The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

There was no sign of women, though. Apparently Suterbilt’s orders that no outsiders should be admitted had been obeyed to the letter.

The factor rapped his knuckles on a wall to direct attention away from the state of housekeeping which he’d permitted. “See these?” he said. “The whole place is a ceramic monocasting, twenty centimeters thick on the outside. You could shoot straight into a wall and not so much as scar it!”

Vierziger sniffed. “Ceramics are all very well so long as you don’t exceed their strength moduli,” he said. He walked down the hall, deliberately shuffling his feet sideways to sweep litter out of his path. “One additional straw beyond that and you’ve got sand, not armor.”

“Well, yes, but …” Suterbilt said. “Ah—the ambiance is at the end of the hall. It was the master bedroom.”

“I assumed that,” Vierziger sneered. “I’m glad you had sense enough to lock your guard slugs away from it. Otherwise there wouldn’t be anything left for Astra to threaten, would there?”

Niko sniffed. “Not much of a lock,” he said. It was an add-on, cemented to the panel and jamb. “I guess it’s good enough, though.”

The guards were restive and concerned. One of them had drunk enough to be obviously angry, but a pair of his fellows gripped his wrists. The group was armed with the assortment of shoulder weapons, pistols, and knives that had been typical street wear for the gangsters before Madame Yarnell arrived.

“I’ll open it for you,” Suterbilt said, stepping forward with an electronic key. Vierziger’s sneering superiority had reduced the factor to nervous acquiescence with every demand, spoken or not.

The room illuminated itself softly when the door opened. The fixtures in the portion of the house which the guards occupied had been dimmed over the months by a grimy miasma. Here the light, though subdued, had the purity of evening over a meadow.

“Nice installation work,” Niko said as he surveyed the bare room. “Some artists, they think the hardware is beneath them. Not her.”

“What?” Suterbilt said. “Are you joking? I had the furniture removed. Quite a nice bed. I’m using it myself.”

“No, no,” the sensor tech said. “The ambiance, of course. Look at these heads.”

Daun walked into the center of the room. His focus on the psychic ambiance burned through the layers of good humor which made him easy to get along with. Niko Daun liked to be alone when he was working …and people who’d been around him while he was in work mode didn’t care to repeat the experience.

“There,” he said, pointing to a glint in the ceiling, a rubidium-plated bead the size of a man’s thumbnail. “There, there, there, there”—the sidewalls—“and the main board here”—he pointed to the shimmering fifteen-centimeter disk in the center of the floor— “where the bed would keep people from walking on it. Though I doubt that would have hurt the resolution, the way she’s got the projectors bedded. Just look at the way she faired them into the matrix!”

“Yes, it can’t be removed without destroying the whole thing,” Suterbilt said. “And probably the house as well.”

Daun turned on him with the casual prickliness of a cat. “Don’t talk nonsense!” the technician snapped.

“Specialist Daun,” Vierziger said smoothly, “we’re here to—”

“Look,” Daun said, the first time anybody who knew Johann Vierziger had interrupted him in a long while. “Since we’re here, I’m going to try the ambiance. This is probably the only time I’ll be around a genuine Suzette.”

Nothing in the sensor tech’s tone suggested he was willing to discuss the matter further. As he spoke, he took a flat, palm-sized device from his smaller toolkit and opened its keyboard.

Vierziger laid the tips of his left index and middle fingers on Daun’s wrist. “Master Suterbilt will switch on the ambiance for us, I’m sure,” Vierziger said.

“Yes, yes, but I’m in a hurry,” the factor grumbled. He took another key from his wallet. He flicked the on switch in the air without result. “Let’s see …”

“Stand over here,” Daun said, gesturing Suterbilt to a point near where the head of the bed would have been.

Suterbilt frowned but obeyed.

“I could have turned it on easier,” Daun grumbled under his breath to the other Frisian.

“You could remove the work so that it could be reconstructed?” Vierziger murmured back.

“Huh?” said Daun. “Course I could. Don’t be an idiot. The adhesive’ll powder at twenty-eight point nine kilohertz. Take about three seconds each. And realigning them afterward, that’s no sw—”

The room shimmered out of the present and into a golden timelessness. Suterbilt had finally managed to trigger the ambiance with his low-powered key.

Vierziger was in an individual paradise. Foliage waved slowly in breezes the viewer could not feel, and the air was perfumed with life itself.