Adele brought up imagery of citizens wearing bright Strymonian costumes marching up three avenues to the square on which the Cinnabar Residence stood, one of several ornate buildings behind walled forecourts. The pavement was plasticized clay, seamless and unable to provide missiles, but the leaders of the mob had thoughtfully provided themselves with sacks of fist-sized stones.
“Why would they imagine Cinnabar was behind rumors like that?” Daniel wondered aloud. “That’s scarcely our style. Thinking we were about to send a plenipotentiary to order a change in the government, now, that might have happened.”
Two uniformed police at the entrance ambled away as the mob approached. One of them even tipped his cap to a woman in the front rank.
“The secret police provided the leaders and hired a number of additional thugs,” Adele said. “There was quite a lot of spontaneous response, though. A large element of the civilian population hates Cinnabar almost as much as they fear us.”
“They’ll have reason to fear one day soon,” Daniel said quietly.
Four chattering women came out a side door of the residence and started down the street. They were members of the housekeeping staff, Adele knew from the records of the incident. All were born on Strymon, though they came from country districts rather than Palia itself.
They saw the oncoming mob, hesitated, and tried to get back through the door by which they’d left the building. It had locked behind them. The women started running in the opposite direction, only to meet another limb of the mob.
Stones flew from both directions. The women hunched, trying to protect their heads with their arms. Members of the mob knocked them down with clubs, then finished the job with boots.
“No Cinnabar citizens were injured,” Adele said without expression. “All the windows on the ground and second floors of the Residency were broken, but the leaders of the mob didn’t permit invasion of the grounds. It was meant as a warning.”
Daniel sighed audibly. “It takes a particular sort of person to kick an old woman to death,” he said. “Well, politics is no proper business of an RCN officer.”
“The next day,” Adele said, “Delos Vaughn appeared at one of his family’s estates three hundred miles south of Palia. With him was a force of eight hundred off-planet mercenaries, paid for by a consortium of shippers and landholders. You met many of the conspirators at the Captal da Lund’s dwelling on Sexburga.”
She called up a montage of images, some from news media and others gathered from the conspirators’ own files. Though the mercenaries had been hired as individuals on a dozen different worlds, they were outfitted with battledress of a standard pattern bearing the badge and shoulder patches of the Land Forces of the Republic, Cinnabar’s army. They carried stocked impellers and submachine guns of Cinnabar manufacture, with a limited number of crew-served weapons.
One of the images showed Delos Vaughn addressing a crowd of civilians. The sound bite attached to the clip rang, “My people, the Republic of Cinnabar has sent me to regain my rightful position as President of Strymon and to free you from the tyranny of Friderik Nunes and his puppets!”
“The secret police believed the troops really were from Cinnabar,” Adele said. She shook her head in disgust and amazement. “They also believed there were six thousand of them.”
The Princess Cecile was maneuvering constantly to optimize its position above Strymon. Neither the changing vectors nor the whine of the antimatter engines disturbed Adele now that she had real work to do.
“What was the position of the army?” Daniel asked. “Or does Strymon even have an army, come to think?”
“There’s a Presidential Police Reserve,” Adele said. She’d searched for army deployments, found none, and finally worked back from clips of the fighting to learn what the government troops were called so that she could determine their strength. “It’s about twenty thousand personnel at full strength, but there was quite a lot of desertion as soon as word got out that Delos Vaughn had returned with Cinnabar backing.”
“I see why the commodore blames me for the trouble,” Daniel said. “And I greatly fear that he’s more right than not.”