From her own seat on the Ouroborous' command deck, Stephanie Henson spoke up. "You have a low and nasty mind, Haruka."

"You didn't complain about it last night."

"A low, nasty and vulgar mind."

"You didn't complain about that either."

"A low, nasty, vulgar and—"

"Enough!" laughed Marti. "To get back to your question, Michael, the delegation that arrived here from Beowulf to finalize our new assignment as Queen Berry's security detachment included several Manticorans. That's not surprising, of course, since Manticore would have initiated the process with Beowulf. One of them was no less a personage than Ruth's father, Michael Winton-Serisburg, the Queen of Manticore's younger brother."

Comprehension seemed to be dawning, judging from the winces on the faces of Alsobrook and the three youngsters.

"Yes, indeed," said Marti. "The prince—well, he's technically a duke these days, but he's still a prince, if you know what I mean. He's still Ruth's father,too, and—apparently knowing his own daughter quite well—he'd come for the specific and express purpose of making sure she did not engage in any risky endeavor like accompanying some scruffy albeit doughty vagabonds—that's you, no offense intended—on what seems to be on the face of it a most perilous enterprise."

"Because it is a most perilous enterprise," grumbled Ganny El, "and I should have held out for an annual stipend from Manticore as well as Beowulf. Would have, too, if I'd known we'd make the House of Winton this jumpy."

Either Brice Miller's faith in the princess or his fantasies were stratospheric, because he piped up: "You watch! I bet Ruth figures out a way to sneak around him. She's really smart."

"I don't doubt that," said Garner. "But 'smart' can only take you so far, when you have a guard detachment of the Queen's Own Regiment watching you at all times. And don't kid yourself, Brice. They may be Ruth's bodyguards, and they may have been with her for a year and a half now—but they'll take their orders from the Queen herself. Or the Queen's brother."

"Oh."

"Cheer up, boys," said Haruka. "There was never a chance they'd let her come, once they found out what she had in mind. A member of the royal family? She's already been taken hostage once—at least, the criminals thought they had her—and the first thing that would have crossed the minds of her family was that if they let her run loose, somebody else would do the same."

"But how did they know what she was planning to do?" asked Ed. "I'm sure the Princess didn't tell them."

Garner discovered that the screen in front of her—who would have thought it, of engineering data?—was deeply engrossing. Judging from the sudden silence, a similar fascination had seized the other members of the crew.

"You did it!" accused Ruth. Her forefinger was shaking right under Hugh's nose. "Don't even try to deny it! You're the one who told them!"

Watching them, Berry couldn't help but be amused. Given the size disparity between Ruth and Hugh, the situation was a bit like a chipmunk—well, being fair, a pretty good sized dog—trying to chastise a bear.

Fortunately, Hugh was generally quite phlegmatic. That was one of the things—one of the many things—Berry liked about him. So he didn't snarl back at the Manticoran princess, nor huff and puff that he was being put upon.

"Why would I try to deny it?" he said calmly. "I readily agree that I'm guilty as charged. Which, in turn, simply means that unlike one person in this room—female, about one hundred and sixty-seven centimeters tall, weight somewhere in the range of sixty-five kilograms, of Masadan ancestry—I'm not crazy. Face it, Ruth. Whether you like it or not, your ability to operate as a field agent is now and will forever more be tightly constrained by the fact that on the scale of 'Hostage, Value Thereof,' you rank ten out of ten. Or at the very least, nine point nine nine unto the two thousandth decimal point out of ten."

Her glare hadn't faded in the least. "It's sixty kilos, thank you very much. I exercise regularly."

He accepted the correction with a solemn nod.

Berry decided that Ruth's temper had probably crested and was now on the downslope. Time to intervene.

"I'm really glad you'll be staying here on Torch, Ruth. It'd be awfully lonely without you—"

She summoned her very best glare—which was pretty feeble, being honest—and bestowed it upon Hugh. "—given the living arrangements that this paranoiac insists I have to maintain from now on."

"Just for the duration of the emergency situation," Hugh said.

" 'Duration of the emergency situation,' " Ruth jeered. "And what would that situation be, O Paranoid-in-Chief? The all out war to the death between Berry's star nation and Manpower, which has now been in existence for, oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred years. That one?"

Hugh chuckled. "Yes. That one."

"A life sentence, in other words," said Berry unhappily.

"Maybe not, Your Majesty. If we can—"

"Don't call me that!"

Hugh took a slow deep breath. "I don't have any choice, Berry—and that's the last time you'll hear me use your given name so long as I have this assignment." For a moment, he looked distinctly unhappy. "One of the basic rules concerning security work is that security agents need to keep their personal distance from the person or persons they're provided security for. In this case . . . that's not going to be easy for me. Informality would make it impossible."

Berry didn't know if she was delighted or chagrined to hear that. Probably both. "I'll kill Jeremy, I swear I will. The first guy who comes along since they put this stupid crown on my head who's not intimated by going out on a date with me—and he makes him my security chief!"

"You can't kill Jeremy," said Ruth. "Sorry, girl—but you were the one who specifically refused his offer to give you the right to exercise the death penalty once a year, at your whim and discretion." The princess beamed up at Hugh. "Been me, I would have taken it. And you'd be for the high jump, right about now."

"Fine. I can have him banished." Berry cocked her head, studying Hugh for a few seconds. "But it wouldn't do me any good, would it? You're one of those people with an over-developed sense of duty. Even with Jeremy gone, you'd keep soldiering on."

"Well. Yes. But to get back to what I was saying, the main reason for this admittedly extreme precaution"—he waved his hand, indicating the operations chamber buried far below the surface—"is because somebody is using some sort of assassination method that we don't understand yet. Once we learn how to counter it . . ."

He looked at the bed that had been crammed into the largest available space in the chamber. "Then you can start living somewhere else again."

Ruth's temper was now rapidly subsidizing, as was usually true when she got angry. "Look on the bright side, Berry. At least the bathroom down here is up to snuff. State of the art, in fact."

"You'd better hope so," Berry said. "Seeing as how you'll be sharing it with me. There's room down here—barely—for another bed."

"Berry!"

The queen ignored her and looked up at her security chief. "I'm sure the Queen's Own would agree, don't you?"

"They'll sing hosannas."

"Berry!"

But Ruth's displeasure at being banished along with Berry to what she called The Netherworld—her Queen's Own guard detachment did indeed sing hosannas—lasted less than twenty hours. The next day Anton and Victor returned from their visit to Trevor's Star, just two hours after a courier ship brought a detailed report on the recent Battle of Monica.

However much Ruth might daydream of being a dashing field agent, the truth was that her great love was analysis. There was enough meat on the bones of that report concerning Monica to keep her down in the operations chamber for four days straight, not even coming up for meals but having them delivered. To her great pleasure, she'd discovered that the computer equipment in the chamber was every bit as state of the art as the toilet and bathing facilities.