Conventions of War def-3

by Walter Jon Williams

  Martinez was in Command at the earliest possible hour that he could expect a reply from Wormhole Station 2. It was early in the morning, before his usual hour for rising, and he clutched a cup of coffee in one hand, sipping as he listened to the routine chatter.

  “Message from Station Two, my lord!” The joy in Acting Lieutenant Qing’s voice was answered by a leap of Martinez’s heart. “The message is in the proper code for the day. Decoding now…”

  A pale Daimong face, set in a frozen expression of horrified surprise, appeared on Martinez’s displays.

  “Welcome to Enan-dal, Lady Michi,” the Daimong said. “I am Warrant Officer Kassup of the Exploration Service. We have been told to await you. Word of your arrival has already been sent to the Fleet. I am sending a digest of the latest news, and I will forward your mail and any instructions from the Fleet as soon as they arrive.”

  Martinez felt the easing of a tension he didn’t know he had. He half listened to Michi’s polite reply, then waited for a moment to see if she had any orders for him. She didn’t.

  Michi finished the report of her raid, with its account of the battles at Protipanu, Arkhan-Dohg, and Alekas, its lists of casualties, the status of her seven ships, the totals of enemy ships destroyed, the description of the ring’s destruction at Bai-do, plus the details of the deaths of Captain Fletcher, two lieutenants, and four petty officers. The report was wrapped in several layers of cipher and sent to the Fleet Control Board by way of Station 2.

  An instant later the crew’s personal messages, already in the queue, were sent, and with these went Martinez’s long serial letter to his wife Terza and shorter letters to his father, his mother, to his father-in-law Lord Chen, and to the two sisters who were still speaking to him. He also sent his father a scan of his portrait.

  Martinez wasn’t needed. He returned command of the ship to Qing, went to his bed, and slept dreamlessly for many hours, well past his normal time for waking.

  Alikhan, wisely, let him sleep.

  Four days later Chenforce sped through Enan-dal Wormhole 2, and half a day later received its mail. Martinez gave the entire crew two hours free time to catch up with the news from home.

  He took advantage of his own offer and retired to his office and shut the door. He opened his desk display and scanned the long list of mail. There was no communication from Caroline Sula. He hadn’t expected anything, but managed to notice its absence anyway.

  He wondered where she was and what she was doing.

  Martinez looked for the very last item by date, sent eleven days earlier. It was a video file from Terza, and he opened it.

  Lady Terza Chen was quite visibly pregnant now-nearly seven months, he calculated. She stood in the camera’s range, draped in a long dark violet gown that emphasized the paler beauty of her face and of the hands that rested lightly on her pregnant belly. Her hair was long and black and worn in a pair of long tails, threaded with ribbon, that fell past her shoulders. Her lovely face bore the serenity that had always seemed slightly unreal to Martinez and had led to uneasy thoughts concerning what exactly was happening behind the tranquil mask.

  With a shock he recognized where she was standing. It was a study in his family’s palace on Laredo, the long, elegant building of white and chocolate marble that stood in the center of the capital. He recognized the hulking, scarred old shelves of dark wood, the equally battered light fixtures.

  The room had once been his. The half-open door behind Terza led to the bedroom in which he’d slept until he left for the academy at the age of seventeen, the room to which he had never returned. His parents must have put Terza in his old room-it was just the sort of sentimental gesture that would have appealed to his mother.

  Martinez hoped she wasn’t too appalled by the old furniture, so badly knocked about by a houseful of active children.

  And he maintained a devout wish that Terza would not discover the nude pictures of an old girlfriend, Lord Dalmas’s daughter, that he’d hidden in the back of the wardrobe that summer before he left for the academy.

  “Hello,” Terza said. She turned to give a profile to the camera and smoothed the folds of her gown over the outline of her pregnant belly. “I thought I’d send a video so you could have an update on the status of your son.”

