“You know that, and I know that, but does Saint-Just know that?” she returned with a shark-like grin. “And even if he does know, does he care? Bottom line, Ivan, he still has a hell of a lot more firepower planetwide to draw upon than we do. I don’t think he could get through the grid, either, but we might both be wrong, and he only has to get lucky once. Besides, they’re only people, and he’s got plenty more where they came from if he breaks this lot.”
Bukato looked at her for a moment longer, as if he wished that he could disagree with her assessment, then nodded.
“Yes, Ma’am. I’ll pass those orders right away.”
“We’ve got the airstrike and assault echelon organized, Citizen Secretary.”
Saint-Just looked up as another of his senior staffers stepped through the office door to make the report.
“They’ve been fully briefed?” the citizen secretary asked.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Then send them in.”
“Immediately, Sir!”
The staffer hurried away, and Saint-Just looked down at his desk and its sophisticated communications panel once more. He hoped the assault shuttles and sting ships he was about to commit to battle could do the job, just as he hoped their pilots truly accepted that they had no choice but to fire on the other members of the Committee of Public Safety. Whatever happened, the integrity of the state must be maintained. He was in a fight for his own personal survival, for Esther McQueen could never afford to leave him alive after this, any more than he could have afforded to leave her alive. But there was more at stake here than mere survival. McQueen might well prove as effective as a political leader as she had proven as a military leader. In the judgment of history, it was entirely possible that she would be considered a far better head of state than Oscar Saint-Just could ever hope to be. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had killed Rob Pierre. That wherever she might lead the People’s Republic, it would not be to the destination Pierre had chosen, and Rob Pierre had been not simply Saint-Just’s friend, but his chieftain.
Perhaps Esther McQueen had never fully understood that, but it would have changed nothing if she had. For all of his blandness, all of his famous lack of emotion, Oscar Saint-Just had the soul of a feudal clansman, and he would have his vengeance.
“Tango Flight, this is Tango One Lead. The mission is a go. I say again, we are go for the attack.”
Citizen Lieutenant Angelica Constantine closed her eyes in pain as the strike leader’s voice came over the com. She couldn’t believe it. No, that wasn’t right. She could believe it; she simply didn’t want to.
She opened her eyes once more and watched her HUD as the icons began to shift and change. Forty StateSec atmospheric sting ships just like her own formed the true heart of the strike’s power, although a dozen pinnaces would lead the way. She didn’t envy the flight crews of those lead ships. They were individually far more capable—and dangerous—than any sting ship, but that scarcely mattered, because there was virtually no chance that any of them could survive to penetrate the Octagon’s defenses, and their crews knew it. Their true function was simply to draw the defenses’ fire. To distract and confuse the tracking and fire control crews in hopes that a handful of the despised sting ships might get through.
Constantine knew all about the attack plan, and she gave it no more than a twenty percent chance of success. And even that estimate, she knew, might well be wildly over optimistic. The attack had been ordered and organized with ruthless, reckless haste in a desperate effort to get it in while McQueen and her accomplices might still be in the process of securing control of the grid. If they hadn’t gotten control of it, or if their control was still less than complete, then at least some of the attackers might manage to get through. But if they did have full control of it…
Not even the Levelers had dared to challenge the Octagon’s on-site defenses, and she wondered now why Citizen Secretary Saint-Just had never had the defense grid disabled or at least placed under SS control. A lot of people, all too probably including Angelica Constantine, were about to die because he hadn’t, and fear flickered and simmered in her mind like some dark fire.
Yet however frightened she might be, fear explained only a part of the knot of despair resting in her chest like a lump of cold iron. Her husband, Gregory, was also State Security… and assigned to the Octagon security staff. She had no idea if he was even still alive, but whether he was or not wouldn’t change a thing. And it probably didn’t much matter either way. Not really. The Legislaturalists had built the Octagon like a fortress, because that was precisely what it was: the command nexus for all of the Republic’s armed forces, and the central facility charged with the air defense of the Republic’s capital, as well. Tango Flight would do its best to break through and disable at least some of the defense grid’s fire stations with precision guided munitions in hopes of opening a hole for follow-on assault shuttle waves to exploit. Success was unlikely at best, but now that Citizen General Bouchard’s hastily mounted ground assault had turned into a bloody shambles, it would take hours—possibly days—to organize a proper assault out of the wreckage, and God only knew how the situation could change in that much time. McQueen’s coup attempt had to be crushed before still more of the regular armed forces rallied to her, and if this attempt failed, the only way to stop her was to flatten the Octagon around her ears. Which would also mean burying Gregory in the rubble right along with her.
The only redeeming factor was that Angelica would probably be dead even before him.
“Tango Flight, execute!” Tango One Lead barked.
“Here they come, Ma’am.”
Esther McQueen’s raised hand interrupted the latest report from Lieutenant Caminetti, and she turned quickly to the huge main plot at Captain Rubin’s announcement.
Normally, that plot was used to display the locations and status of every unit of the vast web of fortifications and fleet units stationed to protect the Haven System from any foreign attack. Now it showed something which very few of the people in the War Room had ever seen on it, even in drills: a detailed holographic map of the City of Nouveau Paris and a hundred-kilometer radius around it. The map was scabrous with the red blotches of identified threats and a thinner scattering of green friendly units, and she felt a familiar stab of tight-mouthed tension as a deadly cluster of tiny crimson arrowheads appeared upon it.
Her trained gaze identified each of the plot’s icons as readily as someone else might have read a newsfax, and her eyes narrowed.
“Those poor bastards.”
She glanced to her right at the soft regretful murmur, and Ivan Bukato shook his head as her eyes met his.
“We have lock,” someone announced, and McQueen turned her attention back to the plot as sighting circles reached out to entrap the arrowheads.
“They must know they don’t have a prayer,” Bukato said quietly, and she shrugged.
“Of course they don’t,” she agreed absently. “And whoever ordered them in knows it, too. But she might be wrong, so she’s spending them to find out for sure whether or not we managed to secure the grid before some StateSec loyalist could disable it. Or possibly in an effort to distract us from something else.”
Bukato’s eyes flicked once from the plot to the unyielding, almost serene profile of the diminutive woman beside him, and then he returned them to the display with a tiny shiver.
An angry war god smashed his palms together, and the mangled wreckage of a pinnace spewed itself across the smoke-tinged blue skies of Nouveau Paris.
It was not alone. The battle steel hatches of massively armored ground emplacements flicked open like striking serpents, and mass-drivers hurled anti-air missiles out of them at four times the speed of sound. The missiles’ impeller wedges flashed to life as soon as they cleared their launchers, and they howled in on their targets like vengeful demons. The pinnaces leading Oscar Saint-Just’s airstrike never had a chance, and then it was the sting ships’ turn.