In Enemy Hands

gets out of hand. Oscar?'

'I've considered each of the officers Rob's nominated,' the SS man told Ransom. 'It wasn't too hard to edit their records and their peoples commissioners' reports. Any one of them will look like a knight in shining armor when we introduce him to the public, and all of them are quite competent in their own field, but we've got enough time bombs hidden in their dossiers to blow them away any time we have to. Of course,' he smiled thinly, 'it would be convenient if the officer in question were already dead before we make those bombs public. It's ever so much harder for a dead man to defend himself.'

'I see.' It was Ransom's turn to lean back and rub her chin in thought, and she nodded slowly. 'All right, that's a good first step,' she admitted finally. Her tone was still grudging, but it was no longer adamant. 'I'll want a good look at those 'time bombs,' though. If we want this talking head to be vulnerable to charges down the road, Public Information's going to have to be careful about just how we initially build him up for public consumption. We wouldn't want any avoidable inconsistencies in there.'

'No problem,' Saint-Just assured her, and she nodded some more. But her expression was still dissatisfied, and she let her chair snap back upright as she stopped rubbing her jaw and leaned over the table towards Pierre.

'This is all well and good as far as it goes, Rob,' she said, 'but it's still a hell of a risk. And we're going to be sending some very mixed signals, however we do it. I mean, we just shot Admiral Girardi for losing Trevor’s Star, and whatever we may have told the Proles, we all know it wasn't entirely his fault.' Pierre was a bit surprised she was willing to make even that much of a concession to a Navy officer, but perhaps it was because even she had to admit dead men could no longer plot treason. 'The Navy's senior officers certainly don't think it was, anyway. They're convinced we only shot him to 'prove' to the Mob that it wasn't our fault, and even some enlisted personnel resented our turning him into a 'scapegoat'! I don't see your proposal making much of a dent in that any time soon.'

'Ah, but that's because you don't know who I'm planning to appoint!' Pierre said, then sat without another word, grinning at her. She glared at him, trying to pretend his effort to play on her impatience wasn't working. Unfortunately, they both knew it was. The better part of a full minute dragged past, then she shrugged impatiently.

'So tell me already!'

'Esther McQueen,' Pierre said simply, and Ransom jerked upright in her chair.

'You're joking!' she snapped, and her face darkened when Pierre only shook his head. 'Well, you damned well ought to be! Damn it, Oscar!' The glare she turned on Saint-Just should have been sufficient to incinerate the SS chief on the spot. 'The woman's personal popularity is already at dangerous levels, and your own spy's reported that she's got ambitions, and plans, of her own. Are you seriously suggesting putting a loaded pulser into the hands of someone we know is looking for one already?'

'First of all, her ambition may be our best ally,' Pierre said before Saint-Just could reply. 'Yes, Brigadier Fontein's warned us that she has her own agenda. In fact, she's made one or two efforts to set up some sort of clandestine network among her fellow flag officers. But she hasn't met with much success, because they know what she has in mind as well as we do. Most of them are too cowed to stick their necks out, and the ones who aren't consider her as much a political animal as a military one. Given the, um, finality with which politics are played these days, they're not about to trust even one of their own if she's shown she wants to join the game. If, on the other hand, we give her a place at the table, that very ambition will give her every reason to make sure the Committee, and, with it, her power base, survives.'

'Hmph!' Ransom relaxed just a bit and folded her arms across her chest as she considered. Then she shook her head again, but this time the gesture was slower and more thoughtful. 'All right,' she said at last, 'let's assume you have a point there. But she's still dangerous. The Mob sees her as the Committees savior against the Levelers, hell, half the damned Committee thinks she can walk on water right now! But we don't even know that she actually intended to save us at all, do we? If her pinnace hadn't crashed, she might just have kept right on rolling with the momentum and finished us off herself!'

