Had you known then, you still would have done it, his mind told him severely. Somebody had to. And be honest, Rob—you wanted to do it. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t decided to sit down at the table as a player, so quit whining about the cards you drew and get on with the job!

“What did you want to see me about, Oscar?” he asked, purely as a way to get things started.

“I just wanted to ask you one more time if you really want to do this,” Saint-Just replied. He spoke as calmly as ever, but, then, he’d sounded calm even as LaBoeuf’s maniacs fought their way towards the Committee floor by floor, too. Pierre sometimes wondered if some quirk of evolution had simply omitted the standard connection between anxiety and voice pitch built into other people. Or if perhaps someone had foisted one of the mythical androids of prespace fiction writers off on him.

“I presume you mean the devaluation?”

“That’s part of what I mean,” Saint-Just said. “That part of it certainly worries me. But to be honest, Rob, it worries me a hell of a lot less than the free rein you’re giving McQueen.”

“We can squash McQueen any time we have to,” Pierre retorted. “Hell, Oscar! You’re the one who doctored her dossier to make it a slam-dunk in front of a People’s Court!”

“I realize that,” Saint-Just said calmly. “And I also realize that I’m the one who vetted her, and the one who countersigned Fontein’s evaluation, and the one who’s recording virtually every word she says. Under most circumstances, I’d feel perfectly confident about it. But these aren’t ‘most circumstances.’ You know that as well as I do, and I don’t like how… comfortable she and her senior officers are starting to sound with each other.”

Pierre scowled and started to speak sharply, then made himself stop. Saint-Just’s paranoia, both personal and institutional, was exactly what made him so valuable. He distrusted everybody, except—perhaps—Pierre. Actually, the Chairman wasn’t too certain even about that. Yet paranoid or no, Saint-Just had given Pierre ample proof of the acuity of his perceptions… most of the time.

Unfortunately, Pierre had also had proof that the StateSec chief could occasionally go off on tangents all his own, and Oscar Saint-Just was not a great believer in moderation. He believed in playing safe… which, from his viewpoint, meant shooting anyone he suspected might even be contemplating treason. At least that way he could be sure he got any guilty parties, and if the occasional innocent got blotted out too, well, making an omelet was always hard on a few eggs.

Up to a point, that wasn’t such a bad thing—except from the eggs’ perspective, perhaps. A certain degree of unpredictability actually made a reign of terror more effective. But that was the point. If they were going to defeat the Manties, they had to begin moving away from outright terror tactics. Oscar himself had agreed with that when they first discussed McQueen’s appointment as Secretary of War. The question was whether his present concerns were based in reality or were the result of another of his tangents.