"It is a pity Dame Stephanie wasn't alive to lead the defense of the amendment," Adrienne said after a long, tense moment, her tone an obvious bid to defuse the tension and shift the subject. "I doubt its attackers would have fared very well against her."

"I don't imagine they would have either, Your Highness," MacClintock agreed, accepting the change. The two of them turned to gaze at the portrait once more, and the lieutenant general smiled. "She and Lionheart would have turned them into hamburger; they'd certainly done it to tougher opposition than that!"

"Then the story about the hexapuma is true?"

"Yes, Your Highness. A lot of the details are uncertain—it's one of those things about which I wish the Harrington family would turn loose whatever documentation they have—but it happened."

"Unbelievable," Adrienne murmured, and MacClintock snorted.

"My advice is to not apply that word to anything you ever hear about Stephanie Harrington, Your Highness. Or not without checking it out very thoroughly ahead of time. She was the youngest person ever to discover an alien sentient species. She is also the only human ever to face a hexapuma armed only with a vibroblade belt knife and survive. She joined the Forestry Service—which, I regret to say, was no great shakes at the time; we were still a privately-funded, only semiofficial body—when she was just seventeen T-years old and almost single handedly reorganized it into a Crown agency which, by the end of her life, had become what I fondly believe to be one of the finest eco-management organizations in this sector of the galaxy. Not to mention, of course, being the first person ever adopted by a 'cat, for which I, at least, can only be grateful."

"She deserved more than an Order of Merit," Adrienne said, but he shook his head.

"What she may have deserved and what she wanted weren't the same thing, Your Highness. Several accounts insist she was offered a peerage when the Ninth Amendment passed. I don't know about that—the Harringtons may—but it's a matter of public record that she declined the Order of the Star Kingdom because, unlike the Order of Merit, the knighthood it conferred would have been hereditary, not simply a life title."

"She declined a peerage?" Adrienne blinked, and the lieutenant general shrugged.

"That's the tradition, and it would match what we know of her. Her family are yeomen, and proud of it. In fact, she was an only child who retained her maiden name when she married expressly because she was determined there would be a `Harrington of Harrington' but not a nobleman living on the Harrington freehold after her. And she found time to produce six children to be sure of that, despite everything else she was involved with! And two of them were adopted by 'cats, too. As a matter of fact, I believe the Harringtons have a higher percentage of adoptions than any other family on Sphinx."

"I still say she deserved more than the Order of Merit," Adrienne declared, then smiled. "On the other hand, I rather doubt that I would have pressed the point or argued with such a, ah, formidable person about it!"

"Which indicates great wisdom on your part, Your Highness," MacClintock told her. The two of them gazed at the portrait of Stephanie Harrington and her 'cat for several more moments in a silence which had once more become companionable. Then MacClintock cleared his throat and waved gracefully at the boardroom's door.

"And now, Your Highness, I believe that speech you didn't want to give is waiting for you."

Henry Thoreau sat on the bench with an unworried expression and reread his newsfax for the third time. No one looking at him would have thought he had a care in the universe, but looking tranquil at need was one of his several talents, and at this particular moment, it was one he needed badly.

He let his eye drift across his chrono as he turned a 'fax page—again—and his carefully concealed disgust ratcheted up another notch. The target and her entourage were over twenty minutes behind schedule.

He allowed himself a mental grumble that never touched his face and commanded himself not to pay any attention whatsoever to the blank-faced young man sitting to his left. The younger man appeared to be reading a book. Actually, he was only hitting the advance button at regular intervals while he stared unseeingly at the display, and Thoreau hoped he wouldn't run out of pages before the target reemerged into the open. Having some sharp-eyed security type notice that there was someone sitting there staring at a blank book viewer would not do wonderful things for his and Krogman's plan.

His nostrils flared slightly at the thought of his partner. He knew why Krogman couldn't execute the hit himself, but that didn't keep him from feeling increasingly grumpy about his own exposure as the delay dragged on. Krogman was the one who'd crafted their weapon, and Thoreau found himself wishing Krogman could have pulled the damned trigger himself, as well. Except, of course, that Krogman couldn't possibly risk being physically present when the attack went down. His record might be clean in the Star Kingdom, but he was a registered psych adjuster.

Unlike many star nations, the Star Kingdom had ruled involuntary psych adjustment of anyone for any reason strictly illegal. The Star Kingdom wasn't alone in refusing to use it as a punitive sentence, but many other worlds allowed for the involuntary adjustment of individuals deemed dangerous to themselves or society. The people who allowed it viewed it—officially, at least—as equivalent to the old "not guilty by reason of insanity" plea. The Manticoran view, however, was that psych adjustment didn't cure anything; it simply crammed in an additional set of compulsions which forced the adjusted individual to act as if he had been cured. That was all very soothing to society, no doubt, and might well prevent an "adjusted" serial killer from killing again, but Manticorans considered that it was both simpler and more ethical—and moral—to shoot someone than it was to lock him up for life in a prison inside his own skull. Besides, even in jurisdictions which routinely employed it, there were those who argued that psych adjustment tended to make mental health professionals lazy. Why bother to fix a problem when one could simply use a hardwired patch to make sure it didn't bother anyone . . . except, of course, for the person who still had it?

And then there were the regimes that just loved adjustment. It was too expensive for use on a mass scale—mostly because of the time involved; the materials cost was ludicrously low—but it could be extremely effective when employed against strategic targets like key leaders of opposition groups. Nor had the military implications passed unnoticed. Though the Deneb Accords forbade adjustment of captured enemy personnel, everyone knew it would happen anyway if someone thought he could get away with it. The development of drugs and techniques to resist it had been on the list of every major military for centuries, and, for the most part, they'd succeeded in producing workable defenses. They weren't perfect, and they could usually be broken by old-fashioned sensory deprivation or systematic abuse. They also required periodic updating as adjustment techniques were improved to defeat them, but at least they managed to prevent adjusters from turning the pre-space nightmare of the mass brainwashing of troops into a reality.

But like any other form of technology, it was extremely difficult to simply shove adjustment back into its bottle. Personally, Thoreau couldn't imagine availing himself of the service. Have an irresistible compulsion—even one he'd selected himself—implanted in his brain? No, thank you very much. He believed he'd pass. Yet there were those who did just that, for reasons ranging from a desire to be addiction-proofed to people who wanted to lose weight to those who feared compulsions in the dark crannies of their souls would drive them into criminal acts. The Star Kingdom might reject imposing adjustment on anyone, but it would not stand in the way of someone who voluntarily sought it, and a small, highly regulated and closely supervised psych adjustment industry existed for the sole purpose of providing the service to those who wanted it.