"Princess Ruth's not coming with us?" asked Brice Miller. He and his two friends Ed Hartman and James Lewis had distressed expressions on their faces.
Marti Garner shook her head, trying not to laugh. "No, that part of the plan had to be scrapped."
"Why?" asked Michael Alsobrook. If anything, his expression was even more woebegone. That was perhaps understandable, since he was about the same age as Ruth Winton, so whatever fantasies he'd been having fell into the Very Unlikely category rather than, as with the three fourteen-year-olds, into the delusional realm known as You Have Got To Be Kidding.
Marti heard a little choking sound to her left. Turning her head, she saw that Friede Butry had her attention riveted onto the screen showing their departure from Torch orbit—a subject which was really not all that interesting. Clearly enough, the clan matriarch was finding the romantic anguish of the male members of her party over the sudden and unexpected absence of the princess to be every bit as amusing as Marti did.
Before explaining, Garner considered the security issues involved. They didn't seem to be critical, however, since the only "secret" she'd be divulging was something that would be blindingly obvious to any observer very soon anyway.
"Well, the request Torch sent in that the Biological Survey Corps release our team for detached duty—"
Hearing another choking sound, she broke off and turned her head to the right. Haruka Takano seemed to be utterly fascinated with the data appearing on a different screen. Which was odd, on the face of it, since that data pertained to the ship's completely routine environmental processes.
"Is something amiss, Lt. Takano?"
He didn't take his eyes off the screen. " 'Request,' " he mimicked. "Is that 'request' as in 'the gangster requests that you cough up your extortion payment'?"
From her own seat on the Ouroborous' command deck, Stephanie Henson spoke up. "You have a low and nasty mind, Haruka."
"You didn't complain about it last night."
"A low, nasty and vulgar mind."
"You didn't complain about that either."
"A low, nasty, vulgar and—"
"Enough!" laughed Marti. "To get back to your question, Michael, the delegation that arrived here from Beowulf to finalize our new assignment as Queen Berry's security detachment included several Manticorans. That's not surprising, of course, since Manticore would have initiated the process with Beowulf. One of them was no less a personage than Ruth's father, Michael Winton-Serisburg, the Queen of Manticore's younger brother."
Comprehension seemed to be dawning, judging from the winces on the faces of Alsobrook and the three youngsters.
"Yes, indeed," said Marti. "The prince—well, he's technically a duke these days, but he's still a prince, if you know what I mean. He's still Ruth's father, too, and—apparently knowing his own daughter quite well—he'd come for the specific and express purpose of making sure she did not engage in any risky endeavor like accompanying some scruffy albeit doughty vagabonds—that's you, no offense intended—on what seems to be on the face of it a most perilous enterprise."
"Because it is a most perilous enterprise," grumbled Ganny El, "and I should have held out for an annual stipend from Manticore as well as from Beowulf. Would have, too, if I'd known we'd make the House of Winton this jumpy."
Either Brice Miller's faith in the princess or his fantasies were stratospheric, because he piped up: "You watch! I bet Ruth figures out a way to sneak around him. She's really smart."
"I don't doubt that," said Garner. "But 'smart' can only take you so far, when you have a guard detachment of the Queen's Own Regiment watching you at all times. And don't kid yourself, Brice. They may be Ruth's bodyguards, and they may have been with her for a year and a half now—but they'll take their orders from the Queen herself. Or the Queen's brother."
"Oh."
"Cheer up, boys," said Haruka. "There was never a chance they'd let her come, once they found out what she had in mind. A member of the royal family? She's already been taken hostage once—at least, the criminals thought they had her—and the first thing that would have crossed the minds of her family was that if they let her run loose, somebody else would do the same."
"But how did they know what she was planning to do?" asked Ed. "I'm sure the princess didn't tell them."
Garner discovered that the screen in front of her—who would have thought it, of engineering data?—was deeply engrossing. Judging from the sudden silence, a similar fascination had seized the other members of the crew.
* * *
"You did it!" accused Ruth. Her forefinger was shaking right under Hugh's nose. "Don't even try to deny it! You're the one who told them!"
Watching them, Berry couldn't help but be amused. Given the size disparity between Ruth and Hugh, the situation was a bit like a chipmunk—well, being fair, a pretty good sized dog—trying to chastise a bear.
