Of course, what the People's Republic of Haven had needed didn't really matter anymore, she reminded herself, because the People's Republic no longer existed. And that, too, had been the work of Admiral Thomas Theisman.

She tipped her chair a bit further back, considering the slightly stocky, brown-haired, utterly unremarkable-looking man on the other side of her desk's gleaming, hand-rubbed Sandoval mahogany. She wondered if the citizens of the Republic of Haven—no longer the People's Republic, but simply the Republic—even began to appreciate how much they truly owed him. Disposing of Saint-Just would have been more than enough to earn their eternal gratitude, but he hadn't stopped there. Nor, to the amazement of everyone who hadn't personally known him, had he made even the slightest effort to seize power for himself. The closest he'd come was to combine the resurrected office of Chief of Naval Operations and that of Secretary of War in his own person, insuring that he had firm control of both sides of the Republic's military machine. But once he'd combined them, he'd steadfastly refused to use them for any purely personal end . . . and descended like the wrath of God on any officer who even looked like abusing his own position. That was a restraint the Republic's experience under the previous two regimes had made it flatly impossible for its citizens to believe in.

Of course, Pritchart reminded herself wryly, very few of those citizens could even begin to imagine how desperate Theisman had been to avoid the job which she herself now held.

Much of that desperation had stemmed from his awareness that he lacked many of the qualities a successful politician required. He understood (intellectually) the need for compromise and the necessity of deal-making and horsetrading for advantage, but he would never be comfortable doing either of those things. That didn't keep him from analyzing the process, often with an acuity Pritchart found herself hard pressed to match. It was just that it was something he could understand without being very good at doing, and he was wise enough to recognize that.

He was also remarkably free of personal ambition for someone who'd risen to his rank in the People's Navy, even under the conditions of accelerated promotion which had obtained after the purges of the old officer corps. The gaping holes Rob Pierre's overthrow of the Legislaturalists had left in the ranks of the Navy's senior officers, coupled with the desperate needs of a losing war against the Manticoran Alliance, had required promotions that opened all sorts of opportunities for junior officers who'd been capable . . . or ambitious.

Surviving after being promoted had been a more difficult task. Between State Security's ruthless determination to shoot officers who failed the State as object lessons to their peers and Oscar Saint-Just's near pathological suspicion of any officer who appeared too competent, every flag officer in the People's Navy had known her own life, and all too often the lives of her entire family, had hung by a badly frayed thread. Eloise Pritchart understood how that had worked better than most, for she'd been one of Saint-Just's official spies. Like Denis LePic, she'd been assigned to report directly to Saint-Just's office on the political reliability of one of the People's Republic's senior flag officers. Unfortunately for Saint-Just, her reports had borne no particular relationship to reality.

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.

Ultimately, she felt certain, it had been her relationship with Giscard, with its resonances to his own relationship with LePic, which had made her acceptable to him. He'd known and trusted Giscard; by extension, he'd felt able to trust her because he knew Giscard did. But the thing which had truly astounded her was that when he offered her both the political and the military powers of the head of state, he'd meant it.

There hadn't been any strings, no reservations, no secretly retained authority. The one thing Thomas Theisman would never be was a puppet master. There'd been one, and only one, condition, and that had been that Eloise Pritchart prove to him that she was as committed as he was to the restoration of the old Constitution. Not the Constitution of the People's Republic of Haven, which had created the office of Hereditary President and legally enshrined the dynastic power of the Legislaturalists, but the Constitution of the old Republic. The Republic whose citizens had been expected to be more than mere drones and to vote. The one whose presidents and legislators had served at the will of an electorate which held them responsible for their actions.