“Sir,” Niko blurted. “Are we really going to help these guys? I mean, both sides, they’re—they’re animals, sir! The least we ought to do is say ‘no sale’ and go on back to Friesland.”
“That still leaves the same people here,” Moden said. “It’s not an answer.”
He swizzled a sip of beer around his mouth. He didn’t appear so much to be savoring as analyzing the fluid.
“Oh, the beer’s not that bad,” Coke said. Without changing his tone, he went on, “I think if we wanted to …”
He paused, looked at his companions in turn, and resumed: “I don’t think it would require much pushing from behind the scenes to get Astra and L’Escorial to pretty well eliminate each other.”
In Matthew Coke’s mind, the response was:
Daun: “Sir, your proposal is clearly against the interests of Nieuw Friesland!”
Moden: “Major, I regret that, in accordance with the provisions of the Defense Justice Code, I’m going to have to relieve you of command for that treasonous suggestion.”
Niko Daun’s face split with a wide grin. “Lord, sir!” he said. “I was afraid you were going to burn me a new asshole for saying that.”
“Yeah,” agreed Sten Moden, setting his mug down hard enough in his enthusiasm to slosh. “We were all afraid to discuss it with you, Matthew. But I don’t care what color their money is—something has to be done about these bastards, and the six of us are the only folks around who might be able to do it.”
“We all?” Coke repeated. “You two talked to the others?”
Daun nodded. “Vierziger said that was what he was here for, he guessed.”
“Johann said he presumed.” Sten Moden corrected. He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. But Johann’s willingness to shoot people isn’t in doubt, is it?”
“Bob, he’s not real comfortable with the business,” Niko resumed. “He’s not afraid of Camp Able, it’s not that, but …Well, anyway, he finally said he was in.”
The sensor tech shook his head. “He’s a good guy, Bob is. I don’t understand what’s going on under the surface, but he’s a good guy. And a fucking wizard with that console!”
“Yeah, he’s good all right,” Coke said. All five of his people were good, were about the best he’d ever seen. And he was talking about dropping them into the gears of a very powerful machine, in hopes that the machine would break before they did.
“Mary?” he added aloud.
“She’s the one who brought it up,” Moden said with a half-smile. “I suppose we’d all been thinking about it, but she said it aloud.”
“She said,” Niko amplified, “that this was sort of like wiping your ass with a broken beer bottle—sooner or later, you were going to wind up in a world of hurt. But if she survived, she didn’t want to remember that she hadn’t tried to change things on Cantilucca.”
Coke drank half his beer in a series of smooth swallows. Nobody spoke again until he stopped to breathe and brush his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll work up a plan of action,” he said. “We’ll have to wait for the cartel representative to leave, but that shouldn’t take long.”
Daun frowned. “She said she might stay here for years, sir,” he said. “We aren’t going to …?”
“No,” Coke said. “No, Madame Yarnell isn’t going to bury herself on Cantilucca for any longer than necessary. A few months at the outside. Her coming is actually better for our purposes. When she does leave, the lid’s going to come off with a bang.”
The red hovercraft Pepe Luria brought back from Delos whined slowly down the street. Its presence cleared a path through the mostly civilian traffic, even though the overt threat of guns and murder was held temporarily in abeyance. The vehicle stopped alongside the table where the three Frisians sat.
A red-veiled side window slid down. Pepe was in the driver’s seat. His father and grandfather sat in back.
Ramon leaned forward to get a better view past Raul. “Come with us, Major Coke,” he called. “We’ll ride in my Pepe’s fine new toy, shall we not? And we’ll talk.”
Sten Moden’s face was blank. Niko Daun looked questioningly from the hovercraft to his commander, taut as the hammer spring of a cocked pistol. Moden, seeing the same danger that Coke did, put his hand firmly on the sensor tech’s right wrist.
Niko was desperately eager to do the right thing, but he hadn’t a clue as to what the right thing was under these circumstances. That was a bad combination….
“Glad to learn there’s something to talk about,” Coke said easily as he got to his feet.
“He’ll be okay, then?” Daun murmured to Moden as the hovercraft drove away with the major.
“He’s got as good a chance as any of the rest of us,” the logistics officer said. He finished his beer in a single mighty draft, then banged the mug down. “Another?” he asked.
Daun shook his head with an impish smile. “I’m meeting a friend in twenty minutes,” he said. His expression segued into a frown. “Unless you think, you know, with the major and all?”
Moden shrugged. “He’ll call us if he needs us,” he said. “Don’t get yourself so fucked up you can’t function, that’s all. But you can’t be a hundred percent on all day forever.”
“Yeah, well, this is nothing serious,” the younger man said casually. “She’s a nice enough girl, but it’s just passing the time.”
He glanced at Moden from the corners of his eyes. “Suppose the major’s getting anywhere with the lady from the port office, sir?”
The logistics officer looked at Daun hard. “Do you suppose that’s any of our business?” he asked.
Daun laughed without embarrassment. So far as he was concerned, there was no rank when guys talked about women. “Not business at all, sir,” he said. “Though the Lord knows Potosi isn’t short of that kind of business establishment.”
Moden laughed also. “Yeah, well, we could ask Bob,” he said. “But I think we won’t, okay?”
The big man got to his feet. “Twenty minutes is time enough for a beer, kid. Sounds like you need to be slowed down some anyhow.”
Pepe had raised the hovercraft’s window even before Coke could open the passenger door. The youngest Luria’s feelings about Coke were a complex blend of disdain, the hostility of a dominating male for a rival, and fear. Pepe was smart enough to know that Matthew Coke was someone he should fear.
Coke’s feelings about Pepe were much simpler: Pepe was a scorpion Coke had found in his boot, to be dealt with directly—in both senses of the word.
The hovercraft wallowed into a turn and proceeded north, toward the spaceport. The chassis was a standard civilian model. With the full four passengers aboard and the armor added by some custom shop on Delos, the vehicle was seriously underpowered. It was a toy, just as Ramon had said.
“Here’s the earnest money,” Raul said abruptly. He extended a quivering hand between the front seats to pass Coke a credit chip.
“Now, how quickly can you get your gunmen here?” Ramon asked. “Madame Yarnell will be leaving Cantilucca in six days, maybe seven.”
Coke took the chip and held it in his hand.
A pair of jitneys was passing in opposite directions in the street ahead. There was room for the hovercraft to fit between them, but the vehicle’s damping program hadn’t been upgraded to take account of the weight of the armor.
Pepe steered left. The car had by now accelerated to 45, perhaps 50 kph. The back end swayed outward, continuing the vector of the directional change after the driver centered his wheel again.
The left-side jitney carried a farm family—two adults, four children, and a vast burden of produce piled on top. The hovercraft sideswiped it with a bang and screech of metal. Three-meter-long stalks of sugar cane slapped the car’s windshield. They left syrupy blurs across the film-darkened glass.