by David Weber
“No,” she said grimly. “I think it’s time that we reinforced the Octagon’s ground forces as much as we can.” Bukato’s eyes widened in surprise, and she laughed harshly. “If Gerard and his people have convinced him he can’t get through on the ground, Ivan, then he’s going to try something else. He has to, because the clock is on our side.”
“But that’s crazy, Ma’am,” Bukato objected, less like a man who thought she was wrong than like one who truly believed she was. “The defense grid would blow them apart!”
“You know that, and I know that, but does Saint-Just know that?” she returned with a shark-like grin. “And even if he does know, does he care? Bottom line, Ivan, he still has a hell of a lot more firepower planetwide to draw upon than we do. I don’t think he could get through the grid, either, but we might both be wrong, and he only has to get lucky once. Besides, they’re only people, and he’s got plenty more where they came from if he breaks this lot.”
Bukato looked at her for a moment longer, as if he wished that he could disagree with her assessment, then nodded.
“Yes, Ma’am. I’ll pass those orders right away.”
“We’ve got the airstrike and assault echelon organized, Citizen Secretary.”
Saint-Just looked up as another of his senior staffers stepped through the office door to make the report.
“They’ve been fully briefed?” the citizen secretary asked.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Then send them in.”
“Immediately, Sir!”
The staffer hurried away, and Saint-Just looked down at his desk and its sophisticated communications panel once more. He hoped the assault shuttles and sting ships he was about to commit to battle could do the job, just as he hoped their pilots truly accepted that they had no choice but to fire on the other members of the Committee of Public Safety. Whatever happened, the integrity of the state must be maintained. He was in a fight for his own personal survival, for Esther McQueen could never afford to leave him alive after this, any more than he could have afforded to leave her alive. But there was more at stake here than mere survival. McQueen might well prove as effective as a political leader as she had proven as a military leader. In the judgment of history, it was entirely possible that she would be considered a far better head of state than Oscar Saint-Just could ever hope to be. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had killed Rob Pierre. That wherever she might lead the People’s Republic, it would not be to the destination Pierre had chosen, and Rob Pierre had been not simply Saint-Just’s friend, but his chieftain.
Perhaps Esther McQueen had never fully understood that, but it would have changed nothing if she had. For all of his blandness, all of his famous lack of emotion, Oscar Saint-Just had the soul of a feudal clansman, and he would have his vengeance.
“Tango Flight, this is Tango One Lead. The mission is a go. I say again, we are go for the attack.”
Citizen Lieutenant Angelica Constantine closed her eyes in pain as the strike leader’s voice came over the com. She couldn’t believe it. No, that wasn’t right. She could believe it; she simply didn’t want to.
She opened her eyes once more and watched her HUD as the icons began to shift and change. Forty StateSec atmospheric sting ships just like her own formed the true heart of the strike’s power, although a dozen pinnaces would lead the way. She didn’t envy the flight crews of those lead ships. They were individually far more capable—and dangerous—than any sting ship, but that scarcely mattered, because there was virtually no chance that any of them could survive to penetrate the Octagon’s defenses, and their crews knew it. Their true function was simply to draw the defenses’ fire. To distract and confuse the tracking and fire control crews in hopes that a handful of the despised sting ships might get through.
Constantine knew all about the attack plan, and she gave it no more than a twenty percent chance of success. And even that estimate, she knew, might well be wildly over optimistic. The attack had been ordered and organized with ruthless, reckless haste in a desperate effort to get it in while McQueen and her accomplices might still be in the process of securing control of the grid. If they hadn’t gotten control of it, or if their control was still less than complete, then at least some of the attackers might manage to get through. But if they did have full control of it…
Not even the Levelers had dared to challenge the Octagon’s on-site defenses, and she wondered now why Citizen Secretary Saint-Just had never had the defense grid disabled or at least placed under SS control. A lot of people, all too probably including Angelica Constantine, were about to die because he hadn’t, and fear flickered and simmered in her mind like some dark fire.
