“You got that right,” Margulies murmured. Her mouth was oily with the liquor’s aftertaste.
“So I hired on, with the Lurias because my old village, it belonged to L’Escorial,” Angel continued. “Not that it mattered. I thought I could make something out of them, give them some discipline. That’d make it better for everybody, you see that, don’t you El-Tee? The farmers too, if it was just paying for protection they had to worry about. Via, what place doesn’t have taxes?”
“You can’t turn the lot out there into soldiers,” Margulies said. “Any more than you can build a gun out of cat turds.”
“Don’t I know it,” Angel whispered. He looked at the bottle in his hand, then drank greedily from it. His Adam’s apple throbbed with three swallows, four, before he set the liquor down again.
“I tried, El-Tee,” he whispered to the bottle. “But they wouldn’t listen. I’d have had to shoot a couple of them to get their attention and Via, the rest would’ve greased me the next night. You’ve got to sleep sometime, and there wasn’t anybody but me.”
He looked up at her. She nodded, agreement without empathy. Angel had chosen, just as surely as the constant low-level pain in Margulies’ rebuilt leg reflected choices she had made.
“The gage stopped working,” Angel said. “I was using too much. The first dose would put me to sleep. My skin was crawling, I’d scratch myself bloody.”
He swallowed. “So I switched to booze and that, you know, that helped some. And I found that mixed gage didn’t put me to sleep the way the pure stuff did, so sometimes I used that.”
“Refinery tailings are poison,” Margulies said harshly. “The best you’re going to do is grind down the nerve sheaths so that you’re a spastic for the rest of your life. Or you’ll go blind. Or you’ll fry your brain and sit around drooling. Think your new buddies are going to want to change your diapers, Angel?”
“I know all that!” he shouted. “I said it was just a time or two with tailings, didn’t I?”
He hadn’t, and if he had said that, it would have been a lie. It was amazing that Angel had managed the effort of will required to get straight when he learned that an FDF survey team was on Cantilucca, but it was vanishingly improbable that he would be able to maintain that state for more than a few hours.
Angel sat heavily on the bed, clutching the liquor bottle to him as if it were the only warmth in a world of ice. “Look, El-Tee,” he said to the wall, “I just want you to know I’ve got it under control now. I’m fine, and in a day or two I’ll have all my gear strac. I just want you to know that.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Angel,” Mary Margulies said as she rose to her feet. “I’d better check on the major. I’ll see you around.”
Twenty-odd L’Escorial gunmen lounged in the open barracks, laughing and talking. The general volume lowered as Margulies left the cubicle, but she heard some pointed gibes.
She didn’t look to either side as she walked to the stairs at the other end of the room. If she looked at the men, she would kill them all.
It wasn’t the liquor or the stench of Angel’s room that made Margulies want to vomit. It was the vision of what her driver had become….
And the warning of what might become of Mary Margulies herself, if she ever tried to reenter civilian life.
Wind kicked dust and litter down the street. The eastern horizon was a mass of cloud, though the late afternoon sun still shone onto Potosi.
Coke drove one of the rented jitneys to the street from the walled courtyard at the rear of Hathaway House. Margulies waited for him at the head of the alley. The angles of a weapon in a patrol sling distended her light cape.
Coke disengaged the torque converter and braked beside her. “I don’t need a guard, Mary,” he said. “I’m just going to run up to the port and send a capsule off.”
Margulies squatted to put her face on a level with his. Her smile was crooked; she hadn’t said much since the pair of them left the meeting in L’Escorial headquarters that morning.
“You could lower the top and squeeze your cyclo into the back of the port van,” she said. “I guess that’s what you’re planning to do. But I could also drive it back myself and save you the trouble. What do you figure?”
Coke looked at the security lieutenant. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds like a good idea. Hop in.”
The jitney had four seats in back, facing outward in pairs from the central spine. Margulies sat crossways, so that she looked forward over Coke’s right shoulder.
“I felt like getting out of Potosi for a bit,” she explained quietly. “This isn’t much out, but it’s out.”
“What the hell is that?” Coke said. He had started to reengage the drive train. Instead, he took his hand from the knob and touched the 2-cm weapon he’d thrust muzzle-down between his seat and the spine in back.
Three red-painted vehicles drove down the road from the spaceport at 30 kph, their sirens blowing. The first and last were armored trucks of the sort the team had seen before. The convoy’s pace was probably governed to their best speed.
An air-cushion limousine drove between the two escorts. The vehicle was fitted with appliqué armor—which couldn’t have been very heavy or the battery-powered drive fans wouldn’t have been able to keep the car floating on a bubble of air. A scarlet film darkened the windows so that they were nearly opaque from the outside, but Coke thought the driver was the only occupant.
Coke switched his commo helmet to channel one, the command push. “Stand by,” he ordered. “Over.”
He didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t think it was an immediate problem, but by definition he couldn’t be sure of that. There was a tiny click behind him as Margulies took her sub-machine gun off safe.
L’Escorial gunmen spilled out of the gateway, thronging the street from which the sirens had driven all civilian traffic. Engines started up in the courtyard of Astra headquarters, but none of the Guzman personnel showed themselves.
The wind gusted again, promising the storm would sweep over Potosi in a few minutes. The open-sided jitney wasn’t much protection, but it wouldn’t be the first time Coke got soaked in the line of duty.
He keyed the command channel again. “Bob,” he ordered, sure that Barbour would be at the console. “Upper right quadrant, feed me a composite of what’s going on across the street. Over.”
“Roger,” the intelligence officer replied. A quarter of Coke’s faceshield brightened with the scene in front of L’Escorial HQ, viewed by miniature cameras Daun had emplaced on the other side of the convoy. “Audio?”
“Negative,” said Coke, “but maybe later. Out.”
The Lurias, father and son, walked stiffly through the gateway. Raul leaned on Ramon’s arm and used a cane with his other hand.
The sirens wound down to silence. The leading armored car fired a warning burst up the street past Astra headquarters. The tribarrel functioned properly, chugging out twenty bolts of deep cyan before the gunner took his thumbs off the butterfly trigger.
The limousine’s doors lifted simultaneously like gull wings. A slim man got out on the other side of the vehicle. Without being ordered to, Barbour manipulated the camera view to give Coke a close-up of the newcomer’s face. The man was young and handsome, with features as fine-boned as those of a bird of prey.
“Pepe!” Ramon Luria called.
Raul walked/staggered two steps forward and embraced his grandson. “You’ve come at a good time, my boy,” the Old Man said.
The sound of the wind rasped syllables away from the words the men across the street spoke. Lightning flashed behind the cloudbank, but there was as yet no audible thunder.
“Bob, patch in the audio,” Coke directed in a whisper. “Out.”
“Trouble with our neighbors?” said Pepe Luria with liltingly ironic tones that now came through Coke’s helmet. “Well, it had to come sometime, didn’t it? I brought some toys that may come in useful.”