Bit of Analysis: HH Crown of Slaves

[VhenRa]

Yeah. The Plasma Rifle makes a mockery of any sorta concept like cover...

[Ahriman238]

"CIC confirms the outer platforms' reports, Sir." Commander Blumenthal's quiet voice only seemed loud in the quiet of Gauntlet's command deck. "Three light cruisers, two heavy cruisers, one battlecruiser, and fourteen destroyers."

The Mesan Navy arrives. 1 BC, 2 CA, 3 CL, 14 DD for 20 ships total.

"Because of that, I was able to respond immediately. And also because of that, Captain Oversteegen, I am quite well informed on what had occurred prior to the dispatch boat's departure. Which means, Captain, that I am aware that the entire 'crisis' in which the supposed 'terrorists' kidnaped a member of your kingdom's royal family, was obviously a pure invention. A carefully engineered deception whose sole purpose was to permit an organization outlawed by every major star nation—including your own—to seize the property of a Mesan corporation and to murder scores of its employees.

"Not content with that, Captain," Navarre's voice went even colder, "your ship has seen fit to sit here in orbit while those same terrorists carried out systematic, brutal atrocities and the massacre of men, women, and children on the surface of the planet Verdant Vista!"

Navarre might not have spent any effort on opening communications with Gauntlet, Oversteegen reflected, but he had obviously taken time to download a complete news report from the media ships still covering the story of the liberation of Congo.

And what a spectacularly bloody story it had become, he thought grimly. Much though it galled him to his soul to admit it, there was more than a faint echo of truth to Navarre's last accusation.

Once the slaves on the ground heard that Manpower's major deterrent to slave revolt was out of commission things got very, very ugly.

"Torch Liberation Army!" Navarre's face twisted in a sneer as he repeated the phrase. "What a respectable name for a pack of cowardly, murderous vermin. I am shocked—no, Captain, sickened—to hear anyone calling himself a naval officer, even of a backwater, neobarb 'star kingdom,' acting as a mouthpiece for the scum of the galaxy. I suppose they expected to be in a position to pay you a handsome bribe for your services after they got done looting Verdant Vista."

"How fortunate for you, Commodore," Oversteegen said calmly, "that you're in a position t' bandy your accusations from the security of your command deck. I, of course, as a benighted subject of my 'neobarb' monarch, far too uncivilized t' appreciate the splendor of your civilized turn of phrase, might be tempted t' react t' them with unseemly violence. Particularly when they come from a man who chooses to wear the uniform of the single so-called 'navy' which has, for the past nine T-centuries, protected the systematic trade in human bein's. And which, I might take this opportunity t' observe, since you have just so rightly condemned the massacre of women and children on Torch, has connived at and cooperated with the systematic sale, torture, degradation, and casual murder of literally millions of those same human bein's durin' that period. At least, Sir, the uniform of the Queen of Manticore has never been sold t' the service of whoremasters, murderers, pedophiles, sadists, and perverts. I suppose, however, that those of you who choose t' serve in the navy of Mesa feel comfortable amid such company."

Burn.

"I do, indeed, feel comfortable in the service of my star nation," he said, softly. "And I am looking forward to the opportunity to deal with you and your ship in the fashion you so amply deserve, Captain. In the interest of demonstrating respect for interstellar law, however, I will give you one last opportunity to avoid the consequences of your arrogance and criminal activities in this system. You will release any surviving Mesan citizens in your custody. And you will turn over to me the terrorist butchers responsible for the outrages and murders committed on the surface of Verdant Vista."

"There are no citizens of Mesa in my custody, Commodore," Oversteegen replied. "All such prisoners are in the custody of the provisional government of the independent planet Torch. And, I repeat, none of the personnel involved in the capture of the space station in orbit around Torch participated in acts of violence against any civilian, regardless of age or gender, on that planet's surface. The actions to which you refer, and which the provisional government deeply regrets and deplores, were committed by the citizens of Torch in the course of liberatin' themselves from the brutality and systematic abuse, starvation, torture, and, yes, murder, of the institution of genetic slavery of which your star nation thinks so highly."

"Citizens!" Navarre spat. "Rabble! Scum! Cat—!"

He chopped himself off before the word "cattle" slipped fully out, and Oversteegen smiled thinly. The encrypted communications channel between Gauntlet and Navarre's flagship was theoretically totally secure. Theory, however, had a habit of sometimes coming up short against reality, and Navarre was clearly conscious of the watching—and possibly listening—news ships still camped out in the Congo System. For that matter, he had to realize that Oversteegen was recording the entire exchange, so a certain discretion was undoubtedly called for.

There are some surviving prisoners in custody though. I guess you'd have to be able to dehumanize slaves to work for Mesa in any capacity.

"Very well, Captain," he said icily. "Since you decline to discharge your responsibilities, I will discharge them for you. I suggest that you stand aside, because my task group is about to put an end to the bloodshed and atrocities being committed on Verdant Vista."

"I regret, Sir," Oversteegen replied, not sounding as if he regretted anything in the least, "that I can't do that. The provisional government of Torch has appealed t' the Star Kingdom of Manticore for protection and assistance in establishin' and maintainin' public order on their planet. As Her Majesty's senior officer in this sector, I have provisionally agreed in her name t' extend that assistance t' the government and citizens of Torch."

-snip-

"Are you totally insane?" Navarre asked in a tone which had become almost conversational. "You have one cruiser, Oversteegen. I have five, plus a battlecruiser and screen. Are you really stupid enough to take on that much tonnage all by yourself?"

"Oh, not quite all by himself," another voice said coolly, and Navarre stiffened as his com screen split and an officer in the uniform of a captain in the Solarian League Navy suddenly appeared upon it beside Michael Oversteegen.

"Captain Luis Rozsak, SLN," the newcomer said, "and this is my command," he added, as the units of his destroyer flotilla disengaged their stealth systems and brought their impeller wedges to full power in a perfectly synchronized maneuver. Eighteen destroyers and Rozsak's light cruiser flagship suddenly appeared on Navarre's sensors.

"Who the hell are you?" Navarre demanded, shocked out of his easy assumption of superiority by the abrupt appearance of so many more ships.

"I am the senior naval officer assigned by the Solarian Navy to the Maya Sector," Rozsak said calmly. "And, as Captain Oversteegen, the Solarian League, in the form of the Maya Sector, has also been appealed to by the provisional government of Torch for assistance and protection."

Rozsak shows, needless to say, no one has any intention of simply handing the planet back to Mesa.

"There is no provisional government!" Navarre half-shouted. "There can't be!" He clenched his fists, obviously fighting for self-control. "The planet is the property of a Mesan corporation."

"The planet, like any other planet, belongs to its citizens," Roszak corrected. "That, Commodore, has been the official policy of the Solarian League from its inception."

Navarre stared at him, and Oversteegen was hard pressed not to laugh outright at the Mesan's expression. True, the policy Rozsak had just enunciated—with, Oversteegen noted, a completely straight face—had indeed been the official one of the Solarian League from the beginning. It was also one the Office of Frontier Security had ignored for centuries . . . when it hadn't actively conspired to fold, twist, and mutilate it with the connivance of powerful corporations and business combines.

Corporations and combines headquartered, quite often, on Mesa, as it happened.

The League's official policy on self-determination of planets, and it's totally contradictory unofficial policy. Still, Rozsak can claim the official one and be well-covered.

"The 'citizens' to whom you refer," Navarre said, after a long, silent pause, "were transported to this planet, housed, and fed by Manpower. They are, in effect, the employees of the corporation. As such, they have no legal standing as 'citizens,' and certainly no legal right to . . . expropriate the company's property."

"The citizens of Torch," Roszak said, and this time his voice was just as cold as Oversteegen's had been, "were transported to this planet by Manpower not as employees, Commodore, but as property. And I would remind you that the Constitution of the Solarian League specifically rejects and outlaws the institution of slavery, whether genetically based or not, and that the League has steadfastly refused ever to recognize any legal standing for the institution or its practice. As such, the League views the present inhabitants of Torch as its legal citizens and owners and has negotiated in good faith with the provisional government which they have established."

The official policy on slavery, which likewise bears no resemblance to the reality.

"The two of you together wouldn't stand a chance against my task group," Navarre said flatly.

"You might be surprised by how much of a chance we'd stand," Roszak replied. "And while you might very probably win in the end, the cost would be . . . considerable. I rather doubt that your admiralty would be very happy about that."

"And speakin' purely as a backward and benighted neobarb," Oversteegen observed with deadly affability, "I really suspect, Commodore, that your government would be most unhappy with the officer who managed, in one afternoon, t' get them into a shootin' war with both the Solarian League and the Star Kingdom of Manticore."

Navarre deflated visibly. It was rather like watching the air flow out of a punctured balloon, Oversteegen thought. The commodore was clearly picturing what a squadron or two of modern Manticoran ships-of-the-wall could do to the entire Mesan Navy. Especially if the Solarian League wasn't simply giving them free passage to reach Mesa but actually acting as a cobelligerent.

Rozsak saw the same thoughts flow across Navarre's face and smiled once more, ever so slightly.

"I think, Commodore," he suggested gently, "that it might be best, all things considered, if you left the sovereign star system of Torch.

"Now."

And like that, Commodore Navarre backs down, and Torch is finally and fully free. Got a few chapter's worth of tying up loose ends and epilogues, but this is the moment the Kingdom of Torch becomes a reality.

[Ahriman238]

Those overseers who did try to stand their ground had been overwhelmed—and their weapons turned to the use of killing other overseers. Not just "overseers," either. Anyone—even a child—associated with "Mesa" or especially "Manpower" had been under sentence of death, everywhere on the planet's surface. A sentence which had been imposed immediately, mercilessly, and in some cases accompanied by the most horrible atrocities.

There had been some exceptions, here and there. Mesans whose duties had not involved discipline over the slaves, especially those who had established a reputation for being at least decent, had been spared in a number of cases. There was even one instance where an entire settlement of Mesan scientists and pharmaceutical technicians and their families had been protected by an improvised slave defense guard against slaves coming in from the outside.

But, for the most part, any Mesan who hadn't gotten himself quickly enough to one of the enclaves where armed Mesans had been able to fort up and hold off the slaves until the surrender was negotiated had simply been slaughtered. The entire surface of the planet had been engulfed, for two days, in a wave of pure murder.

The revolt, which lasted two days, with all the attendant atrocities, though several Mesans were spared, including a whole town.

Once again, Berry realized, the economic reality of slavery based on a high level of technical advancement had manifested itself. There were simply too many ways for literate slaves, in a modern technical society, to gain access to information once the opportunity arose. Which it had, in most cases, when dumbfounded slaves suddenly saw Mesan overseers and staff personnel piling into vehicles and abandoning the area—their faces making their own panic obvious. The slaves, after an initial hesitation, had simply walked into the communications centers and discovered the information on the computer screens—computers which many of them knew perfectly well how to operate.

Death. Death. Death. All of them! Now!

In some cases, the departing Mesans had had the foresight to destroy the equipment. But, more often than not, in their panicky haste to simply flee for a refuge, they had neglected to do so. And, once the com centers had started falling into the hands of the slaves, the slaves had rapidly begun establishing their own communication network across the planet. This was a rebellion which had all the pitiless rage of Nat Turner's—but whose slaves were very far from illiterate field hands. They had organized themselves just about as quickly and readily as the slaves on Felicia had done, after Templeton's seizure of the ship. And, like the slaves on Felicia, there had been enough undercover agents of the Ballroom to serve as an organizing and directing catalyst.

The rapid organization of the uprising, thanks to technically literate slaves able to use modern computers and comm gear.

Before the second of Congo's twenty-seven-hour days had passed, she'd been able to establish contact with all the remaining Mesan enclaves, as well as the major slave organizing centers, and negotiate a surrender. Her terms had been simple: In exchange for their lives and whatever personal possessions they could carry, provided they surrendered immediately and made no attempt at sabotage, any Mesan who wanted to leave the planet would be allowed to do so with no further harm. Under Solarian Navy escort, and into the safekeeping of the Solarian Navy. She'd even offered to place the Felicia at the disposal of the Solarian Navy, to provide the needed transport.

That last decision had been one she'd made with some reluctance. As with everyone involved during those long weeks, Felicia had come to occupy a special place in her heart. She'd even been the one to give the ship her new name: Hope, she'd called her, repeating the name until she simply drove under all the competing names. Of which Vengeance had been the most popular.

The peace, any surviving Mesans will be shipped home aboard Hope, the final name for Felicia II.

It had been the first clash of wills between her and Jeremy. And . . .

She'd won, to her surprise. Mostly because, she decided afterward, even Jeremy had been a little shaken by the horror. Especially after one particularly savage group of slaves had gleefully broadcast a transmission which recorded for posterity the execution of three overseers. Insofar as the antiseptic term "execution" could be applied to death by torture.

A tape of the torturous end of several of the slavemasters was enough to finally convince Jeremy to temporarily give up Hope.

Even worse than the expressions on the faces of the survivors, in some ways, were the expressions on the faces of the Ballroom members—any ex-slave, really—who stood near her watching them leave.

Pitiless. Utterly, completely pitiless.

Berry understood the reasons for that, true enough. There were many recordings in their possession now, which the triumphant slaves had seized. Some of them official recordings made by the Mesan authorities, but many of them private recordings left behind by now-dead or evacuating Mesan personnel. A number of the overseers had been particularly fond of keeping mementos of the atrocities they had visited on slaves, over the long years. Recordings which ranged from nauseating depictions of personal brutalities to the—in some ways even more nauseating—depictions of slave bodies being used as raw material for Mesan chemical vats.

Let Mesa try to use their few recordings of slave atrocities. Now that it was over—had been ended, as all could attest, as quickly as the new government could manage it—Mesa's propaganda campaign would be buried under an avalanche of their own recordings. Already, Berry knew, the galactic media's representatives in-system were practically salivating over the material. It was all . . . disgusting, really. But she could accept "disgusting," for the sake of the future.

This happened on Hades too, why do honorverse villains keep recording their crimes and atrocities?

"All right!" he said, throwing up his hands. "You have my agreement. My word, if you will. Any stinking lousy Mesans who choose to remain on the planet can do so. No repercussions, no discrimination against them, nothing."

"You have to stop calling them 'stinking lousy Mesans,' too. Those who remain behind are now simply Torches."

Jeremy's lips quirked. "I still think 'Torches' is a silly expression."

"It's better than 'Torchese,' which sounds like a breed of dog," she replied firmly. "And stop changing the subject."

-snip-

"Oh, come on, Jeremy. There aren't that many, first off. And almost half of them live in that one settlement that the slaves themselves protected. They're nothing but biologists, for pity's sake. According to the reports I've heard, they didn't even realize where their contract was going to wind up placing them. And, after they got here, they were too engrossed in the fascination of their work to pay much attention to anything else. If nothing else, we can use their talents. They brought their whole families with them, they've now been here for years, and this is their home. That's enough. The same's true, one way or another, for all the others who want to stay. Which, as I said, isn't more than a few hundred anyway."

You could make it Torchies, in keeping with the nicknaming convention. Any Mesan who stays behind, mostly scientists and those who were spared, are free to do so.

The proposal to make the new star nation of Torch a constitutional monarchy, with Berry as the founding queen, hadn't been voted on by the populace yet. Nor would it be, for several more weeks, to allow everyone scattered across the planet time to ponder the matter. But Web had taken an initial poll the day before, using standard techniques which usually gave good results. He'd been a bit shocked when he saw the results. Eighty-seven percent in favor, with a margin of error of plus-or-minus four percent.

He hadn't expected better than seventy percent, he'd told Berry. He wasn't sure yet, but he thought two factors had made the difference. First, the enthusiastic recommendation of the thousands of ex-slaves from the Felicia, who were quickly spreading across the planet as the new government's informal organizing cadre. Second—perhaps even more importantly, and certainly something he hoped was true—because now that the slaves had sated their initial bloodlust, they were a little shaken themselves at the experience. Berry's holo image had been broadcast widely across the planet's com web. Her real one, since the weeks aboard Felicia had also been used by Erewhonese biotechs to reverse the nanotech disguise. And if there was any human image Web could imagine that might help people claw their way out of a pit of rage and hatred, it was that calm, intelligent-looking, pretty young girl's face. It was simply impossible to look at Berry and think her a threat or a menace, to anyone.

Support for the idea of a monarchy, hopefully everyone's had enough blood for a bit.

"I'll tell you what to shoot for, girl. Mind you, it'll take decades to get there. Long, slow decades, where a new people has time to settle into itself. Relax, if you will. And part of that relaxation—no small part—simply coming from steadiness and stability. Shoot for that. Aim that high. Aim for the day to come when they call you something which precious few monarchs in the long history of the human race have ever been called. Far fewer, when you get down to it, than have been called 'the Great.' "

He brought his eyes back to her. "Nothing complicated, nothing fancy. Just . . . 'Good Queen Berry.' That's all. And that'll be enough."

She thought about it, for a while. "I can do that," she pronounced.

"Oh, yes, dear one. I know you can."

Web doesn't want Berry to get a 'the Great' tagged onto her name if it can be avoided. Neither does Berry, so here is his proposed alternative.

"You planned this from the very start! Don't try telling me that Cachat just—what did you call it?—'accidentally stumbled into an unforeseen situation.' Bullshit!"

Kevin Usher tried to snort derisively. The sound was . . . feeble.

"C'mon, Eloise! You're an experienced op yourself. You know damn good and well nobody could have 'planned' something like—"

"Cut it out, damn you!" Now, Pritchart was fully on her feet, leaning still farther over the desk. "I know you didn't 'plan' it that way. So what? I also know that you told Cachat from the get-go to see what he could stir up on Erewhon—and then run with it."

She glanced angrily at Ginny Usher, who was seated on a chair next to her husband. "That's why you wanted Cachat. All that stuff about Ginny was a smokescreen. Cachat is your gunslinger—your damn shoot-from-hip specialist. I know his record, Kevin! That lunatic can and will improvise anything on his feet. This stunt he pulled on Erewhon was even hairier than what he did in La Martine!"

By what measure are these 'hairy,' I wonder? Granted, when sent to La Martine he didn't manage to create an independent state from whole cloth.

Eloise rubbed her face, which, in that moment, looked as tired as Trajan's. "Wilhelm, I can't afford to lose Kevin as the head of the FIS. Whatever else, I've got to make sure there aren't any more coup d'etats. And I don't know anyone except him who'd really do any better than you running the FIS."

Trajan smiled crookedly. "Of course you do. It ought to be blindingly obvious by now."

She frowned with puzzlement, for a moment. Then, when his meaning penetrated, gasped. Partly with shock, partly from outrage.

"You can't be serious! Cachat?"

Yeah, it's decided that Cachat will be transferred to the FIS (spies, instead of cops) and groomed as Wilhelm Trajan's successor as director. Beginning with making him the station chief for operations in the Erewhon/Torch sector.

"Besides," Kevin interjected, "Victor's got the inside track with the Torches also. If you send anybody else out there, he'll just—ah—"

"Run rings around them?" Eloise jibed. "Leave them lying flat on their back in a cloud of dust?"

"Something like that."

The President of the Republic of Haven moved her eyes to a blank spot on the far wall, which she examined for a minute or so. Then, leaning forward, she planted her hands on the desk again and spread her fingers.

"All right, we'll do it. And since we need to send someone official to attend the coronation of the new Queen of Torch in a few weeks—Kevin, you're it. I'll let you break the news to your protégé that he's now an Official Maniac. Which means if he pulls a stunt like this again, I'll flay him alive."

