No Man's Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

a full colonel, at least.
    “So,” Jed said, “One-Eye. You’re the leader. You talk. Explain your presence on the holy soil of the Protectors’ Association.”
    The lie was so well practiced Ryan could have recited it in his sleep. Most of it wasn’t even a lie; that made it all easier, of course.
    “We’re just travelers, Baron,” he said. “We come down the ’Sippi to Nubuque and are headed west looking for work.”
    “You lie,” said the officer who stood to the baron’s left. He was a dried-up specimen even smaller than Jed himself. His skin seemed to have shrunk right down onto the skull protruding above his high uniform collar. All the color seemed to have been bleached out of him as well, except for the vivid blue of the scar that ran down the right side of his face, and the blue eyes that stared like inmates from some kind of crazy-hatch windows. He slapped a pair of gloves from one white hand into the other as he spoke in clipped, vicious words.
    “Relax, Colonel Toth,” Jed said. Ryan knew the man for what he was: a sec boss, and a triple-nasty specimen. “Let’s let them have their say.”
    He frowned at Ryan.
    “But west lie hard-core Deathlands,” he said. “The worst hot spots and thorium swamps in the whole Midwest. If not the continent. Why would you be going that way? Hey?”
    “Reckon there’ll be less competition for gigs, anyway,” J.B. said.
    The blond sergeant—or guard—stepped forward and slapped the Armorer across the face.
    “Speak when you’re spoken to, outlander,” he said.
    J.B. gave his head a couple of upward nods to settle his glasses back on his nose. He blinked mildly through the circular lenses at the sergeant as the man stepped back to his place and said nothing.
    The sergeant didn’t know he was a marked man. If anything, J. B. Dix had less bluster in him than Ryan did, and he was slowest to anger of any of the party. But if you did anger him, you were in trouble.
    “It’s true, Baron,” Ryan said. “It may seem triple-stupe to you, but we have no choice in the matter. Especially since we had to relocate in something of a hurry.”
    Which, of course, was true enough.
    “So,” Toth hissed, “you admit you are fugitives from justice.”
    Yep, Ryan thought. Sec boss.
    Jed waved him off. “They’re not fugitives from my justice,” he pointed out. “Not yet, anyway. So, you’re not spies for that treacherous dog Baron Al, are you?”
    “We never even heard of the man until you spoke the name, Baron,” Ryan said truthfully.
    The baron sat forward and stared at him intently. His map of wrinkles got a marked furrow down the middle of the forehead region, suggesting careful thought or scrutiny.
    “You don’t know, do you?” he said at last, leaning back in his chair again. “Al Siebert, baron of Siebert, so-called, is the vile, claim-jumping bastard in command of that band of land-stealing ruffians who call themselves the Uplands Alliance. And who are nothing but a bunch of dirty, low-down, mangy sheep herders.”
    He said that as if it was the worst insult in the whole world. Ryan found that interesting, although he had no clue on Earth what use it could be.
    I know a lot of people take stock in the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my rad-blasted friend, he thought. But the enemy my enemy hates that much might be eager for a little help in making himself a worse enemy. He thought he knew some people who might like to sign on for just that job, once they cleared up a certain current misunderstanding.
    “They’re lying,” Toth said, though rather blandly this time. “You should let me torture them, Baron. I’d have the truth out of them in a flash!”
    “You just like to torture people, Bismuth,” Jed said. “Which is fine. I like a man who enjoys his work. Keeps his mind serious. But would you say, Sergeant Drake, that these men are fit?”
    “All ran all the way from where we caught them, General,” said the black sergeant from behind