Echoes Of Honor

drafting of Pritchart’s official StateSec evaluations of Giscard had become an even more ticklish and delicate task following their return from Silesia. Striking exactly the right note to deflect blame for the commerce raiding operation’s failure from him by emphasizing his military skill while simultaneously remaining in character as his distrustful guardian had been excruciatingly hard. As far as they had been able to tell, Oscar Saint-Just and his senior analysts had continued to rely solely on her reports, but there’d been no way for them to be positive of that, and it had certainly been possible that Saint-Just had someone else watching both of them to provide an independent check on her version of events.

Now, at last, however, they could breathe a sigh of at least tentative relief, for they would never have been given their current orders if Pritchart’s superiors had cherished even a shred of suspicion as to their actual relationship. That didn’t mean they could let their guards down or be one whit less convincing in their public roles, for StateSec routinely placed lower level informers aboard Navy ships. At the moment, all of those informers were reporting to Pritchart—they thought. But it was possible, perhaps even probable, that there were at least one or two independent observers she knew nothing about, and even those she did know about might bypass her with a report if they came to suspect how close to Giscard she actually was.

Yet for all that, shipboard duty offered a degree of control over their exposure which had been completely and nerve-wrackingly lacking since their return from Silesia.

'That Joubert is an even scarier piece of work than I expected,' Giscard remarked after a moment, and Pritchart smiled thinly.

'Oh, he is that,' she agreed. 'But he’s also the best insurance policy we’ve got. Your objections to him were a work of art, too—exactly the right blend of ‘professional reservations’ and unspoken suspicion. Saint-Just loved them, and you should have seen his eyes just glow when I ‘insisted’ on nominating Joubert for your chief of staff, anyway. And he does seem to know his business.'

'In technical terms, yes,' Giscard said. He leaned back, his arm still around her, and she rested her head on his chest. 'I’m more than a little concerned over how he’s going to impact on the staff’s chemistry, though. MacIntosh, at least, already figures him for an informer, I think. And Franny... she doesn’t trust him, either.'

'I’ll say!' Pritchart snorted. 'She watches her mouth around him almost as carefully as she watches it around me! '

'Which is only prudent of her,' Giscard agreed soberly, and she nodded with more than a trace of unhappiness.

'I realize he’s going to be a problem for you, Javier,' she said after a moment, 'but I’ll put pressure on him from my side to ‘avoid friction’ if I have to. And at least he’ll be making any reports to me. Knowing who the informer is is half the battle; surely controlling where his information goes is the other! And picking him over your ‘protests’ can’t have hurt my credibility with StateSec.'

'I know, I know.' He sighed. 'And don’t think for a moment that I’m ungrateful, either. But if we’re going to make this work—and I think McQueen is right; Icarus does have the potential to exercise a major effect on the war—then I’ve got to be able to rely on my command team. I’m not too worried about my ability to work around Joubert if I have to, but everyone else on the staff is junior to him. He could turn into a choke point we can’t afford once the shooting starts.'

'If he does, I’ll remove him,' Pritchart told him after a moment. 'I can’t possibly do it yet, though. You have to be reasonable and—'

'Oh, hush!' Giscard kissed her hair again and made his voice determinedly light. 'I’m not asking you to do a thing about him yet, silly woman! You know me. I fret about things ahead of time so they don’t sneak up on me when the moment comes. And you’re absolutely right about one thing; he’s a marvelous bit of cover for both of us.'

'And especially for me,' she agreed quietly, and his arm tightened around her in an automatic fear reaction.

How odd, a corner of his mind thought. Here I am, subject to removal at StateSec’s whim, knowing dozens of other admirals have already been shot for 'treason against the people'— mainly because 'the People’s' rulers gave them orders no one could have carried out successfully—and I’m worried to death over the safety of the woman StateSec chose to spy on me!

There were times when Javier Giscard wondered if learning that Eloise Pritchart was a most unusual people’s commissioner had been a blessing or a curse, for his life had been so much simpler when he could regard any minion of StateSec as an automatic enemy. Not that he would ever shed any tears for the old regime. The Legislaturalists had brought their doom upon themselves, and Giscard had been better placed than many to see and recognize the damage their monopoly on power had inflicted upon the Republic and the Navy. More than that, he’d supported many of the Committee of Public Safety’s publicly avowed purposes enthusiastically—and still did, for that matter. Oh, not the rot Ransom and PubIn had spewed to mobilize the Dolists, but the real, fundamental reforms the PRH had desperately needed.

But the excesses committed in the name of 'the People’s security,' and the reign of terror which had followed—the disappearances and executions of men and women he had known, whose only crimes had been to fail in the impossible tasks assigned to them—those things had taught him a colder, uglier lesson. They’d taught him about the gulf which yawned between the Committee’s promised land and where he was right now... and about the savagery of the Mob once the shackles were loosened. Worst of all, they’d shown him what he dared not say aloud to a single living soul: that the members of the Committee themselves were terrified of what they had unleashed and prepared to embrace any extremism in the name of their own survival. And so he’d confronted the supreme irony of it all. Under the old regime, he’d been that rare creature: a patriot who loved and served his country despite all the many things he knew were wrong with it... and under the new regime, he was exactly the same thing. Only the nature of that country’s problems—and the virulence of its excesses—had changed.

But at least he’d known what he had to do to survive. It was simple, really. Obey his orders, succeed however impossible the mission, and never, ever trust anyone from StateSec, for a single mistake—just one hastily spoken or poorly chosen word—to one of Oscar Saint-Just’s spies would be more dangerous than any Manticoran superdreadnought.

And then Eloise had been assigned as his commissioner. At first, he’d assumed she was like the others, but she wasn’t. Like him, she believed in the things the original Committee had said it was going to do. He’d been unable to accept that for months, been certain it was all a mask to entrap him into lowering his own guard, but it hadn’t been.

'I wish to hell you were less visible,' he said now, fretting, knowing it was useless to say and would only demonstrate his anxiety, and yet unable not to say it. 'People’s commissioner for an entire fleet and an Aprilist... they’re going to be watching you like hawks.'

'An ex-Aprilist,' she corrected him, much more lightly than she could possibly feel, and reached over to pat his hand. 'Don’t spend your time and energy fretting about me, Javier! You just pull Icarus off. No one’s going to question my support for you as long as you deliver the goods and don’t say or do something totally against the party line, especially not with McQueen running the War Office. And as long as the two of us keep up appearances in public and perform effectively in the field, no one’s going to worry about my previous affiliations.'

'I know,' he said penitently. Not because he agreed with her, but because he shouldn’t have brought the subject up. There was nothing either of them could do about it, and now she was likely to spend the next hour or so of their precious privacy trying to reassure him that she was completely safe when both of them knew she was nothing of the sort... even without her relationship with him.

It was all part and parcel of the madness, he thought bitterly. Eloise had been a cell leader in the action teams of the Citizen’s Rights Union, just as Cordelia Ransom had, but the similarities between her and the late Secretary of Public Information ended there. The term 'terrorist' had been a pale description for most of the people in the CRU’s strike forces, and many of their members—like Ransom—had accepted the label willingly, even proudly. Indeed, Giscard suspected people like Ransom had seen it almost as an excuse, seen the 'struggle against the elitist oppressors' primarily as an opportunity to unleash the violence and destruction they craved with at least a twisted aura of ideological justification.

But Eloise’s cell had belonged to the April Tribunal, a small but influential (and dangerously efficient) CRU