The Service of the Sword woh-4

by David Weber

  The Special Investigator glanced at Jean-Pierre. "Citizen Commodore Ogilve also seems to have excelled in his duties. I gather he's the one you normally assign to leading the actual patrols."

  The sudden switch to praise startled Ogilve. It was all the more disconcerting because the words were spoken in exactly the same cold tone of voice. Not even that, Jean-Pierre realized. It wasn't cold so much as emotionless. Cachat just seemed to be one of those incredibly rare people who really were indifferent to anything beyond their duties.

  From the expression on her face, he thought Genevieve was just as confused as he was.

  "Well. I'm glad to hear it, of course, but . . ." Her face settled stonily. "I assume this is a preface to questioning my loyalty."

  "Do you react emotionally to everything, Citizen Admiral? I find that peculiar in an officer as senior as yourself." Cachat planted his hands on the desk, the fingers spread. Somehow, the young man managed to project the calm assurance of age over an admiral with three or four times his lifespan. "The fact that you were an admiral under the Legislaturalist regime naturally brought you under suspicion. How could it be otherwise? However, careful investigation concluded that you had been made one of the scapegoats for the Legislaturalist disaster at Hancock, whereupon your name was cleared and you were assigned to a responsible new post. Since then, no suspicion has been cast upon you."

  Seemingly possessed of a lemming instinct, Genevieve wouldn't let it go. "So what? After McQueen's madness—not to mention Jamka found murdered—"

  "Enough." Cachat's fingers lifted from the desk, though the heels of his palms remained firmly planted. The gesture was the equivalent of a less emotionally controlled man throwing out his arms in frustration.

  "Enough," he repeated. "You simply can't be that stupid, Citizen Admiral. McQueen's treachery makes it all the more imperative that the People's Republic finds naval officers it can trust. Do I need to remind you that Citizen Chairman Saint-Just saw fit to call Citizen Admiral Theismann to the capital in order to assume overall command of the Navy?"

  The mention of Thomas Theismann settled Ogilve's nerves a bit. Jean-Pierre had never met the man, but like all long-serving officers in the Navy he knew of Theismann's reputation. Apolitical, supremely competent as a military leader—and with none of Esther McQueen's personal ambitiousness. Theismann's new position as head of the Navy emphasized a simple fact of life: no matter how suspicious and ruthless State Security might be, they had to rely on the Navy in the end. No one else had a chance of fending off the advancing forces of the Star Kingdom. The armed forces directly under StateSec control were enough to maintain the regime in power against internal opposition. But White Haven and his Eighth Fleet would go through them like a knife through butter—and Oscar Saint-Just knew that just as well as anyone.

  Genevieve seemed to be settling down now. To Ogilve's relief, she even issued an apology to Cachat.

  "Sorry for getting personal, Citizen Special Investigator." The apology was half-mumbled, but Cachat seemed willing enough to accept it and let the whole matter pass.

  "Good," he stated. "As for the matter of Jamka's murder, my personal belief is that the affair will prove in the end to be nothing more than a sordid private matter. But my responsibilities require me to prioritize any possible political implications. It was for that reason that I had Citizen Commissioner Radamacher and Citizen Captain Justice placed under arrest. Just as it will be for that reason that I am going to carry through a systematic reshuffling of all StateSec assignments here in La Martine Sector."

  The StateSec officers in the room stiffened a bit, hearing that last sentence. Cachat seemed not to notice, although Jean-Pierre spotted what might have been a slight tightening of the Special Investigator's lips.

  "Indeed so," Cachat added forcefully. "Running parallel to an overly close relationship between StateSec and the Navy here, there's also been altogether too much of a separation of responsibilities within State Security itself. Very unhealthy. It reminds me of the caste preoccupations of the Legislaturalists. Some are always assigned comfortable positions here on the capital ships in orbit at La Martine"—his eyes glanced about the compartment, as if scrutinizing the little luxuries which he had ordered removed—"while others are always assigned to long and difficult patrols on smaller ships."

