David Weber - Torch of Freedom

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.

Anton spent a great deal of his own time with her, although he did go up to the surface for meals—and, of course, he didn't sleep down there. There would hardly have been room for a third bed, anyway.

Victor Cachat divided his time during that four day stretch about evenly. Half of the time he spent with Thandi—a good part of that, in their bedroom—and the other half he spent helping Anton and Ruth analyze the data from Monica.

The decision that he and Anton would take the risk of trying to penetrate Mesa still hadn't been made yet. But that was just a formality, now. The information they were getting from the Monica reports were confirming all the suspicions they'd ever had.

Princess Ruth brushed back her hair. "There's no doubt about it, any longer. Anton and I crunched those figures till they're flat as pancakes. So you can put your fears about any 'hall of mirrors' effect to rest, Jeremy. We weren't looking at images, we was looking at hard cold facts."

"What facts are you referring to in particular?" asked Web Du Havel. He was sitting next to Queen Berry at the conference table in the center of the operations chamber. Victor was sitting next to him, and Thandi and Anton more or less across from him. Jeremy X was standing. As was usually the case, Jeremy preferred to stand at business meetings rather than sit down.

"The data concerning Manpower's financial flows," said Ruth. "There's no way an operation as huge as the one mounted at Monica can keep its costs hidden. And here's what comes out of it. They dropped a bundle on this little fiasco—or someone did, anyway. Sort of. That many battlecruisers don't come cheap, you know, and I think some of the analysts back home in Landing are suffering sticker shock from just looking at the tonnage they threw at us. But— but , Jeremy—I think they're missing something."

"Indeed?" Jeremy gave her one of his patented quizzical smiles. "By all means, dazzle us once again with your legerdemain, O Princess!"

Ruth stuck out her tongue at him, then shrugged.

"I think I can make a pretty good case that they figured out how to cover their costs (assuming it all worked, of course) in such a way that they'd at least break even on the Monica project, especially with Technodyne thrown into the mix. If Technodyne's part of the deal was to provide the battlecruisers from the ships they were supposed to be scrapping, costs come way down . . . on an out-of-pocket basis, anyway. Oh, they still had to pay for all the munitions they were planning on using, not to mention getting the technicians they needed all the way out to Monica. So, yeah, there were some pretty hefty damn expenditures involved here. But hefty as they were, they weren't as hefty as it might look at first glance. And if you factor in the possible future revenues from the Lynx Terminus—which was clearly their long-term target—Manpower could still have wound up coming out of the whole thing smelling like a rose."

"GIGO," said Jeremy. "Garbage in, garbage out."

"I know what theacronym means, thank you," Ruth said crossly. "What's your point?"

Jeremy smiled at her. "Meaning no offense. Still, in the nature of things those figures you fed into your programs were just guesstimates. You have no access to the actual figures. You could be misreading the figures . . . including just how far Technodyne was willing to go to help subsidize this little venture."

"That's true," said Victor. "In fact, I'd accept a disparity of two-to-one or even three-to-one—conceivably even four-to-one—as a GIGO effect. But it would take something like a full order of magnitude to really alter our conclusions, Jeremy."