“Oh, for feth’s sake,” said Varl, “this is just too painful to watch.”
He raised his shotgun, and blasted the intruder with a single shell. The noise was deafening, and the acrid fyceline fumes stung his nostrils. The intruder was thrown backwards through the air with such force that it snatched down the man playing out his line too. The second man smashed in through the skylight, yanked by the rope, and struck his face against the skylight rim with such a tremendous impact that Varl winced.
Both men landed on the walkway floor under the skylight in a tangled, unmoving heap.
Varl racked the pump of his weapon to chamber a fresh shell.
Then somebody, a third man that neither he nor Cant had yet identified, began to shoot down through the roof with a heavy stubber.
Meryn and Leyr, at the freight access, heard the shooting begin upstairs. They knew that neither Varl nor Cant was packing a stubber heavy enough to make that distinctive chugging snort, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.
The small metal saw had just finished with the lock on the loading dock hatch.
The heavy door swung in, slack on its hinges, and somebody sprayed las-fire through the opening as an aperitif. Meryn and Leyr had already planted themselves behind heavy supporting walls, and the las-shots spanked off masonry.
A second spray came in, to wash down the first, and then the first intruder charged.
Leyr had no angle on the hatchway so he shot the hatch instead. At short range, the huge round from the bolt-action rifle dented the metal hatch, and slammed it with considerable force into the men coming through the entrance. Meryn heard yelps of pain and cursing. One of the intruders kicked the door back open on its hinges, but before he could get off a shot, Meryn had dropped him with two sure body hits from his las.
Somebody outside raked another, much longer spray of las-fire in through the door, forcing Meryn back into hiding. The bolts scorched the air beside his flinching face, grazing close.
Leyr tried to repeat his trick of slamming the hatch with a rifle round, but the body of the man Meryn had dropped was blocking the frame and wedging it ajar.
Another long spray of las-fire hosed in. Leyr made the play dead gesture to Meryn. They were swaddled by a ruddy, close darkness and the flowing fumes of gunfire and brick dust sucking out into the cold night. The hatchway had the soft, natural light of the outside world behind it, a seeping grey radiance that seemed to Meryn and Leyr to be as bright as a full moon’s light. Instinctively, they’d clamped their eyes shut every time the las started to hose, in order to minimise flash-shock, and retain their night vision.
The hatch, probably steered by the muzzle of a las weapon, began to swing open provocatively. It moved slowly, suggesting a tantalising target about to be revealed. It was an old trick, and both Ghosts knew it, a tease to coax them into taking a shot and revealing themselves. A young or inexperienced gunman would be tempted to take a pop, even though there was no real target to hit. He’d take the pop, and give himself away.
The men outside weren’t sure if their liberal bursts of las had killed off any defenders inside the hatchway, and they wanted to be reasonably certain they had, before committing.
In the circumstances, it was simply a case of resisting the temptation of that early pop. You had to stay down and quiet about ten or twenty times longer than felt right. You had to wait what felt like an eternity, the blood banging through your temples like water through a sluice. You had to have the patience of a statue, the patience of a steel-and-velvet card player, who could hold his nerve long past the point where anyone else would fold or call.
Meryn and Leyr were part of Rawne’s inner circle for two principal reasons. One was that neither of them had the most crashing respect for rules and regulations. The other was that they were both excellent card players.
After what seemed like an eternity, an eternity in which suns could have been born and gone out again, and dynasties of saurians and mammals could have arisen and receded, a silhouette slowly edged in through the open hatch, black against the grey. Meryn and Leyr didn’t move.
They didn’t move when the second silhouette appeared either. It stepped over the body in the doorway.
A third silhouette appeared.
An excellent card player knows you can only raise so far.
Leyr’s bolt-action rifle boomed like a howitzer in the quiet darkness, and ejected the third figure from the hatchway and out onto the dock. The man simply disappeared, as if violent decompression had sucked him out of the doorway.