Fortunately, Hugh was generally quite phlegmatic. That was one of the things—one of the many things—Berry liked about him. So he didn't snarl back at the Manticoran princess, nor huff and puff that he was being put upon.
"Why would I try to deny it?" he said calmly. "I readily agree that I'm guilty as charged. Which, in turn, simply means that unlike one person in this room—female, about one hundred and sixty-seven centimeters tall, weight somewhere in the range of sixty-five kilograms, of Masadan ancestry—I'm not crazy. Face it, Ruth. Whether you like it or not, your ability to operate as a field agent is now and will forevermore be tightly constrained by the fact that on the scale of 'Hostage, Value Thereof,' you rank ten out of ten. Or at the very least, nine point nine nine unto the two thousandth decimal point out of ten."
Her glare hadn't faded in the least. "It's sixty kilos, thank you very much. I exercise regularly."
He accepted the correction with a solemn nod.
Berry decided that Ruth's temper had probably crested and was now on the downslope. Time to intervene.
"I'm really glad you'll be staying here on Torch, Ruth. It'd be awfully lonely without you—"
She summoned her very best glare—which was pretty feeble, being honest—and bestowed it upon Hugh. "—given the living arrangements that this paranoiac insists I have to maintain from now on."
"Just for the duration of the emergency situation," Hugh said.
" 'Duration of the emergency situation,' " Ruth jeered. "And what would that situation be, O Paranoid-in-Chief? The all out war to the death between Berry's star nation and Manpower, which has now been in existence for, oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred years. That one?"
Hugh chuckled. "Yes. That one."
"A life sentence, in other words," said Berry unhappily.
"Maybe not, Your Majesty. If we can—"
"Don't call me that!"
Hugh took a slow deep breath. "I don't have any choice, Berry—and that's the last time you'll hear me use your given name so long as I have this assignment." For a moment, he looked distinctly unhappy. "One of the basic rules concerning security work is that security agents need to keep their personal distance from the person or persons they're providing security for. In this case . . . that's not going to be easy for me. Informality would make it impossible."
Berry didn't know if she was delighted or chagrined to hear that. Probably both. "I'll kill Jeremy, I swear I will. The first guy who comes along since they put this stupid crown on my head who's not intimated by going out on a date with me—and he makes him my security chief!"
"You can't kill Jeremy," said Ruth. "Sorry, girl—but you were the one who specifically refused his offer to give you the right to exercise the death penalty once a year, at your whim and discretion." The princess beamed up at Hugh. "Been me, I would have taken it. And you'd be for the high jump, right about now."
"Fine. I can have him banished." Berry cocked her head, studying Hugh for a few seconds. "But it wouldn't do me any good, would it? You're one of those people with an overdeveloped sense of duty. Even with Jeremy gone, you'd keep soldiering on."
"Well. Yes. But to get back to what I was saying, the main reason for this admittedly extreme precaution"—he waved his hand, indicating the operations chamber buried far below the surface—"is because somebody is using some sort of assassination method that we don't understand yet. Once we learn how to counter it . . ."
He looked at the bed that had been crammed into the largest available space in the chamber. "Then you can start living somewhere else again."
Ruth's temper was now rapidly subsiding, as was usually true when she got angry. "Look on the bright side, Berry. At least the bathroom down here is up to snuff. State of the art, in fact."
"You'd better hope so," Berry said. "Seeing as how you'll be sharing it with me. There's room down here—barely—for another bed."
"Berry!"
The queen ignored her and looked up at her security chief. "I'm sure the Queen's Own would agree, aren't you?"
"They'll sing hosannas."
"Berry!"
* * *
But Ruth's displeasure at being banished along with Berry to what she called The Netherworld—her Queen's Own guard detachment did indeed sing hosannas—lasted less than twenty hours. The next day Anton and Victor returned from their visit to Trevor's Star, just two hours after a courier ship brought a detailed report on the recent Battle of Monica.
However much Ruth might daydream of being a dashing field agent, the truth was that her great love was analysis. There was enough meat on the bones of that report concerning Monica to keep her down in the operations chamber for four days straight, not even coming up for meals but having them delivered. To her great pleasure, she'd discovered that the computer equipment in the chamber was every bit as state of the art as the toilet and bathing facilities.
