Jeremy grinned impishly. "So? That's what dates are for, don't you know? Just say the word and I'll set one up."

Hugh shook his head. "I see your persistence hasn't changed any. Out of pure curiosity, though, where does a reigning queen go, on a date?"

Jeremy's grin was immediately replaced by a scowl. "With this queen? Damn near anywhere, the crazy girl. She has absolutely no sense of security, Hugh. I mean, none whatsoever."

Arai cocked his head. "This is coming from you? Mister I'll Take Any Chance And Make Obscene Gestures At Security While I'm At It."

"It's not funny, Hugh. She's wide open for an assassination attempt—which you know, and I know, and everybody in thegalaxy knows except her, Manpower would be delighted to carry out—and she refuses to take any serious precautions."

Hugh's rubbed his chin. "None at all?"

"Not really. That gaggle of ex-Scrags she's had around her since the fracas on the Wages of Sin try their best to keep an eye on her. But you're a security expert—used to be, anyway, before you got started on this commando silliness—and you know perfectly well that jury-rigged protection's not really worth very much. The only way the Amazons can pull it off is by pretending they're just accompanying Berry whenever she goes out in public because they're devoted to her. Which is true enough that Berry's willing to look the other way, even if she does sometimes get grumpy about it."

The impish grin came back. "That's because she says having all those lady weightlifters around is scaring off potential boyfriends, most of whom are scared off anyway because of her silly titles. Her term, not mine—'silly.' But it occurs to me that you'd hardly be scared off by a bunch of genetically engineered female super-soldiers on account of Manpower already engineered you to bench press elephants."

"Very funny. I'll admit the prospect of facing down a bunch of ex-Scrags does not fill me with terror. I'm still not doing it, Jeremy." Hurriedly: "Even if I wanted to, there isn't time. If this scheme Cachat and Zilwicki cooked up is going to work at all, I've got to get back to Parmley Station."

"Why?" Jeremy demanded. "Your team can handle the work of getting that station fixed up without you, perfectly well."

"Maybe so—but they can't obtain the freighter. For that, we're going to need serious financial backing and that means I have to report back to Beowulf."

"Oh, that's nonsense. We're not talking about a warship, Hugh—hell, we're not even talking about a big freighter. Just something around a million tons. And as beat-up as we want it, we ought to be able to pick it up cheaply. Between them, Cachat and Zilwicki can come up with the money. Zilwicki could probably do it on his own, without even tapping into Havenite funds. His lady friend is one of the richest women in the Star Kingdom."

Hugh sat through the little speech with growing impatience. "Come on, Jeremy! Stop playing the innocent. You know perfectly well the issue isn't money as such—it's laundering the money so there'll be no trace of it for Manpower's agents to pick up. For that, nobody's as good as Beowulf's secret services."

Jeremy leaned back in his chair and bestowed a cool smile on Arai. "No, actually, they aren't the best. I admit Beowulf's very good at it—but you forget that we're less than a week's travel from the galaxy's champion money-launderers. Who happen to be on very good terms with Torch."

Hugh opened his mouth, and . . . closed it. Then opened it again, and . . . closed it.

"Ha!" Jeremy jeered. "Forgot about the Erewhonese, didn't you? They're not that many generations removed from outright gangsters, Hugh. And all that happened when they 'went legit' is that their money-laundering skills got even better. Had to, of course."

He looked out the window at the lush landscape three stories below. "All we have to do is set the problem before them—Walter Imbesi, that is, we don't even need to talk to the official triumvirate—and you'll have a tramp freighter delivered to you in less than two months with impeccable credentials—lousy ones, of course, but impeccable—and not a trace that any part of its origins had anything to do with either Torch or Manticore or Haven or Beowulf. Or Erewhon. And you've already got a crew that can't be traced."

Slowly, Hugh got up and went to the window, thinking as he went. The truth was that Jeremy's scheme was better than anything even Beowulf's secret services would be able to come up with. Assuming that Cachat and Zilwicki decided to undertake this very dangerous mission—that was still unsettled, as yet—then they'd have as good a backup escape route as you could ask for.

The Mesa System was home to a number of huge interstellar corporations, so it had a truly enormous amount of freight traffic coming in and out. Not as much as Manticore or Sol or a few of the other well-established old star systems in the League's core, but close.

True, Mesan security was pretty ferocious, but it was still forced to work within some limits. About thirty percent of Mesa's population were freeborn citizens, and they had a wide range of rights and liberties that were enshrined by law and even respected, most of the time. Mesa's government was not an outright dictatorship that could operate with no restraints at all. Like many rigid caste societies in history that had a large population of privileged free citizens—South Africa's apartheid system was a well-known example—Mesa's government was a mixture of democratic and autocratic structures and practices.

The same democratic liberties were not extended to the remaining seventy percent of the population, of course. Slaves constituted about sixty percent of Mesa's population. The remaining ten percent consisted of the descendants of slaves who'd been freed in the earlier periods of Mesan history.

In its origins, Manpower had claimed that genetic slavery was actually "indentured servitude." That fiction had been openly dispensed with centuries ago, when the Mesan constitution was amended to make the manumission of genetic slaves illegal. But that still left a large population of freed ex-slaves—legally second-class citizens ("seccies," was the slang term used for them)—inhabiting all of Mesa's large towns and cities, and even a number of villages in more rural areas.

Periodically, calls were made to expel all seccies from the system. But, by now, the seccies had become an integral part of Mesa's social and economic structure and provided a number of useful functions for the planet's freeborn citizens. As had been true throughout history, once a large class of ex-slaves came into existence, they were hard to get rid of, for the same reason that a large class of illegal immigrants was hard to get rid of. People were not cattle, much less inert lumps of stone. They were intelligent, self-motivated and often ingenious active agents. About the only effective way to just eliminate such a large class of people was to adopt a political and legal structure that was sometimes described as "totalitarian."

For a wide variety of reasons, Mesa was not prepared to adopt that option. So, Mesa's security forces simply kept a close eye on the seccies—insofar as they could. That wasn't as easy as it sounded, though, because seccy society was socially intricate, often shadowy, and intermixed with that of Mesa's freeborn citizens. Marriage was illegal, but despite all of Manpower's pretensions to creating new types of people, human nature remained pretty intractable. There were plenty of personal liaisons between seccies and freeborn, regardless of what the law said or official custom prohibited and frowned upon.

A large number of those liaisons were commercial, not personal. Mesa's huge population of slaves needed to be supplied, and—again, despite all official Manpower pronouncements—it often proved most practical to have those needs supplied by slave sutlers. And there were even some luxury goods, as well. "Luxury," at least, as slaves reckoned these things. Many of the slaves were allowed to work for themselves on the side, and use whatever income they garnered for their own purposes. That was a messy but useful way of keeping social antagonisms from becoming too explosive.