Tonight is the night I achieve my destiny, Mathus Conn thought as his army chanted his name.
Standing on a dais made of log pilings hammered into the ground, with a platform of split logs to top it, he raised his hands with palms beneficently opened toward the throng.
“Conn! Conn! Conn!”
All of his life, he now realized, with the waves of sound beating on cheeks flushed with adulation of the multitude, had been leading up to this. It had been preamble. The decades spent working his way from the bottom of the gaudy trade to its top: preparation. He knew what motivated men. He knew their hearts—they’d spilled them to him across his own countertop for years, after all.
“Conn! Conn! Conn!”
And what did it matter that the chant had first been raised and was being led by Potar’s bully-boys, dotted among the crowd? And that many of those who had first taken it up with the shills had done so for fear of getting a sound beating, or worse, if they did not? The chanting was infectious. More and more of those who hadn’t been chanting were caught up as it went along, and joined their voices to the rest. And those who were chanting
found themselves swept up by their own emotions, and carried forward—
Toward the man on the platform and his destiny, which now was theirs.
It didn’t matter at all whether the enthusiasm he saw growing on so many faces by the light of pine-splint torches had started out authentic or not. When the stories were written of this night—or if no one read anymore, then the songs that were sung by campfires, the tales passed on by wrinklie grandparents to their rapt descendants—all that would be remembered was the passion and the acclamation that had greeted the launch of Mathus Conn’s campaign of conquest.
He reached down, picked up a funnel-shaped megaphone made out of papier-mâché and held it to his mouth.
“My friends,” he said.
The chant continued. Forcing himself to smile through his agony of impatience, he raised both hands and made tamping-down gestures with his palm and the megaphone.
The crowd began to pipe down on command. A few overenthusiastic types tried to continue on their own. Conn saw knots of brief convulsive activity dotted here and there throughout the mob as Potar’s sec men beat down the ones who wouldn’t take a hint fast enough.
“My friends,” he began again, and this time his words prevailed. “Tonight I announce the beginnin’ of our real campaign of vengeance for the blood of our murdered loved ones—the war against the traitors of Maccum Corners, who sell us out to the cannie coldhearts and have refused to join our cause!”
A moment of silence followed the announcement. The upturned, fire-tinted orange faces went blank.
From somewhere in the middle of the army a voice was raised. “But they ain’t done nothin’ to us! The cannies are chillin’ us right here! This is where we signed up to fight! This is—”
His words ended in a flurry of club blows delivered from behind by a flying squad of sec men, cutting through the crowd like a wolf pack through sheep.
“Their hands are red with the blood of our friends, our children!” Conn cried, as a limp, bloody figure was hoisted off the ground by wrists and ankles and bundled off into the night. “They help those who chill us. So what shall we do to them?”
He paused, pretending to listen. From the front row of the mob Potar Baggart bellowed like a buffalo bull, “Chill them!”
A dozen of his goons, well-briefed, instantly picked up the new chant: “Chill them! Chill them!”
Conn turned his head to one side, held his hand to cup his ear, miming as if he couldn’t hear.
And hundreds of voices began to roar at him.
“Chill them! Chill them!
Chill them!
”
* * *
“N
OT WHAT
I signed up for,” Frank Ramakrishnan heard one laborer mutter to his companions as they dug at dirt piled up in the bottom end of the small-frame annex. “Signed up to fight the cannies that’re chillin’ us, not this shit. Not to grub around in this stuffy old hole in the ground looking for loot to make Conn richer!”
“I know,” another man said. His eyes shifted nervously left and right in a ratlike face. “My wife needs me. My kids. I—”
As if casually, the cloth-maker looked around. His team of two sec men were standing just outside the door
of the wildly canted room, talking to one of their comrades who had come in on some pretext.
“Hey, boys,” he called to them, “why don’t you head topside for a breath of air, a quick smoke break.”
One frowned. “You know we can’t do that, Mr. R. Potar told us to stick right by you. These bastards would hit you over the head and light out for the hills, soon as look at you.”
Frank looked at the half-dozen workers, who were stripped to the waist. Their bodies glistened with sweat and dirt streaks in the lamplight.
“You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“No, sir!” they answered fervently.
