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pitcher of stout that was calling his name. Maybe even find a girl with the right combination of looks and loneliness.
    And a no expectations of permanence. A few minutes later he waved cheerfully to the security guard, leaving the airport in search of beer and women. Song was optional.

    Cally shared a lane with Grandpa on their way home. She still missed her little apartment, but she wouldn't trade the girls for anything, even if motherhood did mean moving back home. Oh, she hired one of Wendy's granddaughters to play nanny whenever she expected to be gone for awhile, but there still needed to be someone to watch over all the details and make sure everyone got where they should be on time and all the bills got paid. If Grandpa was Clan O'Neal's patriarch and clan head, Shari had matriarchy down pat. The O'Neal Bane Sidhe hid their headquarters in a Himmit-camouflaged mini SubUrb deep under Indiana. The Clan O'Neal hid its headquarters in plain sight in a sprawling farmhouse, in the swampy pine woods of Edisto Island.
    Technically bounty-farmers, living under various names and identities, the O'Neals and the Sundays, their immediate in-laws, and assorted Bane Sidhe waifs and strays had kept the area on and around the island swept clean of all but the occasional stray abat, the pests, for at least twenty years. It would have been inaccurate to call the clan self-sufficient on the local land and sea. They had a source of working capital.
    The Clan O'Neal men (by now the Sundays were regarded as a cadet branch) who planned to work for the Bane Sidhe tended to seek training, and find it, in the armed services. While Fleet Strike and Fleet remained the primary armed forces of the Galactic Federation, the various United States and Canadian military organizations still remained. Missions tended to be against pirates or insurgents. Or the US
    military "loaned" units to Fleet or Fleet Strike, or other Galactic interests, for specialty functions. To limit the problems associated with being off-planet and unavailable, the O'Neals tended to gravitate to what was still called counter-terror special ops. Large parts of it on both coasts still lay in ruins, but the United States was no more able to survive without the rest of the world now than it had been pre-war. The war itself had been a special case, but strategic resources from overseas were as important now as they ever had been. In modern times, counter-terror really meant protecting those strategic resources and the trade lanes that served the many single-export colonies.
    Their service in the military provided excellent training while continuing an honored family tradition, albeit under assumed identities. It also brought hard currency into the Clan community. Their pay covered goods and services that the island community couldn't make or grow for themselves. It stretched the dollars from the small cash crops some of the women grew each year. Low-country agriculture had been a hand-to-mouth proposition long before the war, and the O'Neals didn't go in for tourism, great beaches or not. Still, shipping by moonlight was an old and revered tradition along the North American coastline.
    A couple of what she still thought of as "the kids" had quite a talent for it.
    Having grown up with just Grandpa, and then having lived alone for so long, Cally still felt vaguely claustrophobic if she stayed too long in what had become a happy, if chaotic and often quarrelsome, jumble of aunts and uncles younger than she was mixed with all sorts of cousins, grown or growing. Not to mention various people relocated by the Bane Sidhe, who needed to live someplace anonymous for awhile. Without the slab, that added up to a good little small town, even though a number of kin had wrapped themselves up in very sincere identities and assimilated into the outside world. The Clan was careful to turn in enough Posleen heads for bounty, maintaining the illusion that the area was still infested.
    This brought in a