“Mebbe I’m not worth anything, Baron, but just mebbe no one else is, either, because we’ve never had the chance to be a proper sec force.”
Hutter was silent for a moment. Confusion crowded his brow. The one thing that had never occurred to him was that one of his sec crew may actually talk back to him. Confusion gave way to anger, and his hands tightened around the Uzi he cradled in his lap. From the corner of his eye, Tulk saw that, and allowed the ghost of a triumphant smile to flicker across his face.
“I wouldn’t think about that, Baron,” he said mildly. “You chill me now, and who’s going to drive the wag? You certainly can’t, and besides, by the time you clean the wag out and throw my body out, plus get it back on the track after my chilling body has thrown it off course, you’ll be late. And then you’d lose face. And we can’t have that, can we?”
“No, we can’t,” Hutter replied in a low, flat tone that was so quiet it was almost lost under the roar of the wag engine. His eyes bored into Tulk, and there was nothing in them except the cold flint of hatred and finality. Elias Tulk wouldn’t be going back to Summerfield.
Tulk ignored the baron, and tried to keep the smile from his face, although inside he felt more elation and freedom than he had for, well, for probably all his life, but certainly for the past few years. He, too, knew that he wouldn’t be going back to Summerfield—at least, not with Baron Tad Hutter. But the men had entirely different reasons for thinking this.
Tulk drove on, with Hutter beside him, sunk into a brooding and heavy silence. Toward the rear of the wag sat two other sec men, who had listened in bewilderment to the exchange that had just taken place. Neither would ever risk what they called their lives by talking to Hutter in such a manner, knowing that there were always other sec men willing to avenge petty rivalries by doing the baron’s bidding and assisting them to buy the farm. So the fact that Tulk had just committed suicide—as good as—in front of them made them both feel uneasy about the mission ahead.
They weren’t the only ones to be feeling ill at ease.
AYESHA SHIFTED uncomfortably on her seat. It wasn’t the wooden bench, hard and unwelcoming as the wag bumped over the rutted road surface, that made her squirm uneasily. Rather, it was the closed flick knife that she had concealed about her person before the women had been gathered and put into the wag, where they now sat huddled and crammed together, ten on each side of the armored wag, with three sec men on hand—one to drive, one to ride shotgun and one to man the machine blasters that were mounted through slots in the side of the armored wag. It was stiflingly hot, as the wag offered no protection from the beating sun, the heat gathering and collecting on the bare metal of the roof and sides, turning the interior into an oven. The women sat in mostly sullen silence, with only the odd complaint, slapped down hard by the sec men, sometimes with a word, sometimes with the back of the hand. It was also dark in the enclosed wag, and in the poor light Ayesha could study the downturned and trammeled faces of the women, and the anxiety on the face of the sec man who sat with them in the rear of the vehicle. Because of the gloom she could do this without being observed too closely.
Baron Al had trusted none of the women, or their men. Many of them had husbands and lovers who had been unwilling to let the women go. They had been “persuaded” by force or threats to let their women go, but as the women themselves were also unwilling—incredibly so, in the eyes of Baron Al-—it was more than possible that, starving as they were, the men and women involved would hatch some kind of plan for escape, or at least an attempt at it. So he ordered that each of the women be strip searched before she got on board the wag.