In the plush rear seat of her private runabout as it left atmosphere Naomi turned toward Victor, sitting next to her. He could see the earbug which she'd been using to talk to Walter Imbesi.

"My uncle wants to know if you think he should meet us once we arrive."

"In public?" Victor shook his head. "That'll run the risk of wrecking his plausible deniability. So I'd advise against it—unless he wants to bring Erewhon security down on Templeton and his crew, before they make their move. Which—"

Victor shrugged. "It's his decision, of course, but I'd strongly urge him to let things unfold some more. If we stop Templeton before he strikes, we lose most of our political leverage. But if we don't, and people find out Walter Imbesi could have stopped Templeton before then—but didn't—there'll be all hell to pay."

Naomi nodded and began muttering under her breath, in the easy manner of someone accustomed to using hidden throat mikes. Then she fell silent, listening to whatever her uncle was saying.

She glanced at Victor. "Walter says that could get very rough on the girls."

Victor could feel his face tighten. He could also, out of the corner of his eye, see the little frown on Ginny's face. She was sitting on the seat across from them, looking out the viewport at the receding surface of Erewhon. From this distance—they'd just about reached the orbit of The Wages of Sin —the planet was a gorgeous blue-and-white ball. The sight didn't seem to be pleasing Ginny, though.

"I realize that," he replied. "But I'm not in the business of rescuing Zilwicki's daughters and Manticoran royalty. If we can manage it, I'll certainly do my best to protect them. But..."

Ginny's frown was deepening. Victor's face tightened still further. "Look, it's your uncle's decision. But the best way to handle this, from a purely political viewpoint, is not to worry about collateral damage."

Again, Naomi nodded and began speaking to Imbesi.

" 'Collateral damage,' " Victor heard Ginny muttering. "I hate that damn phrase."

Victor tried to figure out something to say, but Ginny just waved a hand without looking at him. "Never mind, Victor. I understand, and I'm not faulting you. I just don't like it, that's all."

Neither do I. The faces of the two young women he'd met at the Stein funeral floated into his mind. Damn Zilwicki, anyway. Does he always wind up losing his daughters? I just hope this one's as tough as the other one. I'll do what I can, but...

That wouldn't be much, being realistic about it. Victor was throwing this operation together as he went along. Zilwicki's frigate was by now well into hyper-space on its way to Maya Sector. Along with him had gone most of the Ballroom that Victor had any contact with beyond Donald, who'd stayed behind on Erewhon after faking an illness, and seven others. Victor had been moving so fast that Donald and the three men with him were scrambling to catch a shuttle to The Wages of Sin using public transportation. Which meant that unless Victor or Imbesi notified the resort's own security force, Templeton would have to be handled by Victor, a few Ballroom members, and Thandi and her unit—who were outnumbered something like three-to-one.

So be it. Zilwicki's daughter and Princess Ruth would either be protected by their escort from the Queen's Own Regiment, or they wouldn't. Presumably, the Manticoran soldiers who'd been selected for this detail were proficient in close quarter combat. And Victor was sure that the Erewhonese had allowed them to retain their sidearms, waiving the usual draconian security measures protecting The Wages of Sin .

That wouldn't be true for anyone else involved. The space station's security scannerswere reputed to be as good as any in the galaxy. Like Victor and his people, Thandi and her team would have left their weapons behind; they weren't even going to try to smuggle arms into the space station. Neither would Templeton, unless he was a lot less expert than Victor thought he was. The Masadan zealots had not managed to evade Manticore's efforts to catch them for years by being ignorant or overconfident about modern security measures.

Sooner or later, of course—and probably very quickly—Templeton would be obtaining weapons from overwhelmed security guards. But those would be light-powered side arms, not the kind of powerful weapons which could wreak general havoc in a firefight on a space station. Even caught by surprise, the princess' guards should have a good chance to get the girls somewhere to safety.

Well. A chance, anyway. But even if they failed...

Victor chewed on the problem. He wasn't positive, but he suspected this was a kidnapping attempt rather than an assassination under way. And if so, a new possibility raised itself.

"Oh, wow, " whispered Berry, staring out over the main gaming hall of The Wages of Sin. She and Ruth, followed by their guards, had just emerged through the entrance. Web Du Havel had remained behind in their suite, claiming that his age and sedentary habits would leave him exhausted if he tried to tag along with two youngsters enjoying their first romp through one of the galaxy's premier gambling casinos.

