to the sinister Baron Tourment with their prizes. They'd interrogate Krysty and Lori to find out all they could about how many there were, about arms, strength. And if the girls didn't cooperate, they'd use stronger measures.
'Time's wasting,' said Ryan. 'They'll guess we might come in after them. Be ready.'
Never for a moment did Ryan, J.B. or Doc consider just walking away. It would have been easy to head for the gateway and shut the door. Move somewhere else. And with the unreliability and random quality of the mat- trans systems, there was no way they'd ever come back to Louisiana. It wasn't like it used to be with the Trader.
Back then, with a small army traveling together, if you got left, then you got left. It was the survival of the mostest that counted. That was the rule, and every man and woman with the warwags knew that. You lived and you died by those rules.
Now there were just the six of them, moving together through an alien land where hostility was the norm and friendship was suspect. That meant you went out on the edge for one of the others.
One of the codes was a man didn't just close his eyes and ride around.
The three men looked at each other in the dusty, dimly lit room, each absorbed with his own private thoughts.
The stranger's voice, coming out of the darkness by the door, made them all jump.
'You 'gainst Baron?'
Ryan answered. 'Well, we ain't fucking for him.'
'Then we ought talk.'
In the dim light, the newcomer's white hair flared like a vivid magnesium torch.
Chapter Sixteen
Mephisto was thoroughly pissed off with what had happened.
His best ivory suit-was ruined. Soaked in salt water, sodden with orange-gray mud, and liberally smeared with gator shit.
Baron Tourment wasn't that concerned for the health and well-being of his sec men. But to have eight corpses to dump into the bayous in a single day couldn't just be overlooked Ч and there were four more men with serious gunshot wounds to tend.
All that lay on the crimson debit side of the day's accounting. But there was an entry to be made on the credit side.
He had two prisoners, both fairly unhurt. And as a bonus, both were female, and both young and attractive.
They had a few cuts, bruises and scratches, nothing worse. Except that the stun grens always left victims partly deaf for a couple of hours, often caused a little bleeding from the ears and nose and mouth, and frequently burst tiny capillaries in the eyes, making them pink and sore.
Mepbisto was in the storage room in the basement of the old Best Western Snowy Egret Inn, only a few miles away from the Holiday Inn in West Lowellton. Half a dozen of his best men were stationed in the corridor, and the guards around the perimeter had been doubled. The Cajuns had spoken of six people: four men and two women. Mephisto had very nearly gotten himself chilled by a fat man in what looked like a dark blue uniform. The zipping burst of lead had missed him only by a fraction of an inch and had actually torn a hole through the padded left shoulder of his suit.
It was rare that his verbal exchanges with Baron Tourment involved any humor. Even grim humor. But after he had made his initial report, the baron had looked at the state of his beloved suit.
'It looks to me, Mephisto, like you got yourself elected out there.'
He'd replied, 'No, baron, but I surely got nominated real good.'
His lips curled into a smile at the memory. The deaths of the men had creased Tourment's heavy brow, but the news that two women were bound and unconscious in the basement had brought a flash of white from his excellent teeth.
Now Mephisto waited for his lord and master to arrive to inspect the prisoners.
The rooms had two tables; the tops were scored and scarred, even scorched in places. The floor was bloodstained. Being questioned by Baron Tourment was not a gentle experience.
One table held the blonde. A tasty dish for the baron. She was very tall Ч close to six feet was Mephisto's guess. Her long hair was the color of summer corn in the old vids, and her red skirt, topped by a red blouse, showed most of the smooth thighs. Boots in crimson leather reached way over her knees, with high heels that must have added five or six inches to her stature. The boots had tiny silver spurs that made a delicate tinkling sound as the girl struggled with her bonds, moaning and clawing her way back toward consciousness.
'Delicious,' whispered the sec boss. But the other woman was even more amazing.
Though an inch or two shorter than the blonde, she was beautifully built, with firm thighs and fine, proud breasts. Mephisto glanced toward the door, wondering whether he dared risk being caught stripping either of the women for his own pleasure; he decided immediately that he didn't dare. This girl wore coveralls streaked with drying blood from when she'd taken the neck out of one of the sec men who tried to close in on her before they used the stun grens. She still had on the most amazing pair of boots that the sec boss had ever set eyes on. But it was the hair...
Hair that was brighter than any fire. Redder than a chem cloud sunset across the bayous. Long and thick tresses, clotted with mud, tumbled over the girl's shoulders. Mephisto moved closer, extended a hand tentatively to touch the hair.
''Lord Jesus!'
He spun on his-heels, his eyes wide with panic, face pale with terror, afraid that his forbidden Christian oath might have been overheard. If it had, then he was a dead man. Although standing up and breathing, he'd be as dead as a pair of gator-skin boots.
But the hair. It had
These strangers weren't ordinary mercies, hired from some frontier ville farther west in Tex-Mex. They weren't drunken outlander pistoleers who'd slit a throat for a handful of jack and a gaudy whore. Then who were they?
Behind him the door swung silently open on its oiled hinges. Mephisto heard the creaking of the baron's leg-supports. His ears caught the rhythmic chunking of one of the ice-making machines out in the kitchen units beyond. 'Are they awake, Mephisto?'
'Coming around.'
'And we know nothing of them?'
'Nothing. Fine clothes and boots.'
'Weapons?'
'Yeller hair had only a small pearl-handled PPK. Slut's blaster, .22. Nothing else.'
'Red hair?'
'Pistol. But a man's gun. Real stopper. Name on it's Heckler & Koch. Real handsome pistol. Silvered finish. Holds thirteen rounds of nine mil.'
'The fat man who clipped you?' Tourment loomed over the helpless women, his giant shadow stretching across the floor and onto the far wall of the underground chamber. He leaned forward, stumbling, steadying himself on the shoulder of his sec boss; he winced at the frightening power of the pincering hand.
'He... he had a sub, firing triple bursts. I guess a big handblaster as well. He was good. Most of the dead were on his sheet. But both of the women also blasted men forever into the dark night.'
'The big, big question, Mephisto, is: who are they? And where do they come from? Are they friends come to aid our snow wolf? That most of all. Six was the word from the village?'
'One was shot. Six left.'
'Where, then, are the other three?'
