Ruth interjected. "Counter-espionage is to espionage what epistemology is to philosophy, Berry. The most fundamental branch. How do you know what you know? If you can't answer that, you can't answer anything." She flashed a quick, nervous smile. "Sorry. I know that sounds pedantic. But it's true."

Hugh had only a fuzzy sense of the meaning of the term "epistemology," but he understood the gist of the princess' comments, and agreed with her. Manpower could obviously breed such a counter-agent. That would be no more difficult, biologically speaking, than breeding any other slave. And although it would be a nuisance—but no more than that—they could easily enough duplicate a number.

But, as Jeremy had just asked, how could they possibly be sure of retaining the agent's loyalty, once they sent him out?

Hugh could think of ways Manpower might try to retain that loyalty, to be sure. Threatening hostages would probably be the one with the greatest likelihood of success; sometimes the crudest methods really did work best. But keeping people close to the agent hostage and threatening to harm them wouldn't work as well in this sort of situation as it might in others. In the very nature of their origins and upbringing, Manpower's slaves didn't have people close to them. Except for the sort of adopted relations that Hugh himself had gotten, of course. He, of all people, was unlikely to ever underestimate how precious that sort of "relationship" could become . . . yet every slave knew in his bones that those bonds were fragile. They existed only on the sufferance of others, and they were always subject to being torn apart by those same others—and always would be . . . so long as the institution of slavery itself survived. When an agent ended up confronting the sort of gut-wrenching stress inherent in betraying comrades dedicated to the overthrow of the monstrous evil threaning to do just that, "reliability" went straight out the airlock.

In fact, that was true of just about every method Hugh could think of, in a case like this, and Ruth's basic point sat at the center of everything: a turned agent was the great disaster every intelligence agency did everything in its power to avoid. Unless the people Manpower had in charge of its counter-espionage against the Ballroom were complete fools—and there was no evidence that they were, and plenty of evidence that they weren't—there was no chance they'd take this sort of risk.

And if they had been inclined to, it would have bitten them on the ass a long time ago, he thought grimly.

There was a a long, still moment of silence as the question lay ugly and naked among them. Then Ruth inhaled audibly.

"Manpower isn't what it seems," she said. "It just can't be. We already suspected as much, and this is still more evidence—and powerful evidence at that. There is no way a mere corporation, no matter how evil and shrewd and influential and powerful, could have created the man we all just saw dying. Not the way he died. One or two, maybe. With the right psych programming, the right threats and bribes. Maybe. But there's no way—no way—they could create enough of him to justify sending him to Torch for what had to be no more than a routine penetration. We've put this man's life here on-planet under an electron microscope, and he did nothing—nothing at all—except the sort of things a simple, white-bread information probe would have required. No corporation, not even the biggest transtellar, could have enough of these sorts of people to waste one of them on something that routine. They just couldn't. Something else is going on."

"But . . . what?" asked Berry.

"That's what we have to find out," said Jeremy. "And, finally, we're going to put the needed resources into it."

Ruth looked very cheery. "Me, for starters. Jeremy's asked me to . . . well, co-ordinate it, anyway. I'm not really heading it up, exactly. God, is this fun or what?"

Berry stared at her. "You think this is fun? I think it's pretty horrible."

"So do I," said Palane forcefully.

"Well, sure. One of you was born and raised in the warrens of Chicago, in the proverbial desp'rate straits. And the other was born and raised in the serf hellhole of Ndebele, which isn't exactly desp'rate straits but is about as miserable as anything this side of . . . of . . ."

"Dante's third level of Hell," Hugh offered.

"Who's Dante?" asked Berry.

"He must be referring to Khalid Dante, the OFS security chief for Carina Sector," said Ruth. "Nasty piece of work, by all accounts. But the point I was getting to is that I was born and raised in the comfort and security of the royal house of Winton, so I know the truth, which is that the ultimate horror is boredom."

She sat back in her seat, looking very self-satisfied.

Berry looked at Palane. "She's gone barking mad on us."

Palane smiled. "So? She was always barking mad, and you know it. Which only makes her an even better choice, when you come down to it. Who better to set on Manpower?"

Chapter Twenty-Six

"I think that just about does it, Jordin," Richard Wix observed. He was obviously trying to keep his voice properly blasé—or, at least, professionally detached—but he wasn't doing a particularly good job of it, and Jordin Kare chuckled.

"You do, do you?" he inquired.

"We've got the locus' central focus nailed, we've got the tidal stresses, and we've got the entry vector," Wix replied.

"Which is all well and good, Doctor," Captain Zachary put in, "except for that other little problem."

"We been over that and over that," Wix said, as patiently as he could (which, truth to tell, wasn't all that patiently). "I don't see any way a gravitic kick that weak is going to have any significant impact on efforts to transit. We compensate for kicks like that every day, Captain."

"No, T. J., we don't, actually," Kare said. Wix glowered at him, but Kare only shrugged. "I'll grant you that we routinely compensate for kicks of its magnitude. For that matter, we've got a kick several times this strong on the Manticore-Basilisk transit, and it's never been a problem. But you know as well as I do we've never seen one like this—one whose strength and repetition rate vary this sharply and unpredictably." He shook his head. "If you can show me what's causing it—a model that explains it, one that lets you predict what it's going to do for, say, a twenty-four-hour duration—then I'll agree with you that it's a matter of routine compensation. But you can't do that, can you?"

"No," Wix admitted after a moment. "I don't think it's powerful enough, even at the strongest reading we've recorded, to seriously threaten a ship transiting the terminus, though."

"I agree with you." Kare nodded. "That's not really my point, though. My point is that we're looking at something we've never seen before: a kick—and let's not forget, TJ, that what we call a 'kick' could just as accurately be called a 'spike'—that doesn't seem to be associated in any way with the routine stress patterns of the locus."

"Exactly how significant is that?" Zachary asked. Kare cocked an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged. "I'm nowhere near the theoretician the two of you are, of course, but it looks to me like Dr. Wix does have a point about the relative strength of the kick, or 'spike,' or whatever we want to call it. There's no way anything that weak is going to pose any kind of threat to Harvest Joy's hyper generator or alpha nodes, so I don't see its significantly impacting our transit, either. Obviously, something about it bothers you a lot more than that, though."

"What bothers me is that there's not another single instance anywhere in the literature of a gravitic spike like this one that wasn't somehow connected to the observable patterns of the locus associated with it," Kare said, his expression thoughtful. "People tend to think of wormhole termini as big, fixed doorways in space, and in gross terms, I don't suppose there's anything wrong with that visualization. But what they actually are are fixed points in space where intense gravity waves impinge on one another. On the gravitic level, they're areas of immense stress. It's a very tightly focused stress, one in which enormous forces are concentrated and counterbalanced so finely that they appear, on the macro level, to be stable. But it's a stability which results only from keeping enormous amounts of instability perfectly balanced against one another.