Captain Wilcken blurted something, clawed his personal sidearm out of a white patent leather holster, and pointed the small-bore projectile pistol at General the Marquis Bradkopf. Colonel Jaffe was drawing his pistol also.

Part of Coke’s mind reasoned:

Wilcken and Jaffe were supporters of the Association of Barons. They intended to assassinate Bradkopf in conjunction with the attack, leaving Fortress Auerstadt leaderless at the moment of crisis. In panic, Wilcken has gone ahead with the plan even though circumstances have obviously changed….

That was with the conscious part of his mind. Reflex thumbed off the safety of Coke’s sub-machine gun as his left hand slapped the foregrip and his finger took up the slack in the trigger.

The first bolt blew plaster from the wall above the TOC’s doorway. The next four hit Wilcken in the chest and neck at point-blank range, virtually decapitating him.

Officers and their gorgeously clad mistresses screamed and threw themselves down. Coke body-checked the Marquis, knocking him to the side and clearing a shot at Colonel Jaffe. Jaffe’s pistol was only half out of its holster. To Coke’s adrenaline-speeded reactions, the colonel didn’t seem to be moving at all.

The air stank of burned flesh and vaporized blood. Wilcken toppled backward, his head dangling onto his chest by a tag of skin. The pupils of the dead man’s eyes had tilted up into the skull.

Coke’s second burst winked cyan on Jaffe’s corneas. The colonel’s chest burst like a blood-filled sponge. The pistol in his hand fired a single shot into the floor. The bullet moaned away in sparks and a spurt of powdered concrete.

“Traitors!” gasped the Marquis, half-sprawled where Coke had knocked him, supporting his torso on the spread fingers of his right hand. “They were—uh!”

Coke was poised for a further threat, sweeping the bullpen over his sub-machine gun’s holographic sights. The iridium barrel glowed white from the nearly instantaneous bursts. Heat waves trembled through the haze of powergun matrix and smoldering fabric.