Meryn didn’t waste shots. The first and second men were in line with him, and closely spaced. Meryn knew that at this kind of range, a las-round from a rifle could go through two torsos as easily as it could go through one. There was no need for a burst of full auto. He fired, and dropped the men together, as one, tumbling them down in a tangle of limbs as they clawed in vain at each other for support.
There was silence. Nothing stirred beyond the hatch. Leyr drew his rifle open slowly and quietly, and chambered another massive round.
He and Meryn would wait once again, just to be sure.
The red street door at the front of Zolunder’s got its locks kicked out for the second time in three days. Banda and Daur let the three men who entered come all the way inside, and then filled the lower hall with a house-clearing crossfire of shotgun rounds and las. The whole thing was done in less than ten seconds.
Letting Daur cover her with the las, Banda slid down the corridor to the front door with her back to the cold wall, her shotgun low at her side. She edged around the three dead men on the corridor floor, one of whom was still twitching out the last of his nerve memories in a horizontal chorea.
She felt the cold night air against her face, and checked the street. There was no one left outside at the front, just some scuff marks in the snow on the steps.
The stubber fire from the top floor was chattering furiously, the way the stitching machines in the garment-fab over the yard had been, the night she’d arrived for her job interview.
It sounded bad.
Behind her, in the chilly corridor, Daur heard something else that sounded worse.
Elodie had screamed.
Varl threw himself back to avoid the cannon fire tearing down through the roof. Clouds of tile dust and splintered lathe were exploding out of the ceiling; the stub rounds were punching huge, frayed holes in the carpet. He fired his shotgun at the roof, and made a large hole of his own, with all the spalling, debris and force trauma poking out through the roof rather than in through the ceiling. Varl tried to judge the angles and work out where the man had to be if he was firing the weapon that was making the holes.
Cant opened up with his old autogun, and simply raked the stuffing out of the ceiling with the contents of an entire clip.
There was silence when he was done: silence, except for a lot of dust, and the rattle of particle debris spattering down out of the lathework. Cant anxiously changed his clip, not realising that he’d already made the kill.
The man with the stubber, along with a considerable quantity of snow, and a lot of broken roof tiles, came through the ceiling as the rotting and frail old joists that Cant had sawn through with his gunfire gave out. The landing shook with the weight of the fall, and the slam of cold air rushed dust into their faces.
Varl coughed and spat, and put two shots through the body twisted up in the roof debris. The fether was probably dead, but he had inconvenienced Varl, and Varl liked to take these things personally.
Varl looked at Cant and spat out some more dust-thick phlegm.
“You see?” he asked. “Sometimes you can, can’t you?”
Cant grinned. “Yeah, I really can,” he said.
Rawne reached the service gate, but it was shut. There was no sign of anyone trying to force it from outside.
He paused, puzzled. Gunfire was bursting off through the club around him, especially on the top floor. He was confused. He had been sure the main thrust
would have come from the gate. It’s what he would have done.
Maybe Lev Csoni just didn’t have the smarts that Rawne had credited him with.
The service gate was a big, reinforced hatch in the club’s east wall, secured by heavy bolts that padlocked in place. As it wasn’t in use, the area in front of it was used for storage, and crates of drink had been stacked there.
Rawne narrowed his eyes and looked again. The stacks of crates had been partially pushed back, pulled aside so that the hatch had clearance to open.
They’d been pulled aside ready. The keys to the padlocks had been left on the top of one of the crates.
Now he understood. He got it, as clear as day.
Csoni had been expecting someone to let him in.
Rawne picked up the keys. He decided it may as well be him.
Xomat, the muscle, had the las-snub pressed to Elodie’s throat. The cantor-finches were going wild in their cages, fluttering apoplectically like overwound clockwork toys. Some had flown into the bars so hard that they’d stunned themselves, and dropped onto the floors of their cages.
