GblaRCS Chpt 45

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 45 -==
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"Producing and maintaining the necessary infrastructure to allow a doubling of the population of the Niops system every twenty-five years is well within our capabilities, it should even be possible to raise the overall standard of living as we do so because increased automation of industry will increase average productivity at the same time. If we aim for noticeably faster population growth than that however then simply building enough schools, hospitals at cetera while staffing them properly will require a reallocation of resources that will result in necessary cutbacks elsewhere, consumer goods in particular given the obvious reluctance to cut defense spending."Summary Report into the proposal to encourage population growth in the Niops System via Tax Incentives - 2838CE
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===Frustrations with Little Sister===
Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2840
Judith was still standing there obstinately in the middle of the family living room, hands-on-hips looking up at Frederick as if trying to stare him down, an attempt doomed to failure because it was inordinately cuter than it was intimidating. "I don't need a babysitter" she insisted. "I'm not a baby."
"You're my baby sister and you'll always be my baby sister" Frederick countered. This wasn't exactly how he had originally been planning to spend his Saturday either but Barbara had asked a favor earlier in the week when her appointment was rescheduled. "Your Mom's got a doctor's appointment and then after that she's going to see your grandma, and because Dad's at work you get me" he told her.
"When you were my age you didn't need a babysitter." Judith persisted.
"When I was your age they were teaching me how to live off the land and where I should stab people in order to bleed them out." Frederick replied wryly. "As far as I know that's not something they teach at elementary school here" he added, trying not to laugh. In retrospect telling her stories about what he used to get up to when he was little might have been a mistake because it had clearly left her with a rather distorted impression of the sort of things that were generally considered acceptable for pre-teen children in normal society.
The society that Frederick had lived in when he was his little sister's age was, of course, decidedly abnormal and he was fully aware of that, as was the girl of course although it didn't suit her to say so.
He had been less than a year older than she was now when he picked up a rock on Liny, a moon in the Arcadia system, to get ready to fight a detachment of Ghost Bears that were hunting for any stranded Wolverine survivors in the wake of Operation Switchback. Fortunately, their commander wasn't someone that considered slaughtering children either just or honorable, orders be damned, so he had let Star Captain Francis and his charges Sibling Company Gamma go free.
There was a standing order because of that event that if the Wolverines somehow ever returned to the Clan Homeworlds for revenge the Ghost Bears were to be shown mercy, they had earned it.
Frederick sometimes wished he had kept the rock he had picked up to throw at the Ghost Bears as a souvenir but at the time it had just been a rock and they had been on Liny collecting something far more important, supplies for the journey back to the inner Sphere.
"They should. School's boring." Judith complained. Based on his stories Frederick's old 'school' on Circe sounded like much more fun to go to than hers ever did, they taught him how to navigate and read a map and to call in artillery strikes and everything. Daddy always said that artillery was the 'king of battle' so knowing how to do that must be more useful than knowing how to write in cursive she was sure. "And I got into trouble because I keep calling Alice, 'Alice' instead of Miss MacArthur" Judith continued her complaining. "I've always called her Alice, it's not my fault she's a teacher at my school now. Why couldn't she get a job at a different school?" the little girl wanted to know. "It's like I'm being spied on" she added suspiciously. Judith knew what spies were, her daddy used to catch spies for Jennifer McEvedy's mommy, that was before Khan McEvedy died and he became Khan instead.
Being a Khan was special. When she started school the children there whose parents were also Wolverines like her best friend Samantha Callahan used to treat her like she was sorta special too just because of who her daddy was. The kids whose parents were born on Niops didn't really understand why though, and when a couple of them had asked Judith about it the best answer she could come up with was 'I'm kinda like a princess, kinda but not really because I don't get to wear a tiara and I won't get to be Khan one day just because my daddy is'.
Although both her daddy and Sarah McEvedy did kinda end up in charge of the Wolverines because their daddies had once been in charge of the 331st Royal Battlemech Division, which later became the Wolverines, so maybe it was possible she might be Khan one day? Unless her big brother did, or Jennifer McEvedy did, or maybe even David Robertson who was also kinda Wolverine nobility too because his daddy had been saKhan before her daddy was.
And no she didn't dress all 'fancy' sometimes because she was 'kinda like a princess', that was just because sometimes her Mom dressed her up like a doll because she was really into clothes and worked for a company that made them.