With the president's approval, effective immediately. Kevin Usher will be attending Berry's coronation as Prichart's personal envoy.

There was no one behind Cassetti now, who might get hit by a dart passing through his body. Rozsak had no idea how Thandi had managed that. He suspected Anton Zilwicki's hand was involved, somehow—Berry's father was also standing on the administration center's terrace. Which, if so, underscored Watanapongse's warning that the whole operation was no longer "covert" to at least some people outside their own ranks.

No one standing behind Cassetti . . . It would happen now. Rozsak wouldn't have bothered with that curlicue, but he was more ruthless than Palane.

-snip-

Rozsak heard the pulse rifle dart's impact. From the solid WHAP! of it, a good center impact shot. He had Berry by the shoulders and was pulling her down to the terrace a split-second later. It was not quite a "tackle," but . . . close.

Only then did he turn his head and actually look at the lieutenant governor. Not that he'd really needed the confirmation.

The marksman had hit the sniper's triangle dead center, and the hyper-velocity dart had smashed squarely into the man's spinal column on its way through him. The transfer of kinetic energy had been, quite literally, explosive, blasting a twenty-centimeter chunk of Cassetti's neck and shoulders into a finely divided spray of blood, tissue, and pulverized bone even as it flung the instantly dead body back and out of Palane's iron-fingered grip.

No one, Rozsak knew—not even the newsies, some of them standing less than fifty meters away—would ever realize just what Palane had done. They might remark on the freak coincidence which had led the major to tap the lieutenant governor on the arm, undoubtedly to remind him of something, in the very instant before the shot was fired. But none of them would realize that her touching him had been the signal to the person behind that pulser dart. That she had deliberately stood less than a meter from him, holding him motionless to guarantee her chosen shooter a perfect shot and eliminate the possibility that a moving target might change her carefully planned trajectory and put someone else in the line of fire.

Which was a pity, in many ways, he reflected. Because since no one would ever guess, none of them would appreciate the steel-nerved courage—and total confidence in her chosen marksman—required for someone to do what she had just done.

And so the murderer of Hieroynmous Stein, one of them, anyways, meets his maker. Thandi's careful planning and absolute faith in her Amazons.

Rozsak's eyes ranged the terrace. Everybody was now on the floor, shielded by the terrace's low retaining wall, except for one particularly determined holorecorder crew. His eyes met the hard gaze of Anton Zilwicki.

Rozsak didn't have any trouble at all interpreting that gaze. That's it, Rozsak. Don't even THINK about taking it any further.

The Solarian Captain gave Zilwicki a minute little nod. Then, a second later, found himself matching gazes with Jeremy X. The head of the Ballroom was on the terrace floor not far from Zilwicki, his hand pulser gripped in his hand.

To the holorecorder viewers, it would simply look like the natural reaction of an experienced gunman. But Rozsak didn't misunderstand the meaning of that flat-eyed stare—nor the fact that while Jeremy's weapon wasn't directly pointed at him, it wasn't pointed all that far away, either.

He gave Jeremy the same tiny nod. Yes, yes, yes. That's it. This black op is over.

A number of people have figured out who killed Stein, and want Rozsak to know that's an end to the whole affair.

"Didn't think of that, did you?" she whispered, icily. "The retaliation that angry ex-slaves might visit, after the killing of someone they think is a liberator of sorts."

He hadn't thought of it. Startled, he glanced at Palane, still on the floor barking commands into her com. It was an act, he knew—by now, the Scrags would be dead and the cover-up well under way—but it was a very good one. He had no doubt at all that the media would be fooled. To all appearances, Palane was organizing a manhunt.

"Thandi thought of it, though," Berry whispered. The underlying contempt in her tone was not disguised at all.

And even the girl knows. Rozsak realized in that moment that a teenaged queen-to-be already had what amounted to a staff as good as his own—and probably even more trusting. Odd, really, given the disparate elements it was made of.

-snip-

"You and Thandi Palane are quits, Captain Rozsak," she commanded.

Berry knows too. The good Mesans who are staying have all been brought to safety from reprisals on some excuse or other, carefully arranged by Thandi and Victor. The Amazons blow away a few of the remaining captive Scrags, leaving very little for forensics and finishing the cover-up. Clearly the Scrags fragged Casseti before being enthusiastically hunted down.

Her father's smile widened. "Indeed. That was before the vote, yes? So by the time the entire populace was able to express their opinion on whether they wanted a constitutional monarchy, they all knew that their prospective Queen had been waging a battle royal to have herself referred to as 'Your Mousety.' With 'Your Incisorship" as"—he choked down a laugh—"the 'compromise' she was willing to settle for."

"Yup," said Ruth. "Like I said, she got smeared. But the vote in favor of the constitutional monarchy was ninety-three percent—and she did manage to hold the line on the royal 'We.' She just flat refused, pointing out that nobody could make her use the expression. And since she's the only one who can, that made it a moot point. She said it made her feel fat already, with her eighteenth birthday just behind her."

Berry lost that battle, but the very public fight over the curlicues did a lot to sell the Torches on their new queen. 93% in favor of the monarchy.

Michael's gaze shifted to the man next to Barregos. The new top military officer of the SLN in Maya Sector—formerly Captain, now Rear Admiral Luiz Rozsak—was standing just a little to one side, and just a little farther back. Not much. Clearly enough, Maya Sector felt it had a certain "special relationship" with the new star nation of Torch.

Which, in truth, they did. But Michael didn't miss the importance of the position which had been given to the Erewhonese representatives. Jack Fuentes, the President of Erewhon and in fact its central leader—never automatically the same thing with Erewhonese—was standing on the other side of the rabbi. Just as close as Barregos, had he chosen to crowd his way forward the way the governor of Maya was doing.

Precedence at the coronation given to the Erewhonese and Maya Sector representatives. The President of Erewhon may or may not wield actual power, depending on who he is and his connections to the ruling families.

Michael was now certain that the Solarian League, center of the human race, was in for that ancient curse: interesting times. Governor Barregos' popularity in Maya Sector itself had soared to stratospheric heights. For that matter, Web Du Havel had told Michael yesterday that the most recent poll indicated that Barregos was now the best-known and most popular political figure in the entire Solarian League. Which wasn't perhaps saying much, looked at from one angle, since the huge population of the League tended to be oblivious to most political affairs outside of their own systems. There was certainly no chance that Barregos could parlay that new popularity into a real challenge for wresting control of the entire League away from its established ruling interests.

Still . . .

Rear Admiral Rozsak, the same poll indicated, was now quite a well-known and popular figure himself. Michael knew that, for all practical purposes, Maya Sector now had its own independent naval force—and Barregos and Rozsak were quietly launching a massive armament program. If civil war did erupt in the League, Maya Sector would be a very tough nut to crack.

Barregos and Rozsak now the best-known political/military figures of the Solarian League, certainly the most popular. The amazing provincialism of the League.

"To the House of Winton." Not "to the Star Kingdom of Manticore." The Erewhonese were making clear, in their own way, that the back door would always remain open for Manticore's dynasty. But the front door was closing on the Star Kingdom.

-snip-

Since no one was looking at him, for the moment, Michael allowed the sigh to emerge. He tried to look on the bright side. Given Erewhonese custom, the back door was actually a prestigious entrance. Close friends as well as servants always came into the house of an Erewhonese grandee through the back door, never using the front door. In fact, the very closest of friends were given the combination of the lock on that back door.

Translated into diplomatic terms—Michael glanced sideways at his adopted daughter—that "combination" was Ruth Winton.

That's probably the best you could expect, given the High Ridge Government's systemic abuse of Erewhon's trust and goodwill.

Granted, choosing a rabbi from Hieronymus Stein's own branch of Judaism to officiate at the ceremony was a smooth way of furthering ties with the Renaissance Association. It also neatly sidestepped the awkwardness of creating a new royal house without the blessing of any organized religious body.

Still, he thought those were secondary concerns, in Du Havel's political calculations. Michael himself did not know as much as he wished he did, concerning the history and theology of Autentico Judaism. He'd have to do some studying on the matter. But he did know two things:

First, it was easily the fastest-growing branch of that ancient faith, even if some of the most orthodox branches of Judaism refused to accept the Autenticos as a legitimate part of galactic Jewry. If for no other reason, because they choked at the notion of the "Chosen People" as a self-selected body rather than a hereditary one, and the proselytizing that went with it.

Second, it met a particularly favorable reception from the galaxy's most downtrodden peoples. He'd heard, though he wasn't sure it was true, that it was by far the most popular religion among Manpower's ex-slaves—not least of all because the Autenticos, like the Audubon Ballroom, were willing to send organizers back into slavery to proselytize from within. He'd also heard—though, again, he'd have to check the accuracy—that there had been some trouble on the Mfecane worlds because of Autentico activity. He did know, for a fact, that the religion was officially banned on Mesa.

"Shrewd," he murmured again.

The murmur was loud enough to be heard by his wife. "Yes. It's not a militant or intolerant creed—blessedly"—Judith had her own very good reasons for being hostile toward fundamentalist religions—"but . . . how to say it? Autentico Judaism lends itself well to rebellion, leave it at that. Which is fine with me."

Autentico Judaism, the religion of Stein, and the most popular among former slaves. Apparently banned on Mesa, because it 'lends itself well to rebellion' and they've been sending covert missionaries to convert slaves for some time.

Berry Zilwicki was now kneeling and Rabbi Hideyoshi was placing the crown on her head. It was a simple tiara. Berry had insisted on that, and, this time, won the argument. She'd even managed to win the argument over the decorations: nothing more than a golden mouse, with pearls for its eyes. Looking a bit startled, as if it had been caught while stealing cheese.

At long last, the titular Crown of Slaves. Can definitely see Berry's hand in the deisgn.

Queen Berry, of the House of Zilwicki, faced her new subjects—using the term loosely—flanked by a former countess of Manticore and . . .

Cap'n Zilwicki, Scourge of the Spaceways.

Now more than ever, the galaxy's most famous spy.

She began, diplomatically enough, by escorting Governor Barregos and Admiral Rozsak to the fore. Then, the Erewhonese representatives. Then—it was very well done, with a simultaneous wave of her hands, avoiding any favoritism—she brought forward Michael and Judith themselves, with Kevin and Virginia Usher advancing on her other side. (Michael was amused to see the slick way in which Ruth managed to stay behind, avoiding the limelight.) Then, the notables from the Andermani Empire and the Silesian Confederacy; Jessica Stein; any number of others.

Notable attendees.

But Michael didn't miss the significance of the sequence. Berry saved three for the last.

First, the two central figures in the new government of Torch: Web Du Havel and Jeremy X, whom she brought forward together.

The crowd's applause was now almost deafening. Michael wished he'd had the foresight to bring ear protectors.

When Du Havel and Jeremy stepped back, the roar of the crowd eased a bit. Michael thought the worst of it was over.

Then, as Berry brought forward a tall and very powerful looking woman wearing a uniform Michael was not familiar with, and he heard the crowd almost sucking in a collective breath . . .

He knew who she was. Thandi Palane, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of Torch's brand new military in creation. But he hadn't had a chance to meet her yet.

The next wave of applause hit like a tidal wave. Michael couldn't help but flinch a little. Not even so much at the sheer volume of the sound, but at its timber. This was no longer simply applause. This was a snarl of pure fury. The new star nation might have adopted—cheerfully, with good humor, even gleefully—a queen with a mouse on her coat of arms. But no one would ever confuse that nation's fangs with those of a rodent.

* * *

The applause soon crystallized into two slogans, chanted over and over again, like a collective blacksmith hammering out a sword.

One of them he understood. Death to Mesa! was a given.

The other had him puzzled.

After the ceremony was finally done, he asked his daughter.

"What does 'Great Kaja' mean?"

Ruth managed to look ferocious and smug at the same time. "It means Mesa is history. They just don't know it yet."

The end.

So, a shiny new Star Kingdom, a war of former slaves against slavers and slave-makers. I'll be taking a break from this spin-off long enough to finish the Honor book, in theory all the spin-offs take place more-or-less the same time as the main book released at roughly the same time. Of course, the main frequently covers a year or two of story-time and I'm not interested in hunting down all the links and offhand mentions of other events to sync them precisely.

See you in a few.

[Simon_Jester]

Victor can't really disguise his Nouveau Paris Dolist accent, bit of a failing in a super-spy like him. Hence the Christian Bale voice.

I'm not sure the 'war wound rasp' is quite like the 'Christian Bale' voice, but it might be. Dunno.

Also interesting that accents are something that cannot be changed by these body transformations.

"CIC confirms the outer platforms' reports, Sir." Commander Blumenthal's quiet voice only seemed loud in the quiet of Gauntlet's command deck. "Three light cruisers, two heavy cruisers, one battlecruiser, and fourteen destroyers."

The Mesan Navy arrives. 1 BC, 2 CA, 3 CL, 14 DD for 20 ships total.

Well, the local detachment of the Mesan Navy.

There are some surviving prisoners in custody though. I guess you'd have to be able to dehumanize slaves to work for Mesa in any capacity.

We get more information about Mesan society in the next two books: A large fraction of the planetary population (50-60%) are slaves. So free Mesan citizens are pretty well trained to dehumanize them from childhood.

This happened on Hades too, why do honorverse villains keep recording their crimes and atrocities?

Knowing the tendency of real people in the world today to take (and post online) 'selfies' of themselves doing stupid or even actively illegal things... do you really have to ask?

Since the slaveholders on Congo (or the SS on Hades) think what they're doing is right and don't expect to ever be punished, having got away with it for decades or centuries... they're not going to think about it the way you or I would.

You could make it Torchies, in keeping with the nicknaming convention. Any Mesan who stays behind, mostly scientists and those who were spared, are free to do so.

Torchies sounds the same as Torchese, or almost the same.

By what measure are these 'hairy,' I wonder? Granted, when sent to La Martine he didn't manage to create an independent state from whole cloth.

I think Pritchart is using 'hairy' to evoke the image of, I dunno, a rampaging eight hundred pound gorilla in a china shop.

So, a shiny new Star Kingdom, a war of former slaves against slavers and slave-makers. I'll be taking a break from this spin-off long enough to finish the Honor book, in theory all the spin-offs take place more-or-less the same time as the main book released at roughly the same time. Of course, the main frequently covers a year or two of story-time and I'm not interested in hunting down all the links and offhand mentions of other events to sync them precisely.

See you in a few.

Yeah. Next step would be to finish up War of Honor and tackle Storm from the Shadows.

[VhenRa]

You mean finish War of Honor and tackle Shadow of Saganami. Storm from the Shadows is the Saganami series book during At All Costs and takes place roughly at same time as the 2nd book in Crown of Slaves series.

[Simon_Jester]

Sorry, VhenRa. You are right and I was wrong.

[Ahriman238]

Yes.

Oh! I can hardly believe I forgot. Anton's trip to Smoking Frog was most productive as it seems Georgia Sakristos Young/Elaine Kommondorski, wife of Stefan Young the Earl of north Hollow, controller of the North Hollow blackmail files and general Grey Eminence to the High Ridge Government is not merely a criminal. She was a slave. One who sold out thousands of her brethren back into bondage to secure her own liberty. Forget the Landing City Police, the Ballroom have been looking to settle accounts with her for some time.

[Terralthra]

Hairy is a rather ancient (in the Honorverse) term for a particularly rough or difficult situation. It dates from the early-mid-19th century (CE, not PD). It is attested in slang from 1864, which assigns its origin to Oxford University, and hypothesizes that it descends from "hair-raising" meaning scary as hell.

[Ahriman238]

Starting Torch of Freedom.

Late 1919 and 1920 Post-Diaspora
(4021 and 4022, Christian Era)

The date, neatly arranged in their and our calendar.

Beyond the Protectorates, starting at a distance of 210 light-years or so from Sol and extending for depths of from 40 to over 200 light-years, was the region known as "the Verge." The Verge was very irregularly shaped, depending entirely on where and how colony flights were sent out, and consisted of scores of independent star systems, many of them originally colonized by people trying to get away from the Shell Systems, which could be considered the equivalent of what were called "Third World nations" in pre-Diaspora times.

Size and composition of the Verge.

Individually, very few of them of them had populations of more than one or two billion (there were exceptions), their economies were marginal, and they had no effective military power. Many of them had all they could do to resist piratical raids, and none of them had the power to resist the Office of Frontier Security and the League Gendarmerie when it came time for them to slip into protectorate status.

Populations, generally no more than a billion or two, and military power (virtually nonexistent) of Verge worlds.

There was a constant trickling outward from the inner edge of the Verge to the outer edge, fueled more than anything else by the desire of people along the inner edge to avoid the creeping expansion of the Protectorates. Indeed, some people living in the Verge were the descendants of ancestors who had relocated three or four or even five times in an effort to avoid involuntary incorporation into the Protectorates.

People trying to stay ahead of the creeping borders.

From Hester McReynolds,
Origins of the Maya Crisis.
(Ceres Press, Chicago, 2084 PD)

Looks like humanity and Earth, at least, are still around 160 years after the books to write histories about them. Note that no mention is made of the League.

"Oh, it went off perfectly," he said reassuringly, with a half-humorous flick of his free left hand. "Palane did a perfect job. That girl has battle steel nerves, and she buried her tracks—and ours—even better than I'd hoped. She steered the newsies perfectly, too, and as far as I can tell, every single one of them drew the right conclusion. Their stories all emphasize Mesa's—and especially Manpower's—motives for killing him after he so selflessly threw the League's support to those poor, homeless escaped slaves. The evidence could scarcely be more conclusive if I'd, ah, designed it myself. Unfortunately, I feel I can say with reasonable confidence that we've fooled neither Anton Zilwicki, Jeremy X, Victor Cachat, Ruth Winton, Queen Berry, nor Walter Imbesi."

He shrugged insouciantly, and Barregos glared at him.

"That's an impressive list," he said icily. "May I ask if there are any intelligence operatives in the galaxy who don't suspect what really happened?"

"I'm pretty sure there are at least two or three. Fortunately, all back on Old Earth."

The list of people who know Rozsak and Barregos were involved in assassinating both Stein and Casseti.

"So what you're saying is that the spooks on the ground know we had him killed, but that all of them have their own reasons for keeping their suspicions to themselves?"

"Pretty much." Rozsak nodded. "Every one of them does have his or her own motive for seeing to it that the official version stands up, after all. Among other things, none of them wants anyone in the Solarian League to think they had anything to do with the assassination of a sector lieutenant-governor! More to the point, though, this whole affair's offered us a meeting of the minds that, frankly, I never expected going in."

There is that, this is still a net gain for Maya.

"Do you think he's going to be a problem down the road?" Barregos asked, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, and Rozsak shrugged.

"He's not really a lunatic, or even a loose laser head, for that matter. In fact, I'd say our friend Cachat has a good bit in common with a warmhearted rattlesnake, if the simile doesn't sound too bizarre even for me. Although, to be fair, Jiri's really the one who came up with it. It's apt, though. The man tries hard to hide it, but I think he's actually extraordinarily protective of the people and things he cares about, and his response to any threat is to remove it—promptly, thoroughly, and without worrying all that much about collateral damage. If you convince him you're going to be a threat to the Republic of Haven, for example, it'll almost certainly be the last thing you ever do. The only thing likely to get you killed quicker would be to convince him you're a threat to one of the people he cares about. Which, by the way, is a very good reason we should never, ever, in even the remotest back corner of our minds, think about eliminating Thandi Palane just to tie up the loose ends of Ingemar's assassination. I'll admit, I wouldn't want to do it anyway, but it didn't take me very long to realize that bad as Cachat's reaction might be, he wouldn't be anywhere close to the only enemy we'd make in the process. Trust me on this one, Oravil."

