"You'll find it slightly inedible, Joe," Bish told him. "Ravick has
about thirty men of his own and fifteen to twenty city police. He has
at least four 50-mm's on the landing stage above, and he has half a
dozen heavy machine guns and twice that many light 7-mm's."
"Bish is right," somebody else said. "They have the vehicle port on
the street level barricaded, and they have the two floors on the level
below sealed off. We got men all around it and nobody can get out, but
if we try to blast our way in, it's going to cost us like Nifflheim."
"You mean you're just going to sit here and talk about it and not do
anything?" Joe demanded.
"We're going to do something, Joe," Dad told him. "But we've got to
talk about what we're going to do, and how we're going to do it, or
it'll be us who'll get wiped out."
"Well, we'll have to decide on what it'll be, pretty quick," Mohandas
Gandhi Feinberg said.
"What are things like at the Municipal Building?" Oscar Fujisawa
asked. "You say Ravick has fifteen to twenty city cops at Hunters'
Hall. Where are the rest of them? That would only be five to ten."
"At the Municipal Building," Bish said. "Hallstock's holed up there,
trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary is happening."
"Good. Let's go to the Municipal Building, first," Oscar said. "Take a
couple of hundred men, make a lot of noise, shoot out a few windows
and all yell, 'Hang Mort Hallstock!' loud enough, and he'll recall the
cops he has at Hunters' Hall to save his own neck. Then the rest of us
can make a quick rush and take Hunters' Hall."
"We'll have to keep our main force around Hunters' Hall while we're
demonstrating at the Municipal Building," Corkscrew Finnegan said. "We
can't take a chance on Ravick's getting away."
"I couldn't care less whether he gets away or not," Oscar said. "I
don't want Steve Ravick's blood. I just want him out of the
Co-operative, and if he runs out from it now, he'll never get back
in."
"You want him, and you want him alive," Bish Ware said. "Ravick has
close to four million sols banked on Terra. Every millisol of that's
money he's stolen from the monster-hunters of this planet, through the
Co-operative. If you just take him out and string him up, you'll have
the Nifflheim of a time getting hold of any of it."
That made sense to all the ship captains, even Joe Kivelson, after Dad
reminded him of how much the salvage job on the _Javelin_ was going to
cost. It took Sigurd Ngozori a couple of minutes to see the point, but
then, hanging Steve Ravick wasn't going to cost the Fidelity & Trust
Company anything.
"Well, this isn't my party," Glenn Murell said, "but I'm too much of a
businessman to see how watching somebody kick on the end of a rope is
worth four million sols."
"Four million sols," Bish said, "and wondering, the rest of your
lives, whether it was justice or just murder."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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