“Hey!” the policeman cried. He and his partner jumped in opposite directions sideways, as though the little killer’s presence were a bomb going off between them. “Look, what are you—”
Vierziger switched the baton’s power on. He touched the tip of the slim rod to the inside of his own left forearm. The powerful fluctuating current crossed nerve pathways and flung his arm violently out to the side.
He smiled again, turned off the power, and tossed the baton to Coke. “Fully charged,” he said.
Coke slid the baton beneath his waistband. “You’ll get it back,” he said to the policeman. Half his face grinned. “Or somebody will pay you for it.”
He looked at Moden. “Sten, you’re in charge till I return,” Coke said. “I don’t expect potential employers to react that quickly, but if they do, set up a meeting for tomorrow.”
He touched his brow with one finger in a wry salute. “See you soon,” he said, and started for the door.
Margulies fell into step with him. “I’m coming,” she said.
Johann Vierziger shook his head. “Three can be a crowd, Mary,” he said in his cultured, mocking voice. “Matthew will probably be all right…and besides, as he says, it’s a personal matter.”
“Three?” said Niko Daun. Margulies nodded, turned, and leaned the extra shoulder weapon against the wall beside the door.
Barbour looked up from his console. “I’ll be tracking,” he said. If there had been any more emotion in the statement, it would have been a challenge.
Coke laughed out loud. The whole team thought he was behaving like an idiot—but he’d earned the right a few minutes before to do that. The whole team, himself included.
“See you soon,” he repeated, and he stepped out into night fetid with death.
Scores, perhaps as many as two hundred, L’Escorial gunmen clustered around the windrow of bodies in front of their compound. An armored truck—not the one that had appeared before, but a similar design—illuminated the scene with its quartet of bumper-mounted headlights. One man sat cross-legged on the top of the wall, holding a liquid-fueled lamp, and other gunmen waved a variety of electrical handlights.
There wasn’t much effort spent on caring for the wounded, assuming some of the victims were still alive. For the most part the L’Escorials stared, sometimes calling in wonderment. The sight appeared to touch them no more than a particularly vivid traffic accident would have done.
Coke expected the L’Escorials to react to him, perhaps to try to stop him. None of them seemed to notice that he’d left Hathaway House. The pool of light over the bodies acted as a curtain shrouding everything beyond the direct illumination.
A crowd of spectators aggregated quickly now that civilians realized the syndicate gunmen would pay them little attention. Coke noticed that a number of the onlookers covered blue garb with cloaks of neutral gray: Astras who wanted to see what was going on without themselves becoming causes of war.
Coke walked quickly up the street to where Pilar Ortega had abandoned the port operations van. Three filthy locals were in the vehicle now. One of them was trying to shoot something into his thigh with a homemade hypodermic. The injector’s barrel was a hundred-centimeter length of hose.
The staircase to the flophouse Pilar entered was helical and of engineering-grade plastic extrusion. It had been salvaged from a starship. Despite hard use and lack of maintenance, the structure itself was solid and safe.
The stair’s only attachment to the building was looped wire between it and external tubing—water pipes, electrical conduits, and a downspout from the gutter. The wire was of no particular type or strength. Baling wire alternated with insulated power cable and what looked like glass-core data transmission line.
The helix wobbled at Coke’s every step and from any breeze or tremor. He didn’t suppose it was going to collapse under him—and he could probably ride it down if it did break away; the staircase itself was plenty sturdy enough.
But it put the butterflies back in the pit of Coke’s stomach.
The bum who’d been sprawled on the stairs when Pilar climbed them had vanished. Another man now lay halfway up, weeping uncontrollably and holding an almost-full bottle of clear fluid.
Coke entered clean locked beds, the building’s fifth level. The salvaged staircase rose another two meters, but there was no doorway opening onto it from the level above.
The end of a counter protected by a hundred-millimeter mesh of barbed wire narrowed the doorway to half its designed width. A bar with a barbed wire apron closed the other half to prevent anyone from bursting into or out of the flophouse, though Coke wasn’t sure why either should have been a problem.
No one was behind the counter; the gate into the flophouse proper stood open. The sign on the back wall read:
A board from which hung a dozen cheap keyed padlocks indicated the protection you got for the extra twenty-five pesos. Sten Moden could probably have twisted the barrels off their hasps …but men as fit and strong as Sten Moden didn’t spend the night in a flop like this.
Coke raised the bar carefully and walked into the establishment. He’d had full immunization treatments before he left Nieuw Friesland, but there was no point in testing Frisian medical science against the filth that lurked on those rusty barbs.
The flophouse filled the entire level, an area of about ten meters by twenty. It was lighted by glow-strips, scraped and speckled but still able to provide a reasonable amount of yellow-green illumination. The good lighting was probably a safety feature—for the building’s owners as much as for the staff and clientele.
A narrow aisle separated two banks of cubicles. Each contained a filthy mattress. Instead of solid panels, the cubicles had walls of coarse barbed wire netting.
The remainder of the flophouse was bare floor on which the lower grade of derelict sprawled and shivered and moaned. Twenty-odd were present tonight; varied in age and sex, but uniform in their utter degradation.
Something was going on toward the back of the big room. Men clustered around one of the cages, shouting and laughing in cracked voices.
Coke’s face became still. He slid the shock rod from his waistband with his left hand and strode quietly down the aisle.
About half the cubicles he passed were occupied. Some of the men—few were women—in them were lost in their own worlds. Empty stim cones or cruder injectors lay on the mattresses with them.
One man was bent in a tetanic arch. His eyes bulged and his face was purple. Coke was pretty sure the fellow was dead, broken in convulsions by the wrong dose of gage tailings, but the fact impressed him as little as it did the flop’s ordinary denizens.
Other caged occupants called or even tried to grab Coke as he strode by. None of them was coordinated enough to actually touch the Frisian. They didn’t necessarily see him. The drugs and drug impurities with which they’d injected themselves were capable of turning any movement into a wild hallucination.
Pilar Ortega was in an end stall. She stood erect with her arms clamping her overwrap to her, as if by squeezing hard enough she could make herself vanish. Her eyes were wide open, but she didn’t see Coke coming down the aisle toward her.
Seven or eight men gripped the mesh of the cubicle. One of them was the clerk who should have been behind the counter. They had all dropped their pants. They waved their penises at the woman as they jeered.
The clerk was a fat man, completely hairless. He wore a sleeveless black pullover, his overalls pooled around his ankles. As Coke approached, unnoticed in the drug-fueled hilarity, the clerk reached down into his trousers and came up with a key.
“Lookie what I got, Miz Fancypants!” he cried in a voice pitched higher than the size of his gross body suggested. “You think you rented the only key to your lock, did you?”