Her years as an underground fighter had served her well in terms of learning to assume protective coloration, and unlike some of her less wary (and since vanished) companions in arms, she had refused to succumb to the heady euphoria of the Committee’s early days. And when the Committee moved to consolidate the cold iron of its power and those less wary companions found themselves quietly detained and "disappeared" by those they had thought were their allies, Pritchart’s carefully crafted public persona had already made the transition from apolitical guerrilla fighter to committed guardian of the New Order in the People’s name. It had been a dangerous tightrope to walk, but Saint-Just had been deeply impressed by her insightful reports on the relatively junior officers she had initially been assigned to watchdog. Indeed, if the truth be told, he valued her moderation even more because it had been so rare among the people’s commissioners. And so she’d been tapped for ever more sensitive duties, rising higher and higher in StateSec without the people who ran that agency’s ever realizing what actually went on in the privacy of her own thoughts.
Until she was assigned to Giscard. Had it really been less than four T-years ago? It seemed impossible whenever he thought about it. Surely it had to have been longer than that! The intensity of life on the edge, of finding oneself adrift in the fevered turbulence of Rob S. Pierre’s new, improved People’s Republic and locked in a war where one’s own superiors were as likely to shoot one as the enemy, lent a surrealism to every aspect of existence, and especially to anything as insanely dangerous as a love affair between a Navy officer and his people’s commissioner.
And yet, somehow, they’d managed to survive this long. Every day was yet another triumph against the odds in a game where the house always won, sooner or later, but deep inside, both of them knew no streak lasted forever. All they could do was go on as they had, walking their tightrope and dodging each day’s bullet as it came at them, and hope that someday, somehow, things would change...
The truly odd thing, though it never occurred to Javier Giscard to see it so, was that even now, neither of them had even once seriously considered defection. A handful of other officers had made that choice, including Alfredo Yu, Giscard’s old mentor. Yet much as he respected Yu, that was one example he simply could not follow, and he wondered, sometimes, whether that was a virtue or the ultimate proof of his own idiocy.
"Do you really think McQueen can pull it off?" he asked after a moment. Pritchart drew back enough to look up at him and raise an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "Do you think she can actually reorganize the War Office enough to make a difference without getting herself purged?" he expanded.
"I think she has the ability to do it," Pritchart said thoughtfully. "And she’s certainly been given a better opportunity to use that ability than anyone else has had. But whether or not she can make all the pieces come together—?" It was her turn to shrug.
"I’d feel a lot better if I hadn’t heard so many stories about her ambition," he sighed.
"Saint-Just has heard them all, too, I assure you," she said much more grimly. "I haven’t seen her dossier, of course; she’s not my responsibility. But I’ve heard the scuttlebutt among the other commissioners, and there was a lot of nervousness when Pierre picked her to replace Kline."
"Even after she squashed the Levelers?" He tried to make it a jest, but the joking tone fell flat, and she grimaced.
"Maybe even especially after she squashed the Levelers," she replied. "She did it too well and displayed too much initiative and raw nerve—and ruthlessness. And picked up too much approval from the Mob. Besides, half of them figure she would have kept right on moving herself if her pinnace hadn’t crashed. I happen to think they’re wrong, and so does Fontein and, I’m pretty sure, Saint-Just himself. I think she recognized that her lack of a power base would have prevented her from supplanting the Committee, and I honestly believe she also would have refused to provoke the kind of anarchy that would have resulted from any failed putsch on her part. But that doesn’t mean anyone else trusts her... or that even I think she might not make a try if she thought she’d managed to build a strong enough support base to have a shot at success."
"Surely she realizes that, though," Giscard thought aloud. "She has to be smart enough not to do anything that might seem to play into her opponents’ hands."
"I’d like to think so, and to give her credit, she has been so far. But she’s got some of the same problems we do, Javier. The better she does her job, and the more successful she becomes, the more dangerous she becomes."
"Wonderful," he sighed bitterly. "The goddamned lunatics are running the asylum!"
"They are," Pritchart agreed unflinchingly. "But there’s nothing we can do about it except survive, and maybe accomplish a little something for the Republic along the way."
Their eyes met once more, and Giscard smiled crookedly. Like himself, she never spoke of "the People" when they were alone. Their loyalty was to the Republic, or at least to the tattered remnants of the ideal of the Republic, which Rob Pierre had promised to restore. And that, of course, would have been the final proof to StateSec that neither of them could be trusted.
He chuckled at the thought, and she raised an eyebrow again, as if asking him to share the joke. But he only shook his head, then bent to kiss her once more. Her lips warmed under his, clinging with desperate longing, and he felt the urgency rising within him. It had been months since they’d last been alone together, and he pulled back from the kiss, just far enough to look deep into her shining topaz eyes.
"Oh, I think there might be a little something else we might do, as well, Citizen Commissioner," he murmured, and stood, cradling her in his arms as he crossed to his sleeping cabin’s hatch.
Chapter Eighteen
"And come out of there, you worthless piece of—Ah ha! "
Scooter Smith sat back on his haunches with a triumphant grin as the recalcitrant tracking drive of the LAC’s number three laser cluster finally yielded to his ministrations. He didn’t know how the defective drive shaft had gotten past the myriad inspections which were supposed to spot such things, but that was less important than that it had. Well, that and the fact that its sub-spec materials had warped and jammed the cluster’s training gears solid at a most inopportune moment during yesterday’s exercises. It had also managed to splinter and deform itself sufficiently to resist all removal efforts with sullen stolidity for the better part of two hours, and they’d had to strip the entire unit down much further than he’d hoped, but they had it out now.
He tossed it to one of his techs and stood, rubbing the small of his back, then climbed down the side of the work stand.
One of the nicer things about HMS Minotaur’s LAC bays was that someone had actually bothered to put some thought into servicing and ammunitioning requirements. Smith’s last assignment had been as an assault shuttle section chief aboard HMS Leutzen, and, like every other shuttle maintenance specialist, it seemed as if he’d spent about a third of his on-duty time in a skinsuit or a hardsuit floating around in the zero-gee vacuum of a boat bay while he pulled hull maintenance on one or another of the small craft under his care. In most ways, Minotaur’s LACs were simply small craft writ large, and he’d expected to face the same problem, only more so. And he was spending a good bit of time suited up... but nowhere near as much of it as he’d anticipated.
Whoever had designed Minotaur had taken extraordinary pains to enhance crew efficiency. Even after five months on board, Smith was still a bit awed by the degree of automation she incorporated. Traditionally, warships had embarked crews which were enormously larger than any merchant ship of equivalent tonnage would have boasted. That was largely because merchant ships tended to be nothing more than huge, hollow spaces into which to stuff cargo, whereas warships were packed full of weapons, ammunition, defensive and offensive electronic warfare systems, sidewall generators, back up fusion plants, bigger Warshawski sails, more powerful beta nodes, and scores of other things merchantmen simply didn’t carry and hence had no reason to provide crews for. But it was also true that merchies relied far more heavily than warships on automated and remote systems to reduce manpower requirements still further.