size of the Protectors’ camp took Ryan by surprise. About a hundred tents of various sizes and shapes were laid out with mathematical precision in a square grid of “streets.”
In the center was a cleared space with a big tent at one end of it. Actually it was a cluster of bigger-than-average tents, clumped around one with a large room and what seemed like several lesser wings to it. The troop stopped in front of this one and dismounted.
Though it was very early in the morning, Captain Stone sent a rider galloping ahead to bring word to the baron that they were bringing in some captives. Which in turn was evidently an event of some note, since not only did the commander haul his butt out of a warm bedroll, but when the captives were prodded into the biggest tent at bayonet-point he also had a cluster of what had to be his senior officers gathered around him.
Lanterns filled the big canvas-walled room with yellow glow and the tang of kerosene. One man was seated, while the others stood around him, their eyes baggy and bleary from getting roused from their own bunks.
“Kneel before Baron Jed Kylie of Hugoville,” a sergeant barked. This was a new one, blond and fresh-faced, who seemed to have charge of a small bodyguard detail. Their uniforms, which in the light Ryan could make out now were blue, looked fancier than the ones on the patrol that captured them, somehow. “Glorious general and commander in chief of the ever-victorious Grand Army of the Cattlemen’s Protective Association!”
Good thing they cut short the title some, Ryan thought. Otherwise we’d be here all night before they stopped walking all around the muzzle of the blaster and got to the damned trigger.
He was tired, and whether he was going to sleep on the ground as a prisoner, or lie cooling in the open air staring up at the stars, he and his friends were going to rest soon. He wanted to get right to that, whichever way it came.
The one-eyed man knelt right away. It didn’t even jog his pride. They’d done worse to survive.
They had survived. And the smile he’d gotten from Krysty had reminded him that they would this time, too.
Jak, of course, had to make trouble about it. The bodyguards looked outraged by his refusal to bend his knee. But the trooper from Stone’s patrol who herded him in gave him a quick disinterested jab of his carbine-butt in the kidney, and down Jak went, gasping and glaring, with his hair hanging in his furious face like bleached seaweed.
“So,” Baron Jed said, leaning forward in his folding camp chair and squinting. Or Ryan thought he was squinting, anyway. His face was such a mass of seams and wrinkles it was hard enough to see his brown eyes to begin with. “What have we here.”
“Trespassers, Baron General,” announced the familiar brass notes of Stone’s voice. “We caught them in the hills by where Dirty Leg Creek crosses the Corn Mill Road.”
“Ah.” Baron Jed sat upright again. He was a skinny little specimen, although the way his blue tunic was tailored couldn’t hide the fact he had more than a bit of a kettle belly hanging off the front of his wiry frame. His head started wide with a shock of sandy-colored hair and tapered steadily to a long chin that looked like you could use it as the thin end of a wedge to split rails with. His nose was long and thin, the mouth a bloodless slash.
“They got women, Dad,” a big blocky redheaded kid who stood behind the baron’s right shoulder said. “I like them.”
“At ease, Buddy,” Jed said, irritation briefly twisting his face even tighter. “We got business to attend to.”
The youth looked eighteen, with a broad freckled face and mean brown eyes. He had a saber with a bucket hilt buckled to one hip and some kind of handblaster in a flapped holster on the other. Whether he could use either one was a question Ryan reckoned remained open. He had yellow metal bars on his collar; if the Protectors’ army followed the conventions of the long-dead U.S. Army—and from what Ryan had seen so far, they did—that made him a captain.
He let the corners of his mouth twitch in a smile that would almost be perceptible from the other side of it. He had to be stupe, mebbe even a simp, Ryan thought. Otherwise Buddy would be a full colonel, at least.
“So,” Jed said, “One-Eye. You’re the leader. You talk. Explain your presence on the holy soil of the Protectors’ Association.”
The lie was so well practiced Ryan could have recited it in his sleep. Most of it wasn’t even a lie; that made it all easier, of course.
“We’re just travelers, Baron,” he said. “We come down the ’Sippi to Nubuque and are headed west looking for work.”
“You lie,” said the officer who stood to the baron’s left. He was a dried-up specimen even smaller than Jed himself. His skin seemed to have shrunk right down onto the skull protruding above his high uniform collar. All the color seemed to have been bleached out of him as well, except for the vivid blue of the scar that ran down the right side of his face, and the blue eyes that stared like inmates from some kind of crazy-hatch windows. He slapped a pair of gloves from one white hand into the other as he spoke in clipped, vicious words.
“Relax, Colonel Toth,” Jed said. Ryan knew the man for what he was: a sec boss, and a triple-nasty specimen. “Let’s let them have their say.”
He frowned at Ryan.
“But west lie hard-core Deathlands,” he said. “The worst hot spots and thorium swamps in the whole Midwest. If not the continent. Why would you be going that way? Hey?”
“Reckon there’ll be less competition for gigs, anyway,” J.B. said.
The blond sergeant—or guard—stepped forward and slapped the Armorer across the face.
“Speak when you’re spoken to, outlander,” he said.
J.B. gave his head a couple of upward nods to settle his glasses back on his nose. He blinked mildly through the circular lenses at the sergeant as the man stepped back to his place and said nothing.
The sergeant didn’t know he was a marked man. If anything, J. B. Dix had less bluster in him than Ryan did, and he was slowest to anger of any of the party. But if you did anger him, you were in trouble.
“It’s true, Baron,” Ryan said. “It may seem triple-stupe to you, but we have no choice in the matter. Especially since we had to relocate in something of a hurry.”
Which, of course, was true enough.
“So,” Toth hissed, “you admit you are fugitives from justice.”
Yep, Ryan thought. Sec boss.
Jed waved him off. “They’re not fugitives from my justice,” he pointed out. “Not yet, anyway. So, you’re not spies for that treacherous dog Baron Al, are you?”
“We never even heard of the man until you spoke the name, Baron,” Ryan said truthfully.
The baron sat forward and stared at him intently. His map of wrinkles got a marked furrow down the middle of the forehead region, suggesting careful thought or scrutiny.
“You don’t know, do you?” he said at last, leaning back in his chair again. “Al Siebert, baron of Siebert, so-called, is the vile, claim-jumping bastard in command of that band of land-stealing ruffians who call themselves the Uplands Alliance. And who are nothing but
