EVERYTHING. Well... not quite. But we're pretty sure they've got their hands on the latest Manty compensators and FTL com, just for starters. They aren't as fully up to speed as the Graysons are, but that's only because they had too much infrastructure in place when they signed on with Manticore. They haven't been as aggressive about rebuilding from the ground up, and their hardware was already good enough to get by—better than anything we had, at any rate! But they've still got at least eighty percent of the total Manty package, and that means—

Sweet Jesus. Practically overnight, we'd make up almost all of Manticore's tech edge.

He shook his head, trying to focus on immediate questions. "What do you mean by a 'hard bargain'?"

Naomi shrugged. With her bosom, wearing a robe that was too small for her, the gesture was... distracting. "I don't know. You'd have to work that out with my uncle. And then—assuming he was satisfied—he'd have to work it out with the families in power. I can tell you for sure that at the very least they'd insist that the Republic of Haven help us deal with the Congo problem."

"Deal with it in what way?"

"How about carpet nuclear bombardment?" Ginny snarled. "For starters."

Victor grimaced. "Ginny, most of the people living on Congo are slaves."

Ginny started to snap a reply; then, took in another breath and nodded abruptly. "Okay. I take it back. How about a simple war of conquest? Then we shoot everybody except the slaves. Better yet, leave them stranded in that jungle with nothing more than a loincloth and let them die slowly."

Victor sighed and rubbed his face. "Congo" wasn't even the name of the planet they were talking about. Not officially, at least. The star manuals listed it simply under a catalog number, and the Mesan corporation whose private property the planet essentially was called it "Verdant Vista."

But for everyone else in this portion of the galaxy, the place was called Congo. Victor even knew the obscure historical reference from which the name had derived, a place on ancient Earth called "King Leopold's Congo." A colonial hellhole, reborn—and often cited by the Anti-Slavery League and the Renaissance Association as a prime example of the horrors unleashed by the galaxy's toleration of Manpower and Mesa.

Manpower, as it happened, was the Mesan corporation in question and maintained a slave-breeding center there. But the main product of the jungle planet was a variety of pharmaceuticals which were both valuable and difficult to duplicate artificially—and which Congo's owners extracted by using the most savage forms of forced labor imaginable. One study commissioned by the Renaissance Association claimed that the life expectancy of the average slave laborer once they began working on the plantations was not more than six years.

"Please, Ginny," he said softly. "Anger will get us nowhere." He cocked an eye at Naomi. "I assume Erewhon has considered the possibility and ruled it out."

Again, Naomi shrugged. Victor had to repress the urge to shout: Put real clothes on, woman! I'm trying to think!

"You'd have to get the details from my uncle. But, yes, I know we've considered the option of a straight-up military campaign and decided it just wasn't feasible. For starters, while we could defeat Mesa's private fleets, there's the distinct possibility that their OFS cronies could bring in official SLN intervention, as well. Wouldn't fit in very well at all with the League's official position on genetic slavery, but that's never kept Frontier Security from finding justifications to assist non-Solly polities or commercial development in the name of 'frontier stability.' Granted, that's unlikely in this case. But it's certainly not impossible, and no Erewhonese government is going to risk the possibility of an open breach with the League. Besides, even leaving that entirely aside, we simply don't have the ground forces to occupy the planet. We're essentially a commercial power, not a military one. And any ground campaign on Congo..."

She let the sentence trail off. Something like sixty percent of Congo's land surface, if Victor remembered correctly, was classified as rain forest. And the other forty percent was mostly worse: swamps, marshy lowlands, bayous—every conceivable form of terrain guaranteed to make life miserable for ground troops.

The solution was immediately obvious to Victor, but he was quite sure no Erewhonese had ever thought of it. And he wasn't at all sure they'd accept the idea once he proposed it. It would be a radical solution, sure to rub the wrong way against the cautious businessmen and merchants who dominated Erewhon's oligarchical society.

If he even proposed the idea in the first place, he reminded himself, exercising his own caution. His tentative scheme would only work if...

There were at least two big "ifs" he could think of, right offhand. Before he could take the idea any further, he'd have to establish his own liaisons with the relevant parties involved. One of whom—

That last thought came with an odd combination of emotions. A bit of guilt, mingled with quite a bit more in the way of anticipation. It wasn't as if Naomi was actually his girlfriend, after all. Nor was it Victor's fault if the only direct liaison he could think of with the Solarian League's most capable military officer in the region just happened to go through a dazzling smile.

