Grayson remained silent. He'd heard stories of the slave trade among the bandit kinglets of the Periphery, but had not given them much credence. Even Claydon's lingering fear that his mother might have been taken by Hendrik's raiders as a slave to Oberon, that was easy enough to dismiss as the xenophobic fears of an untravelled, nearly uneducated native who had never been beyond the fringes of his own world's atmosphere. The brutal truth was that among the shards of a civilization where machines and the products of technology were treasures, human labor tended to be cheap and easily harvested.
"Where will they take them?" Grayson wondered aloud.
Tor shrugged. "The spaceport, perhaps. They won't be able to use them here. Most likely they'll be coralled somewhere offworld." His voice was curiously level and remote. "They might even load them aboard the old Invidious."
A rumbling crash from farther down the street caught Grayson's attention. He crawled forward, slipping his head past the shelter of the wall close to the street. What he saw shocked him to the core. Standing there was the Marauder, encased in the rubble of a building in flames. A knife twisted cold in Grayson's gut. That building was the house of Berenir the merchant
The Marauder lurched forward into the street, completing the destruction. The front wall of the house rippled and collapsed inward, sending a galaxy of red sparks into the smoky pall above it.
Tor was watching Grayson's face. "That was the house of your friends, I take it."
"Yes... yes, it was. But I don't understand.. Why did they destroy just that one house?" Berenir's house had been eliminated with surgical precision, but none of the other buildings on the block had been touched. Grayson wondered if Claydon had survived. As the Marauder moved on to the north, leaving rubble and flames behind, Grayson thought it was unlikely. He watched grimly as another wall of Berenir's house collapsed in a shower of sparks.
Grayson and Tor edged back away from the street. "Sorry about your friends," Tor said.
Grayson nodded acknowledgment. He felt curiously
empty now, drained of all but the need to strike back against the bandit 'Mechs. But how? How? A feeling of helplessness weighed heavily on him now.
"I'm heading for the port," Tor said. "Technicians are always in demand, and I've got enough ship teching skill to find me a billet. You can come along as my assistant and we'll find a way to dye your hair. Then you won't have to take mud baths, right?"
Grayson thought for a moment, then shook his head. "Go on without me, Captain. I've got something else to do."
Tor was taken back. "What?" he wanted to know. "Where?"
I've... never mind," Grayson said, distracted by his own musings. "I've just got to do some thinking, is all. I'll find you at the port later."
"When?"
Grayson shrugged. "I don't know." He glanced down at his hand, wondering why it was not trembling. His legs and arms felt weak, as though the surge of emotions that had drained away at the sight of the Marauder had left him a husk, scarcely able to stand. The adrenalin high that had kept him going till now was vanishing, leaving him exhausted.
He turned to face Tor. "Just go. I'll join you when I can."
Tor grinned, but worry showed in his eyes. "Don't take too long. Us aliens have to slick together now, right?"
Go to hell and leave me alone, Grayson thought with a viciousness that surprised him. He said nothing, however, but nodded and turned away. He was going to have to find transportation to the mountains, and was not entirely sure that he had the strength to manage it.
* * * *
The junior officer stood stiffly at attention and felt the sweat pooling in the collar of his black body armor. "No, Lord, he is not here," the man reported. Looking up from the paperwork on his desk, the seated man regarded his officer with a cold and level gaze. "He must be. I shot him myself. I saw him fall, right at the spot I marked on the map of the Vehicle Bay I gave you."
"He was not there, Lord." There was fear in the young man's face. His commander had a reputation for ruthlessness. "We have searched the Castle, and checked all the bodies. There... there is evidence that someone was moving about the Castle after our departure. Perhaps this is the boy you seek. A storage compartment door that Sergeant Wynn remembers seeing closed after the battle was open when we returned, and the manifest for that room shows a hovercraft missing. Carlyle's son must have taken a machine and escaped."
Captain Lord Harimandir Singh considered himself a just man ruthless, yes, and demanding but not given to whims of raw emotions. He had fired the single shot that had hit the enemy commander's son in the head. It had been his order that had led the attacking party and its prisoners out of the Vehicle Bay,to follow the surviving Commandos to their spaceport perimeter. If Grayson Death Carlyle still lived, it was Singh's responsibility, and not that of the Lieutenant trying so unsuccessfully to mask his terror.