The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 (42 page)

“Come out, Widow!” Pepe shouted gleefully as he stepped into view again.

Johann Vierziger draped himself with bandoliers and two slung weapons, a sub-machine gun and a 2-cm powergun. He slid a pistol into the pocket of the tunic he wore.

“Pepe must have kept my rig,” he said wryly. “Well, it’s only a tool. Like the flesh itself. The tools aren’t what matter.”

“You and Margulies stick together,” Coke ordered. “I’ll take the opposite side of the street myself.”

Vierziger shook his head and smiled. “The two of you take the other side,” he said/ordered. “I prefer to work alone.”

Vierziger began dropping grenade clusters into various pockets of his garments. His body armor lay where it had been dumped with the other Frisian suits.

Coke looked at the little man, then said, “Okay, Mary, let’s get into position. It’ll be party time any moment now.”

They stepped from the building and crossed the courtyard, covering one another’s movements alternately. Fires lighted the interior of a dust pall to mark Astra headquarters and the street before it. Hundreds of L’Escorial gunmen capered about the site, silhouetted like insects by a lamp.

Adolpho Peres, an overlay on one corner of Coke’s visor, bawled, “I surrender! I surrender! I’m coming out!”

The gigolo staggered through the curtain of dust and smoke. Debris fouled his outfit, a ruffed doublet and tights of black velvet. His eyes were slitted.

Peres negotiated the rubble of the protective facade without falling, only to trip over the riddled bodies of the gunmen who’d preceded him from the building. He tumbled to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. “Oh, dear Lord in heaven Luria I’m your friend you mustn’t—”

The fireflies drifted within a meter of Peres before they one at a time emptied their magazines into him. When the last unit fired, only scraps of bone remained of what had been the gigolo’s muscular torso.

“Four to team,” Lieutenant Barbour said through the silence on the scene his console projected. “Are any of you wearing visible red garments? Report ASAP, repeat ASAP! Over.”

Coke sprinted across the street under cover of Margulies’ shoulder weapon. He took cover at the corner of the next building up from Hathaway House to avoid involving Barbour and the Hathaways themselves. “One negative,” he called.

“Two negative,” from the logistics officer, breathing heavily with the exertion of his climb to the roof of the L’Escorial building.

“Three nega—Five negative,” Niko Daun stepping on Margulies’ report, but they were both clear and that was what mattered.

“Six negative,” said Sergeant Johann Vierziger, by pay grade the lowest-ranking member of the survey team. “And it is time that we act, Matthew. Out.”

“Negative!” Bob Barbour snapped. The command was as unexpected as seeing a nun aim a rocket launcher. “This is Four. I’ll tell you when I’m ready, but do nothing till then. Four out.”

“Roger that,” Coke said, crouching at the corner of the building. He wasn’t sure what the intelligence officer had in mind, but he knew Bob well enough now to trust his judgment. Hell, he trusted every member of his team. “One out.”

The town of Potosi was locked and unlighted. Civilians huddled beneath furniture, praying that their homes would be spared by the heavy weapons that could shatter walls and bring down upper stories in an avalanche of brick and timber.

On Coke’s faceshield, the image of Stella Guzman stepped through the curtain of dust. Her combs gleamed in the glaring lights. She stood like a wraith. The ruin of her fortress wound a shroud about her.

“Luria!” she cried. Her eyes stared straight before her, as though she were unaware of her lover’s corpse at her feet. “I will wait for you in Hell, Luria. You’ll join me this night! Do you hear me? You’ll join me this night!”

Pepe’s assistants were still reloading the fireflies’ magazines. The youngest Luria let his controller hang at his belt and rose to face the Widow. “Why, Stella!” he called. “How shameless! Making an assignation and your lover’s body still—”

He drew a pistol and pointed it. From the purple highlights it was indeed Vierziger’s weapon.

“—warm!”

“I’ll wait for you in—”

Pepe shot her in the face. The Widow turned. Luria continued shooting as the body spun onto the rubble and bounced. The Widow’s hand was outstretched toward Peres, but their dead fingers did not touch.

The last of the fireflies rose from the hands of the attendant servicing it. The six deadly constructs wove a violet corona above the L’Escorial leadership.

