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 lasround 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.