“I can’t fault that, Ma’am,” Bukato said, “but I’m afraid he may be just a bit harder to turn than that.”
“You may be right,” she replied much more grimly. “On the other hand, if I screw the muzzle of a pulser far enough into his ear, I think I can convince him to follow me anywhere.”
She smiled at her followers again, and this time there was no humor at all in her expression.
Oscar Saint-Just’s habitually expressionless face was carved granite as he sat in the office just off his emergency HQ and listened to the latest reports.
“Sir, the troops are getting worried!” a citizen brigadier half-blurted as he burst into the Citizen Secretary’s office. “They’re hearing rumors that the Citizen Chairman is—well—”
Saint-Just turned his head, and the panicky report slithered to a sudden stop as the citizen brigadier quailed before those icy, basilisk eyes. The officer swallowed hard, and Saint-Just let him sweat for perhaps fifteen seconds while he held him pinned under his pitiless gaze. Then he spoke, very coldly and precisely.
“The troops will do what they’re told to do, Citizen Brigadier. As will their officers. All of their officers. We are now operating under Case Horatius. You will so inform all unit commanders, and you will also inform them that any measures of summary justice they may feel are necessary are approved in advance. Is that clear?”
“Y-Yes, Sir,” the citizen brigadier said quickly. He turned on his heel and hurried out of the office even more rapidly than he had entered it, and Saint-Just permitted himself a faint, bleak, death’s head grin. The citizen brigadier was an idiot if he hadn’t already figured out that Case Horatius was in effect. Although, in fairness, it might be shock rather than stupidity, for Esther McQueen had managed to take them all by surprise… again.
Saint-Just closed out the background chatter of combat reports and frantic requests for orders and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. What in God’s name had kicked the woman off now? Surely she had to have realized Rob wasn’t about to have her shot before he knew that the Manties and their allies really were on the ropes! Was it simply that she’d hoped to achieve surprise? If so, she’d succeeded, but for all the ferocious efficiency with which the first stage of her coup had been executed, it was obvious to Saint-Just that the follow-up stages were far less solid.
Not that they have to be all that solid, he admitted grimly to himself. The bitch got Rob. A fresh pain of purely personal anguish stabbed at him, and he suppressed it sternly. There was no time for that. Not now. And she’s got all the rest of the Committee in the Octagon with her. If she can get them to sign off on her actions, then—
A buzzer sounded the distinctive signal which informed him that the communication staff manning the secret, hidden command center which Tsakakis and Citizen Captain Russell had hustled him off to had just picked up a transmission they felt had sufficient priority to interrupt whatever else he might be doing. He grimaced at the thought of fresh tidings of still more disaster, but he also lowered his hands and reached out to stab one of the keys on his communications panel. The combat chatter vanished instantly, and his mouth tightened as Esther McQueen’s voice replaced it.
“To all loyal members of the People’s military! This is Citizen Secretary of War McQueen. The Revolution has been betrayed! I have received positive confirmation that Citizen Chairman Pierre has been murdered—murdered by his own State Security ‘bodyguards’ at the direct orders of Oscar Saint-Just! The reports available to me are still unclear as to what could have prompted the Secretary for State Security to commit this heinous crime, but the simultaneous attempt to take myself and all other members of the Committee into custody clearly indicates the existence of a far-reaching and dangerous organization of traitors within State Security. I call upon all loyal members of StateSec to remember that your oaths of loyalty are to the Revolution, the Committee, and to the Citizen Chairman, and not to the personal ambition of a man who has betrayed all of them! I call upon you to resist his illegal orders and his treasonous attempt to seize complete, personal power from the legitimately designated organs of government. Refuse to assist him in this despicable act of treachery and betrayal!
“To the regular branches of the People’s military, I say this. State Security is not your enemy! Only those individuals within it who choose to serve the purposes of a would-be tyrant and dictator are your foes! As you have so valiantly defended the People and the Revolution against outside enemies, so now you must defend them against internal enemies—enemies who are far more deadly than the Manticorans and their puppets because they strike from the shadows like assassins. I call upon you to honor your oath to the service of the People and the Committee of Public Safety!
“This is not a struggle in which ships of the wall have a place. Whatever Oscar Saint-Just may choose to do, we of the legitimate Committee of Public Safety refuse to turn Nouveau Paris into a wasteland of wreckage and bodies. We hold the Octagon, and we will defend it by whatever means are necessary, but we neither request nor will we tolerate nuclear or kinetic strikes within the area of the Capital! Should you be ordered by Saint-Just or his minions to carry out such strikes, you are instructed to refuse those orders, no matter what threats may accompany them.
“What the Committee most urgently requires at this time are additional loyal ground and atmospheric combat troops. I need not tell any of you how powerful the State Security intervention forces in and around Nouveau Paris are. I hope and believe that many of the personnel of those intervention battalions will remember their oaths to the Committee and refuse to participate in this naked effort to suppress and destroy all that Citizen Chairman Pierre fought so long and so hard to accomplish. But it must be anticipated that many others in those battalions will accept the illegal orders of those officers who have allied themselves with the traitor Saint-Just. The defenses of the Octagon are strong, but we cannot resist a mass attack out of our own resources for an extended period. It is essential to the survival of the Committee that loyal forces relieve the Octagon and escort the civilian members of the Committee to safety. I therefore call upon all Marine and Planetary Defense officers and charge you, as Secretary of War and in the name of the legitimate members of the Committee of Public Safety, to move at once to the relief of the Octagon and the suppression of any and all forces loyal to the traitor Oscar Saint-Just! In this moment of—”
Saint-Just stabbed the communications button again, and this time his expression was a vicious snarl as McQueen’s voice died.
She was good, he admitted. Every word vibrated with sincerity, passion, and outrage. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if even some of his own StateSec people believed her, and he had no doubt at all that a large majority of the regular military would want to believe her. How could they want anything else, when she was the one who had led them to victory and he was the one who had ordered countless of their fellows and their fellows’ families executed? And with Rob dead, they could believe her if they so chose. However senior to her his membership on the Committee might be, both of them were simply “citizen secretaries.” She had as great a claim to legitimacy as he did… at least for anyone looking from the outside into the chaos and confusion which she had sown across Nouveau Paris. Worse, she did indeed have every surviving member of the Committee in the Octagon with her, and he and Rob had spent years stamping out any hint of defiance among the Committee’s membership. Now McQueen had physical control of all those sheep, and Saint-Just had no doubt at all that she could… convince at least the majority of them into signing off on her version of what had happened. As for any of them who declined, he was sure it would turn out that they had been tragically murdered by traitorous StateSec units before McQueen could rescue them from his murderous minions.