Halfway through the gate, Baron DuQuene paused to glance over a shoulder. “Never give up, do you?” he snorted.
“And what if I am right?” Henderson repeated, feeling his heart pound inside his chest. “What are you going to do when the top of the ville starts to grow hot, then the walls soften and melt, the molten stone flowing over your screaming people, burning them into blackened bones. What will you do then? Cry? Apologize? You asshole, you don’t deserve to be the baron of a latrine!”
The guards growled hatefully and shifted the grips on their blasters, obviously eager to chill the old man.
Baron DuQuene stared hard at the man standing alone but unafraid before the gates of his ville. Henderson was known as a ruthless deviant, a sexual pervert, and worse, a jolt addict, but if his story was true, then the bastard had information vital to the safety of his ville. And what could one lone man do? Slaughter his troops and take over? That was a laugh.
“And you can stop the sat, I suppose?” DuQuene scowled.
“No,” Henderson replied honestly, “but we can kill the man who controls it. With him gone, it’s useless.”
“Cawdor has never bothered me. Why should I take your word?”
“Don’t. I could be lying,” Henderson said quickly, feeling the fleeting taste of success on each word. He was close now, so very close.
“Send some troops to recce my ville. When they return, then we can talk about how to save your ville. And my price,” he added in a flash of brilliance. Nobody gave anything away free. He cursed himself a fool for not thinking of that earlier.
The baron turned and talked with a tall thin sec man. From the man’s lack of hair, clothing and stance, Henderson guessed he was the sec chief. The chief wore a wheelgun in a shoulder rig, and some sort of weird blaster strapped to his thigh. The barrel was enormous, twice the size of a shotgun. The stock was new wood, still green in spots, the barrel bound with iron wire as reinforcement. Henderson knew that trick. Heat the iron red hot, then wrap it tight around a weak blaster barrel. When it cooled, it got tight and helped old blasters work for years longer. That weapon had obviously seen long and hard service. Maybe it launched a rocket, or it could be a flare rifle. Henderson once owned a flare pistol. Whatever the thing was, he had no wish to face the business end, and he marked the chief as the first man to die in the revolution.
“As the baron of Green Cove,” DuQuene began loudly, “I always have to consider any potential threats to my people. This could merely be a trick to get inside. If it is, you’ll hang from a rope with crows pecking out your eyes until we shoot you out of boredom.”
Beaming a smile, Henderson said, “And if what I say is true?”
“We’ll discuss your reward later inside,” DuQuene growled. “Get his horse, take his blasters and any jolt you find.”
“If he resists, chill him,” the sec chief said in a raspy voice, as if just risen from a grave.
Henderson allowed himself to be stripped of all weapons, secretly smiling about the bamboo tube of jolt shoved up his ass where few sec men dared to search. He was inside. Now for the second part of his plan.
ORBITING HIGH above Earth, a beautiful black butterfly floated along peacefully in space. The analogy was quite exact, as the inventor of the microwave Kite, Professor Paul Glaser, had collected butterflies as a child and deliberately incorporated the beauty of nature into the orbiting power plant. With a smile, he had always referred to the lovely satellites as Monarchs. But the rest of the predark world soon called the feared machines by the hated designation of Kites. Miles wide, the graceful wings of the Kite were composed of innumerable tiny glass squares, efficient solar cells that converted the raw solar light falling on them into direct current. The trickle of power flowed into superconductor cables, becoming a stream of electricity that was boosted with a step-up transformer into a raging torrent of power that was converted into safe and harmless microwaves to beam down to Earth.