The fact that he'd never personally been a slave hadn't diminished his hatred for Manpower in any way, and he and his family had always been active in supporting the Anti-Slavery League. Judson's parents had never subscribed to the Ballroom's approach, however. They believed that the Ballroom's atrocities (and, even now, Judson figured there was no better word to describe quite a few of the Ballroom's operations) played into the hands of slavery's supporters. That wasn't a point on which Harper would have agreed with them, and truth to tell, Judson himself had always been a bit more ambivalent about that than his parents were. He'd wondered, sometimes, if that was because he felt as if he'd personally had a "free ride" where slavery was concerned. If he was more willing to see violence as the proper response because he felt hypocritical condemning those who resorted to violence against an abomination they'd experienced firsthand . . . and he hadn't. He'd escaped it before he'd even been conceived, after all, and the Star Kingdom of Manticore was one of the few star nations where no one really cared, one way or the other, if someone was an ex-slave or the son of ex-slaves. You were who you were, and the fact that you'd been designed as someone else's property was neither stigma nor a badge of victimhood.

In that respect, Judson knew he would never be able to fully share his parents' attitude. Both of them were fiercely grateful to the Royal Manticoran Navy for his father's freedom and equally fiercely loyal to the Star Kingdom of Manticore for the safe harbor and opportunities it had given him, but Patrick Henry Van Hale also remembered being a slave . . . and he'd been designed as a "pleasure slave." Even though he'd been only around nineteen T-years old when he'd been freed, he'd already undergone the full gamut of what Manpower euphemistically called "training." Lydia Van Hale hadn't . . . but she'd been the one who'd spent years helping him deal with—and survive—the dehumanizing trauma of that experience. In ways they would never be able to escape, Patrick's slavery still defined who both of them were, and it was an experience Judson had never shared. They'd never harped on that, never indulged in the "if only I'd had it as good as you do" school of child rearing, yet he'd become only increasingly aware of that difference between them as he'd grown older. And as he'd also become increasingly aware of the lifetime scars they both carried with them from his father' experience, his hatred for Manpower and all things Mesan had only grown.

Which, he knew, was another reason he'd found it ever more difficult to shed crocodile tears for the Ballroom's "victims."

Yet he'd been his parents' son, and whatever he'd felt, he would never have been able to justify signing on with the Ballroom. Which was why the liberation of Torch changed everything.

His Forestry Service training had included eleven T-Months at the Royal Law Enforcement Center in Landing, which had given him a firm grounding in law enforcement and investigative techniques, and his childhood on Sphinx and the time he'd spent in the bush had accounted for his adoption by Genghis. As far as Judson was aware, only one ex-slave had ever been adopted by a treecat, but there were probably half a dozen children of ex-slaves who had been, and he was one of them. When the Kingdom of Torch had sprung into existence, Judson had realized immediately that it was going to need people with his skill set just as badly as it was going to need people with Harper's skills. In fact, Torch was probably going to need people like Judson even more, if only because there were so few of them.

When Jeremy X. renounced the Ballroom's "terrorists" tactics on behalf of Torch, Judson's only qualm had evaporated. He'd been on the next ASL-sponsored transport to Torch, with his parents' blessing, and Jeremy and Thandi Palane had been delighted to see him . . . and Genghis.

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.

He figured he owed a lot of that to Genghis' influence. The 'cat had been with him for over fifteen T-years, and he'd been Judson's best sounding board for that entire time. That had turned into an incredibly rich and satisfying two-way communication street since the two of them had mastered the sign language Dr. Arif had devised with the assistance of the treecats Nimitz and Samantha, and Genghis had stepped on more than one temper flare in the T-year they'd spent here on Torch. It was hard for a man to lose it when his treecat companion decided to smack him down for letting things get out of hand.

And it was Genghis' ability to communicate fully with Judson which made his telempathic abilities so valuable to Torch. At the moment, they were officially assigned to Immigration Services, although Thandi Palane had made it quite clear to Judson that that assignment was in the nature of a polite fiction. Their real job was to keep an eye on people who got close enough to Queen Berry to pose a potential threat to the teenaged monarch.

It'd help if Berry were willing to let us put together a proper security detail for her, he thought now, with a familiar sense of disgruntlement. One of these days she's going to have to figure out that she's making it a hell of a lot harder to keep her alive by being so stubborn about it. And if she weren't such a lovable kid, I swear I'd snatch her up by the scruff of the neck and shake some sense into her!

The thought gave him a certain degree of satisfaction . . . which was only slightly flawed by Genghis' bleeking chuckle from his shoulder as the 'cat effortlessly followed the familiar thought through its well-worn mental groove.

"Brooding about Her Majesty's stubbornness again, are we?" Harper inquired genially, and Judson scowled at him.

"It's a sorry turn of events when a man's own 'cat rats him out to such an unworthy superior as yourself," he observed.

"Genghis never signed a word," Harper pointed out mildly, and Judson snorted.

"He didn't have to," he growled. "The two of you have been so mutually corrupting that I think you're developing your own 'mind voice'!"

"I wish!" Harper's snort was only half humorous. "It'd make our job a lot easier, wouldn't it?"

"Probably." Judson walked across to his own desk and dropped into his chair. "Not as much easier as it'd be if Berry was only willing to be reasonable about it, though."

"I don't think anyone—except Her Majesty, of course—is likely to argue with you about that," Harper observed. "On the other hand, at least you and I have it easier than Lara or Saburo."

"Yeah, but unlike Lara we're both civilized, too," Judson pointed out. "If Berry gets too stubborn with her, Lara'll just sling her over a shoulder, unlike either of us, and haul her off kicking and screaming!"

"Now that," Harper said with a sudden chuckle, "is something I'd pay good money to see. And you're right—Lara'd do it in a heartbeat, wouldn't she?"

It was Judson's turn to chuckle, although he wondered if Harper found it quite as ironic as he himself did that the closest thing to a personal bodyguard the Queen of Torch would accept was a Scrag.

Well, an ex-Scrag, if we're going to be fair about it, he reminded himself. And given that Lara's one of Thandi's 'Amazons,' I think it would be a very good idea to be as fair as possible in her case.