“Do we surrender now?” Lazlo asked her coldly. “Or do we wait for another day, two days, a week...”
“Or should we fight?” Field Marshal Lena interrupted loudly and pushed his still-full coffee cup away from him in disgust, slopping dark liquid onto the table’s Maltese lace tablecloth. At seventy the man still only had two states, alcohol-induced sleep and full-on, testosterone-fuelled aggression. Lady Clare liked him and so did the Prince Imperiaclass="underline" it was how he survived despite not having been sober for over ten years.
“We can’t win.” Lady Clare said firmly. That wasn’t her opinion, it was a fact. The army was split down the middle, whatever the field marshal might say. Generals Regis and Dershowitz were arguing among themselves, with Dershowitz having already made tentative overtures to the Reich. And if Field Marshal Lena didn’t know that then he should have done. S3 had grabs of Dershowitz’s communications. Military crypt was strong, but there was no PGP in use for which the Third Section didn’t have a breaker.
“We can’t win...” The Prince Imperial repeated Lady Clare’s words back at her, his smoke-grey eyes watching her face. “But we could fight?”
Yeah, Lady Clare thought tiredly, if you want a massacre. She looked at the old man and wondered if he knew how few soldiers would be willing to die if that was the order he issued. All government worked on the basis that the army was both loyal and stupid, but Lady Clare wasn’t sure they were that stupid.
Though the Old Guard would die to a man if ordered. Intensive psychometric testing was in place to guarantee that. And the really bizarre thing was that the man they’d die for was truly nondescript. If he hadn’t been a Bonaparte, no one would have glanced at him twice. As it was, his face was on every bank draft issued by the Banque Impériale de Paris.
And why should he be concerned? Even the Reich wouldn’t dare kill the Prince Imperial if he surrendered. He was an old man, revered, all but defeated: not that he’d been that threatening to start with, except as a figurehead. The Reich could afford to offer him safe passage to Zurich. And the Swiss would have him, Lady Clare had no doubt about that, not with the amount of gold his family had salted away in the vaults of Hong Kong Suisse. It was locked in unbreakable trusts, of course. Otherwise Lady Clare would have suggested moving it somewhere safer, like off-planet.
Outside it was still raining, water slicking the dark streets and undermining already corroded concrete, making the sidewalks even more unsafe. She could see the rain as it beat hard against the window, but she couldn’t hear it. Triple-glazed, micromesh-laminated polymer, it was designed to keep out more than the sound of a storm.
“My dear?” It was the Prince Imperial this time, his voice polite but insistent. The old man wasn’t going to let her sit this one out: she had to commit.
What she wanted to say was Surrender now, please. But she couldn’t get those words out, no matter how much half of her wanted to. So instead Lady Clare took a deep breath and did what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do: tell the truth, or as much of it as she could manage. “At the moment surrender isn’t our best option. But, even so, fighting might not be wise.”
“Wise?” The elderly man seemed puzzled. “Why not?”
“Keep the army as your last resort,” suggested Lady Clare and shut her mouth, sitting back in her chair. With luck she could leave it at that.
Luck wasn’t with her.
“Because we should save them?”
“No.” Lady Clare said brusquely, meeting the Prince Imperial’s gaze. “Because they can’t be trusted.”
The crash of the field marshal’s chair tipping backwards was shock enough to still the whole Council Room but — on his feet or not — the field marshal still didn’t get a chance to speak. Count Lazlo was in there first, telling them all his version of what it was Lady Clare was trying to say.
“No alternative but eventual surrender then...” Fussy, snide, mocking — Lady Clare loathed his voice on instinct, but not as much, Lady Clare suspected, as Lazlo loathed everything about her. Lazlo smiled at Lady Clare, his green eyes watchful but cold. “At least, I think that’s what the Minister for Internal Affairs and National Security is trying to say...” He stressed the second part of her title, as if it were her personal fault that Paris was surrounded, its ferroconcrete buildings being eaten away from within.
“No,” Lady Clare said. “That isn’t what I mean at all...”
She saw surprise reach Lazlo’s eyes, noted too that the young Minister for Finance was suddenly watching her, but what Lady Clare really noticed was hope sparking in the eyes of the Prince Imperial, then just as suddenly dying.
“I won’t sacrifice this city.” His voice was calm, undramatic. But for once his habitual politeness was cut with steel.
“I’m not suggesting that,” Clare said shortly. “The battle computers are down. We have fewer than fifty functioning APVs, almost no working aircraft and hardly any cannon, the virus has seen to that. At best we have fifteen hundred officer-issue Colt ceramics. Hardly enough to fight a war. But then what about the Black Hundreds?” She turned to Lena. “Are their hovers still functioning? What is the state of their guns? And what of...”
“So you vote against surrender?” Lazlo interrupted.
“Wait until I’ve finished talking,” Lady Clare said sharply and then turned her attention to the field marshal who was sheepishly retaking his seat, trying not to catch her eye. They were all men but her. That was the way the Third Empire worked. She hadn’t liked it when she started out, and she didn’t like it now. What she liked even less was that she’d managed to change so little in her forty years of serving the Imperial Government.
She was back in control, at least in control of them if not of herself. They were waiting for her now. Her words would carry dangerous weight as they always had done: and until now she’d always liked that feeling. Liked the slight fear that flickered across people’s eyes when she appeared.
But this was payback and none of them even knew what she was going through. Paris or LizAlec was a choice Lady Clare couldn’t easily make. Not just because the child still thought Lady Clare was her mother, but because it was Lady Clare who gave LizAlec life. Lady Clare had overruled the refusal of the Sorbonne’s Ecole de Médecin to release Alex Gibson’s frozen sperm. That was sixteen years ago. Three weeks later, having ordered a Web-wide search for details of Razz’s clone-insurance policy, she’d had an entire Razz clone quietly lifted from the cryonic vaults of FirstVirtual.
It wasn’t the meat Lady Clare wanted, that vat-kept heap of barely living flesh, it was the clone’s ovaries. The director at Marne had mixed sperm and ova himself, implanting the resulting cytoplast into Lady Clare in her own bedroom at the Hotel Sabatini. Nine months later Elizabeth Alexandra was born — no surrogates, no synthetic wombs, no fast-forwarding the period of gestation.
The child Alex and Razz would never have, because one was psychotic and dead and the other was alive and a god, but still insane for all that. Both had been her lovers in their time: not for long, admittedly, and she’d never meant to either of them what they meant to each other. But all the same, she’d had their child. Alone, at night, in that vast bed.
LizAlec or Paris? How could she vote to surrender the capital of the Empire? How could she not vote...? Lady Clare put her head in her hands, pushing knuckles into dark-ringed eye sockets until fractal stars exploded behind her eyes. No tears, not here. Not in front of these people.
Let the Prince Imperial decide.
“I abstain,” Lady Clare said flatly. Ignoring Lena, Count Lazlo and the youthful but fat Minister of Finance, she met the Prince Imperial’s sad eyes. Saw the tired old man bow under the weight of another responsibility. Saw the hurt in his face and knew she could never tell him why.