Princess or not she was definitely part of House Hallis though, that was a real actual thing for sure she had told the non-Wolverine children. It had originally been what they called a 'Martial House' one based in North America in the Terran Hegemony, a family that owed allegiance to House Cameron and produced soldiers to fight for them like her grandfather, the Franklin Hallis her big brother was named after.
She had cousins on Royal in the Federated Suns, because her daddy's older brother had ended up there after the Terran Hegemony fell and he had reestablished House Hallis there. Not that she had ever met them, or even sent them an HPG to say hello, she only knew they existed because her daddy had sneakily checked up on what happened to his family when he returned to the Inner Sphere. Most people who had followed Aleksandr Kerensky on his Exodus had tried to do that by reading newspapers and books and stuff even though they knew they couldn't actually get in contact.
Judith supposed that the House Hallis on Royal owed allegiance to House Davion now, which wasn't as good as serving House Cameron but at least the Davions weren't completely horrible like House Kurita or House Liao were. Her mommy was actually named after Barbara Liao, who wasn't too bad by Liao standards but still wasn't a very nice person.
"It's not some conspiracy against you, munchkin. Your school was hiring when she graduated teacher-training college. You can ask her that yourself if you don't believe me, she's coming over later" Frederick told his little sister. "We're going to watch a movie on the holovision. Yours is better than the one in her apartment and if I want to watch a movie in barracks I have to fight a trial of possession for the remote control first" he told her, not being entirely truthful about the remote control.
"No, you won't, you'll just make out with each other on the couch. I don't want to watch my brother make out with one of the teachers at my school in front of me, it's weird" Judith protested, it was bad enough when her parents did it.
Of course, Judith planned to deal with that particular issue tactically. She would just plant herself between them on the couch which would also give her better access to the popcorn.
Fred would probably be proud of her if she was stupid enough to explain her plan to him, which she wasn't.
"It'll be worse when you get married. My teacher will be my sister-in-law" she complained.
Frederick laughed. "Who says we're getting married?" he asked.
"Henry Callahan is getting married, and Mom says you'll have to get married and start having kids too soon because you're going to get old faster than Dad did" Judith replied. "I won't have to have children until I'm dad's age though because I've been getting the anti-agg…" the girl stumbled upon the word, "agrath…" she tried again.
"Anti-agathic treatments" Frederick helped her out. He also knew that the reason Henry was getting hitched at a fairly young age was because he had made a vow to himself during the worst of the battle on Illyria against the Black Warriors that if he got out of this alive he was going to ask his girlfriend to marry him.
"Right, those" Judith agreed. "You didn't get them when you were my age and neither did Alice, I mean Miss MacArthur" she corrected herself. "I mean Alice dammit" she swore, correcting herself again because now she wasn't at school.
"Language." Frederick chided.
"I bet you swore way worse than that when you were my age." Judith defended herself.
"No, I didn't" Frederick told her truthfully. "When I was your age any time I swore in front of an adult I had to do twenty-five push-ups" Frederick told her.
"Did that work?" Barbara asked, entering the room after coming down the stairs while trying to fasten her overcoat over her belly and failing. After Frederick arrived for babysitting duty, exactly on time as she had assumed he would be, she had gone to her room to get changed.
When she had phoned him earlier in the week to ask if he would be okay with babysitting on Saturday, since she knew he wasn't on duty that weekend, Frederick had prevaricated at first but Barbara had wheedled him into it saying that his little sister wanted to spend time with him.
That was apparently an outright lie, Judith would have much preferred to have been left alone in the house, but there was no way that was happening.
"Eventually it did" Frederick told her. "At first I just got really good at push-ups" he continued. "Maybe you should try wearing a poncho instead?" he suggested to his now very pregnant stepmother as she continued to struggle with her overcoat. "I mean you'd look like a tent but…" he trailed off, grinning.
Barbara looked at him askance. "Father make exact same joke." she told him. "You definitely clone, not just two-thirds copy of original."
Judith frowned. "How come when grandma calls Fred a clone you tell her off but you get to do it?" she asked rhetorically, not expecting an answer because Mommy didn't answer questions like that. "And for the last time I don't need a babysitter" she said, stamping her feet. "I'm not a baby, I'm going to be a big sister soon" she pointed out.
"That's true, can't be too much longer until Tax-Break in there arrives and your clothes fit again" Frederick observed.
