She probably also knew that her great-great-nephew Brice Miller had managed, with his uncle's help, to circumvent the controls enough to allow the youngster to ride the track any time he wanted to, whether or not the requisite observer was present in the control room. But, if she did, she chose to look the other way. Elfride Margarete Butre, being a wise old woman in fact as well as theory, had learned long ago that rules were meant to be broken, so the savvy matriarch always makes sure to put in place a few rules for that very purpose. Let the children and would-be children break those rules, and hopefully the ones that really mattered would go untouched.

Besides, although she'd certainly never told him so and Brice himself would have been astonished by the news, the truth was that Brice was Ganny El's second most favorite nephew of all time.

Her most favorite was Andrew Artlett.

Brice spent perhaps twenty minutes just gazing at the splendid vista that his perch on the curve provided him. In the distance, serving as a backdrop, was Yamato's Nebula. It was actually a dozen light years away, but it looked much closer. Most of Brice's attention, though, was given to the giant planet around which the station revolved. Ameta's cool blue-green colors belied the fury that swirled in that thick atmosphere. Brice had spent enough time watching Ameta to know that the cloud belts and the periodic spots in them were constantly changing. For some reason, he found that continual transformation a source of serenity. Watching Ameta could remove for a time almost all of the fourteen-year-old angst that afflicted him.

Not all, of course. His two efforts to transfer that ringed glory into rhyme and meter had been . . .

Well. Disastrous. Truly putrid. Poetry so bad there was a good chance the spirit of ancient Homer had shrieked for a moment, back there on distant Old Earth.

About twenty minutes after arriving at the curve, all of Brice's momentary pleasure vanished. He'd finally caught sight of the vessel coming toward the amusement park's docking area.

Another slaver had arrived.

He'd better get back. Things were always a little tense when slave ships showed up to use the park's facilities. They had no legal right to do so, but there were no effective authorities out here in the middle of nowhere to enforce the law. Soon enough, anyway, to make any difference. The mining boom that Brice's great-grandfather had expected to develop on Hainuwele had never materialized, despite several false starts. The gas-mining operations that did take place in Ameta's atmosphere required far less labor than old man Parmley had counted on to keep his amusement park in business—and those miners were in no position to serve as the system's police force, even if they'd been so inclined.

Years back, the first two attempts by slavers to use the park's mostly-abandoned facilities as a convenient and free staging area and transfer station had erupted in pitched battles with the clan. The family had won both fights. But two of them was enough to make it obvious that they couldn't possibly survive many more—and they were now much too poor to abandon the park.

So, a combination truce and tacit agreement had developed between Ganny El and her people and the slavers. The slavers could use the park as long as they kept their activities restricted to specified areas, and didn't bother the clan. Or the tiny number of tourists who still occasionally showed up.

And paid something for the privilege. Fine, it was blood money, and if the Audubon Ballroom ever found out about it there'd probably be hell to pay. But the clan needed the money to survive. There was even a little bit left over after each transaction for Ganny El to slowly build up a kitty that might, some day, finally allow the clan to give up the park altogether and migrate somewhere else.

Where? Elfride Margarete Butre had no idea. On the other hand, she'd have plenty of time to think of a destination, as slowly as the funds accumulated.

Chapter Nine

As he watched Parmley Station growing in the screen, Hugh Arai shook his head. The gesture combined awe, amusement, and wonder at the inexhaustible folly of humankind. Hearing the little snort he emitted, Marti Garner eyed him sideways, from her casual sprawl on the chair in front of the viewscreen. 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 . . .

It was hard to be certain what they knew or didn't know, although it hadn't always been that way. Indeed, there'd been a time when the Republic of Haven had been almost as well connected with Beowulf as Manticore, but that had ended over a a hundred and forty T-years ago.

For the most part, Beowulfers had been less than overjoyed when Haven officially became the People's Republic after the Constitutional Convention of 1750, but it was the Technical Conservation Act of 1778 which had effectively put the final kiss of death on the once cordial relationship. By making it a crime for engineers or professionals to seek to emigrate from the Peoples' Republic for any reason, the Legislaturalists had pushed Beowulf's meitocracy-worshiping public opinion beyond the snapping point. The PRH had responded to Beowulf's highly vocal criticism by launching a vigorous anti-Beowulf propaganda campaign (Public Information had been an old hand at such tactics even then), and relations between the two star nations had nosedived.

Military cooperation between the PRH and Beowulf had been dwindling well before 1778, of course, but it had terminated completely after the Legislaturalists passed the TCA. By this time, the Beowulfers were pretty sure that the regular armed forces of the Republic of Haven thought the Survey Corps was exactly what it passed itself off to be: a civilian outfit, but one which, given that it often ventured into the galactic equivalent of rough neighborhoods, was pretty tough. Nothing compared to a real military force, of course.

But that might not have been true of Haven's State Security, back in the days of the Pierre-Saint Just regime. And just how much of State Sec's institutional knowledge had been passed on to the succeeding intelligence outfit—which had also been one of its executioners—was an open question.

However, it probably didn't matter that much. Beowulf's Biological Survey Corps had never spent much time in Havenite space.

First, because that had become . . . impolitic following the collpase of Haven-Beowulf relations. But, second, because there was no reason to, given Haven's longstanding hostility to genetic slavery. Say what one might about the Legislaturalists—and, for that matter, the lunatics of the Committee of Public Safety—their opposition to slavery had remained fully intact. Personally, and despite a personal partiality for Manticore, Hugh had always been prepared to cut Haven quite a bit of slack in other areas, given its aggressive enforcement of the Cherwell Convention. He was pretty sure most of his fellows in the BSC shared his opinion in that regard, as well, although certain other brahces of Beowulf's military might feel rather differently. 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.