But this was no time for being muddle-headed. Brice gave a very quick summary of what had happened to Michael Alsobrook and Sarah Armstrong, concluding with: "You'd better tell Ganny."

He heard Alsobrook mutter: "Hey, no kidding." But Brice wasn't paying much attention to him any longer. Having done his required duty by quickly and accurately reporting what had happened, Brice was now free to use his own judgment concerning what he should do next. So it seemed to him, anyway. He saw no reason to muddy the waters by asking older and supposedly wiser heads what they thought he ought to do.

He peeked through the vent and saw that the crewmen from the Ouroboros had moved down the corridor six or seven meters in the direction of the slavers' command center in the station's big turret. Which was to say, six or seven meters closer to Brice himself.

So much was cause for caution, but no more than that. Well, possibly a little more than that. Most of the crewmen were carrying flechette guns—the modern descendents of the ancient Old Earth shotgun—and they were specifically designed for use aboard ship, where pulsers' hyper-velocity darts' ability to punch right through bulkheads (and other things . . . like life support systems or critical electronics) was contraindicated. Flechette guns were unlikely, to say the least, to blow through the ceiling of the corridor and strike Brice or his two companions hiding in the air ducts above. The military-grade light tribarrel which had somehow appeared and found its way into the heavy labor slave's hands was another matter entirely, of course. It was designed to punch through armored skinsuits, and it would experience no difficulty at all in turning Brice Parmley into finely ground hamburger.

It seemed unlikely to Brice that anyone was likely to begin blazing away with that sort of artillery inside any orbital habitat unless he absolutely had to, so its presence didn't really worry him that much. He told himself that rather firmly. What did produce some definite alarm, however, was that the people from the Ouroboros had stopped in order to inspect one of the maintenance hatches that gave access to the air ducts.

He heard the female crewman say: "I wish to hell we had schematics." In response, the heavy labor slave shrugged his massive shoulders. Well, he probably wasn't really a slave, in light of recent events. In fact, he seemed to be in command of the operation, from what Brice could glean from subtleties of the crewmen's body language.

"Even if we had them, we couldn't count on them," he said. "A station as immense as this one that's decades old is likely to have had a lot of modifications and alterations—damn few of which would have made their way into a new set of schematics."

The woman scowled. Not at him, but at the hatch above her. "At least there's nothing tricky about the latches. Just straightforward manual ones, hallelujah. Hoist me up, Hugh."

The huge "slave" set down his tribarrel, bent over, grabbed her hips, and lifted her up to the hatch as easily as a mother might lift a toddler. The woman fiddled with the latches for a moment, and the hatch slid aside. Somehow or other—he seemed to be able to move astonishingly quickly for someone with that gorilla physique—the "slave" now had her gripped by her knees and he hefted the woman halfway up into the air duct. From there, she was easily able to lift herself into it.

By the time she did so, Brice had quietly scurried around a bend in the duct, so he was out of her sight. He planned to get at least two more bends ahead of her before he stopped. Behind him, he heard some soft noises which he interpreted as the sound of another crewman being hoisted into the duct. And, very clearly, he heard the female crewman say: "Give us five minutes to get into position."

By now, Brice was pretty sure the people from the Ouroboros were planning to take out the slavers who currently occupied the turret. And given the ruthlessness with which they'd dealt with the first two slavers, he was also pretty sure that "take out" was a phrase which, in this instance, was not going to be combined with soft-hearted terms like "prisoners."

He didn't spend much time chewing on that issue, though. Brice didn't care, when it came right down to it, how ruthlessly the newcomers dealt with the people who currently controlled slaving operations on Parmley Station. The killing of the two slavers he'd just witnessed had been shocking, certainly, because of its violence and suddenness. Beyond that, however, it had no more effect on him than witnessing the slaughter of dangerous animals. Brice's clan maintained practical relations with the slavers, but they loathed them.

The really important issue, still unsettled, was: who are these people, anyway?

He re-attached the com unit to the wire strung in the passageway. Ganny Butre's voice came into his ear. "Who are they, boys? Can you tell yet?"

Ed Hartman was the first to respond, not surprisingly. Brice liked his cousin a lot, but there was no denying that Ed had a tendency to go off half-cocked.

"They gotta be another slaver group, Ganny, trying to muscle in," he said confidently. "Poachers. Gotta be."

James's voice came next. "I wouldn't be so sure of that . . ."

Brice shared James's skepticism. "I'm with Lewis," he said, as forcefully as possible when you were trying to whisper into a com unit. "These people seem way too deadly to be just another batch of slavers."

He added what he thought was the clincher. "And one of them isa slave himself, Ganny. Well . . . was a slave, anyway. I saw his tongue markers."

"So did I," said James. "Ed, you had to have seen it too. You were the closest."

Brice wondered where Lewis and Hartman were right now. Like him, they would have scurried out of sight once they realized some of the people from the Ouroboros were coming into the ducts. Also like him, they'd be cautious but not overly worried about the matter. There were many kilometers of air ducts running all through Parmley Station—and the only blueprints and schematics still in existence were hidden away. If you wanted to pass through the ducts, you either had to move slowly and constantly check your location with instruments, as the crewmen from the Ouroboros were doing, or you had to have memorized the network—as Brice and his cousins had done, over the years. Even they only knew part of it. There was no way the newcomers could catch them, once they were in the ducts.

Ed's reply was a bit slow in coming. That would be caused by nothing more than Hartman's reluctance to tacitly admit that, once again, he'd used his mouth before his brain. "Yeah, okay. I saw it too."

"Well, ain't that sweet?" said Michael Alsobrook. "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.

Brice heard Ganny mutter what he was sure was a curse, but in a language he didn't know. Ganny knew a lot of languages. Then she added: "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?