Last April, when I still wore the outward appearance of a human being, I said goodbye to my legal staffers and got the hell out of town. While the judges considered their verdict, I intended to rest up at my family's Sky Ranch in Arizona and consider my future-especially in regards to the Barky Hunt.

For the first couple of days I did nothing but sleep. Then I worked out in the ranch's well-equipped gym, swam laps in the indoor pool-it still being a trifle brisk outdoors in the high country-read some vintage Louis L'Amour and John D. MacDonald, and finished off each evening riding out to watch the sun go down in a different part of the sprawling Frost family spread.

My favorite mount was a horse named Billy, a huge sweet-natured gelding of the type southwesterners call a flea-bitten gray. That's not to mean he's infested or broken down; the odd term describes a variety of pale horse speckled all over with tiny spots of blue and red hair. Billy was strong and smart, he obeyed orders, and he didn't spook when an unexpected quail or jackrabbit exploded out of the chaparral right under his nose. In Arizona you can't hardly ask more of a horse than that.

On the tenth day of my holiday, Billy and I plodded easily uphill in the lengthening shadows while thin clouds turned from white to pink beyond the Tonto Basin. Spring in the Sierra Ancha is unobtrusively lovely. Golden yuccas, buckbrush, and manzanitas were blooming, tiny little hummingbirds with amethyst throats poked busily around the flowers for a final snack before nightfall, and the ethereal song of the hermit thrush echoed among the mesas and canyons.

It was a great place for unwinding, as different from the capital of the Commonwealth of Human Worlds as it could possibly be.

I'd left Toronto in a seriously fatigued state. Only my close-mouthed executive assistant, Jane Nelligan, knew where I was going, and she was under orders to reveal my whereabouts to no one. I told the ranch staff to ignore my presence, and they did-except for the horse wrangler who cared for Billy, and Rosalia the cook, who supplied me with three gourmet squares a day and kept the chitchat to a minimum.

I'd earned some incommunicado time. After more than two years of cosmic-class courtroom warfare, Rampart Concern's civil suit against Galapharma was finally ready for adjudication. Now it was up to three justices of the Commonwealth Tribunal to produce a verdict in what the media had deemed the corporate trial of the century, David vs. Goliath.

Little Rampart, youngest and smallest of the Hundred Concerns, was suing the pants off Galapharma, one of the oldest and largest. We alleged conspiracy to devalue for the purpose of hostile acquisition, sabotage, industrial espionage, theft and subsequent malicious use of data, subornation of Rampart employees, and a lengthy laundry list of other major torts. Pursuant to Statute 129 of the Interstellar Commerce Code, Rampart demanded as redress the maximum damages set by law-namely, all assets tangible and intangible of Galapharma Amalgamated Concern, including their 5,345 booming planetary colonies.

If we won, Gala belonged to us. If we lost, the best we could hope for was that Commonwealth prosecutors could make an assortment of criminal charges against the big Concern stick. The odds of that happening were slim. Important evidence had vanished, and crucial witnesses were dead or had disappeared. The one man who might have fingered Galapharma for its crimes was also the principal material . witness in Rampart's civil suit; and Oliver Schneider had struck an immunity deal that precluded any obligation to give testimony under the criminal statutes.

If Gala won, its lawyers would waste no time slapping Rampart with a colossal civil countersuit, stunting the growth and profitability of its small rival for years to come-if not destroying it outright.

As Rampart's interim Chief Legal Officer, I had been in total charge of orchestrating our case, always working behind the scenes. Not that I'd asked for the job! I'd fought like a wildcat to avoid it. But my father, Simon Frost, and my big sister Eve-Rampart's Chairman of the Board and CEO, respectively-had leaned on me, inviting my scrutiny of certain inescapable facts.

My older brother, Daniel, the former Rampart corporate counsel and secretary, could hardly head up the litigation. An unindicted Galapharma coconspirator, Dan was kept doped to the eyeballs and under heavy guard in a fishing lodge up in the Ontario North Woods, where he stubbornly professed his complete innocence.

