The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

She turned her back. Her shoulders hunched over her sobs. “You don’t understand,” she cried. “What Terry does is between him and the Lord. I won’t abandon him.”

Coke threw open the gate in the counter and stepped inside. Pilar flinched away, but he grabbed her by the upper arms. “All right, Pilar,” he said. “You won’t go without your husband, so let’s get him.”

She didn’t resist as the Frisian walked her toward the side door where the van was parked. The door opened ahead of them. A Marvelan, one of the clerks from the office next door, stuck his head in. “Hey, Pilar,” he said. “Tomorrow will you cover for—”

He finally noticed Coke and Ortega in an apparent embrace. “Oh,” he concluded.

Coke cleared the Marvelan out of their way by pointing a finger like a lance tip. “Go do your own job for a change!” the Frisian shouted. “Pretend you’re good for something!”

He handed Pilar into the van and stepped around to the driver’s side. The key was already in his pocket. He’d driven the pair of them ever since the first night he escorted Pilar home.

The freighter had vanished into orbit, preparatory to entering Transit space. The two moons were chips on the eastern horizon.

“Where are we going, Matthew?” the woman asked softly.

“I told you,” he said. The diesel spun thirty seconds before it caught. He’d meant to have Sten’s mechanic friend work the cursed thing over, but he didn’t suppose it mattered any longer. “We’re going to get your husband and I’ll put both of you on the next ship out of here.”

He revved the engine to keep it well above its lumpy idle while he dropped the transmission into gear. The van lurched forward. Only when they were twenty meters along the driveway did Coke add the load of the headlight to his demands on the stumbling engine.

“I hope the two of you will find a happy life in your new home,” he added bitterly.

Suterbilt got out of the van in front of a one-story freestanding structure on the northern outskirts of Potosi. The walls were sheer and windowless, and the door would have done for a bank vault.

“You see?” the factor said with a sweep of his arm. “No common walls or floors to break in through. This is probably the safest place in the whole town. A fortress!”

“If it were a fortress,” Johann Vierziger said as he followed Suterbilt from the vehicle, “it would have firing ports. That’s the obvious first problem here.”

He sauntered toward the door. Behind him, Suterbilt wore a look of dawning concern.

“Larrinaga must really have been in the money to afford this,” Niko Daun observed as he brought up the rear. “You wouldn’t guess that to see him now, would you?”

“What?” said Suterbilt. “Well, yes, I suppose he was doing rather well. It was Larrinaga’s competition that drove that old fool Roberson to tie in with Astra, to tell the truth.”

The factor laughed with cruel humor. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire, that was,” he added. “If I’m feeling kindly after we’ve cleaned out the Astras, I’ll let Roberson go off-planet alive.”

He pressed the call button beside the door. A melodious chime sounded, blurred by the thickness of the walls. Nothing else happened for a moment

“And,” Vierziger noted aloud, “none of the so-called guards are keeping a watch on the exterior display.”

He nodded upward toward the miniature lens array above the door. The camera fed a surveillance display inside.

Suterbilt pursed his lips.

Locks within the panel chuckled liquidly as the mechanism drew them back. A man inside grunted and pushed the heavy door open. He wore a red headband and tried to stand at attention when he’d accomplished his task. Three other men stumbled into the entryway behind him, tucking in their clothes and checking weapons that they’d obviously just grabbed.

“Ah, g’day, sir,” the guard with the headband said. “I, ah, we weren’t expecting you tonight.”

The last two guards appeared from the living area beyond. One of them was holding the other upright. The front of the latter man’s tunic was stiff with dried vomit. His eyes were open, but they didn’t focus.

“You normally call ahead, I gather,” Vierziger said to the factor. A sneer was implicit in his dry tone.

“These gentlemen are security specialists,” Suterbilt said harshly. “They’re here to view the premises.”

Vierziger walked into the house. “And to look at the ambiance itself,” he said coolly.

He raised his attaché case, holding it between himself and the guard. The gesture was similar to that of a woman whisking her long skirt away as she passes dog droppings on the sidewalk. When he was clear, he set the case down beside the wall.

The interior of the house was pretty much of a pig sty. Liquor bottles and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of empty stim cones littered the floors. The building had a sophisticated environmental system to exchange outside air, but the filters had been unable to control the stench of human wastes, vomit, and unwashed bodies.