by David Weber
And what happens when everyone realizes just how far you’re prepared to go, Oscar? Will it frighten them into behaving themselves? Or will they wonder just how much they really have to lose with you in charge?
Oscar Saint-Just stared into the pitiless unknown of the future, and if a man with so much blood already on his hands had dared to believe in God, he would have prayed to be spared what he saw there.
“I may be overly optimistic, Ma’am,” Ivan Bukato said, “but I believe we may just have turned the corner.”
He and McQueen stood side-by-side, gazing into an immense viewscreen that showed a panoramic view of the smoke and wreckage strewn about the Octagon’s approaches. Morning had given way to afternoon. Now afternoon was slowly yielding to a red-tinged and bloody evening lit by the pyres of two more waves of assault shuttles and strike aircraft. They had been blown apart by the defense grid just as efficiently as their predecessors, and General Conflans had cut his way through the confusion to the Octagon with the equivalent of almost a complete Marine regiment.
“I think the timing of Maitland’s announcement may have been decisive,” the admiral went on. He waved one hand at the main plot, where the spaceport now showed a solid, friendly green, then jabbed a finger at another block of green. This one indicated one of the neighboring administrative towers, and it had been the blood red of State Security less than five minutes before. “When an entire SS intervention HQ decides to ‘support the legitimate members of the Committee’ against its own commander, it actually begins to look like we’ll pull this off after all.”
“I’d hesitate to start making any long-term retirement plans just yet,” McQueen said with a wry smile, “but it does look as if the momentum is slipping over to our side. Maybe I should go have another discussion with Fontein.”
“All joking aside, Ma’am, that might not be a bad idea,” Bukato said seriously. “Like you, I expected him to cave in sooner than this, but now that rank and file StateSec people are coming over to us, maybe you could convince him that endorsing your position is the best way to minimize the ultimate bloodshed.”
“You may have a point,” McQueen conceded. “Erasmus and I are never going to feel all warm and fuzzy about each other, but I believe the man is genuinely committed to stability and the minimization of wholesale destruction. And I think he’s hardheaded enough to recognize the inevitable when it looks him right in the eye.”
“I’m afraid I’m a bit more cynical about his ultimate motivations, Ma’am. But it’s beginning to look to me like the tide is coming in, and whatever his commitments may be, I don’t think he wants to drown.”
“You could be right to be cynical. And the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter whether he signs on with us out of principle or out of self-preservation, now does it?”
“No, Ma’am, it doesn’t. Not in the short term, at least.”
“In that case, I think I will go have another little chat with him. Mind the store for me, Ivan.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
* * *
“Get me Citizen General Speer on a maximum security line,” Saint-Just said. His voice was almost as emotionless as it had been at the very beginning, but only almost, and one or two of the taut-faced, anxious officers staffing his HQ glanced at one another.
“Yes, Sir,” his com officer said quickly. “Where would you like to take it?”
“At my desk,” the citizen secretary replied, and his chief of staff quickly gathered up the other officers with his eyes and shooed them all down to the far end of the room.
Saint-Just hardly noticed. He sat square-shouldered behind his desk, and waited while the communications system connected him to the woman who commanded every State Security trooper in the city of Nouveau Paris. It didn’t take very long, but the small handful of seconds seemed endless and yet all too fleeting. Then his com’s display blinked alive with Rachel Speer’s strong-boned face.
The pickup at Speer’s end was adjusted for wide focus. He could see the hustle and bustle of her own staff in the background, and even now, one corner of his mouth tried to quirk into a smile. There was no chance at all that she’d simply forgotten to narrow the field of view. She wanted him to see all of that energetic effort… and to remember it when the time came to assign blame for this unpleasant afternoon.
“Citizen Secretary,” she greeted him. “I’d like to say it was a pleasure to see you, Sir. Under the circumstances, however, I doubt that you’d believe me if I did say it.”
“As ever, Rachel, you remain a mistress of understatement.” Saint-Just’s voice was poison dry, and Speer’s face went instantly blank. There were several different ways his reply could have been taken, and it was obvious that she didn’t much care for most of them.
Saint-Just let her worry about it for a moment, but he didn’t really have time for such minor matters, and he cleared his throat. The small, harsh sound wasn’t loud, but Speer’s eyes narrowed as she heard it.
“The reason I’m screening you,” the citizen secretary said flatly, “is that I’ve decided that we cannot permit this situation to drag out any further. Citizen Colonel Yazov and Citizen General Maitland’s defections were bad enough, but now Citizen Brigadier Azhari has gone over to McQueen, as well… and he appears to have taken his entire HQ with him.”
“Sir, I assure you that I had absolutely no reason to suspect that Azhari was even considering such a betrayal!” Speer broke in. “I’ll have his family picked up immediately, and—”
“I didn’t say it was your fault, Rachel,” Saint-Just said flatly, “and assuming that you and I both survive, there will be time to deal with his actions later. I only mentioned them to make the point that we can’t afford to delay any longer. So I am authorizing and directing you to execute Bank Shot immediately.”