None of the subordinate officers in Rampart's legal department were deemed capable of directing a complex, unprecedented civil action such as this one. To bring in an outside team of litigators was not an option, either. There were aspects of the case that didn't bear close scrutiny: for instance, the strong probability that Dan had engineered our mother's death, acting under orders from Galapharma.

And there was also the secret Haluk connection, political dynamite now that the blue buggers were legitimate trading partners of the Commonwealth ...

Simon and Eve maintained that only one candidate for Rampart legal battlemaster had it all-being a major stakeholder in the Concern, a trusted member of the family, and a highly trained lawyer (although nonpracticing) familiar with every aspect of the case.

Yours truly, Asahel Frost.

Trying to wriggle out of the fast-closing trap, I reminded them that I was not a member of the Commonwealth bar and could not be quickly qualified by any string- pulling finagle of theirs. Even though my citizenship had been restored through a technicality, the felonies I'd been framed for were still on my record. In the eyes of the law I was still a convict on probation. In the eyes of the media I was a misfit-a charismatic one, though!-the black sheep of a distinguished family, a notorious loudmouth with eccentric political leanings. There was no way I could represent Rampart before the Judicial Tribunal in person.

No problem, said Simon and Eve. What they needed was not Rumpole of the Bailey or Perry Mason, but rather my expertise in rousting corporate outlaws, gained during my aborted career as an enforcement officer with the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat. A staff of talented associates would handle the actual pleading before the court. If necessary, the underlings could be coached by me every step of the way through cerebral chips.

I shifted into whine mode. Hadn't I already risked my life half a dozen times to obtain crucial evidence supporting Rampart's case against Galapharma? Hadn't I rescued Eve from kidnappers that would have demicloned her and seized control of Rampart? Hadn't I saved Simon himself from a fate worse than death in the infamous prison known as Coventry Blue? Wasn't that fucking good enough? I didn't want to spend years on a convoluted legal case. I had other plans for my life.

"Like what?" my father had bellowed. "Stirring up a fresh hornet's nest with the damned Reversionist Party? Or maybe reverting to beach bum status on that boondock South Seas planet back in the Perseus Spur?"

I invited him to go to hell. He suggested that I perform a sexual act on myself. The discussion trended downhill from there.

Simon and I have a long history of horn-locking, beginning from the time fifteen years ago when I refused on principle to join the family starcorp. Now he castigated my selfishness and lack of filial loyalty. He dredged up my fancy-pants doctorate from Harvard Law School that I'd more or less tricked him into paying for.

Finally, in a fit of bogus cowhand vituperation, the old coot allowed as how if'n I let Rampart-i.e., him-down, I was nothing but a chicken-livered pecker-ass bastard with a yellow streak so wide it lapped plumb around to my brisket bone.

I was about to tell Simon to stuff his John Wayne act where the sun doesn't shine when my sister Eve ordered us both to shut up. Then she made a single point that stabbed me to the heart and put an abrupt end to my weaseling.

"Asa, have you forgotten that our mother's murder was instigated by Galapharma's chairman? Dan only acted as Alistair Drummond's cat's-paw. We probably couldn't prove Drummond's complicity in the crime even if we found he was still alive, but his Concern is still a legitimate target. Do you want some kind of justice for Mom, or don't you?"

Aw, shit... Damned right I did.

So I caved in.

And worked my tail off for two solid years. When the case went to the judges at long last, I figured we had an excellent chance of winning.

I guided my horse Billy along Bear Head Canyon trail, approaching the undistinguished peak we call Copper Mountain. At 2,071 meters, it's the tallest of a scrub-covered range near the southern boundary of the Sky Ranch.

When we were kids, my brother and sisters and I were forbidden to go up Copper because of a dangerous abandoned gold mine on its eastern slope. So of course we made that our favorite secret spot. It was our hideout when we played outlaw, and the den of xeno monsters when we pretended to be Zone Patrol troopers. Just inside the mine entrance, I'd once killed a blacktail rattlesnake that had menaced my little sister, Bethany.

