The Service of the Sword

3

Ironically, the cabin which Yuri Radamacher was taken to by the guards after he left Cachat's presence was larger and less austere than his own aboard the commodore's flagship. That was always one of the advantages to serving aboard an SD, where living space was far more ample. This didn't quite qualify as a "stateroom"—at a guess, some nameless StateSec lieutenant had been ousted to make room for him—but it was still a more spacious cabin than the one Yuri had occupied aboard Ogilve's PNS Chartres.

Still and all, it was only a ship cabin. After the guards left—locking the door behind them, needless to say—it didn't take Yuri more than five minutes to examine it completely. And most of that time was pure dithering; the psychological self-protection of a man trying to keep the little shrieks of terror in the back of his mind from overwhelming him.

Soon enough, however, he could dither no more. So, not having any idea what the future held in store for him, Yuri sagged into the compartment's one small armchair and tried to examine his prospects as objectively as possible.

The prospects were... not good. They rarely were, for a StateSec officer placed under arrest by StateSec itself. Even the fig leaf of a trial before a People's Court would be dispensed with. State Security kept its dirty linen secret. Summary investigation. Summary trial. Often enough, summary execution.

On the plus side, while he and Admiral Chin and Commodore Ogilve had become a very close team over the past few years—exactly the sort of thing State Security did not like to see happening between naval officers and the StateSec political commissioners assigned to oversee them—they had always been careful to maintain the formalities in public.

Also on the plus side, while they had received vague feelers from Admiral Esther McQueen, they had been careful to keep their distance. In truth, they never had belonged to McQueen's conspiracy.

On the other hand...

On the minus side, there wasn't much doubt which way the admiral and Jean-Pierre and Yuri would have swung, in the event that McQueen had succeeded in her scheme. None of them particularly trusted McQueen. But when the alternative was Oscar Saint-Just, the old saw "better the devil you know than the devil you don't" just didn't hold any water. Anybody would be better than Saint-Just.

He tried to rally the plus side again. It was also true, after all, that they had never responded to McQueen's feelers with anything that could by any reasonable stretch of the term be characterized as "plotting."

Or so, at least, Yuri tried to tell himself. The problem was that he'd been an officer in StateSec for years. So he knew full well that Saint-Just's definition of "reasonable characterization" was... elastic at best. The fact was that there had been some informal communications between McQueen and Admiral Chin over the past year or so, which Ogilve and Radamacher had been privy to. And if the messages sent back and forth had been vague in the extreme, the simple fact of their existence alone would be enough to damn them if State Security found out.

If they found out. Yuri tried to find some comfort in the very good possibility that they wouldn't. The communications had always been verbal, of course, transmitted by one of McQueen's couriers. And always the same one—a woman named Jessica Hackett, who had been one of the officers on McQueen's staff. True, StateSec was superb at forcing information out of its prisoners. But there was at least a fifty/fifty chance that Hackett had been one of the many officers on McQueen's staff who had died when Saint-Just destroyed McQueen's command post with a hidden nuclear device. Not even a State Security interrogator could squeeze information out of radioactive debris.

Still, that was small comfort. Yuri knew perfectly well that StateSec would be on a rampage after McQueen's coup attempt. Heads were going to fall, right and left, and lots of them. The only reason Saint-Just had been relatively restrained thus far was simply because the critical state of the war with the Star Kingdom made it necessary for him to keep the disruption of the Navy to a minimum. But, as with everything else, Oscar Saint-Just's definition of "relatively restrained" was what you'd expect to find in a psychopath's dictionary.

Yuri sighed, wondering for the millionth time how the revolution had gone so completely sour. As a longtime oppositionist to the Legislaturalist regime—which had landed him for three years in an Internal Security prison, from which he'd only been freed by Rob Pierre's overthrow of the government—he'd greeted the new regime with enthusiasm.

Enough enthusiasm, even, to have volunteered for State Security. He chuckled drily, remembering the difficulty with which an inveterate dissident in his forties had struggled through the newly established StateSec academy, surrounded by other cadets most of whom were fiery young zealots like Victor Cachat.

Victor Cachat. What a piece of work. Radamacher tried to imagine how any man that young could be that self-assured, that confident in his own righteousness. So much so that in less than a day Cachat had succeeded in intimidating the naval officers of an entire task force and the officers of two StateSec superdreadnoughts.

Had Yuri himself ever been like that? He didn't think so, even in his rebellious youth. But he really couldn't remember anymore. The long years which had followed Pierre's coup d'état, as he slowly came to understand the horror and brutality lurking under the new regime's promise, had leached most of his idealism away. For a long time now, Yuri had simply been trying to survive—that, and, as much as possible, bury himself in the challenges posed by his assignment in La Martine Sector. Other, more ambitious StateSec officers might have been frustrated by being posted for so long in what was a political backwater, from the standpoint of career advancement. But Yuri had found La Martine a refuge, especially as he came to realize that the two naval officers he worked most closely with were kindred spirits. And, slowly, La Martine began to attract and keep other StateSec officers of his temperament.

They had done a good job in La Martine, damnation. And Yuri had found satisfaction in the doing. It had been one way—perhaps the only way—he could salvage what was left of his youthful spirit. Whether the Committee of Public Safety appreciated it or not, he and Chin and Ogilve had turned La Martine into a source of strength for the Republic. Despite its remote location, for the past several years La Martine had been one of the half-dozen most economically productive sectors for the People's Republic of Haven.

He wiped his face. And so what? Radamacher knew full well that Saint-Just and his ilk considered competence a feather, measured against the stone of political reliability.

Victor Cachat. It would be his decision, now. The powers of a StateSec Special Investigator, in a distant provincial sector like La Martine, were well-nigh limitless in practice. The only person who could have served as a check against Cachat would have been Robert Jamka, the senior People's Commissioner in the sector.

But Jamka was dead, and Radamacher was fairly certain that Saint-Just would be in no hurry to name a replacement for him. La Martine was not high on Saint-Just's priority list, being so far away from the war front. So long as Saint-Just was satisfied that Cachat was conducting the investigation with sufficient zeal and rigor, he'd let the young maniac have his way.

There was something ludicrous anyway about the idea of Robert Jamka serving as a "check" to anyone. Jamka had been a sadist and a sexual pervert. As well ask Beelzebub to rein in Belial.

And so the day wore on, as Yuri Radamacher sank deeper and deeper into despondency. By the time he finally dragged himself to his bed and fell asleep, the only thing he was wondering any longer was whether Cachat would offer him the honorable alternative of suicide to execution.

He wouldn't, of course. That had been the tradition of the Legislaturalist regime's Internal Security. Part of the "elitist privilege" which StateSec and its minions were determined to root out. None more so than men like Victor Cachat. Cachat's diction couldn't be faulted, but Yuri had had no difficulty detecting the traces of a Dolist accent in his speech. A man from Havenite society's lowest layers, now risen to power, filled with slum bitterness and rancor.