He grimaced. The van’s headlights were on. This far out of town, their sidescatter was the only illumination. “Do you really think expensive changes will be necessary?” the factor asked.
Vierziger shrugged. “It’s really a pair of changes,” he said. “Part of the guard force has to be outside. Not really to do anything—just to be a tripwire so that if they’re killed, the men inside have warning of an attack. But you also have to provide firing ports for the guards inside.”
“That’s impossible!” Suterbilt said. “You can’t cut holes in these walls!” He slapped one to underscore his point.
“It’s not impossible,” the Frisian said. The lighted half of his face drew up in a deliberate sneer. “It’s simply very expensive— as I said. And necessary. I’ll have a detailed plan for you in two days.”
The door began to swing open. Vierziger stepped forward, moving Suterbilt back a pace. “Any trouble, Daun?” Vierziger asked over his shoulder.
Niko looked at his fellow Frisian. “No,” he said. “No, I took care of my end.”
He didn’t say anything more during the drive back to the TST offices, and he only once looked directly at Johann Vierziger.
Vierziger smiled at him.
“Stay in the car,” Coke ordered harshly. He thrust his sub-machine gun at Pilar. Her hands wouldn’t close on the dense metal and plastic. The weapon slipped into her lap. “If anybody gives you trouble, shoot them. It’s off safe and there’s one up the spout. Just fucking use it.”
He’d stopped the port operations van in front of a six-story structure on the spaceport end of Potosi. Except for the location, the building was very similar to the one which held the Ortegas’— which held Pilar’s—apartment. The ground floor was a club, The Red Rooster, which was beginning to get under way for the evening.
The doorman/bouncer realized that Coke intended to leave the vehicle parked in front while he went up the stairs beside the club’s entrance. The doorman stepped toward Coke and shouted, “Hey dickhead!”
Coke pointed his left index finger at the man’s face. His right hand hung out at his side. The hand was crooked on a level with the butt of his pistol.
“Don’t even think about it,” the Frisian warned. The flat assurance of his voice was more threatening than a snarl.
The doorman backed inside the club. Coke went up the stairs two at a time.
The door off the second-floor landing was metal-faced. The jamb was wood, however, and the interior wall didn’t look particularly sturdy either.
Coke hammered on the panel with his knuckles. “Ortega!” he called. “Front and center! This is an emergency!”
“Hey bud!” somebody called from below. Coke looked down.
A man close to two meters tall, wearing an electric-green jumpsuit, had swung out of the club entrance. He held a combination weapon, a pneumatic gun firing explosive projectiles through a 30-cm long barrel with a shock baton of twice that length mounted beneath the muzzle like a bayonet.
“Serafina’s busy!” he shouted as he pounded up the stairs toward Coke. “Now, buddy, you can wait or I can line you up with somebody just as sweet. But don’t you go—”
Coke judged his moment. He kicked when the pimp was three steps below him. The gun was pointed up and to the left in rhythm with the tall man’s strides. Coke’s boot caught the pimp’s jaw and flung him down the stairs, limbs flailing.
Coke turned to the door. Instead of knocking again, he took a flat ring charge from a pouch on his equipment belt, peeled off the protective layer, and pasted the charge around the door latch.
He pulled the igniter wire and jumped several steps down the stairs to get clear of the blast. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted from reflex.
The charge went off with a flat whack! A fragment of metal whined off the opposite wall. The door jounced on its hinges and stood ajar in a haze of gray smoke.
Coke pulled the panel fully open but kept his body behind the wall. A stunner needle snapped through the dissipating smoke. It sparkled minusculely against the opposite side of the stairwell.
“Ortega!” Coke shouted. “The drum you substituted in the gage going off yesterday on the Tellurian Queen—there’s a bomb in it. The cartel’s stocks on Delos are going up in smoke three days from now, and when they do people are going to be looking for you. You’ve got to get off-planet now!”
“Get out of here,” a man called. “Get out of here! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
A burst of a dozen stun needles hissed and popped through the opening.
Coke fumbled at his equipment belt, feeling for a smoke grenade. He’d go in with his visor on thermal—
“Matthew!” Pilar screamed. Her sub-machine gun ripped cyan runs in the night.
Coke drew as he turned. The street door’s jamb and lintel were a shower of shattered concrete from the cyan bolts. The tall pimp had gotten safe to the shelter of the stairwell before Pilar fired.
The pimp aimed his weapon. Coke shot him in the chest and face.
The pimp jerked his trigger. The pneumatic gun coughed, recoiling out of the dying man’s grip. The heavy shell hit three steps above the landing and burst, showering the stairwell with shrapnel and orange light.
Coke, startled by the blast and prickles from the shell, sprayed three more bolts. He hit the pimp only once—in the ankle as he fell backward. The fellow was dead already, or at least he would be in the next minute or two.
“Ortega!” Coke repeated. His ears were ringing. “Come on out. I won’t hurt you, and you don’t have a lot of time.”
“Matthew, you mustn’t kill him!” Pilar called. She was at the bottom of the staircase. She tried to step past the tall man. His thrashing arm struck her calf. She came up anyway, her face pale and her sub-machine gun’s muzzle shimmering brighter than the stairwell glow-strip.
“Go back!” Coke ordered. She climbed toward him anyway.
The explosive shell had flung the room door shut again. Coke reached for it with his left hand. The panel opened from the inside. A naked woman stepped out onto the landing.
Her name—the name she went by, anyway—was Serafina Amoretta. Coke had seen her image, but that hadn’t prepared him for her youth. She couldn’t be more than fourteen standard years, though her breasts and hips were full.
“Who do you think you are?” she shouted in bright-eyed fury. Perhaps she was on gage or other drugs, though she seemed alert enough. “Do you think you’ll get me by coming here like this? Well, you won’t!”
Serafina stood with her fists on her hips, glaring at Coke on the step below her. There was no sign that the corpse of her pimp or the gun in the hand of his killer affected her in any way. She didn’t shave or pluck her body, but there was only a halo of hair surrounding the lips of her vulva.
“I don’t want you,” Coke said. “I’m here for Terence Ortega, to keep him from being killed by your little game.”
The pistol in his hand embarrassed him. He tried to holster it again. He was awkward now in the aftermath of the shooting. He managed to sear the side of his rib cage with the hot muzzle.
“You want Terry?” Serafina caroled in raucous delight. “So that’s it, is it? His frigid wife sent you to get him back? Terry, come out here. Now!”
Coke risked a look over his shoulder. He prayed that Pilar would have returned to the van, but she hadn’t, she was just below him. Her lips trembled, and her face had no expression.
The door behind Serafina moved. A man looked out nervously, then stepped the rest of the way. He carried a needle stunner in one hand and held his trousers before him as a veil. He hadn’t managed to get his legs into the openings.
“See who’s here, Terry?” Serafina said, cocking her head so that she could watch the man out of the corner of her eyes. “She’s here to take you back with a gun!”
“That’s nothing to do with it!” Coke said. “I tell you, there was a bomb in the drum you thought was refinery tailings. You’ve got to disappear before the folks on Delos learn what I already know.”