LITMIR.BIZ

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who’d been waiting on the stairs began tying the one-eyed man’s hands behind his back.

      “Tie his legs, too,” Grundwold ordered. “Give him enough slack to walk, but not to run.”

      “Where’s Lewis?” one of the sec men asked.

      Grundwold shook his head.

      The sec man, a friend of Lewis, stepped forward and threw a hard punch into the prisoner’s stomach. Ryan doubled over slightly, but recovered quickly. The sec man threw a second punch, fully catching the one-eyed man’s jaw. His head snapped left from the force of the blow, but he showed no signs of pain or fear.

      Grundwold swung his arm in an arc and caught the sec man with the butt of his blaster before he could throw another punch. “Take it downstairs, before you wake up the rest of them,” Grundwold hissed. “We’ve still got one more breeder to catch.”

      The sec man unclenched his fist and grabbed Ryan by the arm, pulling him hard down the stairs. The rope between the prisoner’s legs caused him to stumble, then fall down a whole flight of stairs.

      The sec men picked him up by the arms, then dragged him the rest of the way down the stairs and out of the hotel.

      “Fillinger!” Grundwold said. “Come with me.”

      Grundwold and Fillinger reentered the hallway and began searching rooms for the other outlanders. Grundwold checked the third room on the left and found it empty. He looked back along the hall where Fillinger had just finished searching the second room on the right.

      Fillinger shook his head. The room was empty.

      Grundwold waited in the doorway of the room he’d just searched, his lovingly maintained Persuader 500 trained at the man guarding the far door, who still hadn’t moved.

      Fillinger opened the door to the third room on the right, directly across from where Grundwold was providing cover. He had the door halfway open when he stopped in his tracks and looked over at Grundwold and jabbed his thumb in the direction of the room.

      Someone was sleeping in there.

      Grundwold kept the Persuader trained on the guard as he moved across the hallway to join Fillinger. Then they entered the room together, with Grundwold again moving to the far side of the bed. When they were in place, Fillinger lowered the barrel of his remade longblaster onto the head of the sleeping outlander while Grundwold reached down to pull back the sheet covering the sleeper’s head.

      It was truly Grundwold’s lucky day. Sleeping on the bed was the other breeder.

      “Make a sound and you’re chilled,” Grundwold whispered in her ear.

      She opened her mouth to let out a scream, and Fillinger pressed the blue-steel tip of his blaster even harder against the side of her head.

      She closed her mouth and held her tongue.

      “If you want to try your luck, you should have gone to the casino next door. We don’t play games,” Grundwold said. “Put on your boots. You’re going on a little trip.”

      Flashing him a murderous look, but without making another sound, Mildred put on her boots.

      Although she was fully clothed, Grundwold enjoyed the view of the breeder’s full, voluptuous figure, but didn’t allow the sight to make him careless. “We’ll take your blaster, thanks,” Grundwold said, picking up the target revolver from the table and tucking it into the waistband of his pants.

      Grundwold and Fillinger each took hold of one of the woman’s arms and led her to the door. There was something about the look on the woman’s face that Grundwold didn’t like. She seemed to still want to fight back, and there was a good chance she might do something stupe like try to warn the others.

      “Hold it!” Grundwold said.

      Fillinger paused at the door, and Grundwold took the rag he used to keep his blaster clean out of a jacket pocket. He wrapped the ends of the rag around each of his hands and pulled it taut between them. Then he pressed the rag between her lips until she opened her mouth and he could push it past her teeth. Finally he tied the rag around her neck, preventing her from uttering a sound.

      “You say a word or try to make a sound, the head of the guard outside the door will be turned into wallpaper,” Grundwold said. “Understand?”

      Mildred nodded.

      “All right,” Grundwold said. “I think now she’s ready. Let’s get out of here. And keep it quiet.”

      Together the sec chief and the sec man quickly ushered the prisoner out of the room and down the hallway. The guard was still there on his chair, his eyes never wavering from the door at the other end of the hallway.

      As they reached the stairwell, the door was opened by an attentive sec man, and the three of them were able to pass through the doorway without a sound.

      “Get her to the tower!” Grundwold ordered.

      At once a pair of sec men escorted Mildred down the stairs and out of the hotel.

      “Fillinger, go around to the other door and tell the men there to pull back.” Grundwold looked at his wrist chron. “I want everyone at the base of the tower in ten minutes.”

      The sec men scattered without another word.

      Grundwold lingered behind, making sure to give Fillinger enough time to go downstairs, through the lobby and back up to the second-floor landing to inform the others their mission had been successfully completed. When he was sure the sec men had pulled back from the door at the other end of the hall, Grundwold reached down and pulled the knife holding the door in front of him open.

      The steel fire door swung closed…and locked, the sound of the locking mechanism echoing through a suddenly empty stairwell.

      THE HUGE MUTIE CREATURE was on him. It looked very much like a lizard, but was as big as a horse. Its skin was made up of orange-and-green scales, and each of its forward arms ended with a set of three razor-sharp talons.

      The Armorer had confronted the beast before and had lost. This time would be different. This time he was going to chill it, blasting it into a hundred different pieces.

      The mutie beast neared, its three-inch fangs dripping gore left from its last meal. J.B. took several steps backward, giving him some time to draw his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun. In a few moments there would be a hole in the creature’s chest big enough to drive a wag through, and the whole episode would be little more than a bloody memory.

      J.B. leveled his blaster at the beast, squeezed the trigger and heard the terrifying sound of a metallic click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

      The beast lunged—

      And J.B. awoke from his dream before it tore his limbs from his body.

      He sat on his chair, gasping for breath. His eyelids still seemed heavy, as if he had been awakened from another mat-trans jump, and hadn’t simply dozed off for a few minutes.

      Had it been a few minutes?

      J.B. glanced at his wrist chron. “Dark night!” he exclaimed. According to the chron, he’d been on watch for more than three hours. How could that have been? While there was no excuse for falling asleep while on watch, why hadn’t Mildred or one of the others relieved him?

      He ran down the hall to his room to check on Mildred.

      She was gone.

      He went across the hall to check on Ryan and Krysty…and found a dead sec man from the farm in their room, his belly slashed open, most likely by Ryan’s panga.

      Ryan and Krysty were gone, but Ryan’s Steyr SSG-70 longblaster was still tucked safely under the bed.

      What in dark night had happened to them? J.B. wondered. What had happened to him that he could sleep through it all?

      He ran out into the hallway, shouting. “Doc, Jak, Dean!”

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