"We never did a damn thing for them!" said Ed.
Hugh swiveled his head to look down at him. "But you took their money, didn't you?"
Ed was silent. Brice tried to think of something, but . . . what was there to say, really?
Except . . .
"Unless we were going to die, we didn't have any choice," he stated, in as adult a manner as he could manage. "We're broke. Have been since way before I was born. We had no way to leave and the only way we could stay was by making a deal with the slavers."
"The stinking dirty rotten slavers," added James. Brice thought that was probably the most useless qualifier uttered by any human being since the ancient Hebrews tried to claim the golden calf was actually there as a reminder of the evils of idolatry. And Yahweh hadn't bought it for one second.
The commando just laughed. "Oh, relax. Even the Ballroom . . ." He cocked his head slightly and glanced at Ed. "Did I understand you right, earlier? That you've adopted slaves into your group. And if so, where did they come from?"
"Yeah, it's true. There's about . . ." He paused, while he did a quick estimate. "Somewhere around thirty, I figure."
"Thirty, is it? Out of twenty-four total."
Brice flushed. "Well. Okay, there's maybe more than just two dozen of us, all told. But I'm not fudging about the thirty."
"It's thirty-one, actually," said James eagerly. He seemed to have become addicted to useless qualifiers. "I just did an exact count."
"And where'd they come from?"
Brice raced through every alternative answer he could think of, before deciding that the truth was probably the best option. The commando questioning him might be built like an ogre, but it was obvious by now that there was nothing dull-witted or brutish about his mind.
"Most of them come from way back—I wasn't even born yet—before we'd, well, worked out our arrangement with the slavers. There were a couple of big fights then, and we freed a bunch of slaves both times. Since then, of course, some of them have had kids themselves, but I wasn't including them in the thirty figure since they weren't born slaves."
Hugh scratched his heavy chin. "And who'd they marry? Or whatever arrangements you folks have. What I mean is, who are the other parents? Other slaves, or some of you folks?"
"Both," said Brice. "Mostly some of us, though. Ganny encouraged it. Said she doesn't want any more in-breeding than necessary."
The commando nodded. "That'll help. A lot, in fact. And where'd the rest of the slaves come from?"
"People who escaped later. There aren't many of them, though."
"Sure there are," insisted James. "I count four, all told. That's actually a lot, when you think about it."
It was, in fact. There shouldn't have been any at all, except the slavers who'd operated at the station were pretty sloppy about their work.
But Brice was intrigued by something the commando had said. "What did you mean? When you said, 'that'll help.' "
Hugh's grin was back. This time, though, Brice didn't find the sight all that reassuring. There was something about that cheerful-looking grin that was . . .
Well. Wicked-looking, actually.
"Haven't you figured it out yet, Brice? The only way you folks are going to get through this is by cutting a deal with the Ballroom. Sorry, but there's no way we're going to allow this station to fall back into the hands of slavers. And there's no way you people can stop that from happening on your own, is there?"
Brice stared up at him. Maybe the guy was joking . . .
Alas, no. "And we're not going to take it over ourselves," Hugh continued. "Not alone, anyway."
"And who exactly are you?" asked Ed.
"I'll leave that question unanswered for the moment," said Hugh. "Just take my word for it that we've got no reason to take on the headache of keeping this white elephant intact and running. But I'm thinking the Ballroom might. More precisely, Torch might."
"Who's Torch?" asked Brice and James simultaneously.
The commando shook his head. "You folks are out of touch, aren't you?"
The female commando named Stephanie supplied the answer. "Torch is the planet that used to be called Congo, when Mesa owned it. By everybody except them, anyway. They called it 'Verdant Vista' themselves. The swine. But there was a slave rebellion assisted by—oh, all kinds of people—and now the planet's called 'Torch' and it's pretty much run by the Ballroom."
Brice was wide-eyed. "The Audubon Ballroom has its own planet?"
"Oh, wow," said Ed. "I can see why they might want this station, then." Stoutly: "Every planet should have its own amusement park."
Hugh laughed. "It's a bit far away for that! Still, I'm thinking . . ."
He shrugged again. "Something Jeremy X mentioned to me, the last time I saw him. It's a possibility, anyway."
Brice was wide-eyed again. "You know Jeremy X?"
"Known him since I was a kid. He's sort of my godfather, I guess you could say. He took me under his wing, so to speak, after my parents were killed."
Brice felt a lot better, then. The idea of cutting a deal with the Ballroom still sounded dicey to him. Kind of like cutting a deal with lions or tigers. Or sharks or cobras, for that matter. On the other hand, Hugh seemed pretty nice, all things considered. And if he had a personal relationship with Jeremy X himself . . .
"Did he really eat a Manpower baby once, like they said he did?" asked Ed.
"Raw, they say. Not even cooking it." That contribution came from James.
And if Brice—no, it'd probably take Ganny—could keep his idiot cousins from opening their fat mouths again . . .
Chapter Twelve
It took no more than three days in the presence of Elfride Margarete Butre for Hugh Arai to figure out how the woman had managed to keep her clan together for half a century, in the face of tremendous adversity. Not just intact, either, but reasonably healthy and well-educated—so long as you were prepared to allow that "well-educated" was a broad enough phrase to include very uneven knowledge, eccentric methods of training, and wildly imbalanced fields of study.
Ganny El's clan were probably the best practical mechanics Hugh had ever encountered, for instance, but their grasp of the underlying theory of some of the machines they kept running was often fuzzy and sometimes bizarre. The first time Hugh had seen one of Butre's many grand-nephews sprinkle what he called an "encouragement libation" over a machine he was about to repair, Hugh had been startled. But, some hours later, after the mechanic finished with the ensuing work, the machine came back to life and ran as smoothly as you could ask for. And however superstitious the notion of an "encouragement libation" might be, Hugh hadn't missed the underlying practicality. The "libation" was actually some homemade alcoholic brew that hadn't turned out too well. Unfit for human consumption, even by the Butre clan's none-too-finicky standards, the fluid had been set aside for the "encouragement" of cranky machinery.
Hugh had asked the nephew—Andrew Artlett was his name—whether the "encouragement" was because the machine viewed the rotgut liquor as a treat or because it was an implied threat of still worse liquids should the machine remain recalcitrant. Artlett's snorted reply had been: "How the hell am I supposed to know what a machine thinks? It's just a lot of metal and plastic and such, you know. No brains at all. But the libation works, it surely does."
Ganny Butre would have made a pretty good empress, Hugh thought, if one given to some odd quirks. She'd have made a pretty good tyrant, for that matter, except she had an affectionate streak about a kilometer wide.