"Stop calling your new brother or sister 'Tax-break', it might stick" Barbara ordered her stepson while touching her pregnancy bump. It wasn't as if the new tax code that looked to encourage people having larger families was the only reason she and her husband had decided to have another child, even if it did admittedly have something to do with the timing.
One thing was for sure though. If they decided to have yet another child in a year or two she wasn't going to argue with her husband about using an Iron Womb next time like he had actually suggested for this one. Her back was killing her, her feet hurt, and her ankles were so swollen she couldn't wear her favorite boots, the gorgeous knee-high leather ones from Comstock.
Barbara always liked to dress very stylishly, fortunately by working for her uncle in a company that made clothing she could justify the excessive size of her wardrobe by saying it was expected of her in her business to look good.
By contrast if he didn't need multiple uniforms in different camouflage patterns for different terrains and weather conditions you could have fitted her husband's entire wardrobe in a suitcase. Just getting him to get fitted for a civilian suit rather than wear his dress uniform for any formal or semi-formal occasion had taken years.
"Dad does it, and looking at the size of you are you absolutely sure it's not a new brother and a new sister in there?" Frederick checked, not entirely in jest.
"Definitely not twins, told the doctor doing the scan not to tell me what sex they are but did want a count because I wasn't this big with Judith" Barbara responded.
"I remember," Frederick replied, recalling her first pregnancy back when he was still a high school kid not a serving soldier. "But look at the size of her now" he added, nodding towards his little sis.
"Yes, I'm big now, thanks for agreeing with me. And what do big girls not need? A babysitter" Judith declared triumphantly.
"You're seven. Seven-year-olds need a babysitter. It's the law" Frederick told her forcefully. "If I wasn't here someone else would be."
"Thank you, Frederick." Barbara responded as her daughter pouted.
"You're welcome. I called for a taxi like you asked, they should be here soon" Frederick told his stepmother. "A few more weeks and I guess you'll be able to fit properly behind the wheel of your car again."
"Can fit now, just uncomfortable as… heck." Barbara replied, correcting herself just before she swore.
Frederick scratched his nose. "Any chance that I could borrow your wheels tomorrow to take Alice out for a drive since you're not using it at the moment?" he asked. "The forest they planted out near Arecibo is starting to actually look like an actual park, not just a bunch of shrubs, and I thought it might be nice to go out for a walk with her there."
Barbara nodded, there was a paved road heading out there now so it wasn't like he was asking to taking her precious automobile off-roading, style didn't just mean clothes it meant driving a sleek expensive car too. "Alice still homesick for Buffalo Meadows sometimes is she?" she asked.
"A little I guess. With trees it probably looks a lot more like it did where she grew up here than it does without them" Frederick replied. "She used to climb them and swing on them when she was Judith's age" he added. Your memories of where you lived when you were little always stuck with you, for Frederick he still pined a little for Great Hope and Bearcat sometimes, even though his fond memories of the cities were interspersed with having to flee them before Old Nick had his sibko put up against a wall and shot.
Frederick also wondered if her childhood on Buffalo Meadows was the reason that Alice had decided to become a teacher, she had a thing for kids and that might be because there had been so few of them around when she was little herself. Although the 295th stranded on Buffalo Meadows had managed to make a home for themselves there they had not managed to produce enough offspring to make the colony viable in the long term. Once all the long-lived Terran Hegemony born first-generation had eventually died off it would have been likely only a matter of time before the colony did if the Switchback Fleet hadn't run into them instead.
The Iron Wombs were saving their bloodlines now though. Even General Romanov herself had a child on the way, although she had found someone else to raise them. Even with the anti-agathics you wouldn't want to have to deal with a newborn when you were over a hundred years old as she was now.
"Buffalo Meadows is a Red Dwarf system like Niops, but it was warmer than here because it's an M1V class star not an M5V" Judith piped up.
"Right" the girl's mother confirmed. "And if the star was a little bigger it would be…?" she asked, waiting for the answer.
"A K9V Orange Dwarf" Judith answered. "It's not easy to tell the difference just by looking at them though" she continued. "When Miss MacArthur started at the school she introduced herself to everyone in the assembly hall" she said, calling her 'Miss MacArthur' rather than 'Alice' because it was at school. "She told us where she was from, I mean I knew already of course, and said that the big tree they planted in front of the school a few years ago was from where she was born."