“What are you doing?” Elodie yelled, feeling the gun against her throat. “What are you doing?”
She’d freed Xomat so that he could help them. If Lev Csoni was coming down on their heads, they were going to need all the guns they could muster. She’d ripped off the tape wrapping him to the chair. He’d spat out the gag.
She’d actually said, “We’re all in this together.”
Xomat evidently saw it quite differently.
He’d grabbed her, and held her in an armlock while he fished a las-snub out of a magnetic holster under the bar till. Elodie hadn’t known that Urbano kept a back-up there.
“Shut up,” Xomat told her. He had his arm around her neck, and his weapon was poking into the side of her head. He began to manhandle her in the direction of the hallway that led to the service gate.
“What are you doing?” she yelled again, struggling. Despite the very real threat of the weapon, she was refusing to cooperate.
“For Throne’s sake, Xomat! I know they tied you up, but Csoni’s sent a strike team against us!”
“I know,” said Xomat.
Elodie went limp, and stopped fighting. Now she understood.
“Oh, you worthless son of a—” she began.
Daur appeared in the parlour doorway opposite them. He threw his lasrifle onto the floor, and drew his laspistol. They faced each other in the dark red gloom of the unpowered parlour.
Xomat yanked Elodie close, so tight that she gasped for breath. He made a shield out of her, the gun planted against her head.
“Back off!” he offered.
Daur took a step forward, and aimed the pistol, straight-armed.
“Let her go,” he told the muscle.
Xomat graphically outlined something that Daur might like to do, provided he could find a number of specialist agricultural items, some livestock, and a means of contacting an elderly female relative at short notice.
“He’s in on it!” Elodie squealed.
“Shut up,” Xomat barked, vicing her neck with his forearm.
“You’re in on it?” Daur asked. “You’re what, the inside man? Feth, you must have been gakked off when we turned up and taped you to a fething chair.”
“It was a setback,” Xomat admitted. “But since I didn’t open the door, Lev’s coming in the old-fashioned way, and that means you’ll be leaving in a zip-up carry bag.”
“If Lev’s coming in hard,” Daur said, “he’s made the worst mistake of his life. So let her go. Now.”
Xomat shook his head, and pulled Elodie closer.
“You’re going to let me past, or I swear I’ll put one through her head.”
Daur half-shrugged.
“Actually, she doesn’t mean that much to me, so that’s not much of a threat. Do what you like.”
Elodie’s eyes widened.
“I’m not joking!” exclaimed Xomat.
“Me neither,” said Daur, focusing his aim. “In fact, she matters so little, I may just shoot you through her and have done with it. We’re trained to do that, did you know? Specialist marksman stuff. I know where the soft targets are, you know, the places where a body isn’t bone dense. I can hit an area like that, and the round punches clean through into you. You might as well be hiding behind a curtain.”
“You let me pass!” Xomat yelled.
“Gut, for instance,” Daur said, lining up his weapon.
“Holy Throne!” Elodie wailed.
Xomat roared, and aimed the las-snub at Daur instead.
Daur fired once.
The las-bolt blew out Xomat’s forehead, and toppled him onto his back. He still had his arm halfway around Elodie’s neck, and she went over with him.
Daur rushed to her, and pulled her up.
“Are you all right?”
“What the hell was that?” she yelled. “Soft targets?”
“Take it easy!”
“I don’t mean anything to you?” Her eyes were staring in angry disbelief. The shock was still a few seconds off. Elodie had spats of blood on the side of her face from Xomat’s explosive demise.
“Listen!” Daur urged, trying to wipe the spats away, “I had a good head shot. Right over your shoulder. I just had to get him to take the weapon away from your head in case he pulled the trigger with a muscle twitch when I took him down. I had to get him to change his aim.”
“You were going to shoot me too!”
“I wasn’t!” Daur yelled back.
“You said you were!”
Ban Daur realised that she was a little too flustered to grasp any of his explanations and calm down.
