tlb wrote:What I am trying to point out to you is that Anton was precisely searching for "hints of Georgia's past", in total contradiction to that first line. He had already exhausted the sources on Manticore for the information on Georgia Sakristos Young, who he knew had first appeared as Elaine Komandorski. He would not have abandoned the young women, just to get information on a common criminal; unless he thought it would help combat the North Hollow files.
Ok, that's a good point. Though my point remains that Anton didn't go digging Smoking Frog up out of the blue. There must have been a hint that evidence was to be found there and not on Maya or Erewhon or Hypatia or any of the thousands of other systems. Therefore, some third party must have come across that hint or evidence and made that known to Anton or to his network of sources.
So revising my story line:
Elaine comes into existence on some third planet in the hands of this surgeon. She pays him well and he promptly disappears and moves elsewhere. Whether he knew what she had done to et that money is unknown, but he'd have figured out escaped slaves don't usually have a couple million Solarian credits to their name, so he was right to be wary.
Once she's on Manticore, she begins erasing the links to her past. She's discovered by Dimitri Young, Earl North Hollow, and brought into his service. He reveals a bit of what he knows about her past to keep her in line and promises that he'll erase the files once she's proven herself. But as I said before, it's in both of their interests that she not be discovered by accident, so North Hollow helps erase the evidence that could still be found in Landing of both of her past lives.
At some point in the future, North Hollow trusts Georgia enough to give her read & append rights to the files. At point, she knows that her files contain more than her Landing City past. At a minimum, it must contain some believable hint that Elaine Komandorski was an ex-slave. North Hollow also promises that he'll erase this file.
He does no such thing and Georgia only learns about it after the files have transferred to Pavel. She begins plotting his death, also aided by the fact that he's a sociopath, amoral, despicable and had been "convincing" her to have sex with him for a while. Honor helps along in the duel; Georgia as executor of the North Hollow state has a window of opportunity to delete the files and does. She then marries Stefan Young and becomes Countess North Hollow.
At this point, I don't think anything in the files pointed to Smoking Frog. There's no reason to believe it did. Georgia may have sent someone to the place she had her surgery, but the trail to the surgeon is now at least a decade old.
Then, later, someone on Smoking Frog made the connection from the ex-slave to Elaine Komandorski. Knowing that this name had shown up in the LCPD files, they passed word to Anton. This person and their intermediaries probably didn't know about her later identity as Georgia Sakristos Young. But Anton did, so he goes to Smoking Frog to see the evidence for himself or because the contact wouldn't divulge too many details over interstellar distances or because they required payment.