To be sure, neither his mother nor his sisters had been gorgeous, the way Ginny was, and they'd possessed none of her subtle skills at tantalizing a man—which Ginny, damn her black heart, insisted on practicing on Victor.

Still...

Victor would admit that, in its own grotesque way, the gambit worked like a charm. By fitting himself, Ginny and Victor into flamboyant and well-established roles—older husband, besotted and foolish; young nymphomaniac wife, cheating on him right under his nose; unscrupulous and treacherous underling—Kevin had provided his wife and his protégé with a real measure of protection in case political life went sour again in the Republic of Haven.

And since Kevin had never been a man who'd miss the chance to kill two birds with one stone, the same gambit allowed him to use Victor and Ginny as his special and informal investigating team. He could send them anywhere, at any time, to do anything—and all but a handful of people in the know would simply observe the phenomenon with a smirk.

That explained why they were sitting in a hotel room in Erewhon's capital city of Maytag. The assassination of Hieronymus Stein had presented Haven's new president with a very awkward political situation, and, as often in her history, Eloise Pritchart had turned to Kevin Usher for aid and assistance.

"Let's send Ginny and Victor," he'd immediately proposed. "Ginny's got a perfectly believable public excuse for going to pay her respects, since she's a former Manpower slave herself."

Eloise interrupted. "What do you think, Kevin? Do you agree that Manpower was behind the killing? That seems to be the accepted wisdom, but my antennae aren't quite convinced of it."

He shrugged. "Who knows? The odds are that it was Manpower, yes. If I had to put money down on it, that's the way I'd bet also. On the other hand..."

He shifted in his chair across from the President's desk, as if uncomfortable. "Your instincts might just have something, Eloise. The whole operation was a bit too... flamboyant for me to be entirely happy with the notion, myself. Manpower Unlimited—the whole planet of Mesa, for that matter—is so convenient for so many powerful forces in the Solarian League that it's been able to thrive for a long time just by keeping slightly under the public horizon. Why run the risk of shaking up that well-established profitable situation with something as guaranteed to cause a huge public stir among Solarians as murdering the leader of the Renaissance Association?"

"You're asking that question?" Eloise chuckled. "Kevin, in case you hadn't noticed, Manpower's been taking some hard hits lately—one of them being the hit you landed on them in Chicago during the Manpower Incident. Even cold-blooded slavers can lose their temper, you know."

Kevin shrugged. "Sure. But why take it out on Stein and the Renaissance Association?" Eloise opened her mouth but Kevin forestalled her retort with a raised hand. "Yes, yes, I know Stein and the RA have been the main public voice denouncing genetic slavery in the Solarian League, other than the Anti-Slavery League itself. So what? Stein's been doing that for decades, and Manpower just shrugged it off. They know just as well as you or me or anyone with half a brain that the so-called 'democracy' of the Solarian League is a pure fiction, at least above the level of some of its planetary affiliates. The League is run—lock, stock and barrel—by its bureaucrats and commercial combines, and by and large those pigs-in-a-trough think Manpower and Mesa are just dandy things to have around. And since they've always been smart enough not to step too hard on the personal liberties of Solarian citizens on Earth and the older, well-established colony planets, the moral preachments of the Renaissance Association and the Anti-Slavery League have never made a dent in Solarian policy."

Eloise eyed him for a moment. "What about you? Are you worried they might take out their irritation on you personally?"

Kevin grinned. "Not after the way Zilwicki turned their strike force against Cathy Montaigne on Manticore last year into so much hamburger."

Pritchart snorted. The sound combined sarcasm with something very close to pure glee. Like any old-style Aprilist, Eloise detested Manpower and all it represented. Granted, she had sharp differences and animosities with the Star Kingdom, but whatever else divided Pritchart and Manticore's Queen Elizabeth, hatred of genetic slavery was not part of it.

So Eloise had been savagely amused herself when Manpower's attempted retaliation on Montaigne had backfired so badly. In the years since Montaigne had returned to Manticore from Earth with her new-found lover, Captain Anton Zilwicki had spent his time and energy after his dismissal from service in the Star Kingdom's Navy building what was publicly passed off as a "security agency." The depiction had been accepted readily enough, given Zilwicki's skill at deception. He'd even managed to keep it intact after foiling the assassination attempt on Montaigne.

Which had been... difficult, given that the grounds of the Tor estate had been littered with the corpses of would-be assassins. Not a single member of the large and well-organized assassination team had survived.