Anton spent a great deal of his own time with her, although he did go up to the surface for meals—and, of course, he didn't sleep down there. There would hardly have been room for a third bed, anyway.
Victor Cachat divided his time during that four-day stretch about evenly. Half of the time he spent with Thandi—a good part of that, in their bedroom—and the other half he spent helping Anton and Ruth analyze the data from Monica.
The decision that he and Anton would take the risk of trying to penetrate Mesa still hadn't been made yet. But that was just a formality, now. The information they were getting from the Monica reports were confirming all the suspicions they'd ever had.
* * *
Princess Ruth brushed back her hair. "There's no doubt about it, any longer. Anton and I crunched those figures till they're flat as pancakes. So you can put your fears about any 'hall of mirrors' effect to rest, Jeremy. We weren't looking at images, we were looking at hard cold facts."
"What facts are you referring to in particular?" asked Web Du Havel. He was sitting next to Queen Berry at the conference table in the center of the operations chamber. Victor was sitting next to him, and Thandi and Anton more or less across from him. Jeremy X was standing. As was usually the case, Jeremy preferred to stand at business meetings rather than sit down.
"The data concerning Manpower's financial flows," said Ruth. "There's no way an operation as huge as the one mounted at Monica can keep its costs hidden. And here's what comes out of it. They dropped a bundle on this little fiasco—or someone did, anyway. Sort of. That many battlecruisers don't come cheap, you know, and I think some of the analysts back home in Landing are suffering sticker shock from just looking at the tonnage they threw at us. But—but, Jeremy—I think they're missing something."
"Indeed?" Jeremy gave her one of his patented quizzical smiles. "By all means, dazzle us once again with your legerdemain, O Princess!"
Ruth stuck out her tongue at him, then shrugged.
"I think I can make a pretty good case that they figured out how to cover their costs (assuming it all worked, of course) in such a way that they'd at least break even on the Monica project, especially with Technodyne thrown into the mix. If Technodyne's part of the deal was to provide the battlecruisers from the ships they were supposed to be scrapping, costs come way down . . . on an out-of-pocket basis, anyway. Oh, they still had to pay for all the munitions they were planning on using, not to mention getting the technicians they needed all the way out to Monica. So, yeah, there were some pretty hefty damn expenditures involved here. But hefty as they were, they weren't as hefty as it might look at first glance. And if you factor in the possible future revenues from the Lynx Terminus—which was clearly their long-term target—Manpower could still have wound up coming out of the whole thing smelling like a rose."
"GIGO," said Jeremy. "Garbage in, garbage out."
"I know what the acronym means, thank you," Ruth said crossly. "What's your point?"
Jeremy smiled at her. "Meaning no offense. Still, in the nature of things those figures you fed into your programs were just guesstimates. You have no access to the actual figures. You could be misreading the figures . . . including just how far Technodyne was willing to go to help subsidize this little venture."
"That's true," said Victor. "In fact, I'd accept a disparity of two-to-one or even three-to-one—conceivably even four-to-one—as a GIGO effect. But it would take something like a full order of magnitude to really alter our conclusions, Jeremy."
"He's right," Anton said. "Those guesstimates, as you call them, were produced by me and Ruth working independently of each other. Victor provided us with his own estimates, as well, although those were a lot less rigorous. We didn't match the results until all three of us were finished. Then Ruth crunched the numbers every way possible—using nothing but Victor's numbers, then nothing but mine, then nothing but hers, then every possible combination of the three. Not a single one of those calculations produced a result that was off by more than fifty percent from the numbers produced as an overall average. To hell with false modesty, Jeremy. You'd be hard pressed to find two intelligence agents anywhere in the galaxy who are better than Victor and I are at this business, and Ruth is as good an analyst as almost anyone in ONI."
Jeremy raised a hand pacifically. "I'm not disputing that," he said. "So what you're saying, in essence, is that there's no way you could be misreading the figures?"
"Oh, I'm sure we are misreading them," said Victor. "As you say, we have no direct access to Manpower's records. But we can't be misreading them enough. We just can't, Jeremy. Whatever the exact figures might be, we're close enough to be certain that Manpower's covert activities over the past period can't possibly be explained as the behavior of a business enterprise using any conceivable business model, no matter how ruthless and unrestrained by morality it might be."
"But you just said yourself that they'd at least break even—and might wind up making a fortune off the revenues from the Lynx Terminus."