Yet however frightened she might be, fear explained only a part of the knot of despair resting in her chest like a lump of cold iron. Her husband, Gregory, was also State Security… and assigned to the Octagon security staff. She had no idea if he was even still alive, but whether he was or not wouldn’t change a thing. And it probably didn’t much matter either way. Not really. The Legislaturalists had built the Octagon like a fortress, because that was precisely what it was: the command nexus for all of the Republic’s armed forces, and the central facility charged with the air defense of the Republic’s capital, as well. Tango Flight would do its best to break through and disable at least some of the defense grid’s fire stations with precision guided munitions in hopes of opening a hole for follow-on assault shuttle waves to exploit. Success was unlikely at best, but now that Citizen General Bouchard’s hastily mounted ground assault had turned into a bloody shambles, it would take hours—possibly days—to organize a proper assault out of the wreckage, and God only knew how the situation could change in that much time. McQueen’s coup attempt had to be crushed before still more of the regular armed forces rallied to her, and if this attempt failed, the only way to stop her was to flatten the Octagon around her ears. Which would also mean burying Gregory in the rubble right along with her.
The only redeeming factor was that Angelica would probably be dead even before him.
“Tango Flight, execute!” Tango One Lead barked.
“Here they come, Ma’am.”
Esther McQueen’s raised hand interrupted the latest report from Lieutenant Caminetti, and she turned quickly to the huge main plot at Captain Rubin’s announcement.
Normally, that plot was used to display the locations and status of every unit of the vast web of fortifications and fleet units stationed to protect the Haven System from any foreign attack. Now it showed something which very few of the people in the War Room had ever seen on it, even in drills: a detailed holographic map of the City of Nouveau Paris and a hundred-kilometer radius around it. The map was scabrous with the red blotches of identified threats and a thinner scattering of green friendly units, and she felt a familiar stab of tight-mouthed tension as a deadly cluster of tiny crimson arrowheads appeared upon it.
Her trained gaze identified each of the plot’s icons as readily as someone else might have read a newsfax, and her eyes narrowed.
“Those poor bastards.”
She glanced to her right at the soft regretful murmur, and Ivan Bukato shook his head as her eyes met his.
“We have lock,” someone announced, and McQueen turned her attention back to the plot as sighting circles reached out to entrap the arrowheads.
“They must know they don’t have a prayer,” Bukato said quietly, and she shrugged.
“Of course they don’t,” she agreed absently. “And whoever ordered them in knows it, too. But she might be wrong, so she’s spending them to find out for sure whether or not we managed to secure the grid before some StateSec loyalist could disable it. Or possibly in an effort to distract us from something else.”
Bukato’s eyes flicked once from the plot to the unyielding, almost serene profile of the diminutive woman beside him, and then he returned them to the display with a tiny shiver.
An angry war god smashed his palms together, and the mangled wrec
kage of a pinnace spewed itself across the smoke-tinged blue skies of Nouveau Paris.
It was not alone. The battle steel hatches of massively armored ground emplacements flicked open like striking serpents, and mass-drivers hurled anti-air missiles out of them at four times the speed of sound. The missiles’ impeller wedges flashed to life as soon as they cleared their launchers, and they howled in on their targets like vengeful demons. The pinnaces leading Oscar Saint-Just’s airstrike never had a chance, and then it was the sting ships’ turn.
The transatmospheric craft had come in high, but the pure air-breathers lacked both their ceiling and their speed. The best that they could manage was little more than mach three, but they compensated by coming in in terrain-riding mode. They shrieked in barely two hundred meters above the ground, weaving their ways between the ceramacrete mesas of the People’s Republic’s capital city’s administrative and residential towers, and fresh missiles streaked to meet them.
