Conventions of War def-3

by Walter Jon Williams

  Sula could feel the energy draining from her at this thought. The reason for the creation of the secret government and its military arm was to let the civilian population know that the war hadn’t ended with the fall of the capital, that the legitimate government, the Convocation, and its Fleet were still active, would return, and would punish the rebels and those who aided them.

  The secret government had distributed its own clandestine newspaper,The Loyalist, sheaves of which Sula and her group had humped up and down the streets of the Lower Town, leaving copies in restaurants, bars, and doorways. Even that primitive form of communication was gone now.

  Sula turned as Spence came out of their bedroom, limping only slightly on her wounded leg. She had been shot through the calf during Hong’s ill-advised fight on the Axtattle Parkway, and was lucky-no arteries hit, no infection. The swelling had finally receded, and most of what was left was stiffness. Sula had prescribed Spence a regular routine of stretching exercises, and of walking back and forth in the apartment to keep the wound from stiffening.

  She hadn’t let Spence leave the apartment, even though she could have walked through the neighborhood with only a minimum of discomfort. Sula didn’t want Spence seen outside until she could walk normally. A limp attracted attention, struck the eye as awrongness. In fact, she didn’t want anyone on her team to attract attention, not when the situation was so unsettled, not when the attention might come from the Urban Patrol or from an informer.

  Why is the stranger limping?That was a question Sulanever wanted her neighbors to ask each other, not when the news broadcasts were full of the Naxid triumph in a pitched battle on the Axtattle Parkway, and even an ordinary person might think of flying bullets and wounds.

  She knew that it was perhaps irrational to take these precautions, but she had survived the Naxid occupation so far by taking precautions that others had thought irrational.

  “How’s the leg?” Sula asked Spence.

  “Better, my la-Lucy.” She made a turn about the room and gave a wistful look at the street beyond the window. “Pity I can’t leave, on a lovely day like this.”

  “Work on your walking and your stretching, and you will,” Sula said.

  Human warmth is not my specialty,she thought.

  “Didn’t you like your squid?”

  Sula looked in surprise at her supper, bits of squid grilled on a skewer, which had sat untouched by her elbow for the last hour.

  “I forgot to eat,” she said.

  “Let me warm it,” Spence said, and took the skewer-and the other skewer with mushrooms and vegetables-to the kitchen.

  Sula heard the hum of the convection oven as Spence returned to take another turn around the floor.

  “You must be working hard on something,” Spence said.

  “I’d be a lot happier if Icould work on it,” Sula said. She looked down at the displays on the glossy surface of her desk and touched the pad to disconnect her desk from the Records Office computer. “I was trying to think of a way to communicate with people in the city, let them know it’s not all over. ReplaceThe Loyalist somehow.”

  Spence considered this, her pug nose wrinkled in thought, then shook her straw-colored hair. “I don’t see how. It took all of us several days to distribute those papers last time.” An idea struck her. “But Lucy, you’ve got access to the Records Office computer. Can’t you use that to send electronic copies?”

  “Only if I want the security forces to go through every line of programming on that computer until they find me,” Sula said. “There are invisible tags on every piece of mail that tells you where it came from-and of course a duplicate of every mail goes to the Office of the Censor, and you can imagine what would happen if ten thousand copies ofThe Loyalist turned up in their buffer.”

  Spence paused in her pacing, a thoughtful frown twitching at her lips. “Lucy,” she said, “you’ve got high access. Couldn’t you just tell the computer to lie about all that?”

  Sula opened her lips to make a scornful reply, then hesitated. A subtle chime came from the kitchen, and Spence limped there to take Sula’s supper from the oven. When she returned, Sula had turned to her desk and was connecting once more to the Records Office computer.

  “Eat your supper,” Spence said as she dropped the plate on Sula’s desk, over the flashing symbols that were appearing in its glowing depths. Juices sizzled faintly in Sula’s ear. She picked up the nearest skewer and ate a piece of squid. Reheating had turned the cuttlefish rubbery, but its texture, or for that matter its taste, were by now of little interest. She pushed the plate to one side as the Records Office directory appeared onscreen.

  “Make good use of the help files,” Spence advised.

  As Sula ate her supper, and later drank the sweetened coffee that Spence provided, she discovered that all the Records Office mail-minus the interoffice communications, which remained within the department-went through the same broadcast node, a heavy duty model fully capable of handling the thousands of requests for information delivered to the office every day. The node tagged every mail with its own code before sending the original to its destination, and automatically copied every mail to the Office of the Censor, where it would be subjected to a series of highly secret algorithms to determine any subversive content.

  But how easy was it to program the broadcast node? She followed Spence’s advice and checked the help files.

  Very easy indeed.She was surprised. For someone with the proper user status, the programming features of the node could be turned on or off nearly as easily as flipping a switch.

  Her eyes burned from hours of staring at the display. Sula went to the bathroom and removed the brown contact lenses she wore to disguise her green eyes. She looked at herself in the darkened old mirror above the rust-stained sink, checked her hair roots, then touched her skin. Her efforts at disguise extended to dying her blond hair black and giving herself carotene supplements to darken her pale complexion. She was going to have to use the hair dye again soon, she saw.

