But the excesses committed in the name of “the People’s security,” and the reign of terror which had followed—the disappearances and executions of men and women he had known, whose only crimes had been to fail in the impossible tasks assigned to them—those things had taught him a colder, uglier lesson. They’d taught him about the gulf which yawned between the Committee’s promised land and where he was right now… and about the savagery of the Mob once the shackles were loosened. Worst of all, they’d shown him what he dared not say aloud to a single living soul: that the members of the Committee themselves were terrified of what they had unleashed and prepared to embrace any extremism in the name of their own survival. And so he’d confronted the supreme irony of it all. Under the old regime, he’d been that rare creature: a patriot who loved and served his country despite all the many things he knew were wrong with it… and under the new regime, he was exactly the same thing. Only the nature of that country’s problems—and the virulence of its excesses—had changed.

But at least he’d known what he had to do to survive. It was simple, really. Obey his orders, succeed however impossible the mission, and never, ever trust anyone from StateSec, for a single mistake—just one hastily spoken or poorly chosen word—to one of Oscar Saint-Just’s spies would be more dangerous than any Manticoran superdreadnought.

And then Eloise had been assigned as his commissioner. At first, he’d assumed she was like the others, but she wasn’t. Like him, she believed in the things the original Committee had said it was going to do. He’d been unable to accept that for months, been certain it was all a mask to entrap him into lowering his own guard, but it hadn’t been.

“I wish to hell you were less visible,” he said now, fretting, knowing it was useless to say and would only demonstrate his anxiety, and yet unable not to say it. “People’s commissioner for an entire fleet and an Aprilist… they’re going to be watching you like hawks.”

“An ex-Aprilist,” she corrected him, much more lightly than she could possibly feel, and reached over to pat his hand. “Don’t spend your time and energy fretting about me, Javier! You just pull Icarus off. No one’s going to question my support for you as long as you deliver the goods and don’t say or do something totally against the party line, especially not with McQueen running the War Office. And as long as the two of us keep up appearances in public and perform effectively in the field, no one’s going to worry about my previous affiliations.”

“I know,” he said penitently. Not because he agreed with her, but because he shouldn’t have brought the subject up. There was nothing either of them could do about it, and now she was likely to spend the next hour or so of their precious privacy trying to reassure him that she was completely safe when both of them knew she was nothing of the sort… even without her relationship with him.