Not impeller wedge missiles this time, because hardwired software imperatives made it impossible for the defense grid to fire such weapons at any targets at less than five hundred meters’ altitude. A hit by one of those weapons on any tower would inflict catastrophic damage, and so, as if in some bizarre effort to level the playing field, the slower and lower sting ships could be engaged only with less capable old-fashioned reaction drive missiles.
But if the field had been leveled slightly, it remained uncompromisingly tilted in the defense grid’s favor. The system’s designers might have denied the grid the use of impeller wedge missiles, but it had scores of launch stations, and at least ten missiles targeted each of the incoming attackers.
It wasn’t a battle. It wasn’t even a massacre. Not one of the attackers survived to reach its own launch range of the Octagon, and fireballs and explosions rocked the heart of Nouveau Paris as bits and pieces of men and women and once sleek attack craft thundered down from the heavens.
“My God,” someone blurted. “Assault shuttles?”
McQueen didn’t even turn her head to see to it was. It didn’t matter, and even if it had, she could not have taken her eyes from the plot as a fresh wave of icons appeared. There were dozens of them, each a StateSec assault shuttle with up to two hundred fifty men and women aboard, and they streaked straight towards the Octagon as if their pilots actually believed that the sacrifice of the sting ships might have somehow distracted the tracking systems from their own approach. She watched them come, and an ancient phrase out of the history of Old Earth whispered in the back of her brain.
“C’est magnifque, mais ce n’est pas la guerre,” she said very softly.
“Dear God in Heaven.”
Oscar Saint-Just didn’t even turn his head, and his stonelike expression never wavered. He felt certain that the staffer didn’t realize that he’d whispered his half-prayer aloud. But even if the man had, and even if he’d been foolish enough to mean it as a criticism of Saint-Just as the man who had ordered the mission, the citizen secretary would have chosen, just this once, to ignore it.
His eyes never flickered as he watched the icons of the troop-laden second-wave assault shuttles streak into the teeth of the Octagon’s defensive fire. They came in at just over mach three, but they had come in higher than the sting ships had, and the impeller wedge missiles slashed into them with lethal efficiency. They had better ECM than the sting ships, but nowhere near enough of it to make any real difference, and the missiles ripped them apart effortlessly. Only two of them got close enough for the energy weapons on the Octagon’s roof to engage them directly.
The last assault shuttle went down, taking its embarked company of StateSec ground force troopers with it, and the silence in Saint-Just’s office could have been chipped with a knife. The SS commander watched the displays tally the horrendous casualty numbers with an unyielding basilisk gaze, then gave a tiny shrug.
I had to try. Badly as it turned out, my other options were even worse. And now, bad as they are, they’re all I have left.
He inhaled, and turned away from the displays to seat himself once more behind his desk.
“And now Citizen Secretary Saint-Just knows for certain who controls the grid,” Esther McQueen murmured softly, turning from the main plot to survey the direct view screens. Fires and secondary explosions filled them, and for all the serenity of her tone, her eyes were cold. “I do hope that whoever passed on the order for this attack survives to be captured,” she went on in a nearly conversational voice.
“I’d like to… discuss his choice of tactics with him myself, Ma’am,” Bukato agreed.
“I agree that they never had a chance of breaking through, Ma’am,” Captain Rubin said respectfully, “but as you yourself pointed out, I don’t see that they had any real choice but to try.”
“I realize that, Captain,” McQueen said after a moment. “But it was a forlorn hope from the beginning, and whoever actually ordered those shuttles in should have realized that the instant we mowed down the sting ships. And if she did, and if she’d had an ounce of moral courage, she would have told Saint-Just that sending those shuttles into the same defenses was nothing but an act of murder. It never had any real chance of succeeding as a serious attack, and if it was only a probe, he’d already drawn the response that should have told him everything he needed to know with just the sting ships. There was absolutely no point in taking the additional casualties.”
“Which doesn’t even consider how many civilians must’ve been killed or injured when the wreckage landed,” Bukato pointed out grimly.
