“I hope the two of you will find a happy life in your new home,” he added bitterly.
Suterbilt got out of the van in front of a one-story freestanding structure on the northern outskirts of Potosi. The walls were sheer and windowless, and the door would have done for a bank vault.
“You see?” the factor said with a sweep of his arm. “No common walls or floors to break in through. This is probably the safest place in the whole town. A fortress!”
“If it were a fortress,” Johann Vierziger said as he followed Suterbilt from the vehicle, “it would have firing ports. That’s the obvious first problem here.”
He sauntered toward the door. Behind him, Suterbilt wore a look of dawning concern.
“Larrinaga must really have been in the money to afford this,” Niko Daun observed as he brought up the rear. “You wouldn’t guess that to see him now, would you?”
“What?” said Suterbilt. “Well, yes, I suppose he was doing rather well. It was Larrinaga’s competition that drove that old fool Roberson to tie in with Astra, to tell the truth.”
The factor laughed with cruel humor. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire, that was,” he added. “If I’m feeling kindly after we’ve cleaned out the Astras, I’ll let Roberson go off-planet alive.”
He pressed the call button beside the door. A melodious chime sounded, blurred by the thickness of the walls. Nothing else happened for a moment
“And,” Vierziger noted aloud, “none of the so-called guards are keeping a watch on the exterior display.”
He nodded upward toward the miniature lens array above the door. The camera fed a surveillance display inside.
Suterbilt pursed his lips.
Locks within the panel chuckled liquidly as the mechanism drew them back. A man inside grunted and pushed the heavy door open. He wore a red headband and tried to stand at attention when he’d accomplished his task. Three other men stumbled into the entryway behind him, tucking in their clothes and checking weapons that they’d obviously just grabbed.
“Ah, g’day, sir,” the guard with the headband said. “I, ah, we weren’t expecting you tonight.”
The last two guards appeared from the living area beyond. One of them was holding the other upright. The front of the latter man’s tunic was stiff with dried vomit. His eyes were open, but they didn’t focus.
“You normally call ahead, I gather,” Vierziger said to the factor. A sneer was implicit in his dry tone.
“These gentlemen are security specialists,” Suterbilt said harshly. “They’re here to view the premises.”
Vierziger walked into the house. “And to look at the ambiance itself,” he said coolly.
He raised his attaché case, holding it between himself and the guard. The gesture was similar to that of a woman whisking her long skirt away as she passes dog droppings on the sidewalk. When he was clear, he set the case down beside the wall.
The interior of the house was pretty much of a pig sty. Liquor bottles and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of empty stim cones littered the floors. The building had a sophisticated environmental system to exchange outside air, but the filters had been unable to control the stench of human wastes, vomit, and unwashed bodies.
There was no sign of women, though. Apparently Suterbilt’s orders that no outsiders should be admitted had been obeyed to the letter.
The factor rapped his knuckles on a wall to direct attention away from the state of housekeeping which he’d permitted. “See these?” he said. “The whole place is a ceramic monocasting, twenty centimeters thick on the outside. You could shoot straight into a wall and not so much as scar it!”
Vierziger sniffed. “Ceramics are all very well so long as you don’t exceed their strength moduli,” he said. He walked down the hall, deliberately shuffling his feet sideways to sweep litter out of his path. “One additional straw beyond that and you’ve got sand, not armor.”
“Well, yes, but …” Suterbilt said. “Ah—the ambiance is at the end of the hall. It was the master bedroom.”
“I assumed that,” Vierziger sneered. “I’m glad you had sense enough to lock your guard slugs away from it. Otherwise there wouldn’t be anything left for Astra to threaten, would there?”
Niko sniffed. “Not much of a lock,” he said. It was an add-on, cemented to the panel and jamb. “I guess it’s good enough, though.”
The guards were restive and concerned. One of them had drunk enough to be obviously angry, but a pair of his fellows gripped his wrists. The group was armed with the assortment of shoulder weapons, pistols, and knives that had been typical street wear for the gangsters before Madame Yarnell arrived.
“I’ll open it for you,” Suterbilt said, stepping forward with an electronic key. Vierziger’s sneering superiority had reduced the factor to nervous acquiescence with every demand, spoken or not.
The room illuminated itself softly when the door opened. The fixtures in the portion of the house which the guards occupied had been dimmed over the months by a grimy miasma. Here the light, though subdued, had the purity of evening over a meadow.
“Nice installation work,” Niko said as he surveyed the bare room. “Some artists, they think the hardware is beneath them. Not her.”
“What?” Suterbilt said. “Are you joking? I had the furniture removed. Quite a nice bed. I’m using it myself.”
“No, no,” the sensor tech said. “The ambiance, of course. Look at these heads.”
Daun walked into the center of the room. His focus on the psychic ambiance burned through the layers of good humor which made him easy to get along with. Niko Daun liked to be alone when he was working …and people who’d been around him while he was in work mode didn’t care to repeat the experience.
“There,” he said, pointing to a glint in the ceiling, a rubidium-plated bead the size of a man’s thumbnail. “There, there, there, there”—the sidewalls—“and the main board here”—he pointed to the shimmering fifteen-centimeter disk in the center of the floor— “where the bed would keep people from walking on it. Though I doubt that would have hurt the resolution, the way she’s got the projectors bedded. Just look at the way she faired them into the matrix!”
“Yes, it can’t be removed without destroying the whole thing,” Suterbilt said. “And probably the house as well.”
Daun turned on him with the casual prickliness of a cat. “Don’t talk nonsense!” the technician snapped.
“Specialist Daun,” Vierziger said smoothly, “we’re here to—”
“Look,” Daun said, the first time anybody who knew Johann Vierziger had interrupted him in a long while. “Since we’re here, I’m going to try the ambiance. This is probably the only time I’ll be around a genuine Suzette.”
Nothing in the sensor tech’s tone suggested he was willing to discuss the matter further. As he spoke, he took a flat, palm-sized device from his smaller toolkit and opened its keyboard.
Vierziger laid the tips of his left index and middle fingers on Daun’s wrist. “Master Suterbilt will switch on the ambiance for us, I’m sure,” Vierziger said.
“Yes, yes, but I’m in a hurry,” the factor grumbled. He took another key from his wallet. He flicked the on switch in the air without result. “Let’s see …”
“Stand over here,” Daun said, gesturing Suterbilt to a point near where the head of the bed would have been.
Suterbilt frowned but obeyed.
“I could have turned it on easier,” Daun grumbled under his breath to the other Frisian.
“You could remove the work so that it could be reconstructed?” Vierziger murmured back.
“Huh?” said Daun. “Course I could. Don’t be an idiot. The adhesive’ll powder at twenty-eight point nine kilohertz. Take about three seconds each. And realigning them afterward, that’s no sw—”
The room shimmered out of the present and into a golden timelessness. Suterbilt had finally managed to trigger the ambiance with his low-powered key.