The Trader glared at his war captain as he strode across the wide cabin.
Raven-haired, the young man called Ryan Cawdor stood just over six feet in his
boots yet seemed far taller. The Trader had known instantly, the first time he’d
seen Ryan, that here was a man he could not only entrust with his life, but one
who could inspire trust in others, a man for whom other men might well lay down
their own lives.
That was a dangerous power to own, and there was no denying that Ryan could be a
dangerous man. Rangy, limber, yet powerfully muscled, with that shock of thick
night-dark curly hair, that single eye, intensely, chillingly blue, able to
penetrate to the very core of a man’s being, and the long scar slash from corner
of eye to corner of mouth that no amount of sunlight could burn brown and that
at times of stress and fury seemed almost to glow with a livid fire—this man was
a fierce and relentless war captain. Yet that was by no means the whole story,
as the Trader well knew, for Ryan was no mindless human bludgeon intent on
berserk savagery to gain a particular goal, but a cunning, wily fighter, a
realist, a pragniatist who would battle against all odds, yet knew to the
instant when to retire in good order, when to conserve his forces.
The circumstances of their first meeting had not been auspicious. It was hard to
think about trusting a person when that person had a heavy-caliber automatic
jammed into the back of your skull and was whispering in your ear that one
stupid move would bring about instant dissolution of the brain pan.
At the time the Trader had been sitting at the wheel of his personal war buggy,
and in fact just five seconds before had unlocked it and climbed in after
checking that all the locks were secure and no one had been tampering with them.
So much for security. So much for the antipersonnel device that ought instantly
to have taken the arm off any guy who so much as touched the outside of the
damned door.
But Ryan was good with locks—although even he now acknowledged the superiority
of J. B. Dix when it came to the lock-picker’s art. It was one of Ryan’s finer
points, the ability, if a guy was more skillful than he, to recognize the fact
and admit it. And also, of course, he was on the run. These elements combined
meant that the Trader’s super-secure and seemingly impregnable war buggy was
easy meat.
The Trader had been finishing some business in one of the then typical roaring
towns in the center of the Deathlands—not that the situation had changed much in
a decade; there was still an abundance of such pest holes scattered about the
land—and he had been only too willing to put his foot down when ordered and, in
the muttered words of the unseen man crouching behind him, “Get the hell out”
fast. The land wag train had been waiting for him and ready to go a couple of
klicks out of town. This was clearly no surprise to the stranger, who had chosen
his getaway vehicle with great care.
And when they’d both climbed out of the vehicle and the Trader had turned and
gazed at the man who was still covering him, he’d made his mind up on the
instant. Had known with complete and utter certainty that this was the guy he
wanted, the guy he’d been unconsciously searching for for years. With the
automatic still pointed unwaveringly at him, at a point just below his heart for
maximum incapacitation without, quite, the finality of instant death, he had
offered the unknown man a place in his organization. The unknown man, just as
swiftly, had shrugged his shoulders, holstered the shooter and accepted.
He called himself Ryan, but had offered nothing else about himself—not his
background, close kin, place of origin, taste in women: nothing. In particular,
he had not explained why he was on the run or who he was running from. It had
taken the Trader some time—about five blasted years—to piece a pattern together,