-snip-

"On the other hand," the rear admiral continued, "if you aren't a threat to someone or something he cares about, he's perfectly prepared to leave you alone. As far as I can tell he doesn't hold grudges, either—which may be because anyone he'd be likely to hold a grudge against is already dead, of course. And he recognizes that sometimes it's 'just business' even if interests he does care about are getting pinched a bit. He's willing to be reasonable. But it's always best to bear that image of a rattlesnake basking in the sun in mind, because if he does decide you need to be seen to, the last thing you'll ever hear will be a brief—very brief—rattling sound."

Rozsak's opinion of Victor Cachat.

"Anton Zilwicki is just as dangerous as Cachat, in his own way. The fact that he's got even better contacts with the Audubon Ballroom than we'd thought gives him a sort of unofficial, 'rogue' action arm all his own. It's got a lot less in the way of a formal support structure than Manty or Havenite intelligence, but at the same time, it's less likely to worry about the sorts of constraints star nations have to bear in mind. It's a lot more likely to leave its back trail littered with body parts, too, and it's got one hell of a long reach. He's smart, and he thinks about things, Oravil—hard. He understands just how dangerous a weapon patience is, and he's got a remarkable facility for pulling apparently random facts together to form critical conclusions.

"On the other hand, our initial appreciation of him was considerably more thorough than anything we knew about Cachat, so I can't really say he threw us any surprises. And the bottom line is that even with his links to the Ballroom and people like Jeremy X, I think he's less likely than Cachat to reach for a pulser as his first choice of problem-solving tools. I'm not saying Cachat's a homicidal maniac, you understand. Or that Zilwicki is some kind of choirboy, either, for that matter. Both of them are of the opinion that the best way to remove a threat is to remove it permanently, but at heart, I think, Zilwicki is more of an analyst and Cachat is more of a direct action specialist. They're both almost scarily competent in the field, and they're both among the best analysts I've ever seen, but they've got different . . . emphases, let's say."

And Anton Zilwicki.

There was no question in the governor's mind that Hieronymus had been considerably more idealistic than his daughter, Jessica, yet there'd been even less question, in Oravil Barregos' opinion, that his last name should have been "Quixote" instead of Stein. All the same, as the founder and visible figurehead of the Renaissance Association, he'd enjoyed a unique degree of status, both in and out of the Solarian League, which could not be denied. It might have been the sort of status which was accorded to a lunatic who genuinely believed idealism could triumph over a thousand odd years of bureaucratic corruption, but it had been genuine.

He'd also been the next best thing to completely ineffectual, which was one reason the bureaucrats who truly ran the Solarian League hadn't had him killed decades before. He'd fretted, he'd fumed, he'd been highly visible and an insufferable gadfly, but he'd also been a convenient focus for discontent within the League precisely because he'd been so devoted to the concept of "process" and gradual reform. The bureaucracy had recognized that he was effectively harmless and actually useful because of the way he allowed that discontent to vent itself without ever accomplishing a thing.

Hieronymus Stein and his lack of efficacy.

Just as Barregos had never doubted Hieronymus' idealism was genuine, he'd never doubted Jessica's was little more than skin deep. She'd grown up in the shadows of her father's reputation, and she'd spent her entire life watching him accomplish absolutely nothing in the way of real and lasting change while his politics simultaneously excluded her from any possibility of joining the existing power structure. His prominence, the way the reformist dilettantes and a certain strain of newsies—what was still called "the chattering class"—fawned on him, kept her so close to the entrenched structure which ran the League that she could literally taste it, yet she would never be able to join it. After all, she was the daughter and heir of the senior lunatic and anarchist-in-chief, wasn't she? No one would be crazy enough to invite her into even the outermost reaches of the Solarian League's real ruling circle!

Which was why she'd been so receptive to Ingemar Cassetti's offer to have her father assassinated.

Jessica Stein was part of the assassination so she could head the Renaissance Association and lend her weight or moral superiority to Barregos (or Casseti after he assassinated Barregos) and the Maya Sector when they break off from the League.

The government of the Republic of Erewhon wasn't quite like anyone else's. Probably because the entire system was directly descended from Old Earth's "organized crime" families. Officially, the Republic was currently governed by the triumvirate of Jack Fuentes, Alessandra Havlicek, and Thomas Hall, but there were always other people, with differing degrees of influence, involved in the governing process. Walter Imbesi was one of those "other people," the one who'd organized the neutralization of the Mesan intrusion into Erewhon's sphere of influence.

Erewhon government.

"It's settled," Rozsak agreed. "The Carlucci Industrial Group is currently waiting to sit down with Donald, Brent, and Gail to discuss commercial agreements with the Maya Sector government."

Erewhon is also initiating closer economic ties to the Maya sector.

"The limiting factor's going to be how well we can keep it under the radar horizon from Old Earth, and Donald and I have been working on conduits and pump-priming for a long time now. There's a hell of a lot of money here in Maya. In fact, there's a hell of a lot more of it than Agatá Wodoslawski or anyone else at Treasury back on Old Earth even guesses, which is probably the only reason they haven't insisted on jacking the 'administrative fees' schedule even higher. I think we'll be able to siphon off more than enough for our purposes."

"I don't know, Oravil," Rozsak said. "Our 'purposes' are going to get pretty damned big if and when the wheels finally come off."

"There's no 'if' about it," Barregos responded more grimly. "That's part of what this is all about, after all. But when I say we can siphon off more than enough, what I'm really saying is I can siphon off all that we dare actually spend. Too much hardware floating around too quickly, especially out this way, is likely to make some of my good friends at the ministry just a bit antsy, and we can't afford that. Better we come up a little tight on the military end when the shit finally hits the fan than that we tip off someone back on Old Earth by getting too ambitious too soon and see the balloon go up before we're ready."

Barregos wants to make a generous investment in Erewhon's getting their own shipbuilding industry off the ground, just as he'd also like to buy a number of modern wallers as soon as Erewhon has some.

A sizable percentage of the Maya System's original colonists had come from the planet Kemal. Like most of their fellow immigrants, they'd been none too happy with the planet and society they were leaving behind, but they'd brought their planetary cuisine with them. Now, four hundred T-years later, Mayan pizza—courtesy of the kitchens of Kemal—was among the best in the known galaxy.

That point had particular relevancy at the moment, given the clutter of traditional delivery boxes and plates littered with bits and pieces of pizza crust scattered around the conference room.

Smoking Frog has great pizza, a necessity for long dull staff meetings.

Rozsak nodded in sympathetic agreement. The Eden Habitat was a low-grav geriatric center in geosynchronous orbit around the planet of Smoking Frog. It offered the very best medical care—care as good as anyone could have gotten back on Old Earth herself—and the most luxurious, patient-friendly staff and quarters imaginable.

Eden low-gee orbital geriatric care facility in Maya.

"The Carlucci Industrial Group has the capacity to build anything we need," he said. "It's all just a matter of willingness, figuring out how to pay for it, and time."

"And how to hide everything," Stephens pointed out.

-snip-

"It's not too complicated, whatever it may look like at the moment," Rozsak told him. "Basically, it's sleight-of-hand. The Maya Sector is about to begin investing heavily in Erewhon, which—as the governor will explain to anyone from back home who notices what we're up to—is not only practical but downright farsighted, given Erewhon's current estrangement from Manticore and the steadily worsening interstellar situation out here." He rolled his eyes piously. "Not only does it make sound economic sense for everybody here in the Sector, but it represents an opportunity to start wooing Erewhon—and its wormhole terminus—back into the loving arms of the League."

Hide in plain sight, I like it.

"Anyway, as I'm sure quite a few people back on Old Earth are well aware, Erewhon's never built its own ships-of-the-wall. For that matter, it's bought most of its cruisers from foreign suppliers, as well. Back before they joined the Manticoran Alliance, the Erewhonese bought most of those ships from Solarian builders; since signing up with Manticore, they've bought Manty-built. But that source is going to be closed, especially once they get around to signing that formal mutual defense pact with Haven. On the other hand, Haven's not really in a position to sell them lots and lots of modern wallers, and even if Haven were, the Havenites' general tech base isn't as good—yet, at least—as Manticore's. For that matter, it isn't as good as the sort of 'Manticore lite' tech Erewhon has available on its own.

"So it's going to make sense for Erewhon to begin expanding its own naval building capacity. They've built their own destroyers and other light units for a long time, so it's not as if they don't have the local expertise. They've just never felt able to justify investing in all the infrastructure that goes into building capital ships. Now, obviously, we'd prefer for them to buy Solarian for any wallers they might need." The rear admiral managed to sound as if he actually meant that, Stephens noticed. "Unfortunately," Rozsak continued, "we can't force them to do that, and I'm afraid they're not entirely happy about placing orders for such big-ticket items in Solarian yards. Some of them actually seem to cherish the dark suspicion that the League might hold up the delivery of their new ships in order to do a little judicious arm-twisting where the Erewhon terminus is concerned. Ridiculous, of course, but what can you expect out of a bunch of neobarbs?

"But if they're not going to buy Solarian, and they can't buy Manty or Havenite, then their only alternative is to finally bite the bullet and begin building up the yard capacity to build their own. Obviously, no single star system is going to be able to build a lot of wallers, and it's probably silly of them to invest so much capital in a capacity that's going to be so seriously underutilized. But if they're determined to go ahead and do it, then we might as well invest in the project and help them build it. They're going to be buying a lot of what they need from us, so it'll be a shot in the arm for the Sector's business community. It's going to show its investors a tidy profit, too, and, like I say, it's also likely to give us—'us' in this case being the League as a whole, of course, as far as Old Chicago knows anything about—a toe in the door later on."

Erewhon shipbuilding. I'm going to guess they've experienced the withheld orders as pressure before.

"First, they aren't going to be building any capital ships for us. All of the wallers are going to be being built to standard Erewhonese designs for the ESN. Surely you don't think a loyal sector governor would even be contemplating acquiring unauthorized capital ships of his very own? I'm shocked—shocked—by the very possibility that you might entertain such a thought! Of course, if anyone actually runs the numbers, they're going to realize the Erewhonese are building more SDs than they could possibly pay for—or, for that matter, man!—but it wouldn't be the first time a third rate, neobarb Navy's eyes got bigger than its stomach. If anyone asks, they're planning on putting the excess units straight into mothballs as a mobilization reserve, to be manned only if their navy expands in the face of an emergency situation. Given Battle Fleet's mobilization plans, that should make sense to the geniuses back on Old Earth, for a while, at least. Hopefully, by the time we're actually sending crews out to take possession of our part of the building program, it's not going to matter all that much if someone notices. Don't forget, we're talking at least two or three T-years down the road, where wallers are concerned, even after the yard capacity is built. Probably more like four or five years, minimum, to the first deliveries.

Build times for wallers, the first point for what happens when Erewhon starts building ships for Maya.

"Second, we're going to bury a few 'official' light units of our own in the Erewhonese program." He shrugged. "Given how strapped for hulls Frontier Fleet always is, and given the worsening situation between Manticore and Haven, Governor Barregos obviously has legitimate security concerns. The Sector would make a pretty juicy prize, if any of the locals were gutsy enough—or crazy enough—to try to grab it. That's not likely to happen, of course, but it is likely that privateers and piracy are going to spill over onto our local interests. I mean, the Sector trades with Erewhon, Manticore, and Haven on a regular basis. Sooner or later, we're going to have to start thinking in terms of commerce protection."

Stephens looked a little dubious, and Rozsak shook his head.

"Trust me, Brent. When I get done writing my evaluation as Frontier Fleet's senior officer here in the Sector, everybody back on Old Earth's going to understand that we're critically short of the sort of light units—destroyers, maybe the occasional light cruiser—you need for commerce protection. Unfortunately, everyone's always short of light units like that. Most systems with the kind of economic clout we have are full members of the League, which means they can raise their own system-defense forces to provide that sort of protection. We can't; we're officially a protectorate. That means the only place we can get the escorts we need is from Frontier Fleet, but Frontier Fleet doesn't have them to spare. So, what I'll be doing is using discretionary funds, plus additional 'special subscriptions' the governor is going to screw out of the local merchants and manufacturers, to buy a few extra destroyers, which will then become the property of Frontier Fleet. They'll be integrated into my own squadrons out here, they won't cost the Navy (or any of the other bureaucracies back home) a single centicredit, and when the situation out here finally calms down, Frontier Fleet will cheerfully transfer them somewhere else.

And they'll be buying a few light ships nice and official-like, though most of the cruisers will be officially ESN lent out to support them as the piracy situation gets more out of hand.

"Nobody back home seems to have noticed the . . . tonnage inflation that's been creeping into classes out here, Brent," he pointed out. "By this time, Manty and Havenite 'heavy cruisers' are damned near the size of small battlecruisers, and some of their light cruisers are closing in on the tonnage ranges for Solarian heavy cruisers. The same thing's been happening to their destroyers, too, for that matter. Well, obviously we have to be building ships that could face up to those outsized Manty and Havenite designs, don't we? Of course we do! Still, if no one back on Old Earth has noticed that sizes are creeping up amongst the local neobarb navies, I don't see any special reason why we have to tell them that ours are, do you?"

And there's that, the definitions of ships are subtly changing as they try and make them survivable with MDMs flying every which way. Earth isn't likely to realize what a local light cruiser looks like, or how capable it is compared to their own.

"Officially, we're going to be describing our new units as 'modified Rampart-class destroyers,' for example. We just aren't going to get too specific about what the modifications consist of . . . or the fact that we're talking about destroyers fifty or sixty percent bigger than the original Rampart. I'm pretty sure the geniuses back at OpNav are going to assume that any modifications will result in decreased capabilities, given their view of Manty and Havenite technical capabilities. A view which Jiri's and my modest efforts have probably done just a bit to help shape. And since all of the official correspondence—governmental, as well as from the private builders and inspectors—from the Erewhon side is going to be understating tonnages by about, oh, forty or fifty percent, there's not going to be anything to tell Old Chicago differently. And the beauty of it is that we're not going to be falsifying any paperwork; we're going to be sending them file copies of the actual, official correspondence from Erewhon."

Shrinking the tonnages in official correspondence, quite a favor to the Mayans. And the 'modified Ramparts' designed to take advantage of the Sollies' institutional arrogance.

"The third thing, maybe the most important one of all," he said, his expression much more somber, "is that four- or five-T-year window between now and the delivery of our first wallers. Even after the SDs start coming out of the yards, it's going to take a while for any sort of volume production to build up. We'll hide as many of 'our' wallers as we can in the flow going to Erewhon, of course, but the odds are good that we're going to have to start shooting at somebody before we have a real wall of battle of our own."

Stephens felt a distinct stir of alarm, but Rozsak flashed him the lazy, white-toothed smile of a confident tiger.

"Even with a four- or five-year delay to our own first waller, we're going to be ahead of the curve compared to the rest of the League, Brent. A long way ahead of the curve. Trust me, the 'not invented here' syndrome is going to kick in back home even after they begin to figure out just how screwed any SLN ship is going to be going up against its Havenite—or, even worse, Manty—equivalent. So, what we're really going to need to tide us over is something that can kick the shit out of anything Frontier Fleet's likely to be sending out towards us with unfriendly intentions. Right?"

And that, everything will probably blow up before anyone's likely to find out what they did.

"And it just happens we've come up with something that should let us do that, at least as long as nobody back on Old Earth is paying any attention to all of those ridiculous rumors about how Manticore and Haven have been sticking multiple drives into their missiles. Nonsense, of course! I'm sure those reports are just as exaggerated as Commander Watanapongse's diligent staff has consistently reported they are! Still, it's occurred to us that if someone were building multidrive missiles, and if they happened to have themselves a couple of dozen freighters—freighters that might happen to have military-grade drives, and maybe even sidewalls—that could carry, oh, I don't know, three or four hundred missile pods at a time, then they could probably do a lot of damage to a fleet equipped only with single-drive missiles, don't you think?"

Stephens's eyes narrowed, and Rozsak chuckled again, more harshly.

"That's one of the things Edie and I have been kicking around when we started thinking about doctrine and ship designs. And it's the real reason we're going to be building that extra tonnage into our light combatants. Most of it's going into fire control, not extra weapons."

Something kind of like the Trojan Q-ships, pod-laying freighters, each within a cloud of protecting destroyers brimming with fire control links to handle all the missiles. Though these ones will have military grade drives and sidewalls. Yeah, that sounds like a fairly nasty surprise to anyone who doesn't believe all the military innovation out beyond the borders of civilization.

"There is a household robot in there with a perfectly functional travel program. I haven't personally packed a bag myself in . . . oh, years. Can't remember how many, any longer."

They have robots to clean up, pack the luggage and lift heavy objects around the house. Cathy just refuses to use them, possibly a cultural bias in favor of living servants, I'm sure the robots could otherwise clean up large sectors of the service industry.

Jeremy X grinned. Impishly, as he usually did. "Don't be silly. All the females involved are genetic ex-slaves. So are what pass for their parents—none, in the case of two of them—and every one of their friends. 'Scandal' is simply not an issue, here. What you should be worried about is whether Lars can get off the planet without getting various body parts removed."

Lars Zilwicki, who managed to keep two girlfriends during his extended vacation to Torch. Said girlfriends have just discovered each other, and on an unrelated note they really need to go now.

Most of the plants had been brought from Manticore by Catherine Montaigne. A gift, she said, from Manticore's Queen Elizabeth, plucked from her own extensive gardens.

Berry had appreciated the sentiment. Unfortunately, most of Torch's climate was tropical or sub-tropical, and the planet had its own lush and diverse biota, much of which was quite aggressive. Only the diligence of the palace's gardeners had managed to keep the imported plants alive in the weeks since Montaigne arrived. Now that she was gone, Thandi was pretty sure that Berry would quietly tell her gardeners to let the Manticoran plants die a natural death.

Palace gardens, Manticoran plants not fairing well against the aggressive growth of the local flora.

He shook his head. "I didn't make myself clear. What I meant was that Manpower doesn't belong in the universe in the same way those plants don't belong in this garden. It just doesn't fit. There are too many things about that so-called 'corporation' that are out of place. It should be dying a natural death, like those plants below. Instead, it's thriving—growing more powerful even, judging from the evidence. Why? And how?"

-snip-

"I'm not arguing about the evil and soulless part, Thandi. It doesn't act like a corporation. Evil or not, soulless or not, Manpower is supposed to be a commercial enterprise. It's supposed to be driven by profit, and the profitability of slavery ought to be dying out—dying a natural death like those plants down there. Oh," he shrugged, "their 'pleasure slave' lines will always be profitable, given the way human nature's ugly side has a tendency to keep bobbing to the surface. And there'll always be specific instances—especially for transtellars who need work forces out in the Verge—where the laborer lines offer at least a marginal advantage over automated equipment. But the market should be shrinking, or at best holding steady, and that should mean Manpower ought to be losing steam. Its profit margin should be lower, and it should be producing less 'product,' and it's not."

"Maybe it's just too set in its ways to adjust," Thandi suggested after a moment.

"That sounds like an attractive hypothesis," he conceded, "but it doesn't fit any business model I've been able to put together. Not for a corporation which has been so obviously successful for so long. No one's ever had the chance to examine their books, of course, but they've got to be showing one hell of a profit margin to bankroll everything they get involved in—like their operation right here on 'Verdant Vista,' for example—and I just can't quite convince myself that slavery should be that profitable. Or still that profitable, I suppose I should say."