Another time, my brother, Dan, risked his neck exploring a tumbledown side tunnel and found a glittering chunk of mineral that he declared was real gold. Dan was always the lucky one-until he grew up and succumbed to the temptations of a lunatic Scotsman.

Who might or might not be buried deep inside that very gold mine.

Three years ago, in a last ditch effort to salvage his faltering conspiracy, Alistair Drummond had narrowly missed killing my family and the rest of the Rampart Board of Directors by blowing up the main house of the Sky Ranch. He tried to escape by driving up Copper Mountain in a Range Rover, and when I came after him, he almost managed to nail me before taking refuge in the abandoned mine. I used a Harvey blaster to bring down a landslide on top of him.

Trouble was, we'd never found Drummond's body in the rubble-filled mine shaft.

The horse carried me toward the gap that separates Copper Mountain from Bear Head Peak to the west. I reined in before the going got too rough, pulled a set of power oculars out of my saddlebag, and swept them over the brush-covered flanks of Copper. Of course I found nothing unusual; even the site of the great slide and the subsequent excavation were on the opposite side of the mountain.

"What do you think, Billy? Did the damned mine have another way out? Us kids never found one, and we explored the hell out of that old hole in the ground."

The horse kept his opinion to himself.

I sighed and put the ocs away. To hell with Alistair Drummond. To hell with everything connected to Galapharma and the trial. This was my time to kick back and drift. I turned the mount around so I could concentrate my attention on the sunset beyond Bear Head. The western sky was slashed with crimson and purple streaks of cirrus cloud.

The color faded slowly as I sat in my saddle, deliberately emptying my mind. Billy did a different sort of emptying, then nipped at some fresh greenery. A bat chased a flying bug through the chaparral. The high country was very quiet.

After a while the horse left off browsing, nickered softly, and cocked his ears. He was listening to something upslope. I heard it, too-an irregular metallic tink-tink tinkety-tink that sounded almost like a spoon handle rattling faintly in a thick coffee mug: completely unnatural. A minute later a spherical black thing about the size of a golf ball came creeping down the steep rocky trail on thin jointed legs. Its two rat-eyes glowed in the dusk and its sensors swiveled busily.

A SPYder. It tippy-toed to within four meters of my fascinated horse and came to a halt.

"Good evening, Citizen Asahel Frost," it said. "I am not here to threaten or harm you.

Please confirm this by drawing your own weapon."

The robot's voice was a human transmission. The controller had probably been tracking me by satellite from the moment I left the house. The Sky Ranch doesn't bother with ground-based optical dissimulator technology, although it has a full arsenal of intruder deterrents and multiphase alarm sensors.

"You're trespassing," I said, obediently pulling a Finnila Bodyguard photon carbine from its gun boot on the saddle. The weapon switched itself on automatically and scanned the thing that confronted me.

Device is unarmed, my gun reported. I activated the targeter anyhow.

"I repeat!" said the SPYder. "I am not here to threaten or harm you."

"Goody. But you weren't invited, either. Give me one reason why I shouldn't fry your tiny Tootsie Roll."

"That would be illegal," the machine said smugly, "since you've passed nineteen meters beyond the boundary of the Sky Ranch into public lands."

"Maybe I have," I conceded, lowering the gun. The perimeter in this remote and rugged area was unfenced and unmarked, the scanner units that guarded it were hard to spot, and I'd deactivated the saddle alarm days ago so it wouldn't bug me when I strayed off the spread. "Who are you and why are you stalking me?"

"Jordan Sensenbrenner of the Wall Street Journal here! Would you care to comment on today's Rampart-Galapharma verdict by the Commonwealth Judiciary Tribunal?"

My jaw dropped. "A decision already? My God-it's only been ten days! How did the judges rule?"

"You mean you haven't heard about it?"

"I've been totally incommunicado. Getting some much-needed peace and quiet. You want to tell me what happened?"

The SPYder's voice went cagey. "Perhaps you don't know about Simon Frost's sensational announcement, either. The Journal would definitely like to hear your reaction to that."

"My saddle has a datalink and display. Why don't you pass along what you've got.

