The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Margulies snatched the 2-cm weapon she’d slung from the back of the chair beside hers in the saloon alcove. She’d been ready to drive Coke on his normal evening run to the spaceport to send a message capsule.

Coke was on his way down to the lobby. He paused, midway on the stairs, and asked, “Are they coming here?”

“Not yet, the bloody fools,” the intelligence officer said. “Either they’re not that organized, or they don’t realize that we’re keeping an eye on things.”

Barbour watched his console as he spoke. The main screen showed Johann Vierziger surrounded by L’Escorials and fireflies on a brothel bed, but graphic and numerical sidebars reduced the main image by sixty percent.

Barbour’s shouted warning drew Georg Hathaway’s head from the family apartment. Coke heard the door open beneath him.

“Hathaway!” he said, leaning over the balustrade to make eye contact. “Is anybody in the building but us, you, and Evie?”

“No sir,” Hathaway said, staring at Margulies by the door. The security officer was pulling her armor on one-handed while she held the shoulder weapon with the other and looked out the peephole in the front door. “No sir, there’s only you two gentlemen and the lady, that’s all who are present in our establishment.”

The innkeeper’s voice singsonged, as if he were chanting to himself in private. He was so frightened that his hands were still rather than washing themselves.

Evie Hathaway appeared behind her husband. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Sten’s on the way back,” Barbour noted. “He’s picking up Niko on the way.”

“Via, they shouldn’t risk it!” Margulies muttered from the doorway.

“They’ll be all right,” Barbour said. Tension clipped his tones, but his enunciation remained perfect. On the main screen, a pair of gunmen clubbed Vierziger unconscious. “Pepe guessed Johann sprang the ambiance for Larrinaga. There’s no evidence it’s occurred to him to come after the rest of us yet.”

Coke walked down the stairs and turned to face the Hathaways. “Georg, Evie,” he said. “If you can handle it, we’ll go up to the hide on your roof now. If you can’t, we’ll head for the woods. Either way, tell Pepe or whoever comes looking that an Astra messenger came for us twenty minutes ago. We left with him. All right?”

“Sten and Niko’re back,” Margulies called. The whine of a jitney’s motor came through the peephole and, faintly, through the building’s thick walls. “They’re going around to the lock-up.”

“Go upstairs, then,” Evie Hathaway said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Go!”

“Master Hathaway?” Coke said.

Georg finally met the Frisian commander’s eyes. He patted his wife’s hand on his shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “You are our guests. We will do what we can for you, despite, despite …”

Hathaway’s face settled into unexpectedly firm lines. “Your friend helped Pedro, returned Suzette to him and got him away from here. You’ll want to do what you can for your friend. We’ll hide you until you can.”

“There’s about forty men leaving L’Escorial HQ,” Margulies warned from the peephole. “A couple armored cars are coming up from the garage, too.”

“Sten and Niko have gone up the ladder to the back,” Barbour said.

“Shut it down, Bob,” Coke ordered, putting a hand for emphasis on the intelligence officer’s arm. “Everybody up to the—”

He heard the trapdoor open. “Stay where you are!” he bawled to Moden and Daun, who’d climbed the rope ladder from the locked parking area behind Hathaway House. “We’re on our way!”

Barbour blanked the console. His hesitation at abandoning his equipment was obvious in the longing glance he threw over his shoulder when Coke tugged him way .

“They’re crossing the street!” Margulies warned. She hadn’t moved from her position.

“Come on!” Coke shouted. He gave Barbour a push toward the stairs and skipped up after him, charging his sub-machine gun as he moved. The security lieutenant backed from the door, covering the rear.

“Twenty minutes ago!” Coke called from the top of the stairs.

The Hathaways couldn’t hold out against torture—nobody could if the stress was properly applied, though Coke doubted any non-Frisian on Cantilucca was competent at that either. Whether or not the Hathaways would blurt something when L’Escorial gunmen knocked them around, as would inevitably happen, was an open ques—

“We will stand it!” Evie Hathaway called. “For your sake, and for Cantilucca!”

“Blow the fucking door down!” shouted a gaunt, one-eyed L’Escorial gunman at the front of Hathaway House. Georg Hathaway was already pulling the door open as quickly as its mass would allow.

The five Frisians waited silently beneath piled lumber and the barrels on the roof. Enough of the twilight leaked through cracks in their concealment that they could see one another as their eyes adapted.

So long as the console in the lobby operated as a base unit, the commo helmets could access sounds and images from any of the sensors Daun had placed—including those in the hotel. There were no peepholes to look out through directly.