The silence stretched.
Someone else might have seen the anger in the ranks, the sinking morale, and feared it.
Klaus didn’t fear it. Anger was good. Anger could be used. Anger wasn’t something to shrink away from. On the contrary—
Anger was a gift from God.
Klaus scanned the front rank and made a sweeping gesture with his left arm. His right was still mostly immobile due to a laser shot from the observation tower. “Look. We fell under attack from Bakuninite terrorists, anarchists whose sole aim is our destruction. But look around you— are we destroyed?”
Hit them with the blatantly obvious, first. Klaus looked around, getting a feeling for the mass of the crowd.
“Do you know what those terrorists planned to do?” Of course not. Klaus had been good about putting a lid on the security breach in the warehouse level. No more than a half-dozen trusted people knew about the commuter tube down there—a tube that had since been secretly blasted shut.
“Imagine igniting all the drives in the Blood-Tide while simultaneously decoupling the containment on the contragrav’s quantum extraction furnace.”
Klaus smiled. He had most of them now. A good proportion of the civilians were technical, and could imagine that. For the benefit of the rest, Klaus continued. “If that had happened, you wouldn’t be looking at the damaged building behind me. You would be looking at a glass-bottomed trench nearly a kilometer long from the bottom of a crater fifty to a hundred meters deep.”
He could feel the mood shifting like the tide. Slow, but inevitable. And, properly used, just as hard to deny. It was becoming hard to keep his gestures in check, and he decided to hell with the laser wound. The medic could deal with it. He thrust out his right hand and the pain gave him a shot of adrenaline.
“Preventing this was a defeat? The five marines who died, died to prevent that. The terrorists were tampering with the contragrav by the time the marines managed to stop them—at the cost of their own lives. The flight of the Blood-Tide was the contragrav malfunctioning. They were that close!”
A bit overdramatic perhaps, but the sound of his own amplified voice from the PA systems buoyed him like a drug.
“If it had not been for my own intelligence sources and those five marines, we would not now be ready for the second phase of this operation. Every single one of us would be dead.”
Klaus smiled.
It was time to dispose of the rest of his problems.
“Isn’t it interesting that there are those here who call this defeat?”
A long silence followed. He let it hang as the implication of that sank in. There was another purpose—other than drama—for the pause in his speech. It was a cue for his loyalists to get ready.
“Isn’t it interesting that among the missing is a marine officer whose duty was to guard the perimeter? Isn’t it interesting that the transponder logs show this officer as the last person to board the Blood-Tide? Isn’t it interesting that this officer was on a detail with the Bakuninite traitor Kathy Shane when eight hundred prisoners were allowed to escape?
“Isn’t it interesting that I was nearly a victim of a sniper from our own air-traffic control tower?”
All his people were in position within the hushed crowd.
“It should be obvious to anyone, even without the intelligence sources I have access to, that there are traitors—Bakuninite anarchist sympathizers—within our own ranks. Traitors that have been there since the beginning. The trap I laid with the Blood-Tide had another goal, in addition to taking out the terrorists who were immolated within it—
“The trap was there to implicate the traitors within our own ranks!”
That was the signal for his people to grab nearly two dozen liabilities from within the audience. Most of the people sat in shocked silence as Klaus’ security team dragged twenty-four men and women out of the crowd.
Twenty-four problems, all counted as solved.
“Look at them! Two dozen secret assassins, every one waiting for the right moment to destroy any one of you. Each one would gladly give life itself to see this complex blown off the face of the planet. But they overreached, and exposed themselves—and now they’re revealed for the cowards they are.”
All of them were making quite a hue and cry as they were being dragged to the residence tower behind the crowd. One of them, the marine Conner, was actually crying.
Every single one of them was denying everything.
Klaus would make a bet that not one in ten of the audience believed them. And that one would do nothing about it—because anyone who did would be dragged away with the others.
Klaus waited for the commotion to die down before he went on.
“We are not weaker now. We are stronger.
“We have not been defeated. We have triumphed.
“We are not at the end. We are only beginning.
“Look around you. The future is ours. Bakunin is ours. They will not stop us!”
The speech lasted another forty minutes. When he left the podium, he got a standing ovation.
* * * *
CHAPTER FORTY
Plausible Denial
“Those who are most sure of themselves are those possessing the fewest facts.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“I have been ever of the opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.”
—Benjamin Disraeli
(1804-1881)
Sim Vashniya liked Earth. He liked the blue skies, the ash-free air, and the light gravity that made him feel as though he could do anything. Not only was he enjoying the environment, but his own plans were going very well. Everything was perfect.
Which made it all the more troubling to feel the edges of his mouth twitching toward a frown.
He stroked his beard to conceal the effort he made to maintain his smile. “What are you asking me?” he said.
There was no real reason for him to dislike Dimitri. The old Russian was only another professional trying to do his own job. But for some reason Vashniya was finding it difficult to maintain his good humor, something that usually never took a second thought.
For the first time in quite a long while, Vashniya was annoyed.
The two of them, Vashniya and Dimitri, were sitting in Dimitri’s office. Surrounding them was bedrock, and the monolithic foundation of the Confederacy tower. They were deep in the bowels of the Confed bureaucracy, both literally and figuratively.
“I would like a straight answer, Vashniya.”
Dimitri looked weary. Vashniya understood, but he didn’t sympathize. Every decade, right before the Congress, things got hectic in the intelligence community. That was a given. Water was wet, deep space was a vacuum, and every ten years Confed politics reached critical mass.
It was no excuse for Dimitri to be so unsubtle.
“Am I now to abase myself and admit to all the imagined crimes of the Indi Protectorate?”
Dimitri rubbed his forehead. “I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“I am relieved.”
“You can’t deny what happened on Mars.”
“Nothing denied, nothing admitted.”