The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (16 page)

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.

“It isn’t always this bad,” Pilar said apologetically. Her hands were stiff on the control yoke. “Both the gangs have been hiring recently and bringing men in from the fields. It’s, it’s worse than any time in the six years we’ve lived here.”

Coke didn’t bother to ask whether “years” meant standard or the shorter Cantiluccan rotation.

“These are farmers?” he said, frowning at two bands of a dozen each, kitty-corner from one another at an intersection and only ten meters apart. The gangs glowered at one another as they postured.

A short man with a blue beret hopped up to the side of the van. He braced himself on the window ledge and shouted, “Dog vomit!” at the red-clad gang on the opposite corner.

Niko Daun clutched beneath his tunic. Sergeant Vierziger raised his left index finger to prevent his fellows in the back of the van from moving. His eyes were on the opposite side of the vehicle, however, ready to react if a L’Escorial thug decided to shoot through the vehicle at the challenger.

None of them did. The van rumbled on.

Pilar swallowed, showing that she too recognized how dangerous the past instant had been.

“I meant guards from the fields,” she said, watching the roadway. “Some of them were farmers. Some of them were sailors who jumped ship or were discharged on Cantilucca for bad behavior. Many of them are just, just badmen. They’ve come to Cantilucca because word’s out that the syndicates are willing to hire anybody who’ll carry a gun and swagger.”

“But there’s no formed units of mercenaries on Cantilucca?” Coke asked.

“No,” said Pilar. “No, we’ve at least been spared that.”

So far, Coke thought. But only so far.

The van passed a three-story building on the right, set back in a walled courtyard. The structure was painted entirely blue, although several different shades had been mixed promiscuously. The whole facade was sheathed in concrete, and there were firing slits on each level in place of normal windows.

“Astra headquarters?” Coke asked. He thumbed toward the building, but he kept his hand below the level of the van’s window so that only Pilar could see it.

“Yes,” she said curtly—without looking toward the garish structure.

There were half a dozen guards at the courtyard gate, staring at everything which passed in the street. Their scrutiny drove pedestrians crowding to the left, the way a plume of cloud forms downstream of a hilltop.

Nobody looked at the guards. Nobody. Just for the hell of it, Coke turned deliberately to the right. His face wore a blank smile. The Astras glowered, but they were doing that anyway.

The guards were in full blue uniforms instead of wearing tags and scraps of the color. An elite force, then; and if those slope-browed slovens were the syndicate’s elite, the Astras at least should be willing to pay for professional support.

“I’d think,” Coke said in a neutral tone, “that there might be advantages to a dwelling closer to your place of work.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that too,” Pilar said, giving Coke a brief smile. She was obviously glad of human contact. “But the part of Potosi past the two headquarters buildings is much quieter. The side toward the port is, well, you’ve seen it.”

“Seen enough to imagine the rest,” Coke agreed.

Somebody had sprayed scarlet paint on the pavement four hundred meters beyond Astra HQ. On the left side of the road, a group of twenty or so thugs sauntered from a heavily fortified building, also red, and surged across the street to form a cordon. They called to one another and jeered the civilians they blocked.

Pilar touched her crucifix with the tip of her right index finger and whispered a prayer. She stopped the van and cramped her wheels for a tight turn back the way they’d come.

“What is this?” Coke said. He opened his door and stepped out onto the running board. His eyes scanned front and to both sides, looking for the glint of a pointed weapon or the flash of a shot. His being was centered in his body, ready to send it in any direction.

The van’s rear doors slid back as the rest of the team readied for action. Margulies’ boots thumped on the roof.

“It’s nothing, it’s just a game they play every once in a while,” Pilar said. She tried to ease the van into a turn, but the crowd recoiling from the cordon held the vehicle fast. “We’ll have to go back and try to circle off the road—oh!”

“The idea seems to have caught on with our friends in blue,” Margulies called from the roof of the van. “They’ve got the road blocked behind us now.”

“Do you have any orders, Matthew?” Johann Vierziger asked in a voice as sharp and lethal as a cat’s white eyetooth.

“No!” Coke said. Not the guns, not yet. “Mistress Ortega! What’s the best way through?”

A three-wheeled jitney stopped at the cordon. The driver might have turned as more distant traffic did, but a thug pointed his sub-machine gun at the little vehicle.

L’Escorial gunmen poked and prodded the passengers, a pair of sailors and their local whores. A gunman took the liquor bottle from a sailor, drank from it, and handed it back. The business wasn’t a formal search, just harassment and almost good-natured— until the end.

A gunman lifted up the bandeau of one of the prostitutes to uncover her breasts. The woman’s nipples were tattooed blue.

The gunman’s quick feel turned into a vicious yank. The woman screamed. Another L’Escorial thug bashed her behind the ear with a pistol butt.

Half a dozen of the red-clad gunmen converged like soldier ants to the sound of an intruder. They kicked and punched, stripping the prostitute as she tried to crawl away from them. One of the men thrust the muzzle of his 2-cm powergun between the woman’s legs.

Coke’s vision focused into a narrow tunnel. His mouth was half open and his skin was cold.

He didn’t know her. She was nothing but a whore and a stupid whore besides, a whore who took an indelible stand in favor of one gang of thugs over another.

But he was going to do it anyway, violate his own orders and he’d have had the balls of any team member who did the same—

The L’Escorial lifted his powergun, laughing, and kicked the woman instead. His nailed boots tore a double row of gashes in her buttocks; but that came with the turf. She continued to crawl, ignored now by the gunman and other citizens alike.

