The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

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.