“Now,” the intelligence officer said. “But don’t harm the fireflies, they’re mine. Four out.”

Pepe Luria noticed that his constellation of fireflies moved without his ordering them to do so. He reacted instantly, diving to cover under one of the armored cars flanking him.

“Take them!” said Major Matthew Coke, and the darkness ignited.

Vierziger fired his 2-cm weapon into the side of the vehicle. Even at a range of nearly 500 meters, the powerful charge turned a chunk of steel armor into vapor and white flame rupturing outward.

Molten and gaseous metal sprayed Pepe beneath the opposite car. Luria jumped up screaming, his hair and clothing afire. Vierziger’s second bolt blew his head off in a cyan flash.

Sten Moden launched a missile. The roof of L’Escorial headquarters reflected some of the backblast straight up, so the building itself appeared to have exploded in red flames.

Before the launcher operator fired, he locked a missile on by snapping an image with his guidance laser, then designated it as a point or object target. In the latter case—a maneuvering armored vehicle, for example—the missile guided itself to the target without updates from the operator.

The missiles had a ten-kilometer range, or even farther if they were launched from a level higher than the chosen target. Here, at half a klick, unburned rocket fuel added to the already cataclysmic effect of the powerful warhead.

An armored car disintegrated in a flash so bright that it seemed to shine through the steel. A red-orange mushroom mounted a hundred meters in the air, raining debris. The blast stove in the side of the car nearest the target vehicle and set it afire. The spray of fragments killed scores of L’Escorial gunmen, shredding some of them from knee height upward.

Matthew Coke chose targets—anybody moving on the street this night—and spun them down with short bursts. Margulies fired her 2-cm weapon from a door alcove five meters ahead of Coke, and Vierziger’s weapons slapped with mechanical precision from the alley west of L’Escorial headquarters.

On targets so distant, a sub-machine gun’s 1-cm bolts were near the low end of their effectiveness. Coke preferred an automatic weapon to the wallop of a 2-cm powergun, particularly at the short ranges he expected before this night was over. He could have carried weapons of both styles, as Vierziger did, but when he got tired he might have grabbed the wrong ammo for the gun he was trying to reload. Even the most experienced veteran could screw up that way. . . .

Part of Coke’s mind wondered if Johann Vierziger ever screwed up. Not when it involved killing something, he supposed.

The second missile hit. The launcher was intended for vehicular use. The thrust of exhaust against the sides of a launching tube pushed even a man as big and strong as Sten Moden a pace backward, so it took a moment to recenter the sights between rounds.

This time the target was the vehicle which carried bombardment rockets. The launching rack was empty, but Moden guessed there might be reloads within the armored hull. He must have been right, because the secondary explosion shattered the concrete facade protecting the building across the street and swept away all the external staircases.

The carnage among L’Escorials still stunned by the first blast was immense. The gunmen literally didn’t know what had hit them.

Coke changed magazines, then slung the first sub-machine gun to cool while he fired the backup weapon. Anything moving was a target. They weren’t human, they weren’t even alive; they were merely motions in his holographic gunsights. He supposed a few of his bursts missed, but he was carrying over 2,000 rounds of ammunition. . . .

“Three, cover my advance!” he ordered. He sprinted past Margulies to the alcove that had served a ground-floor brothel at the west end of the building. The strapped and plated door was firmly closed.

Gunmen—L’Escorials now, like the Astras before them—would be seeking shelter in the buildings. There was none. Those inside would not open their doors to the violence beyond, and the lawlessness of Potosi in past days meant the locked portals would withstand the efforts of panicked thugs to break in.

There was only the forest; and, for those who stayed in Potosi, death.

Two figures—a pudgy man and the aged one clinging to his arm—staggered toward the armored cars straddling the hole in the wall before the Astra compound. A tribarrel on one vehicle raked the night, but its bolts slashed at mid-height across the facades across the street.

The gunner didn’t have a target despite the flaring backblast of Moden’s launcher, which Coke thought would have fingered the rocket team across a five-kilometer radius. The fellow was blind with fear, shooting the way a devotee of Krishna might have chanted to bring himself closer to God in a crisis.

Coke aimed at Raul Luria. If he shot Ramon first, the Old Man would fall out of the sight picture as the son who supported him twisted down in death.

