"What in the name of . . ." He shook his head, not sure what to do. Normally, he'd have begun CPR treatment, even though he was pretty sure there was no way to save Allen's life at this point. But there was a nasty-looking greenish slime beginning to ooze out of Allen's mouth, which he was almost certain was the residue or side effect—or both—of some sort of powerful poison. Whatever the stuff was, Van Hale wasn't about to get close to it.

Harper came up, cradling his arm. "What happened?"

"He committed suicide." Judson felt a bit stunned. Everything had happened so fast. From the time Harper tapped Allen on the shoulder to the man's suicide, not more than thirty seconds could have passed. Probably less. Maybe a lot less.

Harper knelt down next to Allen's body, and rolled him onto his back. The former Ballroom killer was careful not to let his hands get anywhere near Allen's mouth.

"Fast-acting poison in a hollow tooth. What in the name of creation is an ex-slave immigrant doing with that kind of equipment?" He looked around, spotted a sturdy-looking stick within reach, and picked it up. Then, used the stick to pry open Allen's mouth so he could look at the man's tongue.

"And . . . that's a Manpower breeding mark, for sure and certain. No chance at all it's cosmetic."

He straightened up from the corpse and rocked back on his heels, now squatting instead of kneeling. "What the hell is going on, Judson?"

Chapter Twenty-Four

It was a good ice cream parlor, in fact. Not as good as Muckerjee's Treats in Grendel, the largest city of Beowulf.

The planetary—and system—capital was the city of Columbia, of course, but Columbia, alas, was only Beowulf's second largest city. In fact, it had been the system's second largest city for right on five hundred T-years, now. There were moments when its population had surged, threaening to overtake Grendel at last, yet it never had. Whenever Columbia seemed on the brink of finally overtaking its rival, something always happened to give Grendel a sudden surge of its own. Indeed, the more consipracy minded Columbians had muttered for generations that it was all a plot by some secret conspiracy to maintain the status quo. There'd never been any actual proof of that, mind you, but by now it was enshrined in Beowulfan legend that Grendel would always be bigger, more commercial—flashier in general. And, while Hugh would never want to appear overly credulous where such paranoid accusations were concerned, he'd once been curious enough to do a little reasearch of his own . . . in the course of which he had discovered that Grendel's zoning laws had, in fact, been modified to encourage accelerated growth on several . . . demographically significant occasions. And on very little notice—and with very little public debate—too.

There were those (although Hugh didn't think he counted himself among them) who went still further and asserted that the same nefarious population plotters had deliberately enticed the original owner of Muckerjee's Treats into locating her emporium in Grendel. The parlor was certainly regarded as one of the city's hallmark and legendary attractions, at any rate, and rumor had it that the city government had extended the current owners several very attractive tax breaks to keep it right where it was. And with good reason, too. No ice cream anywhere in the inhabited galaxy was as good as that to be found in Muckerjee's Treats. Such, at least, was the firm opinion of Hugh Arai and every single member of Beowulf's Biological Survey Corps except the notoriously contrarian W.G. Zefat—and it was perhaps no coincidence that Captain Zefat had been sent off on what was expected to be the longest survey mission in the history of the Corps.

For that matter, the ice cream made in the parlor favored by the queen of Torch—J. Quesenberry's Ice Cream and Pastries, it was called—wasn't really as good as the ice cream made in a number of parlors in Manticore or any one of the inhabited planets in Sol system. Still, it was awfully good, and it had the great advantage over all other ice cream parlors in the galaxy of being the only one currently inhabited by Berry Zilwicki.

After about one hour of conversation in the parlor, an idle remark made by Berry reminded Hugh that when he'd first met the queen he hadn't taken much notice of her appearance. Healthy-looking, not otherwise striking, had pretty much summed it up.

That seemed like the memories of early childhood, now. Vague, half-forgotten—most of all, amusingly childish. In the way these things happen, Hugh's fascination with the young woman had completely transformed her appearance. His view of it, at least, and what else did he care about?

This is still a really bad idea. He repeated that mantra for perhaps the twentieth time. With no more effect than the first nineteen self-reminders.

"Jeremy more-or-less raised you, then?"

Hugh shook his head. "No such luck, I'm afraid. And given his lifestyle at the time—wanted by just about every police force in the galaxy—there was no way he could have even if he'd wanted to. No, I spent the first few years after my rescue in a relocation camp on Aldib's second planet, Berstuk."

"I never heard of Berstuk. Or Aldib, for that matter."

"Aldib's a G9 star, whose official monicker is Delta Draconis. Despite being in the same constellation as Beowulf's star, it's not really that close. It's about seventy-five light years from Sol. As for Berstuk . . ."

Hugh's expression grew bleak. "It's named after the Wendish god of the forest. Who was a pretty evil character, apparently. Which I can well believe."

Berry tilted her head slightly. "Well-named because of the forest, or the evil?"

"Both. The planet's gravity is slightly above Earth-normal. There aren't many oceans and those are small, so the climate is a lot worse. What they call 'continental.' Not unlivable, but the summers are bad and the winters are terrible."

"I thought you were rescued by a Beowulf warship."

"I was. But . . ." Hugh shrugged. "All things considered, I'm fond of my adopted homeworld, and Beowulf's probably—no, scratch that, definitely—the most ferocious star nation in the galaxy when it comes to enforcing the Cherwell Convention. Still, Beowulf has its faults. One of them, in my opinion, is that it pretends the Solarian League is really a functional nation, not just a batch of self-satisfied, overly prosperous, basically self-centered, piles of shared interests tied together in an association of convenience."

Berry raised her eyebrows, and Hugh chuckled. The sound was not remarkably cheerful.

"Sorry. The thing is, the ship that took out the slaver I was aboard happened to be operating in the territorial space of a fellow League star system. No one was ever able to prove anyone in that system had anything to do with the nasty slave traders, of course, but the local government insisted that the poor, liberated slaves be handed over to it so that it could personally see to their needs. The skipper of the cruiser—Captain Jeremiah—was a good sort, but he didn't have any choice but to go along with the demands of the local, legally constituted authorities. So we got handed over."

"And?" Berry prompted when he paused.

"And it's a good thing Captain Jeremiah was a good sort, because he put in a call to Beowulf's local trade representative. In the League, 'trade representatives' do a lot of the same things 'commercial attaches' do for relationships between independent star nations, so they've got more clout than the title might suggest. And the Beowulf representative made a point out of informing the local government that Beowulf felt responsible for the slaves it had liberated and would be expecting regular reports on their well-being. Which is probably the only thing that kept us all from getting 'disappeared.' Unfortunately, it didn't keep those oh-so-concerned local authorities from dumping us with the Office of Frontier Security when it found out it couldn't just make us all—poof, go away." He grimaced. "So, we all wound up stuck on Berstuk. It took quite a while for even Beowulf to get us unstuck. Once it did, though, we were fast tracked for citizenship." This time, he smiled. "The truth is, it's not that easy to get Beowulfan citizenship. The professional associations have a lot of clout on Beowulf—too much, my opinion—and getting citizenship can take a long time unless you've got highly desirable professional skills or money or something else they find especially valuable. It can be done, but there are a lot of hoops to jump through, and it takes a while. Except for liberated slaves. Whatever else I might think about Beowulf, it really and truly hates Manpower's guts. Which is one of the main reasons that liberated slaves get to jump the line over just about everybody else when it comes to getting citizenship."