Brandy scowled. "Gimme!"

"No," Paolo said. "This is mine. Girls can't play with boys' toys." Brandy burst into tears.

After that, day by day, the boys were weaned away from the girls. Daily visits outside the compartment-they returned with glowing reports: they could run up and down the corridors; they could use the swings in the gym; they could use the computer in the schoolroom. The men fed them special foods, treats. The men were teaching them. The men read to them from books, new books, stories about animals and boys and exciting stuff. They were gone hours a day now, returning to the compartment only for baths and bed. Hazel was left with the girls, the two dolls, and the endless sewing.

"You teach those girl babies to sew," Hazel was told. "They're old enough for that."

They didn't want to learn, but that made no difference. Hazel realized that. But . . . no books at all? No vid, no computers, no chance to run and play? She didn't ask. She didn't dare. She didn't even dare tell them stories, the stories they knew, because the compartment was rigged for scan.

She had been warned to talk no more than necessary . . . telling them stories would, she knew without asking, be breaking the rules.

The days dragged by. Stassi, though younger, was better with needle and thread than Brandy. Her stitches were ragged and uneven, but she could get them lined up into a sort of row. Brandy, more active by nature, fretted and fumed; her thread kept getting into knots. Hazel tried to find ways to let the child work off her wild energy, but in that small space, and hampered by a long skirt,

the child was constantly being frustrated. She cried often, and had screaming tantrums at least once a day.

Hazel would like to have had a screaming tantrum of her own, and only the littles' need for her kept her quiet.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Brun Meager exchanged the squad of Royal Security guards for ten of her father's personal militia from Sirialis with considerable relief. She had known some of these people for years, and although she would rather have travelled alone, this was the next best situation. With them, she visited the Allsystems Leasing office and chose a roomy private yacht for the next stage of her journey.

If she was not going to have Fleet's respect anyway, there was no reason to endure discomfort. She chose the highest-priced food and entertainment package, and paid extra for an accelerated load- and-clearance that would get her on her way quickly. Allsystems checked her licenses, and those of the militia who would act as crew, and-in less than 24 hours-she had undocked and headed for her first destination. From now until the Opening Day of the hunt on Sirialis, she was free of schedules and demands, except those she chose for herself.

Since it was handy-relatively-she decided to check out her holdings within the Boros Consortium.

It was something her father would approve of, the kind of grownup, mature behavior he claimed she didn't show often enough. And it was a long, long way from Castle Rock.

She spent two days with the accountants at Podj, feeling virtuous and hard-working as she waded through stacks of numbers, and then decided to skip Corian-where there would be more news media, since it was a shipping hub-and go straight to Bezaire. She plotted the course, calculated the times . . . and scowled at the figures. If she went to Bezaire by any of the standard greenlined routes, she wouldn't have time to visit Rotterdam before the start of the hunting season on Sirialis. But she was determined to visit Lady Cecelia and discuss with that other adventurous lady those things which she could not say to her parents. She could skip Bezaire-but she didn't want to skip Bezaire.

She looked at the navigation catalogs again. A caution route would save her five days, but that really wasn't enough. Maybe the Boros pilots that ran the circuit all the time knew of a shortcut . . . she called up their time-on-route stats. Supposedly they all took greenlined routes . . .

but the on-time figures were improbably high for the Corian-Bezaire leg of the journey. They had a shortcut; she was sure of it. Now who might be willing to let her in on the secret?

For the rich and beautiful daughter of Lord Thornbuckle, a stockholder, the secret wasn't that hard to find. A double-jump-point system where the two jump points had been stable for over fifty years. Fleet had warnings about systems harboring two jump points, but Fleet had warnings about everything. Brun grinned to herself as she plotted a jump direct from Podj to the first of the double jumps. A nice slow-vee insertion in such a small-mass vessel, and she would be safe as safe-and have plenty of time to visit Lady Cecelia.

Jester slid through the first jump point, and scan cleared. Brun checked the references, and grinned. The second jump point was right where it was supposed to be . . . an easy transit. She was tempted to make a flat run for it-nothing else should be insystem-but checked for beacons anyway.

Four popped up on the screen. Four? She punched the readout, up came Elias Madero, which should have cleared the system three days before, and three ships with non-Familias registry.

"Jump us out now!" Barrican said. Brun glanced at him; he was staring at the scan monitor.

"They won't notice us for another few minutes," Brun said. "Whatever's going on, we can find out and-"

"We're scan-delayed too," he said. "They aren't where you see them, whoever they are. And it's trouble-"

"I can see it's trouble," Brun said. "But if we're going to get them help, we need to know what kind-who it is, what's going on."

