Pepe cursed viciously. He continued to overcorrect for the next hundred meters. The car fishtailed up the street, its paint scarred beyond the capacity of anyone on Cantilucca to match.
“The times are the same they’ve always been,” Coke said. “Seven sidereal days, plus or minus, to get the message to Nieuw Friesland. A day to load the companies. Five days to get them here since the troopship will come direct. Plus whatever time it takes Camp Able to decide whether or not to take the contract. If they take the contract.”
“You’ll send the message now,” Pepe said in a rasping whisper. “We’re carrying you to the port to do that. And you’ll see to it that your mercenaries do arrive on schedule, Master Major, or it will be very unfortunate for you and your friends. You don’t expect to leave before all the business with Astra is completed to our satisfaction, do you?”
“Now, Pepe,” Ramon said nervously. “We don’t want the major to think that we don’t trust him.”
“I trust him,” Pepe sneered. “Because he knows he’s a dead man if he doesn’t do what he’s promised to do.”
“What the major has promised …” Coke said in a thin voice as his spirit floated out of his body to observe. “Is that he’ll inform his superiors of the situation on Cantilucca. I doubt they’ll act as you desire. There’s every reason to expect your Delian mistress will summon a large force of her own as soon as the FDF arrives. Camp Able isn’t going to send two companies into a ratfuck.”
“Madame Yarnell is going to be recalled!” Ramon said.
They were beyond the outskirts of Potosi. The hovercraft had accelerated to about 75 kph, probably its best speed with this load. The vehicle pogoed over the bad surface, but the ride was more comfortable than it would have been in a jitney or the port van.
“I heard you before,” Coke said. “When she leaves, I will immediately inform Camp Able of the fact.”
Pepe gave him a look of boiling hatred. The flexible skirts of the car’s plenum chamber brushed a treebole. Contact sent the vehicle in a slow carom toward the other side of the road.
“A bomb will go off in a consignment of Astra gage after it arrives on Delos,” Raul Luria said in a voice as jagged as a crosscut saw.
“Grandpapa—” Pepe said.
“I will handle this,” the Old Man retorted. “There will be a fire, perhaps great destruction. It will be far more important to the cartel than anything happening on Cantilucca is. When Madame Yarnell goes to Delos to investigate, that will be the moment to sweep Astra away forever.”
“And by the time she comes back,” Ramon added complacently, “there will be peace all across the planet, just as we all desire.”
“I see….” said Coke as a placeholder while he thought. “You don’t think the cartel might take a serious view of this bomb?”
The car was nearing the spaceport reservation. Warned by his previous control problems, Pepe started the braking process in good time.
The young man looked at Coke. “Do you think I’m a fool?” he said. “We have nothing to do with the business. It’s Astra gage, and its not traveling on a TST hull. If they do trace the particular drum back, they’ll find it was placed in the shipment by a port flunky.”
“Not one of our people,” Ramon chuckled. “He knows nothing about it. He thinks he’s working a scam to substitute tailings for pure gage. Even the whore we’re working through doesn’t know more than that.”
The hovercraft pulled up in front of the passenger operations building. The idled fans imparted a low-frequency wobble to the vehicle as it rested on its skirts.
“Now will you send your message?” Pepe demanded.
“You bet,” Coke said. “You needn’t wait around—I’ll find my own way back.”
Coke waited until he’d closed the car door behind him before he keyed his commo helmet. Pilar Ortega would be inside at the desk, and he didn’t want her to overhear either. She’d be glad to see him, as she always was….
“Two and Four,” he said, alerting Moden and Barbour. “I’m going to need information on a shipment of gage that went out yesterday or today. Somebody, probably a port official, doctored a manifest, and I need to know his name soonest.”
Margulies stood at the front door, looking out through the triangular viewport. The evening traffic was somewhat lighter than it had been with a thousand more gunmen in town, but civilians had reappeared on the street in nearly a great enough number to balance the loss.
The two police huddled in a corner of the saloon. At another table, Georg Hathaway chatted morosely with his friend Larrinaga.
“There we go,” said Sten Moden with satisfaction. He expanded the sidebar into the main screen. “There’s the anomaly, sure enough.”
Bob Barbour sat in a folding chair beside the console. Moden had handled the equipment enough in his presence that Barbour no longer hovered like a mother hen when the logistics officer used the console.
The intelligence officer leaned forward to check the line Moden highlighted. “Serial numbers out of sequence?” he said. His doubt was evident only in the perfect neutrality with which he stated the evidence he saw.
“Not the Astra serial number,” Moden explained with satisfaction. “That wouldn’t mean anything. This is the transaction number, the slug the port computer gave the drum at initial processing. That ought to be perfectly linear, but see—this one appears in a sequence of drums delivered three days later.”
“I’ll be hanged,” Barbour said. “I didn’t know there were transaction numbers different from the manifest serials.”
He looked at Moden. “Sten,” he said. “You just taught me something.”
The big man grinned. “A lot of people think supply is boring,” he said. “I didn’t find it that way.”
Still grinning, though the expression took on a certain stiffness, he patted the scar of his left shoulder and added, “Sometimes it’s way too exciting.”
“Nothing’s boring if it’s in your soul,” the intelligence officer said. “All right, do you want to run the check on who was on duty or shall I? When we cross-check the time the drum dropped out and the time it reappeared, we ought to have our boy.”
“I’m coming in,” the console reported in the voice of Johann Vierziger.
Moden looked up at Margulies. “Was he out with the major?” he asked.
“Just out,” Barbour murmured before the security lieutenant could respond. “The major’s still at the port.”
“Waiting for us to answer him,” Moden realized aloud. He got up from the console. “Go ahead, Bob. Do the personnel check. Two hands’ll get the data out quicker.”
He grinned. “And anyway, you’re going to have kittens if I don’t let you play with your lady, here.”
When Margulies pulled the door a crack open, Vierziger entered the lobby of Hathaway House wraith-swift. He looked at the men at the console. “You’re succeeding?” he asked.
“So far, so good,” Barbour murmured as his fingers danced over the keys. He didn’t look up from his work, the two parallel half-screens of data which he was correlating.
“I’m glad somebody’s doing something useful,” Vierziger said in a voice of bridled fury. He walked into the saloon alcove.
Margulies turned so that her sergeant was within the arc of her vision, though she instinctively avoided focusing on Vierziger. Tonight he gave the impression of a door glowing white with the fire behind it, restrained until something happens to destroy the panel’s integrity. After that—
“You!” Vierziger said. “Larrinaga. What are you doing here?”
The local man looked at the dapper Frisian. For a moment Mary Margulies thought Larrinaga was going to make a smart remark. She knew she wasn’t fast enough to stop Vierziger if that happened, she didn’t think any human being was fast enough.