Vierziger was in an individual paradise. Foliage waved slowly in breezes the viewer could not feel, and the air was perfumed with life itself.
Movement was thought-swift and effortless. The trees mounted like towers holding the sky, far taller than was possible for normal vegetation which fed its branches by osmosis against the drag of gravity. The viewers’ minds could ascend the roughness of the bark, feel the single-celled microflora which gave texture and color to the trunks, or exist as the entire world—plant, animal, and the supporting soil beneath.
The ambiance was more real than the sidereal universe to those within its pattern of impinging stimuli. Through it all, informing it all, was the single warm presence of its creator.
“ …what remains of my wife is here …” Larrinaga had said. He was right, and he was perhaps right as well that Suzette was a saint.
That wasn’t a subject on which Vierziger felt competent to judge.
The glow dimmed, vanished. Physical reality reasserted itself and memory of the ambiance sucked itself down a wormhole into the unconscious of the men who had experienced it.
Suterbilt shook himself. “I ought to come here more often,” he said. “It relaxes me.”
Niko Daun looked at the projection heads, shaking his head in delight. “Amazing,” he said. “Absolutely amazing. I wish I could meet her.”
“I think,” said Vierziger, “that you just did.”
The effect was no more than a mental hologram; not life, not even something alive. But Vierziger could understand why Larrinaga believed his wife was still present in the ambiance. He supposed that was all you really had of any artist, and perhaps of any human being: the things they had done.
“We can go now,” Vierziger said aloud. His left hand gestured Daun and Suterbilt toward the bedroom door, as if he and not the factor were the host.
The guards had returned to the main living area of the house, an arc of floor raised three steps on one end to set off, without a vertical barrier, the kitchen/dining facilities from the relaxation area. A hologram display blared loud music to accompany a pornographic recording.
The furniture was cheap, obviously junk brought in for the guards when Suterbilt carried off the original furnishings. It had been wrecked—shot, slashed, and broken apart. Two of the men sprawled on the floor, filthy though it was. The man with the headband got up from a legless sofa when the factor reappeared.
“Sir?” the guard asked.
“Keep a better lookout, for one thing!” Suterbilt snapped. He looked over at Vierziger. “Do you have anything to add?”
“Not at the moment,” Vierziger said coolly. “I’ll make my recommendations in two days.”
He looked around the mess and the men guarding it. “They will be expensive to carry out, that I can assure you. But necessary.”
The three men walked outside. Suterbilt’s driver switched on the pump which powered the van’s four wheel-hub hydraulic motors.
Vierziger swung the house door almost to, then caught the panel just before it clanged home and locked. “Blood!” he snapped. “I’ve left my briefcase.”
He pivoted back into the house, pulling the door closed behind him. The guard wearing the headband was halfway back to the hologram. He turned, opening his mouth to speak.
“I forgot—” Vierziger began.
The door rang against its jamb. The Frisian drew and fired his pistol eight times in a single flowing motion.
The man with the headband lurched backward, flinging his hands in the air. The first bolt had blown out the thin bones of his nose and emptied his eyesockets.
The chest of a burly, blond-haired guard vanished in a red flash and a deafening roar. Vierziger hadn’t noticed the string of grenades the fellow was wearing beneath a light jumper. The bolt that should have ruptured the guard’s aorta instead set off a secondary explosion.
The blast flung the remaining guards in four separate directions, complicating the Frisian’s task. It saved the man still seated on the sofa—for the few hundredths of a second before a second bolt slapped his temple while the ceramic wall behind where his head had been glowed white from the previous round.
Each of the men sprawled on the floor before the shooting started took a round. One of them was faceless and screaming from the grenade blast. The bolt that ruptured his skull was a mercy.
The last guard—and it was all in a half-second punctuated by the grenade—was turning with a fully automatic shotgun. Centrifugal force made his long red hair stand out like a porcupine’s quills. The cascade of hair caught the first bolt. It vanished in a red fireball, drinking the cyan plasma and dissipating its force.
Vierziger’s trigger twitched a last time. His bolt punched the guard’s scream back through his palate.
The shotgun fired three times before it jammed. Aerofoil projectiles, designed to spread wider than spherical pellets, zinged from the walls and ceiling. One traced a line as thin as a razor cut across the Frisian’s right cheek.
The living area was bloody chaos.
A toolkit/ammo pouch on the left side of Vierziger’s belt balanced the weight of the pistol he carried on the right. He took out a spanner and turned the white, shimmering barrel off the weapon’s receiver and dropped it on the floor. Rapid fire had eroded the iridium to half its original thickness. The remainder of the refractory metal was so hot that it deformed when it bounced on the cast flooring.
Vierziger fitted a fresh barrel—the kit held two—and reloaded the pistol, then holstered it again. The process of replacing the shot-out barrel had taken less than thirty seconds.
The house stank of ozone and bodies ripped apart and half-burned. The plasticizer of the grenade had a pungent reek, unpleasant and probably poisonous in a confined space. Vierziger ignored it.
Some of the men’s clothing was afire. An arc of garbage centered on the grenade explosion burned also, though all the fires seemed likely to smolder out rather than build into a major conflagration.
Vierziger’s attaché case was just inside the living area, where he’d set it behind a pile of trash when he entered the house behind Suterbilt. He opened the case and took out a cylindrical blasting device twenty centimeters across and half that in depth. He peeled the protective layer off one end, stuck the charge on the front wall near the door, and twisted the dial of delay fuze to one hour.
Vierziger had printed a message on a card before he left Hathaway House. He stuck that to the wall just below the explosive device, then surveyed the room for one last time.
One of the bodies twitched like a decorticated frog. The burning clothes had smothered themselves in veils of bitter smoke. Behind the gray, the hologram danced, more enticing for the partial coverage than it had been when the performers’ tired flesh was uncompromisingly revealed.
Vierziger opened the door. The card on the wall read:
“All right, I’ll tell him!” the Frisian called over his shoulder as he stepped outside.
Standing with his hand on the door he held ajar, Vierziger said to the sensor tech, “Daun, they’re having problems with the hue of their hologram projector. I told them you could fix it in three minutes at the outside.”
He gestured Niko toward the doorway. “Get at it. I don’t want to wait longer than I have to.”
“Say!” said the factor. “I don’t want to wait at all! I’ve already wasted half an hour.”
Vierziger closed the door behind Daun and stood with his back to it. “Relax,” he said. “Remember, you said you needed to use the ambiance more often anyway. Besides, if those turds don’t have the projector to amuse them, who knows what they’ll get up to?”
Suterbilt sighed. “Yes, I suppose there’s that,” he agreed.