THEY QUICKLY GOT everything ready for their departure.
“Best say our goodbyes to the baron,” J.B. said. “Leave our blasters here.”
“Yeah.”
Surprisingly the staircase was deserted, without a single sec man on duty. But neither of them thought anything about that. The air of relaxed competence that ran through the ville meant that it seemed as secure as anywhere.
They were near the top of the stairs.
“Quiet.” J.B. halted a few steps from the open chamber. “Very quiet.”
“Could be that he’s sleeping. Looked like he needed it earlier.”
The Armorer moved more slowly, his head turning from side to side, glasses glinting in the spears of dusty light. “Something’s wrong, Ryan,” he whispered, as the baseball bat from the shadows came hissing around in a lethal arc and struck him across the side of the head, knocking him to the floor.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
At the same moment, Ryan was aware of someone moving fast and silent behind him, up the stairs. He started to turn, reaching for the hilt of his panga, half drawing it, when the bulky figure hit at him with another polished baseball bat. It caught the panga across the steel blade with a loud ringing sound, sending it tumbling down the steps, out of reach.
There was no time to stop to wonder what was happening.
“To wonder is to begin to die,” Trader often said.
The bat swung toward Ryan and he ducked, vaulting onto the open landing, glimpsing a second shadow, poised ready to swing at him.
“Outland bastard!”
He dived and rolled under the blow, feeling it brush against his ribs, cracking into the floor. There was no time to worry about J.B., who was down and out of it.
Out of the corner of his good eye, Ryan caught a glimpse of the baron, who looked almost as if he were sleeping.
Almost.
Once you’ve seen the overwhelming stillness of death, you can never mistake it for anything else.
There was a splinter of frozen time for Ryan to see the unnatural angle of the head on the neck, where the body lay against one of the padded chairs, and the dark grinning mouth that had been ripped open below the line of the baron’s jaw.
As he scuttled across the large room, ducking and weaving, he heard the characteristic light crack of a high-velocity, low-caliber handblaster being fired. There was a hot, whining sound, and the bullet smacked into one of the supporting pillars.
“Get him, Robby?”
“Don’t think so, Teddy. You chilled the little prick with the glasses?”
“Think so, Robby. I’ll give him another good one for luck.”
“Best get one-eye first, Teddy.”
Ryan was pinned down behind a chair, safe for the moment. But he could assume that the brothers, having butchered their stepfather, would each have a blaster. All they had to do was move around the top floor in opposite directions and he was dead meat. He looked behind him, seeing that the only case of blasters anywhere near him contained the single-shot Parker dueling pistol that J.B. had talked about with such enthusiasm.
The baron had said that it was one of the blasters that was actually charged with powder and ball. But if he could reach it and manage a shot at one of the brothers, then there wouldn’t possibly be any time for the complex procedure of loading a flintlock pistol. He would be helpless and exposed for the other brother to gun him down.
“Come and give yourself up, one-eye!”
“He thinks that if he stays in hiding, then a big, brave sec man’ll magic himself up here and save his skin, doesn’t he, Teddy?”
“He does, Robby.”
They were starting to move closer. Ryan could tell because they were so double stupe and arrogant that they continued talking to him.
“But they won’t will they, Teddy?”
“No, they won’t. Because we sent them away and said that our beloved stepfather was tired and didn’t want to be disturbed by anyone.”
“Very tired, Teddy.”
“Very tired, Robby.” Both of them giggled.
“Then we’ll chill one-eye and little glasses man, and show everyone what they did to Baron Hamish Tenbos and how we tried to save him, Teddy.”