Come the Revolution by Frank Chadwick Page B

the same tentative conclusion. We have also studied the audio and video feed from your commlink and that of two other witnesses, so we have a fair idea of the sequence of physical events. We are more interested in your impressions.”
    Impressions? I thought about that for a couple seconds.
    “What, you mean like my gut feeling? Some staffer panicked. Gaant caught everyone by surprise, first with the jammers going down and then when the crowd started in. The staffer overreacted, and then everything came apart. I don’t think Gaant intended it to play out that way.”
    “You say it caught everyone by surprise,” he said. “Does that include you?”
    I noticed e-Loyolaan studying me pretty hard, probably wishing I had big ears to help him tell if I was nervous.
    “Good question,” I answered. “It sort of did, but in retrospect it shouldn’t have.”
    And then I told them about the whole scene out in the atrium, the creepy mob of Gaant’s followers, and what he’d said to pull me into the meeting, that the guys on the other side of the table would be surprised at what happened. At the time I’d thought his little speech about what a bunch of no-good greedy bastards they were was the surprise he had in mind, but he’d meant the whole business of taking control of the meeting, making it public.
    “And you believe that is all Mr. Gaant intended?” he asked. “To simply make the meeting public?”
    I shrugged. “You want impressions and I’ll give them to you, but remember, I hardly knew the guy. I only met him a half-dozen times before today. If I had to guess, I’d say yeah, he just meant to embarrass all those guys, shame them, and maybe stir the public up against them. I think he has this big bunch of followers and he figured to make it even bigger, make some sort of play for political leadership. But what his long-term plans were is anybody’s guess. Now that he’s dead I guess we’ll never know for sure.”
    “Oh, Mr. Gaant is not dead,” Field Marshal Lieutenant e-Loyolaan said, his first comment in the interview.
    “Not dead? I saw him…” I stopped. What had I seen? He fell, he hit his head, the crowd moved his body back out of the way, and they said he was dead.
    “So, just unconscious?” I asked.
    E-Loyolaan nodded to e-Tomai and the captain continued. “We located him in the South Tower trauma/med facility. The last report was that he was stable but comatose and under guard by the municipal police, charged with incitement to riot. Communication with Praha-Riz has been temporarily interrupted.”
    “Yeah, the three officers I talked to in Katammu-Arc said their tacticals were going to clear South Tower. If so, they shut down the comms themselves—standard procedure. But you guys know that, right?”
    They exchanged a look and then e-Tomai nodded.
    I wasn’t sure if Gaant being alive was a good thing or a bad thing. Alive and in police custody he was a living symbol for his followers, and a target for action. Dead he was a martyr, and you can’t negotiate with a dead man. I looked at e-Loyolaan, who was studying me again. He cocked his head slightly to the side.
    “I do not know either, Mr. Naradnyo,” he said.
    “Know what?”
    “Whether we are better off with him alive or dead.”
    So this guy was a mind reader too? Or was I just getting that obvious?
    “We received word that the Honorable e-Lotonaa, your wife, and the e-Traak heiress have crossed the uKootrin frontier,” e-Loyolaan said. “Do we have you to thank for that?”
    Here it comes, I thought.
    “Just doing my job,” I answered, and to my surprise he nodded.
    “Yes, your duty. I understand. And it was the only sensible course of action. I want to thank you for saving e-Lotonaa’s life at Praha-Riz and in the water afterwards. You call him The’On , I am told, short for The Honorable . I do not imagine he enjoys that, and yet he seems to tolerate it from you.”
    “I didn’t know you two were friends,” I