The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

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!”