When did the verdict come down?"

"Mmm ... Maybe we should talk quid pro quo. You give me a decent statement for attribution, I'll have our comsat download the Journal articles we'll be posting later tonight on our site. They contain full details of the court decision given an hour ago, along with your father's announcement. Deal?"

Damn webcrawlers had more nerve than a sperm whale's wisdom tooth. This one was starting to annoy me, so I lifted the Finnila and blasted a rock just a mite to the left of it.

The SPYder skittered sideways and instantly deployed a miniature force-field. "You can't do that! I claim media privilege! I'm just trying to do my job!"

"I can do whatever I please-provided I don't give a damn about the consequences.

You're trying to pressure me, Jordan Sensenbrenner. There are people who'd tell you that's not a very smart thing to do."

"I assure you I didn't mean-"

"That puny shield your bot is wearing can stop a laser bolt but not a gross physical assault. Suppose I kick your expensive little toy down a coyote hole and roll a rock on top? Or maybe stomp it till it's crippled and smother it in some of the horse apples Billy just dropped? Would that make your editor happy?"

The SPYder dropped its defensive shield. It was groveling time. "Citizen Frost, perhaps this interview got off on the wrong foot-"

"It's not an interview yet, only a close encounter of the Wild West kind ... However, I admit I'm anxious to hear the big news before it hits the PlaNet. I suppose I could call the folks down at the ranch and ask them to patch me into Rampart Tower in Toronto, but it might take a few minutes to organize the relay. So I'd be much obliged if you'd just pass on the information out of the goodness of your heart, no strings attached. Don't you think your boss at the Journal would consider that a wise move?"

"Oh, very well," the SPYder grumped. It told me the satellite's access code.

I uncovered the unit on the saddle pommel, activated the antenna and expanded the viewscreen, entered the data and tapped SAT DOWNLOAD. A moment later I was reading the Journal copy quoting the judges' unanimous decision.

Galapharma AC was found guilty on all charges, with no appeal to be entertained by the Tribunal.

Compensatory and punitive damages owed by Gala to Rampart were still to be assessed, but the consensus among legal scholars was that the greatest pharmaceutical and genetic technology company in the galaxy was fucked to a finality. The Tribunal would probably order Galapharma to be turned over lock, stock, and barrel to Rampart, instantly lofting my family's firm into the exalted company of the Big Seven.

Some observers attributed Rampart's victory to the brilliant litigation strategy of its unofficial CLO, the dashing and unconventional Asahel Frost. He was also rumored to have personally apprehended the principal material witness for the prosecution, using highly unorthodox methods.

I finished reading and eyed the SPYder. "Very nice, Jordan. You may quote me as being personally gratified by the verdict, which affirms my faith in the CHW judiciary system. All corporate entities, most especially those of high status whose actions influence the very integrity of the Commonwealth, must conform scrupulously to the dictates of the law."

"Have you yourself always done so, Citizen Frost?" Sensenbrenner inquired blandly.

"There's been speculation that the witness Oliver Schneider was-"

"Next question."

"Perhaps you ought to read your father's statement first."

I skipped through the sidebar articles and trial commentary, scanning for Simon's name. I found the piece, read the headline, and uttered a shocked expletive.

RAMPART CHAIRMAN, JUBILANT OVER GALAPHARMA VERDICT, DECLARES HE WILL.

STEP DOWN IN FAVOR OF MAVERICK SON.

by Jordan Sensenbrenner .

Toronto, Earth, 19 April 2236-In the wake of today's historic verdict favoring Rampart Concern, its Chairman of the Board, Simon Frost, 88, declared: "This is the happiest moment in my life." After congratulating his legal team on its success, he made a sensational announcement.

"During the past few years," Frost said, "Rampart has not only repulsed a criminal hostile takeover attempt but also managed to thrive and expand.

We've risen from a closely held Interstellar Corporation to an Amalgamated Concern, thanks largely to the efforts of a brilliant group of top executives headed by my daughter Eve Frost, Rampart's CEO. I'm proud to have played a role in this expansion, just as I'm proud to be a cofounder of Rampart.

