The leader took the bottle of liqueur and drank directly from it, eyeing Moden past the plane of sluggish red fluid. He handed the bottle to the man aiming at Moden. “Who’s the crip?” he asked.
“My name’s Sten Moden,” the Frisian answered calmly. His hand lay on his lap. The closed flap of his holster was in sight of the gunmen. “I’m from Nieuw Friesland, a businessman.”
“He’s a leftie!” said the Astra who’d warned Nunci not to leave. “Get it? A leftie!”
Without warning he triggered a single shot. The cyan bolt struck near the top of the kitchen door. Wood blew outward in blazing splinters, leaving a hole the size of a soup plate in the thin panel.
Rosaria screamed. Nunci stood transfixed, and Esteban’s fists balled.
Sten Moden gripped the table’s central leg. He lifted and hurled forward the massive piece of furniture with all his strength. Both sub-machine guns fired, into the tabletop and ceiling as the huge club pistoned toward the three Astras. Moden felt the shock of the bolts through his hand, but the table was too solid for the light charges of a pistol or sub-machine gun to tear it apart.
The tabletop hit the far wall, or almost, with a soggy thump. Moden pulled back, then slammed his weapon toward the wall again with his shoulder behind it.
There was a gurgling cry. When Moden withdrew the table the second time, sub-machine guns and other accoutrements clattered to the floor behind it.
Annunciata screamed. She threw herself into her father’s arms.
Moden gave a convulsive gesture that slammed the table back down on its six legs. He was trembling all over. He had to brace his hand on the scarred top in order to continue standing. Powergun bolts had blown smoldering craters in the wood.
Moden didn’t try to look over the table to see what had become of his victims, though he knew he ought to. One of the Astras might still have enough strength to pull a trigger….
But probably not.
The Rojo family spoke or cried in four vocal ranges, all of them incoherently. The Frisian closed his eyes and opened them, drawing deep breaths.
The cafe’s outer door flew open.
Mary Margulies lunged in behind a sub-machine gun. Niko Daun followed her with a set expression and another sub-machine gun.
The would-be rescuers looked at Moden, then looked at their feet. “Blood and martyrs,” Niko said.
Margulies straightened from her crouch. She put her weapon on safe and cleared her throat. “Ah,” she said. “Barbour, you know he monitors the audio from the helmets. He thought you might need a hand.”
Sten Moden looked at his palm. His adrenaline-charged grip had left white valleys where it held the corners of the table leg.
“No,” Moden said. “One was enough.”
Cantilucca: Day Three
The outer fence surrounding L’Escorial’s gage warehouse was woven wire, five meters high and topped with a Y of razor ribbon. The forest had grown to and entwined with the wire despite evidence of desultory attempts to burn it back. The diamond teeth of Coke’s powered cutting bar opened a man-sized hole with one sweep of his arm.
The vegetation in the four meters between the fencelines was cut to knee-height scrub. There was a single row of buried toe-poppers, located so that the mower could straddle them. Daun marked a safe pathway with white tape.
The sensor-controlled directional mines placed every ten meters along the inner fence were even less of a danger. Daun turned them all off with a deactivation signal, just as the watchmen would have done while mowing or carrying out other maintenance operations.
“Who do these bozos think they’re dealing with?” the sensor tech muttered disdainfully to Coke.
“Bozos like the Astras behind us,” Coke replied.
Well behind them. Coke had decided he and Daun would breach the defenses alone. Vierziger wasn’t happy to be a kilometer back in the forest along the road, but that was the only way Coke could be sure the Astras would stay where they belonged.
The last thing Coke wanted was a line of trucks to come driving up while he and Niko were in the middle of the wire. He’d seen relief in the sensor tech’s eyes when they went over the plan the first time. Daun had more reason than most to doubt the competence of indig forces.
“Wait here, sir,” Daun said crisply.
The sensor tech darted across the cleared area to the nearest directional mine, a lump against the inner fence. After a moment’s manipulation there, he moved ten meters down the line to another lump. He tossed something to the ground.
“All right, sir,” Daun said, this time using helmet intercom. “I’ve pulled the fuzes. I didn’t want somebody turning them on again at a bad time. It can happen by accident, even, lightning or a plasma discharge.”
“No, we wouldn’t want that,” Coke agreed under his breath.
He was smiling. He remembered he’d had doubts about how the kid would perform after the experience which got him transferred to a survey team. Just fine, so long as Daun could be confident of his backup …and for that, so far, so good.
The warehouse was a huge hangar constructed primarily of structural plastic, but strengthened at the corners by pillars of reinforced concrete. A bank of lights on the roof was intended to flood the interval between the fencelines. Many of the bulbs had failed without being replaced.
It didn’t really matter. The guards didn’t patrol the exterior, and there were no windows in the building proper from which to observe their surroundings.
The gage syndicates had achieved parity of incompetence. That was fine until somebody arrived who knew his ass from a hole in the ground.
Daun set a small transducer close to the nearest of the inner fencepoles. He stepped swiftly toward the next support, holding a similar transducer and unreeling the thin cable which tied it to the box he’d set on the ground.
“Don’t touch the fence yet, sir,” the tech ordered; needlessly, because they’d gone over the plan in the lobby of Hathaway House, and Matthew Coke knew better than to jump the gun in an uncleared detector field anyway.
“Right,” Coke murmured. He preferred a subordinate who might irritate him with unnecessary warnings to one who let him walk into disaster because, I thought you knew!
Daun turned a switch on the control box. “There we go!” he said. “All right, sir. It’ll think the circuit’s complete even if you blow everything down between these two posts.”
“No need for that,” Coke said. He thumbed the cutting bar live and swept it up and down with his left hand in a nearly perfect catenary arc through the fencing. The blade whined and sparkled happily.
If L’Escorial’s builders had used beryllium monocrystal or some other refractory material for their defenses instead of steel wire, the Frisians’ task would have been more difficult. But if a frog didn’t jump, it wouldn’t hit its ass on the ceiling….
Coke crouched in the opening as Daun sprinted for the building forty meters away. If Coke had to supply covering fire—he carried a sub-machine gun, with holstered pistol and a 2-cm weapon slung just in case—he didn’t want to be so close to the warehouse that he couldn’t cover both ends of the building with his peripheral vision.
Daun wrenched up a lid on the ground outside the building. It wasn’t locked shut. The tech stretched on the concrete pad, holding a light down in the cavity with one hand and reaching in with the other. Bob Barbour claimed this fusion bottle was the sole power source for the warehouse.
Fusion bottles didn’t fail, and the output of one was more than sufficient to power the building’s lights, sensors, and motor-driven trackways. Coke still found it hard to believe that there wasn’t at least a battery-operated emergency radio, despite Barbour’s assurances. If Bob was wrong, well, he was also ready to jam the transmission within a microsecond.