So he kissed her instead.
Rawne drew back the last of the bolts and opened the service gate. The three men waiting outside started to move towards him, but then stopped in surprise.
Rawne had them casually, but securely, covered with his battered Blood Pact lasrifle. The three of them were armed, but they instantly recognised that raising any of their weapons was going to constitute a terminal decision.
“Which one of you is Lev Csoni?” Rawne asked. He knew full well it was the slightly balding, ruddy-faced man in the middle, because he recognised him as the one the girl Elodie had picked out on the pict-feed. He was, however, feeling sportive.
“Uh… I am,” Csoni said.
“You picked a really, really bad night to do this, Csoni,” said Rawne, and shot the other two men.
Csoni turned white and began to quiver.
“Toss your weapon outside,” Rawne told him. Csoni obeyed.
“Now drag those two inside the gate, and bolt it shut.”
Csoni did as he was told. When he had finished, he looked at Rawne.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Let’s go,” Rawne replied, and ushered with his gun.
Rawne walked Csoni into the parlour. On the roof, Varl had just reconnected the power and the lights were flickering back on. Rawne heard the air-circulation cycling up too, and felt it starting to skim off the smells of fear and sweat, gunsmoke, blood and birdshit. The air began to cool.
Banda was watching the front door. Daur was comforting Elodie at the bar. Rawne raised an eyebrow. He knew precisely where comforting like that could lead a man.
Leyr came in from the back.
“Rear’s secure,” he said. “We’ve got the hatch blocked again.”
“And no one’s lying around dead outside?” Rawne asked.
“Who the Throne are you people?” Csoni muttered.
“We dragged all the stiffs in before we shut the hatch,” said Leyr.
Rawne nodded.
“And no one got perforated?”
“Varl and the lad report they’re intact so, no,” said Leyr.
“Which outfit are you working for?” Csoni pleaded. “You’re not Urbano’s regulars. Look, I can pay you. Pay you good!”
“You’re keeping him alive, why?” Banda ca
lled from the front access, nodding at Rawne’s prisoner.
“Collateral,” replied Rawne.
“Please, which outfit are you with?” Csoni implored.
“The Tanith First and Only,” said Rawne.
Csoni blinked. “Who?”
“What do you mean, ‘collateral’?” asked Daur.
Rawne shrugged.
“Csoni’s… what was the word again?”
“Outfit?” asked Leyr.
Rawne sat down at the bar and poured himself a sacra.
“Csoni’s outfit decided that tonight was the night they’d take down Zolunder’s. Now, I’m only guessing, because I have no idea of their resources, but I figure if they don’t come back, then maybe the outfit will send another strike team, and another, and maybe even another and, frankly, by that stage, I will have become pissed off with the whole thing. So, we’re keeping Mister Csoni alive in case we need a negotiating chip. Leyr, tape his sorry arse to that chair. Mamzel?”
Rawne was looking at Elodie.
“What?”
“Don’t unwrap this one, all right?”
Elodie nodded.
Rawne sipped his sacra. A slight smile whispered across his lips.
“What?” asked Banda.
Rawne sighed.
“In hindsight,” he said quietly, holding his glass up to the light, “this entire fething thing was a bad idea. I know. I recognise the fact. I admit my mistake. The op, the scam, the getting arrested, the whole thing, was a wrong-headed feth-up from the very start. We are still, all of us, in a very bad, dark place, and the only glimmer of hope in the distance is the sunlight shining out of Viktor Hark’s backside. That, you’ll agree, is a dismal prospect.”
He took another sip.
“But, you know what?” he asked. “If you think about why we all did this, what drove us to it, I’ll tell you this… feth, I’m not bored anymore.”
No one spoke.
“In fact,” said Rawne, “this is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”
He began to chuckle. Leyr began to chuckle too.
After a moment, the chuckling had become proper laughter, and Banda had joined in.