"My God," LePic said softly, then shook himself. "And Capital Fleet?"
"Didn't make a move, for the most part," Shumate replied. Her distaste at having to do so was manifest, and she went right on, "Two SDs did look as if they might be about to intervene on McQueen's behalf, but Citizen Commodore Helft and his State Security squadron blew them out of space before they even got their wedges up." She smiled with bleak ferocity. "That took the starch out of any other bastards who might've been tempted to help the traitors!"
And from the sound of it, the kill-happy, murderous son-of-a-bitch killed them when there was absolutely no need to, Theisman thought with sick loathing. Nine or ten thousand men and women, wiped out as if they were nothing at all, when all the bastard had to do was order them to stand down— if they were really thinking about supporting McQueen to start with! If he caught them with their wedges still down, there wouldn't have been anything they could've done but obey him. And if they'd been stupid enough to refuse his orders, then he could have blown them away. But that's not what happened, is it, Citizen Captain Shumate?
"The situation was pretty much deadlocked in Nouveau Paris by that time, though," Shumate went on more heavily. "The Citizen Chairman was dead, and McQueen had control of the Octagon. She probably had five or six thousand Marines and Navy regulars siding her, and she and Bukato had gotten control of the place's defensive grid. Worse, they had at least half a dozen members of the Committee in there with them, where they were effectively hostages. We tried to land intervention units on them, and the grid blew them away. Same thing for the air strikes we tried. And the whole time, McQueen was on the air to the rest of the Navy and Marine units in the system, claiming she was acting solely in self-defense against some sort of plot by the Chairman and Citizen Secretary Saint-Just to have her and her staff arrested and shot. Some of them were beginning to listen, too."
"So what happened?" LePic asked when she paused once more.
"So Citizen Secretary Saint-Just did what he had to do, Sir," she said in a cold voice. "McQueen and Bukato might've gotten control of the defensive grid, but they didn't know about the Citizen Secretary's final precaution. When it became obvious it was going to take us days to fight our way in, and with reports more and more Marine and Navy units were beginning to turn restless, he pressed the button."
"The button?" LePic asked. The citizen captain nodded, and LePic scowled. "What button?" he demanded with some asperity.
"The one to the kiloton-range warhead in the Octagon's basement, Sir," Shumate said flatly, and Theisman's belly knotted. "It took out the entire structure and three of the surrounding towers. Killed McQueen and every one of her traitors, too."
"And civilian casualties?" Theisman asked the question before he could stop himself, but at the last moment he managed to make it only a question.
"They were heavy," Shumate admitted. "We couldn't evacuate without giving away what was coming, and the traitors had to be stopped. The last estimate I heard put the total figure somewhere around one-point-three million."
Denis LePic swallowed. The casualties had been even worse in the Leveler Rising, he knew, but another million civilians? Killed simply because they happened to be too close to a building Saint-Just had decided had to go... and warning them might have warned McQueen what was coming?
"So how much of the Committee is left, Citizen Captain?" he heard himself asking, and Shumate looked at him with some surprise.
"I'm sorry, Sir. I thought I'd made that clear. The only surviving member of the Committee is Citizen Secretary — only he's Citizen Chairman now, of course — Saint-Just."
Several hours later, a silent, hard-faced StateSec major showed Thomas Theisman and Denis LePic into an office in Nouveau Paris. The major was clearly unhappy about their presence, and the daggers his eyes kept shooting Theisman's way ought by rights to have reduced the citizen admiral to ribbons. Nor was his attitude unique. Hostile, hating StateSec eyes had followed Theisman all the way from his air car to this office, and an ominous quantity of firepower, from pulsers to plasma rifles, was on prominent display.
And all of them want to rip my head off and piss down my neck, Theisman thought mordantly. Hard to blame them, really. I'm a senior Navy officer, and they just blew up most of the command structure of the Navy and the Marines. They have to be wondering where I'd have stood if I'd been here. Or, for that matter, where I stand now.
The major opened the office door and stood aside with one last, distrustful glare for Theisman and a curt nod for LePic. Both of them ignored him and stepped into the office, and Theisman watched the small man behind the desk rise.
Funny. I was surprised Ransom was so much shorter than her HD imagery, and here Saint-Just is, almost as short as she was. Is there some sort of overcompensation for small size going on here?
"Citizen Commissioner. Citizen Admiral." Saint-Just sounded weary, as well he might, and there were fresh, harsh lines in his face. For all that, however, he was still the same harmless-looking little man... with all the emotions of a cobra. "Please," he invited, waving at a couple of chairs. "Sit."
"Thank you, Sir." By previous agreement, LePic took the lead as their spokesman. Neither of them wanted it to be too obvious that he was trying to protect Theisman, but it seemed wiser to avoid possible confrontations as much as possible.
The two visitors sat, and Saint-Just perched on the corner of his desk.
Remarkable, Theisman thought. This man started out as the second-in-command of Internal Security and betrayed the Legislaturalists to Pierre and helped him blow them up. Then he played second fiddle to Pierre for over a decade... and now he's the whole show, the entire "Committee of Public Safety." And all he had to do was blow up the rest of the Committee along with Esther McQueen. What a sacrifice. The citizen admiral snorted mentally. Wasn't there someone back on Old Earth who once said "we had to destroy the village to save it" or something like that? Suits this cold-blooded little bastard to a "T," doesn't it?
"We were shocked to hear about what happened, Sir," LePic began. "Of course, we'd heard rumors about McQueen's ambitions, but we never dreamed she might try something like that!"
"To be honest, I didn't expect it either," Saint-Just said, and to Theisman's surprise, he seemed sincere, even a little bewildered. "Not out of the blue like this. I didn't trust her, of course. Never did. But we needed her abilities, and she'd turned the entire military situation around. Under the circumstances, I was prepared to take a few routine precautions, but neither the Citizen Chairman nor I had any intention of moving against her without much better cause than reports about her `ambition,' and I was certain she knew it. It's obvious now, of course, that she was plotting all along. Incomplete as her plans clearly were, she still came within millimeters of success. In fact, if Rob hadn't been killed, I don't know if I could have—"
He stopped and waved a hand, looking away from the other two men, and Theisman felt a fresh stab of surprise, this time at Saint-Just's obvious pain over Pierre's death. Thomas Theisman had been prepared to grant the commander of State Security many qualities; the capacity for close personal friendship had not been one of them.