Something doesn't make sense here. Cachat and Zilwicki both spot it.

"Don't call me that!" she snapped. "I hate it when my friends use that stupid title in private—and you know it!"

Anton went over to sit in an armchair. "He just does it because for reasons I can't figure out—he's a twisty, gnarly, crooked sort of fellow—using flamboyantly royal titles in private scratches some kinky egalitarian itch he's got. But don't worry, girl. He doesn't mean it."

Ferociously egalitarian Cachat's use of Your Majesties. He actually respects Berry, but he's doing it because it amuses him.

"Berry, the very last thing your mother needed was to leave herself open to the charge that she spent her time on Torch consorting with agents of an enemy power."

Berry sneered. Tried to, rather. Sneers were just not an expression that came naturally to her. "Oh, nonsense! As opposed to leaving herself open to the charge that she spent her time on Torch consorting with murderous terrorists like Jeremy?"

"Not the same thing at all," said Victor, shaking his head. "I don't doubt that her political enemies will level that charge against her, as soon as she gets home. It will get a rapt audience among those who already detest her, and produce a massive yawn on the part of everyone else. For pity's sake, girl, they've been accusing her of that for decades. No matter how murderous and maniacal people may think Jeremy X is, nobody thinks he's an enemy of the Star Kingdom. Whereas I most certainly am."

Victor is doing Cathy Montaigne a favor by not meeting her, however he rationalizes it in benefit to Haven by cleaning up Manticore's politics a little.

She wouldn't tease him about it, though. Not even later, when they were in private again. By now, she knew Victor well enough to know that he'd simply retreat into obfuscation. He'd advance complex and subtle reasoning to the effect that retaining the personal trust of the Zilwickis would actually work to Haven's benefit, in the long run, and that it would be foolish to sacrifice that for the sake of petty maneuvering.

And it might even be true. But it would still be an excuse. Even if Victor didn't think there'd be any long-range advantage for Haven, he'd behave the same way. And if that excuse failed of its purpose, he'd think up a different one.

Victor Cachat is a man of many complexities.

[Simon_Jester]

Erewhon shipbuilding. I'm going to guess they've experienced the withheld orders as pressure before.

Also, and I think you missed this, the comment on 'general tech base,' with the implication that Erewhon can build things Haven can't. Even if Erewhonese native-built military technology isn't as shooty as Havenite technology, that doesn't automatically mean Haven can do everything Erewhon can do.

This may help explain how the Havenites go about absorbing the Erewhonese technical transfer: some of what Erewhon adopted from Manticore, knowing they could adopt it, is stuff that Haven cannot in turn adopt from Erewhon without retooling important industry.

They have robots to clean up, pack the luggage and lift heavy objects around the house. Cathy just refuses to use them, possibly a cultural bias in favor of living servants, I'm sure the robots could otherwise clean up large sectors of the service industry.

They probably do, realistically. One thing I'm not sure Weber really grasps in his stories is the question of what everyone's going to do all day in an economy where per capita productivity is... negligible for unskilled labor, but massive for skilled labor that knows how to work with expert systems and robots to make stuff happen.

It's an issue we're beginning to encounter in real life.

He shook his head. "I didn't make myself clear. What I meant was that Manpower doesn't belong in the universe in the same way those plants don't belong in this garden. It just doesn't fit. There are too many things about that so-called 'corporation' that are out of place. It should be dying a natural death, like those plants below. Instead, it's thriving—growing more powerful even, judging from the evidence. Why? And how?"

-snip-

"I'm not arguing about the evil and soulless part, Thandi. It doesn't act like a corporation. Evil or not, soulless or not, Manpower is supposed to be a commercial enterprise. It's supposed to be driven by profit, and the profitability of slavery ought to be dying out—dying a natural death like those plants down there. Oh," he shrugged, "their 'pleasure slave' lines will always be profitable, given the way human nature's ugly side has a tendency to keep bobbing to the surface. And there'll always be specific instances—especially for transtellars who need work forces out in the Verge—where the laborer lines offer at least a marginal advantage over automated equipment. But the market should be shrinking, or at best holding steady, and that should mean Manpower ought to be losing steam. Its profit margin should be lower, and it should be producing less 'product,' and it's not."

"Maybe it's just too set in its ways to adjust," Thandi suggested after a moment.

"That sounds like an attractive hypothesis," he conceded, "but it doesn't fit any business model I've been able to put together. Not for a corporation which has been so obviously successful for so long. No one's ever had the chance to examine their books, of course, but they've got to be showing one hell of a profit margin to bankroll everything they get involved in—like their operation right here on 'Verdant Vista,' for example—and I just can't quite convince myself that slavery should be that profitable. Or still that profitable, I suppose I should say."

Something doesn't make sense here. Cachat and Zilwicki both spot it.

This is the sort of thing I referenced earlier. Now that they're in a good position to carefully examine Manpower's actions and what a really major Mesan operation looks like on the ground, they're realizing that Manpower doesn't act like a corporation.

Of course, the real explanation is that Manpower is basically a front through which the Mesan Alignment carries out its genetic experimentation and manipulates various power blocs throughout space. Unlike a real corporation, that means they will pursue unprofitable ventures for 'the greater good.'

[VhenRa]

Also, RE: Maya Sector Fleet.

Cauldron of Ghosts reveals they are also building Podlaying Battlecruisers in the Erewhon yards.

[Ahriman238]

We take a break from your regularly scheduled novel for some snippets of life on scenic Mesa.

When they'd been kids, he never would have believed Jack would be the one to go into the Mesan Alignment's security services. The McBryde genome was an alpha line, and it had been deep inside "the onion" for the last four or five generations. From the time they'd been upperclassmen in high school, they'd both known far more of the truth about their homeworld than the vast majority of their classmates, and it had been a foregone conclusion that they'd be going into the . . . family business one way or another. But Jack the joker, the raconteur of hilarious stories, the guy with the irresistible grin and the devastating ability to attract women, had been the absolute antithesis of anything which would have come to Zachariah's mind if someone mentioned the words "security" or "spy" to him.

Which might explain why Jack had been so successful at his craft, he supposed.

Meet Zach and Jack McBryde. Jack is a spook, Zach a technician. They're both 'Alpha line' supermen, there being at least four lines, predictably alpha, beta, gamma and delta. Not sure what distinctions there are between the lines, perhaps each is meant to be a caste in their Brave New Universe. In any case, we see that even alpha lines aren't necessarily in on the Alingment's master plan.

Both of them, Jack knew without false modesty, were definitely on the bright side, even for Mesan alpha lines, but Zachariah's talent as a synthesizer had come as something of a surprise. That could still happen, of course, even for someone whose genetic structure and talents had been as carefully designed as the McBryde genome's. However much the Long-Range Planning Board might dislike admitting it, the complex of abilities, skills, and talents tied up in the general concept of "intelligence" remained the least amenable to its manipulation. Oh, they could guarantee high general IQs, and Jack couldn't remember the last representative of one of the Alignment's alpha lines who wouldn't have tested well up into the ninety-ninth-plus percentile of the human race. But the LRPB's efforts to preprogram an individual's actual skill set was problematical at best. In fact, he was always a little amused by the LRPB's insistence that it was just about to break through that last, lingering barrier to its ability to fully uplift the species.

Personally, Jack was more than a little relieved by the fact that the Board still couldn't design the human brain's software reliably and completely to order. It wasn't an opinion he was likely to discuss with his colleagues, but despite his complete devotion to the Detweiler vision and the Alignment's ultimate objectives, he didn't really like the thought of micromanaging human intelligence and mental abilities. He was entirely in favor of pushing the frontiers in both areas, but he figured there would always be room for serendipitous combinations of abilities. Besides, if he was going to be honest, he didn't really like the thought of his theoretical children or grandchildren becoming predesigned chips in the Alignment's grand machine.

Mesa still can't breed a specific type of intelligence and so create an ideal technician, strategist, etc. Which is why they need 'phenotype engineering' to torture slaves into fitting their pre-assigned role. This does extend to their own ubermensch, though research is ongoing. For the moment they can play merry hell with the bell-curve of average human capabilities, but not without some trade-offs.

In that regard, he thought, he had a great deal in common with Leonard Detweiler and the rest of the Alignment's original founders. Leonard had always insisted that the ultimate function of genetically improving humanity was to permit individuals to truly achieve their maximum potential. Whatever temporary compromises he might have been willing to make in the name of tactics, his ultimate, unwavering objective had been to produce a species of individuals, ready and able to exercise freedom of choice in their own lives. All he'd wanted to do was to give them the very best tools he could. He certainly wouldn't have favored designing free citizens, fully realized members of the society for which he'd striven, the way Manpower designed genetic slaves. The idea was to expand horizons, not limit them, after all.

There were moments when Jack suspected the Long-Range Planning Board had lost sight of that. Hardly surprising if it had, he supposed. The Board was responsible not simply for overseeing the careful, continually ongoing development of the genomes under its care, but also for providing the Alignment with the tactical abilities its strategies and operations required. Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that it should continually strive for a greater degree of . . . quality control.

Philosophy of the Alignment's founder, Leonard Dettweiler contrasted with it's contemporary leaders.

"What do you mean 'on the scary side,' Zack?"

"Oh, I'm not talking about any hardware surprises, if that's what you're thinking," Zachariah assured him. "As far as I know, the Manties didn't trot out a single new gadget this time around. Which, much as I hate to admit it"—he smiled a bit sourly—"actually came as a pleasant surprise, for a change." He shook his head. "No, what bothers me is the fact that Manticore and Haven are cooperating on anything. The fact that they managed to get the League on board with them, too, doesn't make me any happier, of course. But if anybody on the other side figures out the truth about the Verdant Vista wormhole . . ."

I bet it's a nice change of pace. And yes, there's lots of hints about the dread secret of the Torch wormhole junction. I'm guessing one of the wormholes leads to Mesa. That or hostile aliens far beyond the human sphere, but I'm betting on Mesa.

"Would I be intruding into those 'operational details' if I asked if you've got any feel for whether or not the other side's likely to figure out the truth about the wormhole?"

"That's another of those things I just don't know about," Jack replied. "I don't know if there was actually any information there in the system to be captured and compromised. For that matter, I don't have any clue whether or not the Manpower idiots on the spot were ever informed that the terminus had already been surveyed at all. I sure as hell wouldn't have told them, that's for sure! And even if I knew that, I don't think anyone knows whether or not they managed to scrub their databanks before they got shot in the head. What I am pretty sure of, though, is that anything any of them knew is probably in the hands of someone we'd rather didn't have it by now, assuming anybody thought to ask them about it." He grimaced. "Given how creative its ex-property on the planet was, I'm pretty damn sure that any of Manpower's people answered any questions they were asked. Not that it would have done them any good in the end."

-snip-

"When it comes right down to it, Zack," Jack pointed out after a moment, "you're actually probably in a better position than me to estimate whether or not the Ballroom—or anyone else, for that matter—picked up a hint about the wormhole. I know your department was involved in at least some of the original research for the initial survey, and I also know we're still working on trying to figure out the hyper mechanics involved in the damned thing. In fact, I'd assumed you were still in the loop on that end of things."

A rising inflection and an arched eyebrow turned the last sentence into a question, and Zachariah nodded briefly.

"I'm still in the loop, generally speaking, but it's not like the astrophysics are still a central concern of our shop. We settled most of the military implications decades ago. I'm sure someone else's still working on the theory behind it full time, but we've pretty much mined out the military concerns."

More ominous hints.

Neither brother was going to shed any tears for the "Manpower's people" in question. Although they didn't talk about it much, Zachariah knew Jack found Manpower just as distasteful as he did himself. Both of them knew how incredibly useful Manpower Incorporated had been to the Alignment over the centuries, but designed to be used or not, genetic slaves were still people, of a sort, at least. And Zachariah also knew that unlike some of Jack's colleagues on the operational side, his brother didn't particularly blame the Anti-Slavery League, genetic slaves in general, or even the Audubon Ballroom in particular, for the savagery of their operations against Manpower. The Ballroom was a factor Jack had to take into consideration, especially given its persistent (if generally unsuccessful) efforts to build an effective intelligence net right here on Mesa. He wasn't about to take the Ballroom threat lightly, nor was any sympathy he felt going to prevent him from hammering the Ballroom just as hard as he could any time the opportunity presented itself. Yet even though one difference between Manpower and the Alignment was supposed to be that the Alignment didn't denigrate or underestimate its future opponents, Zachariah also knew, quite a few of Jack's colleagues did exactly that where the Ballroom was concerned. Probably, little though either McBryde brother liked to admit it, because those colleagues of his bought into the notion of the slaves' fundamental inferiority even to normals, far less to the Alignment's enhanced genomes.

Mesan views of others, which the McBryde brothers, at least, do not seem to share.

Herlander was a mathematician and theoretical astrophysicist, and his wife Harriet—their friends often referred to them as H&H—was also a mathematician, although she was assigned to weapons research. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Harriet had a habit of leaving written notes stuck to the refrigerator rather than using her personal minicomp to mail them to him. It was one of what he considered her charming foibles, and he supposed he couldn't really blame her. Given how much time she spent with electronically formatted data, there was something appealing about relying on old-fashioned handwriting and paper.

Meet Dr. Herlander Simoes (with an ~ over the o I can't duplicate on this computer) a Mesan astrophysicist and major player in this story. Concerned when his wife and daughter are nowhere to be found when he gets home from work. They're fine, by the way.

Like a great many—indeed, the vast majority—of the alpha line pairings the Long-Range Planning Board arranged, Herlander and Harriet had been steered together because of the way their genomes complemented one another. Despite that, they'd had no children of their own yet. At fifty-seven, Herlander was still a very young man for a third-generation prolong recipient—especially one whose carefully improved body would probably have been good for at least a couple of centuries even without the artificial therapies. Harriet was a few T-years older than he was, but not enough to matter, and the two of them had been far too deeply buried in their careers to comfortably free up the amount of time required to properly rear children. They'd planned on having several biologicals of their own—all star line couples were encouraged to do that, in addition to the cloned pairings the Board produced—but they'd also planned on waiting several more years, at a minimum.

Although the LRPB obviously expected good things out of their children, no one had pushed them to accelerate their schedule. Valuable as their offspring would probably prove, especially with the LRBP's inevitable subtle improvements, it had been made pretty clear to them that the work both of them were engaged upon was of greater immediate value.

Marriage and reproduction among alpha lines on Mesa. Including steering alpha lines together and offering inducements to have children. They also produce clones not raised by the gene-donors, presumably to keep prize genetic stock from being lost to accident.

"I'm sure both of you are aware that the Board pursues a multi-pronged strategy. In addition to the standard pairings such as we arranged in your case, we also work with more . . . tightly directed lines, shall we say. In cases such as your own, we encourage variation, explore the possibilities for enhancement of randomly occurring traits and developments which might not occur to us when we model potential outcomes. In other cases, we know precisely what it is we're trying to accomplish, and we tend to do more in vitro fertilization and cloning on those lines."

She'd paused until both Simões had nodded in understanding. What Herlander had realized, although he wasn't certain Harriet had, was that quite a bit of that "directed" development had been carried out under cover of Manpower Incorporated's slave breeding programs, which made the perfect cover for almost anything the LRPB might have been interested in exploring.

They try deliberate tinkering with vat-grown clones and slaves, but encourage old-fashioned reproduction for variety and to allow for chance combinations of traits they'd not have thought of. Wow, a eugenics superman race dreamed up by someone who might have cracked a high school biology text.

"For the past few decades, we seem to have been hitting a wall in one of our in vitro alpha lines," Fabre had continued. "We've identified the potential for what amounts to an intuitive mathematical genius, and we've been attempting to bring that potential into full realization. I realize both of you are extraordinarily gifted mathematicians in your own rights. For that matter, both of you test well up into the genius range in that area. The reason I mention this is that we believe the potential for this particular genome represents an intuitive mathematical ability which would be at least an order of magnitude greater than your own. Obviously, that kind of capability would be of enormous advantage to us if only because of its consequences for the sort of work I know you two are already engaged upon. Long-term, of course, the ability to inject it into the genetic pool as a reliably replicatable trait would be of even greater value to the maturation of the species as a whole."

One of the many projects they're working on, they think they've found a genetic potential for an intuitive math gift an order of magnitude beyond an 'ordinary' genius alpha line mathematician.

"The most frequent result is a child of about average intelligence for one of our alpha lines, which is to say substantially brighter than the vast majority of normals or even the bulk of our other star lines. That's hardly a bad result, but it's obviously not the one we're looking for, because while the child may have an interest in mathematics, there's no sign of the capability we're actually trying to enhance. Or, if it's there at all, it's at best only partially realized."

"Less often, but more often than we'd like, the result is a child who's actually below the median line for our alpha lines. Many of them would be quite suitable for a gamma line, or for that matter for the general Mesan population, but they're not remotely of the caliber we're looking for."

"And finally," her expression had turned somber, "we get a relatively small number of results where all early testing suggests the trait we're trying to bring out is present. It's in there, waiting. But there's an instability factor, as well."

"Instability?" It had been Herlander's turn to ask the question when Fabre paused this time, and the geneticist had nodded heavily.

"We lose them," she'd said simply. The Simões must have looked perplexed, because she'd grimaced again . . . less happily than before.

"They do fine for the first three or four T-years," she'd said. "But then, somewhere in the fifth year, we start to lose them to something like an extreme version of the condition which used to be called autism."

Results of the math gene tampering. Tread lightly, Weber, I have very little patience for people claiming autistics are 'lost' to them.

"I'm not surprised you didn't recognize the term, since it's been a while since we've had to worry about it, but autism was a condition which affected the ability to interact socially. It was eliminated from the Beowulf population long before we left for Mesa, and we really don't have a great deal in even the professional literature about it, anymore, far less in our more general information bases. For that matter, we're not at all sure what we're looking at here is what would have been defined as autism back in the dark ages. For one thing, according to the literature we do have—which is extremely limited, since most of it's over eight hundred years old—autism usually began to manifest by the time a child was three, and this is occurring substantially later. Onset also seems to be much more sudden and abrupt than anything we've been able to find in the literature. But autism was marked by impaired social interaction and communication and by restricted and repetitive behavior, and that's definitely what we're seeing here.

"In this case, however, we think there are some significant differences, as well—that we're not talking about the same condition, but rather one which has certain gross parallels. It seems from the literature that, like many conditions, autism manifested itself in several different ways and in different degrees of severity. By comparison with what our research has turned up about autism, what we're observing in these children would appear to fall at the extremely severe end of the spectrum. One point of similarity with extreme autism is that, unlike its milder form and other learning disorders, new communication skills don't simply stop developing; they're lost. These children regress. They lose communication skills they already had, they lose the ability to focus on their environment or interact with it, and they retreat into a sort of shutdown condition. In the more extreme cases, they become almost totally uncommunicative and nonresponsive within a couple of T-years."

I'm going to go with gross parallels, and not make a big stink of it this time. Unintended consequences in hacking of a DNA chain and gluing it back together? Who could have foreseen this?

