"You order queen-size dishes yourself," pointed out Berry.

"Sure. I finish them, too. Come on, Your Mousety. Even with me and Lara and Mr. Human Iceberg leading the way, it's going to be a tussle getting you out of here."

In fact, extricating themselves from the back room of J. Quesenberry's Ice Cream and Pastries and getting onto the street outside proved to be quite easy. In some mysterious manner that Hugh was sure violated at least one of the laws of thermodynamics, the patrons in the place managed to squeeze themselves aside, just enough to leave a lane for Berry and her companions to pass through.

That was further proof, if any was needed, of the queen's high level of public approval. But the experience practically had Hugh screaming. One of the basic principles of providing security to a public official was to keep a clear zone around them. That gave the security force at least a chance—a pretty good chance, in fact, if they were properly trained professionals—of spotting an emerging threat in time to deal with it.

From that standpoint, J. Quesenberry's Ice Cream and Pastries might as well have been named Death Trap. In that press, literally dozensof people could have murdered Berry with nothing more complicated or high-tech than a non-metallic poisoned needle. And there would have been no way Hugh or Lara or Yana—or any bodyguard this side of guardian angels—could have prevented it. They wouldn't have even spotted the threat until Berry was on her way down.

And already dead, not more than a few seconds afterward. Hugh knew at least three poisons that would kill a normal-sized person within five or ten seconds. Of course, they wouldn't actually die that quickly. Contrary to popular mythology that had been fed by way too many badly-researched vid dramas, not even the deadliest poison could outrace the passage of oxygen and fluids through the human body. But it hardly mattered. With any one of those three poisons, the person's death was inevitable unless the antidote was administered almost simultaneously with the poison itself. One of them, in fact, a distant derivative of curare developed on Onamuji, had no known antidote at all. Luckily, it was unstable outside of a narrow temperature range and therefore not very practical as a real murder weapon.

Once they were out on the street, Hugh heaved a sigh of relief that was loud enough for Berry to hear it.

"Pretty bad, huh?"

Lara jeered at her. "You think those midgets in there could have squeezed his lungs empty? Not a chance, girl. I was following him—much to my pleasure—and it was like following a walrus through a pack of penguins. Plenty of room. No, he's obviously a security type—I can spot 'em a mile away—and he's sighing with relief that the security threat level to Your Average Heightness just dropped from Screaming Scarlet to Fire Engine Red."

Berry gave Hugh a reproachful look. "Is that true? Did you just accept my invitation—well, technically, you were the one who asked me out on a date even though like usual the girl had to do most of the work—because you were watching out for my security?" A trace of shrillness entered her voice. "Did Jeremy put you up to this?"

Hugh had always been an adherent to the ancient saw that honesty was the best policy. As a rule, at least. And he'd already figured out that, with Berry Zilwicki, honesty would always be the best policy.

"The answer is no, no, and he tried but I declined."

Berry got a little cross-eyed as she parsed that reply. "Okay. I think." She took his elbow and began leading him back toward the palace. Managing, somehow, to make it seem as if he'd politely offered her his arm and he'd accepted.

Which he hadn't, in fact. His real inclination was to keep both hands free and clear, in case some threat materialized . . .

"Gah," he said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means Jeremy's right. You are a security expert's nightmare."

"You tell her, Hugh!" came Yana's approving voice from behind them.

"Yeah," chimed in Lara. "You are the walrus."

Chapter Twenty-Five

Once they arrived back at the palace, they found a small delegation waiting to meet them. Jeremy X was there, along with Thandi Palane, Princess Ruth, and two men Hugh didn't know. One of them had a treecat perched on his shoulder.

"Should we meet in the audience chamber?" Berry suggested.

Jeremy shook his head. "The security precautions there are sub-standard, as I've told you a gazillion times." Sternly: "And this time, damnation, you will listen to me. We'll meet in the operations room. It's the only place in the palace that's really secure."

Berry didn't argue the point. In fact, she almost—not quite—looked a bit chastened.

The two Amazons and Saburo politely detached themselves. Jeremy led the rest of the group to an elevator, which was just large enough for all of them to fit into it. The elevator took them down . . .

A long, long, long way. Wherever they were headed, Hugh realized, it had to be a place specially constructed for a specific purpose, and almost certainly by Manpower. They were going far deeper than could be explained by any normal architecture, and there hadn't been enough time since the foundation of Torch—not with everything else to be done—for the new nation to have completed such a project.

Hugh's spirits picked up. That was old training at work. The simplest and still surest way to make a room secure from any spying apparatus was to bury it deeply in the earth. Judging from the time it was taking the elevator to get there, and Hugh's estimate of their speed, this room must be at least a thousand meters below the surface, and probably closer to two thousand. About the only particles that would penetrate to that depth, at least reliably, were neutrinos. To the best of Hugh's knowledge, not even Manticore had managed to build detection equipment that used neutrinos.

Sound detection was far easier, of course, since depth actually provided some benefits. But that was easy to block.

Jeremy must have sensed Hugh's curiosity. "Manpower built this buried chamber to cover its most secure computers—read 'really deep dark and secret, burn-before-readingrecord archives.' Which, of course, meants they were also their most incriminating records, as well as the most sensitive. And then the incompetent clown charged with destroying the evidence neglected to punch in the instructions in the proper sequence, during the rebellion. Probably because he was shitting his pants. So the chamber computers locked down instead of slagging the molycircs and everything stored in them. And then he couldn't get them to unlock and let him back in because—apparently—he either never had the access code for that little problem in the first place or (more likely, my opinion) he simply forgot what the hell it was. Probably because he was shitting his pants. Then he just ran away—see prior explanation—and apparently got killed in the general mayhem. We're not positive, because it took us—Princess Ruth, that is—almost two days to unseal the chamber. By then, few of the bodies anywhere in the headquarters area had enough left for good physical identification. And the DNA records were mostly destroyed because the slaves who stormed the record office reduced the library files to teeny, tiny, throughly stomped upon and incinerated chunks of circuitry. Along with the technicians and clerks who'd maintained those records."

Berry grimaced.

But Jeremy just smiled. Thinly, but it was a smile. Whatever else might be preying on his conscience, the massacre of so many of Manpower's management and employees during the rebellion was obviously not one of them.

Hugh didn't blame him in the least. He'd seen some of the vids taken at the time himself, and had just shrugged them off. Yes, some of what had happened here had been hideous—but there was a good reason Manpower's slaves called most of its employees "the scorpions."