Even the princess, accustomed as she was to the splendor of the Star Kingdom's royal palaces, was impressed. " 'Oh wow' is right. Although—I'd say it was garish, except the word 'garish' doesn't begin to do it justice."

Berry chuckled. Leaving aside the flashy gaming tables and machines themselves, everything about the main hall seemed designed to overwhelm the senses of anyone standing in it. She was particularly taken by the holograph images spreading across the entire ceiling, some thirty meters or so above the floor. Right now, the gaming hall seemed to be racing through the center of a galaxy, with the coruscating side effects of an invisible black hole ahead of it. A moment later, the holographic image swept aside and they were back out in intergalactic space, with the Sombrero Galaxy looming in the rear of the hall.

"Wow, "Berry repeated.

Seeing the expressions on the faces of her special unit as they stared at the space station looming ahead of them, Thandi had to keep from smiling. For all their superior airs, the truth was that the ex-Scrags were the equivalent of country hicks. Their whole lives had been spent either in the slums of Terra's major cities, or skulking through other interstices of the inhabited galaxy. Their education was as spotty as Thandi's had been, when she'd left Ndebele years earlier—but, unlike her, they hadn't spent the intervening years in a determined effort to remedy the lack. Secure in their own subculture's superstitions—what do supermen need to learn from sub-humans? —they'd only begun resuming a program of study since encountering Thandi herself. She'd enforced that just as firmly as she had everything else. But, her program hadn't placed any great priority on teaching her new charges the curlicues which galactic luxury could create.

"Luxury" was only part of it. The shuttle, designed specifically for the transport of prospective sheep to their fleecing place, had a huge viewing port. All the better to whet the appetite of the sheep when they got their first sight of the place where they thought they'd be munching the greenest grass in the universe. Which, indeed, they would be—while being fleeced in the process.

The space station wasn't simply dazzling and impressive, it was also huge. Huge, and incredibly complex in its design. Roughly speaking, it was the shape of a sphere—but not a solid so much as a construct of interlocking tubes and passageways and, here and there, much larger chambers. Thandi was fond of a type of food which still went by an ancient term referring to its origins—Italian, it was called—and The Wages of Sin reminded her of nothing so much as what a bowl of spaghetti might look like in zero G. Keeping in mind that the pasta and the meatballs were colored in every shade of the rainbow, lit throughout by a dazzling display of modern fluorescence and holographic technology—and somewhere in the vicinity of eighteen kilometers in diameter. The shuttles she could see in its vicinity, here and there, looked like specks beside it.

A gleam from reflected sunlight on what was apparently a large ship not far away caught Thandi's eye. She suddenly realized that the merchant ship the shuttle had passed very recently was not more than six or seven hundred kilometers from the space station—the space-going equivalent of being within mooring distance.

"Excuse me a moment," she muttered, going over to the viewport controls and turning up the magnification. One of the passengers in the shuttle glared at her, but said nothing. The combination of her imposing height and figure and the fact she'd been polite, was, as usual, enough to deter anything more vehement.

Yes.That gleaming sunlight did come from the same freighter they'd passed. A fairly standard commercial design, massing perhaps five million tons.

Thandi returned the magnification to its normal setting and turned away from the viewscreen, frowning. She wondered what the ship was doing there. There was no particular reason for a freighter to be riding in orbit that close to a pleasure resort, after all. A liner, certainly. The Wages of Sin was Erewhon's principal tourist attraction. But not a freighter.

She hesitated, and then decided it was time anyway to alert Rozsak's destroyers that they might soon be needed.

One of the other luxuries afforded by Wages of Sin' s transportation was a complete communications suite, with a plentiful supply of encrypted channels whose privacy the government guaranteed. Which , she reflected as she plugged her personal com into one of them, means a bit more here than it might somewhere else, doesn't it?

Not that it prevented her from bringing her own encryption software on line.

"Horatius, Lieutenant Carlson speaking ," the voice of the duty com officer said into her earbug. "What can I do for you, Lieutenant Palane? "

Her personal encrypt had identified her, just as it had automatically routed her to the watch officer instead of one of the duty ratings. But it was still reassuring—and satisfying—to be part of an operation where Navy senior-grade lieutenants (the equivalent of a Marine captain) not only knew which end was up but actually sounded like they wanted to help her do her own job.