Three L’Escorials came out onto the roof clumsily. Each of them climbed with one hand and waved his weapon through the trapdoor ahead of himself. The first man out shouted in alarm as the next prodded him in the back with a fléchette gun.
“They been up here,” a L’Escorial noted. “Hey, look at this!”
He’d found the panoramic camera Daun glued to the coping of the facade weeks before. It was a relatively large unit, about the size of a clenched fist, and Niko hadn’t tried to conceal it. The camera provided a view of the entire streetscape—distorted at the edges, but correctable into normal images by the console’s processing power.
“It’s a bomb!” cried the man with the fléchette gun. Why he thought so was beyond imagining, especially since the next thing he did was put the muzzle of his weapon against the camera and fire.
If it had been an explosive device, it would have detonated and killed all three L’Escorials. Instead, the gun’s enormous muzzle blast blew the camera across the street in tiny fragments. The osmium fléchette left a split and a crater in the facade of L’Escorial headquarters.
“What’s that?” a gunman in the street screamed. Another man emptied an automatic shotgun upward, scarring the reinforced concrete of Hathaway House. Dust and sparks flew past the coping.
“You bloody fool!” a L’Escorial snarled—correctly—at the man with the fléchette gun.
“Hey!” called a man through the trapdoor. “You dickheads up there? Come on back, we’re moving!”
Two of the L’Escorials moved quickly to the trapdoor. The third demanded, “What do you mean, we’re moving?”
“I mean we’re going to take out the Astras once and for all!” cried the man below. “Pepe just gave the order!”
The last of the three gunmen jounced down the ladder. Coke waited another thirty seconds, then reached for the latch holding the side of the barrel closed. Bob Barbour touched his hand. “Not yet,” the intelligence officer whispered. “I’ll tell you when they’re all clear of the building.”
Barbour’s faceshield would be taking the input of up to a dozen of the visual sensors in and around Hathaway House. Coke couldn’t have kept that many locations straight, quite apart from needing a clear view of his immediate surroundings in the event of a firefight.
Coke grinned and nodded to his intelligence officer.
“Now,” Barbour murmured. “They’re gone.”
Margulies swung open the door; Coke was out onto the roof first. He kept his head below the level of the roof coping. The sun had fully set, but the afterglow was vivid to eyes that had been covered within the hiding place.
“They took the weapons they found,” Sten Moden said. “They carried my launcher and the reloads back across the street.”
“We’ve got what we need,” said Coke. “First we’ll do something about Johann.”
Mary Margulies looked at him. “We’re going to take them all on, then?” she said.
“Yeah,” Coke said. “All that’re left after they get done with each other.”
Margulies shrugged. “Suits me,” she said, checking with her fingers the pouches of 2-cm ammo on her crossed bandoliers.
Niko Daun slapped another panoramic camera onto the coping, a centimeter from where the previous one had been blown to atoms.
Coke stared at him. “You carried an extra one of those when you ran for cover?” Coke asked.
The sensor tech looked defensive. “I’ve got two of them, sir. Well, they’re real handy.”
“It’s all right,” Barbour said, responding to a threat before his fellows were aware of it. He positioned himself so that his body was between the trap door and the other members of the team. “It’s Hathaway.”
Georg Hathaway stuck his head up through the opening. It certainly hadn’t occurred to the innkeeper that without Barbour’s warning, somebody—very likely Coke himself—would have blown him away.
“Sirs,” he said. His normally pudgy cheeks looked sunken, though the fact he’d climbed the ladder spoke well of his general condition. “They’ve gone for now, all of them. They say they’re going to attack Astra. You can escape now.”
“I’m checking my equipment,” Bob Barbour said, the last syllable spoken as he slipped past Hathaway. He let himself drop to the corridor since the innkeeper’s body blocked the ladder. Hathaway recognized the problem and scurried down also, puffing and wheezing.
Coke started for the ladder. Margulies touched his arm. “Sir?” she said. “What’s the drill? Do we break Johann out now?”
“We check the situation on the big screen,” Coke said. “And then we break Johann out, yes.”
Wild gunfire erupted from the street.
Both syndicates had moved gunmen back into Potosi as soon as Madame Yarnell left, though the gangs kept a lower presence than before. Instead of loitering in opposing groups at every corner, men of the two sides kept generally to one end of town or the other— spaceport side for Astra, the eastern half for the L’Escorials.
Though the Lurias were acting on the spur of the moment, Pepe’s sudden decision was tactically ideal. Three red-painted armored cars were already in the street. The remaining vehicles rumbled out of the garage beneath L’Escorial HQ even as the first phase of the battle began.
The gateway into the Astra compound was blocked, as usual, by the converted bulldozer. As the L’Escorials swept unexpectedly toward their rival’s headquarters, the blue-clad guards started the dozer’s engine.
Pepe’s fireflies stooped like hawks with violet pinions. The short powergun barrel in each firefly spat cyan death at the startled guards. The side hatch to the cab of the converted bulldozer was open. A firefly slid in, lighted the vehicle’s interior with its five-round magazine, and curved out again.
The bulldozer stalled in a cloud of black smoke. The Astra guards sprawled on or around the vehicle, mangled by concentrated gunfire. The fireflies hissed back toward their controller. Pepe had told off a pair of his henchmen as assistants to reload the fireflies’ magazines when they returned.
Civilians vanished from sight. A few Astra gunmen opened fire on the advancing L’Escorials. The Lurias’ armored cars raked the street with their tribarrels and a salvo of 10-cm bombardment rockets. The latter blew up on building fronts with huge red flashes, hurling shrapnel and broken concrete in every direction.
Astras dived for cover in doorways and alleys. Counterfire stopped instantly, though only a handful of Astras were hit by the wild volley. The sheer volume of fire which the vehicles put down was too much for undisciplined troops to face. As more armored cars joined the initial trio, the gunmen who’d been chased to cover tore off their blue accoutrements and disappeared into the night.
The only Astras still fighting after the first exchange were those in the headquarters building with their leaders—and they were trapped like mice in a bucket of water. By taking the initiative, Pepe had won the battle.
A pair of L’Escorials, stoned on gage and bold to the point of lunacy, leaped aboard the converted bulldozer. Astras fired wildly from ports in the headquarters building, but most of the shots were aimed at fireflies which existed only in the gunmen’s minds.
Powergun bolts traced magenta afterimages across unprotected retinas; terror turned the shudder of color into the fireflies’ static suspension system, though all the little devices were at the moment being reloaded.
The bulldozer grunted to life. One of the L’Escorials jumped from the hatch again. He was immediately shot in half by gunmen from both syndicates. The remaining man backed the converted vehicle with a skill that its regular driver couldn’t have managed with leisure and full daylight.
The door to the underground garage was open; an armored truck was driving up the ramp. The bulldozer crashed into the flimsier armored vehicle, blocking the exit completely.
The L’Escorial driver jumped out and scampered away, miraculously unhurt by the sleet of bolts and bullets which pursued him. A L’Escorial armored car nosed through the opened gateway. Its three tribarrels fired point-blank at the rocket pod mounted on the converted bulldozer.