The second member of Frank’s detail grabbed his partner’s sleeve. “Come on, Quint. Don’t be a dickwad.”
Quint shrugged. The three picked their way back up to the humid but fresher nighttime air.
“Now, listen up,” Frank told the conscript workers. “You can’t let a sec man overhear that kind of talk, or Potar will make an example of you. Am I clear? Be careful.”
Their shadowed faces went ashy under their coatings of grime.
“Thanks, boss,” both men said in unison.
Frank nodded. “Excellent. Now—”
He heard a footstep behind him and turned. “Back so soon—?” he began.
Then he stopped. Instead of the sec man he expected to see, he was face-to-face with a black woman a head shorter than he, with her hair wound into beaded plaits. She stuck a blocky revolver almost up his left nostril and clicked back the hammer.
“Think I found an important one,” she called without taking her brown eyes off his.
“Ace on the line,” a male voice responded from outside. “Bring him.”
“Come along, you.” She grabbed his arm and tugged him into motion. She was stronger than she looked.
“Don’t hurt him,” one of the conscripts urged.
“Yeah,” his partner said. “He’s a good one.” He turned his head and spit. “The only one.”
There was a knot of people clustered in the corridor outside the annex. With a shock, Frank realized two things: they had emerged from the hole to the underworld, and they were the outlanders first Wymie and then Conn had been so hot to find.
They bristled with weapons.
“Who are you?” demanded the tall, rangy man with shaggy black hair, his left eye covered by a patch.
“Frank Ramakrishnan.” He swallowed. “I’m chief adviser to Mathus Conn.”
“Is he the one straw-bossing this outfit?” asked a short man in a battered fedora and a dusty leather jacket. He cradled a shotgun casually in his hands.
Frank nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
“Hey!” a harsh voice demanded. It was Quint, the senior of his sec guards. “What’s goin’ on—”
There was a flash and a tremendous explosion. By the light of the muzzle-flare Frank saw Quint’s throat explode as what had to have been a shotgun blast ripped into him at point-blank range.
Silhouetted by the shot was a tall, stork-like man in a dark frock coat. He shifted the huge blaster in his hand and fired another shot. This one, though painfully loud,
was not as world shattering as the first. Frank’s other guard, Ash, went down with a third eye in his forehead.
Their pal, whose name Frank didn’t know, turned to run. The man, who looked to be an oldie, fired two shots with coldheart precision into his back from the revolver. The sec man pitched onto his face.
The one-eyed man nodded. “Any more?” he asked Frank.
“N-not so far as I know.”
As silent as a moonbeam, a little albino in a camo jacket appeared among them. “Coming,” he said.
“He means cannies,” the short man in the hat and jacket said. “Hundreds of them. All hot way beyond nuke red. We best get out of here in a hurry.”
Ryan looked at his hostage and smiled. “Take us to your leader,” he said.
* * *
“—
CONQUER
M
ACCUM
C
ORNERS
, we shall punish them for their treasons!” Mathus Conn was ranting over a megaphone when they came in sight of his army camp. “And we shall reap the rewards of our labors, yes, we shall!”
“What the hell?” Mildred demanded. “Maccum Corners what?”
Ryan was no less surprised. He was as much startled that they could hear the gaudy owner so clearly at a couple hundreds yards’ distance, though he was obviously not using electro-amplification. Whoever his sec boss was, his men were doing an ace job keeping the crowd quiet while Conn was speaking.
Or in this case, getting the crowd to pipe up only on cue. There was a sudden burst of cheering at the implicit
promise of loot and presumably other dark treasures, then it cut off quickly as Conn began hollering again.
He looked to their “hostage,” Frank. “It’s his new fixation,” he said, almost guiltily. “He claims to have evidence the people of Maccum Corners refuse to join his crusade because they have made a secret deal with the cannibals. With, uh, you.”
“As you’ll have noticed, we’ve been otherwise occupied,” J.B. said.
“With the
real
cannibals,” Mildred added pointedly.
“What’s your role in this exactly, Frank?” Krysty asked. Her tone was pleasant, but Ryan knew her well enough to feel the steel in her words.
“I do my best to talk Mr. Conn out of the…worst excesses.”
