Armand LaGuerre didn’t give a shit. As long as Zarir drove fast and true, that was good. As long he stayed silent, it was even better. The rest of the trade crew were garrulous, and there was a time when LaGuerre welcomed that. Hell, even looked for it. And he was still cool with it as long as it was kept to the other wags. But since he’d taken Eula on board, he wanted some silence in his wag. The girl was quiet, and didn’t react well to noise, conversation or questions. Especially the latter. So the chance to get rid of Cody, a talkative bastard at the best of times, into the next wag had been more than welcome. At the girl’s request, the man Dix had replaced Cody instead of riding shotgun in the second wag. LaGuerre was confused by that. Okay, so Eula had really wanted to take the newbies aboard—in truth it had been more her idea to stop for them than his—and she was adamant that she wanted Dix to travel with them. But Cody was a tech man, not a sec fighter. Second wag was safest, but even so…
LaGuerre did not argue with Eula. He hadn’t argued with her since the moment she had joined them. She had found them a little over eighteen months earlier, searching him out in a ville called Evermore, on the eastern fringes of the central badlands. He was in a gaudy house, busy enjoying himself with three gaudies, two of whom were putting on a show while the third made use of the pleasure he was showing at their performance. She had walked in as if she owned the place, asking him if he was LaGuerre and where he was headed.
Most times, if someone did that to him, he would have blown the person’s head off. But there was something about this one—the way she completely ignored the surroundings, not from embarrassment but because she was too focused to notice. There was a kind of calm menace about her. When he asked her why him, she had replied that he was a trader, he was about to leave and she needed to get away quickly.
His first thought was that she had pissed off Baron Chandler, head of Evermore, and taking her on would lead to a firefight with the baron’s sec. She had to have sensed that because she was quick to tell him that her problem was with another ville. She had already traveled a hundred klicks, but she knew she was being followed, and she needed the cover of a convoy to hide her tracks.
It would have sounded bullshit, and dangerous at that, if he’d heard it from anyone else. But from her it was different. It was the way she spoke, the way she carried herself, the serious hardware that was draped around her in a way that wasn’t usual for anyone, let alone a young woman who looked barely old enough to handle a blaster.
Like all good traders, LaGuerre had a nose for a good deal. He may not have been the best trader, but he was better than a lot. She had that air of a rare stash about her. She was something a bit special, and could lead him to a higher level. It got his sense of greed tingling. So he agreed to take her on.
There was one other thing, too. It was on a much baser level, but all things were as one to Armand LaGuerre. It was the way she had looked at his dick when the gaudy slut took it out of her mouth.
He hadn’t had Eula’s pussy. Not yet. But it was only a matter of time.
Meanwhile, he just sat and watched. Watched the two of them sit, stand, walk around the interior of the wag, and say nothing to each other even though the very air around them crackled with tension. Eula had been insistent that Dix travel with them, and for his part the skinny guy with the glasses and hat had seemed pleased by that. LaGuerre couldn’t make him out. When he said that he didn’t know her, he seemed to be on the level. Yet the way he kept looking at her from the corner of his eye; the way the few words he said were guarded, almost to the point of being cryptic; the body language as he stiffened and pulled back every time she got close. All of that suggested that he had suspicions of where they may have met.
LaGuerre would love to know that. She had never enlarged on her initial statement to him. A ville about a hundred klicks from Evermore, going east. That could have been any number of villes. Part of the area to the east was fucked—completely uninhabited. Okay, scratch that. Maybe there were a few settlements in the contaminated area, but they weren’t anywhere he or any other trader particularly cared to go. That still left a number of small villes ruled by desperado barons. Not many traders cared to go there, either. Not much jack, not much to barter. So he didn’t know squat about any of them. If she was telling him the truth—bitch was too self-contained and sure of herself to do anything else—then it had to have been one of those.
He’d moved on quickly, and hadn’t been back that way in the year and a half since she’d joined, so there hadn’t been the chance to check out her story. But he knew one thing—the only trader to really make use of those areas had been Trader himself. The man was legend. He’d got richer than anyone, had more of a stash than anyone, done more business than anyone because he’d worked harder. Yeah, and where had it got him? Sometimes you just had to kick back a little and enjoy the fruits of your labors. LaGuerre realized he was wandering. The point of his train of thought was…Hell, what was it again? Yeah, that was it. If this guy Dix had ridden with Trader, along with the one-eyed guy, then he had to have been to some of those villes in the east. Probably the one that Eula came from, the one where she had gotten into some trouble and had to run.
So maybe Dix knew her secret. And, given that she had wanted to search those guys out, and was interested more in him than in any of the others, maybe she knew his.
That would explain why she was even quieter than usual, and he was like a mutie cat on a sun-fried wag roof.
WHILE THIS HAD BEEN going through LaGuerre’s head, Eula had been guiding J.B. through the armory and associated tech held by the convoy. She had explained to him in few words the condition of the armory when she had joined, and the steps she had taken to both improve the quality of what was there, and to add to the inventory, making them stronger. Each blaster she detailed at length, telling him things he already knew, but seeming to tell him these things for a reason.
For the life of him, J.B. could not work out what the code behind her words may be. She was demonstrating her knowledge to impress him. But why? Why would she want to impress a man she claimed to know, but who had no recollection of her?
J.B. was not a man for subterfuge. He could stay impassive when needed—indeed, there were those who would argue that it was a natural state for both himself and Jak—but an outright lie was something he found hard, even in extreme danger. Why bother? If people didn’t like the truth, then fuck ’em. Equally, he didn’t respond well to situations where people were evasive, trying to tempt you into playing their games. Life was shit, hard and way too short for games. Especially games like that.
He had tried to keep his distance from her. Tried to rack his memory and remember her. Tried to even guess what the connection could be. But there was nothing except a nagging feeling of danger deep in his gut. And a growing curiosity over the fact that she had chosen the vocation of armorer. She was impressing this upon him, as though it would somehow open the floodgates of memory.
Well, if that was what she had hoped, then it was a bad call—not even a trickle.
She was in the middle of showing him the comm tech that she had managed to get up and running after they salvaged it from some ruined ex-military wags—carefully avoiding an explanation of how they had come to be wrecked, he noted—when J.B. decided that he could take no more.
“You’re good,” he said simply, stopping her in midflow, “and I want to know where you learned all this. ’Specially so young. Took me years on the road with Trader to amass the kind of knowledge you’ve got. Had some before I joined, but it was only hitting the road and finding shit that helped it build. But you must have grown up with someone who knew this stuff.”
“I did,” she said simply.
LaGuerre’s ears pricked. Ask her more, Dix, he thought.
“So who taught you?” J.B. pushed.
Eula shook her head. “In time, John Barrymore. In time. I don’t give anything away for free. I want from you, in return.”
“What?”
“That’ll