“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.
“Good evening, sir,” Coke said to the presumed L’Escorial leader. He let go of the hand-grips of his luggage.
The blond man pointed his sub-machine gun into the air and shot off half the magazine in a single ripping burst. A cone of cyan bolts flicked toward the stars.
As their leader fired, most of the other L’Escorials in the cordon followed suit in a ragged volley. They carried a wide variety of weapons, though high-quality powerguns predominated. The night was a bedlam of whacks, hisscracks, and propellant flashes of red, orange, and yellow supplementing the powerguns’ saturated blue.
Not all the gunmen aimed skyward. A burly, bare-chested man wearing garnet-studded nipple rings with a chain slung between them pointed his chemically powered fléchette gun at the front of Hathaway House. He fired twice.
The crashing reports of the hypervelocity weapon rattled shutters and screens against the windows they protected. The building’s facade was concrete containing very coarse aggregate. The tungsten fléchettes blew out craters in sprays of yellow-green sparks. A piece of gravel the size of Coke’s clenched fist flew back across the street. It smacked the wall fronting L’Escorial headquarters.
The gunman rocked with each round from his high-recoil weapon. He was lowering the muzzle for a third shot when the L’Escorial leader batted him across the temple with the sub-machine gun’s barrel.
“Fuckhead!” the leader shouted as his henchman sprawled facedown on the pavement. The victim’s hair, scorched by the white-hot iridium, stank obscenely. “You want to kill us all?”
He’d knocked the fellow unconscious. From the eyes of the man with the fléchette gun, he’d been flying so high on gage and other drugs that he probably wouldn’t remember the lesson in the morning anyway, though he’d feel it.
The L’Escorial leader turned. He waggled the glowing muzzle of his powergun in Coke’s face. “Where do you come from, dickhead?” he demanded.
“We’re businessfolk from Nieuw Friesland,” Coke said quietly. “Though the last stage of our voyage was through Delos.”
“Everybody comes through Delos if they’re coming here, dickhead,” the leader snarled. He pointed his weapon one-handed at one of Coke’s suitcases. “Open that. Now!”
“I’m sorry,” Coke lied, “but they were hold baggage on shipboard, so they’re time-locked. They can’t be opened for another day and a half.”
“Want to bet?” the gunman said. He fired.
The survey team’s luggage was plated with 40-laminae ceramic armor beneath a normal-looking sheathing. The thin laminae shattered individually without transmitting much of the shock to deeper layers. A few rounds from a 2-cm weapon would have blown any of the cases apart, but the burst of 1-cm pistol charges from the sub-machine gun only pecked halfway through the plating.
Furthermore, the ceramic reflected a proportion of the plasma. The spray of sun-hot ions glazed Coke’s trouser legs—the business suit was much more utilitarian than its stylish cut implied.
The L’Escorial gunman’s bare knees blistered instantly, and the fringe of his shorts caught fire. He screamed, dropped his weapon, and began batting with his bare hands at the flames.