“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?
Not that it mattered.
“I am ready to proceed with Bank Shot,” Speer went on formally, and Saint-Just nodded once more.
“Then do so,” he said calmly, and fifteen kilometers away from his office, Citizen General Rachel Speer pushed a button in her own command room. A signal flashed out from that button over a secure landline connection that no one outside the innermost circles of State Security had ever even suspected existed. It reached a relay hidden in a subbasement of the Octagon, and from there it flicked to its final destination.
The fifty kiloton nuclear demolition charge whose presence not even Erasmus Fontein had known about detonated, and the Octagon, Fontein, the entire surviving membership of the Committee of Public Safety, Ivan Bukato, and Esther McQueen and her entire staff became an expanding ball of flame in the heart of Nouveau Paris.
The thermal pulse flashed outward, followed moments later by the blast front itself, and the towers around the Octagon took the full fury of their impact with absolutely no warning. Many of the inhabitants of those towers had fled hours before; the majority had not. They had taken cover, but the towers were over a kilometer in height and half a kilometer in diameter. Their mass and bulk had seemed sufficient to protect those sheltering deep at their cores, and so they had been… so long as the combatants restricted themselves to chemical explosives.
They were not proof against the cataclysmic eruption of fusion-born plasma in their very midst, and the fireball of the Octagon’s destruction enveloped them like the fiery breath of Hell itself.
At least those man-made mountains of ceramacrete were tough enough and huge enough to channel the blast. They acted like a breakwater, protecting the city beyond them with their own deaths, and their sacrifice was not in vain, for “only” one-point-three million citizens of Nouveau Paris perished with them.
Oscar Saint-Just’s office was two-thirds of the way across the city from the Octagon, and the office itself lay at the very heart of its own tower. Not even the eye-tearing brilliance of a nuclear detonation could penetrate that much alloy and ceramacrete, but the entire stupendous edifice trembled as if in terror as the shockwave rolled over it. The deeply buried landlines of the government’s secure communications system were fully hardened against the EMP of the explosion, and Rachel Speer’s image on his com display didn’t even flicker.
Nor did her gaze, as she looked out of the display into his eyes.
“Detonation confirmed… Citizen Chairman,” she said softly.