"There's no big trees on Niops." Frederick corrected her. "Not yet anyway, some of them won't be fully grown until you've got adult grandchildren." he said. "I remember full-grown Circian Oaks that were as tall as dropships."
"Circe is a weird planet." Judith opined. "Sometimes it's colder than Niops VII and covered in glaciers, sometimes it's as hot and dry as Alphard. Most of the time it's kinda between the two though, like when Frederick and Dad lived there."
"Do you know why?" Barbara asked, testing her.
"Mr. Armitage at school taught us it has an eccentric orbit" Judith replied, remembering being shown a hologram of the Circe planetary system that was sped up to show what happened. "It's only inside the habitable zone when the planet's not too close to the star and not too far away either" she said then giggled. "They call it the Goldilocks Zone because it's not too hot and not too cold… like the porridge in the story" she added. They taught you a lot about stars and planets and stuff at school here, more than they did in other places Judith knew, but she didn't really understand why not. Stars and planets were super-important after all, the whole universe was full of them.
"That's right" Frederick confirmed. "On Circe we had what they called a 'Great Year' as well as a normal year, every seven hundred years the planet goes from really cold to really hot and then back again. It's the reason why the plant-life there was so hardy."
"Not hardy enough to grow here very well." Judith countered.
"Not enough sunlight, Circe is a lot brighter and a whole lot bigger than Niops." Frederick replied. "I think your taxi is just pulling up outside." he told his step-mother, spotting it out of the window.
"Thank you, Frederick" Barbara replied. "Be a good girl for your brother, Judith." she instructed her daughter, carefully and slowly bending down to kiss her on the top of the head before heading for the front door.
"I'm always a good girl." Judith replied.
"Right, and you always tell the truth too." Frederick replied wryly.
"I do." Judith insisted. "Bye, bye Mommy." she bade her mother farewell.
"Bye, bye, Judith." Barbara called back, opening the front door and stepping outside. "I'll be back well before your bedtime. Frederick will make you dinner" she added, making a hasty retreat.
"That wasn't in the agreement." Frederick called out as the door slammed shut.
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===Babysitting little Sister===
"So… pizza?" Judith asked hopefully.
"We'll see" Frederick replied with a sigh.
"Ham and pineapple pizza?" Judith persisted.
Frederick looked at her utterly appalled. "Pineapple?" he repeated with dismay.
"But pineapple's not really expensive now like it used to be, they import them from Stafford" Judith told him.
"They could offer to pay me to eat pineapple on pizza and I wouldn't" Frederick told his baby sister. "If we're getting pizza it'll be with anchovies on it."
"Anchovies?!" Judith exclaimed. "Yuck! Nobody likes anchovies."
"I like anchovies, Philomena loves anchovies" Frederick disagreed.
"Philomena's part fish, she doesn't count" Judith argued back.
Frederick frowned. "I hope you're not saying that just because she's genetically engineered she's not a real person?"
"No, I'm saying that she's a real person that's part fish, so what she thinks about fish is going to be different than what other people think about fish" Judith replied, clearly finding her own logic unassailable. "Sam said that Philomena ate all the shrimp at the Callahan family barbeque too" she added, reinforcing her case.
"According to Henry Philomena also steals the bacon off his plate when they have breakfast so maybe she just really likes food that's salty, not just food that swims" Frederick offered a counter-argument.
"Maybe" Judith conceded. "Sam says she's going to be a flower-girl when Henry marries Philomena next year" she told him. "Can I be a flower-girl too?"
"Not up to me, munchkin it's not my wedding" Frederick replied.
"But you're going to be the Best Man, aren't you?"
Frederick laughed. "I could be the groom and it still wouldn't be up to me" he replied. "You could ask Alice to ask Philomena, or better yet ask Philomena yourself."
"Yeah, I guess" Judith replied.
"Oh, and don't think I've forgotten that you lied earlier about never telling lies" Frederick told her.
"I don't" Judith insisted.
Frederick gave her a disparaging look. "Yes, you do" he stated flatly. "When you got me to come to your school that day to talk about what it's like on McEvedy's Folly you promised that the kids wouldn't just want to ask about about me and the Thunderbird."
"That wasn't my fault, I told them not to" Judith defended herself.
