Margulies grimaced. “A civilian,” she said. “Somebody who didn’t have any business here.”
Coke helped Vierziger rise cautiously from the floor where he’d fallen. The little gunman waved him away.
“Find me some clothes,” Vierziger said. His eyes were open. He looked straight ahead and held himself stiffly. “They cut mine off me when they put me in there.”
Niko Daun turned and sprinted up the stairs to the barracks without formal orders from anyone. The dead torturer’s pants wouldn’t have fit, even if they’d been in better condition than the corpse which wore them.
“They had the cage’s power turned all the way up,” Coke said in a quiet voice. “They put him through hell.”
Vierziger looked at Coke and managed a shaky smile. “No, Matthew,” he said. The lilting insouciance was back in his tone. “That was somebody else entirely. And it can’t have been Hell, can it? Because I still have a chance to do penance.”
He flexed his hands with apparent approval.
“Here you go!” Niko Daun called as he returned with boots, a pair of gray trousers, and a camouflaged tunic. The items were all small enough to fit Vierziger. If they weren’t particularly clean, they at least offered the spiritual protection which clothing gives a civilized man.
Coke frowned as Vierziger drew the garments on. “I don’t understand, Johann,” he said.
Vierziger chuckled. “Neither do I, Matthew,” he replied. “But we’re not required to understand, you realize.”
Heavy fire roared from down the street. Coke switched his visor to give him a quarter overlay view of the console display. He chose another sub-machine gun from the selection available in the armory.
The three Astra gunmen in the office with the Widow and Peres stumbled out through a hole torn in the facade by L’Escorial fire. They’d thrown away their weapons. One of the Astras had even stripped so that he didn’t show any blue garments in the lights bathing the battered headquarters.
Fireflies dropped from the night sky, circled the men, and stabbed them with multiple cyan bolts. The Astras screamed and died in the rubble of their fortress. One man flung out his arm to fend death away. Bolts blew the limb off at the shoulder before another round finished him.
“Come out, Widow!” Pepe Luria called. His father and grandfather crouched behind the courtyard wall, but Pepe stood in the gap between two L’Escorial armored vehicles. “We’ll treat you with full honors!”
“I’ll take the roof,” Sten Moden said, hefting his launcher and a case holding three additional missiles. “Niko, will you load for me?”
“The roof?” Coke said. “That’s not great if you’ve got to displace.”
Moden shrugged despite the enormous weight he carried on his one arm. “A good vantage point,” he said. “And the backblast of these—it’d be almost as bad in an alley as inside. The cost of power, you know.”
“Go on,” Coke said. “But be careful.”
L’Escorials had refilled the tubes of the car mounting fléchette rockets. Pepe stepped to the side. This time his henchmen were careful to avoid the lethal wedge of exhaust behind the vehicle.
The gunner inside closed the firing contacts. The twelve rockets rippled off in four nearly simultaneous trios. A fraction of a second after they left the launching tubes, the casings split open and unleashed hundreds of dense arrows, finned to spread slightly along their trajectory.
The fléchettes hit the facade of Astra headquarters like osmium sleet. The pillar sheltering the flag-waving gunman disintegrated, as did what remained of the wall of the office beyond. Dust rose, dazzlingly white in the lights of L’Escorial vehicles.
“Come out, Widow!” Pepe shouted gleefully as he stepped into view again.
Johann Vierziger draped himself with bandoliers and two slung weapons, a sub-machine gun and a 2-cm powergun. He slid a pistol into the pocket of the tunic he wore.
“Pepe must have kept my rig,” he said wryly. “Well, it’s only a tool. Like the flesh itself. The tools aren’t what matter.”
“You and Margulies stick together,” Coke ordered. “I’ll take the opposite side of the street myself.”
Vierziger shook his head and smiled. “The two of you take the other side,” he said/ordered. “I prefer to work alone.”
Vierziger began dropping grenade clusters into various pockets of his garments. His body armor lay where it had been dumped with the other Frisian suits.
Coke looked at the little man, then said, “Okay, Mary, let’s get into position. It’ll be party time any moment now.”
They stepped from the building and crossed the courtyard, covering one another’s movements alternately. Fires lighted the interior of a dust pall to mark Astra headquarters and the street before it. Hundreds of L’Escorial gunmen capered about the site, silhouetted like insects by a lamp.
Adolpho Peres, an overlay on one corner of Coke’s visor, bawled, “I surrender! I surrender! I’m coming out!”
The gigolo staggered through the curtain of dust and smoke. Debris fouled his outfit, a ruffed doublet and tights of black velvet. His eyes were slitted.
Peres negotiated the rubble of the protective facade without falling, only to trip over the riddled bodies of the gunmen who’d preceded him from the building. He tumbled to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. “Oh, dear Lord in heaven Luria I’m your friend you mustn’t—”
The fireflies drifted within a meter of Peres before they one at a time emptied their magazines into him. When the last unit fired, only scraps of bone remained of what had been the gigolo’s muscular torso.
“Four to team,” Lieutenant Barbour said through the silence on the scene his console projected. “Are any of you wearing visible red garments? Report ASAP, repeat ASAP! Over.”
Coke sprinted across the street under cover of Margulies’ shoulder weapon. He took cover at the corner of the next building up from Hathaway House to avoid involving Barbour and the Hathaways themselves. “One negative,” he called.
“Two negative,” from the logistics officer, breathing heavily with the exertion of his climb to the roof of the L’Escorial building.
“Three nega—Five negative,” Niko Daun stepping on Margulies’ report, but they were both clear and that was what mattered.
“Six negative,” said Sergeant Johann Vierziger, by pay grade the lowest-ranking member of the survey team. “And it is time that we act, Matthew. Out.”
“Negative!” Bob Barbour snapped. The command was as unexpected as seeing a nun aim a rocket launcher. “This is Four. I’ll tell you when I’m ready, but do nothing till then. Four out.”
“Roger that,” Coke said, crouching at the corner of the building. He wasn’t sure what the intelligence officer had in mind, but he knew Bob well enough now to trust his judgment. Hell, he trusted every member of his team. “One out.”
The town of Potosi was locked and unlighted. Civilians huddled beneath furniture, praying that their homes would be spared by the heavy weapons that could shatter walls and bring down upper stories in an avalanche of brick and timber.
On Coke’s faceshield, the image of Stella Guzman stepped through the curtain of dust. Her combs gleamed in the glaring lights. She stood like a wraith. The ruin of her fortress wound a shroud about her.
“Luria!” she cried. Her eyes stared straight before her, as though she were unaware of her lover’s corpse at her feet. “I will wait for you in Hell, Luria. You’ll join me this night! Do you hear me? You’ll join me this night!”
Pepe’s assistants were still reloading the fireflies’ magazines. The youngest Luria let his controller hang at his belt and rose to face the Widow. “Why, Stella!” he called. “How shameless! Making an assignation and your lover’s body still—”