"Now, Darinka. Try again."
"Mr. Vice President," tears cut startlingly white tracks in the soot and grime on her pretty face, "these weren't the only bombs."
"What?" He stared at her. He couldn't have heard her correctly.
"All over the Mall, Mr. Vice President," she told him, reaching out in her distress to grip him by the upper arms and shake him. "The Stock Exchange. First Planetary Bank. The Sekarkic Square subway station. They're everywhere! We have hundreds of dead and wounded, Sir— hundreds of them!"
"All right, Darinka," he told her, although a part of him sneered that it would never be all right again. "All right, I understand. I'd better get over to Civil Defense. Do you have your official com?"
"Yes, Sir," she said with almost pathetic eagerness, grasping at anything useful she could do.
"All right. Listen, the regular civilian circuits are jammed, and I lost my com somewhere between here and the Chamber. So get on yours. Contact General Suka. Tell him that on my instructions he's to declare martial law. Do it now; I'll get the formal, signed proclamation to him as soon as I can. Then get hold of Colonel Basaricek, at Police HQ. Give her the same message. And tell both of them I'm going to Civil Defense, and that we'll use the com room there as our headquarters. And tell the General he'd better start bringing in emergency personnel from other cities. We're going to need them."
"Mr. Vice President, you'd better see this."
Rajkovic turned away from yet another hoarse-voiced, exhausted conference. Six hours had elapsed since the horrendous attack, and the news just kept getting worse. According to Brigita Basaricek, the commanding officer of the Kornatian National Police, the count of confirmed dead had already topped five hundred, with twice that many injured. The missing numbered in the thousands, but some of them— most of them, please God! -were probably simply lost in the confusion, not buried under the rubble.
Probably.
"What?" he snapped at the aide whose name he'd never learned. He regretted his tone the moment the words were out of his mouth, but the young man didn't even seem to notice.
"It's the HD, Sir. There's a message from someone claiming responsibility."
Rajkovic found himself back in the communications room without any conscious memory of having moved. The place was crowded, uniformed and civilian personnel standing motionless, staring at the HD in total, shocked silence. They didn't even notice he was there, until he started elbowing his way through the crowd like the aggressive soccer wing he'd once been.
They got out of his way when they finally realized who he was, and he found himself in the front row, staring up at the display with the rest of them. Staring at a face he knew well, someone who had once been a close political ally... and an even closer friend.
"— responsibility in the name of the Freedom Alliance of Kornati. We regret that we have been driven to this extremity, but we will not turn aside from the road we have chosen. The collaborationist regime of President Tonkovic and her sycophants will not be allowed to sign away the sovereignty of our home world. The indecently wealthy traitors whose corruption and greed have inflicted so much poverty, so much suffering, upon so many Kornatians, will profit no further from their crimes. Their plan to sell our planet to the highest bidder to protect their own obscene fortunes will not succeed. And the off-worlders who seek to steal our souls along with our rightful wealth, our liberties, and our rights as freeborn citizens of the sovereign Planet of Kornati, will find only death on our soil. The Freedom Alliance is the avenging sword of the betrayed people of the Split System, and it will not be sheathed while a single traitor clings to power on our world! Let those who love freedom rally to us-and let those who worship slavery fear us!"
She stared out of the HD, dark eyes blazing with a messianic light, and her voice rang with absolute conviction and sincerity. It came to Vuk Rajkovic in that moment that she'd never before found her true place. Not in the electoral fray, not in efforts to reform a corrupt political system, not in the thrust and parry of parliamentary debate. Not even in the white-hot crucible of the annexation campaign. But she'd found it now. This was the struggle to which she could give all she was, all she believed in-all she possessed or would ever possess. He saw it blazing in her face as he looked at her, and he turned to Colonel Basaricek.
"Find that bitch, Brigita," he said harshly. "Find her... and kill her ."
Chapter Fifteen
"— with the Honorable Delegate from Marian." The heavyset speaker stood at the podium, looking out over the assembled delegates of the Constitutional Convention and shook his head. "I have no doubt of her sincerity, nor do I question the probity of her motives," he continued gravely. "Yet the fact remains that she is proposing to barter away ancient, hard-won liberties in the name of political expediency. I cannot support such a proposal, and the delegation from New Tuscany regretfully votes in the negative."
Henri Krietzmann's expression gave no hint of his emotions. That sort of impassivity didn't come easily to him, but he'd had a crash course in it over the past endless weeks here on Flax. And he supposed Bernardus and Joachim were right. There was no point trying to hide what he felt when everyone here knew exactly why Dresden had sent him to the Convention, but it was a pragmatic necessity to appear impartial whenever he held the Convention's gavel. And, perhaps even more to the point, he had a moral responsibility to be impartial in the fashion in which he exercised his authority on the Convention's floor.
He watched Andrieaux Yvernau leave the microphone and return to his own seat, and a corner of his mind noted the rebellious expressions on a couple of the other New Tuscany delegates. It would appear the delegation's unanimity was less pronounced than Yvernau would have preferred. But it was still far more so than Krietzmann liked. Unlike Dresden, where hardscrabble -poverty was the great unifying condition, New Tuscany had its own exorbitantly wealthy (by Verge standards) upperclass, like Spindle and at least half of the Cluster's other systems. Yvernau was probably almost as rich as Samiha Lababibi. As such, the delegation chief faced both enormous opportunity and great risk once the annexation went through, and he wanted all the safeguards he could get. A few of the other New Tuscan delegates, without his vast personal fortune to protect, were growing impatient with him. Unfortunately, the delegation, like the New Tuscan government itself, was overwhelmingly dominated by the local oligarchs. It was highly unlikely any of the others would openly break with Yvernau. In fact, they were under binding instructions to follow his directives, which had put New Tuscany firmly into Aleksandra Tonkovic's political pocket.
Krietzmann waited until Yvernau settled back into his chair, then looked at the Christmas tree of blinking attention lights on his display.
"The Chair recognizes the Honorable Delegate from Tillerman," he said, gesturing for the woman in question to take the microphone.
"Thank you, Mr. President," Yolanda Harper, the Tillerman System's chief delegate said, standing up but never moving away from her seat, "but I'll keep this brief, and I don't think I'll need a mike to make m'self understood." The lanky, brown-haired, weathered woman turned to face the other delegations and threw up one calloused, farmer's hand in disgust. "That last was just about the biggest load of shit I've heard or seen since the last fertilizer shuttle arrived at my place this spring," she said in her blunt, hard-syllabled voice. "The Tillerman delegation unanimously endorses the resolution, and-"
The Chamber door flew open, and Krietzmann looked up in reflex outrage. The Convention's closed sessions weren't to be disturbed, and certainly not in such abrupt, unceremonious fashion! He opened his mouth to say something sharp, then paused. Maxwell Devereaux, the Convention Sergeant at Arms, wasn't trying to prevent the interruption; he was hurrying down the aisle from the open door in front of the haggard-faced, uniformed messenger, and his expression sent a sudden icy chill through Krietzmann's blood.
"I'm sorry, Henri-I mean, Mr. President," Devereaux said hoarsely. "I know we're not supposed to, but-" He drew a deep breath, and shook himself, like a man who'd just been punched in the gut. "This is Major Toboc. He just arrived with a dispatch from Split. I... think you'd better view it."
It was hard to tell which of the faces in the private conference room was most ashen.
Henri Krietzmann sat at the head of the table, with Samiha Lababibi at the opposite end. Joachim Alquezar sat to Krietzmann's left, facing Aleksandra Tonkovic across the tabletop, and silence was a cold, leaden weight, crushing down on them all. Finally, Krietzmann cleared his throat.