Changer of Worlds

out of principle or out of self-preservation, now does it?”

“No, Ma’am, it doesn’t. Not in the short term, at least.”

“In that case, I think I will go have another little chat with him. Mind the store for me, Ivan.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

* * *

“Get me Citizen General Speer on a maximum security line,” Saint-Just said. His voice was almost as emotionless as it had been at the very beginning, but only almost, and one or two of the taut-faced, anxious officers staffing his HQ glanced at one another.

“Yes, Sir,” his com officer said quickly. “Where would you like to take it?”

“At my desk,” the citizen secretary replied, and his chief of staff quickly gathered up the other officers with his eyes and shooed them all down to the far end of the room.

Saint-Just hardly noticed. He sat square-shouldered behind his desk, and waited while the communications system connected him to the woman who commanded every State Security trooper in the city of Nouveau Paris. It didn’t take very long, but the small handful of seconds seemed endless and yet all too fleeting. Then his com’s display blinked alive with Rachel Speer’s strong-boned face.

The pickup at Speer’s end was adjusted for wide focus. He could see the hustle and bustle of her own staff in the background, and even now, one corner of his mouth tried to quirk into a smile. There was no chance at all that she’d simply forgotten to narrow the field of view. She wanted him to see all of that energetic effort… and to remember it when the time came to assign blame for this unpleasant afternoon.

“Citizen Secretary,” she greeted him. “I’d like to say it was a pleasure to see you, Sir. Under the circumstances, however, I doubt that you’d believe me if I did say it.”

“As ever, Rachel, you remain a mistress of understatement.” Saint-Just’s voice was poison dry, and Speer’s face went instantly blank. There were several different ways his reply could have been taken, and it was obvious that she didn’t much care for most of them.

Saint-Just let her worry about it for a moment, but he didn’t really have time for such minor matters, and he cleared his throat. The small, harsh sound wasn’t loud, but Speer’s eyes narrowed as she heard it.

“The reason I’m screening you,” the citizen secretary said flatly, “is that I’ve decided that we cannot permit this situation to drag out any further. Citizen Colonel Yazov and Citizen General Maitland’s defections were bad enough, but now Citizen Brigadier Azhari has gone over to McQueen, as well… and he appears to have taken his entire HQ with him.”

“Sir, I assure you that I had absolutely no reason to suspect that Azhari was even considering such a betrayal!” Speer broke in. “I’ll have his family picked up immediately, and—”

“I didn’t say it was your fault, Rachel,” Saint-Just said flatly, “and assuming that you and I both survive, there will be time to deal with his actions later. I only mentioned them to make the point that we can’t afford to delay any longer. So I am authorizing and directing you to execute Bank Shot immediately.”

Citizen General Speer’s expression tightened, and her eyes widened ever so slightly. Saint-Just watched her reaction carefully, and he was rather reassured by what he saw. He’d been half-afraid that she might object or argue, but she’d obviously had time enough to realize that Bank Shot was a possibility from the outset. And it was equally obvious that whatever she thought of the notion, she was not about to risk anything which might be construed as less than total loyalty at this particular moment in the history of the People’s Republic. Still…

“Sir, have you considered warning McQueen about the possibility of Bank Shot?” she asked very carefully.

“I have. And rejected it,” Saint-Just said flatly. He held her eyes unflinchingly, then waved one hand in a small gesture. “The woman is a realist, Rachel, so you might be right; if we tell her what we can do to her, she might at least try to negotiate some settlement. But we’d also have to tell her how Bank Shot works if we expected her to believe us, and we can’t risk the possibility of her stalling just long enough to locate the hole in her defenses and plug it.”

Speer was silent for another ten seconds, then nodded.

“Yes, Sir. I understand,” she said after only the briefest pause. “I’ll begin the evacuation at once, and —”

“I don’t think you did understand me fully, Citizen General,” Saint-Just interrupted in a voice whose tone of icy calm surprised even him. “I am instructing you to execute Bank Shot immediately. There will be no evacuation.”

“But, Sir! I mean, I realize the situation is critical, but we’re talking about—”

Speer failed to keep the consternation out of her expression, and Saint-Just saw something very like horror in her eyes, but he cut her off brusquely.

“I understand precisely what we’re talking about, Citizen General,” he said, still in that icy voice. “As I just pointed out, however, whatever else she may be, McQueen is no fool. If she sees us evacuating any towers outside the immediate vicinity of the Octagon, she’s entirely capable of realizing what’s coming just as if we’d warned her intentionally. Which would put the ball in her court, if she chose to go back on the air. What if she figures it out and appeals to Capital Fleet to prevent it?” He shook his head. “No. There’s no way of knowing where things might go, so I will repeat myself once, and once only. There will be no evacuation. Is that understood, Citizen General Speer?”

Rachel Speer opened her mouth, then closed it again. For perhaps three seconds, she said nothing at all, but then she nodded.

“Yes, Sir, Citizen Secretary. I understand.”

“—so I believe it’s time that you reconsider your position, Citizen Commissioner,” Esther McQueen said calmly. She sipped coffee from the Navy cup in her hand and smiled ever so slightly as Erasmus Fontein drank from a matching cup. She found herself forced to genuinely admire the people’s commissioner’s air of calm composure, and she was determined to appear just as composed.

“You manage to make it sound so reasonable, Citizen Secretary,” the StateSec man observed after a moment. “Unfortunately, Citizen Secretary Saint-Just might not find it quite so sensible of me.”

“Oh, come now!” McQueen chided. “You know as well as I do how little legitimacy Saint-Just can command on his own. I have all of the rest of the Committee here in the Octagon, and two-thirds of them have already agreed to publicly support me. StateSec officers are even beginning to come over—not in enormous numbers yet, perhaps, but to come over. More to the point, perhaps, Capital Fleet hasn’t made a move. They may not have opened fire on their StateSec watchdogs, but Saint-Just hasn’t been able to get them to fire on us, either, and you know what that means as well as I do. It’s been over fifteen hours now, and he hasn’t been able to suppress us, and he’s the one whose support base is eroding out from under him. When the rest of the Committee comes in on my side, he’s finished.”

Fontein sipped more coffee, buying time to think before he responded, and she was content to let him. Both of them knew how critical it was for Saint-Just to defeat the challenge she represented quickly. That would have been vital under any circumstances, but with Rob Pierre dead it became even more crucial to Saint-Just’s hope of survival to crush any challenge to his own authority quickly. As the Revolution’s watchdog, Oscar Saint-Just was undoubtedly the most hated single individual in the entire People’s Republic of Haven. If any alternative to him even looked as if it might be viable, his hold on power would become far worse than merely precarious.

Fontein lowered his cup and stared into it for several seconds, then raised his head and looked squarely into McQueen’s eyes.

“You might be right about that,” he said finally. “But Oscar may just surprise you yet. And even if he doesn’t, even if you actually manage to pull it off, what in God’s name pushed you into trying it in the first place? My God, woman! You may pull it off, but you had to be insane to risk everything on one throw of the dice this way! And please don’t try to tell me that you were ‘ready’ for all of this. I’ve been assigned to you too long not to recognize when you’re improvising as you go along.”

“Of course I’m improvising,” she told him. “I didn’t have much choice when you and Saint-Just decided I had to go, but I won’t pretend that I had all of my own plans firmly in place.” She shook her head. “I never thought