“The usual,” he replied, easing into a station chair clamped to the floor beside a small table.

“Might have guessed. I swear I’ll train you to be more venturesome one of these days.” Thorne shot a peculiar grin over its shoulder at him—was that intended to be some sort of double entendre? After a bit more rattling about, Thorne placed a delicately hand-painted porcelain cup and saucer upon the table at his elbow. He picked it up and sipped cautiously as Thorne hooked another chair into its clamps a quarter turn around the table, produced a cup for itself, and sat with a small grunt of satisfaction.

He was relieved to find the hot amber liquid pleasant, if astringent. Sugar? He dared not ask. Thorne hadn’t put any out. The Dendarii surely would have, if it expected Naismith to use sugar. Thorne couldn’t be making some subtle test already, could it? No sugar, then.

Tea-drinking mercenaries. The beverage didn’t seem nearly poisonous enough, somehow, to go with the display, no, working arsenal, of weapons clamped to the wall: a couple of stunners, a needier, a plasma arc, a gleaming metal crossbow with an assortment of grenade-bolts in a bandolier hung with it. Thorne was supposed to be good at its job. If that was true, he didn’t care what the creature drank.

“You’re in a black study. I take it you’ve brought us a lovely one this time, eh?” Thorne prodded after another moment’s silence.

“The mission assignment, yes.” He certainly hoped that was what Thorne meant. The hermaphrodite nodded, and raised its brows in encouraging inquiry. “It’s a pick-up. Not the biggest one we’ve ever attempted, by any means—”

Thorne laughed.

“But with its own complications.”

“It can’t possibly be any more complicated than Dagoola Four. Say on, oh do.”

He rubbed his lips, a patented Naismith gesture. “We’re going to knock over House Bharaputra’s clone creche, on Jackson’s Whole. Clean it out.”

Thorne was just crossing its legs; both feet now hit the floor with a thump. “Kill them?” it said in a startled voice.

“The clones? No, rescue them! Rescue them all.”

“Oh. Whew.” Thorne looked distinctively relieved. “I had this horrible vision for a second—they are children, after all. Even if they are clones.”

“Just exactly so.” A real smile tugged up the corners of his mouth, surprising him. “I’m … glad you see it that way.”

“How else?” Thorne shrugged. “The clone brain-transplant business is the most monstrous, obscene practice in Bharaputra’s whole catalog of slime services. Unless there’s something even worse I haven’t heard about yet.”

“I think so too.” He settled back, concealing his startlement at this instant endorsement of his scheme. Was Thorne sincere? He knew intimately, none better, the hidden horrors behind the clone business on Jackson’s Whole. He’d lived through them. He had not expected someone who had not shared his experiences to share his judgment, though.

House Bharaputra’s specialty was not, strictly speaking, cloning. It was the immortality business, or at any rate, the life extension business. And a very lucrative business it was, for what price could one put on life itself? All the market would bear. The procedure Bharaputra sold was medically risky, not ideal … wagered only against a certainty of imminent death by customers who were wealthy, ruthless, and, he had to admit, possessed of unusual cool foresight.

The arrangement was simple, though the surgical procedure upon which it was based was fiendishly complex. A clone was grown from a customer’s somatic cell, gestated in a uterine replicator and then raised to physical maturity in Bharaputra’s creche, a sort of astonishingly-appointed orphanage. The clones were valuable, after all, their physical conditioning and health of supreme importance. Then, when the time was right, they were cannibalized. In an operation that claimed a total success rate of rather less than one hundred percent, the clone’s progenitor’s brain was transplanted from its aged or damaged body into a duplicate still in the first bloom of youth. The clone’s brain was classified as medical waste.

The procedure was illegal on every planet in the wormhole nexus except Jackson’s Whole. That was fine with the criminal Houses that ran the place. It gave them a nice monopoly, a steady business with lots of practice upon the stream of wealthy off-worlders to keep their surgical teams at the top of their forms. As far as he had ever been able to tell, the attitude of the rest of the worlds toward it all was out of sight, out of mind.” The spark of sympathetic, righteous anger in Thorne’s eyes touched him on a level of pain so numb with use he was scarcely conscious of it any more, and he was appalled to realize he was a heartbeat away from bursting into tears. It’s probably a trick. He blew out his breath, another Naismith-ism.

Thorne’s brows drew down in intense thought. “Are you sure we should be taking the Ariel? Last I heard,Baron Ryoval was still alive. It’s bound to get his attention.”

House Ryoval was one of Bharaputra’s minor rivals in the illegal medical end of things. Its specialty was manufacturing genetically-engineered or surgically sculptured humans for any purpose, including sexual, in effect slaves made-to-order; evil, he supposed, but not the killing evil that obsessed him. But what had the Ariel to do with Baron Ryoval? He hadn’t a clue. Let Thorne worry about it. Perhaps the hermaphrodite would drop more information later. He reminded himself to seize the first opportunity to review the ship’s mission logs.

“This mission has nothing to do with House Ryoval. We shall avoid them.”

“So I hope,” agreed Thorne fervently. It paused, thoughtfully sipping tea. “Now, despite the fact that Jackson’s Whole is long overdue for a housecleaning, preferably with atomics, I presume we are not doing this just out of the goodness of our hearts. What’s, ah, the mission behind the mission this time?”

He had a rehearsed answer for that one. “In fact, only one of the clones, or rather, one of its progenitors, is of interest to our employer. The rest are to be camouflage. Among them, Bharaputra’s customers have a lot of enemies. They won’t know which one is attacking who. It makes our employer’s identity, which they very much desire to keep secret, all the more secure.”

Thorne grinned smugly. “That little refinement was your idea, I take it.”

He shrugged. “In a sense.”

“Hadn’t we better know which clone we’re after, to prevent accidents, or in case we have to cut and run? If our employer wants it alive—or does it matter to them if the clone is alive or dead? If the real target is the old bugger who had it grown.”

“They care. Alive. But … for practical purposes, let us assume that all the clones are the one we’re after.”

Thorne spread its hands in acquiescence. “It’s all right by me.” The hermaphrodite’s eyes glinted with enthusiasm, and it suddenly smacked its fist into its palm with a crack that made him jump. “It’s about time someone took those Jacksonian bastards on! Oh, this is going to be fun!” It bared its teeth in a most alarming grin. “How much help do we have lined up on Jackson’s Whole? Safety nets?”

“Don’t count on any.”

“Hm. How much hindrance? Besides Bharaputra, Ryoval, and Fell, of course.”

House Fell dealt mainly in weapons. What had Fell to do with any of this? “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Thorne frowned; that was not the usual sort of Naismith answer, apparently.

“I have a great deal of inside information about the creche, that I can brief you on once we’re en route. Look, Bel, you hardly need me to tell you how to do your job at this late date. I trust you. Take over the logistics and planning, and I’ll check the finals.”

Thorne’s spine straightened. “Right. How many kids are we talking about?”