  His eyes stopped ranging the bulkheads and settled on the StateSec officers. "That practice now comes to an end."

  Jean-Pierre Ogilve had occasionally wondered what Moses had sounded like, returning from the mountain with his stone tablets. Now he knew. Ogilve had to stifle a smile. The expressions on the faces of the superdreadnoughts' officers were priceless. Just so, he was certain, had the idol-worshippers prancing around the Golden Calf welcomed the prophet down from the mountain.

  "Comes—to—an—end." Cachat repeated the words, seeming to savor each and every one of them.

  3

  Ironically, the cabin which Yuri Radamacher was taken to by the guards after he left Cachat's presence was larger and less austere than his own aboard the commodore's flagship. That was always one of the advantages to serving aboard an SD, where living space was far more ample. This didn't quite qualify as a "stateroom"—at a guess, some nameless StateSec lieutenant had been ousted to make room for him—but it was still a more spacious cabin than the one Yuri had occupied aboard Ogilve's PNS Chartres.

  Still and all, it was only a ship cabin. After the guards left—locking the door behind them, needless to say—it didn't take Yuri more than five minutes to examine it completely. And most of that time was pure dithering; the psychological self-protection of a man trying to keep the little shrieks of terror in the back of his mind from overwhelming him.

  Soon enough, however, he could dither no more. So, not having any idea what the future held in store for him, Yuri sagged into the compartment's one small armchair and tried to examine his prospects as objectively as possible.

  The prospects were . . . not good. They rarely were, for a StateSec officer placed under arrest by StateSec itself. Even the fig leaf of a trial before a People's Court would be dispensed with. State Security kept its dirty linen secret. Summary investigation. Summary trial. Often enough, summary execution.

  On the plus side, while he and Admiral Chin and Commodore Ogilve had become a very close team over the past few years—exactly the sort of thing State Security did not like to see happening between naval officers and the StateSec political commissioners assigned to oversee them—they had always been careful to maintain the formalities in public.

  Also on the plus side, while they had received vague feelers from Admiral Esther McQueen, they had been careful to keep their distance. In truth, they never had belonged to McQueen's conspiracy.

  On the other hand . . .

  On the minus side, there wasn't much doubt which way the admiral and Jean-Pierre and Yuri would have swung, in the event that McQueen had succeeded in her scheme. None of them particularly trusted McQueen. But when the alternative was Oscar Saint-Just, the old saw "better the devil you know than the devil you don't" just didn't hold any water. Anybody would be better than Saint-Just.

  He tried to rally the plus side again. It was also true, after all, that they had never responded to McQueen's feelers with anything that could by any reasonable stretch of the term be characterized as "plotting."

  Or so, at least, Yuri tried to tell himself. The problem was that he'd been an officer in StateSec for years. So he knew full well that Saint-Just's definition of "reasonable characterization" was . . . elastic at best. The fact was that there had been some informal communications between McQueen and Admiral Chin over the past year or so, which Ogilve and Radamacher had been privy to. And if the messages sent back and forth had been vague in the extreme, the simple fact of their existence alone would be enough to damn them if State Security found out.

  If they found out. Yuri tried to find some comfort in the very good possibility that they wouldn't. The communications had always been verbal,
of course, transmitted by one of McQueen's couriers. And always the same one—a woman named Jessica Hackett, who had been one of the officers on McQueen's staff. True, StateSec was superb at forcing information out of its prisoners. But there was at least a fifty/fifty chance that Hackett had been one of the many officers on McQueen's staff who had died when Saint-Just destroyed McQueen's command post with a hidden nuclear device. Not even a State Security interrogator could squeeze information out of radioactive debris.

  Still, that was small comfort. Yuri knew perfectly well that StateSec would be on a rampage after McQueen's coup attempt. Heads were going to fall, right and left, and lots of them. The only reason Saint-Just had been relatively restrained thus far was simply because the critical state of the war with the Star Kingdom made it necessary for him to keep the disruption of the Navy to a minimum. But, as with everything else, Oscar Saint-Just's definition of "relatively restrained" was what you'd expect to find in a psychopath's dictionary.

