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.