said,” Niko amplified, “that this was sort of like wiping your ass with a broken beer bottle—sooner or later, you were going to wind up in a world of hurt. But if she survived, she didn’t want to remember that she hadn’t tried to change things on Cantilucca.”

Coke drank half his beer in a series of smooth swallows. Nobody spoke again until he stopped to breathe and brush his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll work up a plan of action,” he said. “We’ll have to wait for the cartel representative to leave, but that shouldn’t take long.”

Daun frowned. “She said she might stay here for years, sir,” he said. “We aren’t going to …?”

“No,” Coke said. “No, Madame Yarnell isn’t going to bury herself on Cantilucca for any longer than necessary. A few months at the outside. Her coming is actually better for our purposes. When she does leave, the lid’s going to come off with a bang.”

The red hovercraft Pepe Luria brought back from Delos whined slowly down the street. Its presence cleared a path through the mostly civilian traffic, even though the overt threat of guns and murder was held temporarily in abeyance. The vehicle stopped alongside the table where the three Frisians sat.

A red-veiled side window slid down. Pepe was in the driver’s seat. His father and grandfather sat in back.

Ramon leaned forward to get a better view past Raul. “Come with us, Major Coke,” he called. “We’ll ride in my Pepe’s fine new toy, shall we not? And we’ll talk.”