"All our evaluations confirm that the two of you are a well-adjusted, balanced couple. Your basic personalities complement one another well, and you're clearly well-suited to one another and to creating a stable home environment. Both of you also have the sort of affinity for mathematics we're trying to produce in this line, if not on the level we're looking for. Both of you have very successfully applied that ability in your daily work, and both of you have demonstrated high levels of empathy. What we'd like to do—what we intend to do—is to place one of our clones with you to be raised by you. Our hope is that by placing this child with someone who has the same abilities, who can provide the guidance—and the understanding—someone intended to be a prodigy requires, we'll be able to . . . ease it through whatever critical process is going off the rails when we lose them. As I say, we've made significant improvements at the genetic level; now we need to provide the most beneficial, supportive, and nurturing environment we can, as well."

So, hope it's an environmental cause? Also, apparently they can call you up in Mesan society and say "Here, raise this clone."

And that was how Francesca had entered the Simões' life. She didn't look a thing like either of her parents, although that was scarcely unheard of on Mesa. Herlander had sandy hair, hazel eyes, and what he thought of as reasonably attractive features, but he wasn't especially handsome, by any means. One thing the Mesan Alignment had very carefully eschewed was the sort of "cookie cutter" physical similarity which was so much a part of the Scrags descended from the genetic "super soldiers" of Old Earth's Final War. Physical attractiveness was part of almost any alpha or beta line, but physical diversity was also emphasized as part of a very conscious effort to avoid producing a readily identifiable appearance, and Harriet had black hair and sapphire blue eyes. She was also (in Herlander's obviously unbiased opinion) a lot more attractive than he was.

Most ubermensch are attractive compared to baseline humans, but they're also a very diverse crowd, specifically to avoid the problem with Scrags where they're immediately and easily identifiable. The clone thing may be more common than I was joking of, or genetic tweaking since it's apparently relatively common for children to look nothing like their parents.

They'd both been aware of the fact that they were supposed to be providing the love and nurture to help ease Francesca through the development process, as Fabre had put it. They'd been prepared to do just that; what they hadn't been prepared for was how inevitable Francesca herself had made it all. Her fourth and fifth years had been particularly tense and trying for them as she entered what Fabre had warned them was the greatest danger period, based on previous experience. But Francesca had breezed past the critical threshold, and they'd felt themselves relaxing steadily for the last couple of years.

Francesca doesn't turn into a pseudo-autistic or a vegetable. Yay.

"They screened me just after I picked her up at school and asked me to bring her down. Apparently . . . apparently they picked up a couple of small anomalies in her last evaluation."

Simões' heart seemed to stop beating.

"What sort of anomalies?" he demanded.

"Nothing enormously off profile. Dr. Fabre's looked at the results herself, and she assures me that so far, at least, we're still within parameters. We're just . . . drifting a little bit to one side. So they wanted me to bring her in for a more complete battery of evaluations. I didn't expect you to be home this early, and I didn't want to worry you at work, but when I realized we were going to be late, I decided to screen you. I didn't realize you were already at home until you answered."

But something is wrong now, oh no!

"I don't mean to sound skeptical," said Jeremy X, sounding skeptical. "But are you sure you're not all just suffering from a case of EIS?" He pronounced the acronym phonetically.

Princess Ruth looked puzzled. "What's 'Ice'?"

"EIS. Stands for Excessive Intelligence Syndrome," said Anton Zilwicki. "Also known in the Office of Naval Intelligence as Hall of Mirrors Fever."

"In StateSec, we called it Spyrot," said Victor Cachat. "The term's carried over into the FIS, too."

Which is what happens when you have too much data, someone smart enough to think they see a pattern in it and next thing you know you've invented elaborate conspiracy theories like Mesa being behind everything bad that's ever happened... er, bad example.

"Yeah, this one! From what's-his-name." She glanced at the display. "Menninger. Remember? He was talking about Pharmaceuticals' overall exposure. They were already leasing their entire operational site here from Manpower, but they were counting on Manpower's giving them preferred slave prices, as well, and let's face it, Manpower transtellars don't have a whole lot of fraternal feeling for each other. Manpower's eaten quite a few of its Mesan competitors along the way, and this guy was worried they were setting Pharmaceuticals up for their next sandwich by putting them deep enough in Manpower's pocket they'd have to accept an unfriendly takeover or go bust!"

Jeremy X cleared his throat. "Let's not forget how closely most Mesan corporations collude with each other, as well, though. Sure, they've demonstrated a huge share of shark DNA over the years, but they do work together, as well. Especially when they're engaged in something the rest of the human race isn't all that likely to want to invest in. Openly, at least. And you can add to that the fact that we're certain that many of them are actually owned, in whole or in part, by Manpower. Like Jessyk."

Anton pursed his lips, considering the point. "You're suggesting, in other words, that Manpower was deliberately accepting a loss in order to boost the profits of Mesa Pharmaceuticals—in which they possibly have a major ownership share, even if they don't control it outright."

Good idea. Wrong. But good idea.

"It's not like their position with Jessyk, where the legal fiction that Jessyk's a separate concern helps give them at least a little cover when they're moving slaves or other covert cargoes. There wouldn't be any point in maintaining that sort of separation from Pharmaceuticals, and there was certainly no legal reason they'd have had to hide that connection. And there are a lot of reasons why they shouldn't have bothered. If the two of them were already connected, they were at least doubling their administrative costs by maintaining two separate, divorced operations here on Torch. Not to mention everywhere else the two of them are doing business together. Why do that? Even assuming they are in bed together, and that Manpower is covering its production costs back home, despite the discounted rate, we're still looking at Peter robbing his own pockets to pay his flunky Paul. They were discounting their slaves to Pharmaceuticals by over twenty-five percent. Leaving aside all the other economic inefficiencies built into the relationship, that's a hell of a hit to the profit margin they could've made selling them somewhere else instead of dumping them here to subsidize Pharmaceuticals' inefficient—by their own field managers' estimate—operation!"

Nope, still doesn't make sense but I have faith you'll get there.

Because the Beowulfers imported a full, functional technological base, and because they were within such close proximity to Sol that scientific data could be transmitted from one planet to another in less than forty years, they never endured any of the decivilizing experiences many other colonies did. In fact, Beowulf has remained pretty much on the cutting edge of science, especially in the life sciences, for the better part of two millennia. Following the horrific damage suffered by Old Earth after its Final War, Beowulf took the lead in reconstruction efforts on the homeworld, and Beowulfers take what is probably a pardonable pride in their achievements. Beowulf's possession of a wormhole junction terminus—especially a terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, which is the largest and most valuable in known space—hasn't hurt its economic position one bit. In short, when you arrive in Beowulf you will be visiting a very wealthy, very stable, very populous, and very powerful star system which, especially in light of the local autonomy enjoyed by members of the Solarian League, is essentially a single-star polity in its own right.

Solly travel guide on Beowulf.

[Kingmaker]

Meet Zach and Jack McBryde. Jack is a spook, Zach a technician. They're both 'Alpha line' supermen, there being at least four lines, predictably alpha, beta, gamma and delta. Not sure what distinctions there are between the lines, perhaps each is meant to be a caste in their Brave New Universe. In any case, we see that even alpha lines aren't necessarily in on the Alingment's master plan.

I think 'line' is in reference to how successful they were in actually creating supermen, i.e. alphas were the most consistently superior in terms of intelligence and physical fitness. However, all four of the greek letter genotypes are regarded as superior to baseline humans (I think).

Philosophy of the Alignment's founder, Leonard Dettweiler contrasted with it's contemporary leaders.

Somewhere, though I'm not sure which book it is in, there's a discussion of the start of the alignment. It is pointed out that, at least initially (as in, before they actually started the whole project), they were pretty much sincere genetic transhumanists. There were no plans to take over the world or implement stratification of society based on genetics. Unfortunately, they were advocating for human augmentation at a time when that was very unpopular and Beowulf was explicitly against attempts to improve on baseline genetics. End result is that they're more or less driven underground and, like any good mad scientist, decide that they would Show Them All. Fast forward a bit and they've gone completely off the rails and Showing Them All has taken precedence over improving the human experience and genetic slavery has poisoned the well on human augmentation via genetics.

[VhenRa]

In Cauldron of Ghosts, one of the Alignment agents actually in internal monologue pretty much has come to the conclusion had Mesa not been a bunch of mustache twirlers with Manpower, their objective would have been completed a century or more ago.

[Simon_Jester]

Meet Zach and Jack McBryde. Jack is a spook, Zach a technician. They're both 'Alpha line' supermen, there being at least four lines, predictably alpha, beta, gamma and delta. Not sure what distinctions there are between the lines, perhaps each is meant to be a caste in their Brave New Universe. In any case, we see that even alpha lines aren't necessarily in on the Alingment's master plan.

Gamma lines are, however, still 'superhuman,' or at least mildly so. "Delta" I can't remember any specific references to; it may refer to the level of modification seen in Mesa's own baseline population, or some such.

"They do fine for the first three or four T-years," she'd said. "But then, somewhere in the fifth year, we start to lose them to something like an extreme version of the condition which used to be called autism."

Results of the math gene tampering. Tread lightly, Weber, I have very little patience for people claiming autistics are 'lost' to them.

The Mesans' genetic ideology is, well, kind of Nazi, so this I sympathize with the fact that you're gonna get your berserk button pushed.

So, hope it's an environmental cause? Also, apparently they can call you up in Mesan society and say "Here, raise this clone."

They think they fixed the bug this time. Also, it seems more normal for the Alignment's society, because they actually believe in the whole 'we are raising adorable little ubermenschen and ubermadchen for the greater good!' line when it comes to their kids.

[Ahriman238]

A chapter with effectively no content useful for this, so let me summarize. In the Hainuwele system in the Verge there's a giant amusement park station, complete with roller-coasters and Ferris Wheels in space (in airtight cars, naturally) Parmley Station, build by a venture capitalist, Michael Parmley who expected it to service vast numbers of people once the gas mining boomed. It never boomed. So his family are stuck there after his death. Manpower has been using the station for a few years now as a transfer point for slaves, after two major battles the clan (oh, they call themselves the Butre clan, after Parmley's widow) and Manpower came to an arrangement where Manpower keeps to their small part of the station and the clan receive a large sum to look the other way thirty years ago. We good?

She was the lieutenant who served as his executive officer, insofar as the command structure of Beowulf's Biological Survey Corps could be depicted in such a formal manner. Even Beowulf's regular armed forces had customs which were considered peculiar by the majority of the galaxy's other armed forces. The traditions and practices of the Biological Survey Corps were considered downright bizarre—at least, by those few armed forces who understood that the BSC was actually Beowulf's equivalent of an elite commando force.

There weren't many of them. The Star Kingdom's Office of Naval Intelligence was probably the only foreign service whose officials really understood the full scope of the BSC's activities—and they kept their collective mouths tightly shut. The tacit alliance between Manticore and Beowulf was longstanding and very solid, for all that it was mostly informal.

The Andermanni knew enough to know that the BSC was not the innocuous-sounding outfit it passed itself off to be, but probably not much more than that. The BSC didn't operate very extensively in Andermanni territory. As for the Havenites . . .

Beowulf's Biological Survey Corps are secretly elite anti-Mesan commandoes. This fact is generally a well-kept secret, though Manty ONI knows, the Andermani know something's up but not necessarily what, and no one's sure how much Haven Intelligence knows or doesn't know after two revolutions and the nuking of most of their records. Certainly the general public doesn't know the secret of the BSC.

The Biological Survey Corps' primary mission could best be described as that of conducting a secret war against Manpower, Inc. and Mesa, however, which gave its personnel a somewhat different perspective. Theirs, after all, was a pragmatic, narrowly defined purpose—a point Hugh was cheerfully prepared to admit with absolutely no trace of apology. Beowulf's continuing galactic prominence in the life-sciences affected all aspects of Beowulfan culture, including that of its military, and that was especially true of the BSC. Assuming you could have gotten any one of the its combat teams to discuss their activities at all—not likely, to say the least—they'd have probably said something to the effect that a person shoots their own dog, when the critter goes rabid.

As the centuries passed, most of the galaxy had forgotten or at least half-forgotten that the people who founded Manpower, Inc., had been Beowulfan renegades. But Beowulf had never forgotten.

Why the BSC exists.

The com beeped, announcing an incoming message. Arai made his own grimace, and straightened up from the chair.

"Speak of the proverbial devil," he said. "Wait . . . let's say seven seconds, Marti, and then answer the call."

"Why seven?" she complained. "Why not five, or ten?"

Arai clucked his tongue. "Five is too few, ten is too many—for a slovenly crew engaged in a risky enterprise."

"That took just about seven seconds," Takano said admiringly.

Expected response time for a slaver, like the one the BSC is using to board the station.

But Garner was already starting to speak. She didn't bother making any shushing gestures, though. Despite its battered and antiquated appearance, the equipment on the Ouroboros' command deck was like the rest of the ship—the product of up-to-date Beowulfan technology, beneath the unprepossessing exterior. No one on the other end of the com system would hear or see anything except Marti Garner's face and voice.

Auto-filter noise outside of the person at the com station. Nice.

That portion of the galaxy which had so far been explored by the human race measured less than a thousand light years in any one direction. As tiny as it was compared to the rest of the galaxy—much less the known universe as a whole—the region encompassed was still so enormous that the human mind had a hard time really grasping its extent and everything it contained.

"Less than a thousand light-years" is just a string of words. It doesn't sound like much, to human brains which almost automatically translate the term into familiar analogs like kilometers. A person in any sort of decent physical condition could easily walk several hundred kilometers if they had to, after all.

Astronomers and experienced spacers understood the reality. Very few other people did. The rough and uneven approximation of a globe which marked the extent of human settlement of the galaxy, in the two millennia that had passed since the beginning of the human Diaspora, contained innumerable settlements that no one had any knowledge of beyond the people who lived there and a relative handful of others who might have reason to visit. And for every such still-inhabited settlement, there were at least two or three which were now either completely uninhabited or inhabited only by squatters.

So far the human explored/colonized sphere of space centered on Earth goes out a bit under a thousand light-years in each direction, or about 20% of the Milky Way by diameter. Odd I'd think, since they have the FTL to push out quite a further if they're willing to accept a long trip. But part of the point here is that humanity's expansions across the stars was neither immediate nor neat, and there's likely three uncharted, abandoned or destroyed colonies for every world generally known to and participating in galactic society. Which makes them ripe for exploitation by Manpower and other shady megacorps.

"Don't tell me the two of you are back at it again. Isn't there something in the regulations about excessive sexual congress between team members?"

"No," said Garner. "There isn't."

She was quite right, as Stephanie knew perfectly well—given that she and Haruka were enjoying a sexual relationship themselves at the moment. The customs and traditions of Beowulf's military, especially its elite commando units, would have made the officers of any other military force turn pale. And, in fact, probably only people raised in Beowulf's unusually relaxed mores could have handled it without disciplinary problems. For Beowulfers, sex was a perfectly natural human activity, no more remarkable in itself than eating. The members of a military unit shared meals, after all, not to mention any number of collective forms of entertainment like playing chess or cards. So why shouldn't they share the pleasure of sexual activity also?

Their relaxed habits on the matter worked quite well, especially given the long missions which characterized the teams of the Biological Survey Corps. It did so because the Corps' teams also followed the Beowulfan custom of making a clear and sharp distinction between sex and marriage. Beowulfan couples who decided to marry—technically, form a civil union; marriage as such was a strictly religious affair under the Beowulfan legal code—quite often chose, at least for a time, to maintain monogamous sexual relations.

Beowulf has no regs about fraternization within the chain of command. Actually, Beowulf's sexual mores are pretty much anything goes as long as it's between consenting adults.

Not surprisingly, one of Beowulf's most ingrained customs was thou shalt mind thine own damn business.

Not a bad custom.

The same was not true, on the other hand, for the team member who always played the role of a heavy labor unit. The moment any slaver's eyes caught sight of Hugh Arai, they wanted to see his tongue sticking out. The man was huge and so muscular he looked downright misshapen. There was no way they were going to let him near them, no matter how many chains he was laden with, until they saw the Manpower genetic marker. Even from a bit of a distance, that marker was effectively impossible to disguise or mimic.

Arai stretched. The small command deck seemed to get even smaller. He smiled at his comrades and, lazily, stuck out his tongue.

There was no need to fake a Manpower genetic marker. It was right there on the top of his tongue, as it had been since he came out of the Manpower process that substituted for birth.

The team leader, Hugh Arai, is a former slave himself. Apparently it's almost impossible to fake a Manpower tongue-barcode, and it can be recognized as genuine even standing well out of reach.

F-23xb-74421-4/5.

"F" indicated the heavy labor line. "23" was the particular type, which was one designed for extremely heavy labor. "xb" instead of the usual "b" or "d" for a male slave indicated an experimental variety—in this case a genetic manipulation aimed to produce unusual dexterity along with enormous strength. "74421" indicated the batch, and "4/5" noted that Hugh had been the fourth of five male babies "born" at the same time.

Variation on the letter for gender code, though still no mention of what c and d mean. X for an experimental tweak to a slave, I'm assuming that's just tagged on and that he isn't actually from the 74,421st batch of an experimental line. I feel really secure in this.

Sarah looked like she was about to yawn. "Of course there are. Weren't you paying attention to your biology tutor? Rats and cockroaches—humanity's inescapable companions in the Diaspora. By now, the relationship is practically commensal."

Two things that live wherever humanity does.

By the time all three of them were in place, they'd be able to provide the clan with direct observations of what was happening with the transfer. They used antique methods for their signals, attaching the clips to wires that the clan had painstakingly laid in many of the station's air ducts. That probably made their transmissions undetectable, at least with the sort of equipment slavers were likely to have.

If anything went wrong, their assignment was simply to flee the area after making a report. Older clan members with weapons would then move in to deal with whatever needed to be dealt with.

The youngest clan members hide in the vents to spy on the slavers every time a new ship comes in. They also use a small device that clips to a wire for wired commo, undetectable with most gear. The ability to hide like rats in the service spaces and their exclusive control of all station maps and diagrams was essential to the clan's early battles with the slavers.

Nobody was really expecting any trouble. Brice had only been two years old the last time violence erupted between the clan and the slavers. Two slavers who'd been part of the station's staff, both male, had been irritated because the latest cargo to arrive had contained no pleasure units. No female units of any kind, in fact. So, after getting drunk, they'd decided to make good the loss by searching out a female from the clan.

It had all been over very quickly. The clan left the corpses in the same compartment that was always used for pay-offs, along with a recording from Ganny El demanding punitive damages. Well, punitive pay, anyway. You couldn't really call it "damages" since the only ones damaged had been the two slavers shot into barely-connected shreds.

The slaver who'd been the station boss at the time hadn't argued the point. Those two clowns had probably been a pain in the neck for him anyway, and the amount Ganny demanded was enough to make the point but not enough to be a real burden. After all these years, the slavers who used Parmley Station knew full well that it would take a major and costly war to exterminate the clan—and, short of that, the clan could make their lives very miserable indeed if they chose to do so. The station was enormous, labyrinthine, and nobody knew it the way Ganny's people did

The last time there was trouble between the Manpower staff and their hosts.

More to the point, since he couldn't possibly have restrained the brute with his own muscles, he held a slave prod casually in his other hand. The device was a distant descendant of the cattle prods used on Earth in pre-Diaspora days. Far more sophisticated in its design and capabilities, if not in its basic purpose.

Slave prod, this one is a fake, but a functional one.

Normal electronic fund transfers were entirely out of the question for an illegal transaction like this one. Despite all the ingenuity and sophistication of the current generation's practitioners of the ancient art of "money laundering," normal fund transfers left too many electronic footprints for anyone to be comfortable about. Besides, slavers—like smugglers and pirates—were not natively trusting souls.

