They pulled his ship-knits off him; he was far too out-massed to fight them, but he regretted the loss deeply. It was too damned cold. Even the ox-like guards stared a moment at his raked and scored chest. They re-fastened his hands behind him, and marched him through the facility, their eyes shifting warily at every intersection.

It was very quiet. Lights burned, but no people appeared anywhere. A strange structure, not very large, plain and—he sniffed—decidedly medical in odor. Research, he decided. Ryoval’s private biological research facility. Evidently, after the Dendarii raid of four years ago, Ryoval had decided his main facility wasn’t secure enough. Miles could see that. This place did not have the business-air of the other locale. It felt military-paranoid. The sort of place where if you went there to work, you didn’t come out again for years at a time. Or, considering Ryoval, ever. He glimpsed a few lab-like rooms, in passing. But no techs. The guards called out, a couple of times. No one answered.

They came to an open door, beyond which lay some sort of study or office. “Baron, sir?” the senior guard ventured. “We have your prisoner.”

The other guard rubbed his neck. “If he’s not here, should we go ahead and work him like the other one?”

“He hasn’t ordered it yet. Better wait.”

Quite. Ryoval was not the sort to reward initiative in subordinates, Miles suspected.

With a deep, nervous sigh, the senior man stepped across the threshold, and looked around. The junior man prodded Miles forward in his wake. The study was finely furnished, with a real wood desk, and an odd chair in front of it with metal wrist-locks for the person who sat in it. Nobody ran out on a conversation with Baron Ryoval till Baron Ryoval was ready, apparently. They waited.

“What do we do now?”

“Don’t know. This is as far as my orders went.” The senior man paused. “Could be a test. …”

They waited about five more minutes.

“If you don’t want to look around,” said Miles brightly, “I will.”

They looked at each other. The senior man, his forehead creased, drew a stunner and sidled cautiously through an archway into the next room. His voice came back after a moment. “Shit.” And, after another moment, an odd mewling wail, cut off and swallowed.

This was too much even for the dim bulb who held Miles. With his ham hand still locked firmly around Miles’s upper arm, the second guard followed the first into a large chamber arranged as a living room. A wall-sized holovid was blank and silent. A zebra-grained wood bar divided the room. An extremely low chair faced an open area. Baron Ryoval’s very dead body lay there face-up, naked, staring at the ceiling with dry eyes.

There were no obvious signs of a struggle—no overturned furniture, nor plasma arc burns in the walls—except upon the body. There the marks of violence were focused, utterly concentrated: throat crushed, torso pulped, dried blood smeared around his mouth. A double line of fingertip-sized black dots were stitched neatly across the Baron’s forehead. They looked like burns. His right hand was missing, cut away, the wrist a cauterized stump.

The guards twitched in something like horror, an all-too-temporary paralysis of astonishment. “What happened?” whispered the junior man.

Which way will they jump?

How did Ryoval control his employee/slaves, anyway? The lesser folk, through terror, of course; the middle-management and tech layer, through some subtle combination of fear and self-interest. But these, his personal bodyguards, must be the innermost cadre, the ultimate instrument by which their master’s will was forced upon all the rest.

They could not be as mentally stunted as their stolidity suggested, or they would be useless in an emergency. But if their narrow minds were intact, it followed that they must be controlled through their emotions. Men whom Ryoval let stand behind him with activated weapons must be programmed to the max, probably from birth. Ryoval must be father, mother, family and all to them. Ryoval must be their god.

But now their god was dead.

What would they do? Was I am free even an intelligible concept to them? Without its focal object, how fast would their programming start to break down? Not fast enough. An ugly light, compounded of rage and fear, was growing in their eyes.

“I didn’t do it,” Miles pointed out with quick prudence. “I was with you.”

“Stay here,” growled the senior man. “I’ll reconnoiter.” He loped off through the Baron’s apartment, to return in a few minutes with a laconic, “His flyer’s gone. Lift tube defenses buggered all to hell, too.”

They hesitated. Ah, the downside of perfect obedience: crippled initiative.

“Hadn’t you better check around the facility?” Miles suggested. “There might be survivors. Witnesses. Maybe … maybe the assassin is still hiding somewhere.” Where is Mark?

“What do we do with him?” asked the junior man, with a jerk of his head at Miles.

The senior man scowled in indecision. “Take him along. Or lock him up. Or kill him.”

“You don’t know what the Baron wanted me for,” Miles interrupted instantly. “Better take me along till you find out.”

“He wanted you for the other one,” said the senior man, with an indifferent glance down at him. Little, naked, half-healed, with his hands bound behind him, the guards clearly did not perceive him as a threat. Too right. Hell.

After a brief muttered conference, the junior man pushed him along, and they began as rapid and methodical a tour of the facility as Miles would have wished to make himself. They found two of their red-and-black uniformed comrades, dead. A mysterious pool of blood snaked across a corridor from wall to wall. They found another body, fully dressed as a senior tech, in a shower, the back of his head crushed with some blunt object. On descending levels they found more signs of struggle, of looting, and of by-no-means-random destruction, comconsoles and equipment smashed.

Had it been a slave revolt? Some power struggle among factions? Revenge? All three simultaneously? Was the murder of Ryoval its cause, or its goal? Had there been a mass evacuation, or a mass killing? At every corner, Miles braced himself for a scene of carnage.

The lowest level had a laboratory with half a dozen glass-walled cells lining one end. From the smell, some experiment had been left cooking far too long. He glanced into the cells, and swallowed.

They had been human, once, those lumps of flesh, scar tissue, and growths. They were now … culture-dishes of some kind. Four had been female, two male. Some departing tech, as an act of mercy, had neatly cut each one’s throat. He eyed them desperately, his face pressed to the glass. Surely they were all too large to have been Mark. Surely such effects could not have been achieved in a mere five days. Surely. He did not want to enter the cells for a closer examination.

At least it explained why more of Ryoval’s slaves did not try to resist. There was an air of awful economy about it. Don’t like your work in the bordello, girl? Sick of the boredom and brutality of being a guard, man? How would you like to go into scientific research? The last stop for any would-be Spartacus among Ryoval’s human possessions. Bel was right. We should have nuked this place the last time we were here.

The guards gave the cells a brief glance, and pressed on. Miles hung back, seized by inspiration. It was worth a try… .

“Shit!” Miles hissed, and jumped.

The guards spun around.

“That … that man in there. He moved. I think I’m going to vomit.”

“Can’t have.” The senior guard stared through the transparent wall at a body which lay with its back to them.

“He couldn’t possibly have witnessed anything from in there, could he?” said Miles. “For God’s sake, don’t open the door.”