Ransom didn't, and that was why Pierre would never have given her the position Saint-Just occupied. She was too unpredictable, which translated into "unreliable" in his mind. And where he was determined to at least attempt to build something constructive atop the bones of the old, murdered power structure, she often seemed more interested in the exercise of power than in the ends to which it was exercised. She was always at her best whipping up the Proles' mob mentality, and it was her ability to direct that mentality against targets other than Pierre and his regime which made her so valuable. Yet it also gave her Office of Public Information the first opportunity to put its spin on each issue as it came along, which gave her a degree of power, intangible, but frighteningly real, that made her very nearly Saint-Just's equal. And, Pierre reminded himself, Cordelia had more than her fair share of cronies within Oscar's own SS, as well. She'd been one of the Committee of Public Safety's roving headsmen immediately after the coup, before he moved her to Public Information, and she retained personal contacts with the men and women with whom she'd served. The fact that she and Oscar were both fierce empire-builders (although, Pierre suspected, for quite different reasons) only made the situation worse in many ways, but at least it let him play them off against one another, maintaining their "constituencies" in a delicate, sometimes precarious balance he could force to support his own position rather than undermining it.

"I understand Cordelia's concerns, Rob," Saint-Just said, answering Pierre’s unspoken appeal after a long, pregnant moment. He tipped back his chair, leaning away from the crystal-topped conference table, and steepled his fingers across his chest in a posture that made him look even more like someone's harmless, nondescript uncle. "We've spent over five T-years convincing everyone the Navy was responsible for the Harris Assassination, and while we've, ah, removed virtually all the precoup senior officers, putting my commissioners aboard the Navy's ships hasn't won us many fans among their replacements. Whether we want to admit it or not, granting political agents, we might as well be honest and call them spies, veto authority over line officers helps explain the fiascoes the fleet keeps sailing into... and the officer corps knows that, too. When you add all that to the number of officers we've shot or locked up 'to encourage the others,' it could certainly be argued that taking our boot off their necks is a questionable decision, at best... even if it was the Navy that saved our asses from LaBoeuf's maniacs. I mean, let's not fool ourselves here; anyone would have looked good compared to the Levelers. Don't forget that part of their platform called for shooting anyone above the rank of lieutenant commander or major for the 'military-industrial complex's treasonous misconduct of the war.' There's no guarantee the Navy would back us against someone less, um, energetic than they were."

His tenor was as mild and colorless as the rest of him, yet Ransom's eyes hardened behind their glitter as she heard the "But" he hadn't quite voiced. Pierre heard the qualification as well, and his own eyes narrowed.

"But compared to our other options?" he said softly, inviting Saint-Just to continue, and the SS chief shrugged.

"Compared to our other options, I don't see a lot of choice. The Manties keep handing our fleet commanders their heads, and we keep blaming them for it. After a point, that becomes bad propaganda as well as bad strategy. Let's face it, Cordelia," Saint-Just swiveled those nondescript eyes to his golden-haired colleague, "it gets awfully hard for Public Information to keep rallying public support behind our 'gallant defenders' when we seem to be killing as many of them as the Manties are!"

"Maybe it does," Ransom countered, "but that's less risky than letting the military get a foot into the door." She switched the full force of her personality to Pierre. "If we put someone from the military on the Committee, how do we keep him or her from finding out things we don't want the military to know? Like who really killed off the Harris government?"

"There's not much chance of that," Saint-Just pointed out reasonably. "There was never any hard evidence of our activities... and aside from a few people who had a hand of their own in the operation, there's no one left who could challenge our version of what happened." He gave a chill smile. "Anyone who knows anything, and is still alive, could only incriminate himself if he tried to talk about it. Besides, I've made damned sure all of StateSec's internal records reflect the official line. Anyone who wants to challenge all that 'impartial evidence' is obviously a counterrevolutionary enemy of the People."

"'Not much chance' isn't the same thing as no chance at all," Ransom retorted.

Her tone was sharper than usual, for manipulator or not, she truly believed in the concept of enemies of the People, and her suspicion of the military was almost obsessive. Despite her need to produce pro-war propaganda which extolled the Navy's virtues as the Republics protectors, her personal hatred for it was the next best thing to pathological. She loathed and despised it as a decadent, degenerate institution whose traditions still tied it to the old regime and probably inspired it to plot the Committees overthrow in order to restore the Legislaturalists. Even worse, its persistent failures to throw the enemy back and save the Republic, which was probably at least partly due to its disloyalty, only reinforced her contempt with fear that it would fail to save her, and it was starting to get out of hand. In fact, her increasingly irrational antimilitary biases were a main reason for Pierre’s decision that he needed someone from the military as a counterbalance.

He often thought it was odd that so much of her hatred should be fixed on the military, for unlike him, Ransom had come up through the action arm of the Citizens' Rights Union. She'd spent the better part of forty T-years fighting not the military, which had virtually never intervened in domestic security matters, but the minions of Internal Security, and Pierre would have expected her passionate hate to be focused there. But it wasn't. She worked well with Oscar Saint-Just, one-time second-in-command of InSec, and she never seemed to hold past connections to InSec against any of State Security's current personnel. Perhaps, he thought, that was because she and InSec had played the same game by the same rules. They'd been enemies, but enemies who understood one another, and Ransom the not-so-ex-terrorist had absolutely no understanding of or sympathy for the traditions and values of the military community.

But whatever the source of her attitudes, neither Pierre nor Saint-Just shared their virulent intensity. Enemies of the Committee, yes; they had positive proof those were out there. But unlike Ransom, they could draw a clear distinction between the Committee and the PRH itself, just as they could accept that military failures were not incontrovertible proof of treasonous intentions. She couldn't. Perhaps that was because they were more pragmatic than she, or perhaps it was because each of them, in his own way, was actually trying to build something while Cordelia was still committed to tearing things down. Personally, Pierre suspected it was because her egoism and paranoia were reinforcing one another. In her own mind the People, the Committee of Public Safety, and Cordelia Ransom had become one and the same thing. He who opposed, or failed, any part of her personal Trinity was the enemy of them all, so simple self-defense required her to be eternally vigilant to ferret out and crush the People’s enemies before they got her.