  Son.Martinez felt his heart give a lurch. That the child was a boy hadn’t been clear when Chenforce had departed for its raid.

  “He’s becoming rather an active child,” Terza said, “and is growing fond of exploration. We’ve been considering names, and in light of his conduct and in the absence of any instructions from the father, we’ve decided we rather like Gareth.” She turned to face the camera, a slight smile on her face. “I hope you approve.”

  “As long as they don’t called him Junior,” Martinez found himself saying aloud, but he felt a warm surge of pride flush through his blood.

  Terza drew back a chair from the battered old desk, rearranged her gown again, and sat. The camera, which was not without its own intelligence, followed her.

  “As you can see,” she said, “I’m still on Laredo. Your parents and Roland”-the brother Martinez wasn’t speaking to, at least not when he could help it-“are dealing with, ah, a great many important guests, who are going to be feted and celebrated and generally fussed over until they give Roland and your father what they want.”

  The very important guests, Martinez knew, were the members of the Convocation, which had fled Zanshaa for a world as far away from the Naxids as they could find. Their location was a state secret-though presumably everyone on Laredo knew-and Terza couldn’t mention them by name without triggering one of the algorithms at the Office of the Censor, which might have stopped the correspondence dead.

  In any case, the Convocation was now completely in the hands of Lord Martinez, Roland, and the rest of the family. If their incompetence hadn’t caused the war in the first place, Martinez would have felt sorry for them.

  “I’ve been playing my part as a kind of auxiliary hostess,” Terza said, “which is less tiresome than you’d think, and gives me something to do other than languish in the nursery. I’ve known many of these guests all my life. And since my father isn’t here, I’m handling Chen business as well as representingyou, though it’s hard to say at this point how any of that’s going.”

  Martinez paused the video and wondered why Lord Chen wasn’t present along with the rest of the Convocation. Terza wasn’t in mourning, and she didn’t seem sorrowful when she spoke of him, so he wasn’t dead or somehow disgraced.

  Perhaps he was on a mission of some sort.

  Probably that information was on one of the communiques he’d skipped. Martinez triggered the video again.

  Terza gave him a significant look. “I obviously can’t go into details,” she continued, “but I’ve been around some important people, and I’ve seen some interesting reports. The material side of the war is encouraging, and time is not on the Naxids’ side.”

  She raised a hand. “I hope you’re raising a lot of mischief but otherwise staying out of trouble. Come back to me and young Gareth as soon as you can.”

  The orange end-stamp appeared on the screen. Martinez stared at it, his mind swimming.

  She had decided to name their son after him. Perhaps that meant she was thinking of remaining in the marriage even after her father and his enterprises ceased to require a massive Martinez subsidy.

  Perhaps the woman his family had bought for him, and with whom he’d spent all of seven days before being parted by the war, had decided to remain a fixture in his life.

  His sleeve comm chimed. He answered, and saw the chameleon weave on his sleeve resolve into Michi’s image.

  “Yes, my lady?”

  “I thought I’d let you know that we’ve just received orders to head for Chijimo. That’s where we were told to rendezvous with the Home Fleet in our original orders.”

  “Things can’t have changed much in our absence then,” Martinez said.

  Mic
hi hesitated. “I’m not sure. Our orders were signed by Senior Fleet Commander Tork, Supreme Commander of something called the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance.”

  Martinez took a moment to absorb this. “Tork?” he said. “Not Kangas?”

  “No, not Kangas. And I don’t know what that means either.”

  “Tork hates me,” Martinez said. “You told me so yourself.”

  She raised her eyebrows and said nothing. After a while Martinez sighed.

  “Terza sends her love,” he said, speaking on the assumption that love would be sent somewhere in Terza’s messages, even if it hadn’t been on the one video he’d had a chance to view so far.

  “How is she?”

  “Doing very well, apparently. Maintaining Chen interests on Laredo in the absence of her father.”

