No Man's Land Read Online Free PDF

bigger-than-average tents, clumped around one with a large room and what seemed like several lesser wings to it. The troop stopped in front of this one and dismounted.
    Though it was very early in the morning, Captain Stone sent a rider galloping ahead to bring word to the baron that they were bringing in some captives. Which in turn was evidently an event of some note, since not only did the commander haul his butt out of a warm bedroll, but when the captives were prodded into the biggest tent at bayonet-point he also had a cluster of what had to be his senior officers gathered around him.
    Lanterns filled the big canvas-walled room with yellow glow and the tang of kerosene. One man was seated, while the others stood around him, their eyes baggy and bleary from getting roused from their own bunks.
    “Kneel before Baron Jed Kylie of Hugoville,” a sergeant barked. This was a new one, blond and fresh-faced, who seemed to have charge of a small bodyguard detail. Their uniforms, which in the light Ryan could make out now were blue, looked fancier than the ones on the patrol that captured them, somehow. “Glorious general and commander in chief of the ever-victorious Grand Army of the Cattlemen’s Protective Association!”
    Good thing they cut short the title some, Ryan thought. Otherwise we’d be here all night before they stopped walking all around the muzzle of the blaster and got to the damned trigger.
    He was tired, and whether he was going to sleep on the ground as a prisoner, or lie cooling in the open air staring up at the stars, he and his friends were going to rest soon. He wanted to get right to that, whichever way it came.
    The one-eyed man knelt right away. It didn’t even jog his pride. They’d done worse to survive.
    They had survived. And the smile he’d gotten from Krysty had reminded him that they would this time, too.
    Jak, of course, had to make trouble about it. The bodyguards looked outraged by his refusal to bend his knee. But the trooper from Stone’s patrol who herded him in gave him a quick disinterested jab of his carbine-butt in the kidney, and down Jak went, gasping and glaring, with his hair hanging in his furious face like bleached seaweed.
    “So,” Baron Jed said, leaning forward in his folding camp chair and squinting. Or Ryan thought he was squinting, anyway. His face was such a mass of seams and wrinkles it was hard enough to see his brown eyes to begin with. “What have we here.”
    “Trespassers, Baron General,” announced the familiar brass notes of Stone’s voice. “We caught them in the hills by where Dirty Leg Creek crosses the Corn Mill Road.”
    “Ah.” Baron Jed sat upright again. He was a skinny little specimen, although the way his blue tunic was tailored couldn’t hide the fact he had more than a bit of a kettle belly hanging off the front of his wiry frame. His head started wide with a shock of sandy-colored hair and tapered steadily to a long chin that looked like you could use it as the thin end of a wedge to split rails with. His nose was long and thin, the mouth a bloodless slash.
    “They got women, Dad,” a big blocky redheaded kid who stood behind the baron’s right shoulder said. “I like them.”
    “At ease, Buddy,” Jed said, irritation briefly twisting his face even tighter. “We got business to attend to.”
    The youth looked eighteen, with a broad freckled face and mean brown eyes. He had a saber with a bucket hilt buckled to one hip and some kind of handblaster in a flapped holster on the other. Whether he could use either one was a question Ryan reckoned remained open. He had yellow metal bars on his collar; if the Protectors’ army followed the conventions of the long-dead U.S. Army—and from what Ryan had seen so far, they did—that made him a captain.
    He let the corners of his mouth twitch in a smile that would almost be perceptible from the other side of it. He had to be stupe, mebbe even a simp, Ryan thought. Otherwise Buddy would be