  Yuri sighed, wondering for the millionth time how the revolution had gone so completely sour. As a longtime oppositionist to the Legislaturalist regime—which had landed him for three years in an Internal Security prison, from which he'd only been freed by Rob Pierre's overthrow of the government—he'd greeted the new regime with enthusiasm.

  Enough enthusiasm, even, to have volunteered for State Security. He chuckled drily, remembering the difficulty with which an inveterate dissident in his forties had struggled through the newly established StateSec academy, surrounded by other cadets most of whom were fiery young zealots like Victor Cachat.

  Victor Cachat. What a piece of work. Radamacher tried to imagine how any man that young could be that self-assured, that confident in his own righteousness. So much so that in less than a day Cachat had succeeded in intimidating the naval officers of an entire task force and the officers of two StateSec superdreadnoughts.

  Had Yuri himself ever been like that? He didn't think so, even in his rebellious youth. But he really couldn't remember anymore. The long years which had followed Pierre's coup d'etat, as he slowly came to understand the horror and brutality lurking under the new regime's promise, had leached most of his idealism away. For a long time now, Yuri had simply been trying to survive—that, and, as much as possible, bury himself in the challenges posed by his assignment in La Martine Sector. Other, more ambitious StateSec officers might have been frustrated by being posted for so long in what was a political backwater, from the standpoint of career advancement. But Yuri had found La Martine a refuge, especially as he came to realize that the two naval officers he worked most closely with were kindred spirits. And, slowly, La Martine began to attract and keep other StateSec officers of his temperament.

  They had done a good job in La Martine, damnation. And Yuri had found satisfaction in the doing. It had been one way—perhaps the only way—he could salvage what was left of his youthful spirit. Whether the Committee of Public Safety appreciated it or not, he and Chin and Ogilve had turned La Martine into a source of strength for the Republic. Despite its remote location, for the past several years La Martine had been one of the half-dozen most economically productive sectors for the People's Republic of Haven.

  He wiped his face. And so what? Radamacher knew full well that Saint-Just and his ilk considered competence a feather, measured against the stone of political reliability.

  Victor Cachat. It would be his decision, now. The powers of a StateSec Special Investigator, in a distant provincial sector like La Martine, were well-nigh limitless in practice. The only person who could have served as a check against Cachat would have been Robert Jamka, the senior People's Commissioner in the sector.

  But Jamka was dead, and Radamacher was fairly certain that Saint-Just would be in no hurry to name a replacement for him. La Martine was not high on Saint-Just's priority list, being so far away from the war front. So long as Saint-Just was satisfied that Cachat was conducting the investigation with sufficient zeal and rigor, he'd let the young maniac have his way.

  There was something ludicrous anyway about the idea of Robert Jamka serving as a "check" to anyone. Jamka had been a sadist and a sexual pervert. As well ask Beelzebub to rein in Belial.

  And so the day wore on, as Yuri Radamacher sank deeper and deeper into despondency. By the time he finally dragged himself to his bed and fell asleep, the only thing he was wondering any longer was whether Cachat would offer him the honorable alternative of suicide to execution.

  He wouldn't, of course. That had been the tradition of the Legislaturalist regime's Internal Security. Part of the "elitist privilege" which StateSec and its minions were determined to root out. None more so than men like Victor Cachat. Cachat's diction couldn't be faulted, but Yuri had had no difficulty detecting the traces of a Dolist accent in his speech. A man from Havenite society's lowest layers, now risen to power, filled with slum bitterness and rancor.

  4

  He was roused by Cachat himself, some hours later. The Special Investigator came into the cabin in the middle of the night, accompanied by a guard, and shook Radamacher out of his sleep.

  "Get up," he commanded. "Take a quick shower, if need be. We have things to discuss."

