“I just mentioned that public interest in the girls’ case is high because their abductionswere connected with the Intergalactic Dating Agency. The IDA outposts on Earth already garner a certain prurient excitement among lesser beings with their unseemly emphasis on lust and libertinism. Not to mention love.” She gazed past the screen, her focus on something he couldn’t see. “Did you know, they call it ‘hooking up’. Hooking, as if it was a hunt for some wild erotic beast.”
Wishingdearly he might never learn his mother’s position on eroticism, he drawled, “And so?”
“Deplorable, really,” she murmured, torpedoing his dearest wish. “Lust and love are for the people. The peerage, such as ourselves, must hold to a higher standard.” She took another sip of tea.
He waited impatiently, knowing her and her tea and her intrigues. “By any chance, would that ‘higher standard’ havea galactic credit limit attached?”
She sighed. “I gave you this opportunity to tour the system so you could see where we stand.” She set her teacup down with a decisive click. “On the brink of ruin, in case you missed it.”
He hadn’t. The central planets were settled, established, and secure enough, but the outer planets—always more marginal with their environmental extremes—and the moons werein dire straits such that the support from the successful planets was strained. Advanced terraforming and high-end engineering, both mechanical and genetic, would allow those territories to prosper—and profit—but only at great investment. “That’s why I’m out here, claiming this salvage,” he reminded her. “It will net us—”
“Nothing,” she said bluntly. “We can’t claim it, not with the universewatching.”
Frustration tightened his shoulders. “Why would anyone even care?”
“An open-worlds’ rights organization has been pushing to overturn council rulings on closed worlds, declaring that keeping them in the dark is cruel and unconscionable, amounting to genocide in some cases. In this case, they are saying, Earth never had a chance to protect their citizens from Blackworm because theydidn’t even know alien abduction was a real threat. This organization—Open Worlds For All—has taken on the Black Hole Brides as their cause, and they are proposing that the station and its environs be turned over to the girls as a sort of compensatory dowry.”
He laughed sharply. “What are a handful of closed-world females going to do with a space station in a decaying orbit around a black hole?”
His mother shook her finger at him. “I hope you aren’t suggesting that females couldn’t run a station.”
“Of course not.” He imagined Rayna would make an excellent station manager. She just wouldn’t want the responsibility. “But they’ll want to go home, not stay here on the edge of Azthronos space in a derelict station.”
“Good,” she said. “So when you take controlling interest, you can do whateverneeds to be done to maximize profits on their behalf.”
“Take control…” He frowned. “What do you mean?”
She gave a delicate shrug. “Why, my dear boy, when you marry one.”
