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research facility. Evidently, after the Dendarii raid of four years ago,
Ryoval had decided his main facility wasn t secure enough. Miles could see
that. This place did not have the business-air of the other locale. It felt
military-paranoid. The sort of place where if you went there to work, you
didn t come out again for years at a time. Or, considering Ryoval, ever. He
glimpsed a few lab-like rooms, in passing. But no techs. The guards called
out, a couple of times. No one answered.
They came to an open door, beyond which lay some sort of study or office.
"Baron, sir?" the senior guard ventured. "We have your prisoner."
The other guard rubbed his neck. "If he s not here, should we go ahead and
work him like the other one?"
"He hasn t ordered it yet. Better wait."
Quite. Ryoval was not the sort to reward initiative in subordinates, Miles
suspected.
With a deep, nervous sigh, the senior man stepped across the threshold, and
looked around. The junior man prodded Miles forward in his wake. The study was
finely furnished, with a real wood desk, and an odd chair in front of it with
metal wrist-locks for the person who sat in it. Nobody ran out on a
conversation with Baron Ryoval till Baron Ryoval was ready, apparently. They
waited.
"What do we do now?"
"Don t know. This is as far as my orders went." The senior man paused. "Could
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be a test.... "
They waited about five more minutes.
"If you don t want to look around," said Miles brightly, "I will."
They looked at each other. The senior man, his forehead creased, drew a
stunner and sidled cautiously through an archway into the next room. His voice
came back after a moment. "
Shit.
" And, after another moment, an odd mewling wail, cut off and swallowed.
This was too much even for the dim bulb who held Miles. With his ham hand
still locked firmly around Miles s upper arm, the second guard followed the
first into a large chamber arranged as a living room. A wall-sized holovid was
blank and silent. A
zebra-grained wood bar divided the room. An extremely low chair faced an open
area. Baron Ryoval s very dead body lay there face-up, naked, staring at the
ceiling with dry eyes.
There were no obvious signs of a struggle - no overturned furniture, nor
plasma arc burns in the walls - except upon the body.
There the marks of violence were focused, utterly concentrated: throat
crushed, torso pulped, dried blood smeared around his mouth. A double line of
fingertip-sized black dots were stitched neatly across the Baron s forehead.
They looked like burns. His right hand was missing, cut away, the wrist a
cauterized stump.
The guards twitched in something like horror, an all-too-temporary paralysis
of astonishment. "What happened?" whispered the junior man.
Which way will they jump
?
How did Ryoval control his employee/slaves, anyway? The lesser folk, through
terror, of course; the middle-management and tech layer, through some subtle
combination of fear and self-interest. But these, his personal bodyguards,
must be the innermost cadre, the ultimate instrument by which their master s
will was forced upon all the rest.
They could not be as mentally stunted as their stolidity suggested, or they
would be useless in an emergency. But if their narrow minds were intact, it
followed that they must be controlled through their emotions. Men whom Ryoval
let stand behind him with activated weapons must be programmed to the max,
probably from birth. Ryoval must be father, mother, family and all to them.
Ryoval must be their god.
But now their god was dead.
What would they do? Was
I am free even an intelligible concept to them? Without its focal object, how
fast would their programming start to break down?
Not fast enough
. An ugly light, compounded of rage and fear, was growing in their eyes.
"I didn t do it," Miles pointed out with quick prudence. "I was with you."
"Stay here," growled the senior man. "I ll reconnoiter." He loped off through
the Baron s apartment, to return in a few minutes with a laconic, "His flyer s
gone. Lift tube defenses buggered all to hell, too."
They hesitated. Ah, the downside of perfect obedience: crippled initiative.
"Hadn t you better check around the facility?" Miles suggested. "There might
be survivors. Witnesses. Maybe... maybe the assassin is still hiding
somewhere."
Where is Mark
?
"What do we do with him
?" asked the junior man, with a jerk of his head at Miles.
The senior man scowled in indecision. "Take him along. Or lock him up. Or kill
him."
"You don t know what the Baron wanted me for," Miles interrupted instantly.
"Better take me along till you find out."
"He wanted you for the other one," said the senior man, with an indifferent
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glance down at him. Little, naked, half-healed, with his hands bound behind
him, the guards clearly did not perceive him as a threat. Too right. Hell
.
After a brief muttered conference, the junior man pushed him along, and they
began as rapid and methodical a tour of the facility as Miles would have
wished to make himself. They found two of their red-and-black uniformed
comrades, dead. A
mysterious pool of blood snaked across a corridor from wall to wall. They
found another body, fully dressed as a senior tech, in a shower, the back of
his head crushed with some blunt object. On descending levels they found more
signs of struggle, of looting, and of by-no-means-random destruction,
comconsoles and equipment smashed.
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