Ruth got a very self-satisfied look on her face. "Yes—but that's not really the point. Oh, I'll bet the rest of the galaxy's busy looking at it exactly that way right this minute, but there are two other factors I think—Anton and I think—they should be looking at, instead."
"And those are?"
"First, no matter who fronted the cash—Manpower or Technodyne—the fact remains that very few corporations in history have ever thrown such huge resources into speculative endeavors as risky as the Monica project. Oh, there've probably been at least a few private venture operations with this kind of price tag, given the scale the big transtellars operate on. All those battlecruisers together didn't cost much more than a couple of superdreadnoughts all by themselves, after all, even if they had to pay full price for them. And when you stack that up against something like, say, TranStar of Terra's infrastructure project in Hiawatha, it starts looking downright picayune. But the risk factor in this case was way outside any standard operation. Especially one that was unsecured. TranStar got a huge chunk of its expenses guaranteed upfront by the League before it ever sent the first survey crew into Hiawatha, and that sure as hell didn't happen here! If everything had worked, they'd have made a fortune. But if anything went wrong—which, after all, it did—they were going to get exactly zilch back on whatever they put into the effort. That's what's so far outside the standard models."
"Corporations are intrinsically conservative when it comes to things like this, Jeremy," Anton put in. "That's why no long-term, really expensive projects that don't have a definite payoff within a reasonably short and specified time frame are ever undertaken by private corporations—unless they have solid government backing and some pretty hefty government guarantees."
"Yeah!" Ruth nodded energetically. "And that brings us to the second thing I think everybody should be considering here. If the primary goal was to kick the Star Kingdom off of Mesa's front step—and that's what everything seems to be indicating—then the possible payoff for grabbing the terminus was entirely secondary, right? I mean, we're postulating that profit wasn't the primary motive."
"Some people are, at any rate," Jeremy replied, then shrugged. "All right, and I'll grant you that all the internal evidence we've seen so far suggests the same thing. But that doesn't mean profit couldn't have been a really important secondary motive!"
"Sure. But they could've accomplished both of their objectives a lot more cheaply, Jeremy, and without doing something so likely to screw up their relations with the League. All they had to do was keep supplying people like that lunatic Nordbrandt, on Kornati, or even Westman, on Montana. If they'd done that, and managed to find a few other hotspots to keep stirred up, they could have kept us tied up dealing with 'local unrest' for years. And that's assuming it didn't make enough domestic stink back in Manticore to make us just decide it was all a bad idea in the first place and go home again. Might not have gotten us to let go of the terminus, but if it went on long enough, it'd probably have gotten OFS involved, and that was really more or less what they had in mind in the first place. Which doesn't even consider the fact that someone back in the League was eventually going to figure out where Monica's new navy came from. Subsidizing terrorists is one thing, as far as the League is concerned; handing its starships over to a bunch of neobarbs was way too likely to be something else entirely. So it's not just how much they were willing to put up against the possible gains, it's also that they had another, cheaper—and safer—alternative. And it was an alternative they damned well knew about, because they were pursuing it at the very same time!"
Jeremy still looked skeptical, but Du Havel was nodding. "They're right, Jeremy, as far as it goes—and if I needed to, and had the spare time, I could easily write a book showing how that pattern has been consistent throughout history. To go back to pre-Diaspora times, for instance, railroads and canals—even a lot of toll roads—weren't built unless the companies involved had gotten some sort of backing or incentives from whatever governments were in place at the time. That said, however, before we leap to any conclusions, we should remember Napoleon's dictum."
"Who's Napoleon?" asked Berry.
"Bernice Napoleon. She's the minister of system defense for Eta Cassiopeiae," said Ruth. For someone as young as she was, the Manticoran princess's knowledge of astropolitics was phenomenal.
"I think Web's referring to an ancient conqueror," said Zilwicki. "But the only dictum I can remember associated with him is something about an army marching on its stomach, which seems pretty irrelevant here."
" 'Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence,' " said Victor. "I first heard it from Kevin Usher. He practically dotes on the quip."
Ruth was looking puzzled again. "And what is that supposed to . . . Oh."
"Web is raising the possibility that Manpower's behavior might simply be the product of mismanagement," said Anton.