“No, it doesn’t,” McQueen acknowledged. “But we can’t really get too sanctimonious about those casualties, Ivan. We’re the ones who fired the missiles that brought them down, after all. And I suppose that in the ultimate sense, we’re at least as responsible as Saint-Just for any civilians that got killed. If we hadn’t made our move, he would just have had us quietly rounded up and shot and none of this would have happened.”
“I know that, Ma’am. But at least we’re trying to minimize collateral casualties.”
“True, and it’s also true that Saint-Just and Pierre between them have killed more of the Republic’s citizens than the entire Manty Alliance put together, so replacing them as the new management has to be an improvement any way you slice it. But we do have a certain selfish interest at stake here, as well, don’t we?”
She smiled thinly, and to his own immense surprise, Ivan Bukato actually chuckled.
“What’s the latest status report from the port?”
Saint-Just’s conversational voice had the impact of a screamed obscenity in the silent, lingering aftermath of the destruction of Citizen Brigadier Tome’s entire brigade. All eyes snapped to him, and then a staffer shook herself and cleared her throat.
“I’m… afraid the news isn’t good, Sir,” she admitted. “We’ve got a little more information now, and it looks like McQueen managed to get Citizen General Conflans slipped into the spaceport garrison’s chain of command without our noticing. The latest estimate is that virtually the entire garrison went over to him in the first twenty minutes—that’s where they got the manpower to stop Citizen General Bouchard’s attack.” The staffer paused, then drew a deep breath. “And I’m afraid that’s not all, Sir,” she went on in a slow but determined tone. “Communications reports that Citizen General Maitland has just joined Citizen Colonel Yazov in announcing his open support for the mutineers.”
“I see.”
Saint-Just refused to allow his voice to show it, but the news about Maitland and Yazov hit him hard. Yazov had been the first StateSec officer to declare his support for McQueen. A mere citizen colonel might not seem all that significant in the great scheme of things, but no one knew better than Saint-Just how much success or failure at a moment like this hinged on perceptions and the reactions of frightened, confused human beings to those perceptions. And that had made Yazov’s defection a body blow. The citizen colonel had been handpicked for his apparent loyalty and devotion,
as much as for his capability, when he was assigned to be in Nouveau Paris spaceport as the competent executive officer that the political appointee who officially commanded the capital city’s primary space-to-ground link required. As such, his defection raised frightening questions about what other “handpicked” officers McQueen might have reached.
That was bad enough, but now Yazov seemed to have convinced his titular CO to join him, and their joint public endorsement of McQueen’s version of what was happening was even worse. If even StateSec officers claimed to believe that Saint-Just was truly the traitor and that McQueen represented the legitimate Committee and its interests, then the steady, ultimately fatal erosion of his position would become inevitable.
They’re driving me to it, he thought almost calmly. They’re not going to leave me any choice. And if I do it…
He closed his eyes for a moment and made himself face the implications of the decision rumbling down upon him with the inexorable power of Juggernaut. It represented what was probably his only hope of crushing McQueen before the balance of power slid too far in her favor. He dared not wait while even more of the regular armed forces stationed here in Nouveau Paris went over to her, and especially not if more of his own StateSec personnel began to follow Yazov’s example.
This thing had to be settled now, before it got completely out of control. In a worst-case scenario, the fighting could drag on for days or weeks, and every hour would increase the odds that still more of the Navy and Marines would throw their allegiance to the Octagon. Even if they didn’t go over to McQueen, other officers might began to get ideas of their own. An ambitious man might very well see an opportunity to carve out a power base of his own while Saint-Just and McQueen were locked in a death grapple which would prevent either of them from dealing with him. And even if that didn’t happen immediately, and even if Saint-Just managed ultimately to suppress McQueen’s rebellion, the damage would still have been done as far as any hope for his own legitimacy was concerned. The longer this dragged out, the more people would be tempted to believe her version of what had happened. Some of that was going to happen whatever he did, but at least a rapid and ruthless resolution might help to minimize the damage.