“Start with the whips,” the baron said calmly, crossing his arms.
In the anxious throng, a young woman started to guide her children off the square.
“You, there!” Leonard shouted. “Stay, mother, and let them watch. This traitor to our ville dies so they may live in safety. That is the gift—knowing is the price!”
Going pale, the teenager curtsied and hugged the trembling children close, their eyes wide with fear.
A sec man on the platform removed his shirt, displaying a Herculean torso of rippling muscles. Expertly, he uncoiled a long whip, the knotted leather moving across the cracked concrete like a writhing snake.
“Wait!” Leonard ordered, holding up a hand.
Everybody watched in silence as the youth stepped forward. Even the baron seemed caught by surprise with this unexpected move. Hope blossomed in the madam’s face, and the executioner turned toward the teenager. “Yes, Lieutenant Strichland?”
“Do not kill her quickly,” the boy said fiercely, shaking with barely controlled rage. “Make this filthy traitor feel the terrible guilt of her crimes!”
Bursting into tears, Patrica soiled herself and started to choke.
“I shall obey, my liege,” the executioner said with a bow, and the whip cracked forward, blood spraying into the air.
The fat woman screamed with a wild animal sound, every inch of her soft body jiggling.
Nauseated by the obvious pleasure Strichland was getting from the torture, Ryan forced himself to watch for a while to appear normal. Hopefully, Krysty was doing the same, blending in and staying low. Then he noticed a commotion among the crowd on the other side of the courtyard.
“Wait!” the baron shouted, staring into the crowd. “What’s going on there?”
A cloak went flying, a man bent over double clutching his gut, a woman screamed and Krysty burst from the bystanders running across the open courtyard. Her hood and cape were gone, her long fiery hair billowing behind her. Instantly, sec men charged from behind the sandbags.
“An outsider!” Leonard shouted, pointing with the knife. “Guards, capture her!”
As if poleaxed, Baron Strichland openly stared at the woman as if unable to believe what was happening. His hair fanned out around him in a wild corona of astonishment.
Deciding to risk a shot, Ryan drew the silenced SIG-Sauer but balked at the sight. The man’s hair was the same as Krysty’s. Exactly the same! Suddenly, Ryan knew what the baron was doing with all the redheaded girls who came to the ville. He was searching for another of his kind, searching for a mate. And now he had found one.
As the crowd linked arms to form a wall blocking her escape, the troops converged from every side. As Krysty raised her blaster, the men in the sandbag machine-gun nest fired a short burst. The rounds struck the ground at her feet, rising a line of dust clouds.
“Halt or die!” the baron commanded, the wanton lust and need on his face brutally on display.
Forgotten at the post, Patrica savored the scant few seconds without pain, knowing this was no release from her death sentence, but merely a brief delay.
Surrounded on every side, Krysty turned wildly, as if searching the crowd. Then she found Ryan. They exchanged glances. He nodded, and she stopped running, dropping her blaster and raising both hands.
“Alive!” the baron roared, climbing down from the platform. “Take her alive at all costs!” The sec men swarmed over Krysty.
Returning the blaster to its holster, Ryan merged with the excited crowd and disappeared from sight.
Chapter Fifteen
The ramshackle old pickup truck rattled noisily down the sandy street, resembling the loser in a car crash. Its tires were bald, the muffler was held on by wire hangers, and the doors were composed almost entirely of duct tape.
But deadly serious armed sec men were in the cab and sitting in the open back. They had been boastful and confident in the ville, but now amid the ghostly ruins of the city, their conversations were brief and to the point. Death lurked everywhere among the crumbling structures: falling masonry, poisonous spiders and lethal plants. Hell-flowers, they were called. Beautiful plants, with gorgeous flowers. But take a sniff and you stopped moving until a buddy dragged your sleeping body away. Something to do with spoors, or such. But if you were alone, the victim would stand there locked in a perfumed dream until he toppled over dead from starvation. Then the plants would feed on the rotting carcass. Before the fuel started running low, the sec men used to firebomb the plants on sight. They hated the filthy things. It was no way for a man to die, stupefied like a drunk in a gaudy.