Moden’s third rocket hit the armored car as Coke took up the slack on his trigger. The gunner found whatever god he worshipped, and the expanding fireball engulfed the Lurias.

Something tapped Coke’s helmet. He spun, slashing empty air with the butt of his weapon. Shock from the blast had flung bits from the wall above him, nothing more.

The L’Escorial vehicles were all out of action, either hit by missiles or wrecked by the explosion of neighboring vehicles. Fuel fires spread a lurid illumination across the scene in place of the harshness of headlights a few minutes before. The wreckage of Astra headquarters was ablaze also, a pulsing, bloody glow that erupted from among the fallen walls.

Fireflies coursed the alleys, working outward from the killing ground about Astra headquarters. Occasionally the little machines dipped and stabbed the darkness with a single shot. They had been under Barbour’s direction since he broke, then changed, Pepe’s control codes.

A violet spark trundled purposefully down the street at a hundred-meter altitude, then dived to waist height directly in front of Matthew Coke. A hatch in the rear of the hovering device popped open. The firefly had expended its ammunition on L’Escorial gunmen and needed refilling.

Coke thumbed five rounds from a sub-machine gun magazine and fed them into the firefly. The hatch closed and the device curved back into action. Better machines clear the alleys like ferrets in a rabbit warren than that men should have to do so. . . .

The fireflies weren’t armored, and their corona discharges marked them for hostile gunmen. Like tanks, however, the machines had a psychological impact on untrained troops that went far beyond the physical threat they posed. Thugs ran screaming or closed their eyes and sprayed the sky blindly.

The fireflies put their pistol bolts into the center of mass. They dropped each target with the cool precision of hunting wasps stabbing the nerve ganglia of the prey that will feed their larvae.

Coke and Margulies advanced past one another twice more. There were few targets for their guns now.

Moden put a missile into the center of the Astra courtyard, blasting a crater in the scattered rubble, and flushed several figures. One of them sent a short burst of automatic fire in the direction of the launcher’s signature. Coke, Margulies, and Vierziger all spiked the L’Escorial shooter; Niko Daun’s sub-machine gun spattered the vicinity of the target a moment later.

Coke paused just short of an alley mouth. “Cover my—” Margulies began.

“Three, this is Four,” Barbour broke in. “Don’t advance just yet, I want to run the alley. Over.”

“What do you—” Coke said.

A blast of shots and powergun bolts glanced from within the alley. A man screamed. Three gunmen—an Astra and two L’Escorials, each unaware of the others’ presence until that moment, burst onto the street. Coke cut them down arm’s length from his muzzle in a single long burst.

Two fireflies which had expended their magazines but were still lethally threatening drifted into sight above the men they had chased to their deaths. The devices’ static suspension sputtered faintly, like hot grease.

Across the street, Vierziger’s bolts lit a gunman who’d been similarly chased into sight. The fireflies turned and rose to comb the next pair of alleys in similar fashion.

“Two to One,” Sten Moden reported. “We’ve run out of missile targets, so we figured we’d work east from where you started. Is that a roger? Over.”

“One to Two,” Coke said. “Roger, but use the fireflies for the action, keep them loaded. Break. Four, put half the fireflies at Two’s disposal. One out.”

Neither Daun nor Moden was properly combat material, but Sten was right: a few L’Escorials would have kept away from the battle on their end of town. They weren’t the hardcore gunmen, obviously. Nonetheless, they couldn’t be simply ignored.

The trio on the ground were nearing what had been Astra headquarters. The stench of blood and death was overpowering. Heat from a burning vehicle—plastics and the rubber tires blazed long after the fuel had been consumed—drove Coke into the center of the street. His boots slipped on blood and flesh pureed by the explosions.

A man who breathed in rhythmic gasps tried to stuff coils of intestine back into his belly. Coke sighted on the dying man’s head, then shifted his weapon back to the search for possible threats.

He knew it would have been kinder to finish off the L’Escorial. He just didn’t have the stomach for that particular mercy on top of so much other killing.

A figure running, its limbs jerking like those of a wind-whipped scarecrow.

The man turned as Coke fired. Coke moved on. At every further step, his mind flashed the terrified visage which his bolts had lighted and blown apart.