  The tone of voice was cold, the words curt; so much Yuri took for granted. But he was well nigh astonished by Cachat's offer to allow him time to shower. And he found himself wondering, as he did so, why Cachat was accompanied by a Marine guard instead of one from State Security.

  For that matter, where had Cachat even found a Marine on a StateSec SD? Except for the rare instances when suppressing a widespread rebellion was required, State Security normally provided its own contingent of ground troops for duty aboard its ships. Saint-Just didn't trust the Marines any more than he did the Navy, and he wasn't about to allow large bodies of men armed and trained in the use of hand weapons aboard his precious StateSec superdreadnoughts.

  He found out as soon as he stepped out of the shower stall, his hair still damp, and quickly got dressed.

  Cachat was now sitting in Yuri's armchair. A pile of record chips was spread out on the small table next to him. Not official chips, but the kind used for personal records.

  "Were you aware of Jamka's perversions?" demanded Cachat. His hand gestured toward the chips. "I spent two of the most unpleasant hours of my life examining these."

  Yuri hesitated. Cachat's tone of voice was always cold, but now it was positively icy. As if the man was trying to restrain a boiling fury by layering it with an official glacier. Instinctively, Yuri understood he was standing on the edge of a crevasse. One false step . . .

  "Of course," he said abruptly. "Everybody was."

  "Why was it not reported to headquarters on Nouveau Paris?"

  Can he be that much of a babe in the woods?

  Something of his puzzlement must have shown. For only the second time since he'd met Cachat, the young man's face was filled with anger.

  "Don't bother using the excuse of Tresca, damnation. I'm well aware that sadists and perverts have been tolerated—whether I approve of it or not, and I don't—on prison detail. But this is a task force of the People's Republic! Officially, on armed duty in time of war. The behavior of a deviant like Jamka posed an obvious security risk! Especially one who was also a sheer madman!"

  Glaring, Cachat picked up one of the chips and brandished it like a prosecutor holding up the murder weapon before a jury. "This one records the torture and murder of a naval rating!"

  Yuri felt the blood drain from his face. He'd heard rumors of what went on in Jamka's private quarters down on the planet, true. But, from the habit of years, he'd ignored the rumors and written off the more extravagant ones to the inflation inevitable to any hearsay. Truth be told, like Admiral Chin, a large part of Radamacher had been thankful for Jamka's secret perversions. It kept the bastard preoccupied and out of Yuri's hair. As long as Jamka kept his private habits away from the task force, Radamacher had minded his own business. It was dangerous—very dangerous—to pry into the priva
te life of a StateSec officer as highly ranked as Robert Jamka. Who had been, after all, Radamacher's own superior.

  "Good God."

  "There is no God," snapped Cachat. "Don't let me hear you use such language again. And answer my question—why didn't you report it?"

  Yuri groped for words. There was something about the youngster's sheer fanaticism that just disarmed his own cynicism. He realized, if he'd had any doubts before, that Cachat was a True Believer. One of those frightening people who, if they did not take personal advantage of their own power, did not hesitate for an instant to punish anyone who failed to live up to their own political standards.

  "I didn't—" He took a breath of air. "I was not aware of any such murder. What went on dirtside—I mean, I kept an eye on him—so did Chin—when he was aboard the admiral's flagship—or anywhere in the fleet—which wasn't too often, he was lax about his duties, spent most of his time either on the SDs or on the planet—"

  I'm babbling like an idiot.

  "That's a lie," stated Cachat flatly. "The disappearance of Third Class Missile Tech Caroline Quedilla was reported to you five months ago. I found it in your records. You did a desultory investigation and reported her 'absent without leave, presumed to have deserted.' "

  The name jogged Radamacher's memory. "Yes, I remember the case. But she disappeared while on shore leave—it happens, now and then—and . . ."

  He forgot Cachat's warning. "Oh, God," he whispered. "After I did the first set of checks, Jamka told me to drop the investigation. He said he had more important things for me to do than waste time on a routine naval desertion case."