David Weber - The Service of the Sword

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 personnel until my arrival. Military situation critical.

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 communiqué 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.

"I'll give the kid this much," murmured Radamacher. "He's StateSec through-and-through, but he doesn't seem cut from the same cloth as Jamka. Watch."

Fascinated, Admiral Chin leaned forward. The sound quality in the holoprojection was as good as the images themselves—not surprising, given that Saint-Just would have had the very best equipment in his own office.

The first thing that struck Admiral Chin was that the head of Haven's State Security seemed a smaller man than she remembered. Genevieve hadn't seen Saint-Just in person for many years, and then only at a distance at a large official gathering. On that occasion, Saint-Just had been positioned behind a podium on an elevated dais, at quite some distance from Genevieve. He'd looked like a big man to her, then. Now, seeing him in a holoprojection sitting behind the desk in his own office, he simply seemed a small, unprepossessing bureaucrat. If Chin hadn't known that Oscar Saint-Just was perhaps the most cold-bloodedly murderous human being in existence, she would have taken him for a middle-aged clerk.

That accounted for some of it. But Genevieve knew that, for the most part, the reason Saint-Just seemed much smaller to her was purely psychological. The last time she'd seen Saint-Just she'd hated and feared him, and had been wondering whether she'd still be alive by the end of the week. She still hated Saint-Just—and still wondered how much longer she'd be alive—but the passage of years and the slow rebuilding of her own self-confidence as she'd forged La Martine Sector into an asset for the Republic had drained away most of the sheer terror.

The door to Saint-Just's office opened and the same young StateSec officer whose face she'd been staring at earlier was ushered into the office by a secretary. The secretary then closed the door, not entering the room himself.

The young officer glanced at the two guards standing against the far wall behind Saint-Just. The Director of State Security was seated at a desk near the middle of the room, studying a dossier open before him.

Chin was impressed by the officer's glance at the guards. Calmly assessing, it seemed—just long enough to assure himself that the guards were not particularly concerned about him. Their stance was alert, of course. Saint-Just wouldn't have tolerated anything else from his personal bodyguards. But there was nothing visible in that alertness beyond training and habit; none of the subtle signs which would have indicated that a man about to be arrested or secretly murdered had just been ushered into Saint-Just's presence.

Chin knew she couldn't have maintained that much poise herself, in that situation, even with her advantage of many more years of life and experience. The StateSec officer was either blessed by a completely secure conscience, or he was a phenomenally good actor.

The officer marched briskly across the wide expanse of carpet and came to attention in front of the Director's desk. Genevieve noted that he was careful, however, not to get too close. The officer was not a particularly big man himself, and as long as he stayed out of arm's reach of Saint-Just, the bodyguards wouldn't get nervous. He would already have been thoroughly checked for weapons. It was quite obvious that neither of the two guards—much less both together—would have any difficult subduing him if he suddenly went amok and tried to attack the Director. The guards were not precisely giants, but they were very big men. Admiral Chin had no doubt both of them were experts in close-quarter combat, armed or unarmed.