"Let's pursue this later," he said, clearing his throat. "For the moment, I assume that Erewhon is furious with the Manties because they won't lift a finger to deal with Congo."

Naomi's face was tight. "Congo poses a constant threat to us. We weren't too concerned until a few years ago, when the Mesans discovered the system had its own wormhole junction. But that changed everything. Sure, Mesa wouldn't attack Erewhon directly—but who's to say whom else those scumbags might allow through the junction? It's like having a gangster for a neighbor, with the combination to your back door. We were assured by the Star Kingdom that after the war with Haven was successfully prosecuted and peace was made, they'd give us whatever help we needed to deal with Congo. Including the promise to put their diplomatic clout into making damned sure that any OFS bureaucrat's temptation to rent Mesa an SLN task force or two was firmly dissuaded. Those assurances were given by the Cromarty Government, of course."

Victor felt the need to play the devil's advocate. Not out of perversity, but because his political instincts told him that he needed to appear objective to the Erewhonese. "In all fairness, Cromarty probably would have kept the promise."

"Yes, probably. Instead, however, Cromarty was assassinated and High Ridge took over, and the new regime has made it crystal clear that they don't feel bound by any commitments made by the previous administration." Harshly: "The dishonorable bastards."

Victor understood the anger lurking under the last sentence, and knew as well that no Manticoran in the current regime would. The informal style of Erewhonese politics came with a cultural background that was just foreign to such people as Baron High Ridge. On Erewhon, a person's word was considered his bond—and the bond was assumed by the families involved. If a man made a promise, and was unable to keep it for any reason, it was expected that his relatives would do so.

Probably the most common popular saw on Erewhon was: a deal's a deal. The Erewhonese were notorious throughout the galaxy—their own portion of it, at least, as well as those sectors of the Solarian League which had regular contact with them—for being inveterate hagglers and bargainers. But they were also just as well-known for being trustworthy once a bargain was made. It was no accident that Erewhon had the lowest percentage of lawyers relative to the general population of any industrialized world in the human-settled galaxy. The Erewhonese just didn't think in terms of "lawyering"—whereas a long-standing joke in the Solarian League had a man suing his mother for the trauma inflicted upon him by childbirth.

"Okay, then. I think I've got the basic parameters of the problem clear enough. For the moment, at least. I need to—ah—investigate a few things. When and where can we meet with your uncle?"

Naomi grinned. "The Wages of Sin, where else?"

Ginny clapped her hands. "Oh, I've always wanted to see that place!" She sprang to her feet and flung herself upon her closet with what struck Victor as excessive enthusiasm. "Wait'll you see the outfit I'm going to wear! Victor's gonna look like a lobster, he'll be so embarrassed!"

Five minutes later she was parading around, showing off the outfit. Victor looked pretty much like a lobster, all the way down to the way his back was hunched. When Naomi announced she was going to match Ginny and go her one better, an impartial observer would have said he bore a closer resemblance to a hermit crab, desperately looking for a shell to crawl into.

To his relief, Victor discovered that the rendezvous with Walter Imbesi couldn't happen immediately, because of the Erewhonese magnate's other pressing business. He'd have a least a day or two of relative tranquility, before he had to board the shuttle for the space station which was Erewhon's most notorious tourist attraction, accompanied by two women both of whom seemed determined to kill him by public embarrassment.

Of course, Victor's definition of "tranquility" would have puzzled most people, who didn't associate the term with scheming and plotting and scurrying in the shadows. But that was a world which Victor had grown comfortable in, during the past several years.

Comfortable enough, even, to feel no particular qualms about entering a Manticoran-officered warship disguised as a customs official, early the following afternoon. And why should he? It wasn't technically a Manticoran warship, after all, and while Victor himself wasn't technically a customs official, the subterfuge had been approved by the niece of an Erewhonese magnate who, even though neither she nor he were technically officials in the Erewhonese government, didn't seem to have any trouble finding the necessary documents on very short notice.

Besides, Victor did know the basic procedures and lingo of customs officials; and, besides again, he wasn't in the least bit interested in either the Manticoran officers of the warship or the warship itself. Just one of the members of the crew. Any one of seventy-three percent of the members of the crew, for that matter.