"Back in 2183, when my brother Ethan and our partner Dirk Vanderpost and I went out to the Perseus Spur to seek our fortunes, we never dreamed that a day like this would come. It was enough that our little Starcorp could meet its payroll and keep the Haluk and Qastt pirates from stealing our cargoes.

"Well, times change. Today both of those races are CHW trading partners.

The Spur boasts 219 prosperous Rampart Worlds, with more being opened to human colonization and economic development every month. I'm tickled pink that I lived to see that happen.

"Now that Rampart has weathered its greatest crisis and come out on top, I've decided that it's time for me to step down from active corporate leadership and make way for younger blood. I intend to retire as Chairman of the Board. And I hereby nominate my son Asahel Frost to take my place. Without him, Rampart would have succumbed to Galapharma's hostile takeover ploy. Without him, we would never have won our civil judgment against Gala.

"I haven't consulted Asa yet, so this is going to be a bit of a surprise to him. But I'm confident that he'll accept the chairmanship, just as I'm confident that Rampart Concern will continue to prosper in the years to come." -- Having delivered the antimatter warhead, the article continued with a summary of my roller-coaster career. Sensenbrenner glossed over my stint as a Divisional Chief Inspector in the ICS, where I had been one of the valiant, overworked band charged with ferreting out wrongdoing among the Big Businesses that effectively control the Commonwealth of Human Worlds. In contrast, the details of my conviction, my dismissal from the enforcement arm of the Commerce Secretariat, and my disenfranchisement were presented in lip-smacking detail. He had even interviewed a few of my more vengeful acquaintances on the planet Kedge-Lockaby, who painted a revolting and accurate picture of me in my days as a drunken Throwaway.

My rescue of Eve from her kidnappers and my alleged apprehension of Oliver Schneider in an illicit raid on the Qastt planet Dagasatt were described more cautiously to skirt the libel laws. (I was a citizen again by then.) The article was silent on my role in the presumed demise of Alistair Drummond.

Katje Vanderpost's mind-boggling gift to me of her Rampart quarterstake had lifted me into the ranks of the political movers and shakers. The writer seemed to have no idea why I'd dedicated almost all of the obscenely large income from my mother's stake to projects of the underdog Reversionist Party. (I'd made a promise to carry on her own sponsorship, since party principles coincided with youthful ideals I had mothballed while serving in the ICS.) Jordan did concede that I'd made a notable splash for ten entertaining months, attacking the Commonwealth Assembly's craven symbiosis with Big Business, until the Galapharma trial forced me to put my political life on hold.

The article ended with speculation on what course I'd choose to follow next.

If they only knew ...

"I can't answer that question yet," I told Sensenbrenner. "I'm going to have to think long and hard about it. But you can quote me on this: I will do nothing that will contravene the Reversionist Guiding Principles, nor do I intend to completely abandon politics." I couldn't resist adding, "Perhaps it's possible that under my leadership, Rampart Concern could modify its operations to reflect the philosophy of Reversionism."

Wow-heresy! The reporter couldn't keep the expectation of a major scoop out of his voice.

"But... most Reversionists favor drastically limiting the political influence of the Hundred Concerns-in effect, destroying the galactic economic structure!"

I laughed. "I admit that some party zealots might feel that way. My own views on the subject are not nearly so radical. Nevertheless, for nearly two centuries Big Business has exploited the stars with only minimal checks and balances by the Commonwealth. I want the Hundred Concerns made more accountable to the Assembly. To the elected representatives of humanity at large. I'd like to see laissez-faire interstellar economics reined in or even abolished, along with the laws that enable human business interests to do just about anything they please if it means increased profits for their stakeholders. I also favor just treatment of nonstargoing Indigenous Sapient races whose worlds are colonized and developed by humanity. And closer regulation of trade with interstellar alien civilizations that might not be fully committed to ... interspecies goodwill."

"Are you speaking about the Kalleyni, the Joru, the Y'tata, and the Qastt, Citizen Frost? Or about the Haluk?"