  “Maurice isn’t on Laredo?” It was Michi’s turn to be surprised.

  “Maybe he’s with Kangas.”

  “I have letters from Maurice that I haven’t had a chance to view,” Michi said. “Perhaps he’ll enlighten me.”

  “Let me know if-” He realized he might be trespassing on Chen family business. “-if it’s relevant to our situation,” he finished.

  “Comm,” Michi said, “end transmission.”

  The orange end-stamp appeared in Martinez’s sleeve display. He blanked it, then looked at the long list of mail that waited for him.

  He decided to go to the top of the list and work his way right through to the end.

  And then he would review the highlights.

  A son,he thought, and smiled.

  And then he thought,Tork hates me. And now he’s something called the Supreme Commander.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Once Sergius Bakshi allied himself with the secret government, everything began to fall into place. Groups who had been fighting Naxids, or who wanted to fight Naxids, or who were merely thinking about fighting Naxids, were brought into contact, and-at least theoretically-placed under Sula’s orders. A table of organization, if anyone had been unwise enough to assemble one, would have been much less neat than the ideal assembly of three-person cells arrayed in tiers. Whole gangs of friends joined at once, and even if organized into cells, knew each other’s identities. The result could be a security catastrophe, but Sula did her best to make sure such groups were as isolated from the rest of her army as possible.

  Messages began to move along the clandestine communication network already employed by the cliquemen. The cliquemen, hardened to violence and death, provided a stiffening that the secret army otherwise would have lacked, a stoic, practical approach to killing that the new recruits would have taken months to learn, if ever. The cliquemen might not have earned love, but they were certainly earning respect.

  Sergius killed the ten Naxids that Sula had demanded of him, and did it with remarkable efficiency, and all outside his own territory. Each assassination provoked retaliation by the Naxids, and each hostage shot created more potential recruits, and tension between the Naxids and the local cliquemen.

  The high sun of summer blazed down on shootings, on bombings, on hijackings, on secret deliveries. Much of the action was directed against the ration authority, both the most visible and the most vulnerable symbol of the Naxid regime. The Naxid police who came into local police stations to oversee distribution of the ration cards were favorite targets. After five were killed and three more wounded, they began traveling in armored vehicles with guards. Since this was about the time that Sidney developed a rocket launcher, the Naxid precautions only let the assassins bag more enemy at once. More cliques were drawn into the war to profit from control of food-as Sula had suggested, the cliques dared not surrender control of the market to anyone else, which included Naxid clans that aimed at controlling the legitimate market.

  Sidney was going through a period of remarkable creativity. From his workshop came designs for small, concealable pistols, for snipers’ rifles far more accurate than the Mark One, for bombs, and for his crude but surprisingly effective rockets. All plans were distributed in issues ofResistance. All, in time, were put to use.

  Sula traveled continuously through the city, for the most part coordinating groups of cliquemen, or talking them into joining the cause, or judging disputes over bits of profitable territory. The visit to Green Park had shown the folly of traveling with an armed group of guards, and so often as not she went riding behind Macnamara on his two-wheeler, a vehicle agile enough to avoid roadblocks or other inconveniences. Sometimes she went alone, or with Casimir in his apricot-colored car. She was expected to appear as Lady Sula, and over the course of the long summer the blond wig grew hot and unpleasant. Her own hair grew out somewhat, and finally she had it cut into her old style and turned more or less her own shade again. The enemy weren’t looking for Lady Sula anyway.

  Nobody seemed to be looking for Julien either. There was a warrant out for him, but no one appeared interested in serving it. Perhaps the Legion of Diligence thought he was still in prison somewhere; and Sergius Bakshi’s influence was enough to keep the ordinary police from pursuing any leads.

  Sula’s delivery company quietly expanded, a fleet of anonymous vehicles quietly delivering contraband from one part of the city to another. One-Step was taken on as an assistant driver. Sula began to miss his presence on the pavement in front of her apartment.