"When I asked if anyone had any questions after I gave my talk the very first one I was asked was 'Were you really nearly eaten by a giant chicken?' and it got worse from there" Frederick pointed out. Somehow he'd thought they'd want to hear more about the feathery pink Mammoths and how floofy they were, or even the goofy-looking Sabre-Tooth Toucans, but no.
"It is kinda a funny story though" Judith opined. "I mean, lots of people have stories about fighting pirates, or clanners, or Rimjobs but you fought a really big bird… and lost."
"You shouldn't say 'Rimjob' Judith" Frederick told her quickly.
"Why not?" the little girl wanted to know.
"It's rude" Frederick responded.
"It's supposed to be rude, they're the bad guys, you're supposed to say mean things about them, right?" Judith queried.
Frederick grimaced. "It's the way that it's rude" he explained as best he could.
"How?" Judith asked, confused what all the fuss was about.
"Well… it's like when people say 'clannerbastards' when talking about Nicholas Kerensky and his people" Frederick replied, improvising fast because he really didn't want to explain to his baby sister what a 'Rimjob' was, other than being an insulting name for people from the Rim Worlds Republic who fought for Stefan Amaris.
"Oh right" Judith responded. She wasn't allowed to say 'bastard' because it was a swearword, although in her defence she didn't know 'clannerbastards' was actually two words said really fast together. "Wait, since when is 'Rim' or 'Job' a swear?" she wanted to know.
Frederick considered his situation. "This is one of those things you need to talk to Dad about not me" he said eventually. He could have suggested she ask Barbara instead but that wouldn't have been as funny. "So is Alice a good teacher?" he asked, less than smoothly changing the subject.
"She's okay, you wouldn't need to know her to tell she hasn't been doing it very long though" Judith replied.
"Too young?"
"Tries too hard to try and make the kids like her by trying to be fun" Judith explained. "The real teachers don't do that."
Frederick laughed. "She is a real teacher Judith" he told her.
"Nuh uh" Judith disagreed. "Can I have a candy bar?" she asked. "Mom put them all in the top cupboard in the kitchen and I can't reach them" she explained the problem. Her brother was good for things like reaching high shelves, he was even taller than Dad and Dad was pretty tall to start with.
"If she put them there to stop you having one then I shouldn't get one for you" Frederick replied, shaking his head no.
"She put them there to hide them from Dad" Judith replied honestly. "They were supposed to be for me, but he kept eating them instead."
Now that sounded plausible enough and given that he wouldn't have minded having a candy bar himself, Frederick attributing that to an inherited sweet tooth, he went into the kitchen with Judith following. "Not that cupboard, that's where Dad puts his beer" she told him when he initially reached for the wrong one. "You're not allowed any" she told her big brother forcefully. "You go crazy when you drink beer."
"I go crazy when I drink enough beer to get drunk, not just from one two beers" Frederick corrected her, "but I wasn't planning to have one anyway" he added. "This cupboard?" he checked.
"Yes, the candy is behind the jars of pickled tomatoes" Judith confirmed.
"Never liked the pickled tomatoes" Frederick muttered to himself as he moved them out of the way. Barbara's Chinese cooking was pretty good but her dabbles into traditional Russian cuisine left something to be desired. "How's your Chinese these days?" he asked.
"Lăolao says my Mandarin is getting pretty good but my Cantonese still needs a lot of work" Judith replied as Frederick handed her a candy bar. "That means maternal grandmother" she explained.
"I'm not totally monolingual, mèi mei" Frederick replied, using the Mandarin word for little sister as he closed the cupboard again after taking a candy bar for himself. "Barbara tried to teach me some Mandarin when I was younger but then you came along and she found herself with a much better student."
"I still think the only reason she doesn't always speak English as well as she can speak English is to annoy Dad because it's the only language he can speak" Judith shared her theory.
Frederick laughed. "I remember a time around about when you were just learning to walk that he once told her that the whole point of the Terran Hegemony was to make everyone learn English so that people like him that grew up with it wouldn't have to ever bother learning anything else" he told his little sister. "The Reunification War was just a smokescreen."
"Really?" Judith asked doubtfully.
"Nah, not really" Frederick replied. "Well, he really said it, but he was only joking."
"What did Mom say?"
"That there was no doubt that he was definitely English" Frederick replied. Supposedly the Hallis family directly traced its roots, albeit via North America, all the way back to England before the Norman Invasion of 1066 so they really were about as Anglo-Saxon as it was possible to be.
