She rolled her eyes again, and Kare found himself hastily suppressing a smile before it could leak onto his face. Queen Berry was a healthy young woman, quite obviously, if perhaps a bit below average height. She had a figure that was slender without being skinny, and a full head of chestnut hair that was quite striking and attractive. He'd been warned before he ever departed Manticore that she was also what one of the Foreign Ministry types had described as "a free spirit . . . a very free spirit," and nothing he'd seen so far seemed to suggest that description had been in error. From the sparkle he'd detected in her light brown eyes, she was fully aware of her reputation, too.
"But I'm forgetting my manners," she said, and half-turned to face the trio of people behind her. "Let me make the introductions," she said, either blithely unaware or uncaring that ruling monarchs were supposed to have other people make introductions for them.
"This is Thandi Palane," Berry said, indicating the tall, very broad-shouldered young woman who'd been standing directly behind her. "Thandi is in charge of sorting out our military forces."
Palane had a very fair, almost albino complexion, with kinky silver-blond hair and beautiful hazel eyes, and although she was in civilian attire at the moment, she managed to make it look as if it were a uniform. Kare had been thoroughly briefed on her, too, although now that he'd laid eyes on her, he didn't really think the warnings about her lethality had been necessary. Not because she wasn't lethal, but because he was pretty sure only an idiot would have failed to figure that out on his own. Her carefully moderated grip was like shaking hands with a cargo grapnel. It could have picked up an egg if it had wanted to, or crumpled a solid block of mollycircs like foil. She couldn't have looked more affable and friendly, either, but it was the sort of cheerful affability one would have expected out of a well fed sabertooth, and he definitely wouldn't have wanted to be around when she decided it was feeding time.
"And this," Berry continued, "is Dr. Web Du Havel, my prime minister. While Thandi takes care of the military, Web is in charge of sorting me out." The teenaged queen smiled mischievously. "I'm never sure which of them has the harder job, when it comes down to it."
Kare had seen HD coverage of Du Havel following his initial arrival in the Star Kingdom of Manticore two and a half T-years earlier. As a result, he knew all about the prime minister's academic credentials—credentials, in their own way, even more impressive than Kare's own. And he also knew that the stocky, physically powerful Du Havel was himself a liberated genetic slave who'd been intended by his Mesan designers as a heavy labor/technician type.
Just goes to show that you never want to piss off anyone who'd make a good engineer, Kare thought as he shook Du Havel's still powerful but considerably less scary hand. Du Havel may be the head of the "process oriented" branch of the movement, but I'll bet there's a bunch of people like him in the Ballroom, too. Although, come to think of it, if I were Manpower, this is one guy I'd rather have designing bombs to throw at me, if that kept him from concentrating on what he has been doing.
"It's an honor to meet you, Dr. Du Havel," he said.
"And an honor to meet you, Dr. Kare," Du Havel replied with a toothy grin.
"And this," Berry said, her mischievous smile turning positively wicked for a moment, "is the famous—or infamous—Jeremy X. He's our minister of war. But it's all right, really, Doctor! He's all reformed now . . . sort of."
"Oh, not so reformed as all that, lass," Jeremy said, reaching past her to offer his hand to Kare in turn. He smiled lazily. "I am on my best behavior at the moment, though," he added.
"So I've heard," Kare said with all the aplomb he could muster.
Aside from Berry herself, Jeremy X. was the smallest person in the entire room. He was also renowned (if that was the proper verb) throughout the Solarian League as the most deadly terrorist, by almost any measure, the Audubon Ballroom had produced in many a year. Given the caliber of the competition, that was saying quite a lot, too. Like Du Havel, he was another example of Manpower having created a nemesis of its very own, although he and the prime minister had chosen very different ways to go about their nemesis-ing. Jeremy, who'd been designed as one of Manpower's "entertainer" lines, had the compact, small-boned frame and enhanced reflexes of a juggler or a tumbler. Although he was undoubtedly on the small side, there was nothing at all soft or frail about his physique, however, and the reflexes and hand-eye coordination Manpower had intended him to use for sleight-of-hand or juggling crystal plates made him one of the most lethal pistoleers in the galaxy. A point he had demonstrated with enormous gusto to his designers over the years.
Kare was well aware that, as the Kingdom of Torch's minister of war, Jeremy had officially renounced terrorism in the kingdom's name. As far as anyone back home in the Star Kingdom of Manticore was aware, he'd meant it, too. On the other hand, the man who'd planned and executed (Kare winced mentally at his own choice of verb) so many deadly and . . . inventive attacks on Manpower executives was still in there, just under the skin. One on one, Kare never doubted that Thandi Palane was more dangerous than Jeremy could ever be; as implacable forces of nature, though, he suspected there would be very little to choose between the two of them.
Which suits me just fine, given the people the two of them are likely to be going after, he reflected grimly. Even if Rabbi McNeil does have a point about vengeance belonging to a higher power. After all, nobody ever said He couldn't use any means He chooses to execute judgment.
"I suppose I should introduce my own associates," he said as he got his hand back from Jeremy, and indicated the tallish, undeniably shaggy strawberry-blond man to his left.
"Dr. Richard Wix, Your Majesty," he continued. "Who rejoices, for some reason I've never quite understood, in the nickname of the 'Tons of Joy Bear.' " He grimaced. "We usually shorten it to 'TJ,' but I understand you have a very efficient intelligence operation here on Torch. If you can pry the origin of his nom de party out of him, I'd be delighted to know what it is."
"I'm sure if anyone can figure it out, it'll be Daddy," the queen said cheerfully, offering her own hand to Wix.
"Forewarned is forearmed, Your Majesty," Wix said. "Besides, it's not really all that much of a secret. If Richard here ever stuck his nose out of the lab, he'd probably have figured it out for himself by now." He gave the youthful monarch a conspiratorial look. "He doesn't get out much, you know," he added in a stage whisper.
"And this," Kare continued in the tone of a man rising above the slings and arrows of smaller-minded individuals, "is Captain Zachary, Harvest Joy's skipper. She's the practical-minded sort who's going to keep us all straight while we get to work."
"I think you and Web are both going to have your work cut out for you, Captain," the queen commiserated as she extended her hand in turn to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Zachary.
"It's not like it's something I haven't done before, Your Majesty," Zachary replied with a slight smile, and Berry chuckled.
"Well!" she said as she released Zachary's hand and gestured at the comfortable chairs around the conference table in what had once been the office of the Mesan governor of what had once been Verdant Vista. "Now that we've got the introductions out of the way, why don't we all find seats?"
It was not, Kare thought, the sort of preplanned, carefully choreographed protocol one might have expected out of most people who ruled an entire star system. On the other hand, Queen Berry's realm wasn't quite like most other star nations, either. It was barely fifteen T-months old (counting from Berry's coronation), for one thing, and it had been born in carnage, bloodshed, and all too often bloodcurdling vengeance, for another. The fact that the liberation of the planet now known as Torch hadn't simply degenerated into a bloodsoaked chaos of massacre, torture, and atrocity was mostly due to the teenaged girl settling into her own chair at the table, and Kare found himself wondering, again, how such a cheerful-looking slip of a girl had done it. There was no question, according to Admiral Givens' people at the Office of Naval Intelligence or their civilian counterparts that it had, indeed, been Berry who'd somehow convinced the liberated slaves to forgo the full, bitter dregs of the vengeance to which generations of savage repression and mistreatment had, by any fair measure, entitled them.