In Enemy Hands

official fiction that the delay was only to give her body time to heal, and Pierre knew from Saint-Just that she'd gone through the motions of getting clearance from her doctors before she asked for this meeting.

All of that was either a good sign or a very bad one. Her popularity with the Nouveau Paris Mob had skyrocketed once word of who'd stopped the Levelers spread. Public Information had done its best to play up the role of the other security forces, many of which, Pierre admitted, had in fact fought with infinitely greater tenacity and courage than he'd expected, but too many people had known the truth. And so McQueen’s existing reputation as the admiral who'd held Trevor’s Star for more than eighteen T-months had been enhanced by her decisiveness in preserving 'the People's revolution.' The fact that she'd probably killed at least as many of their friends and neighbors as the Levelers had meant little to the Mob's members. Ultimately, their approbation was nothing if not fickle, as few people had more reason to know than Rob S. Pierre, but for the moment, she was their darling, and she could have used that to demand an immediate and meaningful role on the Committee. As a matter of fact, he'd been afraid she might do just that, and he and Saint-Just had made quiet preparations for her to suffer sudden, unexpected medical complications if she had.

But she hadn't. Instead, she'd accepted the Committees thanks and the offer of a seat on it, if not with modesty, without arrogance, either. That, too, had struck Pierre's mental antennae as reflecting exactly the right attitude, for any modesty on her part would had to have been false. She knew as well as he did who'd saved the Committee... and that she wouldn't have been offered a place on it even now if Pierre hadn't believed he needed her. Yet she also seemed prepared to take things as they came, without pushing or probing for openings, just as she had always, outwardly, at least, accepted her orders from the Admiralty. Assuming her actions accurately reflected what was going on inside her head, that was a very good thing, and Pierre allowed himself to hope that it was.

But he wasn't about to leap to any conclusions. The contingency plans she'd somehow put together right under Citizen Commissioner Fontein's nose had played a major, possibly even a decisive, part in saving the Committee, but she shouldn't have been able to make them. Of course, her ability to inspire the sort of personal loyalty that carried men and women into battle with her was one of the things which made her so valuable as a military officer. But it was also the kind of ability which might convince subordinates to go along with making unauthorized plans, or, to use an uglier turn of phrase, conspiring with her to circumvent civilian authority, and that was specifically what Oscar Saint-Just had chosen Erasmus Fontein as her commissioner to prevent.

Fontein was one of the best StateSec had, yet he looked like a complete incompetent. The theory, of which Pierre had approved, was that McQueen would feel relatively unthreatened (and hence less security conscious) if the individual assigned to watch her was an idiot, and Fontein had taken pains to convince her he was almost as inept as he looked. From all appearances, he'd succeeded, at least until the need to stop the Levelers had required him to take the mask off and act decisively in cooperation with her. Yet she'd still taken sufficient precautions to manage to conceal that contingency planning from him. Not just partially, but completely. His report had been scathingly self-honest, fully admitting that he'd been taken totally by surprise. Pierre was pleased by his candor; too many others would have been too busy trying to cover their own backsides to draw the proper conclusions and point them out, but Fontein was a professional. He'd made certain his superiors recognized the implications, and Pierre agreed with his warning. If she'd bothered to dissemble that well against someone she regarded as an idiot, she would be even more careful against people she knew weren't fools. And that was why her impeccable behavior worried Pierre almost more than immediate efforts to build a personal power base would have. His conversation with Cordelia notwithstanding, he knew Esther McQueen could easily prove a two-edged sword, and he had no intention of losing his fingers to her blade.

But he'd also discovered how easily someone in his position could double— and triple-think himself into doing nothing, even in the face of current disaster, because of potential dangers which might never materialize, and so he smiled and nodded to her.

'We really should have explained what we had in mind weeks ago, Esther, and I apologize for being so slow about bringing you up to speed. Obviously everything we've had on our hands in dealing with the fallout from the coup attempt has disorganized all our schedules, but to be perfectly honest, there were some political considerations, as well. As I'm sure you can appreciate, not all the Committee's members are exactly enthralled by the idea of giving the military direct representation on it.'

'I can accept that their lack of enthusiasm exists without believing that it's justified,' McQueen replied levelly.

'No reasonable person would expect you to believe it was.' Pierre's voice was just as level, and their eyes met with the air of fencers testing one another's guards. It wasn't precisely a clash of wills, but it came far closer to one than anyone, besides Cordelia, had dared to offer Pierre in over a T-year, and he felt a small stir of pleasure as their foils met. 'The prejudice exists, however,' he continued, 'and I wanted to let things settle down a bit before bringing you fully on board.'

'May I take it that things have, in fact, settled down?'

'You may,' Pierre agreed. He saw no reason to add that, given her popularity with the Mob, her appointment to the Committee, window dressing though it had so far been, had played a major part in helping to settle things. Only a fool, which she manifestly was not, could have failed to realize that, but it wouldn't hurt if he could convince her that he thought she was foolish enough to believe that he thought she didn't know it. 'In fact, if you hadn't asked for this meeting, I would have asked you to join Oscar and me tomorrow or the next day.'

She tipped back in her own chair and quirked a wordless eyebrow, and he smiled. But then his smile faded, and his voice was much more serious as he leaned forward.

'The Levelers' coup attempt has exposed one new problem and reemphasized several we already knew about,' he said. 'The new one is the fact that the Levelers managed to infiltrate the Committee itself. On the purely military side, they couldn't have gotten their bombs in place or sabotaged our command net without inside help, and from a political viewpoint, they had to have been counting on putting at least some members of the present Committee on HD to legitimize their coup after the fighting. I'm sure they could have counted on getting a few obedient talking heads by putting pulsers to our temples, but crazy as the Leveler rank and file were, LaBoeuf and his inner cadre were smart and dangerous. My belief, and Oscar shares it, is that they would never have moved without the assurance of long-term, willing support from at least a portion of the Committee. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to identify those supporters, which means that we have a serious internal security problem that we didn't know about before.

'Oscar's people...' Pierre nodded to Saint-Just '...are working on that. We don't have much to go on yet, but they'll keep digging until they find the moles. In the meantime, we're considering a drastic downsizing of the Committee. At the moment, we're looking at a reduction of perhaps fifty percent in its present membership. We can't make a move that drastic immediately, of course, and we can't be positive that all the unreliable elements would be pruned away in the purge even when we do. What we can plan for, though, is to retain the people we trust the most.'

He paused for a moment, watching McQueen's face. Telling her what he just had was tantamount to promising her that she would remain a member of the new leaner, meaner Committee, but she gave no sign of realizing that. Except for slightly pursed lips and a small nod of understanding, her calm, attentive expression never wavered.

'That, as I say, will have to wait, at least for a while,' Pierre resumed, 'but we can begin dealing with the problems we already knew about now. Between us, the Manties, and the Legislaturalists, our military has been monumentally screwed over, Esther. The Manties, at least, ought to be trying to beat us, but we, and I include the Committee of Public Safety and State Security in 'we', have managed to do a pretty good job of gelding the Navy for them. Well, it's time we stopped blaming the Navy for failing and admit that it's got problems we created. Problems we want you to fix.'

Despite her self-control, McQueen blinked in surprise. She hadn't expected this degree of frankness on the political front, much less such a candid admission of responsibility for the mess in which the Fleet found itself. The very brevity with which Pierre had made that admission only lent it greater weight, and she made herself think for several seconds before she replied.

'I can't disagree with what you've just said, Citizen Chairman,' she said finally, speaking with deliberate formality. 'I probably wouldn't have said it myself, not in so many words, at any rate, because it would be