"Yeah, I figured it out," Ruth said. Her eyes got a bit unfocused. "You know . . . I could probably crunch those numbers, too. Even here on Torch, the data bank we've been able to compile is enormous. There should be enough in there for me to run models using figures from companies that went bankrupt."
"Don't bother," said Zilwicki. "I've run models close enough to those in the past. Even assuming the worst case variant—a private company run by a single individual with no internal restraints of any kind, which doesn't resemble Manpower at all—you still won't get numbers anything like this. These are the sort of outlays measured against possible gain that you only get from governments. And aggressive governments, at that. The sort led by your Alexander the Great types. Not bean-counters."
"Why in the world would you have taken the time to develop such models?" asked Cachat. "I can't think of any reason to do so."
Zilwicki clucked his tongue. "That's because you have the limited horizons and stunted vision of someone who's spent his whole life in the hall of mirrors. I didn't do it for intelligence reasons, Victor. I did it back in my yard dog days, so I'd have a gauge for businesses that submitted bids."
"And you're certain about this, Anton?" asked Web.
"Yes. There's simply no way to explain Manpower's recent behavior unless you introduce major non-commercial factors into the equation. The same's probably true for Jessyk and Technodyne, by the way, although we're not sure about that yet. But we don't think there's any question any longer that it's true about Manpower. Especially when you add this latest data concerning Monica to the information we already had. A corporation would no more behave like this than a corporate employee would behave like Ronald Allen."
Du Havel leaned forward, planted his hands on the table, puffed out his cheeks, and then blew out the air. "Well. I will be damned."
"We may all be," said Jeremy. "What do you think is happening then?"
"The simplest explanation," replied Victor, "is that the recent reverses suffered by Manpower and some other powerful Mesan corporations has driven the so-called Mesan 'government' to actually begin acting like one. If that hypothesis is true, then what we've actually been seeing are not Manpower operations but Mesan operations using Manpower as a cover."
Web cocked his head and looked at Cachat with a quizzical expression. "You don't seem too convinced by that explanation."
Victor shrugged. "It can't be ruled out. It's the simplest explanation, and the most famous of all dictums applies to intelligence work also."
"Oh, I know that one!" said Berry cheerily. "You're talking about Occam's Razor."
"Which is what?" asked Ruth, with some asperity. Her extensive knowledge of political and military matters did not extend to a solid grounding in the history of philosophy.
"I've forgotten the exact words," said Berry. "But the gist of it is that whenever you're presented with two or more possible answers to the same question, always pick the simplest answer. It's the one mostly likely to be correct."
Web, who was quite familiar with Occam's Razor, had sat silently through the exchange. When Berry finished, he said, "But you're skeptical, Victor."
"Yes. I am." Cachat nodded at Zilwicki. "So is Anton."
Du Havel now looked at Anton. "Why?"
Zilwicki scowled. It wasn't much of scowl, actually, but it didn't take much given Anton's blocky face for him to resemble a very peeved dwarf king. "It's a fuzzy matter, admittedly. But I just find it too hard to believe that a planetary 'government' with the history of Mesa's could suddenly start operating as smoothly and efficiently as they seem to have been doing."
"I think it's just about impossible to believe," said Victor. "That so-called 'government' on Mesa has a lot more in common with the board of directors of a company than it does with a normal government."
Du Havel thought about it. There was certainly a lot of truth to what Victor was saying. The political structure of Mesa was essentially that of a corporation in which all free citizens owned voting stock. Slaves, of course, were permanently barred from ever owning voting stock.
The CEO of Mesa was elected by the General Board of the star system. Membership on the board was split between the star system's major corporate entities and members elected by the free citizenry as a whole. The balance of power was unambiguously in the hands of the board members appointed by the major corporations, however. Elective members constituted only one-third of the General Board's total membership; the other two-thirds were appointed by the corporations on the basis of the percentage of the government's taxes which each corporation paid. Because Manpower was far and away the largest single corporation, and, indeed, provided almost sixteen percent of the government's total tax base, its appointees dominated the General Board and normally determined who would hold the office of CEO.