  Her nerves gave a leap as the outer door opened and she realized she was far from the nearest weapon. She tried to calm herself with the thought that it was probably Macnamara returning, and so it proved to be.

  Got to keep a gun in the bathroom,she thought as she returned to the front room.

  “Shall I sleep here tonight?” Macnamara asked. “Or shall I use my own place?”

  Originally, the Riverside apartment had been acquired only for meetings of the team, with the members actually sleeping in their own individual apartments, but the necessity of caring for a wounded team member had changed that.

  “You can go home,” Sula said. “I’ll look after Spence tonight.”

  Macnamara glanced at the symbols glowing in the depths of the desk. “Working on something?” he asked.

  “Yes. A way to communicate with the population.”

  Macnamara considered this. “I hope it’s less work than the last one.”

  After checking her work several times, Sula produced a program that would do a number of jobs in sequence.

  Turn off the broadcast node’s logging, so there would be no record of what followed.

  Turn off the function that appended an identification tag to the message.

  Turn off the function that copied the message to the censor.

  Broadcast a message.

  Turn on the function that copied messages to the censor.

  Turn on the identification function.

  And turn on the logging again.

  After which the program would remove itself from the node.

  She tested her program by sending herself a message-“The information you requested is not available at this department”-and found that it worked. No record of her message, or any of the other tasks she had triggered, appeared in any of the Department logs.

  She could send a message now, if she could only work out who to send it to and what the message was.

  Before Sula cut the connection and turned
off the computer, she checked Rashtag’s message for the next day and found that his word was“ Expedite!”

  Exactly, she thought.

  Spence had long ago gone to bed, but Sula had drunk too much coffee to sleep. She leaned out the window and took a deep breath of warm midsummer air.

  The traffic was gone, the stalls and pushcarts carried away. Energy restrictions had turned off all signs and illuminated only every third streetlight. Under the nearest, a street away, she could see a few figures engaged in intense conversation, their arms gesturing broadly.

  She grinned. It was so late that the hustlers could hustle only each other.

  Sula left the apartment through the rear door off the kitchen, onto the building’s back stair, and climbed to the roof. The roof access had been wedged open for the benefit of some tenant’s cat, and she stepped soundlessly onto the flat roof, her shoes silent on the epoxide roofing material. Normally the city’s glare permitted only a few stars to be seen, but now the city’s subdued glow revealed a blazing spray of brilliants strewn across the night’s velvet canopy.

  Across the sky gleamed a series of silver arcs, each separated from the next by the starry darkness. These were the silent, empty remains of the accelerator ring that had once circled the planet, that had created the antimatter that fueled its economy, that had berthed its ships, warehoused its goods, and supported the lives of eighty million people. When it had been clear that the Naxids were going to capture Zanshaa, the ring was evacuated and then destroyed, its fragments separating as they rose to a higher orbit.

  The ring had circled the planet for over ten thousand years, the greatest and most glorious technical achievement of the Shaa Empire, and it had survived the death of the last Shaa by less than a year. The fragments hanging in the sky, visible from all quarters of the planet, were a silent, reproachful reminder of the fragility of civilization, and of the uncertainty and violence of war.

  And it was all my idea.It had been Sula who first suggested destroying the ring, as a way of making it hard for the Naxids to rule the planet they had conquered. Somehow the credit for the idea had lodged with someone else, and somehow Sula herself had gotten lodged on the planet with Hong’s action group, instead of flying away with the rest of the Fleet.

  I should be upthere, she thought as she looked at the stars. In a warship driving deep into enemy territory, bringing the war to the Naxids, instead of living a hunted existence on the surface of the planet, scurrying from one bolt-hole to the next.

  She thought of one person she knew was flying among the stars with the Fleet, and a lump formed in her throat.

  Martinez,she thought,you bastard.

  TWO

  He could touch the silk of Sula’s pale, perfect skin, feel the warmth and soft weight of her hair on his flesh. Her brilliant emerald eyes gazed at him fondly. He scented the rich fragrance of Sandama Twilight, her perfume. He tasted her lips. He felt the warmth of her breath as she whispered in his ear, and strained to catch the words.

  The words remained forever beyond his grasp. Lord Gareth Martinez woke with a cry in the darkness of his cabin, and reached with a hand to catch at the phantom that had already fled.

  He heard the steady roar of the cruiser’s engines, the engines that were propellingIllustrious from the Bai-do system. He heard the whisper of air through the ducts. He heard the tread of a pair of shoes outside the cabin door, and felt sweat drying on the back of his neck.

  Martinez undid the elastic web that kept him from floating out of his bed during occasional periods of weightlessness, and put his bare feet on the cool parquet floor. He rose from the bed and passed out of his sleeping cabin and into his office. He sat heavily in his chair and gazed down at his desk, at the images he’d set in its display, images of Lady Terza Chen, his wife.

  Terza was beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, cultured, and heir to the Chen clan, a clan of the highest possible social standing. In normal circumstances she would be far beyond the reach of someone like Martinez, who came from an affluent but provincial clan, and who spoke with a barbarous accent he’d been unable to polish away. Terza’s father served on the Fleet Control Board that determined Martinez’s professional future. Her aunt was Martinez’s commander. Their families had arranged their marriage just hours after the argument that had destroyed his relationship with Caroline Sula, and they had spent a bare seven days together before his duty called him away.