Fortunately, it wasn't always possible to rely on normal electronic transfers, even when both parties to the transfers in question were as pure as the new fallen snow. Which was why physical fund transfers were still possible. As the female crewmember stepped forward, Hutchins punched in the combination to unlock the battle steel box, and its lid slid smoothly upward. Inside were several dozen credit chips, issued by the Banco de Madrid of Old Earth. Each of those chips was a wafer of molecular circuitry embedded inside a matrix of virtually indestructible plastic. That wafer contained a bank validation code, a numerical value, and a security key (whose security was probably better protected than the Solarian League Navy's central computer command codes), and any attempt to change the value programmed into it when it was originally issued would trigger the security code and turn it into a useless, fused lump. Those chips were recognized as legal tender anywhere in the explored galaxy, but there was no way for anyone to track where they'd gone, or—best of all from the slavers' perspective—whose hands they'd passed through, since the day they'd been issued by the Banco de Madrid.

Solly credit chips, though most people just use electronic money transfer for all the day to day transactions.

"Here you go, boys. And I can tell you from personal experience that they're just as good as they look."

The very buxom one turned her head to look at him. Hutchins thought for a moment she was actually going to glare at her handler, as unlikely as that was. Pleasure slaves were trained into even greater docility than heavy labor ones.

But then he realized that her look was simply one of intent focus, and was even more surprised. Because of that same training, pleasure slaves spent most of their lives in something of a mental haze.

Urgh, I feel faintly dirty just reading that. Makes sense though that Manpower's slaves would be thoroughly broken as much as possible before selling, even if we hadn't been told repeatedly that they torture children until they fit the mold Manpower selected for them before birth.

"Clear," said the crewman.

Hutchins started to frown, began to wonder what the man meant, but he never finished either process. Indeed, the few remaining seconds of Alberto Hutchins' life passed in something of a blur. Somehow, the other pleasure slave had her chains around his neck, the busty one kicked his legs out from under him, and on his way down the slender one used the chains and his momentum to crush his windpipe and break his neck.

Rada lasted a little longer. Not much. As soon as she kicked out his partner's legs, the buxom slave lashed his hands with her own wrist chains and sent the flechette gun flying. That hurt, and he yelped. The yelp might have alerted the command center and roused the defensive tribarrel turret . . . if, that was, every one of the compartment's cameras and sensors—and the ones in the passage beyond, for that matter—hadn't been spoofed by the various nonstandard items built into that complicated looking slave prod. Rada wasn't really thinking about that at the moment, however, and the yelp was cut short anyway by a paralyzing jab from the male crewman's slave prod. That really hurt.

By then, moving much faster than Rada would have thought possible, the heavy labor slave was there. Somehow, his chains had come off. He seized Rada by the throat—actually, the creature's immense hand wrapped around his whole neck—and slammed his head against the nearby wall. The impact would have been enough to render a gorilla unconscious. Rada's skull was shattered.

BSC team taking out the trash.

"Ganny, we're screwed. They gotta be from the Ballroom."

Brice had already considered that possibility. And if so . . . The clan could very well be in serious trouble. Ballroom killers on what amounted to an extermination mission weren't going to look gently upon people who—at least, from their point of view—also profited from the slave trade, even if they weren't slavers themselves. And they'd have no reason to keep the facility intact, either, the way slavers did. Even assuming Ballroom killers would observe the Eridani Edict, it only applied to planets, not space stations. They could just stand off and destroy the place with nuclear-armed missiles. Or, for that matter, rip it apart with their ship's impeller wedge without even wasting the ammunition.

Yep and yep. Ship can use it's wedge to tear apart physical objects, though AFAIK it's never done in the series. Unless you count the fate of Tepes.

"That's the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn't it?"

Brice frowned. Ganny also used a lot of ancient and stupid old saws. What was a "dollar?" And why did the number sixty-four thousand mean anything?

He'd asked his uncle Andrew about it, once, after the first time he'd heard Ganny use the expression. Artlett's explanation was that the expression dated from the days—way before the Diaspora—when the human race was still confined to one planet and mired in superstition. Dollars were maleficent spirits notorious for sapping the moral fiber of those foolish enough to traffic with them. The number sixty-four thousand had magical importance since it was eight squared—eight no doubt being a magical number in its own right—and then multiplied by a thousand, which, given the antediluvian origins of the decimal system, was surely a number freighted with mystic importance.

I'm just tickled that there are people who don't automatically know 20th/21st Century slang and pop culture references. Uncle Andrew sure seems to like his kickbacks from Manpower, for a man with such a dismal view of the evils of the dollar.

With three of them in there, the compartment was packed tight. And their ability to observe what was happening in the command center was going to be impaired by all three of them having to squeeze next to the entrance panel. Fortunately, the panel was more sophisticated than a simple mechanical one. Instead of narrow open air slits, it had a much larger vision screen. And the screen's electrical shield, designed to keep insects from wandering into delicate equipment, also blurred anyone's ability to look into the maintenance compartment from the command center.

Unless, of course, they turned off the shield so they could look inside for a quick inspection of the compartment without having to open the panel. That was part of the design, too—and the screen could be turned off with a flick of a finger.

Electrical shield to keep insects (on a space station) away from sensitive parts.

They had to move quickly, in fact, or the simple and crude event-loop they'd reconfigured the camera and sensors to show would alert the slavers very soon, unless they were completely inattentive. So the BSC team went into the command center firing. Quite literally—Marti Garner, in the lead because she was the best marksman, had already shot two of the slavers in the center before she finished passing through the entrance.

They looped the security cams.

Hugh Arai was the third member of the team coming into the compartment. He was carrying a highly modified version of a tribarrel pulser. The weapon was as close to a pistol version of a tribarrel as Beowulf's military engineers had been able to design. It was a specialty gun, almost literally handmade. Only someone of Hugh Arai's mass and strength could hope to use it effectively—or safely, for those accompanying him—and its ability to shred bulkheads might have caused some to look upon it askance in what amounted to a boarding action. The BSC was a great believer in providing for all contingencies, however. It was always possible that even slavers might have armored skinsuits available, after all, and despite its drawbacks, the weapon provided the unit with a scaled-down approximation of the sort of heavy weapons that a regular Marine unit would have carried.

Hugh Arai's custom tribarrel pulser.

He spoke into his com. "Take out the living quarters. Stephanie will guide the shots."

They all turned to look at the screens above Henson's console which provided views of the turret from outside cameras. Stephanie began keying in locations. A short time later, the Ouroboros' concealed lasers began firing. It didn't take long before that area of the turret which contained the slavers' living quarters was blown to shreds. They were able to spot only two bodies being expelled by the outrushing atmosphere. But there was no chance that any of the slavers could have survived, unless they were already wearing skinsuits or battle armor—and Stephanie would have recognized those in her readings of the sensors.

Having secured the command center, they fire on the living quarters of the slaver's section (a duplicate of the Dantasyland castle at Disney World) with their ship's lasers. Sensors can apparently distinguish life-signs from life-signs in skinsuits or power armor half a klick away.

"Okay, people. There doesn't seem to be anyone else alive in this place. So we can save ourselves a lot of work."

Knight grinned. "I love nukes. I swear, I do, even if I know it's wrong of me and I'm a bad boy."

Henson chuckled. "I can't think of any commando unit this side of an insane asylum that doesn't love nuclear warheads, Bryan—on those rare occasions they can use them."

Arai spoke into his com again. "Get the missile prepped. We'll be back aboard the Ouroboros within five minutes."

-snip-

Brice decided he had nothing to lose. He started unsealing the panel.

"Hey, don't shoot!" he yelled. Yelped, rather. "We're just kids!"

Ed and James would probably ridicule him for that later, assuming they survived. It would have been a lot more dignified to have called out something on the order of: Hold your fire! We are not your enemy!

But Brice had a dark suspicion that top-of-the-line military units were prone to shoot enemies first and determine who they were later. Whereas even hardened commandos might hesitate before shooting kids.

Yeah, that's probably a good time to interrupt the team.

"How many of you are there, Brice?"

Brice hesitated. "Uh . . . about two dozen."

Hugh nodded and spoke into the com again. "He claims two dozen. Seems like a good kid, loyal to his own, so he's almost certainly lying. I figure at least three times that. You ought to be able to find them with another search, now that you know there's something to be found. And before you start whining, no, that's not a reprimand. If the kid's telling the truth and these are Parmley's own descendants, they've had decades to conceal themselves. Not surprising we didn't spot them with a standard search."

Heh.

"Haven't you figured it out yet, Brice? The only way you folks are going to get through this is by cutting a deal with the Ballroom. Sorry, but there's no way we're going to allow this station to fall back into the hands of slavers. And there's no way you people can stop that from happening on your own, is there?"

-snip-

"Just take my word for it that we've got no reason to take on the headache of keeping this white elephant intact and running. But I'm thinking the Ballroom might. More precisely, Torch might."

"Who's Torch?" asked Brice and James simultaneously.

The commando shook his head. "You folks are out of touch, aren't you?"

The female commando named Stephanie supplied the answer. "Torch is the planet that used to be called Congo, when Mesa owned it. By everybody except them, anyway. They called it 'Verdant Vista' themselves. The swine. But there was a slave rebellion assisted by—oh, all kinds of people—and now the planet's called 'Torch' and it's pretty much run by the Ballroom."

Brice was wide-eyed. "The Audubon Ballroom has its own planet?"

Indeed they do. I'd ask where you've been, but I already know.

"You know Jeremy X?"

"Known him since I was a kid. He's sort of my godfather, I guess you could say. He took me under his wing, so to speak, after my parents were killed."

Brice felt a lot better, then. The idea of cutting a deal with the Ballroom still sounded dicey to him. Kind of like cutting a deal with lions or tigers. On the other hand, Hugh seemed pretty nice, all things considered. And if he had a personal relationship with Jeremy X himself . . .

"Did he really eat a Manpower baby once, like they said he did?" asked Ed.

"Raw, they say. Not even cooking it." That contribution came from James.

Hugh's relation to Jeremy. And obviously there has been some exaggeration of Jeremy's deeds. I'm absolutely positive if he ate a baby he'd have cooked it first.

Ganny El's clan were probably the best practical mechanics Hugh had ever encountered, for instance, but their grasp of the underlying theory of some of the machines they kept running was often fuzzy and sometimes bizarre. The first time Hugh had seen one of Butry's many grand-nephews sprinkle what he called an "encouragement libation" over a machine he was about to repair, Hugh had been startled. But, some hours later, after the mechanic finished with the ensuing work, the machine came back to life and ran as smoothly as you could ask for. And however superstitious the notion of an "encouragement libation" might be, Hugh hadn't missed the underlying practicality. The "libation" was actually some homemade alcoholic brew that hadn't turned out too well. Unfit for human consumption, even by the Butry clan's none-too-finicky standards, the fluid had been set aside for the "encouragement" of cranky machinery.

An offering to the machine-spirits.

For all that it was generally a blessing, prolong could sometimes produce real tragedies. And Hugh knew he was looking at one, right here—with quite possibly a still greater tragedy in the making.

Ganny El, the matriarch of the clan, would live for centuries. So would the two dozen or so relatives on the station who were her siblings, cousins or children, and who'd gotten the treatments before the clan fell on hard times. But the next generation in the clan, people of an age with Ganny's great-nephew Andrew Artlett—there were at least three dozen of them—were simply going to be a lost generation, as far as prolong was concerned. Even if the clan could suddenly afford the treatments, they were already too old. Their parents—even their grandparents—faced the horror that they'd outlive their own offspring.

And the same fate would fall on the next generation, if the clan's fortunes didn't improve. And they had to improve drastically, and most of all, quickly. People like Sarah Armstrong and Michael Alsobrook were already into their twenties, and twenty-five years of age was generally considered the outside limit for starting prolong treatments.

Prolong, and the difficulties when the family falls on hard times and your kids don't get it. Also, 25 is considered the maximum age at which prolong might take, realistically.

"Okay, then. We'll leave in twelve hours. That should give you enough time." He used his own forefinger, which was almost half the size of Ganny's entire hand, to point to two of his crewmates. "June and Frank will stay behind."

"Why?" demanded Butry. "You think we need watchdogs?"

Hugh smiled. "Ganny, your negotiations might actually succeed, you know. In which case, why waste time? While we're gone, June and Frank can start laying the basis for what follows. They're both very experienced engineers."

June and Frank looked a bit smug. The reason wasn't hard to figure out. Judging from the way most of the Butry clan's unattached men and women were gazing enthusiastically upon their very comely selves, neither one of them was going to be suffering from unwanted chastity over the course of the next few months until their crewmates returned.

To some degree, Hugh had chosen them for that reason. In point of fact, both June Mattes and Frank Gillich were experienced engineers, and they'd do a good job of laying the groundwork for modifying Parmley Station as needed, in the event Hugh's scheme came to fruition. But he figured the process would be helped along by what you might call a lavish display of goodwill.

Ganny El, the kids and a few others are coming as a delegation to Torch. Two of the BSC will remain behind to build up the station and-ah, "goodwill."

A Manticoran wit had once commented that Beowulfers were the Habsburgs of the interstellar era, except that they didn't bother with the pesky formalities of marriage. There was enough truth in the remark that Hugh had laughed aloud when he heard it.

Works for me.

When he was very young, barely out of the vats, Hugh had been adopted by a slave couple. The adoption had been informal, of course—as, for that matter, had been the couple's own "marriage." Manpower didn't recognize or give legitimacy to any relationship between slaves.

Still, there were practicalities involved. Even from Manpower's viewpoint, there were advantages to having slaves raising the youngsters who came out of the breeding vats instead of Manpower having to do it directly. It was a lot cheaper, if nothing else. So, Manpower was often willing to let slave couples stay together and keep their "children." With some lines of slaves, at least. They wouldn't allow slaves destined to be personal servants—certainly not pleasure slaves—any such entanglements. But with most of the labor varieties, it didn't much matter. Those slaves would be sold in large groups to people needing a lot of labor. It was usually possible to keep the families of such slaves more or less intact in the course of the transactions, since both the seller and the buyer had a vested interest in doing so. Having slaves raising their own children was cheaper for the buyer of the labor force, too.

Families among Mesan slaves. They're not genetically related (well sometimes they may be, but they've no way of telling) but it's generally simpler to have the slaves raised by slaves, at least the labor varieties. So they keep them and "married" slaves together more often then not.

"There's a difference between 'Spartan' quarters and bare decks. There was no way we'd let anybody who wanted to inspect us to get that far, so we never bothered to set them up. All we ever let anyone see were the killing bays, since that was all it took to establish our identity as slavers."

The "killing bays" referred to the large compartments where slaves would be driven by nauseating gas, in the event a slave ship was being overtaken by naval forces. Once there, the bays would be opened to the vacuum beyond, murdering the slaves and disposing of their bodies at the same time.

It was a tactic that didn't work if the overtaking naval forces were Manticoran or Havenite or Beowulfan, since those navies considered the mere possession of killing bays to be proof that the vessel was a slaver, whether there was a single slave on board or not. In fact, quite a few captains of such ships had been known to summarily declare the slaver crews guilty of mass murder and have them thrown into space without spacesuits right then and there.

That had been the fate of the crew of the slave ship Hugh himself had been on when he was rescued, in fact. The Beowulfan ship which captured the slaver had gotten there quickly enough to stop the mass murder before it was finished, so Hugh and some others had survived. But his parents had died, along with his brother and both of his sisters.

Killing bays, like the one aboard Felicia II/Hope are part of that equipment clause. It's only a useful thing for a slaver so if a ship has one, it's a slaver. Ejecting the "cargo" may keep you clear in much of Solly space, but not if Manticore, Haven or Beowulf nabs you. Which begs the question: if they'd been searched by anyone's navy on their way to carry out this deception, could they reasonably count on a "wait a minute" as the crews noticed the 'slave holds' were never finished? Seems risky otherwise.

He and Wix were officially here as privately paid consultants, on leave from the Royal Manticoran Astrophysics Investigation Agency. If it had been solely up to Klaus Hauptman, the financial backer of this expedition, the two of them would have been in Torch before the smoke had cleared, too. Unfortunately, and despite the Star Kingdom's official recognition of the Kingdom of Torch, the "taint" of the Ballroom had forced the Star Kingdom to move rather more slowly, even after that idiot High Ridge's ignominious departure from the premiership, than Kare was confident Elizabeth Winton or her new prime minister would have preferred. The Star Kingdom of Manticore understood more about the genetic slave trade and Manpower, Incorporated, than most star nations did, but even Manticore had been shocked by some of the HD footage which had come out of Torch. It wasn't just foreign public opinion Elizabeth had been forced to worry about, either.

There were more than a few Manticorans, even among those bitterly opposed to genetic slavery, who nursed serious reservations where the Ballroom was concerned. In fact, if Kare were going to be completely honest, he had a few reservations of his own.

Klaus Hauptman got Dr. Kare, his team from the RMAIA and the Harvest Joy out to Torch to survey their wormhole(s).

"That's interesting," he said out loud. "Especially given the persistent rumors before the liberation that Torch was 'at least' a three-nexii junction. What you've just told us certainly agrees with everything official we've been able to find, but I can't find myself wondering where that specific number—three, I mean—came from in the first place."

No records of any previous surveys found. So why was it general knowledge in the last book that there were three or more wormholes here?

The F6 star now officially known as Torch was unusually youthful, to say the least, to possess life-bearing planets at all. It was also unusually hot. Torch, the planet almost exactly twice as far from Torch as Old Earth lay from Sol, could be accurately described as "uncomfortably warm" by most people. "Hotter than Hell," while less euphemistic, would probably have been more accurate. Not only was Torch younger, larger, and hotter than Sol, but Torch's atmosphere contained more greenhouse gases, producing a significantly warmer planetary surface temperature. The fact that Torch's seas and oceans covered only about seventy percent of its surface and that its axial inclination was very low (less than a full degree) also helped to account for its rain forest/swamp/mudhole-from-Hell surface geography.

The star and planet of Torch. Sort of a Cretaceous hothouse environment. Oh, and the planet was originally named Elysium when claimed by Manpower.

"One thing we have observed, however, is that the terminus' gravitic signature is quite low. In fact, we're a bit surprised anyone even noticed it."

"Really?" Du Havel leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. Kare looked at him, and the prime minister shrugged with a smile. "Oh, this certainly isn't my area of expertise, Doctor! I'm fully prepared to accept what you've just said, but I have to admit it piques my interest a bit. I was under the impression that ever since the existence of wormholes was first demonstrated, one of the very first things any stellar survey team's done is look very hard for them."

"That they do, Mr. Prime Minister," Kare acknowledged wryly. "Indeed, they do! But, as I'm sure all of you are aware, wormholes and their termini are usually a minimum of a couple of light-hours away from the stars with which they're associated. And what somebody who isn't a hyper-physicist may not realize is that unless they're particularly big, you also have to get within, oh, maybe four or five light-minutes before they're going to show up at all. There are certain stellar characteristics—we call them 'wormhole fingerprints'—we've learned to look for when there's a terminus in the vicinity, but they aren't always present. Again, the bigger or stronger the wormhole, the more likely the 'fingerprints' are to show up, as well.

4 or 5 light-minutes to detect a wormhole with Warshawski grav-sensors. Even then it can take a long time to pin down the mouth(s). F class stars, it seems, are the least likely to have wormholes in the first place, and Torch's are much closer to the sun (64 light-minutes) than any previously recorded in such a system. So it seems Mesa stumbled over the Junction purely by chance.

