The innkeeper looked at the cases the security detail had opened. Like those of Barbour and Daun, they were filled with equipment. This time, all the equipment was lethal.
Margulies and Vierziger began handing out weapons to the rest of the team.
Vierziger handed each member of the survey team a vest woven from beryllium monocrystal. Moden and Daun had carefully lifted the segments of ceramic plate from the exterior walls of the luggage. The plates fitted into pockets in the vests, forming body armor almost as resistant as the clamshell hard-suits which the FDF issued for normal field operations.
Coke took off his loose outer jacket and paused. “I don’t think I want armor for this,” he said. He was—
Well, of course he was frightened, a turtle would be frightened if it was about to walk into this one. It was his job, and anyway it’d be all right.
“I think you ought to wear it, sir,” Margulies said.
She’d completely emptied the suitcase on which she’d been working. Weapons and ammunition lay in neat stacks on the tile floor around her. She stood up and latched the case, then twisted the hand-grip 180 degrees. She slid the luggage over to him.
“I think he ought to wear armor also,” said Johann Vierziger, “though I’ll admit I wouldn’t myself if it were me.”
He smiled. His face was that of an ivory angel. “I prefer the freedom. But what I really think is that I should be the one to go outside, Matthew.”
Coke shook his head forcefully. “It’s my job,” he said. “And anyway, it’ll be all right.”
He thrust his arms through the holes of the vest he’d prepared, then mated the front closures. His outer jacket was cut to hang the same whether or not there was armor beneath it. He pulled it on.
“Helmet?” said Barbour without looking up from his console display.
Coke shook his head brusquely. “The implant will do in a pinch,” he said, tapping his jaw. The right mastoid contained a miniature bone-conduction radio transceiver. “They’d react to the helmet the same as they would if I went out in full uniform.”
Barbour nodded without concern. It was his job to offer information to the action personnel. He didn’t—couldn’t—control what they did with the information.
Vierziger slid Coke a second case, emptied and prepared as Margulies had done with hers.
Coke looked down at the luggage, then at his security detail. “One’s enough,” he said.
“Two, Matthew,” said Vierziger.
“Two,” echoed Margulies. “What do you intend to save them for, sir?”
Coke laughed harshly at himself. There was a tendency in any combat unit, particularly with those which operated beyond resupply, to fear using up munitions which they might need later. At its worst, that attitude could mean a position being overrun because the defenders were unwilling to cut loose with everything they had, lest they be out of ammo when the next attack came.
Margulies and Vierziger were right. Unless Coke made the next few minutes really memorable for the L’Escorials, ten times the hardware the team had brought to Cantilucca wouldn’t be enough.
“Right,” he said. “Two.” He took the suitcases.
Niko Daun put his hand on the door latch. Moden’s strength would have been a better match for the mass of the armored panel, but the powerful officer’s one arm carried a three-tube missile launcher. The unit was intended for vehicle mounting, but Moden held it as easily as a lesser man might have done a 2-cm powergun.
Margulies and Vierziger were in position to either side of the door, she with a sub-machine gun, he with his hands empty, though he’d slung a sub-machine gun for patrol carry along his left side. The embellishments of the pistol in the high-ride holster on Vierziger’s right hip winked in the foyer lights.
Robert Barbour sat at his console, calm or comatose. Coke supposed the former but it didn’t matter, not now, as he nodded to Daun and started toward the door, sliding the cases beside him.
Coke stepped through the doorway and shivered in the warm, muggy air. L’Escorial gunmen turned in surprise to face him.
Coke set his luggage against the front wall of Hathaway House. Each of the big cases was a meter long and sixty centimeters high. They were thirty centimeters deep as well, but the volume wasn’t important anymore. Coke left the pair in a very flat V, end to end, almost parallel to the reinforced concrete facade.
He stepped quickly toward the cordon’s leader, the blond man in vest and cutoffs. The fellow’s legs were an angry color; he’d have blisters across the whole front of them by morning, if he survived that long.
A gunman with a bayonetted grenade launcher stuck his weapon toward Coke’s face. The bayonet was a spike rather than knife-style. Coke swept it aside with his left hand.
“Excuse me, sir!” Coke called to the leader. “I believe you’re in charge here?”
“Who the fuck do you think you are, you little prick?” the L’Escorial demanded in obvious amazement. He pointed his sub-machine gun like a huge pistol. The muzzle wavered, but not so much that the 1-cm bore ever drifted away from Coke’s face.
“I’m Matthew Coke, my good fellow,” Coke said. “I’m afraid I have to complain about the behavior of yourself and your friends.”
The need to hold a persona protected Coke against his own fears. This wasn’t him facing a gang of bored, drugged-out thugs, this was a prissy off-world businessman who couldn’t imagine violence as raw as the norm of this hellhole.
A gunman whacked Coke in the back with the butt of a 2-cm powergun. Coke staggered forward, almost into the muzzle of the leader’s automatic weapon. The armored vest saved his kidneys, but it did nothing to lessen the inertia of the solid blow.
Coke flailed his arms to get his balance. “Now that’s just what I mean!” he cried. “What sort of impression do you think that behavior makes on visitors? If you don’t apologize immediately, I’ll have to take action to bring this to your superiors’ attention as clearly as possible.”
“What the hell is he talking about, Blanco?” asked a gunman. He still wore a pair of lacy undergarments from Margulies’ case over his scarlet beret.
What he’s talking about, you moron, is the warning required by FDF regulations before FDF personnel use deadly force in a non-contractual context.
Blanco, the L’Escorial straw boss, stepped forward, poking his sub-machine gun toward Coke’s eyes. The iridium bore was pitted from the long burst of a few minutes before.
Coke hopped backward. Another gunman tripped him. Coke twisted like a cat as he fell, catching himself on his left hand instead of sprawling on his back. Blanco kicked him in the side with cleated boots.
Coke scuttled toward the doorway of Hathaway House, doubled over. He dabbed his left hand down like a deer running with a broken foreleg.
L’Escorials shouted and kicked. One of them swung his 2-cm weapon as a club. Because Coke was moving, the massive iridium barrel smacked him in the small of the back instead of across the shoulders. Again the vest saved him from crippling, perhaps fatal, injury, but the shock made Coke’s mind go white nonetheless. He plowed facedown on the pavement.
The plated door flew open. Johann Vierziger stepped out, grabbed Coke left-handed by the back of the collar, and half-pulled, half-flung, the major into the foyer.
Sten Moden swung the door closed. A L’Escorial stuck his foot in the crack. Margulies kicked the gunman’s knee, then shoved him clear of the opening with the sole of her boot. Several L’Escorials pushed from the other side of the panel, but Moden’s strength overmastered them.
Someone emptied the 30-round magazine of a projectile weapon against the front of the door. A L’Escorial screamed, wounded by a ricochet or at least by spatters of the bullets after they disintegrated on the armor.
The door locked on three wrist-thick bolts worked by a single handle. When the panel slammed against its jamb, Niko Daun slid the bolts home into metal tubes set deep in the concrete.