At All Costs

Chapter Fifty-One

"Where's Ruth?" Berry Zilwicki, Queen of Torch, asked plaintively.

"Saburo says she's ru

The ex-Scrag was still about as civilized as a wolf, and she had a few problems grasping the finer points of court etiquette. Which, to tell the truth, suited Berry just fine. Usually, at least.

"If I've got to do this," the Queen said firmly, "Ruth has to do it with me."

"Berry," Lara said, "Kaja said she'll be here, and Saburo and Ruth are already on their way. We can go ahead and start."

"No." Berry flounced-that really was the only verb that fit-over to an armchair and plunked down in it. "I'm the Queen," she said snippily, "and I want my intelligence advisor there when I talk to these people."

"But your father isn't even on Torch," Lara pointed out with a grin. Thandi Palane's "Amazons" had actually developed senses of humor, and all of them were deeply fond of their commander's "little sister." Which was why they took such pleasure in teasing her.

"You know what I mean!" Berry shot back, rolling her eyes in exasperation. But there was a twinkle in those eyes, and Lara chuckled as she saw it.

"Yes," she admitted. "But tell me, why do you need Ruth? It's only a gaggle of merchants and businessmen." She wrinkled her nose in the tolerant contempt of a wolf for the sheep a bountiful nature had created solely to feed it. "Nothing to worry about in that bunch, girl!"

"Except for the fact that I might screw up and sell them Torch for a handful of glass beads!"

Lara looked at her, obviously puzzled, and Berry sighed. Lara and the other Amazons truly were trying hard, but it was going to take years to even begin closing the myriad gaps in their social skills and general background knowledge.

"Never mind, Lara," the teenaged Queen said after a moment. "It wasn't really all that fu

"Make it plain anyone who cheats you gets a broken neck." Lara shrugged. "You may lose one or two, early, but the rest will know better. Want Saburo and me to handle it for you?"

She sounded almost eager, and Berry laughed. Saburo X was the ex-Ballroom gunman Lara had picked out for herself. Berry often suspected Saburo still didn't understand exactly how it had happened, but after a brief, wary, half-terrified, extremely... direct "courtship," he wasn't complaining. On the face of it, theirs was one of the most unlikely pairings in history-the ex-genetic-slave terrorist, madly in love with the ex-Scrag who'd worked directly for Manpower before she walked away from her own murderous past-and yet, undeniably, it worked.

"There is a certain charming simplicity to the idea of broken necks," Berry conceded, after a moment. "Unfortunately, that's not how it's done. I haven't been a queen for long, but I do know that much."

"Pity," Lara said, and glanced at her chrono. "They've been waiting over half an hour," she remarked.

"Oh, all right," Berry said. "I'll go-I'll go!" She shook her head and made a face. "You'd think a queen would at least be able to get away with something when her father is half a dozen star systems away!"

Harper S. Ferry stood in the throne room, arms crossed, watching the thirty-odd people standing about. He knew he didn't cut a particularly military figure, but that was fine with him. In fact, the ex-slaves of Torch had a certain fetish for not looking spit and polish. They were the galaxy's outcast mongrels, and they wanted no one-including themselves-to forget that.

Which didn't mean they took their responsibilities lightly.

Harper, for example. Looking at him, a casual observer would have seen a man, probably in his late thirties, of relatively average build-maybe just a bit more wiry than most-with dark hair and eyes, a swarthy complexion, and an expression arranged out of reasonably pleasant features. That same casual observer almost certainly wouldn't have realized that Harper S. Ferry had been one of the Audubon Ballroom's most efficient assassins since he was fourteen. In fact, Harper would have had to think very hard-and consult his diary-to recall all of the men and women he'd killed in his lifetime.

Nor did he regret what he'd done. Still, after long enough, a man got tired of killing, even when the scum he was removing from the universe were genetic slavers. Men and women who'd made fortunes off of the systematic sale, abuse, and torture of millions of genetic slaves just like Harper S. Ferry literally for centuries. If he could find another way to hurt them, he was prepared to embrace it, and the notion that jabbing a jagged, pointy stick directly into Manpower Incorporated's eye involved keeping an immensely lovable young girl alive had appealed to him from the begi

And not just because she was so lovable. It wasn't often that a girl barely seventeen T-years old was critical to the survival of an entire planet of refuge, yet that was precisely what Berry Zilwicki was.

Judson Van Hale walked casually across the throne room, angling a bit closer to Harper. Judson had never been a slave himself, but his father had. Fortunately, the senior Van Hale had also found himself aboard a slave ship intercepted by a Royal Manticoran Navy light cruiser. The slaver in question had been equipped to jettison its crew of human beings into space to avoid embarrassing questions, and its crew had suffered a series of fatal exposures to vacuum themselves shortly after its interception. Most of the liberated slaves had become Manticoran subjects, and Judson had been born on Sphinx.

He was also one of exactly three of Torch's present citizens who'd been adopted by a treecat.

That made him an extremely valuable asset for the relatively small bodyguard force Queen Berry was prepared to tolerate. In addition, Harper suspected that the fact that Judson had come from Manticore also helped make him more acceptable to the Queen. He was like a breath of home, a reminder of the first place-the only place really-where Berry Zilwicki had ever felt completely safe.

"This is a lively bunch," Judson murmured disgustedly out of the corner of his mouth as he stopped beside Harper. "Genghis here is downright bored."

He reached up and caressed the cream-and-gray treecat riding on his shoulder, and the 'cat purred and pressed his head against Judson's hand.

"Boring is good," Harper replied quietly. "Exciting is bad."

"I know. Still, I'd sort of like to earn my magnificent salary. Nothing too exciting, you understand. Just enough to make me feel useful. Well, to make us feel useful," he corrected, scratching Genghis' chest.

"Thandi thinks you're useful," Harper pointed out. "That's good enough for me. I'm not going to argue with her, at any rate."

Judson laughed. Harper, unlike the Sphinx-born Judson, had rather fancied himself as a deadly hand-to-hand fighter. Having watched him in the training salle, Judson was inclined to agree with him. Unfortunately for Harper, Thandi Palane wasn't a deadly hand-to-hand fighter; she was a lethal force of nature who laughed at the merely deadly. As she'd demonstrated rather conclusively to Harper the first time he swaggered onto the mat with her.

She'd hardly hurt him at all, really. With quick heal, the broken bones had healed in just a few weeks.