In addition to the appointments Manpower could make in its own right, it had carefully concealed (or, at least, carefully never mentioned) relationships with other major Mesan corporations, through which it controlled the appointment of still more members of the General Board. For example, the Jessyk Combine was officially an independent corporation which appointed 4.5% of the General Board's members, but those appointments were actually controlled by Manpower. If their suspicion that a similar relationship existed with Mesa Pharmaceuticals, that would give Manpower control of—or influence over, at least—another 9.5% of the General Board. Between just those three nominally independent corporations, the Directors of Manpower probably controlled thirty percent of the General Board of the star system outright.
Under the Mesan Constitution, the CEO had to be selected from among the members of the General Board, which virtually guaranteed that he would come out of the ranks of the corporate appointees. And he was, indeed, the chief executive officer of the star system, in fact, as well as name. He served at the pleasure of the General Board, and no CEO could hold office continuously for a period greater than ten T-years, but while he held office, his power was effectively unlimited, and all decisions of government policy were made in a top-down fashion from his office, through an executive branch staff answerable directly to him. His budgetary proposals had to be approved by the General Board, but they were usually confirmed without a great deal of debate. In fact, the (extremely rare) refusal by a General Board to endorse the current CEO's budget proposals was the equivalent of a vote of no confidence, and terminated that CEO's term of office immediately.
It was certainly not a political structure that lent itself to suppleness and risk taking. So far as that went, Du Havel agreed with Victor. On the other hand, he thought Cachat's egalitarian political philosophy sometimes blinded him—partially, at least—to certain realities.
Governments run along corporatist lines were actually fairly common in the galaxy, and Mesa was by no means the sole example. As originally established, for instance, the original Manticoran government had been set up in a very similar fashion. True, it had changed extensively over the centuries, but change was the one true constant of human institutions, when one came right down to it, and many another star nation had evolved into a corporatist form, rather than away from one.
And, done properly, they worked just as well as any other system. Which was to say, never perfectly, but often more than well enough to get by with.
Beowulf was a case in point, actually, since it also had a corporate political structure which mirrored its economic structure. The shareholders who owned all of the stock in the Corporation (which, in turn, owned the entire Beowulf System) elected a Board of Directors and corporate officers, who then ran the corporation and were responsible for providing necessary public services to the citizens of Beowulf. This structure had persisted, essentially unchanged, for the better part of five hundred T-years, and was retained in outer form even today, to some extent. Yet Beowulf's government was quite capable of behaving like a genuine national state, and not just a squabbling oligopoly.
That said, Du Havel thought Cachat was probably right. The key difference between Beowulf and Mesa was slavery. About seventy percent of Mesa's population were slaves. That crude and simple demographic reality placed its stamp on every aspect of Mesan society. True, the thirty percent of Mesa's population who were not slaves enjoyed a high degree of individual civil liberties and were quite well provided for by the various corporations for whom they worked in what amounted to a patron-client relationship. In no small part, though, that represented a payoff from the corporations to their clients as a way to help defuse any inclinations towards abolitionism.
That "payoff" mentality was probably unnecessary, since the notion of a Mesan Anti-Slavery League boggled the mind, but it was indicative of the fundamental paranoia which the institution of slavery bred in its slaveowner class. That paranoia also extended itself—with considerably greater justification—to suspicion of outside "troublemakers." While free Mesan citizens enjoyed relatively high degrees of civil liberty, there were specific areas in which those liberties were extremely restricted. The security organs of Mesa enjoyed virtually carte blanche authority in any matter impinging upon the institution of slavery, and they were ruthless in the extreme with any suspected abolitionist. The majority of Mesan citizens had no objection to this, since they, like their corporate overlords, lived in fear of the specter of servile rebellion and generally supported any measure they believed would make that rebellion less likely.
What all that meant, however, was that the formally democratic aspects of Mesa's governmental structure were basically just that—formalities. That was quite unlike the situation on Beowulf, where the population as a whole—that is to say, its citizens—had final control of the government.
While Web had been ruminating, the rest of the people in the room had kept silent. Partly out of personal respect, and partly for the practical reason that Du Havel was Torch's prime minister. If any decisions were to be made today, he'd have to be in favor of them.
"I don't fundamentally disagree with your assessment, Victor. Or yours, Anton. I could quibble here and there, but that's what they'd be. Quibbles."
"Right, then," said Jeremy. He took a seat next to Berry. The other people in the room recognized the signs—symptoms, you could almost say. Jeremy X was ready to start making decisions. "What do we do?"
