“There’s a name on this,” he said, his features carved from stone. “Might mean shit, but here it is.”
“Who?” Jak asked, reloading.
“Checkpoints along Timber Ridge Road, password is El Morro. Main-gate entry password…Jamaisvous.”
“What did you say?” Doc whispered, dropping the LeMat from limp fingers. The man looked as if he had just been hit wife a club.
“Silas,” Ryan repeated, showing the map. “Silas Jamaisvous.”
Without speaking, Doc retrieved the weapon, his mind lost in dark thoughts. So it was about to all begin once more.
Stuffing ammo clips from the corpse into his pockets, Dean frowned. “I thought he died in that mat-trans jump.”
“We hoped he died,” Krysty stated, her hair a flaming corona about her tense face. “Guess not.”
“Crap! We can’t go anywhere near a redoubt,” J.B. grunted, slinging the duffel bag over a shoulder. “Silas knows the access codes, and could have sec men waiting for us.”
“Or worse,” Jak added grimly.
“So what should we do?”
“We find his base and kill the son of bitch permanently this time,” Ryan said, turning on a heel. “Come on, we still have to fix that tire and get across the bridge. Once on the other side, we’ll hide the wag and proceed on foot.”
Chapter Seventeen
Standing alone on the top floor of the observation tower at Casanova ville, a sec man squinted at the cloudy sky and smiled.
“Almost lunchtime,” the man commented aloud, his stomach rumbling in harmony. Although the sun was blocked by heavy clouds, he could still see that it was just reaching dead overhead. Noon. Soon a servant would bring him a basket of food. The sentry only hoped it wasn’t rat again. They had been eating rat for the past month, and he was getting sick of the same thing every freaking day. Sure, it was better than nothing, but what good was being a sec man if you ate like a civilian?
With a sigh, he rested the heavy barrel of his muzzle-loading longblaster on a shoulder. Spare pieces of flint were tucked into loops on his belt, and his shirt pocket was neatly lined with paper cartridges for charging his weapon. It was a bloody clever invention of the baron’s. Instead of counting as you poured black powder into your weapon, he had made these little paper tubes from library books. A person bit off the top and poured out the black powder inside. It was exactly enough for a full charge, always the same. At the bottom was the miniball, and you used a nimrod to stuff the paper that the cartridge was made out of down the barrel to hold the load in place. Powder, shot and wadding all in one. The sec men could fire ten times faster than before, making their crew of a hundred shoot like a thousand!
One of the servants had dared to suggest it was a predark idea from something called the Civil War, and the liar had been beaten to death right in the market square. Nobody insulted the baron and lived. Except his mud head of a son, that was.
Lightning flashed overhead, and the sentry felt a warm breeze blow over the tower. In October? Suddenly, there was a loud peal of thunder, and bright light flooded the ville. Glancing upward, he was stunned to see the sky become an impossibly clear blue color. He hadn’t ever seen anything like it before! Then his eyes began to sting, and the world went totally black. Blinking to clear his vision, the sentry realized in horror that he was blind. He began to itch all over, as if a million insects were eating his skin. Dropping his longblaster, the sec man dashed for the stairs, going for help, and went straight off the edge of the roof. He screamed all the way down to the cobblestone streets and abruptly stopped as he hit.
Nobody noticed. Cooked birds were also plummeting from the sky, the leaves falling from the wilting trees. Tendrils of smoke rose from the thatched roofs of huts, people screamed, clawing at their faces, horses bolted in panic, blasters exploded, removing hands and entire arms, the fuel dump fireballed and the artesian well began to boil. Becoming hotter by the second, the thick walls of the castle started to turn reddish, then orange, and the melting stones began to sag toward the ground in thick glowing streams. Support timbers snapped, windows shattered, and the shrieking of people trapped in the dungeon rose to anguished howls.