  Not that she often saw her apartment. She whirled through the long summer nights with Casimir, a sequence of dark, close rooms filled with dangerous young men, sweaty dance floors, and clean cool sheets. Late at night, tangled with one another in some grand hotel suite, they laid plots against the Naxids, chose targets, deployed fighters, discussed strategy.

  Casimir and Julien had quietly assembled a group of young, deadly cliquemen, along with other volunteers recruited by Patel, the young cliqueman who had first volunteered to fight the Naxids for love. They called themselves the Bogo Boys, after a practically indestructible toy.

  The Bogo Boys were sent against more difficult objectives. Two judges were killed, one of them an Ushgay returning to the city from his country house. A warehouse of Jagirin foodstuffs was burned. Three mid-level executives with the rationing board-a Jagirin and two Kulukrafs-were assassinated along with their bodyguards.

  Sula took part in none of these operations. “You’re a general now,” Casimir reminded her, “it’s not your job to fight in the streets with the troops.” She devoted herself instead to obsessive planning, making certain that escape routes were properly laid and that no one would be left behind.

  When the rebel government finally arrived from Naxas, Sula resisted Julien’s arguments to attack them as they paraded up Axtattle Boulevard to the High City. The enemy would be ready for that; and events proved her right, as thousands of Naxid police brought in from the countryside saturated the area, occupied the roofs of buildings, and lined the boulevard itself.

  Instead she ordered the entire secret army go on the attack in other districts of the city. The targets didn’t matter, she emphasized, so much as explosions and fire. Cars and trucks were blown up, abandoned buildings put to the torch, flammables piled in streets or public parks and set alight. Security was concentrated on the approach route, so there was little force available to stop the attacks. The Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis moved to the High City surrounded by pillars of smoke and with the sound of explosions echoing between the buildings.

  The committee and their pathetic undersized Convocation-the delegates they’d convinced or coerced into representing their home worlds-took their places in the Hall of the Convocation to take their oaths of allegiance to the new government. From that vantage point they could look through the great glass walls to the Lower Town beyond and see the tall rising columns of smoke; like the bars of a prison they had entered of their own free will.

  The Naxids then grew more serious about roadblocks and searches, putting more police on the streets, importing them from other towns and barracking them in local hotels. As far as
Sula was concerned, more Naxids on the streets simply meant more targets, though it also meant that attacks and escape routes had to be more carefully arranged.

  Since the “official” objectives were now more difficult, the attackers shifted to softer targets. Any Naxid in the brown uniform of the civil service became a target, and eventually any Naxid at all. As a result, Naxids were a lot more scarce in parks, squares, and public concourses. They stayed in their own neighborhoods except while in transit from home to work and back again.

  The Naxids wandered free only in the High City. Sula hadn’t managed a successful operation there since the assassination of Judge Makish. The security presence was too heavy, the escape routes limited, and there were too few non-Naxids living there. An armored blockhouse now guarded the one road to the summit, and both the road and the funicular railway were under the sights of antiproton guns mounted in the High City.

  She rode regularly to the High City in trucks carrying luxury goods meant for the new ruling caste. From what she could see, the luxuries had become the entire point of Naxid rule. The High City was being transformed into a fortress guarding the wealth that was sticking to Naxid fingers. Her own transport company was constantly moving glittering furniture to the High City, or carpets, or ornaments, or paintings, or statues. More of the old palaces were being confiscated by the new regime and refitted to suit Naxid tastes.

  Even the signs in the High City had begun to reflect the Naxid occupation. Naxid eyes embraced a different spectrum than that of Terrans: they couldn’t see red, but could see into the ultraviolet, and unlike most Terrans, they could distinguish between blue and indigo. Thus, many of the new shops and restaurants in the High City had signs that looked like blobs of gray on other blobs of gray to Sula, or one subtly different shade of blue laid on another. They might as well have read“ Naxids Only.”