once they reached their hotel suite, Anton lowered himself into an armchair and took a long and slow breath.

"Didn't mean to be rude. But for this, I'm not relying on any portable scrambling equipment small enough to carry on your person." He glanced toward the corner where the suite's scrambling device was located, checking the green light to make sure it was operating. The double-check was more a matter of habit than anything else. That equipment, paid for out of Cathy's fortune, was the very best available anywhere in the galaxy.

"So what's up?" asked Ruth brightly.

The dubious expression on Berry's face amused Anton. Unlike Ruth, she was not a princess in training to be a spy and, clearly, was not at all sure she wanted to hear whatever it was Anton had learned from the Solarian officer. Berry still hadn't decided what career she wanted to pursue, but the one thing it was not going to be was espionage.

"One in the family is enough, " as she'd put it once over the dinner table. "If you added another, we'd all go crazy." To which Cathy had immediately added: "Amen to that," and his daughter Helen—sharp as a serpent's tooth is the ingratitude of children—had chimed in with: "Not sure we haven't all gone crazy already. No, Daddy, that's just my dog wagging his tail in the corner, hoping I'll toss him some food; he's not a robot sabo-toor, honest. So don't you dare dissect him."

Anton still wasn't sure what career course Berry would finally settle on. The girl suffered from a mental condition which, though probably excellent from the standpoint of her own sanity, was a severe handicap in a modern society: she was interested in everything,but not obsessively interested in any particular thing. A generalist rather than a specialist, by temperament. Someone whose emotional stability continued to privately amaze Anton—the more so, given the horrors the girl had gone through in her childhood—but who showed no special talent for any given occupation.

Berry herself made jokes about it, now and then. He smiled, remembering another conversation which had once taken place over the dinner table. Just a few months ago, in fact, over the end-of-form holidays, when Helen was enjoying her first extended leave from the Naval Academy on Saganami Island.

"It's obvious, Daddy," Berry pronounced. "There are only two things I'd be good at. First, being a housewife—talk about an obsolete profession—or, second, being a queen." Berry pursed her lips thoughtfully: "A constitutional monarchy would be best, I think. I'm sure I'd be a flop as a despot. Too easy-going."

"Be a lawyer," Helen chimed in between mouthfuls. "There's no opening for queens anywhere that I know about, and at least as a lawyer you'd be able to meddle in everything."

"I don't meddle, " Berry said, a bit crossly.

"Nope, you sure don't," came Helen's reply, "even though everybody's always confiding in you. Which means you'd make a great lawyer."

Anton's natural daughter broke off for a moment, shoveling food into her mouth at a rate Anton was certain was anatomically impossible. There had to be a demon residing somewhere in the girl's belly.

Helen's metabolism was a little scary. At the age of fourteen, she'd been on the smallish size. Four years later, she was already over a hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall and still probably hadn't reached her full adult size. The girl had gotten her musculature from Anton, but clearly enough she'd inherited the height which was normal in her mother's family—even if her mother herself hadn't shared it.

"I don't want to be a lawyer."

" 'Course not. So what? You don't much want to be a housewife or a queen, either. Besides, the first one would bore you to death—you're too sensible to slobber all over babies—and, like I said, there's no opening for the second. So," Helen concluded triumphantly, finishing her plate and scooping on seconds, "lawyer it is. Process of elimination."

Scoop, scoop. Anton began to fear for the structural integrity of the table.

"I learned about it this semester, at the Academy, in my course in introductory logic." Scoop, scoop. Like most of the furniture in Cathy's mansion, the table was an antique. Gorgeous thing, sure. But with Helen around, Anton would have preferred an industrial strength assembly bench. "My prof was fond of quoting some ancient philosopher. 'Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however... um, how'd he put it?"

Helen broke off for a moment, in order to feed the demon. "Can't remember, exactly. 'However implausible,' I think. Anyway—" She broke off again. The demon was apparently still rampaging in full fury. "Whatever's left, however screwy, has got to be the right answer. So lawyer it is, Berry. Mark my words."

Judging from the little smile on her lips, Anton suspected that Berry was remembering the same conversation.

"I'd rather you did hear it, Berry," he said. "Whatever decision I make—we make—you'll be involved." He looked at Du Havel, adding: "I'd like to get your reactions, too."

Du Havel nodded. "For what they're worth. I warn you, Anton, I'm a theorist—not a practical-minded spy."

