She studied Hauptman from behind her smile, waiting for him to begin, and her brain replayed all that she knew and had heard about him.

The Hauptman clan was one of the wealthiest in Manticoran history, but it was completely devoid of any connection to the aristocracy. That was rare in so powerful a family, but by all reports, Klaus Hauptman took a certain reverse snobbish pride in his very lack of blue blood.

Like Honor's own family, the first Hauptman had arrived on Manticore only after the Plague of 22 A.L.—1454 Post Diaspora, by Standard Reckoning. The original Manticore Colony, Ltd., had bid high for the rights to the Manticore System in 774 P.D. precisely because Manticore-A III, the planet now named Manticore, was so very much like Old Earth. Even the most Earthlike world required at least some terraforming to suit it to a human population, but in Manticore's case that had amounted to little more than introducing essential Terrestrial food crops and carefully selected fauna, and despite Manticore's long year and extended seasons, the off-world life-forms had made the transition to their new environment with ease.

Unfortunately, that ease of adaptation had been a two-edged sword, for Manticore had proven one of the very few planets capable of producing an indigenous disease that could prey on humanity. It took forty T-years for a native Manticoran virus to mutate into a variety which could attack human hosts, but once it had, the plague had struck with stunning power.

It had taken more than a standard decade for the medics to defeat the plague, and it had killed over sixty percent of the colonists—almost ninety percent of those born on Old Earth—before they did. The survivors' harrowed ranks had been depleted well below the levels of assured survivability, and far too many of their essential specialists had been among the dead. Yet as if to compensate for the disaster of the plague, fate had given the colony the ability to bring in the new blood it needed.

The original colonists had sailed for Manticore before the invention of the Warshawski sail and gravity detectors had reduced the risks of hyper travel to a level passenger ships could accept. Not even the impeller drive had been available, and their voyage in cryo hibernation aboard the sublight colony ship Jason had taken over six hundred and forty T-years, but the mechanics of interstellar travel had been revolutionized during their centuries of sleep.

The new technology had meant new colonists could be recruited from the core worlds themselves in a reasonable time frame, and Roger Winton, president and CEO of the Manticore Colony, Ltd., had anticipated the changes. He had created the Manticore Colony Trust of Zurich before departure, investing every penny left to the shareholders after the expenses of purchasing the colony rights from the original surveyor and equipping their expedition. Few other colonial ventures had even considered such a thing, given the long years of travel which would lie between their new worlds and Sol, but Winton was a farsighted man, and six centuries of compound interest had left the colony with an enviable credit balance on Old Earth.

And so Winton and his surviving fellows had been able not only to recruit the reinforcements they needed but to pay those colonists' passage to their new and distant homes, if necessary. Yet, because they were concerned about retaining political control in the face of such an influx of newcomers, the survivors of the original expedition and their children had adopted a new constitution, converting their colony from one ruled by an elective board of directors into the Star Kingdom of Manticore under Roger I, first monarch of the House of Winton.

The Manticore Colony, Ltd.'s, initial shareholders had received vast tracts of land and/or mineral rights on the system's planets, in direct proportion to their original capital contributions. The new constitution transformed them into an hereditary aristocracy, but it wasn't a closed nobility, for even vaster tracts had remained unclaimed. The new colonists who could pay their own passage received the equivalent of its cost in land credits on their arrival, and those who could contribute more than the cost of passage were guaranteed the right to purchase additional land at just under half its "book" value. The opportunity to become nobles in their own right had drawn the interest of an extraordinarily high percentage of young, skilled, well-paid professionals: physicians, engineers, educators, chemists and physicists, botanists and biologists—exactly the sort of people a faltering colonial population required and all too few out-worlds could attract. They'd arrived to claim and expand their guaranteed credit, and many of those so-called "second shareholders" had become earls and even dukes in their own right.

Of those who hadn't been able to pay their own passage in full, many had been able to pay much of the cost and so had received the difference in land credits on arrival. Small by Manticoran standards, perhaps, but enormous by core-world lights. Those people had become Manticore's freeholding yeomen, like Honor's own ancestors, and their families retained a sturdy sense of independence even today.

Yet for all that, the majority of the new arrivals had been "zero-balancers," individuals unable to pay any of their passage, who, in many cases, arrived on Manticore wearing all they owned upon their backs. Individuals like Heinrich Hauptman.

Today, there was little to differentiate, aside from the antiquity of original homestead land grants and certain purely honorific forms of address which were used with steadily decreasing frequency, between the descendants of yeomen and zero-balancers. But traditional memories of social status remained, and the Hauptman clan had never forgotten its hardscrabble roots. The family's rise to its present greatness had begun two Manticoran centuries before with Heinrich's great-grandson, yet Klaus Hauptman, who could have bought or sold a dozen dukedoms, still chose to regard himself—publicly, at least—as the champion of the "little man." It didn't prevent him from cementing business alliances with the aristocracy, nor from enjoying the power and luxury of his merchant prince status or becoming deeply involved in Manticoran politics, but his "commoner heritage" was fundamental to his fierce, prideful self-image. He regarded himself as a self-made man and the descendant of self-made men, despite the wealth to which he had been born.

And that image of himself was what had brought him here today, Honor told herself, for she'd hurt it. She'd caught him, or his employees, at least, dabbling in illegal trade, and to a man of his pride and self-aware importance that constituted a direct attack upon him, no mere business reverse or legal embarrassment. In his own eyes, Klaus Hauptman was the Hauptman Cartel, and that made her actions a personal insult he could not tolerate.

"Very well, Commander Harrington," he said at last, "I'll come straight to the point. For reasons of your own, you have seen fit to harass my interests in Basilisk. I want it stopped."

"I'm sorry you see it as `harassment,' Mr. Hauptman," Honor said calmly. "Unfortunately, my oath to the Crown requires me to execute and enforce the regulations established by Parliament."

"Your oath doesn't require you to single out the Hauptman Cartel for your enforcement, Commander." Hauptman didn't raise his voice, but there was a vicious snap under its smooth surface.

"Mr. Hauptman," Honor faced him levelly, folding her hands tightly under the edge of the table, "we have inspected all commerce with the surface of Medusa or the Basilisk orbital warehouses, not simply that consigned here by your firm."

"Nonsense!" Hauptman snorted. "No other senior officer on this station has ever interfered so blatantly with Basilisk's legitimate merchant traffic. More to the point, I have numerous reports from my factors here to the effect that your `customs' parties spend far more time `examining' my shipments than anyone else's. If that's not harassment, I would very much like to know what you feel does constitute harassment, Commander!"