The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

The leaders of Astra and L’Escorial faced each other with only the width of the right-of-way between them. Both groups were nervous. Coke’s magnified view of their faces suggested that while the Widow Guzman and her companions felt uncertain, an air of monstrous glee underlay the Lurias’ twitchiness. The L’Escorial leaders knew, or they thought they knew….

The sound of Madame Yarnell’s reconnaissance vehicle preceded the car itself. The driver was winding out his motors, and the active suspension set up an audible keening as it smoothed the high-speed ride over the spaceport highway.

“As pissed as she was to come to Cantilucca,” Margulies said, squatting on the roof of Hathaway House beside the major, “you’d think she’d be happy to be going back to Delos. Doesn’t seem like she is, though.”

“There’s folks that’d bitch if you hanged them with a golden rope,” Coke said. He kept his tone light, but he knew that very shortly the survey team would have to fish or cut bait.

The Hathaways stored building materials on their roof. The team had converted the crates, lumber, and barrels into a temporary refuge against need, but it couldn’t hide them for long.

Madame Yarnell’s car didn’t slow until it reached the center of town. It skidded to a halt from a hundred, hundred-and-ten, kph. Pebbles and a stoneware bottle, miraculously unshattered by the poot! the tire gave it, flew out like langrage from a cannon.

The charge pelted the gunmen who hadn’t ducked away when they realized what was about to happen. The bottle dished in the sloped forehead of a L’Escorial gunman; two Astras leaped back with their hands to their faces, screaming that they’d been blinded.

The car’s passenger door lifted while gravel from the crash stop still clicked and pattered. Madame Yarnell got out. Her headgear was similar in design and purpose to a Frisian commo helmet. She surveyed the crowd that had gathered at her orders.

“You filth!” she said at last. Her voice boomed from the omnidirectional speaker on top of her helmet. “You cretins, you hog feces!”

The cartel representative turned as she spoke, so that all those present could receive her direct contempt. Lightning traced the eastern clouds. A gunman injured by the gravel whimpered brokenly.

“I’m going off-planet now,” Madame Yarnell announced abruptly.

Peres seemed alternately frightened and exultant. The face of the Widow Guzman didn’t change, but she wrapped her arm around the gigolo’s waist and held him tightly. Roberson simply looked terrified, as he had since he appeared in obedience to the summons.

The Lurias’ suppressed glee suggested—correctly—that they knew more about Madame Yarnell’s recall than she did herself. Coke guessed that the cartel representative was too furious at this moment to take much notice of the gangsters’ expressions; but she wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t the type to limit the basis of her judgments to hard facts.

When Madame Yarnell returned to Cantilucca it would be obvious who had gained by her absence. Coke believed it would be very, very bad for those same parties.

“You will keep the peace,” Madame Yarnell said. “While I’m gone, when I return—forever! All of you!”

She looked around the segregated assembly. “If there’s any problem, any problem with the supply of gage from Cantilucca, may the Lord have mercy on you! For I will have none.”

“I wonder how much she knows about what’s been going on while she’s here?” Margulies said.

Coke shrugged. “Not a lot,” he said. “She doesn’t have any local sources she could trust, and she didn’t bring the sort of hardware Barbour and Daun deployed for us. She’s probably pretty frustrated with what she must guess.”

Madame Yarnell threw herself into the reconnaissance vehicle. The driver began his hard turn before the passenger door had finished closing.

“How do you feel, boss?” Margulies asked. She lifted her eyebrow.

Coke smiled grimly. “A little antsy,” he said. “Not frustrated, though. We may or may not be able to pull this off, but we sure as hell know what we’re doing.”

The Delian vehicle screamed up the street, shimmying as hard acceleration unloaded the front wheels. One of the electric drive motors sent occasional sparks quivering out into the night.

“Ramon Luria’s coming this way,” Margulies said as she peered over the roof coping.

“Yeah, he’s probably wondering when the FDF is going to arrive on Cantilucca,” Coke said.

“And?” Margulies asked.

“And the answer’s, ‘Never, if Camp Able takes my recommendation,’” Coke replied. “But I’ll say something more neutral than that to hold him for the time being. Sooner or later, though …”

He started for the trap door and the ladder down into Hathaway House.

“Sooner or later,” Mary Margulies said, “everybody dies. When that happens, I wouldn’t want to remember that I helped keep either group of these bastards in power.”

Cantilucca: Day Seventeen