  During those seven days she had conceived his child.

  He gazed down at the images of Terza and knew that he didn’t deserve her. He didn’t desire her either.

  He touched a hand to his lips. He could still taste Caroline Sula.

  “Lights,” he said. He blinked in the sudden brightness, then blinked again at the sight of the wall murals, which for some inconceivable reason were of naked, winged children. He called up the navigation plots for the wormhole jump from the Bai-do system to Termaine.

  Chenforce, seven ships of war commanded by Terza’s aunt Michi Chen, had bypassed the Naxid fleet securing their conquest at Zanshaa, and had now driven deep into enemy-controlled space. They had wiped out a detachment of ten enemy warships at Protipanu, then raced through a series of systems, destroying merchant shipping, wormhole relay stations, and uncompleted warships.

  And several billion people. The raid had worked brilliantly until Chenforce had come to Bai-do, where the Naxids in command had refused Michi Chen’s orders and launched missiles from the planet’s accelerator ring. In response, Squadron Commander Chen had ordered Bai-do’s ring destroyed.

  Tens of millions of people lived on the ring, and nearly five billion on the planet below. The great mass of the ring dropping onto the planet must have killed millions outright and imperiled the rest. Clouds of dust and debris rising high into the atmosphere from the impact would shroud the sun and smother the food crops. Without the elevators from the ring to the surface, there would be no way to deliver significant amounts of foodstuffs to the planet.

  Most of those who had survived the ring’s fall would die a slow, cold death from starvation.

  One nightmare like Bai-do was bad enough. What was worse was that there could be more.

  In a few days Chenforce would jump through one of Baido’s wormholes into the Termaine system. Termaine was a wealthy world packed with industry and rich farmland that produced an overabundance of exports. Under normal circumstances Termaine’s ring would host a hundred merchant vessels at a time. Naxid warships would probably be found under construction in its shipyards.

  And if those warships fired at Chenforce from the ring, as had happened at Bai-do? The ring would be destroyed, along with the billions below it.

  Martinez looked down into the depths of the three-dimensional navigation plot, at the little blue sphere, ringed with silver, that represented Termaine. He recalled the sight of the blue sphere of Bai-do as its doomed ring oscillated and then fell with slow, tragic majesty into the atmosphere. He remembered the sight of the impacts, the antimatter sparkling amid the great plumes of steam and dust and ruin.

  Let them not call our bluff again,he thought. Perhaps the Naxid high command thought it worthwhile to find out whether the raiders had the stomach for mass murder. But having found out, surely they would not sacrifice more than one world.

  He wanted to reach down into the depths of the desk display, scoop up the little world, and carry it to safety.

  A zero-gee warning gonged through the ship. Martinez looked at the chronometer, saw that it was a scheduled course change and there was no need for him to strap himself in. Another warning sounded, the distant roar of the engines ceased, and Martinez floated weightless. He kept one hand clamped on his chair bottom to keep himself from drifting away-the chair itself was intelligent enough to know to adhere to the floor. An eddy in his stomach told him thatIllustrious was rotating onto its new heading, and then there was another warning for the resumption of gravity followed a few seconds later by the punch of the engines. Martinez dropp
ed into his seat again.

  The ship was going through the orderly progress of its day. The heading was changed on schedule, watches came on and off, decks were cleaned, parts were replaced on schedule, drills performed.

  The only person not going about his routine was Martinez, who was awake and staring into his desk display when he should be in bed.

  He told the navigation plot to go away, and the display darkened for an instant, then filled with images of Terza.

  Terza smiling, Terza arranging flowers, Terza playing her harp.

  Terza, whose soft voice he could barely remember.

  He doused the lights and returned to his bed and his uneasy dreams.

  The High City was half deserted, with overgrown gardens of summer flowers that rioted beneath the blank, boarded-up windows of the great palaces. Even on the grand Boulevard of the Praxis, motor traffic was scarce. Half those pedestrians on the street were Naxids, and most of these were in uniform. Most prominent was the viridian green of the Fleet, along with the gray jackets of the Urban Patrol and the black and yellow of the Motor Patrol.

  Businesses were adapting to the conquerors. Restaurants that had served cuisine tailored to Terran or Torminel tastes now advertised Naxid specialties, and the chairs that served their old customers were being replaced by the short, low couches on which centauroid bodies could take their ease. Tailors’ window displays featured Naxid dummies in sumptuous military splendor, chameleon-weave jackets automatically flashing Naxid scale patterns. Pulse-stirring Naxid music, created by beating on the tuned, hollow sticks calledaejai, clattered from the doors of music stores.

  Sula saw no military or police who were not Naxids. Their presence wasn’t particularly heavy except in the area of the government buildings clustered under the domed Great Refuge, on the east side of the acropolis, where there were checkpoints and armed Naxids on the roofs of at least some of the buildings. Otherwise, small units were posted at important intersections, and there were wandering patrols.