"In addition to making it hard to find in the first place, the faintness of this terminus' Warshawski signature, coupled with its unusually close proximity to the primary, also indicates that it's almost certainly not especially huge. Frankly, despite the rumors to the contrary, I'll be surprised if there's more than one additional terminus associated with it—it looks a lot like one end of a two-loci system, what we call a 'wormhole bridge,' unlike the multi-loci 'junctions' like the Manticore Junction. Some of the bridges are more valuable than quite a few of the junctions we've discovered over the centuries, of course. It all depends on where the ends of the bridge are."

The Torches at the table nodded to show they were following his explanation. From their expressions—especially Du Havel's—the prediction that their wormhole was going to connect to only one other location wasn't exactly welcome, though.

Dr. Kare thinks this isn't a full-fledged Junction they're looking at, but a single wormhole.

"Even in a worst-case scenario, most wormholes are significant long-term revenue producers," Captain Zachary put in. Obviously she'd seen the same expressions Kare had.

"Unless the other terminus of this one is somewhere out in previously totally unexplored space—which is possible, of course—then it's still going to be a huge timesaver for people wanting to go from wherever the other end is to anything close to this end," she continued. "It's only four days from here to Erewhon even for a merchant ship, for example, and only about thirteen days from here to Maya. And from Erewhon to the Star Kingdom's only about four days via the Erewhon wormhole. So if the other end of your wormhole is somewhere in the Shell, anyone wanting to reach those destinations is going to be able to shave literally months off of her transit time. I'm not suggesting you're going to see anywhere near the volume of traffic we see through the Junction, of course, but I'm pretty sure there's still going to be enough to give your treasury a hefty shot in the arm."

"Maybe not a goldmine, but at least a silver mine, you mean?" a grinning Queen Berry asked.

Still plenty valuable anyways. Possibly even if it is a straight shot to Mesa, as I believe. At least it'll make war against them far easier.

"From what I've seen and heard, he'd probably think backing this survey was a good idea even if it wasn't likely to add a single dime to his own cash flow. On the other hand, I understand he's going to be showing a nice long-term profit on his share of your transit fees."

"I think it's what's referred to as 'a comfortable return,' " Du Havel said dryly. "One-point-five percent of all transit fees for the next seventy-five years ought to come to a pretty fair piece of change."

What Hauptman is getting for bankrolling the survey. 1.5% of all transit fees for 75 years.

Anyone who knew anything about Klaus Hauptman and his daughter Stacey had to be aware of their virulent, burning hatred for all things associated with the genetic slave trade. By any measure one cared to use, the Hauptman Cartel was the Star Kingdom's single largest financial contributor to the Beowulf-based Anti-Slavery League. Not only that, the Cartel had already provided the Kingdom of Torch with well over a dozen frigates. No serious interstellar navy had built frigates in decades, of course, but the latest ships—the Nat Turner-class—Hauptman had delivered to Torch were significantly more dangerous than most people might have expected. Effectively, they were hyper-capable versions of the Royal Manticoran Navy's Shrike-class LAC but with about twice the missile capacity and a pair of spinal-mounted grasers, with the second energy weapon bearing aft. Their electronics were a downgraded "export version" of the RMN's (which was hardly surprising, given the fact that they were going to be operating in an area where the Republic of Haven's intelligence services had ready access), but the Turners were probably at least as dangerous as the vast majority of the galaxy's destroyers.

According to official reports, the Hauptman Cartel had built them at cost. According to unofficial (but exceedingly persistent) reports, Klaus and Stacey Hauptman had picked up somewhere around seventy-five percent of their construction costs out of their own pockets. Given that there were eight of the Turners, that was a pretty hefty sum for even the Hauptmans to shell out. And according to the last word Kare had picked up before leaving Manticore for Torch, the Torch Navy had just ordered its first trio of all-up destroyers, as well. Even after they were completed, Torch would scarcely be considered one of the galaxy's leading navies, but the kingdom would have a fairly substantial little system-defense force.

Which just happened to be hyper-capable . . . which meant it could also operate in other people's star systems.

The Torch Navy, at this time consists of 8 frigates that are more like double-sized hyper-capable Shrikes with an extra graser and missiles. A lot of nasty in a small package, and who says frigates aren't relevant to modern navies? Three Manty destroyers on order. All with a carefully thought-out expansion plan where the frigates are used to train spacers for the bigger ships.

"Well," Wix rubbed the mustache that was a couple of shades lighter than the rest of his rather unruly beard, "I hope nobody's going to confuse me with any kind of intelligence analyst. But the best reason I've been able to come up with for Jessyk and Manpower's trying to keep their little wormhole quiet is that they didn't want to draw any more attention to what they were doing here on Torch."

Then why announce it at all? Why call it a three-way Junction?

"Mind you, that's a pretty sophisticated motive to impute to anyone stupid enough to be using slave labor to harvest and process pharmaceuticals in the first place! Completely leaving aside the moral aspects of the decision—which, I feel confident, would never have darkened the doorway of any Mesan transtellar's decision processes—it was economically stupid."

"I tend to agree with you," Du Havel said. "On the other hand, breeding slaves is pretty damned cheap." His voice was remarkably level, but his bared-teeth grin gave the lie to his apparent detachment. "They've been doing it for a long time, after all, and their 'production lines' are all in place. And to give the devil his due, human beings are still a lot more versatile than most machinery. Not as efficient at most specific tasks as purpose-built machinery, of course, but versatile. And as far as Manpower and Mesans in general are concerned, slaves are 'purpose-built machinery,' when you come down to it. So from their perspective, it made plenty of sense to avoid the initial capital investment in the hardware the job would have required. After all, they already had plenty of cheap replacement units when their 'purpose-built machinery' broke, and they could always make more."

"You know," Kare said quietly, "sometimes I forget just how . . . skewed the thinking of something like Manpower has to be." He shook his head. "It never would've occurred to me to analyze the economic factors from that perspective."

"Well, I've had a bit more practice at it than most people." Du Havel's tone was dry enough to create an instant Sahara . . . even on Torch. "The truth is that slavery's almost always been hideously inefficient on a production per man-hour basis. There've been exceptions, of course, but as a general rule, using slaves as skilled technicians—which would be the only way to make it remotely competitive with free labor on a productive basis—has had a tendency to turn around and bite the slaveowner on the ass."

I understand it worked out alright for the Turks for a good long while. But anyways, here's another possible rationale for Manpower's actions on Congo, it's how they think and they're already churning out slaves in industrial qualities.

[Simon_Jester]

Astronomers and experienced spacers understood the reality. Very few other people did. The rough and uneven approximation of a globe which marked the extent of human settlement of the galaxy, in the two millennia that had passed since the beginning of the human Diaspora, contained innumerable settlements that no one had any knowledge of beyond the people who lived there and a relative handful of others who might have reason to visit. And for every such still-inhabited settlement, there were at least two or three which were now either completely uninhabited or inhabited only by squatters.

So far the human explored/colonized sphere of space centered on Earth goes out a bit under a thousand light-years in each direction, or about 20% of the Milky Way by diameter.

That's two percent...

Odd I'd think, since they have the FTL to push out quite a further if they're willing to accept a long trip. But part of the point here is that humanity's expansions across the stars was neither immediate nor neat, and there's likely three uncharted, abandoned or destroyed colonies for every world generally known to and participating in galactic society. Which makes them ripe for exploitation by Manpower and other shady megacorps.

Also note, I think the reason people didn't go further out is that so far, everyone who's wanted their own planet has been able to find one within that radius. The desire to spread out is only so great.

Among other things, it's potentially disastrous to go months and months of travel away from civilized space if you don't have to. If, say, your planet turns out to be unexpectedly salted with all manner of lethal heavy metals or something, you might be well and truly screwed...

The team leader, Hugh Arai, is a former slave himself. Apparently it's almost impossible to fake a Manpower tongue-barcode, and it can be recognized as genuine even standing well out of reach.

Well, aside from the difficulty of tattooing something on a man's tongue, I honestly don't see why...

I'm just tickled that there are people who don't automatically know 20th/21st Century slang and pop culture references.

I think it's a combination of him not knowing, and him knowing and deliberately bullshitting his nephews...

Uncle Andrew sure seems to like his kickbacks from Manpower, for a man with such a dismal view of the evils of the dollar.

Huh? Does he show unusual interest in them?

Killing bays, like the one aboard Felicia II/Hope are part of that equipment clause. It's only a useful thing for a slaver so if a ship has one, it's a slaver. Ejecting the "cargo" may keep you clear in much of Solly space, but not if Manticore, Haven or Beowulf nabs you. Which begs the question: if they'd been searched by anyone's navy on their way to carry out this deception, could they reasonably count on a "wait a minute" as the crews noticed the 'slave holds' were never finished? Seems risky otherwise.

Well, they could pretty easily flash ID as being attached to a paramilitary Beowulf organization, and Beowulf is a League member (and richer/more powerful than most other systems in the galaxy in its own right). So I bet they could at least slow down the people who boarded them, get them interned until the story is straightened out.

Also, as long as they stay outside the Haven Quadrant, they're unlikely to run into a navy that shoots on sight when they see slavers with no slaves. Presumably this operation doesn't take place in Manticore's neck of the woods.
_______________________

On the subject of the rumors of a wormhole junction in Torch it may have inadvertently leaked? Nobody's perfect...

[Terralthra]

The team leader, Hugh Arai, is a former slave himself. Apparently it's almost impossible to fake a Manpower tongue-barcode, and it can be recognized as genuine even standing well out of reach.

Well, aside from the difficulty of tattooing something on a man's tongue, I honestly don't see why...

From what I understand, it's not a tattoo. The papillae, rather than being more or less randomly & evenly distributed across the tongue's surface, are formed into a literal barcode, in visible (and scannable) columns. That's why it's so hard to remove: just removing them surgically wouldn't do it, because they'd grow back in more or less exactly the same. Duplicating that sort of thing with a tattoo would be tricky, given the 3-dimensionality of it.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but you'll only be able to tell that from a distance close enough to examine a man's tongue and see the papillae.

[Ahriman238]

"You," Harper S. Ferry replied repressively, "are entirely too bright and happy for someone who has to be up this early."

A slave who chose the name 'Harper S. Ferry.' I'm guessing he's not the "turn the other cheek" sort.

Unlike Harper, Judson had never personally been a slave. Instead, he'd been born on Sphinx after his father's liberation from the hold of a Manpower Incorporated slave ship. Patrick Henry Van Hale had married a niece of the Manticoran captain whose ship had intercepted the slaver he'd been aboard, and, despite the fact that Patrick had been young enough to receive first-generation prolong after he was freed, he'd still had the perspective of Manpower's normally short-lived slaves. He and his new bride hadn't wasted any time at all on building the family they'd both wanted, and Judson (the first of six children . . . so far) had come along barely a T-year after the wedding.

Meet Judson Van Hale, a child of slaves, former Sphinx Forestry Service ranger and one of only six or seven Torch natives to have bonded with a treecat. When the formation of Torch was announced, along with Jeremy's renunciation of his previous tactics, Van Hale ran to Torch to join their law enforcement, and he and his treecat, Genghis were assigned to clear new immigrants to Torch. Unofficially, Thandi has him keep close to Berry a lot, like her Amazons, in lieu of an official bodyguard a treecat is a formidable thing when it comes to foiling assassins.

He'd encountered a few ex-Ballroom types (and some he was pretty convinced weren't all that ex- about their relationship with the Ballroom) who seemed to regard him as some sort of Johnny-come-lately. Almost as a dilettante who'd sat around on his well-protected ass in his cushy Manticoran life while other people did the heavy lifting which had eventually led to Torch's existence. There weren't many of them, though, and as pissed off with them as Judson sometimes was, he didn't really blame them for it. Or he was at least able to maintain enough perspective to cope with it, at any rate.

I suppose there are going to be differences between Torch's population.

Somebody had to be in charge of the reception, processing, and orientation of the steady stream of ex-slaves pouring into Torch on an almost daily basis. The news that they finally had a genuine homeworld to call their own, a planet which had become the very symbol of their defiant refusal to submit to the dehumanization and brutality of their self-appointed masters, had gone through the interstellar community of escaped slaves like a lightning bolt. Judson doubted that any exile had ever returned to his homeland with more fervor and determination than he saw whenever another in the apparently endless stream of ASL-sponsored transport vessels arrived here in Torch. Torch's population was expanding explosively, and there was a militancy, a bared-teeth snarl of defiance, to every shipload of fresh immigrants. Whatever philosophical differences might exist between them, they were meaningless beside their fierce identification with one another and with their new homeworld.

But that didn't mean they arrived here in a calm and orderly state of mind. Many of them did, but a significant percentage came off the landing shuttles with a stiff-legged, raised-hackle attitude which reminded Judson of a hexapuma with a sore tooth. Sometimes it was the simple stress of the voyage itself, the sense of traveling into an unknown future coupled with the suspicion that in a galaxy which had never once given them an even break, any dream had to be shattered in the end. That combination all too often produced an irrational anger, an internal hunching of the shoulders in preparation for bearing yet another in an unending chain of disappointments and betrayals. After all, if they came with that attitude, at least they could hope that any surprises would be pleasant ones.

For others, it was darker than that, though. Sometimes a lot darker. Despite Harper's deliberate humor, he knew as well as Judson that any given transport was going to have at least one "Ballroom burnout" on board.

And that's why they want a treecat to clear all newcomers. Explosive population boom to Torch as slaves, Scrags and outcasts everywhere flood in.

For all the vocal sympathy others might voice, from the comfort of their own well fed, well cared for lives, for the plight of Manpower's victims, there was still that ineradicable prejudice against slaves. Against anyone defined primarily as a "genie." As a product of deliberate genetic design. It wasn't even as if some genetic slaves didn't have their own variety of it, he thought, given the attitude of all too many of them towards Scrags. In his darker moments, he thought it was just that every group had to have someone to look down on. That it was an endemic part of the human condition, however that human's genes had come to be arranged in a particular pattern. Other times, he looked around him and recognized the way the vast majority of people he personally knew had risen above that "endemic" need and knew it was possible, in the end, to exterminate any prejudice.

There's a lot of prejudice against 'genies' in any case after the Final War, so much more so for those designed as untermenschen.

Torch had to stand as the light for which it was named, the proof genetic slaves could build a world, and not just a vengeance machine. That they could take their war with Manpower with them and transform it in ways which proved that, in fact, they were not inferior to their designers and oppressors, but superior to them. And just as they had to prove that to the people whose support their survival required, they had to prove it to themselves. Had to take that ultimate vengeance upon Manpower by proving Manpower had lied. That whatever had been done to them, however their chromosomes had been warped or toyed with, they were still human beings, still as much heir to the potential greatness of humanity as anyone else.

Most of them would have been incredibly uncomfortable trying to put that thought into words, but that didn't keep them from grasping it. And so when someone who couldn't accept it arrived on Torch, it was Immigration's responsibility to recognize him. Not to deny him entry, or to threaten him with arbitrary deportation. The Torch Constitution guaranteed every ex-slave, and every child or grandchild of ex-slaves, safe haven on Torch. That was why Torch existed. But, in return, Torch demanded compliance with its own laws, and those laws included the prohibition of Ballroom-style operations launched from Torch. Despite everything else, Torch would not imprison people who refused to renounce the Ballroom's traditional tactics, but neither would Torch allow them to remain or to use its territory as a safe refuge between Ballroom-style strikes. Which was why the people whose own hatred might drive them to do exactly that had to be recognized.

What to do with those who can't assimilate.

His own right hand twitched very slightly on the virtual keyboard only he could see, activating the security camera that snapped a picture as the brown shipsuit sank into the chair in front of one of the Immigration processors. However nervous the newcomer might be, he was obviously at least managing to maintain his aplomb as he answered the interviewer's questions and provided his background information. He wasn't even glancing in Judson and Genghis' direction any longer, either, and he actually managed a smile when he opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue for the Immigration clerk to scan its barcode.

"Virtual keyboard" and tongue-check. Genghis has a sense of nameless dread about a newcomer, so they decide to keep an eye on him for now.

Some of the ex-slaves resented that. More than one had flatly refused when asked to do the same thing, and Judson found it easy enough to understand that reaction. But given the incredible number of places Torch's new immigrants came from, and bearing in mind that the mere fact of ex-slavery didn't necessarily mean all of them were paragons of virtue, the assembly of an identification database was a practical necessity. Besides, the Beowulf medical establishment had identified several genetic combinations which had potentially serious negative consequences. Manpower had never worried about that sort of thing, as long as they got whatever feature they'd been after, and that lack of concern was a major factor in the fact that even if they were ever fortunate enough to receive prolong, genetic slaves' average lifespans remained significantly shorter than "normals' " did. Beowulf had devoted a lot of effort to finding ways to ameliorate the consequences of those genetic sequences if they could be identified, and the barcode was the quickest, most efficient way for the doctors to scan for them. There wasn't much that could be done for some of them, even by Beowulf, but prompt remedial action could enormously mitigate the consequences of others, and one of the things every citizen of Torch was guaranteed was the very best medical care available.

And the reasons for the tongue-check, it's a quick and easy means of identifying people, and since slaves weren't exactly designed with longevity in mind, some lines are particularly prone to a variety of nasty congenital conditions, best if they screen for those right away.

"Actually, I did very seriously consider having him assassinated when he came out so strongly in support of those Ballroom lunatics in Verdant Vista. Unfortunately, getting rid of him would only leave us with his daughter Stacey, and she's just as bad as he is already. If 'Manpower' went ahead and whacked her daddy, she'd be even worse. In fact, I suspect she'd probably move making problems for us up from number three or four on her 'Things to Do' list to number one. An emphatic number one. And given the fact that she'd control sixty-two percent of the Hauptman cartel's voting stock outright, once she inherited her father's shares, the problems she could make for us would be pretty spectacular. This survey business and those frigates they've been building for the Ballroom wouldn't be a drop in the bucket compared to what she'd do then."

Albrecht Dettweiler and his son (clone) Benjamin discuss the mutual headache that is Torch, Klaus Hauptman's paying for the wormhole survey there and why such a wealthy man so bitterly opposed to Manpower wasn't assassinated long ago. Ben then suggests killing Hauptman and his daughter at the same time, but you'll never guess what arrangements they've made.

"It would appear our good friend Klaus and his daughter Stacey don't want to see their opposition to Manpower falter just because of a little thing like their own mortality. Collin got a look at the provisions of their wills a few T-months ago. Daddy left everything to his sweet little baby girl, pretty much the way we'd figured he had . . . but if it should happen that she predeceases him or subsequently dies without issue of her own, she's left every single share of her and her father's ownership percentage—and voting stock—to a little outfit called Skydomes of Grayson."

Yep, they've made Honor their heir if no other is born. Can you imagine OBS Hauptman's face if you'd told him that one? As they go on to discuss, Hauptman knows that Honor's sense of duty will compel her to look after his people, and to keep fighting Manpower. Also, he has personal experience in exactly how hard it is to bribe or threaten her.

"Damn," Benjamin said thoughtfully, then shook his head. "If Hauptman and Skydomes get together, Harrington would have control of—what? The third or fourth biggest single individually controlled financial bloc in the galaxy?"

"Not quite. She'd be the single biggest financial player in the Haven Quadrant, by a huge margin, but she probably wouldn't be any higher than, oh, the top twenty, galaxy wide. On the other hand, as you just pointed out yourself, unlike any of the people who'd be wealthier than she'd be, she'd have direct personal control of everything. No need to worry about boards of directors or any of that crap."

