The trip from Manticore to Erewhon was complicated but not all that difficult. There was no direct junction terminus connecting the Star Kingdom to Erewhon's solar system, but there was a connection via the Phoenix Cluster, the rather inaccurate name given to a three-star system republic (of sorts) which was home to the Phoenix Wormhole Junction. Compared to the Manticoran Junction, the Phoenix Junction scarcely deserved the term. The Phoenix terminus of the Manticoran Junction was associated with the Hennesy System, but the Phoenix "Junction"—which boasted only two termini and linked the Cluster to Erewhon—lay in the Terra Haute System. To get there, the Pottawatomie Creek had to first go to Hennesy via the Manticoran Junction and then make a five-day-long trip through hyper across the intervening twenty-five light-years to Terra Haute. Since junction transits were effectively instantaneous, it was the Hennesy-Terra Haute leg which accounted for virtually the entire length of the journey.

Of course, if Phoenix had been inclined to be sticky about it, the Pottawatomie would have been unable to use the Phoenix Junction at all up to less than six T-months before. The cluster had closed its wormhole to all military traffic the moment war broke out between the Star Kingdom (and its Erewhonese allies) and the late, unlamented People's Republic of Haven. In the absence of a formal peace treaty between Manticore and Haven, Phoenix had declined to rescind the prohibition until quite recently. Rumor said that the initiative in dropping it had come from Erewhon, not Phoenix, but not even Zilwicki's sources were positive about that.

Still, Anton's ship might have been allowed to transit even before the change in policy. She was a private vessel, after all, not a warship in the service of the Crown. But that didn't change the fact that she was also the equivalent of a frigate—in fact, she was a frigate in all but name, designed and built by one of the Manticoran yards which did a lot of naval construction. The Tor fortune made Cathy one of the few private individuals able to finance Pottawatomie 's construction. Actually, not even she could have afforded such a project, but she'd been able to advance enough seed money to begin a subscription campaign which had rapidly tapped into a deep well of Manticoran opposition to genetic slavery—a well made deeper than ever by widespread public anger over the way High Ridge had been able to contain the damage done by Montaigne's files.

Among that opposition, oddly enough, had been Klaus Hauptman. By far the wealthiest man in the Star Kingdom, Hauptman was not normally the sort who would have had any sort of truck with "terrorists," however noble their particular cause might be. But the man was a quirky individual, and one of his quirks was a detestation of genetic slavery. He'd made support for its extirpation one of the major philanthropic commitments of the Hauptman Foundation his father had endowed seventy T-years before and whose board his daughter Stacey now chaired. Hauptman himself had not actually participated directly in the subscription campaign, although Stacey had done so rather discreetly. But what he had done was even more valuable: he owned the shipyard which built the Anti-Slavery League's frigates, and he did the work at cost, with no profit and none of the usual padding which went into military projects.

For all their expense, frigates were too small in this day and age to be really suitable for the navies of star nations. On the other hand, the vessels were very well designed and equipped to deal with the slavers and pirates who were their natural prey.

Thus, one of the Pottawatomie 's features was speed. But, given the passengers he was carrying, Anton saw no need to push any higher than the Zeta bands of hyper, so shemade the trip in what was, for her, a rather leisurely amble.

The three courier boats which were also on their way to Erewhon, on the other hand, were under no such compunction. In fact, although they'd departed from Manticore several hours after Pottawatomie, two of them were specifically determined to get to Erewhon ahead of Anton, and they were well-equipped for the task. Effectively nothing but a hyper generator, a pair of Warshawski sails, and an impeller drive, they were designed to ride the ragged edge of the Theta bands, which gave them the next best thing to a forty percent speed advantage over Pottawatomie . So, although they actually made transit from Manticore to Hennesy after Anton's ship, they quickly overtook and passed her on the Hennesy-Terra Haute leg of the journey.

The people on the third courier ship didn't even know about Anton's situation. But that vessel was making the entire trip in hyper-space directly from Haven, and the natural habits of a Havenite courier crew moving through what was technically hostile space—Manticore and the Republic were officially still at war, even if hostilities had been suspended—meant they weren't dawdling.

As a result, by the time Anton Zilwicki and his companions arrived at Erewhon, the news of his impending arrival had preceded him—along with copies of Underwood's program—and several interested parties were studying the material.

The Havenites had known nothing about it until they arrived the day before. Having made the trip directly from the Republic to Erewhon, they hadn't passed through the Manticore Junction and therefore hadn't picked up the broadcast. But they were no less interested than others.

To put it mildly. Victor Cachat was even driven to a rare use of profanity.

