He snorted and let his chair snap upright, then stood to pace restlessly around his huge office while he pondered the paranoia of that last thought. Thomas Theisman had been born fifteen days after his unmarried Dolist mothers sixteenth birthday, and he often wondered what she had been like. All he had of her was a single holocube of a skinny teenager in the cheap, typically flashy garb and overdone cosmetics Dolists favored even now. She'd been almost pretty, in a washed out, rather vapid-looking sort of way, he often thought, and there'd been at least a glimmer of intelligence and a trace of character in that otherwise amorphous face. With a few more years of maturity, a little genuine education, and a reason to at least try to improve her life, she might even have grown into someone he would have liked to know. But he'd never had the opportunity to find out if she had, for she'd handed him over to one of the state-run creches before he was six months old. He'd never seen her again, and he had even her holocube only because the senior matron of his creche had violated regulations to let him keep it.

Which, he told himself now, rubbing the deep scar on his left cheek, is probably a good thing. Since I've never met her, don't even know if she's still alive, for that matter, not even State Sec would threaten to shoot her to "motivate" me. Or I don't think they would, anyway.

He grimaced again and stopped near the door of his office, turning to survey the site from which he governed his doomed domain.

It was, beyond a doubt, the biggest, most luxurious working space he'd ever had, for this was the nerve center of the Barnett System. Buried deep at the heart of DuQuesne Base, the largest military installation on the planet Enki, it was only a moments walk from the War Room. Once second only to the Haven System itself among the People’s Navy's command slots, it had been outfitted with all the luxury the old Legislaturalist officer corps had reserved to itself, and if the decor showed signs of wear and neglect, at least no one had gotten around to stripping the office of the "decadent trappings of elitism." Theisman supposed he was grateful for that. The only problem was that no amount of personal comfort could disguise the fact that he was in yet another of the hopeless positions the People’s Republic and its Navy seemed to spend so much time stumbling into, and he couldn't quite suppress the suspicion that he was here because the situation was hopeless.

He put his hands behind him and gripped them together, rocking on his heels as he contemplated his unpalatable and probably brief future, and cursed himself yet again for his inability to play the political game properly. If only he'd been able to bring himself to kiss ass a little where the Committee of Public Safety or State Security were concerned he might not be in this office, looking down the barrel of a loaded pulser. He'd known all along that he was headed somewhere like this, he supposed. It wasn't because he'd been loyal to the old regime, for the old regime had given him very little reason to feel any devotion to it. Nor was it because he was disloyal to the PRH, for whatever its faults might be, the People’s Republic was his country, the star nation whose uniform he'd chosen to wear and which he'd sworn to defend.

No, the problem, as he was only too well aware, was that he couldn't stomach the stupidity and waste and gratuitous violence wreaked in the name of discipline by half-wits who lacked the intelligence to see where their version of "discipline" must ultimately lead. Like many other officers, he'd found in the Legislaturalist purges a chance for the flag rank he could never have attained under the old regime, but his attitudes, as his military skills, had been shaped by his one-time mentor Alfredo Yu. And like Yu, Thomas Theisman believed in finding ways to maximize the strength of the raw material assigned to him, whether in terms of equipment or personnel, which required that an officer lead, not simply goad from behind.

But the crude tactics embraced by the SS rejected that tradition. Indeed, StateSec didn't want leaders in the military, for anyone who could motivate his people to follow him and give of their very best for him in the furnace of battle could only be regarded as a potential threat to the new regime. And that, Theisman told himself gloomily, was the real reason he was in this office. He'd made the mistake of convincing his personnel to follow him without devoting sufficient industry to personally espousing the Committee of Public Safety's platform, and that, despite a record as one of the Committee’s most effective field commanders, had turned him into a dangerously ambitious disloyalist in StateSec's eyes.

He rubbed his scar once more, remembering the bloody chaos of the day he'd received it stopping a Manty thrust at the Seabring System. It hadn't mattered in the end, but his stand at Seabring had probably bought Trevor's Star another three or four months, possibly even more. It had also cost virtually his entire task force, for he'd been forced to engage dreadnoughts with battleships and battlecruisers. He knew he'd fought well, even brilliantly, but brilliance had been too little to overcome his units' individual inferiority. He'd had twice as many ships as his opponent but less than two-thirds the tonnage, and battleships and battlecruisers had no business fighting dreadnoughts even at two-to-one odds. Not even if they'd had technological parity. He'd managed to destroy only a single Manticoran dreadnought in return for the total destruction of seven battleships and eleven battlecruisers plus sufficient damage to send three more battleships, including PNS Conquerant, his flagship, to the breakers, but he'd inflicted such a heavy pounding upon the enemy in reply that the opposing admiral had broken off to shepherd his cripples clear.

Eleven battlecruisers and ten obsolete, undersized, underarmed "capital ships" which had no business in the wall of battle anyway wasn't an exorbitant price for holding a star system... assuming that there'd been any point in holding it in the first place, and he tried to believe there had been. Oh, the First Battle of Seabring hadn't stopped the Manties cold, nor had it prevented Theisman's successor in command of the system from losing the Second Battle of Seabring or saved Trevor’s Star in the long run. But it had at least slowed the enemy up, weakened him at least a little, cost him at least a few escorts and sent half a dozen dreadnoughts back to the yard for extensive repairs. And in a war in which the People's Navy could count its victories on the fingers of one man's hands, it had been a major boost to the Navy's morale... a point Theisman tried to remember when he reflected upon the nineteen thousand men and women who'd died winning it.

So here he was, servant of a government which had rewarded him with a chest full of medals for delivering even a passing victory at Seabring only to send him to Barnett to fill what had once been a premier command slot but now could end only in defeat whatever he did. And given that StateSec was still in the habit of shooting defeated admirals, it seemed highly probable that the Committee of Public Safety had finally concluded that it could dispense with the services of one Thomas Edward Theisman.

He snorted again, this time in bitter amusement, walked back to his oversized desk, and settled himself once more in his overly comfortable chair. It was possible he was being too pessimistic, he told himself. Of course, it was better to be overly pessimistic than optimistic in the current Peoples Republic, but perhaps Esther McQueen’s elevation to the Committee of Public Safety was a hopeful sign. She would be the only military person on the Committee, and for all her brilliance in battle, she'd always been dangerously ambitious, even under the Legislaturalists. Isolated as she was among civilians with no understanding of the problems the Navy faced, and ambitious to boot, she was more likely to get caught up in playing the power game than in solving the Fleet's problems. And even if she was inclined to fight for the Navy, she looked like being too little and too late to save Theisman's bacon, but he couldn't quite quash a lingering hope that she would make a difference. Whatever her other faults, she'd been a Navy officer for over forty T-years, and she'd always been able to inspire loyalty in her immediate subordinates. Perhaps she would remember that loyalty cut both ways... or at least see the need to strengthen the Navy if only to keep her own constituency strong.