Baron Armand DuQuene was a huge man, with a dense mane of red hair flowing onto his wide shoulders, a matching mustache and beard covering most of his features. He was dressed as casually as the troops and carried two handcannons, the weapons reversed in their holsters, the butts sticking toward the front. A jagged scar sliced across his face and down his neck, a thin white streak in the redbeard growing over the ancient wound.
“My lord, I” the gate guard started, but the baron cut him off with a wave.
“How interesting. A baron riding alone, without any sec men,” DuQuene said as an opener, hooking a thumb into his gun belt. The man and his guards stayed well within the array of concrete dividers, even though they outmanned and outgunned the lone whitehair. “But I know your face. Your ville is to the east and north of here. Castle Nova, or something like that.”
“It was called Casanova,” Henderson corrected him, stroking the muzzle of his mount to quiet its nerves. “Not anymore.”
“Changed the name, eh?” He shrugged. “It’s a baron’s choice to call his home anything he likes. What happened to your guards, plague?”
The wall gunners grew tense and worked the bolts on their weapons. The assortment of deadly diseases that had swept the world after skydark were mostly gone these days, but outbreaks of the black cough, or blood fever still occurred. The only cure was to burn everything and run for the horizon. Now the old man noticed that more than a few of the bald men on the wall had lifted into view glass bottles filled with brownish liquid. Rags had been stuffed into the openings. In horror, Henderson realized they were getting ready to firebomb him out of existence.
“I didn’t change the name,” Henderson explained, controlling his raging temper. “It’s gone, the whole bastard ville is gone.”
The sec men murmured in surprise but didn’t lower the Molotovs or blasters.
“Muties?” DuQuene asked, frowning. It was a natural question. With any major trouble, a person always checked for muties first. The animals were the worst. They sometimes were so bizarre looking a person didn’t know what part to shoot at until it was too late. Eagles with tentacles, jellyfish that leaped from trees, and it was getting worse all the time.
“Not muties, or coldhearts, or a wildfire,” Henderson stated calmly over his whinnying horse. “It was melted. Melted like candle wax by a sky machine.”
“What brand of hot horseshit are you trying to sell?” the red giant scoffed in amusement. “There aren’t any more sats. Everybody knows that.”
“Then everybody is wrong,” Henderson snarled, releasing the stallion and walking dangerously closer. “My ville, and everybody inside it, was reduced to smoke in a matter of seconds by some predark weapon operated by Front Royal!”
More murmurs rose from the crowd of guards, disbelief openly battling with raw fear. Henderson had been counting on this. The common hatred of technology ran deep in people these days. Science had smashed the world, giving them muties, terrible diseases, and a host of other deadly things aside from the acid rain and rads pits. Even simple machines like wags were viewed with suspicion by many folks, and the very word “sat” made even hardened sec men recoil. There was no known defense against an orbiting sat aside from not being there when it cut loose. Of course, Henderson had no proof it really was a sat that destroyed his ville, but that was the word he had chosen to strike terror in their hearts. And who knew, maybe it was a predark sat. Stranger things had happened.
“You saying Nathan Cawdor can talk to a sat?” DuQuene asked, looking upward. Then he burst into laughter. “I have heard some tall tales before, but this is the best. Cawdor doesn’t even have a war wag with armor, but you’re telling me that now he got a sat?”
“Yes!”
The baron of Green Cove ville turned away. “Stop wasting my time. Guards, take his goods and whip him into the forest. Goodbye, Henderson.”
“And what if I’m right?” the baron hastily asked as the sec men approached.
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