"What a fucking mess," he snarled, after Ginny turned off the recording. "Anton Zilwicki! The last person we want to see here."

Virginia Usher eased back into the couch in their hotel room, crossed her very shapely legs and shrugged her very shapely shoulders—all the more shapely in that the sari she was wearing was designed to show them off. The garment bore only a passing resemblance to the ancestral style which had originated millennia before in south Asia. Ginny's sari wasn't quiteas revealing as the version of it she'd worn in years past, when she'd worked as a prostitute after escaping from Manpower, but it skirted the very outer edges of anything which might be called suitable dress for polite company.

Victor eyed the garment sourly. "And why are you putting on the act, anyway? There's nobody here but the two of us."

Ginny gave him her patented grin. Like the sari, the expression wasn't quite as salacious as the one she'd once bestowed on prospective customers, but it came close.

"Oh, stop sulking. Kevin would have a fit if he found out I broke cover on assignment. What if somebody should come knocking on the door—room service, maybe? Seeing me in the sweats I usually wear at home would play merry hell with my image as a slut. And after all the trouble Kevin's gone through to establish it! Me too, for that matter."

Victor shook his head. There were things about his boss and mentor he'd never understand. The cheerful way Kevin Usher had his wife pretend to be a tramp was one of them. Part of it could be accounted for by Kevin's phenomenal self-assurance, true; but most of it, Victor was convinced, was due to the man's quirky sense of humor. Who else but Kevin Usher would get a chuckle out of the way most people derided his personal life? (In private, of course, not to his face.)

When Kevin Usher had emerged from the shadows after the Theisman coup, to accept the Pritchart Administration's request that he take over Haven's new internal police agency, he'd been faced with the problem of what to do about his wife. Heretofore, he'd seen to it that no one but a handful of anti-Pierre Aprilist conspirators had even known of her existence. Now...

There'd been no way to keep her a secret any longer, given the public exposure Kevin would have as head of the new Federal Investigation Agency. And that made Kevin very nervous. Granted, Eloise Pritchart was one of Kevin's oldest and closest friends—although not even she had known about Ginny, since there'd been no need for her to know—and she was now President of the new Republic. He trusted her completely, and was inclined to feel the same way about Thomas Theisman, the admiral who'd led the coup d'etat which had put her in power. And he shared their commitment to reestablishing the rule of law and a tradition of peaceful transfers of power in the Republic. But if Kevin Usher's whole life had taught him one thing, it was that political power in the Republic of Haven was a treacherous beast. You never knew when it might turn on you, and until it was safely muzzled, he had no intention of trusting it.

So, Kevin had solved the problem in the way the man did everything—combining directness with cunning, and with not a smidgeon of concern for his own reputation. He assumed the public role of a cuckold the same way, in times past, he'd accepted the public role of a drunk. If worse came to worst and Usher underwent one of the dramatic falls from grace so common in Havenite politics—which, judging from the history of the past two centuries, might well end up with him before a firing squad—at least Ginny would likely be able to avoid it. Nobody viewed a promiscuous cheating wife as a threat, after all, to anyone but her husband.

Victor could appreciate the professional artistry involved. The "Usher flair," as he thought of it. What he didn't appreciate—not in the least—was that Kevin and Ginny had immediately (and rather gleefully) appointed Victor as the cuckolder-in-chief. The young subordinate and protégé who was repaying his trusting boss by having an affair with his mentor's wife.

"It's a classic," Ginny had pronounced.

"It makes me look like a complete swine!"

"Well, true," Kevin had allowed, grinning at Victor. "Just think of it as part of your training, wonderboy. What kind of silly amateur spy worries about his 'image,' anyway?"

"We're not 'spies' any longer," Victor groused.

"Don't be so sure about that." Kevin shrugged. "Who knows what we'll be facing, in the years to come?"

Victor might still have refused, except that Ginny cornered him. "Please, Victor," she'd pleaded, in that inimitable half-comic/half-serious way of hers, "it'll make my life so much easier. You're the one man I know that I won't have to be fending off in private after making eyes at him in public."

That had been true enough. Victor was by no means immune to the temptations of the flesh, and there were times he found being in such close and intimate proximity with Ginny immensely frustrating. But his emotional relationship with her, in the time since they'd met on Earth, had settled into something very close to that of a younger brother and his older sister. He wasn't oblivious to Ginny's often well-exposed female figure. But it wasn't really much different from his life as a boy, growing up in the cramped slums of the Dolist quarters of Nouveau Paris, when he'd also been frequently exposed to the half-naked forms of his mother and three sisters.