"We don't do anything—if by 'we' you're including Torch or the Ballroom," Anton replied. "We've already agreed that Mesa's gotten agents here. So we have to start small and . . . call it 'quarantined.' "
"Who, exactly, is 'we,' then?" asked Du Havel.
"Initially, just three of us." Anton jabbed a thumb at his chest, and then pointed to Victor and Ruth. "Me. Him. Her. It's the only way we can be sure we're completely evading any Mesan double agents. And then, if and when we need backup, we'll use Ganny Butry and her people."
"And just how do you propose to get into Mesa?" Jeremy demanded. "Or I should say, vanish from sight once you do. There's no way you'll be able to do that without using at least some of the Ballroom's contacts on Mesa."
He cocked his head. "So. How exactly do you plan to get around that problem?"
"By using one member of the Ballroom as our liaison, and one only. Saburo. He knows a number of Ballroom contacts on Mesa and"—Zilwicki's jaws tightened—"given what happened to Lara, we figure he's as trustworthy as anyone this side of Whatever Saints Might Be."
Jeremy pondered the matter, for a moment, and then nodded. "Good plan, I think. I assume you'll leave Saburo behind, though, when you do the actual penetration?"
"Oh, yes," said Victor. "Trying to smuggle him into Mesa would be an order of magnitude harder than smuggling ourselves in. The one thing that Mesan police forces watch for like hawks is any attempt by ex-slaves to penetrate their security."
"True enough. For you and Anton, though, the real trick will be vanishing once you get onto the planet." He smiled. "And do please note that I'm not asking you how you plan to do that."
They smiled back. And said nothing.
Web didn't even try to figure out the espionage technicalities. He was far more intrigued by another issue. "Leave aside security," he said. "Am I the only one here who thinks it's downright weird that you propose to form an elite corps—no more than three of you; four, if you count Saburo—of secret agents, made up of Manticorans and Havenites?"
Berry grinned. "It is weird, isn't it? Given that they're officially at war with each other."
"Technically, I've got dual citizenship now," said Ruth stoutly. "So I figure I count as a citizen of Torch, not a Manticoran."
That claim was . . . dubious. To begin with, while Torch recognized dual citizenship, the Star Kingdom didn't. Not for anyone, much less a member of its own royal house. Granted, under the circumstances, the Manticoran government had been willing to look the other way when Ruth took out Torch citizenship. Leaving that aside, nobody in their right mind—and certainly not Victor Cachat—doubted for a moment that Ruth would never act against Manticore's interests.
Cachat looked uncomfortable. Zilwicki, on the other hand, seemed quite relaxed. "We can chew on the legalities until the heat death of the universe. What matters, though, is that if we're right, then Manpower and Mesa are engaged in a lot deeper game than we thought they were. And whatever else may be true, the one thing that's sure and certain is that their intentions will be hostile in the extreme toward both Haven and Manticore."
Victor spoke up. "Which means that whatever we uncover, we're going to have to share it and—what's almost certainly going to be the biggest problem of all—convince both Haven and Manticore that our assessment is accurate. There will be no way to do that without both Anton and me being involved from beginning to end."
"I can see that," said Jeremy, nodding. "But . . . ah, I hate to remind another person of his duty, Victor, but I thought you were the head of Haven's intelligence not only here on Torch but also on Erewhon. 'Chief of Station,' I think it's called."
Victor looked uncomfortable again. "Well . . . yes. But there's a lot of latitude involved." More brightly: "And they've sent out a very competent subordinate. I'm sure she can handle things while I'm gone."
"And just how can you be so certain she's that good?"
"Oh, we've worked together before, Jeremy, on La Martine. She did a superb job of organizing the murder of a rogue StateSec officer, and handled the beating I gave her afterward just about as well." Seeing the stares, he added: "Well, I had to have her beaten. Only way to cover her tracks. I learned that from Kevin Usher, the time he beat me to a pulp in Chicago."
He rose from the table. "And now that we're settled on our course of action—even though most of you don't actually know what it is—I've got to start planning our entry into Mesa. Anton and Ruth still have a lot of data-crunching to do, but they don't really need my help. That sort of thing is, ah, not my forte."
Du Havel saw that Berry was now looking cross-eyed. It was hard not to laugh. He was quite sure he knew what the young queen was thinking.
Sure isn't. Victor Cachat's forte is mayhem.