"It won't help anyone if we're blown away," Calvaro said. He had come up behind her. "This thing can't fight, and we don't know what those are-they might outrun us."

"We're little," Brun said. "They'll never even notice. Flea on the elephant."

"Milady-"

That did it. Her father's men, protecting her father's daughter; they probably thought she would faint at the sight of blood. When would her father realize that she was grown, that she was capable . . .

"We're going to sneak in closer," she said. "And look. Just look. Then we can jump out and tell Fleet what's happened."

"That's foolish, milady," Calvaro said. "What if they-"

"If they're pirates, they'll think we're too small to bother with." She pushed back memories of that lecture on recent incursions from outlying powers. These were not the Benignity-she had seen Benignity ships on scan. Nor the Bloodhorde, which was all the way across Familias space and probably still licking its wounds after the Koskiusko mess. These were common criminals, and common criminals were after the big, easy profit . . . not chasing a small yacht with a few insignificant passengers.

"If you would jump out now, we could be back in range of the Corian ansible in just a few hours-"

"And have nothing much to say. No, we need to record some data, at least the beacon IDs of those other ships-" She grinned at them, and saw the grin have its usual effects. Her father's employees had been putty in her hands since she had convinced the head cook to give her all the chocolate eclairs she could cram into her mouth. Nor had she been sick, which only proved that the stuffier grownups were entirely too cautious.

Sneaking nearer with the insystem drive just nudging them along was dead easy. Brun napped briefly, slightly worried that one of them might figure out the lockout code she'd put on the nav computer so that they couldn't go into jump while she was asleep. But they hadn't. They'd tried-she could see that in their expressions, a mix of guilty and disgruntled-but she'd used a trick she'd learned at Copper Mountain and it held.

Scan delay was down to one minute by then. One of the mystery ships was snugged up to the merchanter, and one was positioned a quarter second away. The third . . . her breath caught. The third had moved . . . on an intercept course.

It couldn't have seen Jester. The yacht was too small; they could have spotted the bobble near the jump point, but after that-after that she had laid in a straight course and they could have extrapolated.

She should have jinked about. In the back of her mind, a nagging voice told her that she should have done what Barrican said, and jumped out right away. The pirates could not possibly have caught her then. Now-if they had military-grade scans-she flicked off the lockout. She could jump from here; there were no large masses to worry about. She had no idea where they might come out, jumping this far from the mapped points, but it had to be better.

She set up the commands, and pushed the button. A red warning light came on, and a saccharine voice from the console said "There are no mapped jump points within critical; jump insertion refused. There are no mapped jump points . . ."

Brun felt the blood rush to her face as she slapped the jump master control the other way. A rented yacht, with standard nagivation software . . . she had not thought about that, about the failsafes it would have built in, which she would not have time to bypass. Of course Allsystems Leasing would protect their investment by limiting the mistakes lessees could make.

She looked at the insystem drive controls. The yacht's insystem drive, standard for this model, should be able to outrun anything but Fleet's fastest-but only if she could redline it. She noticed that the control panel stopped well below what she knew was its redline acceleration.

Still, it was all she had.

"Milady-" Barrican said softly as she reached out.

"Yes-"

"They might not have seen us, even so. If you don't do anything, they might miss us still."

"And if they don't, we're easy meat," Brun said. "They've got the course; a preschooler could extrapolate our position."

"But if we seem to be unaware of them, they might still consider us unimportant. If you do anything, they'll have to assume you have noticed trouble."

What she had noticed was how stupid she'd been. Someday you'll get into something you can't handle by being bright and pretty and lucky, Sam had told her. She'd assumed someday was a long way away, and here it was.

"We have essentially no weapons," she said softly, though there was no need for quietness. "So our only hope of escape is to get within effective radius of that jump point-unless they do ignore us, and somehow I don't think they will."

On scan, the other ship's projected course curved to parallel theirs. Another of the smaller ships now moved-and moved in the blink-stop way of a warship that could microjump within a system.

"We can't outrun that," Brun said, under her breath. "Two of them . . ."

"Just go along as if we had no scans out at all," Barrican advised.

It was good advice. She knew it was good advice. But doing nothing wore on her in a way that action never did. Second by second, Jester slid along much more slowly than it had to; second by second the unknown ships closed in. What kind of scan did they have? Koutsoudas had been able to detect activity aboard other ships-could these? Would they believe that a little ship on a simple slow course from jump point to jump point would notice nothing?