“This is not a struggle in which ships of the wall have a place. Whatever Oscar Saint-Just may choose to do, we of the legitimate Committee of Public Safety refuse to turn Nouveau Paris into a wasteland of wreckage and bodies. We hold the Octagon, and we will defend it by whatever means are necessary, but we neither request nor will we tolerate nuclear or kinetic strikes within the area of the Capital! Should you be ordered by Saint-Just or his minions to carry out such strikes, you are instructed to refuse those orders, no matter what threats may accompany them.
“What the Committee most urgently requires at this time are additional loyal ground and atmospheric combat troops. I need not tell any of you how powerful the State Security intervention forces in and around Nouveau Paris are. I hope and believe that many of the personnel of those intervention battalions will remember their oaths to the Committee and refuse to participate in this naked effort to suppress and destroy all that Citizen Chairman Pierre fought so long and so hard to accomplish. But it must be anticipated that many others in those battalions will accept the illegal orders of those officers who have allied themselves with the traitor Saint-Just. The defenses of the Octagon are strong, but we cannot resist a mass attack out of our own resources for an extended period. It is essential to the survival of the Committee that loyal forces relieve the Octagon and escort the civilian members of the Committee to safety. I therefore call upon all Marine and Planetary Defense officers and charge you, as Secretary of War and in the name of the legitimate members of the Committee of Public Safety, to move at once to the relief of the Octagon and the suppression of any and all forces loyal to the traitor Oscar Saint-Just! In this moment of—”
Saint-Just stabbed the communications button again, and this time his expression was a vicious snarl as McQueen’s voice died.
She was good, he admitted. Every word vibrated with sincerity, passion, and outrage. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if even some of his own StateSec people believed her, and he had no doubt at all that a large majority of the regular military would want to believe her. How could they want anything else, when she was the one who had led them to victory and he was the one who had ordered countless of their fellows and their fellows’ families executed? And with Rob dead, they could believe her if they so chose. However senior to her his membership on the Committee might be, both of them were simply “citizen secretaries.” She had as great a claim to legitimacy as he did… at least for anyone looking from the outside into the chaos and confusion which she had sown across Nouveau Paris. Worse, she did indeed have every surviving member of the Committee in the Octagon with her, and he and Rob had spent years stamping out any hint of defiance among the Committee’s membership. Now McQueen had physical control of all those sheep, and Saint-Just had no doubt at all that she could… convince at least the majority of them into signing off on her version of what had happened. As for any of them who declined, he was sure it would turn out that they had been tragically murdered by traitorous StateSec units before McQueen could rescue them from his murderous minions.
And that bit about forbidding any nuclear or kinetic strikes on the capital—that was downright brilliant! It snatched the moral high ground right out from under his feet, and at the same time it posed a threat which was almost certain to hold his own SS-crewed warships at bay. Citizen Commodore Helft had already destroyed two superdreadnoughts which had looked like moving to support McQueen, and at the moment, the rest of Capital Fleet’s ships were under the guns of Helft’s battle squadron. He could undoubtedly destroy dozens of them before they could bring up their sidewalls, but there were too many of them for him to count on getting all of them before the survivors got him. And thanks to McQueen’s orders, it was virtually certain that at least some of them would try to stop him from bombarding the capital, even at the risk of their own near-certain destruction. And once he started killing them in large numbers, their consorts would almost certainly react, for how could they know where Helft would stop if they didn’t stop him.
Someone else knocked on the frame of his open office door, and he looked up to see a citizen colonel whose name he could not recall.
“Yes?”
“Sir, we just got another report from Citizen General Bouchard.” The citizen colonel paused, and cleared his throat. “Sir, the Citizen General says that his attack has been stopped. I’m… afraid they took heavy casualties, Sir.”
“How heavy?” Saint-Just’s expressionless tone never wavered, and the citizen colonel cleared his throat again.
“Very heavy, I understand, Sir. Citizen General Bouchard reports that both of his lead battalions are falling back in disorder.” The citizen colonel inhaled deeply, and straightened his back. “Sir, it sounds to me like what he really means is that they’re running like hell.”
“I see.” Saint-Just regarded the citizen colonel with a sharper edge of interest. “What actions would you recommend, Citizen Colonel?” he asked after a moment, and the officer met his eyes squarely.
“I don’t have any firsthand information, Sir.” The citizen colonel spoke with much less hesitation, as if what he’d already said had broken some inner reserve. “From the reports I’ve seen here, though, I don’t think Citizen General Bouchard is going to get through on the ground. They’ve got too much manpower and firepower, and, frankly, Sir, they’re much better trained for this sort of standup, toe-to-toe fight than we are.”
“I see,” Saint-Just repeated in a somewhat colder tone. “Nonetheless, Citizen Colonel,” he went on, “and notwithstanding the inferiority of our own troops, this mutiny must be suppressed. Don’t you agree?”
“Of course I do, Sir! All I’m saying is that if we keep hammering straight down the same approaches into their teeth, we’re going to take insupportable casualties and fail to achieve our objective, anyway. At the same time, Sir, it looks to me as if they can’t have much of a central reserve within the Octagon itself—not of ground troops, anyway. They’ve got more forces moving towards them from half a dozen Marine and Navy commands, but their reinforcements aren’t there yet. I believe that the organized units we retain on the ground in the vicinity would be better occupied throwing a cordon around the Octagon to keep additional mutinous units from reaching it. While they do that, we should move Citizen Brigadier Tome’s brigade up to support Citizen General Bouchard while we bring in reinforcements from outside the capital. If we have to, we can put in a frontal assault once we have the manpower to carry through with it despite our losses. In the meantime, Sir, I would recommend that we keep as much pressure on them with air attacks as we can, but without committing ourselves to a serious attack and the losses it would inevitably entail.”
Saint-Just regarded the other man thoughtfully. No doubt there was a great deal of military logic to what the citizen colonel had just said. Unfortunately, this was as much a political confrontation as a military one, and every hour that McQueen continued to pour her appeals into the listening ears of the regular military units in the Haven System moved the political balance further in her favor.
“I appreciate your candor, Citizen Colonel… Jurgens,” he said, squinting a bit as he read the name off of Jurgens’ name patch. “And if Bouchard’s people are falling back anyway, then no doubt ordering them to assume a defensive stance, at least temporarily, makes sense. But there are other factors to consider here, as well.”
The citizen secretary rubbed his forehead—the equivalent in him of another man’s raging tantrum—then shrugged.