James Axler – The Mars Arena

“All ten are there?” a deeper voice asked.

“Yes.”

Dean slitted his eyes open. He could already tell he was lying on a hard surfacenot the ground, though. As he let the dim yellow light filter into his vision, he opened his hand on his side opposite the one the men talked on. He splayed his fingers, sliding them across a smooth wooden surface that held only a few nicks and rough spots.

“You say this group has been trained together, Solomon?” the deep voice asked.

“For just short of ten months,” Solomon answered.

“This one looks kind of skinny.” Something hard pressed into Dean’s side, and he closed his eyes, clamping his lips shut against a cry of pain.

“Don’t worry about him, Baron,” another man said. “Bastard kid there is quick as lightning. Had him in my sights, and he wheeled on me as I was squeezing the trigger. Disappeared like a fucking ghost and was gone before I could draw another bead.”

“So he can run,” the baron said. “Don’t need a runner. Need a fighter.”

“He can fight,” Solomon said. “He’s a chiller.”

“Know that for a fact, do you?”

“If that boy had gotten his hands on a weapon, you might not have all your men back out of the brush,” Solomon replied. “If he hadn’t trusted me just long enough, I wouldn’t have bagged him for you. And I think he was already figuring out that I wasn’t on his side.”

Dean slitted his eyes open again. This time he saw the wall of bars separating him from the speakers. Solomon was talking to a gruff-looking man in road leathers, the right side of his face spider webbed with tattoos, a rifle resting easy in the crook of his arm.

“Moves like that, Baron,” the gruff man said, “you can’t teach. Boy’s been around some.”

Beyond the trio of men, another dozen were making final preparations on the wags that had formed a loose circle around the area.

“Give me that light,” the baron ordered. He took a cylinder from the man beside him, switched it on and fanned the lens out into a broad cone.

With the extra light, Dean could see that he was in a wag of some type. The sides were covered by canvas over a rib cage of bars just like the ones covering the back end, converting the wag to a cage on wheels. Slavers used vehicles like these when they could.

His heartbeat sped up. Solomon had sold them out to slavers. The other boys were scattered around him. A few moved, struggling to throw off the effects of the trank dart they’d been hit with.

The baron strode to the end of the wag, then stepped up on a platform mounted there. The wag shifted as it took on the man’s weight.

Framed in the light he directed at the top of the canvas-covered cage, the baron looked fierce. His face was scalpeled by hard living in mean times, scraped free of any softness or empathy. Long black hair framed his face and ran down past his shoulders. A mustache and goatee almost disguised the old knife scar that ran across his cruel lips. Another scar started from the bottom of the goatee and trailed down the side of his neck, showing how close he’d come to death.

He wore jeans with wraparound black chaps over them, a body-armor vest with a death’s-head painted over his heart, a deep turquoise silk shirt with a high collar under that. Feathered earrings thatched with blue-jay quills hung from either side of his head. A cut-down Mossberg Bull-pup 12 shotgun rode in a hand-tooled breakout holster that ran the length of the man’s right thigh, the butt sawed off and replaced with a fold-out metal stock. He carried a Detonics .45 in shoulder leather.

“I’m Baron Vinge Connrad,” the man declared. “That probably don’t mean a thing to most of you.”

It didn’t mean anything to Dean. Scoping out the other boys without moving his head, he figured it didn’t mean anything to anyone else, either.

“What does matter,” Connrad continued, “is that I own you as of this minute. You can live or die right now.” He slipped the Mossberg free of the thigh holster and held it in one hand. “What’s it going to be?”