Citizen General Speer’s expression tightened, and her eyes widened ever so slightly. Saint-Just watched her reaction carefully, and he was rather reassured by what he saw. He’d been half-afraid that she might object or argue, but she’d obviously had time enough to realize that Bank Shot was a possibility from the outset. And it was equally obvious that whatever she thought of the notion, she was not about to risk anything which might be construed as less than total loyalty at this particular moment in the history of the People’s Republic. Still…
“Sir, have you considered warning McQueen about the possibility of Bank Shot?” she asked very carefully.
“I have. And rejected it,” Saint-Just said flatly. He held her eyes unflinchingly, then waved one hand in a small gesture. “The woman is a realist, Rachel, so you might be right; if we tell her what we can do to her, she might at least try to negotiate some settlement. But we’d also have to tell her how Bank Shot works if we expected her to believe us, and we can’t risk the possibility of her stalling just long enough to locate the hole in her defenses and plug it.”
Speer was silent for another ten seconds, then nodded.
“Yes, Sir. I understand,” she said after only the briefest pause. “I’ll begin the evacuation at once, and—”
“I don’t think you did understand me fully, Citizen General,” Saint-Just interrupted in a voice whose tone of icy calm surprised even him. “I am instructing you to execute Bank Shot immediately. There will be no evacuation.”
“But, Sir! I mean, I realize the situation is critical, but we’re talking about—”
Speer failed to keep the consternation out of her expression, and Saint-Just saw something very like horror in her eyes, but he cut her off brusquely.
“I understand precisely what we’re talking about, Citizen General,” he said, still in that icy voice. “As I just pointed out, however, whatever else she may be, McQueen is no fool. If she sees us evacuating any towers outside the immediate vicinity of the Octagon, she’s entirely capable of realizing what’s coming just as if we’d warned her intentionally. Which would put the ball in her court, if she chose to go back on the air. What if she figures it out and appeals to Ca
pital Fleet to prevent it?” He shook his head. “No. There’s no way of knowing where things might go, so I will repeat myself once, and once only. There will be no evacuation. Is that understood, Citizen General Speer?”
Rachel Speer opened her mouth, then closed it again. For perhaps three seconds, she said nothing at all, but then she nodded.
“Yes, Sir, Citizen Secretary. I understand.”
“—so I believe it’s time that you reconsider your position, Citizen Commissioner,” Esther McQueen said calmly. She sipped coffee from the Navy cup in her hand and smiled ever so slightly as Erasmus Fontein drank from a matching cup. She found herself forced to genuinely admire the people’s commissioner’s air of calm composure, and she was determined to appear just as composed.
“You manage to make it sound so reasonable, Citizen Secretary,” the StateSec man observed after a moment. “Unfortunately, Citizen Secretary Saint-Just might not find it quite so sensible of me.”
“Oh, come now!” McQueen chided. “You know as well as I do how little legitimacy Saint-Just can command on his own. I have all of the rest of the Committee here in the Octagon, and two-thirds of them have already agreed to publicly support me. StateSec officers are even beginning to come over—not in enormous numbers yet, perhaps, but to come over. More to the point, perhaps, Capital Fleet hasn’t made a move. They may not have opened fire on their StateSec watchdogs, but Saint-Just hasn’t been able to get them to fire on us, either, and you know what that means as well as I do. It’s been over fifteen hours now, and he hasn’t been able to suppress us, and he’s the one whose support base is eroding out from under him. When the rest of the Committee comes in on my side, he’s finished.”
Fontein sipped more coffee, buying time to think before he responded, and she was content to let him. Both of them knew how critical it was for Saint-Just to defeat the challenge she represented quickly. That would have been vital under any circumstances, but with Rob Pierre dead it became even more crucial to Saint-Just’s hope of survival to crush any challenge to his own authority quickly. As the Revolution’s watchdog, Oscar Saint-Just was undoubtedly the most hated single individual in the entire People’s Republic of Haven. If any alternative to him even looked as if it might be viable, his hold on power would become far worse than merely precarious.
Fontein lowered his cup and stared into it for several seconds, then raised his head and looked squarely into McQueen’s eyes.
“You might be right about that,” he said finally. “But Oscar may just surprise you yet. And even if he doesn’t, even if you actually manage to pull it off, what in God’s name pushed you into trying it in the first place? My God, woman! You may pull it off, but you had to be insane to risk everything on one throw of the dice this way! And please don’t try to tell me that you were ‘ready’ for all of this. I’ve been assigned to you too long not to recognize when you’re improvising as you go along.”
“Of course I’m improvising,” she told him. “I didn’t have much choice when you and Saint-Just decided I had to go, but I won’t pretend that I had all of my own plans firmly in place.” She shook her head. “I never thought Pierre would authorize my removal before we knew for certain that the Manties were on the ropes.”
“What are you talking about?” Fontein demanded, and McQueen’s eyebrows rose at the genuine surprise in his voice.
“Please, Citizen Commissioner,” she said. “I won’t pretend I was happy to learn that Saint-Just had authorized you to move against me, but I decided that I should consider that was only business, not personal. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly necessary for you to try to pretend he hadn’t, though.”
