The memory of the gaunt man’s unsmiling visage as he explained his personal—and therefore group—mission still haunted Tulk. He had no doubt that Correll was insane, and yet he could understand that. He had no idea of Correll’s own personal history, but he knew from his own experience that to have to internalize the intense emotions that a baron abusing privilege could bring was to skirt close to insanity. Some stayed the right line—as he believed he had—because they had to keep living with the enemy. Others, like Correll, didn’t, and so were allowed free reign to their feelings, and perhaps the descent into madness.
After a briefing, Tulk had returned with the personal knowledge that Correll was as insane as Hutter, just in a different way. But this was, in a sense, irrelevant. Correll’s madness allowed Tulk to unleash his own, and gain his revenge.
And that was priceless.
The knowledge that it was nearly time filled him to bursting, but—mindful of the still puzzled baron beside him—he allowed himself only the expression of putting his foot down on the gas, and coaxing more speed from the wag’s protesting engine.
“AYESHA, THIS ISN’T going to make things any better for us. We’ll just get beaten before they screw us, and it’ll hurt,” whined the big blonde from her seat in the back of the wag.
“Shut up, bitch,” snapped the girl with the Uzi. She didn’t turn to glare at Anita, but the big blonde could feel the hostility coming off her, and immediately shut up, even trying to stifle her sobs.
“Thanks for that,” Ayesha murmured as she spared a glance for the sniveling blonde. “Any more of that shit, and I probably would have slit her throat, as well.”
“Anytime, babe,” her ally replied. “But I hope you’ve got some sort of plan, ’cause I’ve just seized the moment, and I don’t know what the hell to do next.”
“First thing is to get their blasters,” Ayesha said decisively, moving down the middle of the wag. She addressed the sec men in the front directly. “I want you to hand your blasters over the back, holding them by the business end with your fingertips only. I don’t want you getting any ideas, or else my friend here may just blow your mother fucking head off. Okay, boys?”
The sec men complied without a word, the one who had twisted in his seat dropping his H&K over the back, while the driver unholstered his Walther PPK handblaster and dropped it over the back, straining to keep the vehicle on track as he leaned behind him.
Ayesha moved in front of her ally and pulled the blasters back, crouching low but keeping her head up and her sights firmly on the sec man who was still facing her. The knife, still dripping, she kept in her left hand, the blade angled up ready to strike if attacked.
Gathering the blasters, she pulled back and stuck the Walther in the waistband of her jeans. The H&K she held on to, looking around at the women on the benches. Most of them still looked like Anita—downtrodden and resigned to their fate, fearing it would now be worse because of her actions. But a couple of the women had brightened considerably, and although they had nowhere near the courage of the girl holding the Uzi rock steady, they could be useful.
“You,” she said, indicating a slim woman with sharp features and short, cropped hair who had begun to take an interest in events. “What’s your name?”
“Adrienne,” the woman replied in a tone that was nervous, but had an underlying bite of insolence that could be useful.
“Consider yourself recruited to our little women’s liberation army,” Ayesha said, tossing the H&K to her. “Know how to use that?”
“It’s a blaster like them all. Just give me a second or two to work out its little peculiarities,” Adrienne replied in an offhand manner.
The sec man facing them spit down onto the floor of the wag. “Don’t think you bitches are gonna get away with this.”
Without a word, the girl with the Uzi took half a pace forward and swung the barrel of the blaster up in an arc, catching him in the mouth and nose, which gushed crimson. Before he had a chance to react or even register the agony he felt, she had stepped back out of range and resumed her position, with the blaster trained on the pair of sec men in the front of the wag.