“And how’s that going for you?” J.B. asked. The Armorer was unusually voluble this night. Ryan guessed he was pumped at having pulled off two incredibly demanding demo shots—both technically and tactically—with near-total success in less than forty-eight hours. Even a man as mechanically precise as J.B. had his professional pride.
He thought he heard screams from the cave-in site behind.
Either the workers didn’t clear out like we told them to, or they caught more sec men to leave to the coamers, he thought. Either way, time’s blood. In this case, pretty literally.
“We have to shake it,” he said firmly, trying not to let his anxiety show.
“That’s a big mob he’s got there,” Ricky said dubiously. “Really big.”
“That is an army, lad,” Doc said. “In intent and size, if not in training.”
“And we’re going to walk right into the middle of it?” Mildred demanded.
“That’s the plan,” Ryan said.
“Why, again?”
He tamped down his irritation. This was not the best time to be questioning him. Then again Mildred wasn’t hanging back. They were on the verge of walking into the circle of light from a hundred fires, crossing the point of no return.
“We’re caught whatever we do,” Krysty said. “There’re too many of them swarming around, and they know the ground too well. We could never hope to slip past.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Are you forgetting recent events, Millie?” J.B. asked blandly.
“What? Oh.”
“Put your hands back up, Frank,” J.B. said. “It makes it more convincing that way.”
The tall man’s eyes darted left and right with surprise in his dark face. “Oh, yes. Sorry.” He obeyed.
“Walk in side by side with me,” Ryan told him. “Blasters out, everybody.” He made a show of holding his SIG near Frank’s narrow face.
He had to give it to Conn. The former gaudy proprietor—Ryan reckoned he’d gone into a new line of work now—could hold a crowd’s attention. Nobody had eyes out on the surrounding night. Of course part of that was plain overconfidence, that no one would dare to challenge such a huge force, for this peaceful region, directly.
It was the second time in not much more than an hour
that Ryan’s and his friends’ survival depended on somebody powerful’s blind overconfidence in that power.
He narrowed his gaze at the sight of all the men and some women wearing red hankie armbands and carrying clubs or toting blasters, cruising through the crowd in twos and threes. Conn hadn’t just been busy recruiting warm bodies to his cause. In a short period, he had acquired a sec force that would do credit to any baron.
But the sec teams were focused mostly on their big boss, looking for clues as to how to prompt the crowd. Instead it was some of the regular grunts who spotted the intruders, who after all were strolling almost casually among them, straight for Conn’s dais.
“Hey, wait!” Ryan heard a man’s voice yell. The cry was echoed by several others.
And then a woman’s scream: “Oh, blind NORAD,
it’s the baby-chillers
!”
That got everybody’s attention. A nearby sec unit of two men and a crop-haired woman closed in.
Suddenly the companions had blasters leveled in all directions. Krysty menaced the sec team with her Glock.
“Full-auto, folks,” she said. “I’d take my hands away from those blasters.”
Tied to mostly single-shot, antique-style weapons as they were, the people of the Pennyrile knew about automatic weapons, if mostly through awestruck legends that greatly amplified their power and effectiveness. Men and women of the sec force halted. They didn’t raise their hands, exactly, but they sure moved them away from their waists.
Ryan jammed the muzzle of his P226 under the angle of Frank’s jawline, with his finger outside the trigger
guard. He knew nobody in the throng around him would notice, not even the sec men.
He and his companions kept walking forward, aware of the terrible pressure of what was going to erupt out of their former dig site at any minute.
When the hubbub around them grew loud enough, and the skin between his shoulder blades grew itchy enough about what those behind them might be getting up to, Ryan raised his face.
“Conn!” he shouted.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Conn yelled at the disturbance. “Mr. Baggart, see to whoever’s disruptin’—”
A gigantic figure who’d been standing near the log platform where his master stood turned and began to lumber toward the intruders.
“The fat bully-boy’s his sec boss now?” J.B. asked.
“Oh, yes,” Frank replied.
“We’re disrupting your little tea party,” Ryan said. He didn’t shout, just put snap and volume in his words to make them carry about the murmur and occasional startled outcry from the mob. “We are not baby-chillers, and we’ve come to warn you. The real baby-chillers are following hot on our tails!”