By now, Ruth was perched on the edge of her chair. She, clearly enough, did not share any of Berry's misgivings. Nor, for that matter, any of Web Du Havel's easy relaxation. The princess seemed on the verge of bouncing up and down with impatience.

"What that Solarian lieutenant had to tell me was that he could provide me with the link to track down—try to, anyway—the origins of the mysterious Elaine Komandorski."

The name obviously meant nothing to the two girls or Web. Anton would have been surprised if it had. So far as he was aware, even the woman's name was known only to a small number of Landing City's police force. And none of them had found out, as Anton had, what eventually happened to her.

"She doesn't use that name any longer. She changed identities quite some time ago. Nowadays, she's known as Lady Georgia Young, formerly Georgia Sakristos."

Both girls knew that name, even if Du Havel didn't. Berry's eyes were wide; Ruth's, as wide as saucers.

"The wife of the Earl of North Hollow," Anton continued. "And the person who is considered by many people, me included, to be the gray eminence—at least when it comes to the dirty work—behind the current government of the Star Kingdom." He gave the princess a glance. "You can add her name to Kevin Usher's on that little list of the galaxy's top spies."

Ruth stroked her throat. "She controls North Hollow's black files, doesn't she?"

Anton nodded grimly. "Yes, she does. For all practical purposes, anyway. Those damned files assembled by the old Earl North Hollow, which have been used to blackmail more of Manticore's politicians than I want to think about. And, I don't have any doubt, were all that enabled High Ridge and his cohorts to contain the damage which should have ensued after Cathy and I released the files we brought back from the Manpower Incident on Terra."

"Who was 'Komandorski'?" asked Berry.

"Elaine Komandorski, in her heyday, was one of the most notorious criminals in Landing City—among the police, at any rate, even if her name wouldn't have meant anything to most Manticoran citizens. She was no crude armed robber, you understand. She specialized in things like industrial espionage, swindling; financial crimes, essentially. Except that the police are sure she was responsible for the murder of at least two people, and had something to do with the 'suicide' of yet another, in order to cover her tracks."

"But—" Berry shook her head. "If you could prove that the current Lady Young was—"

Anton shook his head. "Not good enough. Yes, with DNA evidence it could be proved that Georgia Young and Elaine Komandorski were one and the same person. But Komandorski was never convicted of anything, despite being the subject of an amazing number of police investigations. The cops are morally certain that she committed most of the crimes she was suspected of, but they couldn't prove it.

"So"—shrugging—"the most we could get out of it, as it stands, would be publicly embarrassing the High Ridge regime. Big deal. As long as High Ridge has his hands on those black files, he can put enough pressure where it matters to keep a lid on it. Just like he did with the Manpower investigation."

Ruth's quick mind had already raced ahead. "The police, I take it, were never able to find out where Komandorski came from."

"No. Neither have I. She just... appeared one day, in Landing City, and with enough of a bankroll to start her scams. And they weren't piker scams, either."

"So if you could track down her origins, you might be able to break the thing wide open."

"Sure. But—"

Ruth cut him off. "Yes, I know, the question's obvious. Why did a Solarian junior officer hand you this juicy little tidbit? And who's he acting for? You can be dead sure—okay, ninety-nine percent dead sure—that altruism wasn't the motive. Which means, so far as I can see, only one of three alternatives."

Anton leaned back. He was curious to see how far the girl could work the chain of logic.

The princess started ticking off her fingers. "The first alternative—the best one, from our point of view—is that someone else has a grudge against Komandorski but, for whatever reason, isn't in a position to act on it. So they're setting up Captain Zilwicki as their hatchet man."

"Good," grunted Anton. "Now tell me what's wrong with that picture."

Ruth frowned. The expression made her thin face—well, Berry's thin face, if Anton wanted to be precise—look more intense than ever. Hunched over in her chair as she was, elbows on knees, her blue eyes peering intently at the floor, with her long dark hair spilling over her shoulders, she made Anton think of a young witch pondering her first major incantation. A very young witch, and a rather pretty one, true; but a witch sure and certain.

Anton, as he had many times since the nanotech transformation, found himself more than a little disconcerted. The fact that Ruth now looked like Berry, and Berry looked like Ruth, he could handle. But their personalities hadn't been transformed, a fact which often left him feeling confused. An intense—almost high-strung—"Berry" was a contradiction in terms.