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them off “—Brian Mordor, the one-eyed leader. Jock and Snowy, the old guy and the albino. One’s crazy as a mutie coot. The other’s a shit-hot hunter and real dangerous. Had my way, I’d shackle the little bastard at all times. Can’t trust them… Krysty, the mutie with the weird strength. Gonna have to watch her, boys. Millicent, the one who’s a healer. Don’t let that fool you, boys. Heard she can fight like a man. Kinda looks like one, to my eyes. Krysty looks more my type, though I hear she’s Brian’s woman. And then we got J. T. Edson, the blaster man. They say there ain’t shit he don’t know about weapons. Useful guy.”
    “You know a lot about us,” Ryan said slowly. “We don’t know shit about you. Want to tell us?” He keptthe irony out of his voice. The man seemed to know something about them, but with a strange twist. Like that old game Chinese Whispers that Krysty had told him about, where information was passed on from person to person, half heard. He wondered what else they would know, but yet not know.
    The squat sec man sniffed and spit again.
    That’s one hell of a sinus infection the guy’s got, Mildred thought, but held her peace.
    “Listen, Brian, I ain’t got nothing against you personally, see, but unless you shut up I’m gonna have to bust you in the jaw. My baron wants you, and he’s got you. But that don’t mean that a little accident don’t happen between here and him getting to see you, especially if you can’t keep your yap shut. You don’t talk unless you’re asked something, you see?”
    Ryan bristled at being spoken to in such a fashion. He could see the smug looks on the faces of the surrounding sec men, and he was seized by a desire to wipe it from their faces. But his hands and feet were still bound, and he had no weapons. He gritted his teeth so hard that his jaw cramped as he fought down his temper. Although he knew he shouldn’t rise to the bait, there was something about the squat man that irritated him—an assumption of superiority based on nothing more than the fact that he held a blaster.
    And something about the way that sec man looked at him. As though he was sizing him up.
    Just what did Baron Crabbe want from them? Want enough to have been searching for them, and to have collated information that seemed to be almost but not quite right? That was a cause for concern. Did he wantsomething that they would be unable to give because they had never had it? Any further rumination, taking his mind off his anger as it did, was interrupted by the further supercilious tones of the sec man who had escorted them this far.
    “Are you going to argue with Ryan—” he pronounced the name with emphasis “—or are you going to tell me why you’re not paying up in full?”
    “I was in the middle of telling you when one-eye here interrupted me,” the sec man snarled, raising his blaster and checking it pointedly. Behind him, the other guards moved menacingly. “Thing is, Brian and his boys—and girls, if you’ll excuse me,” he directed at Krysty, “have got a little task that Crabbe wants them to undertake for him. Now, much as he appreciates the fact that Valiant sniffed them out, and that you’ve brought them here, he feels that it would be a little remiss of him to pay in full before they’ve undertaken that task. After all, they look right, but if they ain’t, then that’s a lot of jack to throw away. Y’see?”
    “But we’ve brought them here in good faith—” the sec man began.
    “Ain’t saying nothing against you or Valiant,” the squat man interrupted. “How many times? Shit, get the point. You keep the half no matter what. Turns out that we all made a mistake, then that’s it. If these’re the right guys, then you get the second half of the payment. Look at it my way—you already called out Brian as Ryan. That don’t inspire me, you know what I’m saying?”
    The pompous sec man’s voice held a quiver of fear as he spoke once