Torch of Freedom

  Her response to the signal would, needless to say, have appalled any proper military unit.

  "Yeah. Ouroboros here."

  A man's face appeared on the com screen. "Identify yourselves and—"

  "Oh, cut the bullshit. Check your records. You know perfectly well who we are."

  The man on the other end muttered something that was probably a curse. Then he said: "Hold on. We'll get back to you."

  The screen went blank. Presumably, he was consulting whoever was in charge. In point of fact, there would be no records of the Ouroboros on Parmley Station—for the good and simple reason that the ship had never come here before. But Arai's team had gauged that the erratic and unstable manner in which the slavers who used the station kept it staffed, insofar as you could use that term at all, meant that the absence of records would just be attributed by the current overseers of the operations there as the product of sloppiness on the part of their predecessors.

  Parmley Station was a transshipment point of convenience for freelance slavers, not one of the depot ports Manpower itself maintained on a regular basis. That corporation, as powerful and wealthy as it might be, was still a commercial entity, not a star nation. Manpower directly managed the core portions of its operations, but its activities were much too far flung—not simply throughout the immense reaches of the Verge but even through large parts of the Shell—for it to personally supervise all of them. So, just as it often farmed out paramilitary operations to mercenaries, Manpower also farmed out many of the fringe aspects of the slave trade to independent contractors.

  A few of the larger independent slavers maintained their own regular transshipment stations, here and there. But most of them relied on an ever-shifting and informal network of ports and depots.

  Those weren't very hard to find. Anywhere in the Verge, at least. The accounts of human expansion into the galaxy related in history books made the phenomenon appear far neater and more organized than it really had been. For each formally recorded colonizing expedition and settlement—such as the very well documented and exhaustively studied one that had created the Star Kingdom of Manticore—there had been at least a dozen smaller expeditions that were recorded poorly if at all. Even in the era of modern electronic communication and data storage, it was still true that most of human history was only recorded verbally—and, as it always had, the knowledge faded away quickly, with the passage of two or three generations. That was still true today, even with the advent of prolong, although the generations themselves might be getting a little longer.

  If anything, the records of Parmley Station were more extensive than the records for many such independently financed and created settlements. That portion of the galaxy which had so far been explored by the human race measured less than a thousand light years in any one direction. As tiny as it was compared to the rest of the galaxy—much less the known universe as a whole—the region encompassed was still so enormous that the human mind had a hard time really grasping its extent and everything it contained.

  "Less than a thousand light-years" is just a string of words. It doesn't sound like much, to human brains which almost automatically translate the term into familiar analogs like kilometers. A person in any sort of decent physical condition could easily walk several hundred kilometers if they had to, after all.

  Astronomers and experienced spacers understood the reality. Very few other people did. The rough and uneven approximation of a globe which marked the extent of human settlement of the galaxy, in the two millennia that had passed since the beginning of the human Diaspora, contained innumerable settlements that no one had any knowledge of beyond the people who lived there and a relative handful of others who might have reason to visit. And for every such still-inhabited settlement, there were at least two or three which were now either completely uninhabited or inhabited only by squatters.

  Such obscure settlements were the natural prey of the independent penumbra of the slave trade. The slavers avoided any settlements which were heavily populated or possessed any sort of military force. But that still left a multitude which were either uninhabited completely or inhabited by groups small enough and weak enough to be exterminated or forced to cooperate.

  Slavers preferred cooperation, though, for the same reason they generally stayed away from completely deserted installations. Such places deteriorated rapidly, once all humans abandoned them—and the last thing any slaving contractor wanted to be bothered with was repairing and maintaining what amounted to nothing more than a way station for them, especially since it could be temporary. Slavers often found it necessary to abandon such way stations, if they came to the attention of one of the star nations that took the Cherwell Convention seriously.

  As best as Arai's team could piece together the fragmented data, it seemed that Parmley Station had fallen into the hands of the slave trade about three decades earlier. There had apparently been some initial resistance put up by the people who inherited Michael Parmley's foolish enterprise, but so far as Takano could determine, those people had either been driven off or killed.

  "Is that turret the only place the slavers maintain operations?" Stephanie asked.

  Haruka shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. I'd say . . ."

  "Probably," Hugh concluded for him. "As far out into space as it extends, that turret is big enough to hold a large number of slaves."

  Marti cleared her throat. "Uh . . . speaking of which, boss."

  "What? Already?" He gave Garner's feet a glance. "You haven't even put on the spike-heeled boots yet."

  "They're too hard to fit into a vacuum suit." She gave him a leer. "But I can certainly put them on after the operation, if you're in the mood."

  Henson shook her head. "Don't tell me the two of you are back at it again. Isn't there something in the regulations about excessive sexual congress between team members?"

  "No," said Garner. "There isn't."

  She was quite right, as Stephanie knew perfectly well—given that she and Haruka were enjoying a sexual relationship themselves at the moment. The customs and traditions of Beowulf's military, especially its elite commando units, would have made the officers of any other military force turn pale. And, in fact, probably only people raised in Beowulf's unusually relaxed mores could have handled it without disciplinary problems. For Beowulfers, sex was a perfectly natural human activity, no more remarkable in itself than eating. The members of a military unit shared meals, after all, not to mention any number of collective forms of entertainment like playing chess or cards. So why shouldn't they share the pleasure of sexual activity also?