The two sailors and the remaining woman slipped through the cordon during the incident. The driver left the jitney where it was. He ducked into a doorway marked DRINKS & ENTERTAINMENT.

Pilar shut off the van’s engine. “There’s no way through or around,” she said. “No safe way. They—”

She closed her eyes and whispered something with her finger on the crucifix again.

“This doesn’t happen very often,” she continued in a resigned tone. “I suggest you take beds in one of these—” she grimaced “— places. That’s what I’m going to do. It will be quite horrible, but . . . you can’t tell what they’ll take it into their heads to do. Many of them mix tailings and alcohol together. It makes them crazy. Crazier.”

“This doesn’t look like a great neighborhood a-tall,” Niko Daun said, looking around at the dingy buildings.

He was right. The add-on levels above the original constructions were reached by rickety outside staircases. The signs reading BEDS or SLEEP or (in one case, and perhaps little more of a lie than the others) SAFE LODGINGS were always on these outside stairs.

“How far away is the Hathaway House?” Coke asked Pilar as he continued to scan.

“It’s right across the street from the L’Escorial building,” Pilar said, “but that’s the problem. It wouldn’t do you any good to walk around the, the armed children, because they’re exactly where you want to go.”

“Hathaway House may not be any better than these flops anyway,” Sten Moden suggested. He didn’t sound concerned.

“There’s six of us,” said Robert Barbour. “We ought to be safe enough for the night.”

“The Hathaway is a decent place,” said Pilar. “I mean really decent, the only one in Potosi. But you can’t get there. It doesn’t have any back door. That’d just be another point to guard.”

“I would say,” Vierziger said coolly, “that it’s not too far to carry our luggage if the lady doesn’t want to drive us.”

“It’s not want,” Pilar burst out angrily. “It’s not safe to cross that gauntlet, safe for you!”

People with great need or great confidence were getting past the cordon. A gunman in red cordovan boots cut a citizen’s belt and sent him scampering away with his trousers around his ankles.

Women were fondled, generally roughly. A few people were relieved of small objects—a gun, a chip recorder; perhaps some money. For the most part the cordon was an irritation, not an atrocity.

But it could become an atrocity at any moment, Coke knew. The only apparent check on the gunmen’s activities was their own desires. There was no sign of external control.

Coke glanced up at Margulies on the roof of the van. He’d order her into a firefight without hesitation, but this was something else again. At the start, anyway.

“Mary, it’s your call,” he said.

She shrugged. “I’m not thrilled either way,” she said. “But we came here to get information. I guess we may as well go do that.”

She hopped down, bracing her left hand on the van roof. Her toes took her weight, so that she landed as lightly as if she’d stepped from the side door.

“All right, that’s what we’re going to do,” Coke said. “Whatever comes, we’re going to take it. When we’re in the hotel, we’ll take stock—but not before then. Understood?”

Sten Moden shrugged. Daun said, “Yessir,” very quietly, and Robert Barbour nodded. The intel lieutenant looked nervous, which was actually good: that meant he understood what was likely to happen. Coke thought he’d be okay.

“You mustn’t do this!” Pilar said. “Please, just come with me.”

She started toward stairs marked CLEAN LOCKED BEDS, rising from the unpaved alley beside where the van was parked. A man—or perhaps a woman within the ragged garments—lay supine just below the first landing.

“Nothing without orders, Matthew,” said Johann Vierziger. “Nothing. I understand.”

Coke nodded. “Let’s do it,” he said, hefting his own pair of cases from the van and starting toward the cordon.

“Please!” called Pilar Ortega. “Please, Master Coke! You don’t know what you’re doing.”

She was wrong there . . . but that didn’t necessarily mean that the business was survivable.

A few additional gunmen wandered out of L’Escorial headquarters to join the cordon. One of them brought a carton from which he tossed thimble-sized stim cones to his fellows.

Other L’Escorials left, bored by the lack of activity. Three of them headed for a ground-floor establishment whose doorjamb and transom were outlined in red glow-strip.

Many of the dives in the immediate neighborhood were marked red. None of them had blue anywhere on their signs or facades.

“S’pose they’d all go home if we waited a bit?” Daun asked.

“No,” said Barbour beside him. There was tension in the voices of both technical specialists, but many things need to be tight to function. Neither of the men sounded as if he was about to break.

The 400-plus meter stretch of road between the rival headquarters had largely emptied since the cordons were established. The only traffic was of pedestrians crossing from one bar to another or climbing stairs to a flophouse.

A few drivers returned to their vehicles and ran them into the alleys. The jitneys had large-diameter wheels and often studded tires (though not all of them had tires). They could probably get along well enough off the pavement, though a serious pothole would overbalance them sideways. The little vehicles had narrow tracks and a high center of gravity.

The survey team, pulling its luggage toward the L’Escorial cordon, stood out like six sore thumbs.

The gunmen quieted speculatively. They didn’t break their rough spacing across the width of the street, but there was a slight edgewise movement to concentrate in Coke’s line toward the doorway of Hathaway House.

The door was metal-faced. It opened a crack. An orange-haired woman in her late middle age looked out. She closed the door after surveying the situation, but a triangular viewport opened immediately toward the top of the panel.

A blond man in his mid-twenties walked from the center of the line toward the end which the team approached. The fellow wore a crimson vest and cutoff trousers, high boots with rows of spikes around the calves, and a waist belt heavy with pouches of spare magazines for his sub-machine gun. His right arm and left leg were tattooed in patterns too stretched and faded to be identified in the bad light.

Coke paused a meter short of the blond man. Vierziger was a pace behind him; the rest of the team slanted back in precise echelon. Under the present circumstances, Moden instead of Margulies brought up the rear.