“Like me?”
“Anyone who looks or acts different. Might mean Krysty and Jak, as well. Watch our backs.”
“Morgan isn’t essentially a bad man,” she said.
“You get any feelings about the baron yet?”
“No. Have to meet him. Then I still mightn’t feel anything from him.”
BARON SHARPE’S MEN found them before they reached the village, mounted patrol, on good-quality horses. There were twelve men, all in a uniform of dark green jackets and rich blue pants, all armed with identical single-shot muskets.
They reined in a hundred yards or so ahead of Ryan and the others, forming a loose skirmish line, every man bringing his blaster to the present at a single word of command.
“Efficient,” J.B. said. “Good to see someone who cares about security and decent order.”
Morgan nodded. “Sean Sharpe’s not a man to allow sloppiness.”
“Stay there, outlanders, and don’t move your hands to your weapons if you wish to see another dawn.”
“Sounds like Clint Eastwood writes his script,” Mildred muttered. “Sorry, didn’t think. Probably none of you has ever heard of him.”
“We going wait?” Jak whispered. “Could be best chance take them now.”
Ryan remembered, as he knew J.B. would be doing, that Trader always used to claim that the best time for successful aggression against an unknown enemy was in the first five seconds of the encounter.
“Wait,” he said. “No reason to think we’re in any danger here.”
“How about the story he collects muties and puts them in a zoo?” Krysty asked.
She was interrupted by another shout from the leader of the sec men. “You hear me, strangers?”
Emma closed her eyes for a few moments, looking as if she were counting the beats of her own heart. She opened them again. “It’s safe, for now,” she said.
“Hi, there, Joaquin!” Morgan yelled. “They’re friends. Saved me from stickies.”
“Who the fuck’re you, calling me by. Is that Morgan? Josh Morgan?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s your uniform?”
“Stickies stripped me. These people chilled them all and saved me. Clothes came off of a dead stickie.”
There was a gust of wind, rustling the leaves on the elms, carrying the first part of the next shout. But they all heard the ending of it. “. all the others?”
Morgan turned down both of this thumbs in the universal sign of death.
“All?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure these people are ace?”
Morgan started to walk toward his colleagues, beckoning for Ryan and the others to follow him toward the line of waiting horsemen.
“Stay on red,” the one-eyed man hissed, his own right hand resting on the butt of the SIG-Sauer.
But there was no problem.
The sec patrol was far more interested in the return of their lost prodigal, gathering around Morgan, firing questions at him, though Ryan noticed that some of the men’s eyes kept sliding uneasily to Krysty and to Jak. But none of them were taking any notice of Emma.
Finally the sergeant, the grizzled veteran called Joaquin, slapped his gelding on the side of the neck. “Enough of this. Time for talk later.” He searched out Ryan.
“Baron’ll want to thank you. Thank you all. We found the scene of the ambush.” He coughed into his gauntlet. “Not a lot left of the poor devils. There’d been no warning of stickies in the baron’s lands. No bastard warning at all.”
Ryan had removed his threatening hand from the blaster. “No man would have ridden around that,” he said.
Morgan went on tiptoe to say something to Joaquin, who nodded. “‘Course,” he said. “Josh says there hasn’t been much in the line of food for a day or so. On behalf of Baron Sean Sharpe I invite you to come with us to the ville and be our guests and enjoy both bed and board.”
“Glad to,” Ryan said. “Real glad to.”
THE SEC SERGEANT’S generous invitation didn’t extend to ordering any of his men off their mounts, offering them to the outlanders. Though he did, hesitantly, ask if Krysty, Mildred and Emma wished to ride or walk.
“Walk, thanks,” said Krysty.
“Me, too. Thanks all the same. Never been that great on the back of a horse.” Mildred smiled at Joaquin.