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he got his say in council. Within reason.
    The baron nodded. “Yes. And helping us locate their base.”
    “So you can wipe it out?” Ricky asked.
    Ryan did shoot him a glare this time. The youth’s dark eyes got wide and he drew his neck in between his shoulders like a frightened turtle.
    “Sadly, that lies beyond our capabilities. Although, given time, we could get help from some of our neighbors. They’ve been hitting us all hard for months—not just stealing our people, but chilling, raping, looting. And destroying what they can’t carry off.
    “But what we can do is harry them. Make it hard for them to do any more raiding. They do what they do to turn a profit, after all. We can, and will, increase their costs until they find some grounds that are easier to hunt.”
    “So, make them somebody else’s problem, huh?”
    “Exactly, Mildred. If you have a better solution, I implore you to share it.”
    “She doesn’t,” Ryan said. “I wouldn’t mind hearing it, either, truth to tell. So this is the bastards’ main base?”
    “By no means, Mr. Cawdor. It’s merely a forward base for a segment of the sizable network of slavers that has plagued this coast for years. They invade a territory in force, plant themselves and send out smaller raiding parties. Then withdraw.”
    Ryan heard a rustling that he knew meant Ricky Morales was shuffling his booted feet as if he needed to take a piss. His adored older sister, Yamile, had been kidnapped by the slavers who trashed his home ville and murdered his mother and father before his eyes. He traveled with the companions, searching for her, convinced she was still alive. And despite the fact she had been taken on the distant island of Puerto Rico, they’d learned enough in recent months to know that the slaver network extended from the islands of the Carib to the Cific Ocean.
    Ricky also knew what thin ice he was walking on—alien as that was to his tropical homeland. Also, he probably knew that the baron and his wife were unlikely to know anything about his sister’s fate. No matter how much they knew about the slavers.
    “Right,” Ryan said. “We’ll do it.”
    “Ryan!” Mildred couldn’t hold back anymore. She even tore free of Krysty’s arm—and Krysty was as strong as most men her size. “We don’t know what they’re doing for him! We don’t know what they can do!”
    “It wouldn’t matter a bent empty cartridge case if all they could do was sacrifice a bastard goat, Mildred,” Ryan said. “We already know we can’t save him. We’re empty.”
    “Ryan,” Krysty said urgently. “She does need to see him now. We all do.”
    “Me, too.” Ryan turned back to the baron. “Take us to see him. Show us what you can do.”
    “With pleasure,” Frost said.
    The baron gestured. A slender young man in linsey-woolsey tailored to look like a uniform came to his side. The baron murmured a brief command. The aide nodded and took off.
    Ryan’s brows rose.
    “Your pardon, Baron,” Doc said, “but if I may be so bold—was that language you were just speaking Russian?”
    Ryan already knew that answer.
    “Yes,” Frost said.
    “Will you kindly tell us why you speak it here?”
    Katerina smiled again.
    “Why, because we—our family in particular, but pretty much everybody hereabouts, these days—are descended in part from the crew of a Soviet submarine that foundered off this very shore as the skydark began.”

Chapter Six
    “The B-276 Kostroma was her name,” Baron Frost stated as he led the companions briskly down a corridor into the depths of the fortress. “She was a cruise-missile-armed Sierra-class nuclear boat. As the war began she was cruising at shallow depth near the coast of what was then the state of Maine, when she was hit by an Mk-48 torpedo launched by an American attack sub. Tradition says she was SSN-706, the USS Albuquerque . How the crew could have known any such thing is debatable, but this is what we are taught.”
    He led