'She might have, but I don't believe for a minute she planned to,' Pierre said, just a bit more emphatically than his level of confidence deserved. 'The Committee at least has the legitimacy of the original resolution which created it, not to mention almost six T-years as the Republic's functioning government. Even if she'd managed to wipe us out herself, what would she have had for a power base? Remember that only her own flagship supported her when she came to rescue us, and she was clearly doing her duty then. There's no way she could have counted on the rest of the Fleet to support any sort of putsch on her part, especially not given her reputation for political ambition.'

'It sounds to me like you're trying to convince yourself of that,' Ransom muttered darkly. 'And even assuming you're right, doesn't your logic undercut your own argument for giving her a seat at the table? If the rest of the officer corps see her as a political animal, why should appointing her to the Committee convince them to support us?'

'Because political animal or not, she's also the best field commander we've got, and they know that, too,' Saint-Just answered. 'They don't distrust her competence, Cordelia, just her motives. In a sense, that gives us the best of both worlds: an officer whose ability is recognized by her peers, but whose reputation for political ambition sets her apart from the 'real' Navy.'

'If she's that damned good, how did we lose Trevor's Star?' Ransom demanded, and Pierre hid a smile behind his hand. Cordelia's ministry had turned Trevor's Star into a sort of metaphorical redoubt for the entire People's Republic, the 'line in the stars,' the point from which no retreat could even be contemplated, despite his own suggestions that she might want to tone the rhetoric down just a bit. To be sure, the system had been of enormous strategic importance, and the military consequences of its loss were what had originally inspired him to look for a naval representative for the Committee. Yet viewed against the sheer size of the Republic, even Trevor's Star was ultimately expendable. What was not expendable was public morale or the People's Navy's will to fight, both of which had taken yet another nose dive when 'the line in the stars' fell to the Royal Manticoran Navy's Sixth Fleet.

'We lost Trevor's Star,' he told Ransom, 'because the Manties have better ships and their technology is still better than ours. And because, thanks in no small part to our own policy of shooting losing admirals, their senior officers go right on accruing experience while ours keep suffering from a severe case of being dead.'

His caustic tone widened her eyes, and he gave her a thin smile.

'McQueen may not have been able to hold the system, but at least she inflicted heavy losses on the Manties. In fact, given the relative sizes of our navies, the Alliances proportional losses were probably worse than ours, at least before the final engagement. Her captains and junior squadron commanders gained a lot of experience during the fighting, too, and we managed to rotate about a third of them home to pass that along. But it was obvious at least a year ago that White Haven was going to take the system eventually. That's why I pulled McQueen out and sent Girardi in to take the heat.' Ransom quirked an eyebrow, and Pierre shrugged. 'I didn't want to lose her, and given our existing policies, we'd have had no choice but to shoot her if she'd still been in command when Trevor's Star went down.' He smiled wryly. 'After last month's excitement, I'm inclined to see that as one of my more brilliant moves of the war.'

'Hmph!' Ransom repeated, sliding lower in her chair once more and frowning down at the conference table. 'You're sure McQueen is the one you want for this? I have to tell you that the more you tell me about how competent she is, the more nervous you make me.'

'Competent in her own area is one thing; competent in our area is another,' Pierre said confidently. 'Her reach considerably exceeds her grasp on the political side, and it'll take her a while to figure out how the rules work on our side of the street. Oscar and I will keep a close eye on her, and if it starts to look like she's figured it out, well, accidents happen.'

'And whatever negative considerations might attach to choosing her,' Saint-Just said, 'she's a better choice than the next candidate in line.'

'Which candidate would that be?' Ransom asked.

'Before our raid on the Manties' commerce in Silesia blew up in our faces, Javier Giscard would have been an even better choice than McQueen. As it is, he's completely ineligible, at least for now. His political views are more acceptable than McQueen's, in fact, Commissioner Pritchard continues to speak very highly of him, and in fairness to him, what happened to his plan wasn't his fault. In fact, our decision to recall him was probably a