"Ryan did that," she whispered. "Threw a blaster into your mouth."

For a moment Strasser hesitated, poised above her. His thick, powerful erection shrank between his thighs, and he lifted a clubbed fist threateningly.

"Keep your mouth shut, redhead slut," he hissed. "I'll tell you when to open it, and I'll tell you what to do with it. Understand?"

Krysty nodded. "And you'll give me a son?"

"If you're good to me, bitch. If you're not, it'll be one of my toys to remind you of how to obey your master."

A log fire was dying in the open hearth. A small brindled puppy was sleeping in front of it, head on its paws. And on the table by the fire was a selection of Cort Strasser's toys. A whip with a short, stubby handle was studded with nails. The thongs were plaited wire, and the tips were splinters of jagged glass. Next to it was a longer whip, with a single, cutting lash. There were knives on the table, as well as a number of sexual aids — phalluses of differing sizes and shapes, but all with some unexpected and cruel refinement.

"You ready, whore?"

Strasser's narrow mustache was glistening with perspiration, and he licked his lips. By lifting her head a little Krysty could see that he was once again fully erect.

"This isn't right."

He laughed, his breath foul in her face. "Not right? You triple-stupe slag! Don't tell me what's right."

"Gaia, help me!"

Krysty's head was hurting, and the weight of the sec boss on her stomach was making her feel sick. But she felt powerless against the man's strength.

"Gaia don't do shit, lady," he cackled, bracing himself between her thighs.

"Let her go, Strasser."

Ryan stood in the doorway, a silvery automatic pistol in his right hand. Doc and J.B. were with him, and in the corridor behind, Krysty glimpsed the sparkle of snowy hair.

"Go fuck yourself, Cawdor," the sec boss snarled, unmoving.

"Sure thing," Ryan replied, turning on his heel.

"Ryan!" Krysty called.

"What?"

"Wait!"

"Going, lover. Got to keep moving. Mebbe stop one day."

"Let the back-shooting bastard go," Strasser urged, pressing the tip of his engorged maleness against her body.

"Ryan, I want you."

"Cort there'll give you what you want, lover," Ryan said wearily. "Child, family, place to settle and live."

The headache was electrifyingly painful, throbbing to the beat of an unseen drum. Krysty struggled against Cort Strasser, but her normal power had gone.

"Only with you, lover," she yelled.

But she and Strasser were alone on a hillside, above a shallow valley. Beneath them she could see the polluted waters of a vast rancid lake. The sec boss still held her beneath him, about to complete the rape.

"Gaia, help me."

"I'll help you with this." He laughed, making Krysty sure she would vomit at any second.

A little dog, barking its brave defiance, hurled itself at Strasser, distracting him for another, blessed moment.

The dog received abrupt punishment from the murderous man. He reached out with his free hand and caught the pup around the throat, squeezed once and dropped the twitching little body to the warm earth.

"Killer!" she spit.

"Yeah, you believe it."

"You'll die."

He stroked Krysty's long red hair with his free hand and smiled with a shocking gentleness. "Yeah. We all will."

"I can't stand it."

Cort Strasser's face shimmered like a reflection in a wind-tainted pool. The grip on her arms weakened, and Krysty tried again to pull away from him. Her eyes felt as if someone were trying to push them from their sockets with white-heated pistons.

"Gonna give you what you want, slut. Give you what all women want."

He thrust then, and she screamed at the terrible ripping, rending pain in her loins that tore through her body and made her black out.

"Noooo!"

Keeping a hold on his sanity was one of Ryan Cawdor's toughest struggles.

Three jumps, back to back to back, the last from a defective gateway, were enough to scramble anyone's brain. He fought as hard as he knew how to hold the sweeping tide of blackness at bay. But it rose and rose about him, until even his mental and physical powers were drained.

He was in an abandoned ocher quarry, endless ravines and canyons of multicolored clays that ranged from the palest gray-white to the deepest, richest vermilion. Ragged trees lined the tops of the sheer cliffs, and the remnants of rotting wooden ladders were pinned to the walls.

The air was heavy and sulfurous, weighing down on Ryan's head and shoulders. His steel-toed combat boots slithered in the orange clay, making it hard to progress in any direction. And all directions looked the same. His coat was sodden with his sweat, and he wasn't carrying any kind of weapon.

Ryan felt there were other people somewhere in this Technicolor wilderness, but he couldn't quite see or hear them. He saw the marks of feet, sometimes fresh with moisture still seeping into them, and twice he thought he heard a voice behind the next twisting turn. But when he rounded the blind corner nobody was there.

As he eased the patch from over his left eye, he was assaulted by a sudden memory of his murderous brother, Harvey. The livid scar etched across his right cheek flared at the thought.

There was a doorway in the bright wall of stone ahead of him and a barred gate with a huge, brooding figure standing in front of it — an armored man, holding a strange weapon of polished brass with a gaping muzzle. It was like no blaster that Ryan Cawdor had ever seen, and he knew instinctively that it possessed a dreadful megacull capability. Nothing he could do would enable him to beat this sinister sec guard.

Yet the gateway presented him with his only chance of escaping from the ocher maze.

"What's your sec clearance, outlander?" the sentry asked in a booming voice.

"B 100."

"Name?"

"Cawdor. Ryan Cawdor."

The giant consulted a piece of white parchment in his mailed fist. "Cawdor. Cawdor. Cawdor. Did you say Cawdor?"

"Yeah."

"Did you say Richard Cawdor?"

"No, Ryan."

"You said Richard!"

"No."

The weird weapon lifted toward the one-eyed man, its barrel reflecting the pink of the sky. "Ryan Cawdor, are you saying?"

"Yeah, and you'd better not point that blaster at me, unless you aim to use it."

The guard roared a rippling belly laugh. "Well, now. I call that mighty big talk for a one-eyed thin man like you, Ryan Cawdor."

Ryan winced at the noise, finding it made his splitting headache even worse.

"You going to let me through, or do I chill you where you stand?"

"No need, outlander. My list has your name on it. This door is only for you. And now I'm going to open it."

The corridor had walls of pale gray, a floor of black tiles and a ceiling of peeling yellow paint. It stretched away ahead of Ryan, as far as he could see.

Above him he could hear the noise of countless feet, marching in a stumbling dissonant rhythm, the sound muffled by the ceiling. On either side of the passage were rows of identical doors, each with a tiny peephole.

Ryan paused and looked in the first one, then the second and the third, moving to the other side and finding that each peephole revealed exactly the same thing — a square concrete cell, with a bunk bed and an enamel chamber pot. The rooms were seven feet across and had a barred window of opaque arma-glass six inches wide.

And in each room stood a naked person — alternately male and female — with their backs toward the doors. Their hands were manacled behind them, and bags of rough hessian covered their heads, knotted at the sides with purple cord.

None moved or made any sound, nor was there a sign of anyone who might have been a guard.