The Service of the Sword

"Don't worry about Patricia, I know where the bodies are buried," Rachel said. "As for the charge issue, I just told Gonzalvez that to get him out of our hair. Where should we go?"

"Anywhere but Prague," Mullins said with a shudder.

"I hear Gryphon is beautiful in the winter," she said with a grin.

FANATIC

by Eric Flint

1

Citizen Rear Admiral Genevieve Chin stared at the holopic on her desk. Without even realizing it, she was perched on the edge of her chair.

Citizen Commodore Ogilve, slouched in a nearby chair in her office, put her thoughts into words:

"He looks like a real piece of work, doesn't he?"

Glumly, Chin nodded. The holopic on her desk was that of a State Security officer whose face practically shrieked: fanatic. The fact that it was the image of a young man did not detract from the impression in the least. Coarse black hair loomed over a wide, shallow brow; the brow, in turn, loomed over eyes as dark as the hair. The eyes themselves were obsidian flakes against an ascetic-pale, hard-jawed, tight-lipped, square-chi

Chin couldn't detect any traces of the leering cruelty that had not been hard to find on the face of the officer's predecessor. But she took no great comfort from the fact. Even assuming she was right, that cold-blooded part of her which had enabled a disgraced admiral to survive for ten years through Haven's Pierre–Saint-Just–Ransom regime would have preferred an outright sadist to a sheer fanatic as the effective new head of State Security in La Martine Sector. One could at least hope that a sadist would be careless or lazy, too often distracted by his vices to pay full attention to his official assignment. Whereas this man . . . 

"Is he really as young as he looks, Yuri?" she asked quietly.

The third person in the room, who was leaning against the closed door to her office, nodded his head. He was a somewhat plump middle-aged man of average height, with a round and friendly looking face, wearing a StateSec uniform.

"Yup. Just turned twenty-four years old. Three years out of the academy. Unfortunately, he seems to have done splendidly on his first major field assignment and caught Saint-Just's eye. And now, of course . . ."

Citizen Commodore Ogilve sighed. "Since all the casualties State Security suffered in Nouveau Paris when McQueen launched her coup attempt—what in Hell what was she thinking?—Saint-Just is throwing every young hotshot he's got left into the breaches." He wiped his face with a thin hand. "If we'd had any warning . . ."

"And what good would that have done?" demanded Chin. "Sure, we could have seized this sector, and so what? As long as Nouveau Paris stayed under Saint-Just's control, he'd have the whip hand." Chin leaned back in her chair wearily. "God damn Esther McQueen and her ambitions, anyway."

She glanced at her desk display. It was dark, at the moment, but she had no difficulty imagining what it would have shown if she'd slipped it to tactical mode. Two State Security superdreadnoughts keeping orbit close to her own task force circling the planet of La Martine.

Admiral Chin's task force was much bigger in terms of ships, true—fourteen battleships on station, along with an equivalent number of cruisers and half a dozen destroyers. And so what? Chin was fairly confident that under ideal conditions she could have defeated those two monsters—though not without suffering enormous casualties. She had the advantage of handpicked officers and well-trained Navy crews, whereas the officers and crews of the StateSec superdreadnoughts had no real battle experience. They'd been selected for their political reliability, not their fighting skills.

But it was all a moot point. The StateSec warships had their impellers and sidewalls up and she didn't. They'd gotten word of Esther McQueen's failed coup attempt in Nouveau Paris before she had, and had immediately gone to battle stations . . . and stayed there. By the time she'd realized what was happening, it had been too late. Any battle now would be a sheer massacre of her own forces.

It had almost been a massacre anyway, she suspected. McQueen's coup attempt had immediately placed the entire Navy officer corps under suspicion; especially any officers who, like Chin herself, dated back to the old Legislaturalist regime.

But when her own People's Commissioner had been found murdered three days before the news arrived . . . As accidental as it may have been, the timing had been unfortunate—putting it mildly!

Ironically, Genevieve suspected, she owed her life to the Manticorans. If the Star Kingdom's Eighth Fleet hadn't begun their terrifying onslaught on the People's Republic of Haven, State Security probably would have decided just to destroy her chunk of the Navy. But . . . Oscar Saint-Just was between a rock and a hard place, and he'd probably decided he simply couldn't afford to lose any part of the Navy that he didn't absolutely have to lose.

That, at least, had been the gist of the message sent ahead to the two StateSec superdreadnoughts by Saint-Just's handpicked hatchetman.

She studied the holopic again. No further action to be taken against Navy units or perso

And so things had remained for a very tense three weeks, since the news of McQueen's coup attempt had arrived at the distant sector capital of La Martine. The entire Republican Navy in the sector had been under arrest in all but name. All of it, for the past week—the superdreadnought captains had demanded the recall of every ship on patrol. Genevieve Chin and her people had been under the equivalent of a prison lockdown, with two ferocious State Security SDs standing guard over them while everyone waited for the young new warden to show up.

"Do you know anything about him, Yuri?"

Yuri Radamacher, the People's Commissioner for Citizen Commodore Jean-Pierre Ogilve, pushed himself away from the door. "Personally, no. But I did find this record chip in Jamka's quarters. It's a personal communique from Saint-Just."

Ogilve stiffened in his chair. "You took that? For God's sake, Yuri—"

Radamacher waved him down. "Relax, will you? Now that Jamka's dead, I am the highest-ranked StateSec officer in this task force—in the whole sector, as a matter of fact, even if the captains in command of those two SDs aren't paying any attention to my exalted rank. The fact that I searched Jamka's quarters after his body was found won't strike anyone as suspicious. In fact, suspicion would have been aroused if I hadn't."

He pulled a chip from his pocket. "As for this . . ." Shrugging: "I'll have to destroy it, of course. No way to just put it back without leaving too many traces. But I doubt its absence will be noticed, even if Saint-Just thinks to enquire." Radamacher made a face. "Not only was Jamka a slob, but after anyone studies more than ten percent of the chips scattered all over his quarters they'll realize . . ."

He shrugged again. "We all knew he was a vicious pervert. Let Saint-Just's fair-haired boy"—motioning to the holopic with the chip—"wallow in that muck for a bit, and I don't think he'll be worrying about a missing private message from Saint-Just."

Yuri slid the chip into the holoviewer. After a moment, the image of the officer was replaced by another. The same officer, as it happened. But this was not a formal pose. What began playing was a recording of an interview between the officer and Saint-Just himself, which had apparently been made in Saint-Just's office recently.