“But he—” Fontein began, then cut himself off. He stared at her for several seconds, and then chuckled with absolutely no humor at all.
“I don’t know why you think Oscar was planning to remove you any time soon,” he told her, then waved one hand in the air as he saw her expression of disbelief. “Oh, I’m not saying that he hadn’t decided you had to go, Citizen Secretary. I’m only saying that anything he and I discussed was at a very preliminary stage. The, ah, evidence preparing stage, one might say. In point of fact, I was instructed not to act against you in any other way without his specific authorization, because the Citizen Chairman hadn’t authorized him to act.”
It was McQueen’s turn to be surprised. Almost against her will, she found that she actually believed him, and she began to chuckle herself.
“It would have been much simpler all around if you could have just told me that, Citizen Commissioner,” she said after a moment. “If I’d had just two more weeks to put things together, Saint-Just never would have known what hit him, much less had time to respond! Still, I suppose all’s well that ends well.”
“I still believe that congratulating yourself on victory could be a bit premature,” Fontein said. “On the other hand, you’re right about Oscar’s failure to suppress your little mutiny quickly. And if you truly do have the rest of the Committee in your pocket, I suppose the odds are that you really will manage to pull it off in the end. I trust you won’t think any less of me if I admit that I would prefer to survive rather than to die a principled but useless death. I don’t suppose you’d care to troll any offers of high office under the new regime under my nose to entice me to shift allegiance, would you?”
“I can if you want me to,” McQueen replied. “Of course, you’re not stupid enough to believe me if I do. No, Citizen Commissioner. I don’t believe I trust your cupidity enough to attempt to bribe you with the offer of a platform from which to intrigue against me in turn. What I’m offering you is a chance to sign on for the record, with the understanding that afterward you will be provided the opportunity to slip away into quiet and obscure retirement on some nice Solarian planet of your choice with a comfortable pension tucked away in some Solarian bank. I believe you know me well enough to know that I’ll keep my word about allowing you to retire… as long as you do retire. And that if you don’t retire, I won’t make the mistake Saint-Just did and leave you alive to make problems in the future.”
She smiled pleasantly at her people’s commissioner, and as if against his will, Fontein smiled back.
“Such candor is rather refreshing,” he observed. “And I suspect that I can legitimately convince myself that lending you my public support is actually my duty on the grounds that anything which brings the fighting to a close quickly will reduce both the civilian casualty count and the probability of long-term instability for whatever regime replaces Citizen Chairman Pierre’s.”
“So you’ll publicly endorse my authority?” McQueen pressed.
“Let’s just say that I’m inclining in that direction. I would, however, like the opportunity to speak with the members of the Committee who are currently your… guests first. Both to assure myself that they really are your guests, and also that you’re not, ah, exaggerating the level of support you enjoy from them.”
“I believe that can be arranged, Citizen Commissioner.”
Esther McQueen stepped back into the War Room. Bukato looked up from a conversation with Captain Rubin and General Conflans and started to walk across to her, but she waved him back to his conference. It looked like they were discussing something important, and good as her news was, it would keep.
She folded her hands behind her, and turned back to the visual display of the smoke and flames littering the Octagon’s approaches. Lights were coming on in the residential towers outside the actual defense grid perimeter, and she shook her head.
Look at that, she thought. A goddamned war going on less than three kilometers away, and I’ll bet two-thirds of them are just sitting there watching out their windows while we kill each other! What a hell of a thing when the citizens of the capital city of what’s supposed to be a civilized star nation have seen so much bloodshed that they don’t even head for the hills when it starts up all over again.
She shook her head again and watched the red disk of the setting sun dropping
behind the tops of the towers to the west of the Octagon.
Maybe I should decide to take it as a compliment—a sort of comment on their faith in the accuracy of our fire control! She snorted. They probably figure one bunch of politicos is as bad as another. God knows I would, in their place, by now. I wonder if they really care which of us wins, or if they’d just prefer for us to finish one another off for good and get it over with?
She gazed at the setting sun a moment longer, then drew a sharp breath, and turned briskly back to the War Room. There were things to do and people to talk to, and she had a lot to accomplish yet.
I didn’t really expect to make it to noon, she told herself. But I did, and however hard I work at restraining Ivan’s optimism, I really do think he’s right. We’ve got the bastard. He needed to nail us by nightfall, and he hasn’t.
“Sir, you have a com request from Citizen General Speer.”
This time, Oscar Saint-Just didn’t even acknowledge the information. He only reached out and pressed the stud to accept the call.
“Citizen General.” He nodded to the woman on the display, and she nodded back.
“Citizen Chairman.” Saint-Just’s face tightened ever so slightly as someone applied that title to him for the first time. There was a subtle message in Speer’s choice of words, and he wondered if perhaps she might have more of a point than he realized… or chose to admit to himself, at least.
Just how badly do I want Rob’s job? I know that I’ve always told myself that only a madman would want it, but did I really mean it? And if I did, then why aren’t I on the com to McQueen right now, trying to work out some sort of compromise to end this thing without killing any more people? Vengeance for Rob is all well and good, but isn’t it just possible that there’s something else at work here, as well?
