"Yes, Mum. Me folks thought it sounded good, and I'm certainly Irish."

Sittithong realized that the young woman wasn't making a play on words; she meant it.

"You are…" Good lord! "… seventeen standard years?"

"Yes, Mum. But I'll be eighteen next March."

The commander quickly adjusted to the stock military calendar. "Then you were only sixteen when you… became pregnant?"

"Aye, Mum. Old enough, it seems, though the old superstitions said it was too young and couldn't be done on the first time. Guess they were wrong 'bout that."

O'Brian had a thick accent that was related to Murphy's but was much, much more pronounced. Sittithong guessed that it was the Irish dialect, whatever that meant.

The infobase picked up her mental query and gave her the details on a thin frame to the right of the personnel record. Some small island on Old Earth. A nationality, as it were. The planet the girl was from, though, was Tara Hibernius, a midway colony near the border beyond which they could no longer go. The colony had been established by a group of wealthy conservatives who wanted to found an agricultural society based on an idealized vision of an ancient state of their native land that probably never existed in the first place.

The pattern wasn't uncommon, particularly in the early days of colonization. In fact, such things had been encouraged. The irrational revolutionary nut cases with money and influence and possibly fanaticism as well could be bled off by giving them a chance to prove their ideas, and if you had a wealthy enough benefactor or group, then the Confederation hadn't even had to shell out much to set the places up. When the dissident and the dangerous actually paid to take themselves out of your society, how could you not help but ease the way?

Tara Hibernius was only two wormgate jumps from Vaticanus, too. Strict and very conservative Catholic society. So Murphy might not have been stretching the truth about the place. They might well have imposed technological limitations on the average citizens there just to keep them isolated and their lifestyle mandated just so; this allowed for a cultlike society where people lived in ignorance of what else there was in the universe, the founders' ideal. Back to the land, back to the simple life-it was consistent.

But paying an old reprobate like Murphy to get your pregnant daughter off to some distant planet where she'd be totally unprepared to live wasn't consistent. Some of these cults killed their sinners, but this seemed neither an act of excommunication nor of loving desperation. It made no sense at all.

The computer-aided psychology report on any of the three was no more help. Except for a strong sense of deception, the physiological results were totally contradictory and so were the stories.

"Why were you on Captain Murphy's ship instead of staying back on your native planet?" the exec asked her.

Irish O'Brian shrugged. "It beat the alternative, Mum."

"Indeed? And what was that?"

"Bein' burnt up with the baby and all, Mum."

"The people of your world would have burned you alive?" The exec would have sounded more shocked if she actually believed that it would happen.

"Oh, yes, Mum. Me and me sisters."

"Sisters? I don't see any relationship here."

"Oh, it's a different kind of relation, that," O'Brian replied, sounding casual and innocent. "Sort of sisters in the soul more than in the blood. They'd already got the other ten of us, y'see, so there wasn't no doubt but what they'd do to us."

"They burned ten other young women? You saw this?"

"Yes, Mum. Didn't hav'ta, though. When any one of us goes, well, the others just sort of know, y'see."

"No, I don't see, I'm afraid. I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Well, Mum, it's like this. The Old Country, it was united by a prophet who married off a daughter of the line of Judah to King Brian. That was at the old Tara, which is why that's a part of the New Country name, y'see. They think they have the direct authority of God, and the Church is their instrument."

Were all these people totally insane? "What does all that have to do with anything, my dear?"

"Well, y'know, we don't exactly get along with God, y'know. We ain't been all that impressed with his side, y'see."

This was going nowhere. The exec did, however, notice one thing that she hadn't before. "Um, that necklace you're wearing. Is it some family thing, or a gift, or some sort of religious medal?"

The girl ran a long finger down the slender golden chain around her neck which ended in a large stone of some sort, emerald in color but looking somehow different, and certainly rough.

"Well, 'tis of our beliefs, Mum."

"May I look at it?"

The idea seemed to frighten the girl, the first real rise the exec had gotten from her. "Please, Mum. It's not good for you to touch it. It's just a stone, but it's very important to me. Please don't make me give it to you!"

Sittithong thought for a moment. What the hell, they weren't getting anywhere. "Very well, calm down." She sighed and considered where to go from here and didn't get very far. Finally she said, "That will be all for now, citizen. Please exit and wait until we've spoken to your companions. We might well want to talk to you all again after this. Unlike Captain Murphy, you haven't committed any criminal acts as far as we're concerned."

"So long as you don't send us back to our deaths, anyplace is fine, Mum. We'll get by."

Yeah, sure. Seventeen, pregnant or with an infant, little possessions, no money or credit, no education, no skills. Oh, you'll cope fine.

When O'Brian was gone, the commander called, "What do you think, Captain? You want to take the next one, or me?"

"I think these people are all lunatics," Captain Kim replied. "I've been looking over the initial examinations and interrogations of all three and that's about what we can expect from the other two, it appears. I'm not sure whether it's worth losing any more time or sleep over this." He got up and came around to the exec, who rose and yielded the chair to the captain. "Still, let's see what comes of this, if anything. I don't want to be hasty here, and we've got procedural problems."

"Indeed. Most people in their circumstance will tell us where to drop them off."

"Let's take the other two together and see if we can make any sense of this." He pressed a point on the desk signalling the marine outside. "Send in the other two together now."

"Aye, sir," was the response, and the door opened and the other two girls entered. Like O'Brian, neither seemed particularly awed by the room nor the presences within it, nor noticably concerned about their situation, either. If anything, the best either officer could sense was mild indifference to their situation.

The captain and exec looked them both over. They looked around in a bored sort of way but did not return the stares.

To the right of the captain was a short and somewhat chubby young woman with light brown hair and bright, almost impossibly blue eyes. To her right, his left, stood a taller, more striking figure with long blonde hair that was unnaturally pure and golden yellow, a sexy stance and baby face with lips that seemed to form an impertinent but sexy pout even when at rest, and strangely unnerving hazel eyes. The fact that this one was as pregnant as the others did not in the least diminish her radiant sexuality; even the neutered officers knew what she radiated and could sense it.

The exec went over and whispered to the captain, "Sir, doesn't it strike you that these girls, all three, seem unnatural somehow? The colorations are natural according to the medical exam, yet have you ever seen eyes or hair of those colors in nature on any planetfall?"