  Their relaxed habits on the matter worked quite well, especially given the long missions which characterized the teams of the Biological Survey Corps. It did so because the Corps' teams also followed the Beowulfan custom of making a clear and sharp distinction between sex and marriage. Beowulfan couples who decided to marry—technically, form a civil union; marriage as such was a strictly religious affair under the Beowulfan legal code—quite often chose, at least for a time, to maintain monogamous sexual relations.

  Neither Hugh nor Marti answered Stephanie's question, which was rhetorical anyway. She hadn't expected an answer. Not surprisingly, one of Beowulf's most ingrained customs was thou shalt mind thine own damn business. As it happened, Arai and Garner had stopped having sexual relations almost two months earlier. There had been no quarrel or hard feelings involved. The relationship had been a casual one, and they stopped for the same reason someone might stop eating steak for a while. It was quite possible they might resume again before too long, if the mood came upon them.

  There had not, however, been any spike-heeled boots involved. Beowulfan customs wouldn't have found that abhorrent, assuming both parties were consenting adults. It just so happened that both Hugh Arai and Marti Garner had conventional tastes, when it came to sex. Conventional, at least, in their own terms. Plenty of other cultures would have been aghast at what passed for "normal sex" on Beowulf.

&
nbsp; The com unit came alive and the same man's face appeared. "Yeah, okay. We can't—well, we figure you're okay. What do you got for us?"

  "The cargo's not too big. Eighty-five units, all certified. Mostly heavy labor units."

  "Pleasure units?"

  "Just two, this trip."

  "Male or female?"

  "Both female."

  The heavy face broke into its first smile. "Well, good. We can use 'em."

  Henson rolled her eyes. "Oh, great. I've got to put on the act again."

  "I'll pass the word to June," said Haruka.

  Stephanie Henson and June Mattes were the two female members of the team who usually served as would-be pleasure slaves on these operations. Both of them, especially Mattes, had the sort of flamboyantly female physiological characteristics that suited the roles. For the same reason, Kevin Wilson and Frank Gillich played the roles when males were needed. The tactic worked because slavers receiving the cargo were almost invariably gripped by their own lusts, so they rarely thought to check the cargo's certifications until it was too late. A very attractive appearance was usually all that was needed.

  The same was not true, on the other hand, for the team member who always played the role of a heavy labor unit. The moment any slaver's eyes caught sight of Hugh Arai, they wanted to see his tongue sticking out. The man was huge and so muscular he looked downright misshapen. There was no way they were going to let him near them, no matter how many chains he was laden with, until they saw the Manpower genetic marker. Even from a bit of a distance, that marker was effectively impossible to disguise or mimic.

  Arai stretched. The small command deck seemed to get even smaller. He smiled at his comrades and, lazily, stuck out his tongue.

  There was no need to fake a Manpower genetic marker. It was right there on the top of his tongue, as it had been since he came out of the Manpower process that substituted for birth.

  F-23xb-74421-4/5.

  "F" indicated the heavy labor line. "23" was the particular type, which was one designed for extremely heavy labor. "xb" instead of the usual "b" or "d" for a male slave indicated an experimental variety—in this case a genetic manipulation aimed to produce unusual dexterity along with enormous strength. "74421" indicated the batch, and "4/5" noted that Hugh had been the fourth of five male babies "born" at the same time.

  "Which outfit do you want to wear this time, darling?" Marti asked. "Rags soiled, rags torn, or rags stained by unknown but almost certainly awful fluids?"

  "Go with the fluids," said Haruka. He waved at the screen. They had almost arrived at the docking bay. Only a portion of Parmley Station could be seen any longer in the screen. That portion, not surprisingly, looked old and worn down. But it also looked just plain dirty, which wasn't at all common for vacuum conditions. That was probably a side effect of the nearby moon's plasma torus. "The damn thing looks like it needs a scrubbing."

  The com unit squawked again. The squawk was a completely artificial effect, the product of Beowulfan electronic ingenuity. It would resonate back to the slaver's unit and make a suitably run-down impression.

  "Use Dock 5."

  "Right," said Garner. "Dock 5 it is." She switched off the com.

  "And a scrubbing it's about to get," said Henson. "Fluids included."

  Arai nodded. "The human body holds five to six liters of blood. Even slavers, who have no hearts."

  Chapter Ten

  Brice Miller worked the brakes, easing the cab to a gentle stop. The brakes were an antique design, relying on hydraulic principles, but they worked well enough. Brice was rather fond of them, in fact. Like much of the station's jury-rigged equipment, it took some actual skill to make it work.

  There was a small group waiting for him at the terminus. He waved at his cousins James Lewis and Ed Hartman and tried not to scowl openly at the third and fourth members of the party.

  Those two were Michael Alsobrook and Sarah Armstrong. They were in their twenties, not teenagers like James and Ed and Brice himself.

