Danny made a wry face and gestured to the exit. "After you, Baron," he said.
Joachim grinned and walked out ahead of the other man. Without turning he said, "I wouldn't shoot you in the back, Mister Pritchard."
Danny laughed. Workmen moved into the meeting room behind him to tear down the privacy capsule for use in another few days or a week. It was simply a framework with an active sound-cancellation system between two layers of light-diffusing membrane.
"Joachim, we've known each other too long for nonsense," Danny said. It was battlefield humor, but this was surely a battlefield. "You'd shoot me any way you felt like at the moment."
Joachim giggled. They'd reached the hallway, but guards had formed a bubble of space around them without being directed to.
Margritte had been standing with the rest of the aides and clerks. They'd gone off with the remaining council members, leaving her alone. She was as still-faced as a statue in a wall niche.
"If I thought it was necessary, I suppose I would at that," Joachim said. "As you would do in similar circumstances. Wouldn't you, Daniel?"
Danny looked at the shorter man. They'd known each other for such a long time . . .
Aloud he said, "If you mean, 'Would I shoot you if I thought that was necessary to bring an end to policies that I'm sure will destroy the government?' then the answer is apparently, 'No.' Even though I believe that if I don't kill you, nobody in that council meeting is going to die in bed. None of us."
"You have your beliefs," Joachim said, shrugging. "I have mine. I don't believe that I should wait to see if a man who threatens the president is really serious; or if maybe he'll change his mind before acting; or if he's simply too incompetent to carry through with that threat."
"Joachim . . ." Danny said. He and the other man were so focused on one another that the bustle of the hallway could have taken place on another planet. "You know I'm right. You can follow a chain of consequences as far as anybody I've ever met."
"Yes, Daniel," Joachim said. "And so can you, which is why you know that I'm right also."
He giggled. "A pity that we can't run the experiment both ways before we make our decision, isn't it?" he said. "Well, perhaps in another universe Nieuw Friesland is being governed according to other principles. For now . . . well, go to your wife, Daniel. The only thing I know about is killing."
Danny opened his mouth, then closed it and smiled. He said, "That's been our job for a long time, Joachim. Maybe you're right and it still is. If so, the Lord help us."
Joachim frowned. "I left my hat," he said, stepping back into the meeting room.
"Watch it!" a workman shouted as he and his partner swung one of the last panels of the privacy capsule out of its frame. When the fellow looked over his shoulder and saw who he'd spoken to, the panel slipped from his hands.
Joachim ignored him and bent to retrieve the saucer hat on the frame bracing the chair legs. He turned with a smile and called to Danny, "You have to remember, Daniel, that dying in bed has never been a goal of mine."
One of the west-facing windows shattered in a cyan flash. The bolt caught Joachim between the shoulder blades. His body fluids flashed into steam, flinging his trim figure in a somersault that landed him face-up at Danny's feet. The shot had torn the right arm from his torso, but his cherubic face was still smiling.
Mister Daniel Pritchard wasn't carrying a gun, but his reflexes were still in place. He threw himself to the floor, snatched the pistol from the cutaway holster on Joachim's right hip, and rose. He fired three times out the window through which the shot had come.
Danny didn't expect to hit anything but empty sky, but he'd gotten to be a veteran by learning that you always shot back instantly. At the worst it wasn't going to do their aim any good, and every once in a while you might nail the bastard.
People were shouting and running. The meeting room's other high vitril windows cascaded in splinters as guards smashed them out with gun butts. They began raking shots along the distant hills.
Danny lifted himself into a crouch to get a better view. A trooper wearing body armor, one of Joachim's White Mice, landed on his back and flattened him again.
"Keep the fuck down, sir!" she shouted. "We already lost the major!"
"Roger!" Danny said, trying to breathe against the weight of the trooper protecting him with her own body. "I'll stay down!"
The guard got up and scuttled to join her fellows as they fired into the distance. Danny didn't have commo, so he could only hope that the captain commanding the security detail was doing something more useful than the nearest personnel were.
"What happened?" said a voice nearby. He looked back, expecting to see Margritte. She was in the corridor under a guard twice her size.
President Hammer hunched at Danny's side. In one hand he held the pistol he'd worn in a shoulder holster, but the fingers of the other traced Joachim's cheek with a feather-light touch.
"A two-see-em bolt through the window," Danny said, gesturing with his pistol. The inlays winked festively, reminding him whose weapon it'd been. "One round only, so the shooter was either really good or really lucky."
He set the gun down. A floor tile cracked, broken by the glowing iridium barrel.
"Joachim wouldn't have given him more than one round," Hammer whispered. His face was set, but tears ran down his cheek. "I never thought I'd see this. Never."
Hammer holstered his own pistol and rose to his knees. The guards had stopped shooting. Under a sergeant's bellowed orders they backed away from the windows and stood shoulder to shoulder, a living wall between the direction of the shot and the men they were here to protect.
The bolt had blown the remainder of Joachim's tunic away. His chest was as white and hairless as an ivory statue.
"Where's his lucky piece?" Hammer said.
"What?"
Hammer looked at Danny, his expression suddenly blank and watchful. "Joachim always wore a coin from Newland around his neck," Hammer said. "That was the only thing he'd brought from home. He said it was his luck."
"Colonel?" Danny said harshly. He got to his feet. "I'm not behind this. I don't care if you believe me, but it's the truth anyway. However, this is the best piece of luck you and the whole planet could've gotten."
Joachim's corpse smiled at him from the floor.
AFTERWORD
ACCIDENTALLY AND BY THE BACK DOOR
1.
Some people decide at an early age that all they want to be is a writer. A high school classmate of mine was like that, actively Gathering Material while the rest of us were basically being kids. His career never got off the ground—he sold a couple fillers to Reader's Digest—but Robert E. Howard and my late friend Karl Edward Wagner had the same attitude and were extremely successful in their time.
I wasn't like that: I was going to be a lawyer. I intended to write and sell at least one story, but writing was only a hobby so far as I was concerned. This distinction affects everything that comes after.
2.
I sold two horror stories to Arkham House before I was drafted in 1969, and sold two more in 1970–1. The fourth sale came after I got back to the World and reentered Duke Law School. Then August Derleth, the proprietor of Arkham House, died and left me without a market.
There were very few professional outlets for fantasy stories at the time, and the fan press didn't pay at all. The modern fantasy/horror small press really started when Stu Schiff began paying a penny a word for stories in Whispers in 1973 (at my instigation, I'm proud to say). I had no luck selling the professional markets my fantasies using backgrounds from ancient history, and I scorned the notion of giving stories away to fanzines.