himself a frown, "but let's be grateful for what he already gave us. He turned from his own to be helping us because he thought it right; now I've the thinking he's to be paying for it soon and late." "I know, Lad. I know." She patted his shoulder, smiling contritely, and he felt a surge of guilt. It was hard enough heading a Fringe World delegation without your own people snapping at you. Besides, Fionna was fight to worry. The one clue they had to Greuner's message was the phrase "Gale Warning," and that was the code he and the little man had arranged to indicate a major Corporate World offensive against the Fringe.

"I did pick up something a mite useful," he proffered as a peace offering. 'rhe name of the new New Zurich bully boy, I'm to be thinking.

Fouchet. A tall, mean son-of-a sand-leech with a face like boiled blubber." "He's their new security chief?." Fionna asked, eyes narrowing.

"Chief, you know they're not to be using such titles] They're not so crude as that--heql to be called Computerman's Syndic or some such. But, aye, he's the one.

And had he just a little more curiosity or a little less brain--mind, I'm not sure which it was--it's squeezing Greuner's information from him I'd be the now." "Lad," Fionna said sternly, "I've told you we can't operate that way! They already call us 'barbarians". What do you think they'll call us if you start acting like that?" "Aye? I don't have the thinking it's to mind me the much," Ladislaus said, laying the accent with a trowel. "It's maybe "Corporate Worlder" they're to call me if I have the doing of their own against them. And where's the difference to lie? Yon Corporate Worlder flays his whales with money, Chief; I'm only after the doing of it by hand." Fionna started to reply tartly, then stopped.

She and Ladislaus had grown up together on the cold and windy seas of Beaufort, and she knew it irked