  Twenties going on fuddy-duddy, Brice thought sourly. The cab came to a halt and he clambered out.

  "Stop glaring at us," Sarah said. "You know the drill—and it's Ganny's drill anyway, not ours."

  " 'Course, I agree with her," added Alsobrook. "The last thing we need in a delicate situation is hormones running loose with pulse rifles."

  "Easy for you guys to be so blasé about it," James said. Like Brice himself, he was looking enviously at the pulse rifles cradled by Alsobrook and Armstrong.

  "Yeah," chimed in Ed. "We're the ones gotta crawl around in air ducts without so much as a pocket knife for self-defense."

  "Self-defense against what?" said Michael, his voice edged with sarcasm. "Rats?"

  A bit defensively, Brice said, "Well, there are rats in those air passages."

  Sarah looked like she was about to yawn. "Of course there are. Weren't you paying attention to your biology tutor? Rats and cockroaches—humanity's inescapable companions in the Diaspora. By now, the relationship is practically commensal."

  "For them, maybe," said Hartman.

  In truth, the occasional rats he'd encountered in the vents had scurried away as soon as they caught sight of Brice. He imagined the rodents might pose a danger if someone was weak and incapacitated—but, in that case, what difference would it make if the person had a weapon or didn't? His real gripe was just that—that—

  Teenage male hormones were practically shrieking that he needed a weapon! When he sallied forth against the foe. Dammit.

  Alas, older if not wiser heads prevailed. Sarah reached into the small bag she had slung over a shoulder and began pulling out the com units. The units themselves were small enough she could have fitted all three into her hand, but the wire and clip they each came with made them quite a bit bulkier if not much heavier.

  "Here you go, guys. I just tested them and they're working fine."

  There being no point in further argument, Brice took one of them and stuffed it into a pocket. "Usual place?" he asked.

  Alsobrook nodded. "Yeah, there's nothing fancy going on. Just another slave ship coming in to transfer the cargo."

  Brice made a face. "The cargo." It was more than a little disturbing, the way familiarity with evil calloused the soul over time. Even the clan had fallen into the shorthand habit of referring to the hideous merchandise by the slavers' own parlance. Perhaps that made it a bit easier to just watch while dozens of human beings were forced from one set of shackles to another. Watch—and extend their hand for a pay-off.

  He'd written a poem about it once. The fact that it was probably a really lousy poem hadn't made it any the less heartfelt.

  But . . . there was nothing he could about it. Any of them could do about it. So he just headed off toward the air vent that led into the ducts they normally used for their lookout posts. His cousins James and Ed followed.

  By the time all three of them were in place, they'd be able to provide the clan with direct observations of what was happening with the transfer. They used antique methods for their signals, attaching the clips to wires that the clan had painstakingly laid in many of the station's air ducts. That probably made their transmissions undetectable, at least with the sort of equipment slavers were likely to have.

  If anything went wrong, their assignment was simply to flee the area after making a report. Older clan members with weapons would then move in to deal with whatever needed to be dealt with.

  Nobody was really expecting any trouble. Brice had only been two years old the last time violence erupted between the clan and the slavers. Two slavers who'd been part of the station's staff, both male, had been irritated because the latest cargo to arrive had contained no pleasure units. No female units of any kind, in fact. So, after getting drunk, they'd decided to make good the loss by searching out a female from the clan.

  It had all been over very quickly. The clan left the corpses in the same compartment that was always used for pay-offs, along with a recording from G
anny El demanding punitive damages. Well, punitive pay, anyway. You couldn't really call it "damages" since the only ones damaged had been the two slavers shot into barely-connected shreds.

  The slaver who'd been the station boss at the time hadn't argued the point. Those two clowns had probably been a pain in the neck for him anyway, and the amount Ganny demanded was enough to make the point but not enough to be a real burden. After all these years, the slavers who used Parmley Station knew full well that it would take a major and costly war to exterminate the clan—and, short of that, the clan could make their lives very miserable indeed if they chose to do so. The station was enormous, labyrinthine, and nobody knew it the way Ganny's people did. After the first fight with slavers, Ganny had had all the schematics and blueprints in the turret erased, except for those relevant to the turret itself. Then she'd had all the schematics and blueprints anywhere in the station erased except for a small number which were hidden away—and the computers which held them couldn't be hacked into because they were kept entirely offline.

  So, the slaver boss had paid the weregild, and there'd been no further repetitions of the incident. Still, you never knew. The only difference between the slavers and the rats and cockroaches who also infested the station was that the rats and cockroaches were smarter—shrewder, anyway—and had way, way higher moral standards.

  * * *

  Alberto Hutchins and Groz Rada perked up when they saw the two slaves following closely out of the personnel tube behind three of the crewmen from the Ouroboros. Both were indeed female—and both were just as good-looking as pleasure slaves always were. One of them was downright voluptuous.

  Their pleased expressions faded when they caught sight of the slave following them. The creature's body exuded physical power. Not menace, exactly, since he was festooned with chains and a lifetime of hard labor and strict discipline would have certainly made him docile. Still . . .