Honor's fortunes in this event. Okay, Skydomes and the Hauptman Cartel together wouldn't put her on a top ten list of wealthiest people in the galaxy. But it would make her the richest single individual in the Haven Sector, i.e. Haven, Manticore, Silesia, the Andermani, Erewhon, and Grayson. Apparently some Manty corporations are exceedingly wealthy, even as the Sollies measure such things.

"In the meantime," his father continued more briskly, "and getting back to my original complaint, we've got to decide what we're going to do about Kare and his busybodies. It's not going to take them very long to complete their survey of the terminus. They're going to figure out that something's peculiar about it as soon as they do, and we really don't need them making transit and finding out where it goes."

"Agreed." Benjamin nodded, but his expression was calm. "On the other hand, we've already made our preparations. As you just pointed out, somebody like Kare's going to realize he's looking at something out of the ordinary as soon as he gets a detailed analysis. I doubt he's going to have any idea just how peculiar it is before they make transit, though, and once they do make transit, they're not going to be in a position to tell anyone about it. I agree with Collin, Daniel, and Isabel, Father. The survivors are going to conclude that whatever it is that makes this terminus peculiar is going to require a much more cautious—and time-consuming—approach before they try any second transit."

I'm just going to back up my earlier prediction, the Torch wormhole leads to Mesa.

—"makes me wish even more that our little October surprise on her flagship had been a bit more successful. If we'd managed to kill her, I'm sure Klaus and Stacey would have at least reconsidered who they want to leave all of this to."

-snip-

"I'm not sure I want it brought forward yet," Albrecht said. "What I do want, though, is to make sure we don't fritter away our cover assets. Losing Anhur that way in Talbott last year was just plain stupid. And we're lucky that idiot Clignet and his 'journal' didn't hurt us any worse."

Connections to the other two threads, putting this conversation at least a couple months before a point I haven't quite reached in the main thread, and a year after the destruction of Anhur in Talbott, which I just covered.

"Second, this wormhole survey expedition has me worried. If we wipe out the people mounting it, and turn the system into someplace that no longer has any habitable real estate, we should also reduce interest in a 'killer' wormhole that no longer goes anywhere interesting, anyway. Not to mention getting Jeremy X and his merry band of lunatics on Torch out of Manpower's hair—and ours—as permanently as possible. And clearing the way for us to reassert sovereignty—after a decent interval, of course—over the system for ourselves.

Yeah, they're putting together a fleet of StateSec ex-pats to hit Torch.

Benjamin pursed his lips thoughtfully. The chance of any of their ex-StateSec puppets ever discovering the suicide charges which had been built into each of their ships during routine maintenance overhauls ranged somewhere between ridiculously minute and zero. Personally, if he'd been aboard one of those ships, he would have been going over it with a fine-toothed comb, given all of the many sets of circumstances he could think of under which it would be convenient for "Manpower" if their mercenary pirates simply . . . went away, as his father had put it. The fact that people who'd been StateSec officers didn't seem to be even considering the possibility was only one more indication, in his opinion, of how far they'd fallen since Thomas Theisman's restoration of the Old Republic had turned them into interstellar orphans.

And their precautions and plans for their StateSec flunkies afterwards, all in one.

"Let me see if I've followed your devious thinking properly here, Father," he said after a moment. "You're thinking that we go ahead and mount Operation Ferret and use our reinforced StateSec refugees to take out Verdant Vista. They go ahead and blow out the defenders, then take out the planet itself. As soon as they've done that, we deliver their severance checks and all their ships blow up. The planet is so wrecked nobody in his right mind would ever want to live there again, so the only inherent value the system has any longer is the wormhole terminus, which has just been demonstrated to be exceedingly dangerous. At the same time, we take out a huge chunk of the Ballroom's organized support and bodyslam its morale—and that of the ASL in general—throughout the galaxy. And because nobody's going to have any interest on living on the planet, most of the galaxy probably won't be too surprised—or get too worked up—if Mesa, not Manpower, presses its claim to what's left. Most folks will probably figure that it's just Mesa trying to recoup a little of the humiliation it suffered after being thrown out in the first place."

"More or less," Albrecht agreed. "And even if it doesn't work out with Mesa regaining formal sovereignty over the star system, it should throw things into confusion long enough for nobody to have possession of it—or be mounting any more survey expeditions—before Prometheus rolls over them."

The master plan for dealing with Torch summarized, lest you think I was taking dramatic license.

Mayan "beef" actually came from "mayacows"—locally evolved critters that looked sort of like an undersized brontosaurus crossed with a llama. Unlike the Old Earth animal from whom it had taken its name (more or less) the mayacow was oviparous, and quite a few of the local population were partial to mayacow omelettes. Those had never really appealed to Rozsak, but he'd decided over the past several T-years that he actually preferred mayacow beef to Old Earth beef. There truly were enormous similarities, yet he'd discovered some delightful, subtle differences, as well. In fact, he'd invested a modestly hefty percentage of his own income in backing a commercial ranching venture on New Tasmania, Maya's smaller continent. Unlike a great deal of the planet, New Tasmania was tectonically stable, remarkably lacking in volcanoes, and blessed with huge expanses of open prairie. Even today, there was plenty of room for operations like the Bar-R to grow and expand, and Rozsak was already showing a tidy profit on the new markets he'd opened up in Erewhon.

Mayacows. Also, Luis Rozsak is secretly a gourmet chef who cooks to relieve stress. Only Governor Barregos knows this about him.

"There's actually turned out to be even more cash in the till than I'd expected," he replied. "I don't think we can siphon any more out of our official budget without risking questions from Permanent Senior Undersecretary Wodoslawski's minions at Treasury, but it's rather impressive how much some of the transstellars' local management has been willing to kick into my 'discretionary fund' for those 'subscription ships' of yours. And even better, Donald's managed to arrange things so that a good seventy percent of our total costs look like—and are, for that matter—good, sound investment opportunities." He shrugged. "We're still racking up a pretty impressive debt, but Donald and Brent are both confident we'll be able to service the interest and pay down the Sector's own public debt within no more than five to ten T-years."

Paying for the Maya fleet.

"I'm glad to hear it," he repeated, "but unless I'm pretty badly mistaken, our expenditure curve is about to start climbing steeply. Chapman and Horton are ready to start laying down their first locally designed SD(P)s. Which means, of course, that we're about ready to start doing the same thing. Discreetly, of course."

"Oh, of course," Barregos agreed. He smiled tightly. "The first half dozen of those were factored into the numbers Donald and Brent discussed with me last week, though."

Erewhon is starting construction of podnoughts, and the Mayans plan to snag at least half a dozen. On the one hand, unless there's plenty more that would make them a second tier power. Then again, consider they'll have podlaying freighters and the vast gulf between the second and third tier powers where a third tier is defined as 'doesn't have podnoughts.'

"A seven hundred and fify percent increase in Junction transit fees, a seventy-five percent duty on any Erewhonese product in the Star Kingdom, and a seventy percent capital gains tax on any Erewhonese investment in Manticore strikes me as a pretty substantial 'smack,' " Rozsak pointed out dryly. "Especially given the fact that Manticore's been Erewhon's biggest single trading partner for decades."

Manticore's punishment to Erewhon for defecting, which has apparently triggered a recession on Erewhon. You burn those bridges, Elizabeth!

"At any rate, right now, and not wanting to wish any additional unhappiness on our newfound friends in Maytag, it's offering us quite a few interesting opportunities we probably wouldn't have had otherwise. Among other things, CIG ended up needing a lot more capital investment from our side to get it up and running. That's why we floated that new bond issue back on Old Earth, which is also one of the reasons we're in better economic shape—and in a much better strategic position in Erewhon—at this point than we'd expected to be. Financially, the fact that the Sector was already so heavily invested in Erewhon gave us plenty of cover when the resumption of hostilities meant we had to raise additional capital from sources outside our immediate area. And Treasury was perfectly willing to sign off on the bonds—for the bureaucrats' usual cut, of course."

He smiled evilly, and Rozsak raised both eyebrows in silent question.

"Well," Barregos told him cheerfully, "those same bureaucrats back on Old Earth insisted—positively insisted—that the bond issue in question be underwritten directly by the Treasury instead of the Sector administration. I think it had something to do with . . . bookkeeping issues."

-snip-

"And having them do the bookkeeping helps us exactly how?" the admiral asked after a moment. "Obviously it does, somehow, but I would've thought that having their fingers directly in the pie would be more likely to sound alarms at their end as we get further down the road."

"As long as the graft keeps rolling in, they aren't going to care what we're really doing with the money at this end," Barregos pointed out. "That's a given, and it's been part of our strategy from the very beginning. But what else it does for us is to make the debt a charge on the Solarian League, not the Maya Sector, and it never occurred to me or Donald that we might be able to get away with that!"

So when they break away, the League is going to be left holding the bill for their new modern navy?

"I'm not sure the League would have 'anything significant' to offer Manticore." Rozsak grimaced. "Even now, and even while I'm fully aware of how much that particular fact is likely to be working in our own favor in the not-too-distant future, I'm still a little pissed off—well, irritated, at least—by the thought that the Manties are so far out in front of the SLN. It's downright humiliating. Almost as humiliating as the realization that no one back on Old Earth seems to have the tiniest sliver of an awareness of just how bad things really are from their perspective. I'd like to think that someone in the Navy somewhere has at least the IQ of a gerbil!

"But Erewhon isn't Manticore," he continued. "The Erewhonese's tech base isn't nearly as advanced as the Manties' is, and I'd estimate that they're at least a generation or two behind the Manties' deployed hardware. How far behind the Manties' R&D they are is something I'm not even prepared to guess about at this point, but there are a lot of ways in which Solarian tech is letting them downsize and improve on some of the stuff they're getting from Foraker's teams. And," he bared the tips of his teeth, "under the circumstances and given the way Haven surprised them, as well as the Manties, with Thunderbolt, neither Greeley nor Chapman seems to feel any great need to fall all over themselves passing on their own improvements to Haven."

Short version, Erewhon (and by association, the Maya Sector) have access to most of the new Manty hardware, top-shelf Sollie stuff and some of the innovations coming from Foraker, and they've wrangled an advance or two (unspecified for now) that no one else has thought of. Largely by making Solly-tech improvements to new Haven hardware.

"It's just that we're still at a vulnerable stage," Rozsak continued. "We've got a dozen of the new destroyers, and a couple of the new light cruisers, in inventory now, but we're still well short of any significant increase in our overall combat power. And we're also at a point where we can't call on anyone else—except for additional Frontier Fleet units, which we both know is the last thing we want to do—if something comes along that we end up needing backup to handle. I know that's not likely to happen, but one of my jobs is worrying about unlikely things, and I don't like the feeling of being spread too thin to handle all of our obligations if something does fall in the crapper."

Maya's situation if it all falls apart right now, they've gotten a dozen shiny new destroyers and a couple of light cruisers from the Erewhon yards, presumably Erewhon's buildup is on a somewhat larger scale.

[Simon_Jester]

And that's why they want a treecat to clear all newcomers. Explosive population boom to Torch as slaves, Scrags and outcasts everywhere flood in.

Although it's only been a few years; if the planet's population is growing at anything like the rate required to give it a significant population anytime soon, the number of newcomers is just plain too large to be monitored by one man with one treecat, or for that matter five men with five treecats...

Yep, they've made Honor their heir if no other is born. Can you imagine OBS Hauptman's face if you'd told him that one? As they go on to discuss, Hauptman knows that Honor's sense of duty will compel her to look after his people, and to keep fighting Manpower. Also, he has personal experience in exactly how hard it is to bribe or threaten her.

Or, for that matter, arrange to have her killed.

Honor's fortunes in this event. Okay, Skydomes and the Hauptman Cartel together wouldn't put her on a top ten list of wealthiest people in the galaxy. But it would make her the richest single individual in the Haven Sector, i.e. Haven, Manticore, Silesia, the Andermani, Erewhon, and Grayson. Apparently some Manty corporations are exceedingly wealthy, even as the Sollies measure such things.

Manticore is probably the single most convenient place in the human universe to put a corporation that does interstellar trade, because they have very fast access to information and goods via the Junction, and probably very favorable taxation rates compared to a lot of League systems.

Mayacows. Also, Luis Rozsak is secretly a gourmet chef who cooks to relieve stress. Only Governor Barregos knows this about him.

I'd imagine a few others know, but then again maybe not.

"A seven hundred and fify percent increase in Junction transit fees, a seventy-five percent duty on any Erewhonese product in the Star Kingdom, and a seventy percent capital gains tax on any Erewhonese investment in Manticore strikes me as a pretty substantial 'smack,' " Rozsak pointed out dryly. "Especially given the fact that Manticore's been Erewhon's biggest single trading partner for decades."

Manticore's punishment to Erewhon for defecting, which has apparently triggered a recession on Erewhon. You burn those bridges, Elizabeth!

I'm actually not sure what the situation is vis a vis Erewhon and Elizabeth. Although it's certainly well within her comfort zone to get so angry over a perceived betrayal that she counterproductively alienates a neutral party.

[Ahriman238]

So far the human explored/colonized sphere of space centered on Earth goes out a bit under a thousand light-years in each direction, or about 20% of the Milky Way by diameter.

That's two percent...

D'oh!

My ability to drop orders of magnitude remains intact and fairly annoying. You are correct. Which means there's still a lot of frontier out there, lots of potential for aliens in the future. Oh, and in a vs. debate they're probably going to be fairly limited in population and FTL compared to certain galactic superpowers.

Odd I'd think, since they have the FTL to push out quite a further if they're willing to accept a long trip. But part of the point here is that humanity's expansions across the stars was neither immediate nor neat, and there's likely three uncharted, abandoned or destroyed colonies for every world generally known to and participating in galactic society. Which makes them ripe for exploitation by Manpower and other shady megacorps.

Also note, I think the reason people didn't go further out is that so far, everyone who's wanted their own planet has been able to find one within that radius. The desire to spread out is only so great.

Among other things, it's potentially disastrous to go months and months of travel away from civilized space if you don't have to. If, say, your planet turns out to be unexpectedly salted with all manner of lethal heavy metals or something, you might be well and truly screwed...

Didn't stop the original colonists in cyro-ships. For that matter, look how often things did go horribly wrong, Manticore, Grayson, New Potsdam. Which... actually makes your point, two out of three were resolved with considerable outside help. Still, I picture humanity's progression to the stars as a long chain of trying to outrun the "civilizing" influence of the Solarian League.

The team leader, Hugh Arai, is a former slave himself. Apparently it's almost impossible to fake a Manpower tongue-barcode, and it can be recognized as genuine even standing well out of reach.

Well, aside from the difficulty of tattooing something on a man's tongue, I honestly don't see why...

I sincerely have no idea.

Uncle Andrew sure seems to like his kickbacks from Manpower, for a man with such a dismal view of the evils of the dollar.

Huh? Does he show unusual interest in them?

Not particularly. Just struck by the irony of someone who only survives because of kickbacks from some truly horrible people decrying the evils of the dollar.

And that's why they want a treecat to clear all newcomers. Explosive population boom to Torch as slaves, Scrags and outcasts everywhere flood in.

Although it's only been a few years; if the planet's population is growing at anything like the rate required to give it a significant population anytime soon, the number of newcomers is just plain too large to be monitored by one man with one treecat, or for that matter five men with five treecats...

It's not like they personally interview every newcomer, more like they greet or are in a concourse when every shuttle lands from a new ship and Genghis points out anyone who feels crazy, or too broken up inside to function in society. Mind, that's probably still unworkable in the long run but I seem to recall hearing that the treecats make Torch their next colony world?

Yep, they've made Honor their heir if no other is born. Can you imagine OBS Hauptman's face if you'd told him that one? As they go on to discuss, Hauptman knows that Honor's sense of duty will compel her to look after his people, and to keep fighting Manpower. Also, he has personal experience in exactly how hard it is to bribe or threaten her.

Or, for that matter, arrange to have her killed.

Though not meant that way, it's an impressive insurance policy in it's own right. "Kill me, and you get to deal with her."

Mayacows. Also, Luis Rozsak is secretly a gourmet chef who cooks to relieve stress. Only Governor Barregos knows this about him.

I'd imagine a few others know, but then again maybe not.

Probably not. Barregos was speculating to himself whether Rozsak just doesn't open up to others that much, sees only the Governor as a peer worthy to critique his work, or if he's afraid the domestic and unmanly hobby would run counter to his image.

Manticore's punishment to Erewhon for defecting, which has apparently triggered a recession on Erewhon. You burn those bridges, Elizabeth!

I'm actually not sure what the situation is vis a vis Erewhon and Elizabeth. Although it's certainly well within her comfort zone to get so angry over a perceived betrayal that she counterproductively alienates a neutral party.

My impression is that Elizabeth accepts that Erewhon is lost to them for the time being, but is keeping a door open. At the same time, Erewhon needs punishing for their 'treachery' no matter how High Ridge pushed them into Haven's arms. Imbesi, off the record, admits that the fee/duty/tax hikes are fair in that light however much trouble they cause the Erewhoni.

By the way, in earlier main-series books they were the Erewhoni, but I keep seeing Erewhonese. Does anyone know if Weber commented on the change or what?

[VhenRa]

Fairly sure that they are making BC(P)s as well. And they have MDMs coming online too as well as extended range single-drive missiles.

Maya Sector/Erewhon navy when it finally comes online will be up there in terms of tech, behind the Manties/GKGs admittedly and probably behind the Havenites too (Now that Manticore's R&D department has relocated itself to Bolthole as of A Rising Thunder)

[Ahriman238]

Fairly sure that they are making BC(P)s as well. And they have MDMs coming online too as well as extended range single-drive missiles.

Maya Sector/Erewhon navy when it finally comes online will be up there in terms of tech, behind the Manties/GKGs admittedly and probably behind the Havenites too (Now that Manticore's R&D department has relocated itself to Bolthole as of A Rising Thunder)

Sure. Realize that while they're starting from and will want to keep some anti-piracy forces, the new construction for Maya is meant for one purpose and one purpose only: when the time comes, to make the SLN their bitch. They don't need to keep up with the Manties, or even Haven to do that.

[Simon_Jester]

Didn't stop the original colonists in cyro-ships. For that matter, look how often things did go horribly wrong, Manticore, Grayson, New Potsdam. Which... actually makes your point, two out of three were resolved with considerable outside help. Still, I picture humanity's progression to the stars as a long chain of trying to outrun the "civilizing" influence of the Solarian League.

I'm sure that's true to a degree- but for every ragtag colony of browncoats Vergers trying to escape the Alliance League, there are probably several colonies within or near League space that are perfectly 'square' with the League, operated under the aegis of its member worlds and businesses.

Basically, infill.

It's not like they personally interview every newcomer, more like they greet or are in a concourse when every shuttle lands from a new ship and Genghis points out anyone who feels crazy, or too broken up inside to function in society. Mind, that's probably still unworkable in the long run but I seem to recall hearing that the treecats make Torch their next colony world?

Well, the catch is that if there are like six treecats on the planet, and they have to sleep sometime... assume everyone partnered with a 'cat works twelve hour shifts, that still means they can only have three places on the planet where a treecat is standing at all hours of the day. Since spaceships arrive at all hours of the day, one of those has to be Concourse A at a spaceport, one can be Concourse B, and I guess the third is Queen Berry.

So basically, you have two security telepaths standing there while the whole immigrating planetary population walks past. To me that sounds unmanageable, you'll need more locations.