“Unless you set my family free,” the doctor continued quickly. Already he was afraid he had gone too far, asked for too much, but it was too late to turn back now. “Give them a boat and food and black powder enough for four blasters. When the boat is out of the harbor, I will announce the news of your son.”
“You dare,” Baron Kinnison grated low and dangerous, drawing another weapon from his clothing. It was a bigger blaster, trimmed with gold filigree and sporting a barrel wider than a grown man’s thumb.
“You would do anything to make your son a blood heir to the Iron Throne of the Thousand Islands,” Glassman replied, oddly calm. “Why do you think I would do less for my son to be free?”
Without speaking, Lord Baron Kinnison raised the blaster and thumbed back the hammer. Dr. Glassman stood there with the blaster in his hand, knowing that he could never use it. The punishment for attacking the baron would bring bloody horror to his family forever. He had played his card, father to father. The gambit would be accepted, or he would be chilled. That was all there was to it.
A long minute passed with only the sounds of the ocean breeze and the soft cries of the newborn child.
“Accepted,” Kinnison said, easing down the hammer with his gore-streaked thumb. “They go free and you die.”
“Agreed,” Glassman said, and entered the tiny cottage. There were raised voices, a woman’s scream, the soft chug of a silenced weapon firing again and again, and then the man walked out carrying a tiny wiggling bundle of life.
Glassman and the infant took the front seats, and Kinnison squeezed his bulk into the rear cargo area to stay as far away from his son as possible. Kinnison opened a canvas satchel and started to toss cylindrical grens through the open doorway of the cottage.
Gunning the engine to life, the doctor drove away from the cottage and passed the fence just as there was a brilliant flash of light and the first of the white phosphorous charges ignited. Chem flame shot out the door and windows, and soon the entire clearing was a roaring inferno, flames licking into the sky for a hundred feet. Kinnison watched the destruction with some degree of satisfaction. Willy Peter didn’t burn as hot as thermite, but it made much less smoke. Let people think what they wanted, but nobody would know the source of the child but himself and the healer. And when Glassman was aced by his hand, Kinnison would order one of the steam-powered PT boats to find and destroy the runaway slaves in the stolen ship. Setting the man’s family free, and letting them stay free were two entirely different matters.
As they drove over the plains of grass, the jungle rapidly approaching, a sea breeze carried the smell of the burning cottage to the Hummer and the child began to cry.
Every jounce of the wag bringing pain to his sores, Kinnison bristled at the noise. “We’ll never smuggle him into the fortress this way. Silence the thing!”
Slowing carefully, Glassman offered the newborn a clean rag dipped in coconut milk, and it started sucking happily, kicking tiny legs.
“All hail Corbet Kinnison,” Glassman said, “heir to the Iron Throne of the Thousand Islands, admiral of the fleet, general of the army, master of the black powder.”
“Not yet,” Kinnison said, glancing across the island to the imposing fortress on top of the main mountain of his island ville. “But very soon.”
Avoiding the farms with their slaves and overseers, Glassman drove the Hummer through an arid stretch of land yet to be reclaimed from the last acid rainfall until reaching a rough culvert, actually a cooled river of lava from the island’s active volcano. Here the baron painfully stepped from the wag and watched it drive off before starting his long journey toward the fortress on the hill.
Walking was difficult for the overweight man, and he was drenched in sweat by the time he reached the end of the culvert and emerged onto a great grassy plain.
Pausing on a low hill to catch his breath, the baron looked out upon the world he ruled. Tendrils of dark smoke rose from the mines, which delivered the basic ingredients for black powder, and a good mile away were the mills that mixed and rolled the explosive into usable form. More farms spread into the jungle hills, tiny plows pulled by slaves harvesting the grain and fruit for his table. Nearby stood the slave pens and the execution yard. Keep the dead in sight and the living will obey, his father had always said, and he had been correct.