Then she shook her head again, but this time the gesture was slower and more thoughtful. "All right," she said at last, "let's assume you have a point there. But she's still dangerous. The Mob sees her as the Committee's savior against the Levelers—hell, half the damned Committee thinks she can walk on water right now! But we don't even know that she actually intended to save us at all, do we? If her pinnace hadn't crashed, she might just have kept right on rolling with the momentum and finished us off herself!"

"She might have, but I don't believe for a minute she planned to," Pierre said, just a bit more emphatically than his level of confidence deserved. "The Committee at least has the legitimacy of the original resolution which created it, not to mention almost six T-years as the Republic's functioning government. Even if she'd managed to wipe us out herself, what would she have had for a power base? Remember that only her own flagship supported her when she came to rescue us, and she was clearly doing her duty then. There's no way she could have counted on the rest of the Fleet to support any sort of putsch on her part, especially not given her reputation for political ambition."

"It sounds to me like you're trying to convince yourself of that," Ransom muttered darkly. "And even assuming you're right, doesn't your logic undercut your own argument for giving her a seat at the table? If the rest of the officer corps see her as a political animal, why should appointing her to the Committee convince them to support us?"

"Because political animal or not, she's also the best field commander we've got, and they know that, too," Saint-Just answered. "They don't distrust her competence, Cordelia—just her motives. In a sense, that gives us the best of both worlds: an officer whose ability is recognized by her peers, but whose reputation for political ambition sets her apart from the 'real' Navy."