She’d never really expected that she and Citizen Admiral Javier Giscard, the man she’d been assigned to spy upon and whom she’d found the audacity to fall in love with, instead, would survive. Nor would they have, if Theisman hadn’t overthrown Saint-Just before the Secretary for State Security could have Giscard purged.

But they’d done far more than merely survive since then. Pritchart’s pre-revolution stature as “Brigade Commander Delta,” one of the leading Aprilists, was what had made her so valuable to Saint-Just as one of his people’s commissioners. The Aprilists had been widely regarded as the most “respectable” of the various armed revolutionary groups which had opposed the Legislaturalists. They’d also been far and away the most effective, and her Aprilist credentials had lent her an aura of legitimacy which Saint-Just had been eager to co-opt for his new Office of State Security. And, she admitted, like her friend Kevin Usher, she’d permitted herself to be co-opted. Outwardly, at least. She’d had to, if she’d wanted to survive, because she’d known even then that sooner or later any of her old Aprilist comrades who persisted in clinging openly to their ideals would quietly disappear.

They had… and she hadn’t. There were times she still felt guilty over that, but even on the worst nights, she knew any feeling of guilt was illogical. She’d done what she had not simply to survive, but to place herself in a position which might let her help others, like Giscard, survive as well. Standing up defiantly for her principles would have been noble and gallant… and unforgivably stupid. It had been her responsibility to stay alive to fight for those principles, however clandestinely, and that was precisely what she and Giscard had done.

In the end, they would have been found out and executed, anyway, if Theisman hadn’t gotten to Saint-Just first. And just as Saint-Just had found her reputation as an Aprilist useful for State Security, Theisman had found it equally useful for his own purposes. He’d needed someone—anyone—to whom he could hand the position of head of state. Pritchart doubted that more than half a dozen people in the entire People’s Republic had been prepared to believe he truly didn’t want that position for himself. In fact, she hadn’t believed it herself, at first. But, then, she hadn’t really known him before he’d recalled her and Giscard to the Haven System, along with the rest of Twelfth Fleet, to reinforce his own Capital Fleet.

Only the fact that Theisman had always had a reputation within the Navy as a man with no political ambitions had permitted Giscard and Citizen Admiral Lester Tourville—both of whom, unlike her, had known him for years—to convince her to return to Haven. All three of them had been intensely wary anyway, despite the naval officers’ acquaintance with him, but Pritchart had been stunned literally speechless when he informed her that he wanted her to organize the interim civilian government.

It hadn’t been all pure disinterest on his part, of course. She’d recognized immediately how useful she could be to him as a figurehead. After all, she’d had more than sufficient experience in a similar capacity with Saint-Just. And she’d been sufficiently realistic to admit that he had an overwhelming responsibility to reach for anything he might be able to use to prevent the complete fragmentation of the People’s Republic. If she was a potentially unifying force, then she had no more choice about accepting the job, figurehead or not, than he had about offering it to her. Or to someone like her, at least.