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He'd pla
Ned Pierce whistled admiringly. "Hey, that's quite an arsenal. Uh, Sir. You allowed to have this?"
Yuri shrugged. "Who knows? You wouldn't believe how vague the regulations get when it comes to specifying what Special Investigators—their assistants too, I presume—can and can't do."
He stepped aside from the locker. "This really isn't my line of work. So I'll let the two of you choose whatever weapons you think most suitable."
Pierce reached eagerly for a light tribarrel—about the heaviest man-portable weapon made (short of a plasma rifle, at any rate)—with a thousand-round ammunition tank. The tank was coded for a mixed flechette, armor-piercing, explosive belt, and the Marine's eyes glowed with anticipation. But—
"For Pete's sake, Ned!" Rolla protested. "You'll slaughter everybody on the bridge with that thing. You know how to fly a seven-million-ton SD? I sure as hell don't."
"Oh." Pierce's face looked simultaneously embarrassed and frustrated. "Yeah, you're right. Damn. I love those things."
"Just take a frickin' flechette gun, if you really need to splatter people wholesale," growled the StateSec sergeant, plucking a hand pulser out of the locker himself. "At least that way you won't blow any essential hardware apart, too! Or have you forgotten how to aim at anything smaller than a moon?"
"Teach your grandmother how to suck eggs," retorted Pierce. Quickly, easily, the Marine sergeant took out a flechette gun, examined and armed the weapon.
Then, he and Rolla studied each other for a moment. It was an awkward moment.
Yuri cleared his throat. "Ah, Sergeant Pierce, I believe you're senior to Sergeant Rolla. In terms of service, certainly—and, as Diana said, I don't see any other way to settle these things at the moment. Nevertheless—"
To his relief, Ned just shrugged. "Yeah, sure, Sir. Hey, look, I ain't stupid." He nodded at Rolla. "Jaime can have it. I really don't care."
"Good. What I hope we'll be dealing with is really more a police matter than a military one. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Sergeant Rolla has experience making arrests. Whereas, ah, you—"
Pierce's piratical grin was on full display. "I blow people apart. Don't worry about it, Sir. Mama Pierce's good little boy will follow orders."
Yuri's fears that they might face opposition on their way to the bridge proved to be unfounded. All they encountered, here and there, were a few small knots of StateSec ratings huddled and whispering. Clearly enough, some scraps of the news had begun percolating through the ship. Just as clearly, the scraps were just that—murky, muddled, impossible to make any clear sense from. The huge size of the superdreadnought added to the confusion. Wild rumors in a smaller ship might have stayed concentrated long enough for people to boil down the truth from them. In an SD juggernaut, rumors echoed down endless passages, becoming completely distorted and incoherent the farther they went.
He was a bit puzzled, at first. He would have expected Gallanti to have at least stationed StateSec guards at the critical access routes to the bridge. But . . . nothing, until they finally reached the hatch leading into the bridge itself.
By then, Yuri had figured out the reason, and so it was armed with that knowledge that he marched forthrightly toward the two StateSec security ratings standing guard by the hatch. The two guards were not from a special unit, summoned by Gallanti for the purpose. They were from the unit which was routinely stationed there—and these two happened to have the bad luck to be on shift when the crap hit the fan. They looked as nervous as mice when cats are on a rampage.
Gallanti was just a stupid, self-centered, hot-headed bully, that's all. The explanation was no more complicated than that. A woman who'd gotten her way for so long simply because of her rank and her overbearing personality that she wasn't giving a second's thought to the fact that she might be facing a tactical situation.
He was almost surprised he couldn't hear her screaming even through the closed hatch.
The Boss is blowing her stack, and when the Boss blows her stack everybody has to stand around and eat her shit. A law of nature, like gravity.
Idiot.
"Stand aside," he commanded, as soon as he came up to the guards. The words were spoken in a mild tone, but a very self-assured one.
The guards didn't think to question him. In fact, they were obviously relieved that he was there. Yuri jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Sergeant Rolla.
"You're now under the command of Citizen Sergeant Rolla. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Citizen Assistant Special Investigator." The replies came simultaneously. Then, seeing the figure of the commo rating following gingerly at the rear, their eyes widened.
Yuri opened the hatch and stepped through, followed by the two sergeants. Behind, he could hear one of the guards hissing to the commo rating.
"Jesus, Rita. You told us you were just go
"Piss on Gallanti," Enquien hissed back. "I went and got the People's Commissioner. He's here now—and that bitch's ass is grass. You watch."
The phrase she used made Yuri pause in midstep. Not "the Citizen Assistant Special Investigator." Just . . .
The Citizen Commissioner. No. Simply the People's Commissioner.
He found it all, then. All he needed for what had to be done. In that moment, for the first time in his life, he thought he understood that bizarre self-assuredness possessed by fanatics like Victor Cachat.
The People's Commissioner.
Indeed, it was so. For ten years he had carried that title, and made it his own. He had absolutely no idea what the future was going to bring, either for himself or anyone else, except for one thing alone. Whatever else happened, he was quite certain that the title "people's commissioner" was going to go down in history draped in the darkest of colors. As dark, he knew, as the term "inquisitors."
And rightly. Whatever the promise, the reality had turned it inside out. A post created to shield a republic from the possible depredations of its own military had been turned, not only against the military, but the republic itself. The old conundrum, reborn again. Who will guard the guardians?
Yet, he remembered reading of an inquisitor in the Basque country, in that ancient era when humanity had still lived on a single planet. Sent there by the Spanish Inquisition at the height of its power to investigate the truth behind a wave of accusations of witchcraft, the inquisitor had stopped the witch-burnings. Indeed, had insisted upon proper rules of evidence at all subsequent trials—and then released every supposed witch for lack of any such evidence.
Yuri had run across the anecdote in his voluminous reading. Years ago, that had been; but he'd taken a certain comfort from it ever since.
He even managed a chuckle, at that moment. Yuri Radamacher did not believe in an afterlife. Yet, if there was one, he was quite sure that at that very moment in Hell, some good-natured, round-faced, overweight, apprehensive little devil was being chewed out by Satan for "slackness."
It was time for the People's Commissioner to do his duty, then. The people of the republic needed protection against an officer run amok. Yuri advanced onto the bridge, with resolute steps.