Rumor had it that their bodies—pieces of them, anyway—had wound up being delivered by freight shipping to several of the large recruiting halls on Manpower's home planet of Mesa. Slavery was not Mesa's only profitable business. The planet was also the galaxy's largest center for free-lance mercenary outfits.

The whole episode had been successfully passed off for public consumption as a murky and mysterious business. After a few days, it had faded out of public notice in the Star Kingdom; and had never been noticed much at all in the Solarian League, since Solarians always tended to be oblivious to anything happening outside of their own gigantic borders. Manpower Unlimited had not, obviously, accepted any public responsibility for the affair. And, for different reasons, neither "Zilwicki Security" and Catherine Montaigne nor—certainly!—the High Ridge Government had wanted the thing scrutinized carefully. But, soon enough, every serious intelligence agency in the settled portion of the galaxy had figured out the truth. Catherine Montaigne was now using her fortune and the talents of her new lover to finally give the Anti-Slavery League some real teeth—and Anton Zilwicki had just bared them, dripping with blood.

Since then, from all anyone could determine, Manpower had kept a distance from Montaigne. If nothing else, after seeing two task forces shredded by Zilwicki—one in Chicago, and now another on Manticore—the sort of professional mercenaries who provided Manpower with their muscle would be demanding astronomical prices for any further such projects.

Eloise smiled. "Am I to infer, Kevin, that you've set your own little mantrap in case Manpower ever decides to go after you? I'm not sure that isn't bending the spirit of the law which governs your Federal Investigation Agency, you know."

"Bends it into a pretzel," agreed Kevin. "On the other hand, it keeps my people on their toes—and keeps Manpower off my back."

Eloise didn't pursue the matter. She knew perfectly well that there was no way Kevin Usher wouldn't wander into gray legal areas in his new post. His current profession as Haven's chief cop was a set of clothing worn by an old and experienced conspirator, after all. But so long as he didn't break the new laws outright and refrained from "black ops," she'd look the other way.

So, she brought the discussion back to the subject directly at hand.

"I've got a problem here, Kevin."

"That's one way of putting it," he chuckled humorlessly. "The Renaissance Association invited the Republic of Haven to send official representatives to the funeral, just like they did every other government in the galaxy. If we don't show up, all our preachments about political wickedness are going to look like so much self-serving prattle. But if we do show up, we're guaranteed to irritate—at best—most of the forces in the Solarian League that we're still relying on for tech transfer."

Pritchart scowled. "God damn High Ridge. If the Manticorans would just sign a peace treaty with us, I'd cheerfully tell those Solarian scumbags to take a hike." She sighed heavily. "I don't suppose Foraker could..."

"You'd have to ask Tom Theisman about that," replied Usher. "But I doubt very much if even Shannon Foraker can keep upgrading our military capability without a fair amount of tech transfer from the Sollies."

He cocked his head and regarded Eloise. "That's why I'm proposing we send Ginny. Sure, it'd still be a 'private response,' not an official one. But..." He trailed off, thinking for a moment.

"Might do the trick. Well enough, anyway. Everybody knows you and I are personally close, and since Ginny's my wife it won't take any brains at all for people to understand that you're making your own feelings clear in the matter—without doing it in a way that forces the Solarians to take public umbrage."

"There's more to it than that, Kevin. We've been getting some odd—and very interesting—feelers from the Erewhonese lately. Both through Giancola's people and the Federal Intelligence Service."

It was her turn to cock her head. "I see that doesn't surprise you any. Ha! Old habits die hard and all that." Mock-sternly: "Kevin Usher, you are not supposed to be in the foreign intelligence business any longer. You're a cop now, remember?"

He didn't bother to respond to the half-accusation with anything more than a flashing smile. "So I am. But this here honest cop doesn't trust your Secretary of State Arnold Giancola any farther than I can throw him—neither do you, Eloise—and while I don't dis-trust Wilhelm Trajan, he's—ah, what's the word—"

"He's a plodder," said Pritchart bluntly. "No dummy, mind you, but I wanted him in charge of the Federal Intelligence Service mainly because I knew he wouldn't use that post to start the usual kind of old-style Havenite political scheming. The way Giancola's been doing with the State Department, damn him."

She ran fingers through her long platinum hair in a gesture that combined aggravation and weariness. "You and I both know that you'd have been ten times better than Wilhelm at running the FIS, Kevin. But what I really needed, more than anything, was someone I trusted completely on top of our new domestic police agency. A person can scheme all he wants, as head of the FIS, but he can't organize a coup d'etat. For that, you need the internal security forces."