“A starship,” the cold voice demanded. “A starship and your word that we’ll be allowed to take it and leave, Hansen.”
“Your lives, Solbarth,” the Commissioner repeated flatly. “And the rest of your lives to spend on whatever hellhole or prison asteroid the Consensus chooses to send you. But I promise you your lives.”
The remote quadrant of Hansen’s visor suddenly melted into an image of the gang’s hideout. All the interior walls of the third story had been removed. The cases of food and water suggested that Solbarth hadn’t been entirely bluffing when he’d said they could withstand a siege.
Not years, though. Not the dozen males and three females still moving.
A corpse had been dragged into the center of the room. The moaning man, his right hand hanging by a scrap of skin, still huddled beneath the window at which Hansen had shot him.
The female who’d just gotten up from the protective-systems console to join the argument was a Mirzathian, skeletally thin and over two meters tall. The SpyFly whose sensors were recording the scene made a bright pip on the holographic screen the Mirzathian was supposed to be minding. The touch of a key could have pulsed the drone’s electronics fatally, but neither the Mirzathian nor any of the other gang members had time to spend on that now.
Solbarth was a male of average height, with a pale complexion and features of perfect beauty. He was wearing a loose-fitting suit of rather better quality than the clothing of most residents of District 7. He moved languidly, but Hansen’s practiced eye could still identify the bulge of a pistol high on Solbarth’s right hip.
When Hansen wore a business suit, that was where his own holster rode.
“He won’t really spare us!” the Mirzathian shouted.
“He won’t really blast all them civvies!” a heavy man with a shoulder-stocked plasma weapon boomed simultaneously.
“He didn’t come here,” Solbarth said mildly, “here—” he gestured down in the direction of Hansen, standing beneath the overhang “—to lie to us. He’s Hansen, and he’s quite mad . . . but I think he’s telling the truth.”
“Look, whadda we got to lose?” whined another gunman. “Look, they blast us or we wind up drinkin’ our own piss ‘n starvin’, right? So whadda they do to us worse if we do chuck it in now?”
“Wait,” said Solbarth.
He leaned closer to the window above Hansen and called, “Commissioner, there’s something that you don’t know about me. How can I trust—”
“I don’t know that you’re an android, Solbarth?” Hansen said. His words echoed uneasily, in his ears and weakly through the radio link from the SpyFly that had penetrated the hideout. “Sure I do. The offer stands.”
“You promise,” Solbarth said forcefully. “But the Consensus wipes androids that vary from parameters, Hansen. You can’t promise for the Consensus.”
Hansen wiped the lower half of his face with his left hand. Sweat glistened on his skin, but his mouth was as dry as the pavement.
“Solbarth,” he said, “you’re a murdering bastard and I’d’ve strangled you with my own hands if I could. But I’m Hansen, I’m Special Units, and here I’m in charge. For this moment, I am all twelve hundred worlds of the Consensus.”
He took a deep breath. “They can fire me for making this deal if they like. But the Consensus will stand by my deal . . . or by god, Solbarth, the Consensus will deal with me. On my honor.”
The image of Solbarth turned to face his henchmen. “I think,” he said with delicate insouciance, “that we should take the offer.”
“I say you’re fucking crazy!” the Mirzathian snarled. She snatched up an antitank launcher and leaned toward the window.
Hansen wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a man draw and fire as swiftly as Solbarth did . . . though Solbarth wasn’t technically a man. The contents of the Mirzathian’s skull splashed the inner face of the forcefield and sputtered. With their velocity scrubbed away, bits of bone and fried blood tumbled out the window and fluttered past Hansen to the sidewalk.
There were two more shots from within the hideout; the heavy man collapsed around the plasma weapon cradled in his arms. Either he’d been planning to use it, or he’d looked like he had . . . or, not improbably, Solbarth was making a point to the remainder of his gang in the most vivid fashion possible.