Of course, it was well known that the Terran Hegemony was actually a Scottish conspiracy not an English one. The first Director-Generals had all been McKennas then the Cameron's took over. Even if you looked closer to home the 331st Division had been commanded by a McEvedy, the 295th by a MacArthur and the Niops Association Militia was currently commanded by a Nellis, the Nellis family also being of Scottish descent.
Moreover, with Giles Olson gone the new High Associator was now former councilman James Murray. Franklin Hallis had joked that anyone would think the Jocks had won the Battle of Culloden.
"You didn't have candy-bars when you were little did you?" Judith asked, taking a bite out of hers.
"No, but I really liked the oaty cereal bars that they gave us when we went hiking, they were flavoured with synthetic honey" Frederick replied. "Whoever it was making the stuff was better at his job than the person that made the artificial Maple Syrup, not that I knew that until I got to try real Maple Syrup for the first time on Camelot Command."
"What was it like living there?"
"Much better than living on Yukon, less cramped and we got to eat lots of fruit." Frederick told her. "But you've heard all my stories before, so why are you asking?"
"So I can tell them to our new little brother or sister and make sure I get them right" Judith explained. "You never know when you're going to be sent off on a mission so you might not be there to tell them yourself" she said. "It's important that they know the stories so they know our history. Wolverine history, so it's not forgotten when you're gone."
"You know, just because I'm not going to live to a hundred and fifty like you are that I'm not going to die of old age anytime soon right, munchkin?" Frederick asked wryly.
"I'm not stupid." Judith replied, rolling her eyes in a very familiar fashion that reminded Frederick of when he did it himself, or when Dad did it, which was basically the same thing.
It was likely a very good thing that other people couldn't read Franklin Hallis's body language nearly as well as Frederick Hallis could, especially considering he was having his first meeting with the new High Associator next week and he didn't really rate the man all that highly.
"Okay, so do you want to hear the story about Liny again just to make sure you've got it right?" Frederick asked his little sister.
"Nah, you've told that one loads of times, and you always say that you wished you'd kept that rock you picked up to throw at the Spook Teddy" Judith replied. She did like that nickname for the Ghost Bears though, it was almost as good as calling the Jade Falcon's the 'Green Turkeys' or the Smoke Jaguar's the 'Mist Kittens'.
Clan Widowmaker was only ever called Clan Widowmaker though, no cutesy nicknames for those jerks.
"Tell me again about visiting Bearcat and Katyusha City." Judith requested instead.
"Okay, but only if you agree to having anchovy pizza later." Frederick bargained.
"Fine" Judith agreed unenthusiastically.
"And you admit that putting pineapple on a pizza is dezgra."
"Neg!" Judith replied, glaring at him. She couldn't just speak English, Mandarin and some Cantonese, her Clanner was better than you'd expect from someone that had never been within two thousand light-years of Strana Mechty too.
Challenging Frederick to a Trial of Possession for the holovid remote control later while sitting between him and Alice on the couch proved to be a mistake though. He still won even after bidding himself down to the index finger and thumb on one hand.
Stupid genetically-engineered strong grip and freakishly fast reaction times. He always beat her when they played Grande Circuit Challenge III on the games console too.
At least he'd be old and slow one day and she wouldn't be. Then she'd whup his ass but good at everything!
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : The last time we saw Judith Hallis, daughter of Franklin and Barbara Hallis, she was a baby but that was back in Part XXV in 2833 and time marches on. She's now seven and doesn't think she needs a babysitter because when her big brother was her age he was already a future member of the Warrior Caste in training (the laws regarding the treatment of young children on Niops are a little different than they were in the Clan worlds though). Judith has a new sibling on the way which her parents insist is not just because of the taxbreak.Given the expected big hike in population growth expected due to the tax-breaks for having more children (and more Iron Wombs each year) Alice MacArthur choosing to go into teaching is probably a savvy career move. One thing they did not have many of on Buffalo Meadows was children.Roger Callahan is older than Franklin Hallis and has a few grandchildren now at this point, one of his grandaughters going to school with Judith (he still looks younger than you'd expect because he was Terran Hegemony born and got the anti-aging treatments as a child that Niops has brought back).We get to meet the new High Associator in the next part.
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Chapter 45